Disclaimer: I own nothing, I make no money,
Author's Note: My first foray into Naruto fanfic. I hope it delivers.
Bone-White
"Here's the thing: he thinks she's beautiful. Not beautiful in the conventional Hyuuga way – because there is a Hyuuga kind of beautiful. Hanabi has it. Neji had it. It's a kind of straight-backed, hollowed-out beauty that promises to sear you if you get too close. But not Hinata." - Uchiha Sasuke and Hyuuga Hinata. The familiarity of ghosts.
Hyuuga Hinata doesn't actually see him the day of his return. But then, she doesn't have to see to know. Hinata knows many things without ever having actually seen them. Most things she knows are unseen. Like Naruto's fear. Like Sakura's regret. Like Neji's presence.
Like her father's love (he loves her, she knows this – even when she doesn't see it).
She knows that Uchiha Sasuke is back, but 'back' is such a vague, undisclosed destination in the first place, since she couldn't exactly figure out what he was returning to anyway.
Home? Maybe, but not the kind he left. Never the kind he left – if he had one in the first place.
Kakashi? It wasn't likely. The Uchiha compound? That didn't matter without Uchihas to fill it. His duty as a Konoha shinobi? The idea would be laughable if it wasn't so painfully, blatantly pathetic.
Perhaps his team? What was left of it anyway (hard hearts and clenched jaws, what else did he expect – but somehow Sakura manages a faintly whispered 'Sasuke' and no one had ever expected her to say that name with anything more than contempt again, but then – but then).
One night, Hinata is walking home when she catches sight of him standing at the end of the street, hands stuffed in his pockets, gaze turned toward the part of town that would have been the Uchiha's if things had been different.
If they hadn't all died maybe.
She thinks she should be sorry for thinking it, but it isn't anything more than fact and she's so perplexed by this distant-gazed Sasuke and his stiff shoulders and left-heavy lean, the casual bend of his elbows when he stuffs his hands deeper into his pockets and shifts his weight to the other leg – she's so perplexed by (and maybe a little cautious of) this 'returned' Uchiha, that she doesn't even notice when her hand slips to the kunai at her thigh, her touch hidden by her jacket's sleeve.
But then he turns to her. Directly. As though he knows.
Hinata stills, nicking the edge of her finger on the edge of her kunai with her abrupt halt, her hand tightening reflexively along the comforting metal at her thigh.
He blinks at her, and then there's the crooked, inscrutable twist of his lips and he walks away. Past her, but not close.
Not close enough for her to unsheathe her kunai completely, but enough to wonder if maybe Hyuugas weren't the only ones who could know without seeing.
Uchiha Sasuke is back and Hyuuga Hinata doesn't know what for.
She walks stiffly back home, never minding the prick of blood at her fingertip.
In this world, there isn't always a beginning, middle, and end. Sometimes it's just the long stretch in between. The vacant space amidst the moments, the minutes, the months, spent waiting.
The ghosts at Sasuke's fingertips are familiar with waiting.
Sometimes it's just a beginning, and middle, and middle, and middle and –
"Hinata!" Naruto calls happily, which is a strange sound for Sasuke to hear – not because he hadn't expected Naruto to ever be happy again, or because he couldn't recognize it in his voice when it was there – but really just because he hadn't ever expected to still be alive long enough to hear it himself.
War is a taxing, grotesque thing. Sasuke was good at it. But it made a stranger of him – to himself, and to the world.
But mostly to the things he used to know. Or wanted to, at some point.
(He likes to think he knew what happiness sounded like – just once.)
Hinata blinks down at the seated blonde, his mouth full of ramen and eyes full of something else. Her cheeks tinge a faint pink and then there – there.
Sasuke reminds himself that some things never change.
Naruto pats the stool next to him, and Hinata takes it demurely. She barely glances Sasuke's way.
It doesn't seem to matter though, because he's placing his chopsticks across his half-empty bowl (or maybe it's half-full, he's never really understood that, or wanted to, really – a bowl is a bowl, and empty is empty- even when it's full), pushing from his own seat and moving to leave.
"Where are you going?" Naruto asks, looking up at his friend.
'Friend'. What a fucking joke, and somehow wrong, because the taste in Sasuke's mouth is bitter (has been for a long time) and he doesn't really have an answer for him.
"Elsewhere," he finally replies, lips pursing tight. He flicks a glance to the Hyuuga girl, but she is staring at her bunched hands at her knees.
When he walks away, Naruto still hasn't lost that happy lilt to his voice, turning to Hinata with a dismissive wave. "Ignore him. Anyway, where have you been?"
