Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.
WARNING: Story features many mentions of suicide, self-harm, depression, substanse abuse, death, violence and cursing. Slight AU.
"What is death like?"
Hyuuga Hinata stared emotionless at her mother's tombstone and the question rang in her head like a broken recorder, playing again and again. It bounced up and down the edges of her mind and she sucked in the cold air sharply.
The usual lush, green grass of Konoha was withered and dry, like many other things in the winter. Including her heart this time around.
Hinata's pale hand quivered as it reached for the crisp tombstone. She ghosted her cold fingers over her mothers name and bit her lip sharply. She could feel the weight of her emotions pressing down on her, almost as if someone had asked her to carry some bags and they forgot to take them back. It was too much and Hinata got up and ran away from the Hyuuga graveyard.
She sprinted out her clan compound and into the forest, welcoming the sight of the dead trees and the bite of the cold air. The sky was a bitter gray and threatened a downpour of heavy rain. These sights soothed her oddly enough, reminding her that perhaps she wasn't the only one who felt this way.
It was the two year anniversary of her mother's death and she still felt like it had been yesterday when her mother lay ill in her bed, slowly rotting away as she gave birth to her sister. Hinata didn't blame Hanabi, but the pain that the death had caused her was debilitating. She felt some days that waking up wasn't even worth it. Her father was always disappointed in her and she couldn't at least find comfort in her mother's loving arms after a bad day.
She was empty.
Hinata was to start the Academy tomorrow and she couldn't care less. She regarded everything in her life now with a certain apathy and she found that she could barely hear her own heartbeat sometimes.
It was a distant sound and sometimes she wondered if she was dead.
She sat down and tucked her legs under her, picking at the shriveled grass and thought about things. The sun was gone and had been throughout most of the fall, often accompanied by a harsh wind or storm. It seemed spring was so far away and out of her grasp.
Leaves were dancing all around her and the wind was singing a desperate song, making her hair flow wildly. The light of the sun was pale and Hinata noticed somewhat distantly that it would probably begin pouring soon. Instead of getting up, she stayed on the ground, focused on the way the trees moved with the wind, how they seemed unmoving despite the harsh environment.
She wished she could be a tree. An unmoving pillar, unaffected by the chaos surround it.
Instead she was a leaf, constantly falling and withering away.
Sasuke wasn't usually an unhappy child. He was much more somber than kids his age, but he liked to laugh and have fun just like any other person.
But when he walked throughout his clan compound and found body upon body, he felt more than a little unhappy. He retched at the sight of close friends and relatives dead and bloodied, their glossy eyes staring holes into him.
His body was violently shaking and he ran towards his home, sobbing hysterically and praying to all the gods that his family were safe. Dread filled his body when he realized that the door of his house was opened, the shadows leading inside a bad omen for what was to come. Sasuke continued either way, tears marking his pale cheeks.
He spotted the blood and immediately fell to his knees. His parents were sprawled on the floor, their throats neatly slit, blood staining the walls.
Sasuke moaned in agony, clutching his mother's cold hands, shaking her body, begging for her to wake up. Her form was unmoving, an empty corpse with no light in her eyes.
"Foolish little brother."
At the sound of his brothers voice, Sasuke felt relief that his remaining family member was alive but paled momentarily when he spotted the katana in his strong hands.
He shook his head, not wanting to believe his own flesh could have done something so evil and vile.
"I-Itachi, n-no! Please tell me you didn't do this!" Sasuke screamed, his breaths coming out sharp and panicked.
"I wanted to test my capacity," was the monotone response his elder brother gave.
Sasuke screamed, grabbing his head and squeezing his eyes shut, feeling like his mind would explode, so overwhelmed and in shock.
"Look at me."
He cried and stared at the demon red eyes of his brother, looking at him with a matching pair of his own. Drops of blood stained his eyes and Sasuke ignored it, the sudden clarity of his vision becoming alarming.
From the looks of it, Itachi hadn't expected such a thing and narrowed his eyes at the sudden development of Sasuke's sharingan. He just stalked it off as being an effect from the extreme stress Sasuke was experiencing.
Itachi didn't wait any longer and used his Mankegyo to put Sasuke in an agonizing illusion, ignoring the screams in his head that told him this was wrong.
Sasuke jolted when a crimson haze surrounded both him and Itachi, searching for an escape.
