Title:
Coal and DiamondAuthor: 8sword
Date: 7.23.10
Disclaimer: Masashi Kishimoto owns Naruto.
Summary: And all the hatred that should have leaked away with the life in Itachi's dark eyes stayed stuck to Sasuke instead, clinging to him like dirt to bloody hands. He cannot hate Itachi. So he must hate someone else.
Author's Notes: AU. If Sasuke returned to the village and did not face any significant punishment and negotiated a marriage contract with Hyuuga Hiashi to wed Hinata.
Myriad thanks to everyone who read Alpha Female, which I actually wrote because I had writer's block with this story.
Relevant fact: cut diamonds exhibit total internal reflection, which basically means that any light that hits them is reflected repeatedly inside them before emerging from it.
The jeweler chooses a diamond ring for Hyuuga Hinata's wedding band.
His decision is preceded by a congratulations on their impending nuptials and a smiling instruction to Sasuke that the ring should match the bride.
When an unsmiling Sasuke looks back at him without moving, the old man's smile falls, and he begins to shuffle through the jewelry case himself. After a moment, his arm still inside the glass case, he seems to remember himself; he looks up and smiles, asking Hyuuga-sama if she sees anything she likes.
Hinata, her face paling instead of flushing, murmurs that the rings are all very beautiful and any of them would be alright.
The jeweler's smile brittles again, but he brings out a diamond-studded band. The clear, shining stones fit Hyuuga-sama perfectly, he says, looking at her downcast white eyes.
To Sasuke, this comparison is imbecilic. As is the entire process of buying a ring to signify their marriage when it is already written in blood on a contract and in pale green chakra on her forehead.
Hinata's eyes, he thinks, looking away from the bandage which covers the seal which makes him grit his teeth even though he cares nothing for this woman who will be his wife, are nothing like diamonds. Diamonds are hard. Hinata's eyes are soft, too weak even to meet anyone's gaze for longer than a moment before slipping away.
Had he any interest in picking a jewel that "fit" her, it would be a pearl. Small. Unnoticed. Unvalued.
He says nothing, however, merely pulls out the money to pay the jeweler as he measures the band against Hinata's finger.
Something changes, once the ring is glinting on her finger.
Unintentionally – Sasuke has been back in the village for only a few months and engaged to her for less than two weeks, but that is more than enough time to know that she is too timid to act against him on purpose – she keeps her hands hidden inside long jacket sleeves, concealing the band just as the bandage around her head covers the Branch seal.
The wedding is not for another week yet, but his authority began the moment her father's blood touched the marriage contract scroll. He tells Hinata, carelessly, to let the ring show.
The threat of or I will show it for you runs beneath his words in the arch of his eyebrows and the trace of his finger, as cold as a kunai blade, down her throat to the zipper of her jacket.
Her eyes remain on the ground, but her chin arches higher as though to avoid his cold touch. Sasuke does not remove his finger but only waits for her to roll up her sleeves. When she does, he lets his hand slide away, and he turns. But then he turns back.
"Take off the bandage."
Her eyes flutter from the ground to him. They flinch, flutter away, to his shoulder. "But," stumbles a whisper from her lips.
He takes a step closer to her, the proximity a cold warning again: or I will remove it for you.
Her fingers rise up to the white fabric. He can picture what it will look like as she unwinds it, the streamer of white fabric slithering down to the ground like a dead snake.
Her hand falls back to her side. "No," she whispers.
A few months earlier, Uchiha Sasuke sat in the Hyuuga clan head's receiving room. The seat in which Hyuuga Hiashi impassively invited him to sit placed Sasuke's back to the paper doors. Poor etiquette for a ninja guest, to place him in such a vulnerable position, but Sasuke sensed that it was as much a message of disdain as it was discourtesy.
He did not mind. He had his own message to send back. The Sharingan was superior to the Byakugan, and he did not fear sitting with his back to any of them.
A set of chakra and footsteps passed behind him, muted through the closed shoji door. Muted, but detectable. Only by the grace of the strict clan manners his mother had drilled into him, still clinging like cobwebs to his reflexes was Sasuke kept from turning to follow the presence.