Sasuke thinks maybe some things do change.
Somewhere along the line, he shoves his way into her periphery. Not intentionally. That is easy enough to tell. Sasuke has never really cared for others' attention, least of all hers. But he has it all the same.
It starts with his constant presence in Naruto's company. At first it is necessary, a condition met upon his return, along with the Hokage's invisible seal at the base of his spine, the heightened ANBU patrols, the general sense of unease that pervades the village whenever he is out.
"Does it hurt much?" she asks him once, watching as he holds a hand to the junction where his neck meets his shoulder and Hinata imagines the curse seal is brimming just beneath the surface of his skin. She only wonders at the sensation of teeth piercing skin for a moment – just long enough to remind herself that Orochimaru is no man and Sasuke is no victim, not in the sense she knows.
He doesn't look at her. Has never looked at her. "Does it matter?" His hand slips back to his side.
Out in the field, Naruto is sparring with Sakura and the shade over Hinata's head shrinks more and more beneath the blaring sun. She blinks at his question.
He finally looks at her.
This is the thing though: Sasuke doesn't see like she does, for all the merits of the Sharingan. "It's not like you could lessen the pain, anyway, so why ask?"
Belatedly, she realizes she had asked for Neji, and not for Sasuke. Because she had never asked the question when Neji was still alive, and maybe some part of her resents herself for it. Maybe some part of her still wants to fix it, but dead men feel no pain, and it's a pointless question to ask now, so she filters her regret through Sasuke and pretends it means something.
Seals are like doors, Hinata finally understands. At the juncture of neck and shoulder, Sasuke's stays closed, Orochimaru on one side, and Konoha on the other. Somewhere in between, is Sasuke.
Hinata remembers Neji's eyes when he had died, the blank, paleness of milky irises, the sheen of sweat over his Hyuuga curse as his hitai-ate slipped from his forehead – his mouth tipping open as though to speak but it is only a trickle of blood that emerges.
Hyuuga is a house of closed doors.
Hinata stands on the other side, fingers curling around the doorknob, perpetually waiting.
Sasuke's hand inches back to his neck, stiff with remembrance.
It is easier to see the faults in each other, than in themselves.
Neither of them has ever liked mirrors.
His Sharingan is still sealed for his first mission. The Hokage keeps a tight leash, but Sasuke is too worn to care.
Time is all he needs. It mends and breaks all things. Even trust.
Hinata takes a kunai to the thigh when she steps in front of him – stupidly, because even without his Sharingan, he is fast enough to evade it.
"What the hell, Hyuuga?" he curses, watching Naruto bandage her thigh when the fight is done. He wonders if maybe Naruto's touch lingers too long, or Hinata ducks her head a little too low, or maybe he's just fixating on things that don't need to be fixated on (like he hasn't already fixated on the stark contrast of red blood along her pale thigh, or the harsh exhale of breath that leaves her lips when the bandage is pulled tight, or the heavy curtain of her hair when she bends over the wound – like he hasn't fixated on any of this and more).
"We each…have our missions," she answers cryptically.
Sasuke narrows his eyes accusingly at her.
Because if he was her mission – if the Hokage had sent this weak, hesitant, ghost-like Hyuuga to watch over him – then the world really was at its fucking end – but then wait.
She looks up at him, a whisper of hesitance crossing her eyes, bone-white in their stillness (bone-white because the lilac is a lie, a trick of the light – there is nothing there but hard, hollow marrow).
Sasuke swallows thickly, and she turns away, eyes along the grass. She takes Naruto's offered hand and doesn't look at him.
Sasuke suspects that – though he will never truly know until many years later (and even then, he has to practically drag it out of her, his breath in the hollow of her neck) –
He suspects that this was no assignment.
Hinata thinks of that story. The one about the wolf and the crane.
The wolf had a bone lodged in its throat after feeding, and went to the crane promising a handsome reward if they removed the bone. The crane was hesitant, of course, to stick its long neck and head down the wolf's throat, but it acquiesced in the end. And when the bone was free, and the wolf walking away, the crane stopped him, asking "What about my reward?"
The wolf had sneered, teeth glinting in a threatening promise. "Isn't it enough that I have not snapped my jaws shut on your pretty little neck? Isn't it reward enough that you escape with your life?"
Hinata looks down at the gash along Sasuke's collar bone, his bloodied shirt hanging off his shoulder. She is no medical nin, but Sakura is still unconscious, and the faint green that glows at Hinata's fingertips isn't the right hue. It's sharper and blunter all at once. Sasuke feels her incompetence acutely. He winces slightly in response, but otherwise there is no show of pain.