As if sensing his thoughts, Itachi quickly put that to rest. "This genjutsu has no escape. For 72 hours you will be tortured, everything feeling extremely real."
And in an instant, Sasuke had to watch his parents be murdered every minute, only being able to scream and sob hysterically.
When it ended, Sasuke woke up with dead eyes in the Konoha Hospital, feeling absolutely nothing.
In the Academy a few weeks later, Iruka had realized something.
He observed his class silently, watching as the naïve, innocent children chatted and played, noticing two kids who did not do the same. One was a girl, the heir to the Hyuuga clan and the other was the recently named dubbed Uchiha, Sasuke. They looked normal from a distance, nothing seemingly wrong with them, but when looked on more closely, you could see the emptiness in their eyes, the absolute absence of emotion. It worried him greatly because he knew how kids like that ended up.
Dead or in ANBU.
He didn't have more time to dwell on that when Naruto began picking fights with the other students, forcing him to step away from his thoughts and intervene.
Hinata paid attention to the lessons with half lidded eyes, not having gotten enough sleep from persisting nightmares. She listened intently though, if only to focus on something other than the numerous slits to her forearm.
It had been a spontaneous decision after she had woken up from a nightmare with a sweat and tears falling down her face. Hinata had grabbed a spare kunai she kept in her room and watched crimson drops of blood drip onto the floor. The pain felt almost relieving, the sudden emotion making her feel alive. In that instant she had felt and wasn't so hollow.
She wasn't sure if it had been wise to do such a thing, but decided it didn't matter. Feeling anything was better than feeling nothing.
Hinata observed the students of her class and watched with detachment at their smiling faces and bright eyes. They were pure. Untouched. She almost envied them for being so carefree, so happy and utterly unaware of the cruel world around them. She wished she could turn back time and become the shy, blushing little girl she used to be.
Her lilac eyes however lingered on the form of one silent boy.
He was lean with pale skin, almost resembling a ghost and with a mess of raven hair with disturbingly blank, onyx eyes. She zeroed in on his eyes and she almost laughed aloud.
He had the same eyes she did.
Sasuke could sense her eyes on him and he was almost tempted to stare directly back. He could tell it wasn't a usual lovesick fangirl because there lacked a feel of discomfort he usually felt when one of them began to ogle them. No, this was someone quietly observing him. A calculated analysis, so to speak.
When he felt the eyes left him, he turned around to face a Hyuuga that sat in the back of the class, regarding everything apathetically.
She took him by surprise when he realized with cold dread that they were the same. The same haunted look was spinning in her eyes.
It almost bothered him to think someone could have experienced pain like him. He had lost everything and for another person to have been through a similar situation made him feel smaller. Unimportant.
Sasuke toyed with the thought of approaching the Hyuuga girl and dismissed it a second later, going back to taking notes from their sensei's lesson.
Two days later and Hinata was on top of the Hokage Mountain, standing precariously on the edge.
Little whispers of the wind told her jump, cooing softly in her ear that everything would be better if she took a step forward. She believed them, thinking back to how meaningless her life was.
Her father hated her, in turn making her sister her and her mother was dead. She was a disappointment to her clan and the world. No one in her life seemed to give a damn about her.
She had nothing to live for.
Hinata smiled sadly, her vision becoming blurry from the tears that threatened to spill. She would finally see her mother again.
As she stepped forward, an arm pulled her harshly back and she rolled back into the boy that was Uchiha Sasuke.
Hinata wanted to scream and rage at him for saving her and felt at a loss at what to say. She narrowed her eyes and relieved herself from his grip, feeling disappointed once again.
"Why?"
She only managed to utter that single question, it being the only thing that could sum up her thoughts.
He shrugged indifferently, staring at the spot she had been about to jump from. "You would have lost and proved everyone right."
Hinata's eyes widened momentarily. He was actually right. If she had killed herself, she would have even lost the battle between her own self. An even bigger failure.
"I wont thank you, but I agree with you."
He nodded and they parted ways, Hinata with a heavy heart and conflicting emotions and Sasuke with a mind that was buzzing from the day's events.
AN: Thank you for reading this chapter. I really enjoyed writing it! It was angsty af and that's pretty much going to be a recurring genre for this story, but there will be happy moments throughout. Please leave your thoughts and criticism!