Dreamcatcher

By Airyo

Lessons in Wishing - 5

Despite her best effort, Itachi was again waiting for her, already lounging against the tree when she arrived.

Hinata felt uncomfortable under his careful gaze as she approached.

"I am not late," he said with a slight nod in greeting. Hinata paused, even though she warmed at the private joke between them.

Last night had proceeded too smoothly. She'd let herself get too comfortable in the safety of darkness, but the light of day peeled back every illusion. Like overworked muscles, everything only felt more stiff and stilted than before. One step forward, three steps back.

"That's good," she replied for the lack of anything else. She fell silent, and she stared at his feet, waiting for him to say something. Except he wasn't - the jerk was simply waiting. She detested that he forced the conversation to her control. "How is this going to work?" she finally managed.

Then like a puppet jerked to action, Itachi began to react again.

"Now that I have a slightly better gauge of your reactions, I have a few questions I would like you to answer as fully as you able or willing to," he began. Hinata nodded, and launched into the same summary she provided every person who tried to untangle the puzzle of her strange, strange mind.

"I don't remember when the nightmares began, but Hyuuga-sama says they began sometime after I was kidnapped. I was around five, and Hanabi-sama had just been born..."

Itachi raised a hand, a gesture asking her to cease. She trailed off uncertainly. Most people listened to that, searching to the kill the root and therefore the rest of the sprawling entity with it. Never mind the fact that her "condition" was hopelessly tangled and melded into everything she knew.

"I hate to interrupt, but details of how your sensitivity came to be is useless when I don't have understanding of how it is currently."

She blinked. Wasn't that what yesterday was for? He'd refused to ask any questions, and upon explaining each one in excruciating detail, asked for her permission to place one simple genjutsu.

"Then what do you want to ask?"

Itachi sat, and gestured for her to do the same. Hinata obeyed, because her time was given to him now, and it seemed somehow rude to reject such a simple thing. She took a seat an arm span's away, facing the same direction so she didn't have to continue staring at everywhere but his eyes.

"Did you have any nightmares from yesterday's session?"

"I wouldn't call them nightmares, but I did dream of related subjects."

"So there is a noticeable relationship," he said, and she nodded. "Was it a continuation of the final situation in the genjutsu?"

Hinata paused. How did he guess? "Yes. I merely dreamed that I left after you didn't arrive, at which point, I was chased down the empty street by...monsters." Itachi gave her a curious look for her strange inflection, but she wasn't ever going to tell him that she'd been chased down the street by screeching Itachi-fangirls.

"And is there any ever effect on the caster?"

Hinata gave him a confused look, because the battlefield was always inside her mind. "No," she answered, regardless how ridiculous it was that he had any reason to fear her.

She expected him to ask more, because that was what the others always did. Why? How? Where? When? Poking and prodding for details, more details, and more and more details with their words. She'd expected this cross-examination yesterday.

Instead, he shifted so he faced her again, cross-legged like before.

"This time, I am going to purposely create a genjutsu with missing elements, gaps, as many call them ," he explained. "I want to investigate your ability to patch those gaps." He lifted one hand to form a seal. She could see the thick calluses lining his palm, and her renewed awareness of them calmed Hinata. It was proof that he was human after all, a person of breakable flesh and bone. He wasn't the monster. "May I?" he asked, just like yesterday.

"Yes." She looked up, and their eyes finally met. His pupils were still dark, solid and slanted and safe.

She could feel her pulse pounding against her eardrums.

And before she succumbed to his spell, Hinata decided that this - whatever this was and will become - wasn't so horrible after all.

AN: Woops. Work ate me. Here are two chapters as an apology.