Instead, he took a sip from his tea as his host glanced at him, the skin around his white Hyuuga eyes hardening in ridges.
Hyuuga nodded, and Sasuke heard one of the retainers just behind the door rise and ghost after the presence.
"She is here," said Hyuuga, the skin around his eyes not relaxing as he returned his gaze to Sasuke. "But you already knew that."
Sasuke said nothing, merely returned Hyuuga's blank gaze from above the rim of his tea. Inside, he felt a touch of faint surprise. He had come only that day with his proposition, yet the Hyuuga was already bringing his daughter into the negotiation. Sasuke had expected tests of some sort; threats; canvassings of his clan resources; discussions of his village status and mental health after his time with Orochimaru.
Neither of them spoke for some time.
"She is taking her time coming to join us," said Sasuke said at last. Although it was a gross violation of etiquette, he had followed Hinata's chakra signature upstairs to where it was now stationary.
"My daughter will not be joining us."
The retainer had returned, not with Hinata but with a scroll. He knelt and extended it in his arms to Hyuuga.
The Hyuuga clan leader unrolled it on the table. A fleck of blood peeked from the tip of his thumb, appeared suddenly on the scroll. "She is not needed to make the contract."
He pushed the scroll toward Sasuke.
Who glanced down at it. He could still see Hyuuga Hinata's chakra signature in his mind's eye, a wan white ghost.
He pressed his blood to the marriage scroll.
Hinata's father was the one who led her to the mat on which Sasuke knelt before the priest. Were anyone allowed inside the chamber to observe this ceremony, which they were not, they might have made the mistake of thinking, based on the way that Hinata leaned away from her stern-faced, long-haired father, that the bride was eager to reach her future husband.
But that appearance was not reflected in her eyes, as she lowered herself beside him silently despite her layer of silks. Tradition dictated that Sasuke look at the priest, not at her, but he turned his head to watch her impassively. Her hands curled in her lap, her lifted chin, and her white face staring ahead. She was nothing like the finger-twiddling, gaze-avoiding, red-faced genin he remembered.
In fact, more than anything, with her ramrod-straight posture and dark hair pulled back, she suddenly reminded him of his mother.
Tou-san, sitting at the table as Sasuke wandered into the dark kitchen to sneak a knife for target practice because Itachi-nii will not let him use his kunai. Kaa-san, easing open the door and stopping short when she saw the both of them.
Without moving, Tou-san spoke. "Where were you?"
Kaa-chan's voice, hard, not like it was supposed to be. "I'm a ninja, the same as you, Fugaku."
"No. I told you no more –"
Kaa-chan's voice sharp like a kunai. "You told me? I'm not one of your trainees, Fugaku!"
Strange how the fuzzy memories Sasuke had of his parents fighting could twist his insides into tighter knots than the Sharingan-sharp memories Itachi gave him of their deaths.
He can remember cowering behind Itachi, as his older brother stood stock-still in the kitchen doorway and watched them, ignoring their mother's order to go to your room and take Sasuke with you because Kaa-san and Tou-san need to talk. He can remember tugging at Itachi-nii, wanting to be away, away from the shouting and the poisonous look on Tou-san's face. He can remember thinking that Itachi was the reason they always fought, because Tou-san wanted Itachi to graduate early, to join ANBU, to join the police force, and Kaa-san wanted him to slow down.
He can remember the blank look on Itachi's face as he watched them both, the same expression he wore when he watched a training spar between two graceless academy students. Something a few degrees too cold to be disgust shifting in his dark eyes.
The hatred that Itachi planted inside him that black night and cultivated for red-edged years until that last battle is not something that disappears. It is not like Juugo's cursed seal, creeping out in slow intervals and then retreating until no signs of it remains. It is not like the chakra from a Chidori, unbearably intense for an instant and then dissipating without a trace to indicate it ever existed.
It is more like Sabaku no Gaara's sand, always there, seething across his skin and tendriling toward new targets.
Maybe if Sasuke had not found out the truth about his aniki's sacrifice, the hatred could have seeped out of him, drained into the stone with Itachi's blood.
