Naruto was pinned, as a collector would pin butterflies before transferring them to a plate of glass. He struggled and cursed Pein, snarling threats and pleas in the same harsh voice but Pein only went on a monologue about how love destroyed people, how people destroyed people.
Hinata understands his point, can even sympathize with it.
She remembers the sound of Naruto's voice urging to stand up, urging her to fight, while blood spattered from her mouth and the crowd looked on in horror at the living dead girl. Naruto shouting and yelling at Neji that destiny didn't matter. Naruto, bright as the sun, so bright, so beautiful and so awful that sometimes Hinata felt like Icarus with paper and wax wings when she wanders to close to his orbit.
Hinata leapt down in the crater and places herself between Pein, who looks mildly surprised and annoyed at her entrance, Naruto and feels his eyes – blue and deep as the ocean – bear into her back. "Hinata?" he sounds hesitant. Hinata has never heard him sound hesitant before. "Hinata what are you doing? Get away from here, he'll kill you!" he starts struggling, tearing himself on the poles that pin him to the ground.
Hinata feels her heart swell – it feels something like all her love and her regret and her sorrow – as she listens to him beg her to leave. Leave him at the hands of Pein.
If she leaves now, she will leave knowing she left Naruto to die, a fate she believes worse than her own death. Death for her will be final but Naruto's death will haunt her for the rest of her life, a curse upon her for letting the sun go dark.
She won't leave him.
"I'm not afraid to die for you because I love you," she says and it feels like freedom, something like absolution. Her words are the words engraved on tombstones, lasting and final. She feels her heart burst, raw and red and shredded.
She hears Naruto scream at her. Pein is advancing towards Naruto, murderous in his intent.
She steadies her frantic heart and reaches for serenity. In theory, preparing yourself to die is easy, imagining life flowing out of you for someone else is romantic, to save them is romantic. In reality the feeling of saving someone who doesn't love you back is enough for your heart to stay in your throat. Hinata has never needed him to love her back, and she still doesn't and she doesn't need pity-love or a lie to love him as she does. Over the years she's more or less compared herself with a plant that feeds off the sun– as long as he is there, alive and happy and whole, it's always been enough to sustain her.
It still is; that hasn't changed.
Pein is getting closer.
She hears Naruto continue to roar and rage behind her but ignores him. He doesn't understand her and that's okay and really the only thing she regrets about this meeting is that her confession is tinged with the scent of a grave and that Naruto will probably cry at her funeral. He won't even really understand why she will die for him when Pein outmatches her so terribly.
This was not about besting Pein, or proving herself in front of Naruto to flaunt her feelings. There is never a moment where winning seemed even remotely possible. This is not a fight she is meant to win. This is a fight meant only to buy Naruto time, and it will be enough.
It has to be, for his sake.
It has to be.
