N/A: In celebration of Naruto's 17th birthday.
Disclaimed.
In Another Life
By: You Are My Math
He remembers, the fresh of his wounds, an arm lost, the trajectory of his kunai, the sting of pain in his heart, the taste of iron in his lips, and a war waged in a battlefield of where he both lost, and saved a friend. He remembers in a blurry, shadowed glimpse of the past the gentle hand that he clung into when he was at the edge of giving in.
The hand, that made him promised that, someday I'll hold you down the aisle of the future where there are no wars, no distance, no mistakes—the hand that made him believe of what it could have been.
He looks up on the midnight skies of early October, and smiles.
He isn't really a hopeless one, but in the midst of the patchwork of time of the universe, somewhere in the stars, or maybe in the nook of the cousin universe, his old self, proud and content, is watching him right now.
"Kami," he whispers at the notion of chances he always has.
Sometimes, in the past, he pictures out a life of another chance, a life in another dimension. Never would he have imagined that it will happen so with his memories—though vague, and ambiguous—intact.
He could've wished for more, demanded for what he wants, but when he looks from across the field at the bleachers seat, he knows before he takes his next breath that she is the vision of what he won't deserve even after all these years.
And yet, here she is, standing more than five meters away from him, smiling as though the remnants of a lost childhood weren't on her history. Maybe, after all these years, God knows what he truly deserves.
"Naruto-kun,"
At a loss at the sound of his name on her voice, he watches in dazed at her. When he is debarred from going anywhere else, she walks to him. When he couldn't make a single word for her, she smiles at him—and everything seems like a conversation enough after that.
Her smile, unfaltering, and gentle, soothes him. Even after all these chances? He wonders. Maybe, always, he answers himself quite content at how lovely she looks underneath the luminescence of the moon; how she looks captivating in her loose ponytail at the side, dressed in a white dress shirt; how everything seems to blur at the second she walks in the middle of the field smiling at him.
"Happy birthday," she says, now standing a few inches away from him.
"Hinata," he says, feeling the weight of realization on his shoulders, as he leans down his forehead on her left shoulder.
"Hmm…?"
He doesn't know what it was that made him realize what he couldn't and wouldn't realize before; he doesn't know what it was that made him believe to the concept of chances, or what made him wonder about worth, and prized.
But all he knows, when he rests his head on her the way he does right now, is he just wants to feel her more than anything else, and little else in each place, forever.
"Thank you."
He remembers quite well, and quite vague in his mind that somewhere in the past, when the world is falling it is with her hand, and gentle touch that made him think that she, who was and still is the person that, is standing right beside him.
"You're welcome." Hinata smiles.
It takes no word to understand him.