Archive of Our Own ^beta

It’s late afternoon and Hinata has only just begun dinner preparations when an ANBU knocks on the kitchen window. “Hinata-hime,” Porcupine says politely, “your presence is requested by the Hokage.”

It’s a rare slip for ANBU; no one but a Hyuuga would call her that, these days.

“Thank you, Porcupine-san,” Hinata says. “I’ll come immediately.” But she takes a moment to wipe her hands on a dish towel and drape it over the carrots she’d only just begun to slice. A Hyuuga will give her the time to do this. 

After she’s removed her apron and put it back on its hook, she quickly replaces her house shoes for the sandals she keeps by the window and follows Porcupine out onto the roof. The sun has begun to set, the deepening shadows changing the features of the carved Hokages into unfamiliar shapes. The Academy must have just released for the afternoon; as Hinata and Porcupine skirt the Akimichi quarter, she can hear the uninhibited shrieks of small children, most of whom are yelling about how hungry they are.

Some small part of Hinata wants to worry at the summons--why on earth would the Hokage want to speak with her? And urgently enough to send ANBU to collect her--but she’s learned over the years how to control her anxiety, and not letting herself descend into a hysterical spiral of speculation is a key part of that control. Besides, if it was an actual emergency, Porcupine would have slung her over their shoulder and shunshined back to the Tower, apron and all, Hyuuga or no Hyuuga.

When Hinata and Porcupine climb through the window, the Hokage’s office is crowded with people, half of whom are ANBU radiating varying levels of killing intent and the other half of whom are shouting over each other. Crow is standing just behind the Hokage with an unsheathed tantou in his hand, which more than anything is what clues Hinata in that this situation could go very bad very, very quickly. 

The Godaime has two fingers pressed against her temple and her eyes squeezed shut, as though by not watching this disaster she can pretend it isn’t happening. Hinata sympathizes, acutely.

“Godaime-sama,” Porcupine says, still politely, yet somehow distinctly audible over the deafening din.

The Godaime’s eyes snap open and she looks over her shoulder at them. For a brief moment there’s a flicker of something--a flash of crimson iris, her pupils dilating, bleeding purple--and then she blinks and they’re back to their usual brown. She smiles, but it’s very tight. “Ah,” she says. “Hinata, thanks for coming by.”

Hinata folds her hands at her waist and bows. “How may I serve?” she asks as Porcupine melts back into the crowd of ANBU lining the walls. 

“We’re in need of your eyes, of course,” the Godaime says. “A brief survey found that you’re widely regarded as the Byakugan bearer with the most acute sensitivity for chakra pathways.”

Hinata can feel herself begin to flush and has to close her eyes for a second to inhale through her nose. It feels embarrassing to agree, and disingenuous to disagree. This smacks of Porcupine; who even bothers with that Hinata-hime nonsense these days? “Ah,” she finally manages, opening her eyes and trying to smile at the Hokage. “I don’t know if that’s true, but please inform me how I might be of use to you.” Her face feels like it’s been set on fire.

The Godaime flicks her fingers at the crowd of shrieking flak jackets. “How many clones are in there?” she asks. It’s an incredibly bizarre question, but Hinata was raised better than to question her elders. She activates the Byakugan and scans the crowd of people, focusing on their chakra pathways. Three extremely familiar circulatory systems--Yamanaka Sakura, Hatake Kakashi, Uchiha Fugaku--are clustered up along with the jounin commander, and then next to them four more pathways, unfamiliar but not at the same time. For a moment, Hinata’s head twinges, as though she’s drunk, or drowning.

“Not clones,” Hinata says softly. “Not twins. But very similar. Too similar. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

“Oh, good,” the Godaime says drily. “That makes, what, twelve of us? Please describe what you see, Hinata. And can the rest of you be quiet ?” With the Byakugan activated, Hinata can see the moment that the Godaime unleashes a flare of three-tails chakra. It cracks the air overhead like a whip and the volume abruptly decreases.

Hinata points at first Sakura and then Kakashi. “Sakura and Kakashi-san,” she says. She then points at two other individuals. “These two, their chakra pathways are identically patterned, but off-sync. Not Sakura, not Kakashi-san. But neither are they clones; a clone would have the same circulation rate but less chakra.” With her eyes focused on chakra circulation, she cannot make out physical features, but she can see from their circulatory pathways that Not Sakura and Not Kakashi both turn their heads to look at her. Ah. “He doesn’t have the Sharingan,” she says. It’s always a bright spot in his skull, sucking at his circulating chakra like some kind of inexorable black hole. 

“And the others?” the Godaime prods.

“Uchiha-sama,” Hinata says, pointing at each as she names them. “Nara-sama. A jinchuuriki, I think perhaps the nine tails? And--Sasuke ?” Perhaps it is embarrassing that it has taken her this long to notice. She deactivates the Byakugan and her vision briefly unfocuses, chakra pathways superimposed on blurry features, and then her normal color vision resolves itself. A man who is not Sasuke stares back at her, through long hair that is draped over his left eye. “W-what happened to your arm?” she hears herself ask faintly, and then she shakes her head. “My apologies,” she says. “It is irrelevant.”

