Hinata sat in the garden again, humming as she pulled weeds, with dirt on her nose she didn't notice. Adorable. She looked up at him and gave him a curious look. He shrugged, and she went back to work so he could watch her work again.

Sasuke still had so much to tell her.

Hinata let him force out her frustrations with training more often. It made him feel better to have an opponent that didn't beat the shit out of him. However, it built a new frustration in him. He had always been too driven or too annoyed to notice how intimate fighting with a woman could be. Though he knew for a fact if he got this close to Sakura, or any number of women in the village, sweating and panting, he wouldn't be as nearly as turned on as he was when she looked so directly with determined eyes and a flushed face.

Hinata seemed to notice the new tension too, when either got pinned when she ran into him in the kitchen or when she looked him in the eye too long after a joke. She was feeling the attraction too, but they didn't talk about it. They both knew it was a bad subject for either right now.

His wife's face turned red, listening to him. Oh, you just wait, Sasuke smirked.

Hinata came in once again drenched. He wasn't sure if the water down her face was tears or rain, but if he had a guess...

"What's wrong?" Sasuke asked as she took off her wet outer layers, hanging them.

Hinata kept her mouth closed tightly and looked at him broken. She stayed by the doorway while he fetched her a towel and laid it over her head, but she made no move to dry her hair. She looked even more drowned with a towel veil.

He felt the anger for her build and tried to shove it down. She whimpered, flattening her back against the wall. He moved closer and started drying her hair for her. She closed her eyes and tried to breathe evenly, bringing her hand up slightly to grip the edge of his shirt tightly.

"You get cornered?" She bit down on her lip, staying silent. Oh, he hated it when she did that. She could just tell him. He was quite aware of what the village thought of him. "Hey, tell me what happened." She opened her eyes only to glance at him briefly.

"It's nothing." She mumbled, turning her head to avoid his eyes.

Sasuke sighed irritably, glancing down. He caught sight of her shirt. It was drenched in more than water and stretched.

"Did someone grab you?" She flinched at his question. "Hinata, answer me." He let the towel fall to her shoulders as he quickly checked her neck for any more signs of a struggle.

Her eyes filled with more tears. "I'm fine. A simple misunderstanding." She whispered, pushing his hands away as gently as she could against his anger.

"Who grabbed you." He snapped, her eyes focused on his shoulder, and her fist in his shirt tightened. "Hinata!"

"I..." Her face twisted painfully. "I think there are much better things to worry about than who I spend my spare time with and who that person was!" She squeaked out between strangled hiccups. "I don't want to hear people's personal opinions on my choice of friends anymore." She barely whispered out.

"You were attacked because of me?" He growled.

"No! I disagreed with some civilians." She told him firmly.

"About me!" He snapped. "And they thought it was okay to grab you?" His fury heightened. He could feel the heat rise in the small shoe room. "They knew you can't fight back as a ninja. That's cowardly."

"I was fine. It's just a shirt, a small spill, and a misunderstanding." She insisted.

"I am getting sick of you letting everything slide. This is an attack on you." He yelled, slamming his hand flat into the wall above her head in frustration.

She didn't flinch. "It's best to leave it go!" Looking up at him with a frown as he towered over her, she wasn't frightened of his hardly lidded anger.

"I don't need your protection!" He told her, getting within inches of her face. "I don't need you around to fight battles for me."

"I'm fighting my own battles." She huffed back.

"You're letting people walk on you because you're used to it." She averted her eyes as he got angrier.

"I'm fine." She told him.

"Yeah? Then why did you come here? I'm not killing myself anymore. I don't need you anymore!" He knew they were the wrong words as soon as they came out of his mouth.

Hinata finally flinched. Her face lost all its fire, and she stared at him with those big blank eyes blinking away blobs of tears.

She quickly reached past him for the door.

He was flooded with panic, he slammed the door back closed, putting his strength in so she couldn't open it with the handle, and they both stared at each other in silence, only hearing the rain and the heavy breathing from yelling. Swirling around them was their heat, fleeting rage, frustration, and their shared panic of being left alone again.

Their eyes spoke for them without changing from their shared panicked expressions.

Sorry.

Me too.

Don't leave.

Don't let me.

They stared at each other for a few moments more. Seconds of humid silence before one more thing was said only between their eyes.

