37

Uchiha Sasuke stayed in his home then.

But his "home" seemed not to be called home at all. The paper doors in the house were full of holes and cracks. The courtyard walls collapsed; The withered trees were almost burnt, and stone road were turned all around. Most of the water in the pond evaporated and the lotus leaves fell apart fragmentary. Half of the roof of the house fell down, leaking pale sunlight from the broken beams.

Sasuke was sitting in the ruins. In the corridor he sat there was a huge rapture, which traversed the ten-metre-long corridor.

The man who had always been boring tidy now looked just as terrible as his house: His black coat slanted down from the right shoulder, and the blood flowing down from his forehead to the chin. The cold air in the deep winter invaded him and made his face pale.

But he still sat there, from twilight to dawn, to dusk, to midnight, till another morning.

He sat there and did nothing. He seemed to be thinking nothing, and there was nothing left to see. Only the Indigo obizime in his palm was clutched tight and can't let go. It was finely weaved into unique texture with two beautiful white pearls passing through in the middle.

Suddenly, someone came over with a little stumbling footsteps.

Sasuke did not look up, as if no footstep was heard in his ears.

"Yo, Sasuke."

Uzumaki Naruto was already accustomed to his indifference, so laughed and greeted him. The smile pulled the serious wound on his face and produced some pain. He got beat by someone else black and blue, looking ten times more miserable than Sasuke.

The night before last, he fought with Sasuke and got injured. After that, he went to the Hyuga's Mansion to return Hinata's body. That's when he was beaten by Hanabi's guards for almost one hour and did not strike back.

And the young woman, the lord of Hyuga, was silently sitting by the side of her long-gone sister.

She did not say a word until Konohamaru stepped up to her and tried to persuade. Hanabi raised her head and looked at him and Naruto with distant eyes without any emotion. She was even disinclined to show her hate.

Then she lowered her head and clenched her sister's cool, pale hand:

"Tell the whole Konoha and report to the Dyamio: From now on, Hyuga Hinata has no relation with Uzumaki family any more. She'll still be buried in our ancestral tombs."

"The Hyuga clan will still obey the dispatch of Hokage, but shall not the seventh Hokage nor his any follower step into our house once again. Otherwise we have the right to kill on sight."

"Farewell, respectful Hokage."

After that, Naruto did not return to his house, but went to the cemetery and stood there for a night facing the tomb of Hyuga Neji.

Uchiha Sasuke did not answer his greeting, sitting still in the corridor indifferently. Naruto walked directly to him and sat down on the mud beside his feet. Somehow, Sasuke did not show the attitude to get rid of him. They fought very hard last night, almost demolished the house, but now they were getting along as usual. Both of them were indeed strange men.

Naruto looked at the messy dirt and overturned grass heaped because of their fight for a long time, and suddenly said:"Sasuke, I used to think that lots of your thoughts were all wrong."

Sasuke's eyes flickered a little but he did not answer.

Naruto did not seem to expect answers, murmuring, "but am I more right than you? If so, why didn't you ever become happier after I found you back? "

"...It's meaningless to talk about," Sasuke finally opened his mouth and said, "what's in the past,."

"I just couldn't figure it out, and I didn't dare to." Naruto shook his head lightly and smiled bitterly, as if he were negating his whole past, "Was I so wrong that my deeds made her... Unwilling to tell me any truth, even if it was about her life? "

"..." Sasuke rubbed the pearls in the obizime with his thumb. It has such warm and milky white, enwrapped with long time pain and bearing, but also too hard to hold. It's without a doubt a symbol of her cruel and stubborn arrogance. "she knew you too well. If she told you the truth, how would you leave her? But she just can't tolerate it no more... She was pushing you away and hoping you leave. "

Naruto couldn't help looking up at him.

He will remind of this scene in the future many, many times.

It was the first time that he saw this man, who had been proud and indifferent since an early age and used a cold, rock-like shell to cover his heart, showed a kind of excessive mixed with excessive pain, excessive sorrow, and excessive tenderness.

The moist feeling in the dark eyes, unlike his past intense, violent love and hatred, was rather gently spreading and moving like a black butterfly who had only one chance to spread its wings was experiencing the only moment of this life and death.

It can not be repeated, it can not be retained. That's why it was heartquaking.

Naruto understood all of a sudden. It was because he actually knew both Sasuke and Hinata well, that he came to the opposite conclusion at this moment.

- She shared with him the secret that should be carefully kept, and he kept it for her until now. In fact, Neither the Hyuga Hinata afraid to trouble others, nor the Uchiha Sasuke hate to be troubled, would have done such things. They were both stubborn as stone, and will never take a step back even in the face of the whole world.

A long time ago, in a small Izakaya, Naruto remembered his close friend said: "You can indulge her a little."

"I guess..." In the end, he just lifted his head and looked at the profound sky, letting the droplets in his eyes dried up slowly. "Maybe all of her wilful persistence can only get understood and cherished by no one else but you."

Sasuke clenched the indigo band in his hand. Her annoying face appeared in his mind: That was a person who insisted to do the "wrong thing" and change the immutable fate. It reminded him of the bleak wind he had heard in the wilderness when he was young, and suddenly overlaid with another man, bleeding from his deep, red eye and gently smiling.

The gentleness was too lonely and rigid to be known. It was like some one brushed through your eyes with two fingers, and then stabbed a knife into your heart and its iron wall.

With the sharp pain of the stabbing illusion, facing the silent snow in the mountains, Sasuke said a sentence that can not even bring an empty echo. Nobody knew whether his defence had a trace of favoritism or not: "...She just hoped, you could be happy."

Naruto kept silent for a long time. He smiled bitterly, and slowly put his wounded forehead on his knees, like a child who was fear of coldness, like the evening sun tired of people's hopeful gaze.

"Ah... I will. "

"Just wait a minute... I will go to become 'happy'. I will not let her down... I will let no one down, and make everyone satisfied."

"I just need... a minute. "