Chapter 1
The hazy hallways of her mind contained, amidst other, unremarkable highlight reels, a spool of memory pertaining to that fateful morning. Hesitant love, a loose vestment that draped her life and lent it a rosy hue, had been stripped away, courtesy a missive; and dread, a dread that to this day had not dissipated, set in. The missive itself had made at her heart like a loosed crossbow bolt: and whereas in a heart armoured in ambition it would've only made the slightest indent; hers, touched as it was by a tender love, was rent in two— the pulsations of her passions poured out till she was quite bloodless and quite faint. That quaint missive told her tersely that she was to be married, a decree set forth by the Hokage himself; and though in secret she wailed, ranted and railed, there was nothing to be done, no recourse to be availed—she was, on the thirty first of March, to marry Uchiha Sasuke, for reasons unknown.
Unknown, as it turned out, was an exaggeration. She was told by her father in no uncertain terms, that being a waste of space, being above all else a burden to him and the clan, and being the spare, so to speak, she was lucky not to be banished into a branch family, seal seared across her forehead; that to marry into the Uchiha clan was an honour beyond her wildest imagination, an honour that her father had wheedled out of the honourable Hokage through entreaty and supplication. Hers was not to reason why, just to do as was asked of her; for, outside that, she had no rights whatsoever, being as she was—a pretty but inept girl, her father's greatest disgrace, the first firstborn in six generations to lose her birth-right to a younger sibling.
What her father did not know, was that her heart already belonged to another. But even if he had, it would've made no difference. For if she were to tell him that she was in love with the village idiot, she would be laughed out of the room. If she were to muster up a measure of defiance and stutter through her sentiments about his ardour, his passion, the depths of his person, the breadth of his ambition, she would at best be locked up and at worst— but no, no; that did not bear thought. This was her lot. She was born to be breeding stock. She was raised, so that she be told on the day of her wedding, by her sister, that she not fuck this up, that she was a loser, that she was unwanted, both whence she came from and where she was going to.
And though time had turned the dissonance that resonated in her breast into a detached quiescence, her sister had indeed foretold her fate. She was a maiden wed at the first sprinklings of spring, and a maiden still, though the showers had passed and the first fruits broken forth on the boughs. The arms of summer were weighed down by the alms of spring. Shadows on the streets elongated; the skies at night were star spangled affairs that spoke of a seething, sweaty, sticky passion, of a vigorous yet languid love. The freshets bountifully bequeathed the world with a school of iridescent fish, little hatchlings that streaked through kaleidoscopic patterns of sunbeams playing on the shimmering surface. Some sun-kissed days, the gurgle of streams and the warble of bursting bubbles broke forth. The air was an orgasm of scents and sounds—regal wings fluttered forth, lilted songs, like religious hymns, were hummed in twitters; and in little lisps, the melodious moans of human passion floated in the air. And every breeze brought with it a fragrance of faint jessamine; and the morning dew bore an opalescent hue as it dripped down fresh stalks of grass in her garden. And yet…yet, amidst all this opulence, she remained a mendicant: stripped of purpose; oscillating in identity between the unwanted Hinata Hyuga and the unloved Hinata Uchiha; bound in marriage; beggared of the love she once had, though that too remained stuck at the back of her brain, a siren song, a miracle of the mind, the coil of a six-year old soulful passion shrunken back into embryo, but not to dust, not nothing— and, to sum it all up, she remained frustrated, and her husband, an enigma.
Fine term, though: husband. She had a desire to huff bitterly at that. All she had met within this household, within this enclosure of grey paint, slatted windows, latticed walls, and nauseatingly formal rooms, was hostility. Her husband…she'd known him in passing at the academy— prodigy, a rival to the man she loved, ethereally beautiful yet always distant—yet never spoken to him, met him once before they were wed; and after the wedding, spent with him one morning, and waited in trepidation one night, for, that evening, he had been in such a foul mood, had simmered with such rage, such resentment, that she had trembled at the thought of spending the night in his company; yet he had never shown, not even to consummate their marriage; and next morning, her mother-in-law, the only soul in the house who ever made any sort of attempt to speak to her, had told her, not unkindly, that her husband had left for a mission, the duration of which was unknown.
Over the past month, Hinata had come to the conclusion that Uchiha Sasuke hated her; that the distance his brother, for instance, kept, was sufficient evidence that all she was in this house was an unwelcome guest. And so too it was whenever she wandered outside, for the entire colony snuck at her apprehensive glances, and though the odd person stepped up, and the odd person made a strained attempt at being friendly, every undulating eyebrow seemed to send her way the same message: you are an outsider, you are a Hyuga, you would not be here if we had a say.
So she waited, harbouring in a mouldy corner of her mind an ever diminishing hope for emancipation; yet waited nonetheless, in the clammy embrace of bittersweet anticipation, for the return of a man she had been made to marry: a man she did not want, and a man who by no means seemed to want her. And all she wanted to know was why. Why her. Why was it she that had been plucked away from the sanctitude of her doomed, dissolving romantic dreams about Naruto; why thrust into this recurring social nightmare where day after day she slept alone, woke alone, sobbing softly— stranded amidst the unfriendly, ignored by her in laws, unwanted by her family, and with nowhere to go, and only her husband's benison to turn to.
And one gloomy evening, when the cricket with its incessant stridulating contended with the swallow's swelling strain for the world's attention, Sasuke returned.