He reached forward, grabbed the back of her head, burying his fingers into the wet mass of hair, and closed the heated distance between their open mouths. Her eyes closed, and her lips responded instantly. With the reassurance, she wasn't pulling away, and he had read the sign right, he continued his heated assault on her lips. She didn't flatten against him. She kept the space between their chests and shivered. Her hand came back up to crumple the end of his shirt, unintentionally yanking him down closer to her height.

They parted for air, staring at each other with shared red faces from lack of air, heat, and embarrassment.

He let go of her hair, slowly detangling his hand, and they separated.

There was a question in the air and new forms of panic washing over them.

She answered it by lightly tugging his shirt, silently asking him to come down to her level, and lightly returned her lips to his only briefly before backing up again, flattening against the wall, sliding her eyes shut, and fainting.

Hinata covered her face peeking through her fingers.

"What?" Sasuke asked her with fake innocence as she turned redder.

"Nothing." She squeaked.

The story took a similar turn. Once she woke up on the couch, Hinata quickly reverted to shy once the initial hormones and emotion were overflowed with pure embarrassment and headed to the kitchen, where she was soon thrown a clean shirt to wear.

This also may have marked where she started stealing his clothes.

Once again, they didn't talk about it. Just kinda let it happen.

Sasuke found there was no better way to cure her anger and frustration than kissing her nose when she wasn't paying attention, except when he was the reason she was frustrated, then he just made it worse.

Hinata shyly kissed him before she left. He pulled her to him when she came in the door. It was the most amusing when her hands were full, and she tried to keep a fluster hold on them.

The training was much more interesting now, at least for him, sometimes she got frustrated with his lack of focus, but he was certainly getting better at something.

As far as he knew, no one knew, not that anyone who would have thought it wouldn't have. Hinata spent all her free time at his house, but he wasn't going to dare kiss her in public and hurt what little respect the village still gave her, a shared silent understanding to keep it quiet because who the hell needed to know anyway.

That worked up until her cousin figured it out.

The knock tipped him off. It wasn't her. Even when she was angry, she knocked lightly as she could then let herself in.

Who did he need to tell to get lost in the woods today? He had thought just he opened the door and dodge what would have been a palm to his chest.

"The hell?" He growled.

"Stay away from Hinata-sama. She has enough to deal with without a deadbeat trying to 'get at' her." Neji shot at him.

"How is it your business." He wondered how he had found out. He knew Hinata wouldn't have flat out told him.

"She doesn't need visible bites either because she is a terrible liar." Okay, now he was confused.

"I didn't bite… oh." Yeah, he kinda did, not purposely. That was something that happened during training. He had gotten pinned. He bit her, which had gotten him a palm to the face in surprise. It must have been harder than he thought if it was bruised but not have hurt enough, she noticed it, or he would have been scolded before her cousin had ever noticed it.

"Yeah, oh," Neji growled. "You are lucky. I saw it before her father did."

"If she has a problem with it, she will tell me. You didn't need to tell me your 'concerns' because I don't care what you have to say about it." Sasuke huffed, leaning against the wall.

"It should because she is not visiting anymore." The shorter male declared.

Sasuke's bored demeanor turned angry in a second. "She will come if she wants, and you will let her do what she damn well pleases, or I'll come to find her myself." He pushed off the wall to tower the Hyuga.

Neji was in no way intimidated. "She doesn't need you causing her more trouble than she has."

"She comes to get away from you a lot," Sasuke informed him through his teeth. "Ever think that a compound full of people who hate you might be suffocating or a village that openly tells you how your decisions are wrong because they know you won't lash back is isolating?" Neji faltered, making his face twitch. "You aren't locking her in that prison. She comes here to get away from all of you."

"She is not going to become your toy, so she has a place to hide," Neji growled before he was promptly punched in the face.

Hinata covered her mouth and gasped. "What?"

"I wasn't too appreciative of him claiming you were whoring yourself out for a place to hide." Sasuke rubbed the back of his head. "You weren't too happy with me after that, and in the end, we were both wrong, and you were deeply disappointed in us both."

Hinata chewed her lip, frowning.

"He hadn't known how unhappy you were because you made a point to hide it, and I hadn't realized how worried he was or why. You hadn't told me that your step down was coming up so soon, and the arguments of your sealing were becoming heated. It was a clan matter, but you told me after this while defending him."

She nodded, noting the general dates he spoke up, making a timeline in her head.

"Now, if that wasn't odd enough, your sister came to visit."