But he did find out. And all the hatred that should have leaked away with the life in Itachi's dark eyes stayed stuck to Sasuke instead, clinging to him like dirt to bloody hands. He cannot hate Itachi.
So he must hate someone else.
Even with an ANBU mask concealing them, Hinata's eyes are disgracefully bad for night missions. They catch even the faintest glimmer of moonlight, reflecting it through the slits of her mask.
Sasuke, although he is her husband and his decisions do not require justification, allows her to believe that he has her removed from the ANBU roster because of this danger. He does not find it difficult to ignore the mutterings and dirty glances of her numerous ANBU teammates and friends, with all of whom she spends entirely too much time, outside, away from him.
The day after his wife's removal, as Sasuke goes to the Hyuuga compound to summon Hyuuga Neji for a mission to which the Hokage has assigned them both, a Hyuuga retainer leads him down a paper-walled hall.
For this place, which once concerned him not at all, he now holds contempt. It is with the sharp ear of a rival clan leader that he hears Hyuuga Hiashi's voice and with the boiling resentment of a wronged son that he notes its resemblance to the tense-jawed tone of authority his own father used.
"I can only approve of such a removal," it says. "Godaime-sama has a weakness for giving the kunoichi of your generation higher positions than you have the power to hold. You would not have lasted long as an ANBU."
There is a submitting sound like a sigh, or a whisper of hair from a bowed head. "Hai, otou-sama."
The conversation is directly beside him now. Faintly, Sasuke can detect the scent of freshening herbs that Hinata places between her kimono in their drawers. He looks straight ahead and continues to walk, unhurried, down the wood-floored corridor even as the retainer tries to quicken their pace.
"I do not think I need to remind you that if you were to die before giving the Uchiha an heir, your sister would have to fulfill the contract in your place. I would not look kindly upon your spirit should that happen."
There is another soft, "Hai." Then Sasuke is rounding a corner, urged along by the retainer, and can hear no more.
Four days later, after returning from his mission with Neji, he goes to the Hokage and has his wife put back on the ANBU roster.
It clings to him, the old Uchiha clan pride, like a snake skin not fully molted. Refusing to let the woman who belongs to him to be cowed by the man he hates, no matter the relation. Refusing to let her be cowed at all.
He will make her hard, like him.
There are two things Sasuke has never seen her do in the compound. The first is use her Byakugan. As though she senses that the Uchiha who once lived in these empty buildings would not have approved of her bloodline limit. Or as though, with the seal still burning faintly beneath her dark hair, she does not want to use the technique of the clan that sealed her.
The second is cry.
One day a few months after their marriage, he enters the house as silently as he ever does and stops just as silently in the doorway to the main room.
She is bent over on the sofa, her hair pulled into a tail so tight that it looks like it has been cropped to the length it was when they were genin. Her head is in her hands, clear moisture gleaming on the sides of her blue-veined wrists.
A board chirps beneath his foot. He must have shifted forward.
She looks up.
Her eyes. Are glittering.
He returns her gaze for a moment longer and then continues into the kitchen.
That night, she wears the colorless filmy fabric that she wore on their wedding night. She curls up on her side without pulling up the covers. Her hair covers her face, but her back is not to him.
He interprets these details and responds, pressing an arm to either side of her on the mattress. His lips find the skin of her neck beneath her hair and his fingers trace her collarbone before dipping lower.
Her shoulder blades tense beneath his chest. He slides his face from her neck to behind her ear to ask if his fingers are too cold. His breath at her ear makes her hair tremble but nothing else. He drags his fingertips lower and at last feels her jump slightly, her breath hitch, against him.
Only afterward, as he draws away from her, lips clinging to hers before they part like static-charged cloth clinging to skin, does he see that her eyes are blank, staring past him, up at the ceiling. As he lifts himself off of her, her eyelids close, her expression as blank as her white eyes.
