Prologue…?
There were hints of rich and dark purple petals peeking at her from between the innocence of the white buds and neutral green leaves and stalks. The clear glass of the vase did nothing to disguise the pathetic bareness of the stems as the bouquet stood to a narrowing point in the exact center of its entrapment. With no hint of water present, she mused that they were either placed by a careless and spendthrift owner, or that the display was fake and plastic in nature.
It's too late for her to be sitting there, staring at a display of freesia. She muses on the possible time now, wondering how much has passed since she was instructed to wait here until someone is sent to call her in. She glances away from the reflection of a glow on the vase and focuses on the only door in the room, beside which was placed a pristine leather armchair. No sound or movement made evident an ensuing summons, so she looked back at the end table the vase was placed upon.
It was a strange waiting room, this. It did not appear to serve any purpose but as a temporary host to a single person. There was only this table, this vase and that couch. The walls were a dull cream colour, the couch an innocuous shade of brown, and the end table was a painted white, looking cheap, with no drawers or embellishments but for a vase atop it. She fingered a petal, expecting to feel cloth or plastic, and was surprised when the petal gave way to her rubbing, revealing the crumpled and bruised petal of a real plant.
The entire room is made of dead things, she presumed in surprise. Cut and dead flowers, kiln-fried vase of long-dead mineral. The skin of a dead beast upon which to sit and the body of a felled tree, likely broken to chips to mash together and stable the form of an end table which was chemically enhanced to present a perpetual falsity of newness. She decided then that the room was a depressing state of unfinished – dead with a shroud of alive. And the only living thing in the room aside from herself was being pushed into the waiting arms of death, deliberately deprived of water.
The door behind her was suddenly jarred open, rusty hinges squeaking in protest, another shock for a place presented in so pristine a manner. One should think they would oil the hinges…
"Miss Hyūga? The coroner will see you now. We've had a busy day, I'm afraid. The wait hasn't inconvenienced you, I hope?" It was a young man, his face clean-shaven and grey hair falling carelessly into dark brown eyes, and he waited expectantly for her reply and compliance in emerging from the room through the door he held ajar as he smiled politely at her. She watched him blankly until the shadow of stretched lips he bore faded away to the unforced lines of boredom before she stepped forward. He turned before she reached him and lead her through the corridor, and she allowed herself a look back into her brief purgatory, at the sad colour of the flowers in that dead room. The darker petal she had bruised seemed to demand her gaze, so she turned to watch the young man's back as she followed him.
This had happened too often lately. She was growing almost numb to the sight of dead children. After all, when you don't know the person before they are dead then seeing them, unmoving and with no personality, strips away the part of you that sees a spark in other people. You begin to lose feeling for death, and the loss of other's lives. They are only stranger's, after all. They don't really matter in the grand scheme of things, so long as you didn't know them. So long as it's not your own, you can admit that yes, it is sad, but you can forget about it. You never knew them, how can you mourn them, so many die every day, mourning is impossible, and there's always another life being made, coming into existence. That's why populations are growing. Never mind that people are being killed by the thousands that don't have to die. You don't know them…
Her child had been gone almost three years now. She could still see the long lashes, the wide eyes that watched the world in wonderment with innocence. Everything was so new to her child, so wondrous. That precious child, whose eyes scrunched up with joy as she allowed her face to beam at you, and mirth to gurgle through her lips towards you, lifting up a part of you inside until you felt like laughing too as you saw the world anew. Beautiful, precious child. She blinked rapidly, dispelling the image of a curly head and little hands waving up at mama. She dashed a tear from her bottom lash and increased her pace that had slowed without her awareness until she caught up with the guide.
They had passed doors and taken turns, because when she looked behind her all she saw where once there was a door was a blank stretch of white wall. The floor had changed from coarse carpet to linoleum as well, and the comfortable and aesthetically pleasing overhead lights had now transformed into small circles of sharp brightness, making the halls look stark and pretending with try hard pictures and many gaudy posters for things she didn't care to know.
