A/N: I'm not blind, so it's possible there are inaccuracies here despite me trying my best. If anyone is blind and thinks something in the story is off, please let me know.
And yes I am behind on these. I still plan to write for both of March's prompts, but we'll see if I post either of them in March or if they both come in April. I'm trying my best!
Word count: 2,663
Hinata awoke in what felt like a bed, but the world remained black, leaving her to rely only on touch. Memories of the fight replayed in her mind as a reminder of how she'd gotten where she was. They'd had her pinned down before she'd blacked out. Everything after that was a mystery.
Everything was still black. She turned her head in confusion and blinked a few times. At least, she thought she was blinking, but things were still black.
The lack of vision was alarming. She couldn't tell that her muscles were sore or if she had any injuries. The only thing her brain could focus on was that the world was black when it wasn't supposed to be.
She moved, trying to tell if she was dreaming. Her hands ran over the sheets of the bed, and she felt the same course cotten that she was used to in the Konoha Hospital. She kept traveling, hoping to pick up absolutely anything else, when someone's hand cupped hers and squeezed. Hinata nearly cried in relief: It was Naruto. She could easily tell from the calluses beneath her fingers.
"Hinata? Are you awake?"
Hinata's heart skipped a beat at the sound of her husband's voice. Everything else was overwhelming, but she linked their fingers together and held tight. Though she couldn't see, she turned her face in the direction his voice had come from, searching for any further signs she could as to what was happening.
"Yes," she said, her uncertainty showing in her voice. "I'm awake, but I–I can't see anything."
Naruto took a shaky breath and tightened his grip on Hinata's hand.
"They took your eyes," he whispered, his voice trembling with emotion. "We did everything we could to get them back, but it was either save you or save your eyes, and… I'm so sorry, Hinata."
Raising a trembling hand, Hinata felt where her eyes should have been.
"They gave you glass eyeballs," Naruto explained as she felt the area. "They don't help you see, but the doctor said that your eye socket needs to keep its shape."
He swallowed loud enough for Hinata to hear.
"They even made them the same color as your old eyes. You can hardly notice the difference.
A tear slid down Hinata's cheek. She hadn't known that was possible without her eyes, but apparently it was. It was the first of many things she would have to learn. Naruto's thumb stroked her cheek, catching the tear before it fell to the bedsheets.
Hinata held her hand out and smiled when Naruto pressed his cheek against it just like she'd wanted him to.
"It's okay," she said softly as tears continued to drip down her cheeks. "Thank you for saving me. I can live without my eyes."
Naruto pressed his face into the crook of her neck, letting out quiet sniffles that made Hinata's own tears come faster. Despite the awkward position of him hunching over the bed, she held him.
Though she couldn't see him, he was there, as solid as he'd ever been.
In the days and weeks that followed, Hinata did her best to go about life in the same way she always had. It wasn't always possible, but she did her best and learned to adapt when she could.
Cooking was one of her biggest hurdles. She had considered herself a decent cook before. She'd never work at any renowned restaurants, but she had a number of dishes that she could cook while hardly thinking about what she was doing.
Some parts of the process were still easily manageable. She couldn't see the rice, but she knew about how many times she needed to rinse it before it was clean.
Adding ingredients to the pan was also easy enough, and she could tell from the temperature and time passing when things should be complete, even if she couldn't check those things in the same ways she had before.
However, some tasks weren't as easy. Using knives had been one task Hinata would have thought she could do through touch alone, but she knew that her finished product didn't look like the identically sized pieces she'd once been able to produce.
The dashi simmered beside her as she struggled and struggled with the tofu. All she wanted was for it to be in neat, uniform cubes like it had once been so simple to make, but even without sight, she could tell that wasn't what she was getting. She resigned herself to what she could do, telling herself that it wouldn't alter the flavor anyway.
She scooped up a handful of tofu, preparing to drop it into the soup stock, which should have been an easy enough task. Instead, an unknown object lay on the floor. Hinata had no idea where it had come from, and she tripped, sending several pieces of tofu flying through the air.
She felt rather than heard Naruto's presence. Wind whipped at her pants legs as he snatched the tofu out of the air. Hinata hadn't finished processing what had happened by the time he was standing beside her with one hand against her back.
