It was on one of those long blissful evenings some days after the jounin meeting, but still months before the final day on the bridge, when, to her surprise, she found herself talking about Nawagi. He found his way into the conversation quite innocently, not smelling of blood or shaking torn muscle through the shroud as he did in her nightmares, but instead grumbling at her the way he used to when she'd insist on helping him comb his hair in the mornings, or held back a little too obviously in shuriken practice. He'd always been so adamant he had to become a man right away, couldn't keep losing to his sister all his life - never mind her being nearly ten years his senior. She had heard he lit up like a new star the time Sarutobi-sensei gave his academy class the spiel about protecting what was important to you, and a week later he informed her he wouldn't just merely outdo her someday, he'd be the one to protect the whole village himself. Naturally, she teased him mercilessly about it for weeks; how he could ever make Hokage when he could barely even land one kunai on the target, and he complained that was only because she kept tickling him when he was trying to aim, damnit! And she'd said, what, like this? But I'm only trying to correct your technique. And he'd lost his grip on the kunai altogether, sending it sailing through the air to land by unknown miracle right smack in the centre of the bulls-eye.
The remainder of the afternoon was lost to debate over whether a) He was just that good that he could get a perfect shot in even while flailing wildly to get her hands away from his armpits, or b) That he'd never have made that shot without his wonderful, genius sister's help, so naturally she'd just have to spend the rest of their practices tickling him constantly from here on.
By that point it had become painfully obvious she was rambling like a loon, but there was a warmth in Dan's smile when she finished. He said, "He was very lucky to have a big sister like you," which was, when faced in the cold light of day, about as cheesy as that sort of line gets, but at the time sappiness didn't seem so very out of place.
When she asked about his own sister the smile faded. She'd never been a natural but she'd tried so very hard, he told her. Like so many ninja children they'd been robbed of a father before she reached the age of two; Dan had been responsible for most of her upbringing, had been as close to a parent as anything else she could remember. She wanted so much to be like her big brother, and no-one had ever thought to tell her that she had never been under any obligation to follow his path. She was found at the bottom of a trench with a kunai embedded in her left eye, her death unremarkable in all respects excepting only that it was his sister who would not be coming home.
It was hard to joke with Dan, he understood her and all she'd been through a little too well. Harder still to admit, even years after, that as much as she had wanted to see him as her savior, her guiding light, he was the one following her all along. Who would always be one step behind her, offering support for the campaign he didn't know how to begin himself. Maybe she should have known then which of them was meant to be Hokage, which was meant to be the one to stand by the Hokage's side.
The day she first saw him is missing from her memory, lost in the blur of faceless jounin and chuunin on a hundred unmemorable missions and a thousand fruitless meetings. The first day she became aware of him, however, that will always start in her memory with the sound of his voice coming to her defense unexpected. The face and the man would come soon after. Not much of a rescue, really, since the best it achieved was to lump one more worry on the Hokage's already overflowing plate (she'd swear sometimes he was born with some of those grey hairs); but she'd needed something to believe in, he someone to believe in him; and for better or worse they found each other.
One day, she would be so old and jaded enough that the name of Hokage will be stripped of all magic, that protecting anything will be an impossible dream, that the idea of fairytale love will leave her hollow and bitter; but even then she would never entertain the theory that his motives that night were anything other than they seemed.
There had been a dream she used to have, not every night, but still frequently enough to give her ample time to become familiar with it between Nawagi's death and Dan's arrival in her life. In it, she stood in front of her brother's gravestone, storm clouds above starting to burst, Nawagi just out of reach before her. He holds the necklace out to her, says "I'm sorry, nee-san, I don't want it after all." She can see through his skin, the way his jaw muscles move, like something from the pictures in her anatomy books. She tries to tell him not to let go of it, but the moment their fingers meet he presses the necklace back into her hands and then both boy and necklace crumble away into dust through her fingers.
The dreams stopped, after Dan. Indeed, for a long time after Dan's death dreams in any sense of the word were utterly stripped of all promise or meaning; reduced to misleading phantoms, mockeries of the real guidance or hope. In later years it never seemed more than cruel irony that the necklace accepted her and not them, because what could it possibly mean to declare someone worthy of the name of the Hokage when they can't even save the people that matter most?
Still, on that long ago day on the bridge, one she still occasionally allows herself the indulgence of remembering, there were truths in everything said and unsaid that she would not come to appreciate until so many years later, brought back to her with the sight of that too-familiar grin on Uzumaki Naruto's face. Of the Hokage dream that will be born anew as long as the village they so many times staked their lives to protect still stands - the one piece that connects her history, her past and her present; and that will be her life as long as she still has a future.