AN: A bit late for Bisexual Awareness Week (16-22 September), but I hope you guys like it. I would love to write some lengthier pieces with these two if interest would be present.
Young adulthood, present-day AU. Mentions of depression. I do not own the characters of this universe. R&R!
They met in at school; eighth grade, to be precise. They met through their common friend, TenTen. The brown-haired girl was Neji's girlfriend, so, naturally, she and Hinata crossed paths at some point and clicked immediately, enjoying the same books, TV shows and music. Sakura was TenTens classmate, actually her best friend. None thought very much of the other at first.
The first milestone in their friendship was actually being assigned together at a cultural event. They both volunteered to help at an art exhibition for local creators and happened to be responsible for the same location. Sakura was like a magnet: she knew how to talk and entertain and Hinata couldn't help herself gravitating towards her. Heck, on that night she had her first cigarette, of course, offered by Sakura. They talked about boys – how Sakura was hopelessly in love with Sasuke, who moved away after his parent's car accident. He grew bitter and didn't want to live in the same city anymore. His older brother took charge and proposed moving out of Konoha. Hinata also opened up and told her about her infatuation with Sakura's very own desk mate, one rather cheeky Naruto Uzumaki. It wasn't news to Sakura, who already noticed the rather shy girl stutter and blush every time she was in his proximity.
Soon Hinata found herself at Sakuras place helping her to dye her hair pink. On her first try, Hinata failed to bleach Sakura's hair properly, such that the overlay with the pink dye turned out to be a rather uneven peach hue. Even so, Sakura loved it and by the end of the year, Hinata managed to perfect her skills, such that Sakura finally got her platinum pink spot on.
The girls found to be so often together that Hiashi felt the need to question his eldest regarding her sexuality, even prompting her to "get a fucking boyfriend" and to "stop being a lesbian". Hinata was hurt but knew her father was most probably much too drunk again. She shrugged it off, yes, she loved Sakura like a friend she thought, but her object of infatuation was Naruto, no mistake about that.
They talked about their first sexual experiences with each other. Sakura managed to land a relationship with her dream boy, she'd be forever grateful for that she silently thought. Sakura had slept around here and there, but never actually found any stability again. Even when Sasuke came back and seemed to share her old feelings, their union didn't cross the one-week mark. Hinata never questioned this any further.
For Christmas, Hinatas father told her not to bother to come home anymore. Even though it deeply hurt, she expected that. She knew how disappointed he was with her mediocre academic results. The problem was that Hinata didn't want to study law, but she tried, she worked every day but eventually, her lack of love for the subject at a prestigious university was fated to show. When talking to Naruto, he merely shrugged. One week before he was due to leave, Hinata finally got the courage to ask him whether she could join him and his family. He refused to press the matter until the last day, so when his mother refused (Hinata simply rationed that his mother would have liked her son to find a girlfriend more like herself), he didn't press further and left the very next day, leaving her behind in tears.
It was painful spending Christmas and New Year's alone in her dorm.
After one year of living her dream relationship, she realized she wasn't as loved, as cared for and as understood as… When she was in high school, with Sakura. Maybe it was too late, maybe it was selfish, but she pulled her old baggy jacket over her shoulders and embarked on a search for the first flight towards Sakura's current location. She knocked at the door of the pinkette merely a couple of hours later.
They locked eyes and even though they wanted desperately things to be the same as they were before college, they weren't. Both had grown differently – Sakura drowned her unhappiness in drugs and alcohol and was living a reckless life. Hinata slipped in and out of depression regularly, falling into a passive state where she lived her life often as a passenger. Sakura, on the other hand, had to drink to the point of nausea to feel alive, to get tattoos in unsterile conditions or even engage in unprotected one-night stands.
When they were younger it had always felt like they were two tangent, parallel lines, but, as time showed, they were slightly angled with respect to each other: they had once intersected and since the angle between the two lines was so small, it seemed like they were headed in the same direction. They weren't. It hurt trying to find that feeling of easiness around each other. Or so it seemed.
As the days rolled by, they found that even though the previously shared commonalities were gone, they had grown such that they found new overlaps in their interests they wouldn't even have dreamed about in their earlier years. Hinata would have lied if she would have said that Sakura and her never engaged in romantic behaviours when they were younger.
When they were 18 they had been the only guests to climb all the way to the mountain cottage for a birthday party. The others had used the gondola. They had their change of clothing in their backpacks, so Hinata went ahead to shower first before changing. Unbeknownst to her, she had entered the men's shower and as Sakura found the lone women's shower empty, she immediately knew what trouble her shy friend had gotten herself into. Facepalming she groaned and went to retrieve Hinata. They shared the women's shower kissing and washing each other tenderly. They often used to mess around at parties but they never discussed their romantic feelings back then.
Hinata was here to confess how she had actually felt all these years ago - maybe it wasn't fair, probably she came too late but it weighed heavily on her chest. Had Sakura experienced the same ease when being intimate with her, the pull which came so naturally? Sakura laughed and told Hinata a story she had never heard before. Once, when Hinata was grounded, Sakura took her ukulele and started singing their song under her window until Hiashi hushed her. Hinata never heard her, as she had her headphones on most probably. That story was their answer. They always belonged together. It was natural, it was their happy place, that togetherness./p
The shy Hyuuga ended up never leaving Sakura's. They pulled each other's life together and held each other together just as they knew the other one needed to and together they built each other up. Yes, there was no love more self-explanatory than theirs.