When Naruto got home, the squirrel inside his head was running marathons and backflips and his once rusty gears were about to break loose. Never in his life he had so many thoughts at the same time before, they were so many and went to fast that that were hitting against each other as if someone had shot a glass filled with rubber balls inside the usual ramen and sex nothingness that permeated his skull.
Liked him, Kurenai said. Had feelings for him.
Hinata loved him.
She fucking loved him, like, love-love, like love-lovey-freaking-dattebayo-loved him!
Even inside his head sounded so... Impossible. Nobody loved him!
Like, romantically. With Sasuke and Sakura... It was love but it was desperation and sex had been a way to process all the suffering they went through together and because each other. It was love, it always would be. But it wasn't the same. It the kind of love that had so many conditions, so many unspoken regrets and hurt that would never be able to heal because neither him or Sasuke or even Sakura (no matter how much emotionally evolved she pretended to be, she was still in the middle of that mess). It had been love, but it is the sort of thing that appears in those depressing melodramatic with old man dressed like geisha plays Tsunade-baa-chan and Kakshi-sensei forced him to watch when they were trying to educate him for the job. Everybody died in the end of those plays.
At least Sasuke and Sakura had just broke up with him.
Now Hinata's feelings... Well... It was impossible, unbelievable.
Yeah, he knew she had the hots for him since they were wee snotty kids, and that was there was a couple of times she tried to shield him with her own body, but like, she was always gloomy, dark and weird. The kind of person that cross a road without looking to both sides, he had thought she was just trying to kill herself like Sasuke tried to do all the goddamn time. All the inbreeding in those old clans, man, made people a little loose in the screws, ya know?
He didn't hold that against them (well, not from Hinata).
He never though much of it, Hinata's crush on him. She was dark and weird, but she was also like, a princess, a real princess. He might have been the village's fool, but he wasn't that stupid, he knew which girls he could bother without having to move his diet from Ramen to daisies' roots. The worst Sakura's dad could have done to him back in the day was annoy him with a bad pun or throw garbage at him, but a lot of people did the later when he was a kid.
Thinking now, despite leaving the shinobi life, Hinata was still, technically, a princess. The princess from the oldest and more powerful Clan in Konoha. And he had been fooling around with her... Even though he has the Hokage and very powerful... Old fart Hiashi might not care a rat's ass for her, but thank fucking god Neji was dead.
Naruto squirmed in horror by the idea of ghost Neji haunting him for disgracing his precious Hianta-sama.
How the hell had it happened? Hinata falling for him? Like, why?
He knew he was hot but... It wasn't about that, not if she was in love him since they were kids, if when she threw herself in front of Pein she meant love and love-love instead of, ya know, general love for... Urgh, he couldn't even bullshit around that. t's just that, at the time there was so much things happening at the same time and he was such a doofus, he didn't, he couldn't process this love of hers, wrap it around his head, he was having trouble doing it now!
Why had he wanted so hard to be Hokage for? Clearly if someone as stupid and blind made to the position it was never anything special!
"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" he cried out, wanting the pull his hair off.
The door of his house opened on its own.
"What are you doing here, dobe?"
Naruto blinked, Sasuke's bored face looking blurry as if he was the semi-blind one. He looked down, and the old doormat carpet he was currently stepping on still said "doorbell broken yell DATTEBAYO really loud". That was his house, alright, he didn't end up back in the academy again, where sometimes his drunken legs brought him with a horrible sense that he was late for his classes (sensation that never bothered him when he was actual an student there).
"What are you doing here, teme?!"
"I don't mind the traveling, but I did miss taking a proper shower at home," Sakura appeared dressed only in her pink towel and wrapped around her hair another one, this one wasn't bought on Konoha Mart in a pack of four, that one had silky embroidery, that one belonged to Hinata. Naruto felt some inexplicable rage burning inside of him. "Sasuke-kun, who is- oh, what are you doing here, Naruto?"
He yelled, wasn't dattebayo because that has too many sounds and Naruto didn't have the brain capacity, just rage, even Kurama pulled his ears down and cowered like a scared puppy.
"I LIVE HERE!"
"Tsc, dobe, turn it down!"
Sakura just sighed, and pulled Naruto in and made him sit on the sofa, he sneakily turned one of her pink throw pillows around so she wouldn't see the cherry lube stain that he had forgotten to ask Hinata how to remove. Sakura had a pitiful expression on her face, and for once, she answered Naruto's loud show of distress with almost same grace she would deal with Sasuke's hiss fits.
"I told you, he was not dealing well with us leaving."
And still, in the high of her kindness towards to him, Sakura's words were delivered to Sasuke. Un-fucking-believable!
"Out! I want both of you out my house, dattebayo!"
He had been heartbroken over these two for the last six months, why? Well, there was a very long list containing a lot of feelings, co-dependency, longing, friendship, past life bonds and amazing three-way sex, but Naruto would rip said metaphorical list to shreds before Shikamaru could translate to him what metaphorical meant.
Sasuke and Sakura didn't look the least offended or hurt by his words, they just exchanged an annoyingly intimate look between the pair of them.
"Great," Sasuke said in the same deadpan tone as if nothing unusual was happening, "we already booked the movers."
"Sasuke-kun!"
"What? We did. We came just to pick a few things, but you knew that, I sent you a raven."
