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It’s awkward. Nobody says it, nobody admits to thinking this, but they all are; every single person who witnessed that fateful day wonders. Naruto proclaimed to Madara and-what was his name again? Tobi? Didn’t somebody say it was Uchiha Obito instead? – well, that other man. Naruto said the dead are dead, carried with us only in our hearts. That it would be a disservice to their memory to treat them any other way.
To want back what can never come back. Except-
There’s the Impure World Reincarnation Technique.
Once forbidden and now uncannily common, the Second made this thing. Rumor has it- and no one is really sure how rumor got started- Orochimaru, of all people, condemned it. All this is white noise though to the reality that she wakes up with every day now.
Hinata saw her cousin breathe his last, and now he walks the halls again. It’s not like she wanted him dead. He knew things- Hyuuga things- about her that no one else did. Not even Kiba or Shino. Not even Kurenai or Hanabi. Certainly not Naruto who has avoided her since-
Neji’s last words sit between her and Naruto. They also sit between her and Neji.
Her heart had throbbed in her throat that moment when what Neji said finally- finally- made everything fall into place and she realized he loved her. As a man loves a woman, he loved her, and he was dying and he knew she did not love him, not really, not in the ways that mattered to his heart. So he spent his last words giving to her the man she did love, asking him to take responsibility for their clan, for her. Asking Naruto to fill all of Neji’s ambitions since Neji was not going to be around to fulfill them himself.
Which brings everyone back to the question- How to make it not awkward, this living with the newly resurrected?
Hinata does it mostly by avoiding him, avoiding them both. Naruto’s easy. He lives across town and doesn’t really want to see her either. The last words Naruto’d said to her made that abundantly clear.
“Friends- that’s all we’re ever going to be- My team- and Sakura- they- Just friends, okay?”
He hadn’t even waited for an answer. He’d taken to the rooftops before even seeing her reaction, he’d been that anxious to put the miles between them.
Avoiding Neji’s harder. Taking earlier breakfasts, and extra missions along with changing the subject whenever Hanabi brings up anything involving their cousin seemed to mostly work. But Neji has started eating earlier too, and with the entire shinobi world finally at peace there aren’t many missions, and Hanabi can be like a dog with a bone when she wants. More like a dog with a steak, really. When Neji finally corners her, he admits her sister has been tipping him off to her daily schedule.
“Hinata-sama,” Neji says. There are marks on the resurrected, Hinata thinks, but are there still seals? Neji and nor his resurrected father walk with foreheads uncovered. “I have missed our conversations.”
Damn him for being too polite to say what he really thinks of her childish coping mechanisms.
“I-I th-thought with your f-father, you might w-want t-time-“
“I don’t remember dying,” he says, and Hinata stares, but does not quite believe. It would be an easy fix, to pretend. But saying something does not make it truth, and, even if he does not remember the confession, that does not mean his feelings have dissolved along with memories. Her hand finds his face.
“Don’t you?”
“I-“ But whatever Neji had been going to say is stopped. It becomes something else. “I have not seen Naruto-kun around much.”
Naruto has never been to the compound either Before or After.
“So you do remember,” Hinata admonishes, and takes a single step back. She puts distance between them.
“It would be easier if I didn’t,” Neji lets that truth breathe between them for a moment before continuing on, “Hinata-sama, I- I’m not asking-“
“Of c-course you are.”
“I wish you wouldn’t stammer with me. You didn’t use to.”
“B-because I w-want to stammer,” she manages, and Neji’s words only sting half so much because they are true.
“I miss you.”
And she has missed him too. Theirs has been a strange journey these past few years, and if the word ‘friend’ is not accurate to what they had been to each other, it is very close. Grief and mourning are very strange when the person is not gone, merely changed. Or perhaps not changed. Viewed through new eyes. She has run out of things to say.
“What do you want?” she asks. Neji laughs, uneasily. “F-for now?”
“You,” he says and adds quickly, seeing the dawning horror on her face. “You as you were- our conversations, meals shared, our jokes, and our sparring sessions. I won’t remember how I died, if that’s what it takes. If that’s what you want.”
She nods. “ I will t-try.”
He nods too and something in him loosens. “That’s all I can ask.”
And if there is longing in his voice, she ignores it. He moves past her, walking along the egwa toward the compound door.
“Wh-where are you going?” she asks.
His dry laugh and then a reply, “Ironically, to see Naruto-kun.”
