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Midnight, In C Minor
Chapter Seven: Scintilla
(n.) a tiny, brilliant flash or spark; a small thing; a barely visible trace
"You are undisciplined," Sasuke says.
It isn't the first she's heard such words, though it usually comes to her in the low, disappointed tone of her father.
Her father - shoulders taut and brow sweat-lined (that cruelly unmarked brow she has learned to carry as her own burden) - turns abruptly from her to take the artfully painted tea cup from the branch house member's offered tray. The branch house member stays with back bowed just slightly, head down, a supplicant bend to their elbows as Hyuuga Hiashi takes his drink, letting the fragrant tea's steam waft just below his nose before he takes a sip.
Hinata, meanwhile, is panting in exhaustion, knees digging into the fine pebbled courtyard behind her father, her hands gripping at the grass beneath her.
Her Byakugan is still activated, and just beyond the graceful arch of her father's wrist when he downs the still steaming tea, Hinata thinks she can see Hanabi with her fingers curled around the far threshold, a thin lipped smile curling along her prepubescent face as she watches in shadow, and - even further still - there is Neji.
Her cousin's back is to her, braced along one of the many walls separating them, and when he curls his fingers tighter along his folded arms, she knows he sees her, too.
The house of Hyuuga is always watching, even when they aren't.
There is still dirt beneath her fingernails when her father places his empty cup back on the tray, his lips a stern line, and his command of 'Again!' echoes far past any walls she used to consider shelter in this once-home.
Sasuke pulls the band around her thigh tight, cinching the wound closed, and Hinata winces as the pain brings her sharply back to the present. Her mouth stays closed. She has learned to keep agony silent behind clenched teeth.
She stares at him, perhaps too pointedly, because he doesn't look at her - his gaze instead fixed to her bleeding thigh.
If she thinks back on this moment years later, she will remember how his fingers had grazed her knee as they retreated. She will remember how he hesitated before he stood. She will remember how he looked at her without the shelter of walls between them.
"You are undisciplined," he repeats on a sigh, almost a huff of annoyance, his hands on his knees as he pushes himself to a standing position. "But not without potential."
There is no one to watch her fumbling this time - no one but Sasuke.
She discovers, belatedly, that he never hides his gaze.
(The dirt beneath her fingernails just needed a good scrubbing is all.)