"I didn't get any fucking ravens from you," spit Naruto, still fuming and wanting to rip Sasuke's other arm for how unfazed he looked over the whole ordeal. Maybe his legs too. Once Naruto had vowed that if it came to it, he would to rip Sasuke's legs to make him stay. Right now he kinda just want to see his best-friend-turned-enemy-turned-friend-turned-ex-lover to bleed.
"It's alright," Sakura said picking Naruto's hand in hers, "it's better if we tell you in person anyway. Naruto, Sasuke-kun and I eloped."
Naruto just stared at her. He was angry, he was heartbroken, he had been in love with the two of them for as long as he could remember, and now they were going forward, and he was falling behind. Again.
It wasn't fair.
And at the same time. At the same time...
It didn't hurt as much as he thought it would. Sasuke and Sakura, he always knew they wouldn't stay. Hell, it has surprised him beyond his imagination when he had been included in their romance. Of course, he had individual feelings for each of them. Sakura had been girl of his dreams for so long and Sasuke... Well Sasuke was his fucking soulmate and yet... Just like they seemed to be okay to go forward without him, in that moment, looking at them waiting a reaction for him. Putting him in the spotlight for the first time ever, Naruto felt too big between them, their rough edges just didn't click with his how they had before.
And Hinata. Hinata was leaving him too.
Naruto sprang up.
"Well, congratulations, don't forget to leave the address of your new house on the way out. I have to go, look at the hour it's two o'clock, and I do have a nine to five job! Crazy me! Bye bye."
And Naruto dashed out the house.
"Is he having a stroke?" asked Sasuke and Sakura just answered with a concerned expression.
oOo
He had just left.
Just left.
And the look he gave her...
Hinata wanted to throw up.
Why was her life like that? Why every time it seemed things was starting to go smoothly something awful happened to knock her over like a sad cartoon tortoise?
She stumbled down to a sitting position in that stupid supply closet that honestly, how had nobody smelled the stank of sex all this time? Heavens, how low had she fallen, literally. Hinata hugged her legs close, tears staining her smart black skirt.
Why had he kissed her? She was leaving! She had accepted that it would always be like this, she was done.
Why couldn't she just keep her mouth shut? She used to be good at that!
Of course, she had to humiliate herself further asking those questions, as if it wasn't obvious that she didn't do anything wrong. She was wrong. She was the wrong woman. She had offered herself like a shameless woman and he accepted the comfort, it was not his fault. And now he was feeling better, he moved on, and he had kissed her that last time out of pity for her because he knew. Naruto, she thought, for the first time bitterly, had a very compassionate heart.
Never you, he had said. Yeah, she's got the fucking memo.
Finally.
She walked out of the supplies closet and ran to the bathroom, the good thing about being crying herself to sleep every night is that her skills in faking to be put together was better than it had ever been. And she had been already a good faker of normality before, it came with the Byakugan and the family trauma.
Closing the door behind her, Hinata stared herself in the mirror.
Just a week before her back had been hitting that mirror almost hard enough to make it crack as Naruto fucked her on that sink.
She now felt like she had been used just like that bathroom. Another sob gurgled out from deep inside her guts and she bent over forward, the tears so hot they almost sizzled on her cheeks.
This wasn't fair, it wasn't right. God, she had loved that man for almost twenty years, two thirds of her entire life, she had tried to protect him with her own body more than once, and that is what she got from it? To be discarded like some old ramen cup? Well, not even that since he actually reutilized his ramen cups as plant pots, something that she had found incredibly cute when she found out, but now all she wanted to pour hot water over his dear succulent collection and what them cook.
Better, watch his face when he saw them cook.
Yes, she though as she used the cheap tissue they bought to be used at the Hokage prefecture's bathrooms to dry the melted mascara that made her face into a tanuki, that was a good thought. Maybe she should do just that. Not the plant thing, because the poor plants didn't do nothing wrong, and she liked plants too, but maybe she should get revenge somehow.
But how?
What could she do that would hurt him at least a tiny fraction of how he had hurt her?
She looked at the pathetic woman on the mirror, Hinata would show him, she's show everyone what a woman scorned was capable of.
She just had to think about an excuse to leave work in the middle of the day first that wouldn't result in a dent on her paycheck, though wining her freedom from a family that wouldn't mind if she tripped over a soda can and crashed her head on the pavement and died was worth it, there were some downsides of not being an heiress any longer.
oOo
When Naruto got back to the Hokage prefecture Hinata was nowhere to be seen and he had looked in every single place she could be hidden, even in the rooftop behind the water reservoir (where once they had very uncomfortable sex). He ran back downstairs, his heart doing flips as he saw her station was occupied.
"GAAGH!"
The one behind Hinata's desk was no Hinata. Could have never been Hinata, not in a million years backwards.
"Where is Hinata'ttebayo?!"
"Good evening Hokage-sama, how nice of you to visit," the horrible hag said. "Hyuga-san went home, said she wasn't feeling well. Honestly, what is it with that girl? Does she think that only because she's from nobility she can excuse herself from work every time she has cramp? Because I'll be straight here-"
"SHE WAS HAVING CRAMPS?!"
WHAT IF SHE WAS SICK AGAIN? AND HIS DICK DIDN'T EVEN HAD DONE ANYTHING THIS TIME!