Her hair falls over her shoulder, obscuring her view. She huffs in annoyance, the raised veins around her eyes throbbing with exertion. Just as she is about to twist her neck in hopes of flipping the hair back, Sasuke raises his hand to brush the strands past her shoulder.
His fingertips graze her neck and seem to still there, his hand hovering just by her shoulder. She flicks her gaze to his, eyes crane-white, and catches the sharp ends of his lips curving upward like a fish hook.
Her mouth opens, as though to say something, or maybe just to breathe (she seems to have forgotten how) or maybe just to taste the air, her tongue flicking hesitantly over her lips when her eyes dart back down to his collar bone. She can feel, rather than see, his intake of breath, because she has stopped looking, at least with the Byakugan – though she never stops seeing (not the way all Hyuuga's know how) and she begins to wonder –
Expect no reward for serving the wicked, the tale had always ended.
Hinata turns her long, white neck for a better glimpse at his wound, bone in her grasp.
If he should snap his jaws shut, she doesn't think she would mind.
Here's the thing: he thinks she's beautiful. Not beautiful in the conventional Hyuuga way – because there is a Hyuuga kind of beautiful. Hanabi has it. Neji had it. It's a kind of straight-backed, hollowed-out beauty that promises to sear you if you get too close.
But not Hinata.
Hinata's beauty is in the calloused skin between her knuckles, in the way she pours her tea last at the table, in the way light seems to cocoon in the hollow of her elbow, a casual grace as sensual as it is polite.
He has her pinned to the tree one day mid-spar, their kunais grating against each other as she barely holds back his weight. She winds a foot behind his knee and tries to tug him off balance, but he adjusts quickly, shoving her back against the bark with a heavy shoulder.
She grits her teeth, a blunted cry of pain trapped behind her tongue. Narrowing her brows, Hinata stares up at him, and then stops.
He watches as her whole face shifts into – something. A bloom of realization lights beneath her skin and before he can realize what he's doing, he's leaning his weight back from her.
What makes her beautiful is also what makes her dangerous, and Sasuke thinks there's a lesson in there somewhere, but he's too far gone to learn it, and lessons were never his thing anyway (ask Kakashi) because what couldn't be branded into his flesh wasn't worth learning in the first place (maybe this was why cursed seals and cursed eyes were the only things left to him – he was a stubborn student, after all).
Still, it makes more sense to say Hyuuga Hinata is beautiful than to say Uchiha Sasuke has learned his lesson.
Which lesson is that, anyway?
He never really finds out – because then her shoulders are slumping in something of defeat (though never quite defeat, because her body is unfamiliar with it, and he's sure she'd break before she ever admitted to it but still) – something like it.
Something yielding and quiet.
"You have your brother's eyes," she says.
And what the fuck?
He shoves away from her.
How could she know? How could she know?
(At some point in the future, she tells him how she's always known, even without seeing, because that's what Hyuugas do, and that's what Hinata is best at, and even if she was blind and deaf and dumb, she'd be a fool not to see that – because dead men feel no pain, and yet here – here is Sasuke.)
His eyes blaze red, and then she is sure. "It's why you came back."
He doesn't answer her, instead flicking his kunai to her throat, and then stilling at her utter lack of resistance. Her hands slip to her sides, her features softening. "You're living for him."
It's such a stupid idea, once she says it aloud. And one he can't threaten her to take back, because it's true. Because it's the biggest fucking cliché in the book and it's true. Right down to the quiet, blood-tinged eyes – right down to the unobtrusive, compliant 'shinobi way' he vowed to undertake the moment he stepped through that gate.
Because Uchiha Sasuke died. (And sure, the same could be said for Itachi, but ask Sasuke which one of them deserved to live and well, here we are.)
Because he never planned to come back for himself. He had already given his name up for lost, already resigned himself to an uneventful, unfulfilled life – but a life nonetheless (beating heart, clenching lungs, blood-rushed veins – something – this at least he owed Itachi). Because he had already settled for the grey monotony of a fallen Uchiha.
He stares at Hinata, breathless and aching.
The worst part is that he's still lying to himself.
The truth is, they were all choking on bones – some of them their own.
"Anything?" Naruto asks her, lying face to face beside her on the bed mats.
Her Byakugan rescinds, the veins flattening out past her eyes as she blinks back into the present. "It's clear."
Naruto sighs in relief, the first she's heard since this mission started, and the vulnerable flutter of his closing eyelids makes her heart clench.