He doesn’t stop walking toward the door.
In the aftermath, no one was quite sure why Kabuto- for they had indeed determined it was Kabuto- has chosen who he did for his resurrections, or why they did not die when he did. Apart from Neji (Neji whom Naruto had asked for- Neji whom had been specified to receive such grace from none other than Orochimaru and the Second, Tobirama, himself), they were the walking dead, now home again.
It was odd having an uncle again. She hadn’t remembered him well before. But then, it was Neji’s affair, and her father’s. They were the ones to spend time with Hizashi. Whether they were saying what had been left unsaid before, showing what those empty years apart had done, she did not know. She only caught sight of him from time to time, so it was a surprise when he showed up at her training session to talk.
“Kurenai-chan,” he had called to her teacher. “You have a team. Now I feel old.”
Hinata had picked up her head from where she’d collapsed, and brushed sweaty hair out her eyes. Kiba had exchanged glances with her, and Shino’s bugs had started to swarm. Kurenai on the other hand-
She’d thrown herself upon the man.
“Sensei! I’d heard rumors you were back, but- I hadn’t dared hope!”
Hizashi had laughed. “You haven’t changed since you were thirteen!” He’d teased. “My niece didn’t tell you though?”
“No,” A funny look had crossed Kurenai’s face, but it was normal again when she’d answered, “But so many of the Hyuuga have been-restored to us-I’m sure…”
“Yes,” her uncle’s answer had been mild enough. “I’m here about my niece though, actually. Was wondering if you’d let her play hooky for the afternoon.”
And that was how she had ended up here, sitting next to a man she knew, but did not remember.
They stop at a stall on the way home and Hinata waits off to the side while her uncle buys something. When he turns, he has two orders of dango in his hand. He offers one to her.
“You still like this, right?” he asks, taking a bite. She stares a moment; Hyuuga should not eat out in the street like hoodlums. She’d been told that as a child.
“I got them for you and Neji-chan.” He tells her as if to explain things. It explains nothing, but she takes a bite too. It tastes good.
They walk and for a while say nothing. Hiziashi weaves his way knowledgably through the streets as if he hasn’t been-dead, gone, whatever you want to call it- for fourteen years. She wonders if anyone has told them this isn’t the same city it once was, literally or otherwise. That Pein had annihilated it. That she had tried to stop him or that Neji had- but she stops that train of thought. Try not to think about him, she reminds herself.
They walk to the monument where the Fallen Leaf have their names. Hizaishi stares down. It takes him a minute to find his own name. Hinata suspects he had to follow her own gaze to do it.
“I understand you and my son have had… a unique relationship, since.”
Hinata nods, so she won’t risk a stutter.
“That may have been…hard, on you.” He pauses. This is one of the few silver linings her speech impediment has given her; she has learned people do not like silence, and they will talk if you do not. So she does not talk. He begins again instead. “ I am… sorry for that. It is not what I would have wanted for either of you, but we so often misinterpret those around us.”
Sorry for leaving behind a five year old son with the impression his own family had condemned his father to death? Yeah. Hinata’d be sorry too, if it weren’t for the fact that, well, everything about it is so damn tragic, her own part in it too.
“But I understand you got past that?”
“Is th-that what Neji-niisan told you?”
“Your father too,” Hizashi agrees. “Neji-chan- Neji-kun -He has grown into a man any father would be proud of.”
“Yes.”
“So you know what I will ask of you?”
Her face colors, and she wonders what Neji has told this man she does not truly know.
“Y-yes,” she repeats.
“Compared to this Uzumaki-san, Neji-“
“You know n-nothing of N-naruto-kun!”
“I know nothing but what Neji-kun and your father have told me. And I… I know nothing of my son but what Neji-kun and your father have told. So tell me, why not Neji-kun?”
Hinata leaves, on the pretext of finding some place to dispose of the trash from their earlier treats. Hizashi does not go with her. His question does.
On reaching the compound gates, Hinata finds everything oddly deserted. Usually an academy student or two- might be training in the near-by dojo, or children might play the courtyard or maybe an elderly couple could be found conversing on the egawa. Winding her way to the Main House’s private family quarters, she finds Hanabi in her room, waiting with news.
“You’ll never guess who is here!”
Normally her sister’s bouncy mood would make her smile, but with her previous conversation too much on her mind, Hinata is in no mood for gossip.
