A/N: This story is starting to become quite dear to me, so I am very willing to go on writing new chapters. So it happens that an update comes this early, compared to other times. Thanks to the reviewers aryaputra and LilyVampire who check and leave their feedback all the time - I really appreciate this.
Sitting in the dark, in the middle of a room and hearing a storm outside. With eyes closed, to make yourself think you were the one who decided there will be darkness. Sitting still, to make yourself believe you are not afraid to try and leave that place - you just don't want to, right? Unnerved by the roaring outside, but making yourself believe that you're not afraid at all not even curious. But you are aware of the actual darkness. You do hear the storm. And you feel uneasy and curious. When it is going to end, I will be relieved, you tell yourself. But you have no idea how the storm stands in the way of your relief, because you don't feel uneasy about the darkness, or the roaring, or of having to move somewhere else, with that roaring you hear and the darkness ahead, do you?
And so she stood that night, in her room, in her darkness, waiting for the relief after the storm, telling herself she cannot possibly feel uneasy about it and wondering what she could be uneasy about, really.
They said all of the connections had been settled, that the surgery had been a success. But her problem was other and they couldn't understand it. She had this feeling that it was not normal, what was going on in there, beneath the bandages. Nerves others than the ones they usually dealt with, that had been sleeping for long, were now awakened. And they were finding something to stick themselves to, after all of that time. Impulses of energy ran through them and made it itch and burn and ache, but all of it felt in a positive way. A feeling of expectancy.
As she laid there, numbness spread through her body, as powerful as silence spreading through the room. And soon there was not the expectancy anymore. And there was not even the darkness. Because there's nothing in sleep from the world outside, just from the one inside. ...unless something from reality intrudes.
Itchy...
She was there again, on the battlfield. Surrounded. Anbushed. There must have been around fifteen covered faces. She had to be realistic: that was a dead end. She would not survive for the arrival of any back up. And she had no way of calling for back up, anyway. She could barely atack and mostly defended herself.
Temples... so itchy...
The defense was not going great, either. She was getting injured. Her chakra was getting low. And so were the chances to survive. The best she could do was die a honorable death. Die fighting. It was the most someone like her could do, it seemed.
"Those eyes are not ordinary, see that?" one of them smirked to another. "We could use an extra prize for the work."
Her fingers reached for the itchy spots, in her sleep and encountered the tight bandages.
Her heart raced faster. A chill ran down her spine and it made her miss once more - a kunai flew into her knee. And she fell on that knee. The pain became striking with the fall. She tried to gather herself together and stand up, pulling out the damn kunai, while staying out of the reach of many other weapons. But one more got stuck in her flesh, in her left upper arm, spreading pain all down the way, momentary paralyzing her entire arm. And they were getting closer, already feeling victorious.
She unconsciously scratched along the bandage, but no use. And they were so tight... And the temples itched so badly...
She had to make up her mind fast. If they got to take her eyes, there went her honour, as a Hyuuga and as a ninja. She held the kunai she had gotten out of her knee tighter, the previous wounds burning now, but paralysing no longer.
Her fingers twitched in the darkness, reaching for the edges of the bandages...
Her eyes focused. Though burning with pain, her arm and leg were stable. She grasped the kunai, watching them approaching her slowly - they knew she had no way out.
She caught the edges on both sides of her face...
She watched, trying to memorize their placement as well as she could. And when they were as close as she wanted them, she breathed in, raised the kunai and, in one fast move, slashed across her eyes.
The itching turned to burning and she ripped the bandage with both hands, eyes opening wide, looking past the darkness and beneath the wall to see a dark haired man just entering the room next door.
Breathing hard, she straightened herself on the bed and her trembling hands traced lines across her temples and lower, around the eyes.
"It can't...," she whispered in the dark. She raised her hand up and looked at it. Spread all through the hand, like shiny vines, her chakra was flowing powerfully and chaotically. For more than a minute, she looked at it, in awe. And then she flinched and stood up. She rushed towards a desk in the nearest corner of the room, wrote something on a piece of paper, looking, all along, only at the chakra flowing in her hand - she was well used to write without needing to see what she was writing. Folding the sheet in two, she opened the little door the had been using all along for these means and passed the message to the room next door. And she waited.
