Memoirs of a Shinobi
Ghostflower Eyes Fade
+Hinata+
on the silken sheets unfaithfulness lay,
pretty in uncertainty, breath tainted
ghostflower ridden eyes are empty
and now you desperately need warmth.
but all that surrounds you is your sorrows,
a soft melody that bleeds you dry
I was always known for my sensibility; my calm, somewhat sophisticated sort of silence, often paired with timidity for fear of saying something that would provoke unneeded violence. Even when I grew older, my timidity only seemed to grow as the date of my coronation as the Head of the Hyuuga Clan grew nearer, for I feared that I would end up making the same mistakes as many of my predecessors, thus extending the hate associated with the Hyuuga houses upon many generations when it could have been stopped. However, oftentimes around my friends, I would be open and cheerful, my stuttering would fade away and I wouldn't have to worry anymore about being the Head of the Clan, because they didn't care one way or another.
However, this silence also gained me many things, brought me much knowledge, as it could be discerned as a frightened silence to my enemies, giving me time to assess their weaknesses; it could be seen as a respectful silence to other Clan Heads and to other Hyuugas; it could be seen as indifferent sort of silence to those whom I disliked, and although I was not talking down to them, as I would never, they would be infuriated by my impassability, yet were powerless to do anything about it. So it was often that I sat in silence, practiced in it, as many Hyuugas enjoyed meditating to calm their minds and bodies, but I never really enjoyed the obligatory silence I was encouraged to possess. It was a personality type that was forced upon me as a young child, in the face of my father, as was my natural submissiveness and timidity. However, I oftentimes used the silence to my advantage, letting my tormentor thinking they had won the battle, but in the end I always won the war. As I grew, I molded it into a sophisticated sort of air I held about me, as was expected of the heiress to the prestigious Hyuuga Clan; and in the end I relented and let it permeate my conscious thought, finding I made better decisions while calm and quiet.
It was this silence, this quiet, that I tried desperately to hold onto when I heard the news. Yet it slid past my fingers, beyond the far reaches of my mind, like silk that could not be grasped and fell into the silver stream below the wooden bridge upon which I stood. I often took walks around the Hyuuga compound during the sunset hours, enjoying the scenery and the slight breeze that I had been denied as a child; forced inside to practice the Byakugan that I just couldn't learn properly, and thousands of techniques that I was always deemed too weak to do in the end. I stopped on a delicate wooden bridge, and began staring down at the flowing water beneath the slim wooden slats. In my hand I held a slender white rose, the tips of which were painted a light pink. The path was lined with thick white stones and filled in with light brown pebbles which rolled when I walked over them. Nothing in the Hyuuga compound was rough or unpolished, everything gleamed with the ultimate precision, and nothing was left untouched. Nothing in the Hyuuga lifestyle was unrefined; everything was sophisticated, washed over with millions of soapsuds, but nothing could hide the ugliness of the Hyuuga hierarchy, no amount of lustrous black lacquer could hide the scratches and dents made in the rough wood of the Clan, nothing could disguise the smell of betrayal amongst family, the division according to birth.
Nothing in the Hyuuga compound had any color; all of the rooms in the Main Complex are made of the traditional thin white screens and in the Branch Annex, they're made of slightly thicker, beige screens; nothing there has feeling or the makings of a home, its just empty and desolate and cold. I slowly peeled off a white petal from the rose, feeling the gossamer skin against my own, let it slide from my thin fingers, to float down to rest on the waters that would take it far away from this oppressiveness, this empty place of no return, where the only person who saw its beauty was supposed to destroy it without a single thought. Someone came up to me while I was slowly peeling off the second petal, pretending to watch the pink edges fray about my fingers, while I really was watching them draw closer to me on the white-stone lined path.
He reached me, bowed, and said respectfully, "Hinata-sama."
I ignored this gesture as I had been subjected to it too much when I was younger; I continued my work on the rose, a sick feeling growing within my chest as he spoke on, slowly untying the black hitai-ate wrapped around his forehead. "Hinata-sama… There has been news from the Godaime… Naruto-san has—" The petal I had been pulling on suddenly ripped in half with a jerk as I realized what he was saying. He finished whatever he was saying in a low voice, I didn't even need to listen to the words to know what he had said. I let the torn petal float downwards, drifting on a waft of air, my moonstone eyes trying to focus on its milky surface, but failing miserably. I could feel my calm slipping away from me, the silence I had so perfectly constructed to protect my true self from harm. It was falling with the petal, being washed in cold water until I could barely breathe, the shock taking my breath away. But as the icy feeling of nothingness faded away, a wave of anger took over me.
"Who killed Naruto?" I said quietly, my voice low and dangerous, a tone I hadn't used in years, if ever.
"We're n-not sure, Hinata-sama… Nara-san has g-gone to inspect the a-area—" He stuttered, almost like I would have, had it been years ago and I wasn't forced into being hard and heartless like my family.
"Who. Killed. Naruto?" I repeated, as though I was talking to a young child.