Her guide wore a blue scrub, and black pants peeked out from the bottom of his coat. His glasses caught a flash of the lights as he turned his head back to see if she was still following. The flash gave his straight mouth a sinister, grim look. Hinata repressed a shudder and focused on following him down the now familiar path towards the room she'd dubbed the ice-room. Perpetually cold and filled with drawers of dead bodies.
When they came to a halt before a drawer in the middle the row of three, not so far from the door, Hinata took a deep breath, and held it as her guide gave her an almost amused look. He was not her usual guide, and she surmised he was new, which would explain his almost cavalier attitude towards these dead bodies. He slid out a draw containing a cloth covered, small body, and Hinata felt dread pool in the pit of her stomach. Then the face was uncovered, and it was not her child's blue-tinged features upon which she gazed. The hair was black and close-cropped, roughly so. The cheekbones protruded over sunken eye-pits, and the eyelids were closed with a brush of straight – not curled – lashes.
Hinata released a broken sob of self-disgust, horror and relief as she frantically shook her head that no, that was not her child. A greater dread descended over her, for what if her child was facing worse than death? What if she spends all her life looking for a child who will never be found? What if-?
"…-ss Hyūga? Are you alright?" the guide was holding her shaking shoulders as she trembled like a leaf in a storm, the body was once more covered and the drawer closed. But she could still see the blue skin, although now the eyelashes were curled, and the chin softer, and the hair longer, until she was seeing her own daughter lying cold and lifeless.
"Hush now, there's no need to cry, Miss Hyūga." A deceptively soft voice wrapped around her, and Hinata lifted her eyes to look into the eyes of Orochimaru, the chief coroner. He placed a calming hand on her should which Hinata forcibly withheld recoiling from. He was so pale it looked as though he had never seen the light of day, and she saw her tear-streaked face reflected back at her through his pale brown eyes, so pale they looked like yellow, and the small flecks of green that were visible to her let Hinata know he was far too close. She stepped back, taking a deep breath and centering herself. If she broke down like this, she would no longer be allowed to see the bodies they brought in.
"Are you feeling any better?" Orochimaru asked, the grey-haired male who had guided her standing to the side and watching the interaction with interest. Hinata gave a small, shaky smile in reply unable to trust her throat not to crack under the strain of words should she choose to speak.
"Good. I take it that this child is not the one for which you are looking?" Orochimaru continued, slipping off his rubber gloves with a snap as he strode towards a waste basket. Hinata shook her head negative, and managed to choke out a soft, "No." in reply. Orochimaru turned and smiled in what may have seemed a benign way, but his eyes remained cold and reptilian in their calculation.
"I suppose you are still against providing blood so that we may test the corpse before having to contact you for any matches?" Hinata shuddered at his callous way of speaking as she shook her head to indicate that, no, she did not want this man to take her blood and keep it in his creepy lab. She scolded herself for her inner bad thoughts, but maintained them nonetheless when Orochimaru looked more disappointed than he should.
"Very well. My new assistant, Kabuto, will see you out. We will be in contact with you as usual, Miss Hyūga." Orochimaru called back to her as he departed deeper into the building, where his research lab was located, and Hinata turned to Kabuto who was regarding her with unreadable eyes and a stony face. He immediately began to make his way back through the door they had entered from, his strides long and hard to match. Hinata hurried to keep up, not wanting to be trapped down in the ice-room.
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Hinata sat in her living room later that day, allowing herself to unwind after managing to make it through all of her classes at university without recalling the morning at the morgue. She was twenty-two years old and majoring in Literature, and her apartment was two train stations from her university. Her life seemed idyllic and almost worry-free. She had to study, hold down a part-time waitressing job, and maintain enough contact with her Father that he would not worry for her.
But she was missing a crucial part of her. It had been three years since her daughter went missing, and four years since the father refused to claim her child. She was a senior in high-school, it was prom night, and she got drunk for the first time ever. She also had sex for the first time ever. A lot of firsts went down that night, including first conception.
