A.N. : Much like the Spanish Inquisition, nobody expects me to actually update! Take this one with my apologies for never responding to all the lovely reviews on the last chapter. I was convinced I would have this up in short order and thought I would just cruise through and send good news along with the grateful PMs. And then 2020 just sort of happened. But! I will be along to thank everyone as soon as I've had some sleep. I recall one reviewer in particular was kind enough to point out a typo, and even kind enough to assume it was intentional, but in fact my cat just likes to rest her head on the number pad when I'm typing and I don't always catch her little asides.
But now I am tired and rambling, and hoping that all of you are doing well, and will forgive me this very short chapter.
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Hiashi's days were much the same as they had been before Hinata disappeared. He rose at false dawn, dressed and made his way outside where he would practice until either his muscles protested or true dawn began to break across the sky. He would venture inside then, scrape and bathe the sweat from his skin, ensure his clothes were crisp and undisturbed. From there he walked the compound in a pattern so familiar to him he might have carried it out blindfolded.
First to Neji's room, a brief pause without to listen for the tell-tale shuffle of Neji setting his equipment to rights in preparation for his own exercises. Next to Hanabi's room, close to Neji's; though skilled, she was still his youngest and after nearly losing Hinata once Hiashi had been paranoid enough to move her to the center hall where she would be cocooned on all sides. She would wake as soon as he slid her door open, and pointedly roll over to go back to sleep. Each morning he would admonish himself that he shouldn't indulge her laziness any longer, and each morning he would find himself sliding the door shut with no more than a quiet sigh.
Hinata's room had always been last. Of the three of his charges, she was usually the last to bed and consequently the last to rise. He would hesitate outside her door, debating whether to wake her. Her skills had stagnated, and even at a young age it had become apparent she would never be the pride of the family in terms of mastering their techniques. When Hanabi had showed such ambition and promise the differences between them had become all the more glaring.
Most mornings he left, wondering what sort of changeling had taken the place of his eldest daughter. He would wake Hanabi properly then, chivvy her into getting dressed and running through her drills until he was satisfied. But the problem of Hinata would tug at his thoughts; she didn't fit seamlessly among the Hyuuga, she wasn't happy, and he had no means of ensuring her an honored status among a family that prized its martial achievements above all else. There seemed little point in humiliating her by insisting she continue along the same path he led Hanabi down or in subjecting her to Neji's thinly veiled contempt.
So he left her to own devices; Hinata practiced as she pleased, and otherwise had the freedom to dictate her own days. None of which would be any benefit to her outside the Hyuuga family. Receiving an offer for her from the Aburame clan had been an unexpected blessing. There at least Hinata would have a duty; married to the eldest son she could expect to become the matriarch of a respected clan. She need not concern herself with martial prowess or her family's legacy; she would be doing her duty by the mere fact of her existence then.
Methodical, wise beyond her years, he had no doubt she would be a valued partner to Shino, whose letters gave the impression of a patient, cunning man in the making. Hinata would serve her family admirably well, although not in the way Hiashi had hoped.
This morning had the shape of every morning that had come before, only hopelessly skewed as they had been since he first realized Hinata was not returning. Hiashi rose later than usual, weary from a restless sleep, carried out his exercises with perfunctory competence, and made for each of his charges' rooms without bothering to set himself to rights. Neji's room was silent and had been for days. He hardly spent any time in the compound any more, returning only for occasional guidance. Hiashi hadn't seen him for days, and knew only that he was in the company of the mercenary outfit.
They had something, Neji had said, just what it was they didn't know yet, but the lead was promising enough that he had taken to sleeping wherever their wandering took them in the day. Some days Hiashi received a pigeon, with a brief missal describing their progress. Most days he did not. For three days now there had been nothing but silence, either in Neji's room or the rookery. He hoped it was promising news.
Hanabi's room was next, as always. Hiashi slid the door open, fingers tightening fit to splinter the wood when he registered that Hanabi's futon was already packed away. There was no sign that she had even slept in it, and for one awful minute Hiashi thought all his children had been lost to him. A ragged breath clawed its way out of his throat, an animal sound of pain that might have become a sob in a younger, gentler man.
Seasoned warrior that he was, Hiashi swallowed his panic before it could consume him. He made for Hinata's room with unaccustomed haste, following some basic instinct to complete the pattern. And there she was, curled in Hinata's futon, too tired to rouse when the door clacked open this morning. Some tightness Hiashi hadn't even noticed released its grip on his chest and he drew his first easy breath since he had found the empty room.
