Late

It's a good thing they're leaving in half an hour. She sighs, glancing at the clock on her bedside table. Kunai, shuriken, explosive tags, chakra pills, bandages, scrolls, maps... Has she forgotten anything? It's not like she needs someone to tell her what to bring for a mission like this... Tracking is her specialty, after all. Had Shino been here, it'd be just like one of the many missions Team Eight has successfully completed before.

Had Shino been here... he'd probably be better suited to the job than her. He always enjoys a challenge and this mission... it's hard to imagine how short-handed they have to be for Tsunade-sama to assign it to a genin team. She has confidence in Shikamaru's abilities and wants to be happy for him but... she's just heard of Sasuke's defection less than an hour ago and now she's already preparing to go after him.

Time is of the essence, of course, and she might as well get out of the house now and start looking for Sasuke, if all she can do now is go over the list of things again or let the memory of that night replay itself interminably in her head. Sasuke was there, two nights ago. She saw him, and talked to him... and now it's as if her memory has cheated her. What she remembers about the boy can't possibly be true, because they never really talked to each other until then. And if the first time is meant to be the last time, then what's the meaning of remembering it at all? Sasuke never trusted her enough to tell her anything. He never meant to tell her why he had chosen to desert Konoha in her hour of need, nor even gave her reason to believe she should ask about it... or did he?

Did he really want her to know? Did it even matter who she was? Someone came. Someone insensitive enough to disturb the aloof Uchiha's late-night meditation. Someone like her... just came to say hello, complained about her own busy schedule, then went straight home to get some much-needed sleep. She... She didn't know anything, and Sasuke asked her, "Do you really want to know that?" And she said yes, and she meant it, and she knew that she could never say no to anyone, because the word had never been found in her dictionary, and Sasuke knew her just well enough to know that too.

Sasuke-kun... Back in the academy, everyone knew why he suddenly didn't want to talk anymore. Everyone knew, but no one wanted to admit it. Everyone had questions but no one wanted to be the first to voice them... to his face. And those questions that never saw the light of day... unconfirmed, undenied, sprouted like weeds in the deserted garden of the fallen conjurers of fire, and fed our appetite for horrors and monstrosity with stories about the abandoned house. The roads that led to it seemed quieter, the lights dimmer, and the winds chillier.

Even Naruto, who seemed oblivious to all matters of spirit, once asked her to "scan" the area for anything out of the ordinary. She felt compelled to tell him more about the byakugan and some of the lesser-known dojutsu but when he insisted, she did what he asked her to do. She looked. She thought she should just take a cursory look but... She took a virtual tour of the house. She didn't know what to expect, and she couldn't find what Naruto - what they were looking for. If it was haunted, it was beyond her power to see that. So she told him she couldn't find anything, and she didn't know if what they said about the house was true, but he didn't seem afraid anymore.

She supposed she should be glad... but if he didn't keep his promise to keep quiet about what she had done, she would have other things to worry about. Using the byakugan for superstitious purposes... in her father's opinion, may very well betray her total ignorance of her inherited bloodline limit, unless she could talk him into believing whatever she was looking for in that house was no phantasma.

What exactly was she looking for then? What did her prying eyes want to see in his old house? What did she want to know? Cold, distant, rigid... were labels the colored-eyed people prefer to attach to her family name. For her, pretty words like "gentle," "delicate," or "fragile," were reserved. No one had ever called her inquisitive before. She wondered why. Knowing the limits of her eyes, she still couldn't resist the urge to look around. Knowing the limits of her eyes... she found it still harder to believe what she could see was indeed all there really was.

People on the street liked to think of their eyes as a tool. Her byakugan. Sasuke-kun's sharingan. She knew they were right, but she never had to think about that. She couldn't imagine a life without her eyes. A fight without her eyes, yes, she did that often during her academy years, but a life without her eyes... she couldn't even pretend to understand what it would mean. Panoramas, solitary rambles through her keen eyes, in daylight and after dark, looking into a pond, at the koi, contemplating the anatomy of their existence as they swam in it, unsuspecting of their confinement or her vigilance. All that gave her a sense of security in unfamiliar surroundings, all that made sense to her fuzzy mind, all that spoke to her heart...

Was lost on them. An unfamiliar face of the mundane world. The visualization of the invisible... The world was only interesting to them when it spoke to them in their language, from their perspective, about their lives, but her eyes had a life of their own and an insatiable desire to see, to know, to play, to discover... and a heart that was loath to enslave or be enslaved by love or hate.

She was useless to them, so were her eyes, but they refused to admit it. If she was too little to fight, someone from another country could keep her eyes for her. If she was too weak to subdue even her little sister, Hanabi could take her place, or she could be made into a puppet. She already had the makings of a delicate vase, so in a way, her continued existence already served a purpose. If she wasn't glad to be part of their grand scheme, she hid her distaste with care. She hid it in her books, in her flowers, but never in her diary, which was nothing but a concise account of what she had learnt each day at the academy, with her team, or from other members of her clan. It had little sentimental value, and she kept it mainly to improve her handwriting.

Uchiha Sasuke. Has she ever written his name in one of her diaries? They had been classmates for years, but what does she really know about him? They were only children... A child like them. Had he once been a child like them? The weary eyes she saw that night on his faultless face said no. They were too deep... They made her wonder - when exactly did a child cease to be a child? He has always been ahead of them, and they only realize how far he's gone now, years after the massacre, years after the premature death of his childhood. They are already late. She can only hope it's not yet too late... to let him know there are still people in Konoha who don't believe his eyes are only as beautiful as they are rare and terrifying, or as powerful as they are fatal.

Author's Note

Originally this was meant to be the first half of this chapter but as I tried to make the transition from her thoughts to a conversation which was meant to be the second half, I found that the transition sounded too much like the closing of a complete idea, so I decided to end it here. I'll probably write the conversation in the next chapter, and make it short.

I don't know if I'll be able to finish the next chapter and post it before Christmas so I have to say it now. Merry Christmas and happy new year! Thank you again for reading, favoriting, and following this story. Your reviews have helped me a lot. Your reading it makes it more real than I could ever imagine. And thank you Mashitas9, I like to write about Neji as much as you want to read, the cousins will have a lot to talk about later, after this mission.