“What are you doing in my room?”
It is not enough that people seem to think her private matters are theirs to rifle through; her physical space is to be invaded too? Hanabi rolls her eyes. Only thirteen and already Hanabi considered herself a master spy. Hinata thinks her father might be pleased with Hanabi’s high career aspirations, but Hinata has found in practice it is mostly a pain. In her sister’s mind nothing is off limits.
“Weeellll- if you don’t want to hear from me-“ Her sister walks out the door in a mock-haughty manner, and even knowing it’s what she wants, Hinata follows.
“Hanabi, I swear, if you don’t-“
A flash of yellow hair, a laugh that sounds familiar and yet- off-pitch and too deep to be who she thinks- Could he really be-? But-? Another laugh, this one unmistakably her father’s (or, she supposes, it could be Hizashi’s. She doesn’t remember if their laughs are different).
Then, she sees them.
“The Fourth is visiting,” Hanabi says unnecessarily, and pulls her back into her room.
“Shut the door, please.” Even to her own ears, Hinata’s voice sounds distant. Her heart aches; the man looks so much like his son, she’d thought- No. Another thing she didn’t want to think of.
“Why do you think he was here?”
Hinata shakes her head. “I don’t know. A million things. He’s helping with the-“
Hanabi waves her hands. “Yeah, yeah. I know, but do you think it’s about his son? About what Neji said? Oh! Oh! Maybe they’re arranging marriiaaage!”
Hanabi laughs.
“Shut. Up.” The words hiss out between ground teeth. Hinata is just so sick of everyone having a say. This is between her and- and Naruto. Not Neji. Not her father. Not his father. Not Naruto’s father either, and certainly not Hanabi.
Hanabi stares at her, her cheeks flooded with color and the rest of her face pale. It looks almost like she’s been slapped. Without another word, she gets up and leaves. She makes it only half way down the hall before taking off in a run. Hinata can see because Hanabi doesn’t bother to shut the door. And now Hinata is a bad sister too. One more thing to add to a list of deficiencies.
Tired to death, Hinata throws herself down on her bedding. She doesn’t cry though and hours later at the dinner table no one mentions Minato’s visit at all.
“I miss the life I left behind.”
This is a conversation she should not be hearing. But then, people should not be having such private conversations where just anyone could listen.
Neji and his father sit, a perfect tableau, framed in the open doors of the dojo. Neji, who had been rising, freezes, stays motionless at his father’s words, and miraculously no one sees her. Hinata backs off the dojo’s egawa, and sinks down to the ground beneath her. Their words are still quite clear.
“It is a strange thing, to come back and find myself closer in age to my son than my brother.”
This is perfectly true. Hiashi’s face sports fine lines at the eyes and mouth, grey hair on the scalp, and there is a heaviness, a weariness in the way he walks that speaks of ages more than his mere forty-four years. Hizashi, killed only five days before his 31st birthday, has come back young man. An angry man, a tired man too sometimes, but there is a lack of weight to his movements, to his voice.
“At the end of the day what I want is to go home. I find myself thinking of things to share with my Neji-chan, a joke I heard, a story, a toy. Instead, some man I have never met sits in my house. You are a good man. Too serious, and a little proud. Still, any father would be proud. But you are not my son.”
There is nothing, and then there is the hollow sound of footsteps against the egawa’s boards, and then there is Neji, a retreating back that is straight and proud, but something in the way he holds his shoulders is off. He must have never seen her as he passed, she thinks, and he doesn’t look back now. Hinata rises as she watches him turn a corner and then turns back and stares. Unspeaking, Hizashi stares back too, his face an unreadable mask.
Days later, Hinata taps a bundles of masks hanging off the roof of one of the stalls at the market. Nearby she sees children playing with some more of these masks, obviously bought off this stall. They are cheap, breakable things, flimsy versions of what the ANBU wears. She wonders if any of the children are at the Academy, or if they are civilians playing in a make-believe world where nobody ever dies.
Hanabi grabs her arm- and her attention- away. “What do you think of these?”
She holds up a pair of dangly earrings marked at a suspiciously low price. How to delicately say the things will probably make one’s earlobes turn green and fall off? Hinata sighs and opens her mouth to retort when-
A flash of something yellow walks by.
It is not that she is still looking for Naruto everywhere she goes. She’s not. (almost not anyway). It is the way everyone else pauses, follows that Yellow Flash with their eyes.
