Title: Still I Rise -- #5: degrees
Characters/Pairings: Hinata, Neji
Rating: K
Notes: "What do you do / With a BA in English? / What is my life going to be? / Four years of college / And plenty of knowledge / Have earned me this useless degree. / I can't pay the bills yet / 'Cause I have no skills yet. / The world is a big scary place! / But somehow I can't shake / The feeling I might make / A difference to the human race!" --Robert Lopez and Jeff Marx, from Avenue Q (which is the best musical on Earth), "What Do You Do With a BA in English?" The sad part is, I'm totally an English major.
Hinata needs a job.
She also needs a handle on her life, because while continuing to mope around Neji's apartment and eating the food he graciously makes for her is a rather tempting prospect, she would rather stop freeloading. Neji is a graduate student, after all, and while he is a supremely competent one, he does not have an endless supply of money with which to support her dead weight.
So she needs a job. Moving out into an apartment of her own is a far away notion, but she should pay part of the rent, at least.
Hinata chews on her bottom lip as she surveys the brightly lit screen of her lap-top. Writing books is something she has wanted to do since she had been tiny and just waking up to the realization that there were people—real, live, breathing people who made the books that lined her room and protected her from the stifling quiet and taught her so many, many things, and the books did not spring, whole and perfect, into the world, and that they would have to be built, word by word, letter by letter, inky whorl by ink whorl. It is maddening to think that she is free to pursue it now, that she is free to think that her baccalaureate degree in creative writing—such a small, helpless thing, just like her—would be able to avail her of something, that she is free to use it and build her own world here with her own hands. It kind of makes her want to throw up and hide in the tiny room Neji has supplied her with, but then she would just be a burden on him, and that is enough to make her cheeks burn with shame.
And quite frankly, Hinata is sick of being a burden.
She types rapidly, clicking through page after page, scribbling information and occasionally sipping coffee that's long gone cold, and as she prints out appropriate forms and takes note of pertinent numbers, slowly, in her mind, a resolution begins to form. It's puny and shaky and probably destined to fail, but she has to try. She owes it to Neji, at least.
After a moment, she corrects the thought.
No, she thinks firmly, I owe it to myself.