She and the boy who had slipped up had never spoken to each other before then. He didn't believe her when she told him she was pregnant with his child. And why should he? They were both so drunk, the only reason she knew she had sex was the blood in her panties and the pain in her crotch. Added to that was the fact that he had a crazy fan-club, made of girls who would just love to get pregnant so they could trap him into marriage, and there wasn't much case to be made to Sasuke Uchiha when trying to persuade him that he did knock you up. He left for university two months later, in a different city, and she'd come up here to San Francisco for her own studies before her Father was any the wiser.
When she'd given birth she'd had it hard, but she was still getting money from her trust-fund, so it wasn't too bad. She'd drop her daughter off at the child care near her university, do a class, come back for a feeding and get back before the next class started most days. Her daughter started bottle-feeding before the strain of doing this got too much, and they had settled into a routine. Misaki had recently started taking her first steps when one day she'd gone to pick up her daughter from the child care and was told she wasn't there.
Hinata was desperate. She was all alone in a new city, and her daughter was missing. She had no option but to call her Father and ask him to come down, it was an emergency. Imagine his surprise to find the girl he had sent away looking like a woman, crying as she told him the grandchild he didn't know existed was kidnapped.
To Hiashi's credit, he held it together fairly well. He'd made some calls, while Hinata tried not to go crazy worrying over what may have happened, where her daughter was, who had taken her. He asked for a photograph only, and that was the extent of their communication. The police could not be contacted until 24 hours had passed, so Hiashi had called in private investigators.
But there was no trail. Not one of the attendants knew who had picked up Misaki, and not one of them were the one to see Misaki off. Wherever they turned was a dead end. It was not a malicious kidnapping, as no one even knew Hinata Hyūga had been pregnant. No one could recall seeing a baby who met the description given of Hinata's daughter. Now she was stuck coming to the morgue every time there was a matching dead body, because who knew where to look when it was like the missing child never existed.
Hiashi was apologetic but firm. Hinata was on her own. She had disgraced the Hyūga name and would have to bear the consequences of keeping such a thing hidden. Hiashi continued to look for his granddaughter, but from that day Hinata would have to support herself. She clearly believed that she could deal with her problems on her won, and Hiashi could not forgive what she had done and kept from him. If she had shared this child's existence, this might have been prevented. They could have given her a care-taker to work around the clock.
Hinata mourned every day and blamed herself. She had not wanted to trouble anyone, she had only wanted to love her baby girl, and be happy. She did not want her family to be shamed by what was now giving her such joy. This little person who saw the whole world when she looked into Hinata's eyes, who made Hinata feel like she was important. So Hinata mourned, and blamed, and continued to cry herself to sleep at nights as she recalled the many baby girls she'd seen in the morgue. Girl's whose names were unknown. And she cried that her baby girl might end up like that with no one knowing, and that she would never see the child's face again.
Three years is a long time for hope to be carted through, and Hinata could feel her hope wearing thin as she held up the pretence of success at university to avoid further shaming her Father when he had all but forgiven her. She was tired of throwing herself into her studies with the reckless abandon of one who is trying to forget, at least for a little while. But she was so sad, all the time, and felt little need to carry on when every day looked to be the same as this day.
If only Uchiha Sasuke were less suspicious, perhaps this story would have a different beginning. But Uchiha was a strong and powerful name that many wished to associate with. Which is why Misaki Hyūga was kidnapped. There could be no risks allowed for what crazy fan girl bitches would do.
A/N
Hello readers! This is JokerAtWork, here to welcome you to my story and wondering what you all thought? Should I continue? Should I dub this Oneshot, and leave the story there? Do you have any idea what the story is? Lol jokes, but seriously, lemme know! Drop a hello if you're gonna follow! Yellow. I'm so freaking mellow. My voice reads like a chello. This rhyme is outta the flow. So I am just gonna go-o. Yo.
R&R!