I understood the Hyuuga rage; it was calm, it was cold, it was thoughtful and almost indistinguishable from our normal personas if looked upon from outside, but it was overwhelming inside. Just because we never showed anger, did not mean we did not have anger; and often, because we were so inexperienced in expressing our rages, or dealing with them when they became too much, we went on killing sprees, carved paths of destruction into mountainsides, or simply crushed anything that got in our way. Feeling this anger taking over me, I clutched the stem of the rose, feeling the thorns dig into my skin, and I relished in the sudden pain. Pain could distract me, pain could save me, pain could remind me of my place in the world, could remind me that I had no power of death. A reddened drop of blood slid down my pale skin, collected at my wrist, stretched into a droplet like tear, and fell down to disappear into the twisting light blue waters at my feet.
Blue chakra was spinning under my skin, begging to be released, and I could feel my presently dormant bloodline limit activating. The rose began to grow an eerie flickering blue as chakra collected around my fingers, twining around the stems, to collect in the center of the rose. Suddenly, with an undeniable urge to do so, I grabbed the head of the rose with my other hand, and ripped it off furiously, watching the pale petals float in the light breeze, the stem falling slowly to rest under the skin of the water. My silver eyes hardened with the Byakugan, veins protruding from my thin face as I whirled to face the chuunin.
"WHO KILLED NARUTO!" I demanded of him, and watched angrily as he started backing away, palms raised in protection against me.
"Now, Hinata-sama… Please! Please, I don't know how he died! Please just go to the Godaime—Hinata-sama! NO!" he cried desperately as I advanced towards him, he tripped backwards down the path lined with the moonstones so like my eyes. Stumbling, he regained his footing as I walked towards him, chakra pooling around my fingers, sliding up my palms, until I could feel my power mounting.
He could not turn his back to me and run away as he wished, that would be disrespectful, besides he knew that I would strike him if he did any such thing. However, after all of the years of going on missions and fighting against adversaries, I had not gained many morals to abide by while angry at someone who posed any sort of threat to me. My timidity had long since faded away when I wanted to fight someone, and right now he was telling me that Naruto, Naruto for God's sake, had DIED. There was nothing that could hold me back; I would kill anyone in my way.
Then his ocean blue eyes unexpectedly struck me, filled with tears and desperation, and in my anger I remembered Naruto's eyes. They were so similar, the determination was gone and replaced with fear, but they were still so the same. How dare he defile Naruto's eyes, how dare he hold the same color in his orbs that Naruto held! Suddenly I lunged forward, chakra forming a sharp spike on the tips of two of my fingers, and I slammed my fingers into his stomach, before whipping around poking several points on the back of his neck. He shook with the ferocity of my blows, unable to do anything but stare at me blankly as I completed my Hakke Rokujuyon Sho Eight Trigrams Sixty-Four Palms, delivering blow after blow to his torso and neck. Finally I had finished, and I stood back, breathing heavily as I glared at him, Byakugan still activated. He simply stared at me blankly, eyes empty and unfeeling as they bored into my white ones, before he promptly slumped to the ground, unconscious or dead, I could care less.
I gazed at his motionless form for a moment more, heavy eyes half-lidded, hands hanging by my sides before realizing what I had done. My anger, the uncontrollable urge to kill heartlessly, had washed over me like an ocean wave, taking my sanity away with it. But the ocean swelled back, returning my senses to me, and I breathed in the heavy scent of death and the sweet smell of the earth and the air. The thick foam whirled around my feet, drawing me backwards, over the thin wooden slats that formed the bridge, and I was running in the opposite direction, and I didn't even know it until I saw the trees flying past me.
I knew that people from the Hyuuga compound would find the body and take it away; by the time I returned it would be gone. I didn't even know where I was going; I just let my feet guide me over branches and under waxy leaves that lazily nodded under the darkening sky. Stars were forming in the navy heavens; the round globe of the moon was already visible even underneath the heavy foliage. Finally reaching my destination, or so I believed, I stopped abruptly in an empty clearing, shaking all over as the news of Naruto's death sunk in.
Only when I was sure of my destination and I knew I was alone did I allow myself to crumble. Slowly, I knelt in the scuffed dirt, eyes wide and blank as I stared into the dark trees that now blocked the moonlight from reaching my face. I was tired, oh so very tired of everything, all the pressure and it consumed me, pushed me out of your gradually fading light, your now sunset sunshine. It had dimmed with your departure and I could feel the darkness resting on my heart, pulling me into the space between night and day, a heavy dusk that settled about my skin as I wearily stared into the distance, unfeeling. I let myself fall to the ground; this was no fairy tale, there was no one there to catch me or to hold me in the cold, dank air of night. I lay there quietly; it was a strange, washed out defeated kind of tiredness that beleaguered me, one that permeated the chilly air and I was eventually forced to breathe its musky scent as the unbroken silence slowly muffled my soul with exhaustion.