He took a few minutes to collect himself, watching her eyelids flicker with dreaming, her fingers twitching spasmodically around the blanket she had pulled up to her chin. He had used to find them like this all the time when Hanabi was an infant in arms. Hinata would scurry to her sister's room at the first whine, bundling her up and stealing her away to her own room. Despite his repeated warnings he would find them just like this: Hinata curled about a bundle of blankets, a dividing wall between she and her sister, her chin perched on the edge of it where she had fallen asleep studying the baby's face.
It had seemed a good omen then, that the bonds between them were already so strong. All the more so when Hanabi learned to toddle to Hinata's room on her own, letting herself in whenever the winds or thunder frightened her. Only that closeness had been stretched taut by their different lives as they grew older, and that bond, left untended had frayed. Until now.
Hiashi withdrew, closing the door behind him carefully and returning to his own quarters to ready himself for the day. He would return within the hour when he was certain Hanabi had time to wake, secret herself back to her own room and fall asleep again in time for her father to wake her.
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Hinata had grown accustomed to waking next to Naruto; this morning, like any other, she expected to find herself tangled in his arms and was not mistaken. Untangling herself without waking him took patience, creeping out to bathe and change was agonizing, each footfall carefully calculated to avoid squeaking floorboards or warped wood. Hinata breathed a sigh of relief once she was clear, warming water for herself to bathe quickly. She still felt exposed, vulnerable in a way that wasn't entirely pleasant. Her courage from their nights together always seemed to wane in the early daylight, and she wasn't ready to face him until she was put to rights.
She cleaned up quickly, pausing to remark on what looked like shallow scratches across her skin. She mixed Sakura's rouge and powder, covering the marks; Naruto had been so careful with her, she didn't want him worrying for her delicate skin when she had plainly asked for everything he offered the night before. Still, she thought back to the occasional pricks she had felt against her skin and wondered how he had managed it when he kept his nails filed so bluntly.
She crept past their room again, ears pricked for any sound of him stirring, and hearing none she hurried outside. Her head felt clearer in the open air, her fast-approaching decision less immediate, and sometimes she thought she could see things from the corner of her eye when she was traipsing the woods. Creatures sometimes, or symbols carved into the trees that weren't there when she looked at them directly no matter how she trained her eyes.
At least the winding paths had become familiar to her; she didn't dare venture from them yet, but she had begun to wander farther from the shrine each day.
Today she chose the path to the left when she reached a fork, and then right. The trees had overgrown this part of the path; it felt wilder, darker than the path she usually took. It had been disconcerting at first, without even birdsong to accompany her, but Hinata had learned to enjoy the strange silence broken only by her careful tread. She begged leave of any spirits to enter; the world was a stranger place than she had imagined, but being still unsure of how strange it was exactly, she chose to err toward caution.
Naruto would be awake by the time she returned, and their day would follow a familiar routine: he would invite her to spar, she would accept, they would cook and clean and work together, each in their own corner of the world and hardly aware of the other until evening. They would eat, play cards, and eventually she would screw her courage to the sticking point and invite him to bed again. Maybe. She felt closer to him then, more comfortable with herself as well. But as always, with the morning came second thoughts.
She wasn't ashamed, not really, she assured herself. It was just that she still felt like she hardly knew Naruto at all. His past with Sakura and Sasuke was new to her, and still unknown. He had kept the secret of their shared thread from her even as he struck their bargain, and for all it seemed as though he talked of everything, she had finally noticed their second night together that he seldom said anything substantial. Somehow she ended up being the subject of his rambling as he coaxed story after story from her. If not her, then Sasuke or Sakura or other names whose faces she hardly knew.
If she had asked him, Naruto could have told her of her family, the waxing and waning bond between she and Neji, could have dissected her martial techniques or quoted back to her at least a dozen adages first heard from her father's mouth. In exchange, she knew he was a demon fox that had somehow befriended a baffling array of creatures. That he was older than she but younger than his home, that there was some conflict he wouldn't touch on, some still festering resentment between he and the tengu that purported to be his closest friend. All of it added up to a picture that made little sense.
He was her husband, and she had promised to live with him as such. But, nagged that voice of doubt that had woken her that morning, he had promised to treat her as his wife. And he hadn't, not outside their room; outside she was a friend and a help meet, but no sort of confidante.
Naruto wasn't as guileless as his open face suggested. He was keeping secrets, deliberately, expecting her to make a place in his world and stay without offering more than the excuse of fate for a reason.