Diamond, he thinks as he lies there on his back, staring at the same ceiling. None of his caresses touched her at all. She was not reaching out for him. He had interpreted incorrectly. This was no plea or apology or reassurance. Only an exchange. He caught her showing unhappiness with this life, and she has been raised by her father's clan to know the proper response to reimburse him for her misconduct.
He shoves himself out of bed, angrily, snatches his clothes from the bedpost, and stalks to the training ground.
A transition from one silence to another. From the silence of the living, their disapproval breathing in every room. To being alone, the very absence of sound building up until the pressure seemed to rupture his eardrums inside his skull, the fluid leaking out.
To this.
Weeks go by without him touching her.
One cold night, they use the fireplace for the first time. While Hinata fetches spare blankets from the hall closet, Sasuke puts coal onto the grate and stares at the orange flames crackling above a floor of ashes. Ashes that must be at least fifteen years old, for no one has entered the house since he came back, and the last time that there was a fire in this fireplace was the winter that it snowed in Konoha, when Itachi entered ANBU and his father was happy and his mother smiled like she was, too.
At the sound of Hinata's feet padding back into the room, he sits back on his heels, hands on his knees. When he lifts his hand to take a blanket from her, black soot from his hands stays behind on his gray pants.
"Oh," says Hinata softly when she sees this, and goes to the kitchen. He hears the water running, and then she comes in with a washcloth.
Sasuke does not extend a hand to take it from her. He leaves his hands, palms upturned, on his knees and waits for her to wipe them clean herself. He waits, almost impatiently, for some black dust to rub off onto her white hand.
But none does. She pulls away with the black-streaked cloth, as untouched as ever, and stands up with a small sigh, as though she is an adult humoring a spoiled child.
It makes him angry.
He catches a handful of her pant leg, jerking her to the floor as roughly as an enemy-nin. He grips her chin, his thumb pressing into her jugular. He attacks her mouth.
She does nothing, only stays still. When he finally pulls away, her eyes are on the wall beyond his shoulder, as though to say wearily, are you done now?
And Sasuke is even more furious than before, ink-eyed, paper-lipped furious, wrenching her face to the side to make her look at him, his fingers bruising on her jaw –
Her eyes, glittering.
Her Byakugan is not activated, but he feels, suddenly, as naked as if it was. Like a dark, dirty chunk of coal so weak and soft it comes off as dust on people's fingers.
Her face when she comes home from visiting her father's sick(hopefully death)-bed. Colorless and drawn. As though poisonous words still nest inside her ears. Sasuke does not understand why she goes back to that man.
Her mouth mumbles platitudes. He's her father. It's her duty, as his daughter. He will be hurt if she does not go to him. He loves her, in his own way.
But her eyes, shadowed and dull, tell Sasuke that she does not understand why she goes any more than he does.
Although her insistence upon going angers him and makes him sulk at the table, ignoring her each night instead of responding to her quiet "I will be back by nine," it is also, unpleasantly, comforting. If Hinata will go to see the man she should hate, then she will stay with Sasuke, too, when he is old and dying alone and stone-lipped in his echoing clan compound.
Only when she returns one night twenty minutes after nine, unlocking and easing the front door open so quietly that it takes her a full minute to slip inside, and he is still sitting there in the dark kitchen, watching her, the demand where were you rising to his lips, does he realize just how same the situation is.
"Why don't you hate him?"
He has gone into the living room and found her sitting in front of the fire. Just sitting there. And when she turns around to murmur an okaeri, her white hands have black soot on them. His eyes flick to them and then to her white eyes. Glinting like diamonds.
"I can't." Her voice a whisper. "I'm not…" She doesn't finish.
Her eyes are wetter, brighter, than before. Sasuke thinks of internal reflection. Of hatred as light instead of dark, of it trapped inside her where the only person it touches is herself.
He leans in close to her. His mouth just centimeters from hers. "I want you to hate someone."
Against his lips, she mumbles, "Even if it's you?"
Sasuke considers this. Slants his mouth across the curve of her ear, his hot breath changing the pale white skin to pink. Then he closes his mouth over hers and bites down on her lip. Hard.
Some time later, he lifts his head to gaze at her.
For the first time in their marriage, her diamond eyes gaze back.