Title: Still I Rise -- #33: bright
Characters/Pairings: Hinata, Naruto
Rating: T
Notes: Part 2 of the NaruHina arc. Yay.
"Damn!" says a voice, and once she opens her eyes, they slam into a pair of bright, bright blue ones, set in a tanned face framed with a mop of golden hair. "Shit, I really didn't mean to do that! Oh, man, you're not hurt, are you?"
"N-no," she stammers, managing to tear her gaze away from his face before he has cause to think of her as some depraved loon. "I'm all right. You didn't hurt me."
"Oh, good!" he says, obviously relived, and gives her a grin that turns his eyes into bright blue crescents and stretches his cheeks into half-moons. Hinata's heart flops over in her chest. "Hey, lemme treat you to coffee as an apology."
If Hinata had been herself—if she had not just been offered a book deal and given a lifetime's worth of dreams on a silver platter—she would have fled the scene, blushing frantically and trying to calm the mad stutters of her heart, but she does not. She feels impossibly, irrevocably invincible, so, instead, she rights herself, clutches her skirt, and says, "Thank you. Coffee would be lovely."
He gives her his wide grin again as he helps her up. Hinata hopes against hope that her palm isn't too sweaty.
"Brilliant! You have time, right? I was only going up to find that old pervert anyway, it's not important. Anyway, you new? I don't think I've seen you around the building before…"
He can talk a mile a minute and his smile and his eyes remind her of endless skies and gusting winds. He is a frenetic with energy: it crackles like sparks off his skin and onto hers, is evident in the wide gestures of his hands and the snap of his step, in the sharp rhythm of his words and the whoosh of his breath. He is open and exuberant, drunk with life and thoughtlessly wordy and everything that Hinata has wanted to be but has never found the courage to become.
And as she slowly sips the coffee he buys her and sits across from him in a trendy bistro, she finds herself falling in—well, not love, perhaps, not yet.
But something dangerously close.