She brushes the hair from his forehead before she can stop herself, and he catches her wrist in the quiet between them. Behind her, Sasuke sleeps soundlessly. The night is cool and crisp, and the tender thrum of Naruto's thumb along her pulse point makes her tug her hand back unsurely.
Narutos's eyes sift open to hers.
The trouble with love is that it never comes to you when you're ready for it. And maybe that's Hinata's real curse. A perpetual state of unpreparedness.
"Hinata." His voice is low and breathy, and Hinata pulls the sheet tighter to her.
"I'm sorry," she whispers quickly, a tense flutter of recollection settling in her gut. This is familiar, somehow. Familiar in all the wrong ways and yet – she knows this moment intimately.
"It's okay," he assures her, lips pursing into a tight line. He blinks in the dark at her, steady and quiet, and then he shifts closer.
Everything shifts closer. The axis of their world, the far horizon over the hills, the inevitable break of dawn at their backs. Everything is suddenly immediate and instant and insatiable.
She should kiss him, she knows. She should, and she would – but she doesn't.
"Hinata, I –"
"We should get some sleep." She turns over.
Naruto stills, staring at her back for many moments, before he sighs and succumbs to sleep himself.
Hinata realizes Sasuke has been awake this whole time. She realizes, because he is staring at her when she turns.
She realizes, because she should kiss him, and she would –
But she doesn't.
"You love him, don't you?" He asks it as he spins a kunai along his knuckles, his fingers flexing with the conscious effort of keeping it aloft.
She hesitates a moment, as though she is thinking about her answer, but really, what is there to think about? They both know the truth, and truth is hardly ever something universally known, but this – this they know. It is impossible not to.
"It is easy to love Naruto." Her non-answer is as damning as silence would have been, but somehow this is worse.
"Being loved by Naruto is easy," he corrects, or adds, or maybe just says because he can, because he knows it intimately. And he isn't sure if this is a comment on her or a comment on Naruto, or whichever variation may hurt more. Because if it was easy to be loved by Naruto, then why was she not? Or if his love was so cheap, then why did it matter if she had it in the first place? Because even Sasuke had it, and he wasn't even sure he wanted it, not really, not truthfully (he did, but she would never know that, and neither would he, not consciously at least).
She smiles – a hesitant, fluttering thing – her eyes shifting down. "I suppose you're right."
He doesn't want to be. God, he doesn't want to be.
Sasuke has never known 'easy' love.
He is especially rough this session. Hinata flits from tree branch to tree branch, kunais lodging a hair's breath from her position, again and again. His chakra crackles the air between them, even from this distance, and she wonders if it would be easier to fall.
To fall and let him win this time. And all the times after.
Or maybe just this moment – this moment when the intensity of his katana cracks the tree beside her into two clean halves, unlike anything she's seen before (in practice at least – because she isn't stupid enough to think she's seen the extent of his abilities, and she isn't pretentious enough to think he'd care to show her – because who was she really, who was she to him?)
Her eyes flash with the Byakugan, veins coming to life, everything suddenly clear and precise and chakra-lined. Pulses of blue and white that outline her surroundings as well as her enemy – her enemy at her back – and she twists, palms forward (there has never been anything gentle about the Hyuuga's Gentle Fist but she has never pretended as such) and before she can strike, his katana slices clean across her shoulder and then back along the other one. She cries out, flipping back to anchor to another branch, one hand steadying herself, the other twirling her kunai out of its pouch and it's instant – the scrape of his katana along her kunai as he presses again.
His eyes are already red but she expects this. Pushing him off, she follows with a feather-soft palm aimed at his rib – the resounding wave of chakra threads through the air and it's heady for a brief moment, for a split-right-down-the-middle second, when he inhales the burning scent, mouth parted at her shoulder, and then her elbows lock and his weight gives way and he's following her down through the tree branches.
The fall is harder than either expects, her back along the moss-strewn ground, his arms on either side of her. They lay there panting for many long moments – many long moments that might have been the start or end of it all, she's not really sure, and doesn't care to find out, if she's being honest with herself.
All she knows is that when he finally bears himself up, his weight still pinning her to the forest floor, her chest still heaving with the exertion, his dark hair obscuring her view, and when he finally lifts his gaze to hers ,when his blood-red eyes meet her own bone-white ones –
It's not Itachi's eyes she finds staring back at her.
The red dims into a faint black – black like the hollow of forest they left decimated behind them and suddenly she clings to him, her fingers curling into his shirt, kunai still clutched between them. Sasuke's arms tremble with the weight of holding him steady above her, his eyes flicking to the cuts along her shoulders.
