A/N : After what Kishimoto pulled with Neji, I don't think I can view Naruto in the same way. Anyway I had to write something about Hinata (being my favorite and all) but I don't think I've done her justice.
Warnings: One curse word and some liberties I took with Hinata's mother, as always.
SPOILERS.
Disclaimer : Naruto's not mine.
It wasn't that she didn't love Neji.
That would be the worst kind of lie and Hinata would not allow anyone to torment her in this manner. It also wasn't the fact that she was a collected and concentrated person that helped her focus more quickly than Naruto after… that happened. She was neither collected nor calm and no one could accuse her of high self control.
The truth was both simpler and more complicated than that.
It was the fact that she was more of a grown up than Naruto, or anyone else in Konoha Twelve {you're eleven now, eleven, eleven, eleven}, minus perhaps Shikamaru, even if others often failed to recognize that in her.
All except him. Her beloved older brother that died protecting her and hers. {Myfaultmyfaultmyfault}
When Hinata was barely five years of age, her beloved {brown eyed, non-Hyuuga mother} had died, the very same night her little sister was born {by the official wife of the Head who bore the beautiful silver orbs of her pureblood clan}.
She had lost that night the love and protection of her mother and in that same night her father was torn, ripped away from her, leaving her for a more blessed {appropriate} child, with more talent and power in her pure Hyuuga veins. Half a year later you will finally lose the only person you'd have been left, but that now seems more welcome than today's reality .
Hinata is left alone, to wither and despair and eventually be cast away. After all, every family has their dirty little secret and those are often best hidden under the rug. Soon no one remembers there was ever another wife to the Head, a second, illegitimate one with brown eyes and soft smiles. Hinata had been the first Lady's and if she is untalented and weak, well her little sister is more than enough.
Hinata stops being a child the day her father leaves her in front of the Academy without so much a backward glance. Hinata realizes that not all parents love their children and if she ever had been cared for, she was no longer. She had lost.
Hinata knows and appreciates the fact that her Naruto-kun has known great pain and anguish. However, she also understands, even if she's never heard those words from the traitor herself, that Sasuke had been right. You can't understand how it feels to have a family that loves you one day and the next sight you see is that of your dead mother and an unfeeling and angry {grieving} father not even sparing you a glance.
Naruto would never understand the cold nights of terror, pure loneliness and loathing (being to herself or, even worse, to Hanabi) nor could he ever know the shock, the feeling of not knowing where you stand, who you are. The incredible hurt of not knowing who you are. Her beloved ball of sunshine, she was certain, had his own, perhaps more terrifying demons that she would never hope to understand, however Sasuke had been right. He never had known parents that were taken away from him. She likens the feeling to the question she had once asked a Hyuuga friend from the branch house who happened to have a twin brother. In her longing for companionship, she'd foolishly asked how it felt to have a twin (perhaps to feel closer to how her father felt about the loss of his? She couldn't know).
The answer had been all too simple "I don't know what it's like not to have a twin."
And that was just it. Naruto hadn't known how it felt to have parents, he'd been an orphan all his life and while he could feel something missing, it wasn't the same as Sasuke's or even her losses. Hinata would never dismiss his pain as lesser however they were and always would be different.
What Naruto didn't know and, for some time, she had idiotically clung to the idea (hope) that he'd never know, was losing someone yours. In their world though, it was only a matter of time he would know. And know her pain, he did.
He lost his master. The same way Shikamaru lost his. In a battle unable to do anything to help, against o a foe with no name, for a reason that was lost to them. Naruto grieved and despaired and hurt and perhaps then understood a fraction of that pain. Inevitably though, he forgot. He managed to come to terms through time and thinking and if her beautiful hero was anything, he was hopeful and strong. So, he had his time to mourn, to yell and rage, but through it all, he stood up once more. He had time. Time.
Time he didn't have that cursed day. Time he couldn't afford to lose, none of them could, with Neji, her brother, bleeding in his arms, dying because of her and for her {because as much as a part of her would like to put a bit of the blame to Naruto, to ease her nights, the truth was, Neji's blood was on her hands, cursed again and again to have him and his father taken for her sake. Two times she should have died.}
People whisper about that day. People point their fingers and mutter behind tight lips and curse her through haunted eyes for her lack of feelings, her lack of tears and shock at the sight of her protector wasting away in front of her. People say that the monster demon showed more of a humanity for the man that shield him, had even been paralyzed with grief and pain, while she.. She had stood and slapped him and urged him to move, she'd stayed focused and concerned about the one that was left instead of her kin and what kind of monster is she anyway?
The frozen Hyuuga they call her. The one that seemed angelic and kind had been shown to be the most uncaring of them all.
Hinata doesn't care for them. They can point and stare and whisper, she won't listen and it doesn't matter. She knows her reasons.
Hinata had stopped being a child at six, when she first walked the door of the Academy, standing alone, against a crowd she so much feared.
Hinata had stopped trying to fight the inevitable, death and sickness and happiness, all of those things happen all the time and she has been numb to them for many years. She won't weep or lose her cool for anyone, even for him, because she is a woman and she is stronger and she is frailer and she has lost enough to know better.
And it was time, Naruto grew up too.
The world doesn't care if you have time to get back, won't care even if you need it. It keeps it's course, uncaring of you, or anyone else, it will continue so forever and ever until it too wither away and die.
If she weeps, if she begs every deity that exists to bring Neji back in the confines of her home, that's her business and that's her time. In the time of the war, when her Neji died for her and hers she doesn't have the right to mourn.
What she owes to him (and what Naruto owes to her) is to keep fighting and to win. So she'll slap and demand and force him to get up, to stand again and to fucking win (because now, trying is simply not good enough) and she will face her demons when it's over, or atone with her death.
Until then, Hinata is not allowed to be herself.
She's been selfish enough as it is.