By the main road, they won't be lost. But in favor of better judgement, as his previous travels had been, Sasuke took to instinctively discovering paths of his own.
If the police were in search of a swordsman for assassinating an Edo official, they must be searching for him. Sasuke had briefly forgotten, the vision of the fact lost to the peaceful sounds of the forests: Danzo's horror-stricken eyes, neck cut in half by his sword.
"S-Sasuke San, are you sure t-this is the right way?" the woman asks, her grip tight around his elbow. She trips on the protruding pine root, yelps, and Sasuke catches her by the shoulders.
"Tired?"
"I-I bumped my toe…"
Her foot had moss and dirt stuck to the nail and Sasuke crouches to brush it away. Her small toes wiggle slightly. Her pale foot, the size of his palm, reminds him of a child's.
Minute insect bites and itchiness from dry pine needles on the forest floor and spindly weeds on her skin chagrins him, and his mind segues to his mother's balms: the scents, her rolled sleeves as she poured them in jars, all distant items of the past which once seemed real. Perhaps, he had only dreamt they were real.
"Does it hurt still?" he asks.
She flushes. "I-It's fine… N-Not anymore… T-Thank you."
Her bashfulness impresses a stark lack of her previous conviction, dictating him what she needed. To Sasuke, apart from the insecurity of blindness, this was due to his unnerving company. Being attentive to women was his brother's strongest suit, not his.
Beads of sweat bedeck the sides of her face, her lips chapped. Sasuke decides they take a rest as he sees a shaded river bank.
"Y-you don't talk much, do you?" she says, sitting on a rock and rubbing her feet together.
Sasuke drinks from the river. Schools of grey fishes and their young skitter aimlessly about, magnified by the sheer clarity of water.
Judging it was alright to the taste, Sasuke refills his container and takes the woman's wrist to feel up the container in her hand.
"Water."
Touching her made things easier. She hasn't disapproved of him doing so since she does the same. A tit for tat, and the secret thrill that lingers. As she lifts the bamboo tube to drink, Sasuke guides the opening to her mouth. And this, too, held a strange thrill. Because only he sees, and observes to satisfy his curiosity. Taken long, it is the ultimate voyeuristic act.
"You need a walking stick," he says out of nowhere. The woman takes two more gulps and holds out the container to his direction. Her head cranes down.
"A walking stick… That's right. I'm someone who needs a walking stick now."
She sighs in a wistful manner, sorrowful, and Sasuke almost asks who she is, where she came from that she raced down the cliff, and what her dealings were with the West. But Sasuke was beyond answering questions himself and drops the idea the instant it reaches out to him.
The sun burning high at its peak strikes at the middle of day, but under the thick shade of gigantic pines, fogs still held faintly aloft and a translucent veil of light drops from the space of canopies.
Out the corner, a rustling movement in the browning, tattered leaves alerts him to a fast incoming creature.
"Snake." Sasuke unsheathes his sword and cuts the snake's neck from the rest of his body. It slithers with last vigor remaining and turns limp.
"D-did you ki-kill it?"
"Nn." He grunts, making a chest sound.
"How pitiful."
"If you take pity on a snake, you'll be killed." He waves it in front of her. Intrigued by her blindness, how she can't fear what she doesn't see, Sasuke presses the cold, severed carcass to her cheek.
"What—" She feels the object, and realizing what it was, she screams, takes a step back and stumbles. Sasuke snags her in just in time by the waist. At his amusement, she clings and pushes him all at once, a woman of fickle mind; until he feels her belly pump hard breath on his face, and the pulse in her neck throb in a fast tick.
"T-that was a very mean thing to do."
And because he looks at her close, he sees: sternly, she demands his respect.
Just as darkness looms, and hoots and hisses and caws condensed at every turn, Sasuke camps by an abandoned shrine and starts a fire. He fixes her a bed with a couple of blankets and her silks for a pillow. But she doesn't hit the sack. He offered her roast snake but was refused, and she made do with a single rice ball.
"You'll run out of strength," Sasuke says.
"I won't tire easily. I was in bed for days." She scratches her feet and pressed her hands on them.
"Don't deny facts just because you're angry." Sasuke idly recalls if he packed her socks. He adds more dry sticks into the fire and it crackles loud.
"Why do you keep saying 'you'? I have a name, too."
"You haven't introduced yourself."
As though this hadn't been her intention, her face alights. "I'm sorry. I must've forgotten…" For a lady, she is severely absentminded.
The smears of ointment on her scraped arms and the band wrapped around her head remind him, however, of her disorientated state days earlier, asking the same questions repeatedly, what day it was, and how long it had been since she was brought in.
"My name is Hinata… Hi written as the sun." She scribbles on the ground with her walking stick close to the fire. "Nata from the word 'to face'… Did I write it well?"
Sasuke doesn't see anything but he affirms her.
"Liar." Her carefully composed face breaks into a knowing smile, the flicker of flames dancing in her blank eyes. As if to offset her brazenness, her fingers fiddle and she starts uncertainly, "The truth is… I've forgotten how to write characters. A lot of things in my mind are foggy. Even the people in my house, my cousin, my sister. I know I have them but I've forgotten their faces. But for some reason, I remember my father quite well. He's a bit famous from what I recall. And we have the same eyes. Like with pads of cataracts. People initially assumes he doesn't see well, but more than seeing, he's a very forward-looking man… He's called Hiashi Hyuuga. Do you know him?"
At once, Sasuke's blood runs cold.
Danzo was dead. That had been the end.
But a grain of notion swirls at the name, attracting pieces to itself, until it was all he thought.
Hiashi Hyuuga. A former lord who later evolved his powers into a bureaucrat. Rumored to be an accomplice of westerners, sheltered in a fortress guarded by men armed with guns. Also Danzo's protector; why he wasn't convicted for stabbing his brother.
Itachi, out of the goodness in his heart, had once appealed to Danzo over sake for jobs for the samurai under his liege. It was all for this so-called nation's restoration and opening-up to progress.
The next day, his brother couldn't be back. And nobody cared.
Hinata's voice grounds him to the present. But the agony of vengeance had woke, burning at the pit of his stomach.
"Sasuke San?" Sasuke doesn't answer, his dark gaze intensely unremoved from her. "You probably don't… Had you been travelling alone, would you have arrived by now?" Her cadence drops and she presses her lips in a thin line. "I bet you'll arrive there earlier by yourself."
He won't. He had aimed north, wherever that led him. His pain dulled as he strayed further away south. But now, with her, he's going back.
"Why do you trust me?"
She turns to him, eye to eye, as though she sees him. "Is there any reason why I shouldn't? Just because you're samurai... You saved me. And I feel safe around you. I feel it's alright to trust you."
When she tire at last, he sets out to be alone, but her unconscious hold on his kimono stops him.
Her dark hair covered her face like an unkempt blanket, and he tucks it behind her ear. Hinata's beauty is one of peace found in pure lifelessness.
Awe fills him as when he first found her, as it morphs to a silent plea, to fulfill his vow on his brother's grave: make everyone who did him wrong, pay.
Maybe it shouldn't end with Danzo.
