Title: Habitual Behaviors
Summary: And these are the rites that they'll perform every day for the rest of their lives.
Note: n/a

There are many things about the people closest that remain unknown. Most stay in the dark where they are born for various reasons… if only to protect someone, if only to comfort someone else.

Sasuke has some bad habits he'd rather not fess up to. When he's alone, at home in the sunset evenings, sometimes he finds his way into his parent's bedroom. Everything there is still untouched. Just the same way it was the day they left this world.

He comes in about every other week to keep the dust from settling too deeply in the fabrics. This small disturbance is nothing. He does little else to disrupt the solemn peace that has made it's home here. He actually enjoys keeping this place clean. It's not so much a ritual as it is a wait. He wants this room to be ready for when they return. It could be any time now for all he knows. He's never sure but he hates to second-guess.

This little bit of hope that he carries with him, it's the only thing that can give him the strength to open their closet doors and see their clothes still hanging there. The satisfaction of relief that they have not completely left his life; they live on in his memories, his dreams, but especially in his heart.

He can pick up the sleeve of one of his mother's most expensive kimono without fear, and drag it slowly across the skin on his forearm. It leaves a soft fluttering, fleeting feeling on the nerves there. The touch was one she used to reserve for him to ease his troubled mind. When father always seemed so disappointed... when Itachi was always so much better... when he was still so stupid...

Hurts were easy to soothe back then.

And by the front door, where his father's more traditional looking geta lay, his return home before his death. Sasuke can sit by the ledge nearest the outside porch and slip his toes in and out of the thongs. Father had very big feet, so he of course has larger shoes to fill. Whenever he finds himself here, he wonders if he was ever a good son... not just some miserable screw up who couldn't do anything right the first time.

Are they proud to call themselves his parents? Was he ever deserving of their love? Or is that the thing that caused them to be taken away...?

He doesn't parade around in their belongings because that would be disrespectful. And he never even pulls them out or so much as looks at them if he thinks someone else may be watching. It's too childish to be like that, but in the more private recesses of mind he can pretend he's six again without the worry of any kind of discipline.

Itachi's room is off limits.

There is nothing left in there unless you count the walls, barely standing, and the small pieces of furniture that have somehow managed to survive his younger brother's wrath. It has long since been torn apart in a rage, and Sasuke can't even bring himself to look it's way when he passes by it now.

All of these behaviors are born of his suffering.
But no one knows about it because there's no one here.

Hinata is guilty too. She does so many things when her father's watchful eyes aren't upon her. The first is embracing her weakness. She doesn't want to hurt people. It's easy to wound, it's so much harder to heal.

Sometimes she sits alone, behind a tools shed in the outside gardens, picking and mixing herbs with her own bare hands. She can't have any special provisions of her own, people would frown at her purchases, and she has long since decided life is much easier without people constantly asking questions.

So she'll do it with her own hard work, show everyone that she can be made worthy too.

Squishing the plants beneath her fingertips, watching the juices mingle and congeal, this will help to stop the sting around over-used chakra points. Hanabi can use it now especially since her training sessions with their father have doubled. But when she is not concerned with her family or the close-knit group of people she considers friends, Hinata takes part in two more shameful activities. Little girls often do this, but at the age of twelve it's unusual and a tad bit too foolish for someone of her stature.

She likes to dress up in her mother's old clothes. She still mourns the day her mother was dressed in her formal funeral kimono, so she only wears the more cheerful colored robes that her mother owned. The wedding ceremony dress is her favorite. It shows her, every time she stands in front of a full figure mirror, that the love her father showed her mother once wasn't just a farce. It was an agreeable union. It's a security knowing that she was loved once too... that she was something special to cherish, in both of her parents eyes before she became nothing more than a failure to one.

Even if her body has still not grown enough to properly fill the robes, when she is finished tying the obi poorly, as she has never had a mother's instruction beyond the age of five, she feels filled with what can be called love again.

It's the same one that's been taken away from her by the very family that gave her life.

With this attire, Hinata can feel at peace. She can feel confident; she can be herself. But as her shaking fingers begin to remove herself from the silky embrace, she cries. She always cries...

It's embarrassing, she knows, but it's like dying every time; always denying the way she truly feels. Peeling away her armor, all seven to twelve layers of it, she needs to hide in something less glamorous now. The tears are her own each time, but she only keeps them within the confines of her mother's grand vanity.

What would father say if he saw?
She puts the robes back in their proper boxes before getting ready to go out and train again.

So when Sasuke passes her on his walk back in from town, he can tell she's been crying. He can see she's someone full of frivolous sentiments; things so pointless and trite that they're probably not even worth holding onto anymore. It's easy to outwardly scoff and ignore his own weaknesses by pointing a hypocritical finger in her direction, mindful of the groceries he's carrying, because that strong will that guides her on her way to the training fields certainly can't stand up to his sort of brutality.

But if she looks up at him, should he call out to her, with those white eyes passed down from generation to generation in her family's clan... he knows he'll feel a sudden twinge of panic. His hidden paranoia will stumble him up for just one second and she'll see him for he truly his because she's a smart enough girl to know he's got some nasty little secrets of his own that are just waiting for him when he gets home.

So let her pretend that training harder by herself makes her stronger.
Let him go on believing that they'll really all come back to him one day.

Happiness is something so sought after, but so very hard to maintain.