"Are you all right?" he asked, voice low.
Hinata stared in his direction, bits of tofu still clutched in her hands. She didn't answer as she turned to the pan, using her hand to detect the warm air and tossing in what tofu she had left with no problem.
"I'm fine," she said, tossing a smile in Naruto's direction.
Hinata stirred the stock with Naruto's gaze on her. She kept a smile on her lips despite not facing him. It was as if she could feel Naruto's mind working as he came up with something encouraging to say, but she didn't want encouragement.
She hated the way everyone kept acting like she needed it since she'd lost her sight. Could they not talk to her about anything else anymore?
"Breakfast will be ready soon," she said right as the rice cooker began to beep. "Can you set the table?'
There was a pause where Hinata figured Naruto had probably nodded before he remembered she could see it.
"Uh, yeah," he said instead.
She felt him reach for the dishes and breathed a little easier as he began scooping the rice into four different bowls.
Sometimes, the Hokage had to travel. That was just the way things were. Before becoming blind, Hinata had found comfort in Naruto's letters. She would re-read them until he came home, and she'd kept every single one he'd sent her.
But she couldn't read anymore.
Instead, she took the box out and flipped through the letters, feeling them in her hands and doing her best to remember what they'd each said. Even if she couldn't remember the exact words, the sentiments were there. It was more comforting than nothing at all.
The first time a letter arrived after she'd lost her sight, she was a little surprised. It hadn't occurred to her that Naruto would send one.
Boruto brought it to her, but he didn't hand it to her like he usually would.
"Do you want me to read it to you?"
His voice trembled as if he'd be scolded for asking the question, but Hinata smiled and wrapped an arm around his shoulders to tug him into her side.
"Well, it's not like I can read it myself," she said.
Boruto still hesitated before he began reading out loud. Despite Naruto's letter being light-hearted, his voice was shaky as he read.
It became a new tradition after that. Naruto would write letters, and Boruto would read them, sometimes only to Hinata but sometimes to Himawari too. And it was nice. The new letters were different in tone than Naruto's previous ones, but sitting there with her children and listening to Naruto's words were moments she cherished.
A door slammed, and Hinata sat down her drink with a smile. It was nearing time for Himawari to come home, and she was unsurprised when her daughter's happy shouting filled the house.
"Mama!" the girl yelled as she hurried into the room where Hinata sat. "Mama!"
Hinata laughed to herself and lifted an arm to invite her youngest onto the couch beside her. Himawari came without any hesitation. Though she had started at the Academy, she wasn't eager to distance herself from her mother.
"I brought you a gift, Mama."
Hinata frowned. Himawari was a thoughtful child who remembered everyone's birthdays, but she didn't often bring random gifts home.
"What is it?" Hinata asked.
Himawari jostled her as she vibrated with excitement and fished for something in her bag. She took Hinata's hands and guided them to a book. Hinata frowned in confusion. Books were no longer useful to her in the way they once had been.
"Touch here," Himawari instructed, guiding Hinata's fingers to a series of dots across the cover.
Hinata ran her fingertips over all of them, trying to make sense of the design and why the book was dotted with them.
"They're hiragana," Himawari explained. "Except in dots. See?"
She led Hinata's finger to the first of what Hinata now realized were characters. It was three dots lined up in a vertical row.
"This symbol is に (ni)," she explained.
"How do you know that?" Hinata asked, her lips quirking upward in a grin. "One day wouldn't be much time to learn."
She felt Himawari shrug where she was leaning against her side.
"It would be, but the title is written underneath the Braille too. The whole title is just Japanese Braille. Shino said that it should be a good start for learning if you wanted to. I can read the letters as you feel them. That way you can remember them."
Hinata smiled at the young girl and wrapped an arm around her shoulders, tugging her in close.
"That would be wonderful, Himawari," she said before dropping a kiss to her forehead.
The rest of their night was spent pouring over the Braille book, laughing together whenever Hinata got an answer wrong as Himawari quizzed her.
It didn't take long for them to buy a Braille writer. As Hinata's fingers roved over it, memorizing its surface, she couldn't help but think of old-fashioned typewriters that she'd seen but never used. The Braille writer felt much like that except with raised dots on the surface of the keys. Having memorized them all, it was exhilarating knowing that she could press any one of them and have them appear on paper just as her written characters once had.