Speak of make-believe worlds where no one ever dies- It is Uzumaki Minato, the Yellow Flash himself. Hinata turns back to finish the conversation with Hanabi, but her little sister is nowhere in sight.
She turns to go when a hand reaches out.
“She took the earrings with her,” the stall owner says. His one hand is sweaty around Hinata’s wrist, and the other is held out expectantly. Hinata rolls her eyes, but reaches into her pouch.
“If her earlobes turn g-green because of them, I’ll b-be wanting my money back,” she wished the threat were louder than a mumble, but- well, and she needed to find Hanabi anyway, instead of arguing with a marketplace seller.
It’s not hard to figure out where her little sister most likely went. Hinata follows the trail of people who have obviously paused for a moment before resuming activities. It is a sure sign the Fourth had been this way, and her sister cannot leave a secret alone. Any chance to play the spy, she’ll take.
Eventually, she finds herself first at the straggling edges of the market, then into quieter sections of town with proper storefronts with windows. Finally, she can see the Yellow Flash himself as he turns the corner into a residential section of town, though she can’t see her sister still. Hinata is not worried about that. She’s bond to be near by- and sure enough, an arm snakes out to grab her and pull her behind a bush.
Hinata could have fallen with more grace and less noise. She is a ninja after all, but the noise she creates serves Hanabi right, especially when the man does turn to see what’s going on.
Hinata is not so annoyed as to actually let him see her, of course. He- and they- continue on. It’s all apartments now. The buildings are pretty-ish in a forgettable sort of way. She doesn’t know anyone who lives here. Most the people she knows are members of clans, who nearly all have great compounds like the Hyuuga do. Not all ninja are clan members, of course, but if not, they most often find housing nearer the Hokage Tower and Shinobi Academy. That entire section of town was nicknamed the Rooftop Highway, in fact, for the number of shinobi running across the tops of buildings. As a side-effect, rent was always pretty cheap there. Naruto had told her that, once.
Minato enters one of the building’s gates, which to Hinata’s eyes looked no different from the ones on either side of it.
“Why’d he go in there?” Hinata asks, standing up from behind the bush they’d been crouching behind.
“Get down!” Hanabi hisses. “Besides, don’t you know anything? That’s where he lives. Geez, I thought we’d see something more exciting.”
“Lives?” Hinata was confused. “But Naruto-kun’s apartment is in the south of town.”
“Like anyone would want to live in that rathole of an apartment building. The Fourth moved the two of them here weeks ago. Don’t you pay attention? I thought Uzumaki-san was your One True-“
Hinata turns from her sister to see what made her stop teasing. There’s the sound of the gate opening. Neji of all people emerges, waves to someone, and turns left.
“Neji-niisan’s visiting Uzumaki-san again?” Hanabi is credulous in the way only thirteen year olds can be. “They must have started a Dead Father’s Club or something.”
Hinata finds the joke in bad taste, but pays Hanabi no mind. Why didn’t she know Naruto had moved? Or that Neji was visiting him? Not that there was any reason Neji shouldn’t. The two were friends, of a sort-he had died for Naruto, after all. And why had Neji left so soon after Naruto’s father came home?
Dead Father’s Club, her mind traitorously suggests, and the thought stays. She couldn’t get it out of her head if she tried.
The journey back home takes a long time. They are hot and thirsty from being out in the sun several hours and needs-must walk much further across town thanks to Hanabi’s unexpected spying session. When they make it to the gates of the compound, barely an hour before dinner, she is greeted with the instructions that she is needed in her father’s office. As a child she was often greeted in such a way, usually a forewarning that she had incurred her father’s withering disappointment. These days what such a statement means is far less sure.
When she walks in her father is seated at his heavy desk, so out of place among the scrolls and white walls decorated with delicately penned calligraphy, a few of which Hinata herself had made over years and gifted in misguided bids to win approval. Standing beside her father is her uncle, and a low-pitched, heated discussion is taking place. She wonders some days if it is the twenty extra years her father has witnessed of Konoha’s ruckus political climate that bring up so much disagreement between the two men, or if this has always been their nature. Neji is there too, back to the door and therefore to her. He could not have made it here much earlier than she, though in an effort to remain unnoticed by their cousin, Hanabi had insisted on a much more circuitous route home than Neji had probably taken. The presence of these two men, ironic considering her latest interactions with them, actually calms her. Hizaishi is clearly here in his official capacity as advisor and guard to the clan head, and Neji is here as advisor too. Not to her father, but to her, for she sees she too has been called to this place in her official capacity- as clan heir.
