Title: Mine
Author: Killaurey
Rating: G
Word Count: 1,920
Summary: In the days before her wedding, Hinata reflects.
Notes: Part 1 of 22 of my Speak Now (Taylor's Version) Project, a series of unconnected one-shots each based around one of the songs off of Taylor Swift's album Speak Now (Taylor's Version). The lyrics at the beginning and ending of this fic come from her song Mine.
Disclaimer: Naruto doesn't belong to me. It's Kishimoto's and I just play with it.
You made a rebel of a careless man's careful daughter.
You are the best thing that's ever been mine.
"Are you sure?"
It's a question asked several different ways, with varying levels of tact, in the days leading up to her wedding. Ostensibly, everyone is very happy for her. Ostensibly.
Hinata looks at her face in the mirror and then picks up her mother's hairbrush to comb the tangles free.
It would be easy, if she thought they were asking because they didn't care about her or him. It would be easy, then, to get angry about it, in her quiet way, and to ignore the comments and the questions, the poking and the prodding.
The thing is, though, Hinata knows that the people who ask her this, who really want to know if she's sure, are asking because they love her. Most of them even, in their way, love him too. She knows that.
Which makes their questions that much harder to answer.
How is she to explain what has become a foundation of her existence? Despite everything, there's still some notoriety. He's won hearts and minds and loyalties and yet…
She knows all the reasons why marrying him might be a bad idea. She knows it's going to be rough at times, especially when Hatake Kakashi steps down as Hokage and Naruto takes over, she knows that she's going to have to be the one with the good common sense, that she's going to have to manage their household while, in good time, he manages the rest of the village.
She knows that being married to Uzumaki Naruto is going to be a lot of work.
So, when they ask her if she's sure, she knows they're asking with the best of intentions.
"Are you sure?" really means "Can you handle all of that? It's going to be really, really hard. He's going to be absent a lot. You know how he gets."
And she does. She does.
But, even still, she's sure of it.
She is never properly introduced to him. At four, then five, then six, Hinata is only vaguely aware of the loud boy who seems to radiate colour no matter what he wears. If she had been asked about him, at those ages, she'd have admitted she was scared of him.
(She'd been scared of everything, back then.)
He was too loud, too noisy, too chaotic. He played pranks that made other girls cry and other boys angry. He dragged down every group assignment. Made every lesson last longer.
In retrospect, now, she knows he'd been desperately lonely and looking for attention, any attention, whether good or bad, to chase away the emptiness. Her heart aches for the little boy he'd been.
But Hinata completely understands why it was years and years before his classmates, her included, warmed up to him even the tiniest amount. It wasn't just the apathy from the adults bleeding down on all of them. It was Naruto himself, too. He'd been too much.
She's not quite sure when her fright of him began transmuting itself into reluctant admiration. Not a crush, not at seven, eight, or nine. He'd still been mostly a stinky, chaotic force of terror and Hinata, at that age, had had enough things to scare her without wanting to spend more time around more of the same.
Somehow, though, over the years of the Academy, where she kept to herself and he did the opposite, she decided that, even though he was scary, and smelly, and probably really gross, it was also very… admirable…
The way he kept trying.
She didn't see why he kept trying, not when it just wound up with people yelling at him, but it never, ever stopped him from trying, from laughing, from giving it, whatever it was, his very best.
And somewhere along the line, while she watched him, she started to want to keep trying herself.
It had been terrible. Hinata still cringes in remembrance of how poorly that had gone for her, back then, with her family.
Trying had almost been worse than not trying at all.
But each morning, she'd seen him trying against impossible odds and her fragile willpower had been bolstered by his sheer existence.
She still hadn't found the nerve to talk to him, not even when he failed the graduation exam once, then twice, having tried to take it early, but… by the time it became her turn to take the exam, oh so very grown up at twelve, Hinata had known her crush on him was as deep and unreasonable and unshakeable as Sakura's crush on Uchiha Sasuke.
(She'd have rather died than be so forward as Sakura was though.)
The Chuunin Exams…
Well.
The less said about them the better, between all the drama and pain, and the fact that Neji nearly killed her because she'd refused to acknowledge her loss. Waking up after that had been excruciating and that hadn't been just due to the physical pain.
But it had also been the first time that Naruto had really paid attention to her, as Hinata, and so even when she tries to box all those memories up and put them back on a shelf in her memories—they'd led to good times, great friends, she'd grown so much—she can never quite manage it.
Even though they're mired in pain and stained with the shadows of their juvenile selves, it all mattered, once upon a time.
Naruto leaves for three years.
She, to her dismay, doesn't get over him or move on any more than Sakura does with Sasuke.