Naruto and Boruto took to learning Braille the day they brought home the Braille writer, both of them picking it up faster than Hinata imagined they would.
The next time Naruto left the village, Hinata didn't have to dictate to one of their children to write him a letter.. She sat down at the Braille writer and smiled as she typed the whole thing out for herself. Removing the paper from the machine, she ran her fingers over the Braille and held the letter to her chest.
It felt good to speak for herself in such a way again.
The loud bang of the front door alerted Hinata to Boruto's arrival. Hinata smiled to herself as she settled down at the table, a cup of tea cradled in her hands. She listened to Boruto muttering to himself as she took off his shoes at the entrance. When he finally came farther into the house, he made as much noise as a stampede of horses.
"What are you doing back so early?" Hinata asked.
She listened as he pulled out the chair across from her at the table. He apparently wasn't keen to answer, but Hinata didn't turn away from him.
"No extra training today?" she pressed.
"There's a letter from Dad," Boruto said in lieu of a real answer to her question. "Do you want to read it?"
Hinata smiled as Boruto tore open the letter. A second later, he cursed, making Hinata's brow furrow.
"What is it?" she asked, leaning into the table.
Boruto swore several more times before answering.
"The stupid old man wrote the letter in Braille."
There was so much anger in Boruto's voice that it took Hinata a second to process what he was saying.
"Braille?" she asked. "But he doesn't have a Braille writer."
Boruto scoffed.
"It looks like the idiot did it by hand. He just stuck a bunch of holes in the paper." Another curse. "I could have just read the letter."
Hinata ignored the frustration in Boruto's voice as she held out her hand for the letter. He handed it to her without any hesitation.
The letter had been written on thick paper that was able to withstand the large number of times it had been poked through.
It wasn't perfect by any means. Some of the characters were hard to read as Hinata ran her fingers over them, and it was short, though Hinata could tell that wasn't from a lack of effort. She smiled as she read the letter by herself, Boruto still complaining across from her.
As soon as she finished, she allowed herself a short laugh as she stored it back in its envelope. She reached out to ruffle Boruto's hair, and he met her halfway, allowing her to do so even as half-heartedly tried to shoo her hand away.
"Thank you, Boruto," she said, giving his head one last pat as she stood to store the letter with all of the others she kept.
"I don't know what I'm being thanked for," he muttered from where he sat slumped in his chair. "I didn't even do anything."
Decades later, once Hinata and Naruto were both gone, it fell on Boruto and Himawari to sort through everything left in their childhood home.
With some things it was easy to decide what to do with them. There were older clothes that showed wear and tear that they easily threw away. Others, like the family photo albums, were too precious to dream of parting with. They divided them between themselves and made copies of the most precious photos for them both to keep.
Other things were a bit more puzzling.
There was the ramen poster that had hung in the house for as long as either of them could remember. Despite the memories it held, neither of them were keen to hang it up in their own home, yet throwing it away felt like an affront to their parents that they had difficulty coming to terms with.
They were still arguing about the poster when Himawari uncovered the small wooden box in the bottom drawer of Hinata's bedside table. It was a stained wood with nothing in the way of ornamentation.
Himawari flipped it open, her stomach doing the strange thing it did whenever she uncovered a new possession of her parents and wasn't sure how it would affect her.
Sure enough, tears stung at her eyes as she saw the letters. There were so many that they nearly fell out of the box the second it was opened.
"Boruto," she called gently.
Sensing his sister's sadness, Boruto stopped ranting about the poster and sat down beside her, taking a few letters from the box himself.
They flipped through them in silence, never reading one in completion but reading bits and pieces of as many of them as they could.
The older ones were all scribbled in their father's familiar handwriting, but the newer ones were in Braille. Boruto snorted when he uncovered the messy first attempt that his father had once sent. He ran his fingers over the dots before passing it to Himawari who did the same.
This was one of the easy ones. They divided the letters between themselves, only arguing over who would get their father's first attempt at Braille.
Himawari won in the end; Boruto had known she would from the beginning.