She opens her mouth but he speaks first, and she thinks that was a mistake because –
"I'm not Naruto," he pants heavily, accusingly, hands curling into the dirt between them.
She knows this – has known this –from the very beginning. But it hasn't been so adamantly clear until the faint scent of Sasuke – like burnt light and wet pavement – sinks into her skin and stains her.
(She doesn't discover until much later that it will never truly wash out.)
She's about to croak her answering 'I know' when he sinks lower, head falling to rest along her stomach, still kneeling over her, above her, around her.
She is drowning in him.
"I'm not Naruto," he whispers again, this time softer. This time with the tender hesitance of someone who maybe wishes they were.
Hinata never knew anything could sound quite so tragic.
A beginning, and middle, and middle, and middle, and –
Sasuke is just so tired of living for ghosts.
The seal at the base of his spine has been gone for a while now, but even with the use of his Sharingan back, he cannot make out her expression.
"I miss Neji, sometimes." She says it from across the fire, and maybe he should have been surprised, but it isn't surprising really. She misses a lot of things from before the war. Neji would be no different.
He remembers Neji, too. Perhaps not as accurately and painstakingly as some things – things like Kakashi's sighs and Naruto's bloodied jaw and the faint glint of light off Sakura's pink hair when she thought he wasn't looking.
Fact is, he was always looking. Etching every minute detail of them into his skull, because even if they took his eyes, some things he would always see.
Burning their imprint in the backs of his eyelids. A seared reminder of what it meant to be Uchiha Sasuke. Or at least, what Uchiha Sasuke meant to them.
He doesn't rightly know what it means to himself these days.
"I miss Itachi," he whispers to the fire, or perhaps to her, or even to the dead (they are always listening, you know).
It isn't a whole lie. It isn't a whole truth either, but he thinks maybe she knows this, because he's become embarrassingly easy for her to read and he realizes that whether he says it or not, the sentiment is there, as sheer and apparent as the sheen of sweat on her brow.
She blinks those painfully white eyes at him beneath the fringe of her dark hair. And then she inches closer, her knees shuffling in the sand until she is kneeling before him.
The fire crackles in the still air, her hand alighting on his knee.
"I know," she says faintly.
Except she doesn't. She will never really know (even when she does – because he tells her, when the nightmares are more than hooks in his mind and the only thing keeping him awake is the steady thrum of her fingers at his collar bone and her breath at his ear – he tells her then, when more than shadows keep nightfall at the foot of their bed).
She'll never truly know.
But it's a nice thought anyway, and he's okay with that.
He thinks it says something that he doesn't remove her hand from his knee.
It's easy, she finally realizes, once she actually makes the decision. It's the easiest thing in the world.
"I want you, Sasuke," she says, her hands folded demurely in her lap, eyes unblinking on his. She has that straight-backed, hollowed-out Hyuuga beauty – but it's frighteningly more palpable now, because it's coupled with the calloused skin between her knuckles, and the way she pours his tea before she pours her own, and the way the light gathers in the crook of her elbows as she kneels expectantly before him.
His arm sweeps out and the table is upturned instantly, the tea crashing along the floor beside them. He crawls to her, threateningly, one hand grasping the hair at the base of her neck, the other gripping her chin as he forces her to look up at him.
"I'm selfish, Hyuuga. You of all people should know that," he growls above her lips.
She swallows thickly, her hands inching for his waist. They settle tentatively at the edge of his hips.
Sasuke's fingers flex in her hair, pressing closer to her, his other hand dropping her chin to boldly venture beneath the edge of her kimono, his hand stealing up her thigh.
He means it as a threat, she's sure, but she takes it more like a plea. Because she already knows he isn't Naruto, and she already knows he doesn't share, and more than anything, she already knows – even if he doesn't yet –
She is just as selfish as he.
"Does it hurt much?" she whispers in question, a hollow memory of a time before. A time when seals were doors and Hinata spent her life waiting.
His eyes flash in uncertainty – not quite red yet, not quite there, but close enough. He licks his lips in anticipation.
"It won't, soon enough," she says, without waiting for an answer. And then she is leaning into him, lips pressing against his, fingers digging into his waist. Her tongue presses tentatively to his bottom lip and the hand along her thigh drags her forward across his lap as he opens his mouth to her, his groan of desperation lost against her tongue.
In the end, she is right. It doesn't hurt at all – even when he thought it would.
Some days his eyes are blood-red. Hers remain – always – bone-white.
Hyuuga is still a house of closed doors.
But Hinata never promised to stay a Hyuuga.