He was just back from the last mission. A few blood drops fell down his arm and onto the floor, as he entered the room - he needed to take care of that wound. Hinata would be better at those kind of things, but it was quite late to storm in.
"Ah, talking about..." A sheet of paper came from her room. He picked it up and opened it, filling it with bloody fingerprints.
I see you are back.
It was nothing unusual for her to sense him coming, by chakra, sound, even the smell of fresh blood she had become very sensitive to. But the choice of wording: 'I see...' She had her surgery that day, right? See.
He threw his weapons on the bed and left the room, entering hers. First thing he noticed were the bandages thrown on the floor. "I think it was too early to..." But he was, first in his life, speechless, as he came closer, catching a glimpse in a mirror she had found, with a crack down its middle.
"Where did you get these eyes from?" Hinata asked, breathless, like on the edge of crying, her cracked reflection in the mirror showing utter shock.
"No, these are normal eyes...," Sasuke replied immediately, shaking his head slowly, astonished himself. He knelt where she was kneeling, in the light of a lamp, took the mirror from her hands and placed it down and, catching her by the shoulders, turned her around to face him.
He caught her face between his fingers and took a close look at that pair of eyes and further, at the thin, long bumps around them. Finally, he let go.
"We must congratulate ourselves," he smirked and got up. "We just solved an old mystery: which are better, Sharingan or Byakugan?"
"What are you saying?" Hinata surely couldn't get the humour.
"Let me clear the funny part of this, for you. Sharingan appears in some kind of conditions, while one gets born with the Byakugan - this was already a plus for the Byuakugan. And now this: it can be used on different eyes, as long as the nerves are not affected," he leaned and pointed at the thin bumps on her temple.
Her hand reached there and she laid her fingers upon them. She closed hers eyes and, concentrating, felt the bumps smoothing under the touch - she was not used to that any longer, but a warm feeling came with the familiarity. Once again, she stretched her arm and picked up that mirror. The eyes were a metallic grey, in colour, but the current look in her eyes was of a soft sort. As it turned focused, the softness faded out, and the metal turned to dark ice. There was something about it that he simply did not like.
"Well, they are still 'compass' material," she snapped, not to him, but more to herself, putting the mirror away. And then she sat up, with the new realization. She picked up the lamp and stood up, looking all around. The room was not much, but still right then it was amazing to look at. The white sheets. And the white walls. The ink spattered papers on the desk. The wooden closet. Drops of blood... on the floor...?
She looked up at him with frowning eyebrows. Sasuke's eyes narrowed as he he took a look where she had been glancing earlier, then back at her, with a flat look. "I was going to take care of that," he muttered.
She pulled his arm with one hand, pulling the chair next to the desk, with the other, and made him sit there. He had been too taken by surprise to react to it. And he shot her a glare when he realized how he'd been moved around. "Let me guess you did not have puppets when you were a child," he said, clenching his teeth, as she removed the piece - though gently - of fabric, unfortunately glued to the wound, because of the coagulating blood.
"No. It was considered laughable for a future clan leader to lose time with such childish preoccupations," she replied calmly, checking the wound. "Quite deep. What made it?" she questioned.
"I was hurt with my own katana...," he murmured.
"What?" she laughed, accidentally brushing the wound.
"Take care in there!" he snapped back. "... and it is a long story; nevermind that," he closed that subject and she knew he wouldn't add anything more about it.
"I've been thinking for a while...," she started after some moments of silence.
"Where?" he didn't even left her finish. "I knew you were planning to head somewhere. That was the only reason you could have agreed so easily for," he added afterwards, seeing her surprised that he guessed her intentions so easily.
"I can't really explain things right now, but there's this place I've wanted to visit," she answered, finishing bandaging the wound.
In definitive, they never explained anything, not even to each other. Simply because none was the kind to be able to make such things. They were both more about the 'doing' than the 'saying'. It's surprising how things can sometimes work out that way. Again, it was about being 'one of them'.
"When?" He did not ask for more details.
"I don't know. Soon."