As I lay unmoving, I tried desperately to remember your smile so faded, your cheerful face, but it was impossible to imagine something so distant. Heart aching I attempted to feel as though you weren't gone, and you were standing right there in front of me, offering a hand to help me up. I tried to feel your kindness, your happiness, but I couldn't. You were gone. My face crumpled as I realized I could not remember you properly, none of your memories could touch me anymore, it was as though you had never existed for me. Tears formed in the corners of my eyes and I hunched my shoulders to prevent myself from crying. I closed my eyes when I heard someone coming, their slow, deliberate footsteps echoing over the path of the hill. I knew the walk, completely silent to all that were unfamiliar with its strange sound, but I ignored them as they drew closer and closer to my unmoving form.
"Hinata," his unused, gruff voice was softened with… compassion?
I didn't move, I had frozen my body in a place where even he, with his hard spoken truths that cut away the cobwebs of my protection, could not reach. He walked closer, reaching out with one hand to lightly touch my shoulder, shaking me.
"Hinata," he repeated, "Hinata! I know you aren't asleep."
I turned my body away from him, rolling until my face was nearly in the dirt, until I could feel dust swirling up my nose and I could smell the water deep beneath the surface. My mind and body had inverted so clearly, I had turned so coldly into myself that any extroverted sign to anyone I knew was impossible. Cold prickled my skin and my fingers were throbbing as they were resting under the weight of my hip, against my burning skin underneath my jacket.
"Hin—" he began again, his grip tighter on my shoulder, while the snowy anger common to many of the Hyuuga Clan came back full force, suddenly and unexpected. I twisted my torso abruptly, slamming my chakra-powered palm in the direction of his stomach, but he knew me too well. He grabbed my flying wrist with a painful accuracy, and stared down at me in silence.
"Hinata. Stop." He said calmly, staring at me from behind two dark, round glasses that I couldn't see behind and knew not what lay beneath the shadowed lenses.
However, I was unwilling to listen to his logic, and I swung my foot at his legs, hoping to catch him off-guard, but he jerked me upright by the wrist suddenly, and I was thrown against his chest, the momentum of my kick pushing me forward.
"Let me GO!" I cried, beating my fists against his chest in a desperate, vain attempt to make him let go of me. In response he simply held me closer, wrapping his arms around my shoulders until I was pressed against his high collar, breathing in his scent of wind and crushed pine needles. Suddenly I was shaking all over, tears falling down my face as I finally broke, my anger simply sliding away until I was left empty, cold, and broken.
"It's okay Hinata… get it all out… its okay…" he whispered, his hands rubbing circles around my back, his breath pooling over my hair to soften in my ears. I clutched his jacket closer to me, attempting to bring some of his warmth into my cold body.
I had loved you, sought out your smile and laugh like the beacon of a lighthouse, while I was afloat in a sea of worry and self-doubt. You had guided me towards the land where I was finally able to establish myself. Your light and your warmth had protected me, given me strength in storms of uncertainties when I was lost and cold. But when I had finally warmed myself and stood upright on my own two feet, I held close to your memory, a shred of the past to guide me even when you weren't there to help me along. However, you had changed from that affectionate, open boy that you were years ago, and I clung to the past as if you would suddenly appear as before, running around and yelling cheerfully. You never did, and I finally realized I didn't need you as my pillar of strength any longer; but still I tried to hold onto that memory of you. It tied me to the past, when I was still in need of your help, when I was still timid, naïve, and young. When I still needed you; I never wanted to let your memory go, but it was wasting me away.
Now you're gone, and I'm forced to let you go, move on by myself, and try not to look back. But I will, I know I will, and I know that a little bit of your memory will always live inside of me, your smile, your laugh, your eyes will forever ride in my heart, and I will never forget. But you're part of my past now, and although I don't love you like I did back then, your love will always be with me. Your strength will give me strength when I need it most, it will give me calm, it will power me until death. And even now, as Shino wraps his coat around me to give me warmth, I can feel your memory giving me strength to stand on my own two feet, can feel my tears drying from moonstone eyes as Shino takes me arm and I lean against his side as we walk away. I can feel your sapphire eyes on me from wherever you may be, smiling as I think of you, finally able to hold myself upright while thinking of you.
You gave me strength, you gave me resolve, you showed me the way to go through the heavy clouds that poured insults and doubts over me, pooling around my feet, holding me back. You parted the clouds, lighting the path I should take, and dried up my past fears and let me take steps forward. And although you're gone, you'll live with me through times of worry and show me the way again just like before.
awww hinata was my FAVORITE to write! well at least the beginning where shes all mad xD i was gonna update sooner but ya see... there was lots of hw on thursday and on friday well.. i was doing stuff... oh well! i love the postal service.. listen to their songs! thank you all of you reviewers.. :) made me so happy... oh and yeah the last chapter was supposed to be dedicated to glennon cuz it was his bday the day i updated! yay! happy bday glennon! oh and ive always wanted to go into detail about the hyuuga property and stuff... hehe forgive me...
next up- Kiba! When someone becomes so reckless they'll do anything you tell them, how do you bring them back?