Occupied with her thoughts, she strayed farther than she meant. By the time she wrenched herself from her brown study the trees had overgrown the path and caught at her yukata; beneath her feet was dry grass rather than the winding dust trail she had grown used to and unexpected roots crept out to catch her unaware.
Hinata hesitated, glancing back over her shoulder toward the shrine and safety then again to the remnants of the path ahead that obviously hadn't been trod in some time. Would the illusion hold as strongly here? With all the time in the world, why hadn't Naruto ventured down this path more often?
A flicker from the corner of her eye, there and gone like the flash of sun through the leaves was enough to decide her. Whatever wards were set about Naruto's home, they felt thinner here. She could almost see the illusion that hid the path from the forest, could almost feel that scarlet thread twining about her finger. Naruto had found her before when she wandered from the path, he could again if she was truly lost.
Or this might be the exercise she needed, the key to discovering the world to which she had so far been blind.
Hinata pushed onward. Sometimes the forest felt like a living thing, protecting its guardian's secrets but the going got easier as she continued, almost as though with each step the forest was grudgingly yielding ground to her, accepting that she would not be so easily deterred. It could have been hours or minutes before she found herself stepping into a clearing, dappled sunlight streaming down to the forest floor again.
It felt like a cautious welcome, like a kitten inspecting an inquisitive hand just before brushing against it. Leery of presuming upon something she didn't understand, Hinata lingered in the shade until the wind picked up, combing through her hair, sending a few leaves scattering to the ground. The season was turning, she remembered, her time was running out. Her decision remained firm while she still felt like an outsider in this strange place, but this might be the first sign of a rapprochement.
She ventured out into the sunlight, out across the ground to a clump of creeping weeds that hid a hillock from view. Beyond that was a crystalline pond, so still and clear it looked like an extension of the forest floor, only the soil had never been so dark as that, so fathomless. Hinata knelt, dipping her fingers into the water to watch the ripples, yanking them away and flicking them to see if the droplets disturbed the surface. The wind didn't, not so much as a small wave. The face looking back at her, while unquestionably Hinata, was different enough to stay her.
Leaning down, Hinata examined it with a careful eye. The marks that she had covered that morning were plainly visible in her reflection, but perhaps her rouge had been scrubbed away sometime during her wandering. If that had been the only difference she might have dismissed it, but in the water she could see her pupils- an impossibly light color, only just darker than her iris and usually imperceptible in her own mirrors save when she focused. The lines that had etched themselves into the skin beside her eyes at such a young age were distressingly apparent, and Hinata found herself rubbing at them unconsciously.
Oh. Feeling silly, but assuring herself she had no audience to witness her flight of whimsy, Hinata reached out her hand again, gathering up some water and scrubbing her face as though cleaning it. It was frigid and stung as soon as it touched her delicate skin, but she only closed her eyes tightly and scrubbed the water into them that much harder.
The water saw the truth, she thought. The little things she preferred to hide, the marks on her face and skin, the eyes that at once set her apart and yet made her just another extension of her family. The trace of a permanent wondering frown that had gathered between her brows the first morning she woke here. And the burgeoning worries she tucked neatly away in some quiet corner of her mind when she rose each morning. The same ones she tried to leave at the shrine when she went for her walks.
When she opened her eyes again, dabbing them lightly on her sleeve, her gaze was arrested by the first unfettered sight of the thread twined about her finger. When she had first arrived she might have been surprised enough to cry out. A week ago she would have gasped. Now she stared, taking in its twistings and turnings. She had imagined a straight line, a taut string stretched between she and Naruto. Something red like the fireworks her father had set off for Hanabi's first birthday.
Instead it was snarled and tangled, the darker pink of a camellia. Not at all how Naruto had described it, but then he had always seemed more sure of their bond and fate than she. Perhaps the string was not so much a reflection of that fate as her perception of it.
"Thank you," Hinata spoke the words aloud, just in case something was listening. In case this had been meant for a gift or a reward for her perseverance. She had no answer in return, but then she hadn't expected one either.
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A.N. Yes, that's all for this time. I promised someone on AO3 I would have a chapter up by Sunday and I am keeping my word. But I thought I could just magically iron out the thing I hated about the chapter and post all of it at once and that didn't happen. In lieu of providing something that I would have to post and then pull down and change, I went ahead and left the part I'm okay with for this update. And (Here I go, making promises again) if I really can't fix the bit that I hate by early July, I'll just get over my snit and post it.
All of that exhaustively said, thank you for reading as always!