She straightens her back and steps in through the doorway. That small movement alerts each man in the room.
“Ah, Hinata,” Her father rises from his seat, not from any gestures of particular greeting, but to hand her a scroll. “Look at this.”
As has been usual for these past few months, what she reads is indirectly connected to the Dead-Now-Living. Other villages also had many of their famous dead brought back to life by Kabuto, of course. And there had been little rhyme or reason to it. Why Tsunade’s fomer lover, but not the famous Mito-sama? Why Hinata’s uncle, but not the White Fang? But the Land of Fire had the dubious honor of also seeing returned to them four men resurrected by Orochimaru for the stated purpose of leading better than Konoha’s currently leaders had done. Loathed as anyone is to follow Orochimaru’s lead after the massacre The Sound had made of her first chuunin exam…well, who would reject “The God of Shinobi,” Hashirama? Certainly not his granddaughter, Tsunade, who had claimed to be content managing the hospital. But then there came the problem of what to do with the Second, with the Third, with the Fourth. All dynamic men. All men of very different vision.
An over-abundance of leadership seems poised to tear the city apart, really, and the heads of all the clans had been scrambling to see promises were kept and that alliances long-held were not swept away with the city’s trash. With this in mind, she bends her head over the document before her.
Neji steps up behind her, making no conversation, seemingly focused at the problem at hand. His height seems magnified, especially when standing so close to her. Is he so close merely to read over her shoulder? Or are there deeper motives?
“Well,” her father intones after a moment, interrupting her second-guessing. “Neji-san, Hinata? I have heard from my brother his…thoughts on what the Hyuuga position should be. I would hear from you both as well.”
Her tongue feels knotted as she scrambles to put together disjointed thoughts, but Neji answers first in measured tones, and only the slightest glance her way let’s her know he speaks first for her benefit, to give her time. His words are much more calm and considered than her uncle’s passionate ones from a few minutes before had been. This matters to her somehow, but she is not sure why. She pushes aside the stray thought, focuses, and when her father asks her opinion a second time she has no trouble giving it.
The next morning, Hinata catches Neji in the hallway on his way to breakfast. Since the chuunin exams, her father had made it clear that Neji was welcome- expected even- at the Main House’s table for meals. There had been surprisingly little awkwardness over this until they’d all come home from the War of Five Shinobi Villages (a name that seemed a misnomer, but she didn’t write the history books). Then she’d been dealing with the painful and suffocating realization of her cousin’s feelings, but there’d also been the obvious tension between brothers, what she now recognizes as Hizaishi’s resentment that her father had continued to grow up without him.
Neji’s father is noticeably not with him now, though the meal invitations had been extended to him as well.
“Hello, Hinata-sama,” Neji’s expression is guarded. Even with this, his face looks so much younger than it had the night before dispensing his advise in her father’s office, or than it had that afternoon leaving Naruto’s new home.
She smiles. Her fingers press nervously together, but she manages a smile at least.
“I-I was thinking. Are you sp-sp- Are you sparing with anyone today?” She had had to start over to keep the stammering back, but glancing up, she can see Neji appreciates the effort.
“I’m not.”
“Would you like to?”
“Alright.”
The once-dead-now-living all have strange lines across their faces. As if their bodies had cracked, and been stitched together again. They make Neji’s face oddly unfamiliar when he smiles, and there’s a rush that flashes through her and settles briefly in her stomach. The sensation is so different, and it makes her wonder if, like his father, Neji ever misses the life he left behind. She wonders if they can rebuild it, she and he. There is nothing more she wants from him, but finds, perhaps, it is in her to want that.
Or, no-
That is not quite right. Now Neji stands before her and-like her father, like Hizaishi, like Naruto and like even herself-he has learned that what you think you loved is rarely the same as the reality of what you loved. Yet he is still standing her before her, and he is Neji-kun, not Neji-chan; nii-san, not Naruto-kun. She had expected to feel eaten up, eventually, by his intense devotion. But that isn’t the case. Somewhere in her, as he stares back at her a small smile on his face, she instead finds herself hoping he has learned the trick of loving with eyes wide-open. That she can look at and love him truly one day too.