Ino, who rolls her eyes over the both of them with great, exasperated fondness (when she's not cackling over Shikamaru's slow descent into love with the beautiful and terrifying Temari) tells them that, like, it's absolutely incomprehensible to her that they're both so hung up on guys that can't stick around for them.
"Naruto's training is important," Hinata says, flushing wildly and hating that her emotions are written all over his face. "He'll be back and then… then…"
She doesn't actually know. She's had less than a handful of conversations with him.
She loves him with her entire heart and soul.
What if she's not good enough for him?
Ino lays one hand on hers and leans in and says, "Hinata, you're enough."
And that—that helps.
"It's Ino's superpower," Sakura says moodily, once Ino has fluttered off to go talk to someone Hinata vaguely recognizes from the Academy. "She just swans in, has the right words to say, and all of a sudden… things don't look so bad."
Hinata nods carefully, though she's never really sure what to say when her feelings for Naruto are directly contrasted to Sakura's for Sasuke.
Sakura loves Sasuke wildly, madly, entirely (and Hinata can relate) but Sasuke also… also turned traitor, nearly got half their friends killed, and is the reason Naruto has gone off to train for three years without contacting anyone in Konoha.
Hinata doesn't point out the differences.
It's not worth the screaming arguments or the crying jags that happen when Sakura is triggered by someone with justifiable concerns about Sasuke and Ino isn't around to manage the resulting meltdown.
Which is always interesting to watch because she knows, even if Sakura doesn't, that Ino doesn't give a—pardon her language—flying fuck about if Sasuke returns. Traitors, Ino said once, while they were both tipsy out on a celebration after a successful mission, should be killed.
(But Ino doesn't say that to Sakura.)
The closest thing she's ever heard Ino say to Sakura that's a blatant criticism is a blithe, "Well, Forehead, you know what they say—there's a lid for every pot!"
Naruto not being around means that, somehow, despite having more friends than ever, that she's also lonelier than ever. She misses him, which is outrageous, but shaming herself for her feelings doesn't change them and so, over time, she just… stops.
She loves him. It's easy enough to do when he's not around.
Hinata nearly dies when he comes back to town. He's gotten so handsome, so strong, so—
He treats her like an old, beloved friend and she doesn't know what to do with that, except that it thrills her and leaves her flustered in equal measures.
Then, since the three years are up, shit hits the fan and she thinks she comports herself well enough to not be ashamed of herself, to be able to look herself in the mirror, right up until Naruto needs her help and she—
She jumps in, heart first, and it's all very dramatic and embarrassing and her feelings spill out of her as she's, for once, a heroine even to herself.
And Naruto goes for it.
Well. It gets complicated. There's a whole war going on but, in the small pieces of peace they snatch from it, they begin talking. He admires her, he says. He thinks she's so totally cool. She tells him that it's because of him she's come so far.
"Nah," he says, looking away with a blush staining his face, "you'd have done it anyway! That's how awesome you are!"
And even with everything going on, Hinata is happy. There's dark, terrible things (Neji's loss is one she will never recover from, never, no matter how complicated their relationship had been) but there's also bright, beautiful things, like Naruto's smile. The way Shikamaru walks Temari to the gate. How Ino, usually so outspoken and bold, turns into a tongue-tied mess in the presence of Sai, who is strange and empty at first and then the warmest, most absolutely smitten-and unafraid to show it—man that Hinata has ever seen.
(It's honestly embarrassing watching them; Hinata is just as in love but she, she cannot bring herself to be that effusive and she's glad that Naruto is less over the top in that one particular way.)
Sakura's relationship with Sasuke… Hinata will never understand it. She doesn't try to and, instead, tries to just be happy for her friends.
Their choices might not be the ones she'd have made but, then again, her choices aren't the ones they've made either.
The important thing is that they love one another and that means it'll all be okay.
Hinata puts her mother's old brush down and nods quietly. There. That's much better.
Naruto is not the kind of man that Ino would have chosen. Nor would Sakura or Temari have picked him. She listens to their quiet concerns, since she's the first of them to be wed, and she smiles widely at their love.
They'll accept it, because it makes her happy, but she also loves them for having the nerve to say the things other people just whisper about behind her back.
She knows it's going to be hard. She knows that being Uzumaki Hinata will be its own challenge, different from having grown up as Hyuuga Hinata. To the girl she used to be, this is still a bit rebellious, almost too daring, like a tightrope with a warning to not look down, but she's sure of it.
Her balance can't be shaken so easily these days.
"Alright," she says, to the girl in the mirror, the one that's never looked happier, more confident in herself. "I'm ready to see what the future holds."
Do you believe it?
We're gonna make it now.
And I can see it.