"I don't read the newspapers anymore." She croaks, her voice strained and her head looking away from the paper in Itachi's hands.
Itachi glances downward, then up again, the white of his eyes darkened, and his dark irises almost undetectable. "The media makes cynics of us all." He states, unsure of her meaning.
He stares at the back of her head, her hair matted and, his mind wanders as he hasn't let for years. Isn't it odd, that humans have all that square blank footage at the back of their head, whilst the front of the head is so busy and crowded, and important. Couldn't we have evolved two faces, or at least stuck the nose or perhaps the ears a little further back, so you know, the general face area was more spatially economic?
"They're getting back the MIAs." She replies, cradling her steaming coffee like the baby they had lost.
His thoughts spin back to the grimness of reality as she watched Hinata's small hands caress the coffee cup.
Turns out the rejuvenated dead can't father live children, though to be fair, they were pushing it to imagine Itachi could.
"And they're working out the obituaries."
She lets that hang in the air, for a little while. Itachi respects that, but presses further into uncharted territory.
"Don't you want to know…?" He asks, slightly perplexed, cocking his head in an incessantly childish way that Hinata finds more annoying that affectionate.
"I'll visit the memorial site… leave flowers, read who is there and who isn't. But the obituaries taste bad."
"Taste bad?"
She takes a swig of her coffee, and glances over him, her eyes more tired and less free-willed than she used to be when Itachi and her first met. "I have synesthesia. " She sighs into the dregs off her coffee, like it's more of a pain than a condition.
"What is it?" He asks, uncomfortable of encountering something he doesn't know. "Is it a bad condition?"
She's not used to having to explain anything to him, and she looks slightly shocked. For a moment he hopes against will it'll be something that explain those miscarriages, something that can be cured, with pills and ointments and chakra therapy.
"I can taste numbers and see them with different colours. People too have their associative colours and tastes and scents and sounds and it's all very, very heavy sometimes. It's not anything bad though." She laughs hollowly, as if it were funny.
"Oh." He's almost bitterly disappointed, but he's learnt a lot about the numbing inability of hope. "So what do obituaries taste like?"
"Like salt water."
"Oh. Tears?"
"No. More like the silt at the bottom of the Naka river. It's gravelly and harsh and it forces your way down your throat, seeping into your sinuses. It's a horrible sensation." She pauses for a moment. "I prefer to avoid it."
"You always avoid things you dislike." His voice comes from nowhere, or at least, not his head, but maybe his heart, left cold and bitter from the lack of her warmth at night.
"Y-you shouldn't say things like that. It's uncalled for." She trembles. The empty coffee cup shakes, and her eyes avoid his too direct gaze.
He almost makes another cutting remark, and he would, were she another girl he was simply cohabiting with, or someone who would simply fly into rages and match him word for word. But she's Hinata, and she simply lapses into sad, solemn silences where she thinks, and rethinks and calculates, until she's overthought (and before her, he'd not ever believed anyone could overthink anything) a simple throw away comment into something much larger, and far more oppressive.
But then again, he is Uchiha Itachi, and if you're not regurgitating everything he has ever said to you in your head whilst he speaks, it's a sign he's loosing what ability he has left.
"I'm afraid that if we get close again, I'll get pregnant again, and we'll, we'll…" Her shoulders tremble and her head dips. "There are some things that are broken. That can never be fixed. That should never be fixed. You should have never come back from the dead. We should have never gotten together. You know how I feel." She looked out of the window towards the grey watercolour of a sky and with white clenching hands, set the coffee cup down by the sink.
"I'll load the dishwasher." He says in monotone, triviality filling in those awkward silences that used to be so full of hidden emotions. "And the Naka river is a freshwater river."
"You would know."
There's no gleam of a ring on her finger. Itachi's glad she's simply his partner, though he supposes they're just simply co-habiting nowadays. Makes it easy for both of them to simply back out and there's no real argument about legal fees or whatever. He always supposed that he had eternity to propose.
"You just said there are some things you shouldn't say. I can accept that. You're loosing your moral higher ground."
Her fists ball up, and her pretty face screws into a shade of fury he's seen a million times on the battlefield, before the war ended and everything pretended it was back to normal.
"Don't call me a hypocrite."
"You did that. Not me."
Ah touché. He's levelled the field.
"I-I… I would have loved to be the father of your children. You would have made a good mother. We would have been good parents. We could have made this work." He admits, his darkened eyes travelling to the obituaries and scanning the names for someone he might know, just to lighten the conversation somewhat.
Her back is as straight as a board and she tenses up as she is taken by the shock of an issue being so directly tackled by Itachi. They always speak indirectly. It's all very smoke and mirrors, illusions and magic and mindfuckery mixed and blended until you don't know when he's serious, and when he's not.
"I would have loved to have had a family with you." She admits, tired and stick thin. She's stopped eating well lately, and he knows that her natural courses have stopped, she's so tiny.
Suddenly he wants to have her in his arms once more, to smell that odd jamboree of scents, of honeysuckle and jasmine and freshly cleaned linen. How long is it since that natural fragrance has reached him? Has it faded and withered, like the woman in front of him, a shadow of what it once was?
A popping sound emits from his mouth as he opens them, his lips suddenly dry.
"I still love you." He admits, more guilt ridden than a Catholic's confessional. He shouldn't but he does, but sometimes he's still not sure.
" I don't know what to say to that." she answers, her voice as ruined and coarse as her uterus has come to feel.
Her legs twitch closer together and to her surprise she walks over to him and sits down by his side, and traces his face that'll remain unchanged whilst hers ages.
He is fair featured and has a light but jagged bone structure. He's angular and sharp, and his chin is pointed but his jawline is horrifically solid. The crevices where the lines under his eyes form, his thick (girly) eyelashes, his pointed, roman and slightly hooked nose. He is a handsome man. And he'll stay forever handsome until the leaves that regenerate his body disappear with the wind.
They don't know when that could be. It could be forever, it could be tomorrow.
He feels like dead leaves and steam, and he tastes like the scent of bread.
"Perhaps it is better this way." She croaks, as if she believes it.
"Maybe."
"Hn." She sighs, retrieving her hand and placing her chin on it. "Will you make me some coffee?"
"Sure. If you tell me what purple tastes like."
" I can't explain it very well."
"Well try. I'll keep listening."
She crosses her legs and caresses her face, watching her undead lover glide across the kitchen. Theres something here that ought to be kept, and kept safely. She doesn't know if It'll work, or if it'll last, but for this moment, and many moments afterwards, it ought to remain protected.
Author's Note
I guess I wanted to get that out of my head. The break-down of relationships- the intimate moments, the cracks, the silences and the what if, perhaps, maybe... times fascinate me. It's all very human, and very simple and there's something awfully voyeuristic looking into these moments.
I wonder if anyone is sythesthetic? I've exaggerated it in Hinata's case here, as she has the whole kaboodle of symptoms, and she's very strongly sythesthetic. I'm only weakly so, and I only get it when I think of numbers. I can think of numbers in colour, and it's odd, but I get feelings off them too. I must sound crazy, but dividing things by three is the best feeling in the world for me :D
Oh Shnizel (If you are reading this) - this isn't your challenge (I'm still working on it, and I'm attempting to tame it into a nice, easy one shot. It keeps on developing into a multi-chapter. Darn you!)
Thank you for reading :)