She knows she should look away, but she can’t. If he cut his hair, wore a hitai-ate, had his left arm, if, if, if--

“Oi!” the strange jinchuuriki says. His voice is strident but a little hoarse. “Don’t you recognize me?”

It takes Hinata a moment to realize that he is speaking to her. She looks at him for a long moment, taking in his shock of blond hair, the clan markings on his cheeks, his extremely vibrant eyes. “No,” she says eventually. “I’m sorry, have we met?”

“Have we met ?” he shrieks, only to be hit over the head with a closed fist by someone who looks like Sakura without her tattoos. “Shut up ,” she hisses.

Sakura turns to Hinata and lifts an eyebrow. Get a load of me , she flashes in a quick tangle of hand signs. Presumably she’s referencing the fact that the woman who looks like her has chiseled biceps the size of pomegranates. 

“She says we’ve never met!” the jinchuuriki is still shrieking. “What if something’s happened to her memories? That asshole on the moon might trick her into marrying him again!”

Fugaku turns an extremely chilly stare onto the Godaime. “I demand an investigation,” he says. On his left, Shikaku somehow groans with his whole body without making any noise.

The Godaime sighs, fingers going up to her temple. “I know,” she says.

“If that treacherous cur--” Fugaku hisses, and the Godaime repeats, “ I know ,” cutting him off before he has the chance to build up a head of steam. Hinata is familiar with the technique; it’s what Mikoto uses to calm him down after particularly acrimonious meetings with the council of elders.

The jinchuuriki is still wailing about the moon. The two people who look like but are not Sakura and Kakashi are wearily attempting to calm him down. The man who looks like Sasuke has turned his unnerving stare onto Fugaku, so Hinata shamelessly activates the Byakugan again. She’s surprised by how little the absence of his left arm impedes his chakra circulation. His chakra reserves are scraped out but that tidal push-pull, as familiar to Hinata as her own heartbeat, remains steady. 

“Sakura,” the Godaime says wearily, “if you wouldn’t mind fetching your wife, I think we ought to get started.”

Sakura chirps, “On it, sensei!” and leaps out of the window. 

“And who even is this,” the jinchuuriki is demanding, pointing at the Godaime. “That’s Kakashi-sensei’s hat!”

Although the Godaime is well-known for her manners, this is clearly what finally cracks her legendary patience. She rockets up and slaps her fists onto her desk, the three-tails chakra crackling around her like killing intent. Her desk creaks ominously. “I am Nohara Rin, Godaime Hokage,” she snarls. “A better question is, who the hell are you and what the fuck are you doing in my village!”

~

Fugaku walks Hinata home. He’s still crackling with self-righteous fury, but it has tempered itself into stiff indignation. Because Hinata knows that he finds traveling by rooftop to be undignified, they take the long way back. The sun has long since set and the streetlights are lit, sending shadows scuttling between buildings. Hinata is cold enough that she wishes she’d grabbed her coat. Every time they pass someone in a Konoha Police uniform, Fugaku inclines his head in acknowledgement but otherwise says nothing. 

Hinata spends most of the walk trying to figure out how to recover supper. It’s too late to begin braising pork for tonjiru, as she’d originally planned. Perhaps it’s for the best just to make tamagoyaki and call it a night. 

Itachi finds them when they’re a block away. “Father,” he says politely, and then, “Hinata,” with a very small smile. He looks tired, of course; when doesn’t he look tired? This is why Hinata had originally planned to make tonjiru. She always adds a little ginseng when she cooks it for him. “Are you joining us for supper?” he asks. Hinata has to hide her wince; she can’t serve the head of the Uchiha clan tamagoyaki and pickles. They won’t be eating until midnight at this rate.

But, of course, once the invitation has been tendered she doesn’t have much choice. “Please, do come,” she says to Fugaku.

“Thank you,” he says coolly, “but Mikoto is waiting for me. Have a good evening.”

Hinata feels a little light-headed with relief that her housekeeping won’t undergo an unexpected inspection. “Have a good evening, Uchiha-sama.”

She and Itachi wait until he’s gone, around the corner, before both of them sigh. Hinata can’t help snorting out a laugh, her spine relaxing a little, and she falls into step with Itachi. He’s carrying his work bag looped over his shoulder; he must have come directly from the Academy.

“Father was concerned about something,” Itachi observes, pulling open the door to her apartment building and gesturing for Hinata to proceed him up the stairs.

“We were called to a meeting with the Hokage,” Hinata explains. “I can’t say more, I believe. I hope you’re all right with a simple supper tonight, I was called away before I could get the pork belly out of the fridge.”

“Hmm,” Itachi says. She can hear the smile in his voice, but his face is, as is his wont, still and undisturbed. “Tamagoyaki?”

“We have the makings of a salad, I think,” Hinata says.

“Or,” Itachi says, pausing, and Hinata has to bite her lip not to smile and ruin the joke.

“Or,” she agrees seriously.

“Pickles,” Itachi says softly, like it’s a secret. He stops one step back from the door, letting Hinata move forward and press her thumb to the frame, deactivating the ward seal.

“I’m home!” Hinata calls as she opens the door.

Sasuke, hunched over the kotatsu, does not look up. “Brought in a stray cat, I see,” he says, but absently. He’s rewrapping the handle of his katana, finally; Hinata had bought the leather for it two months ago.

“You always let that go too long,” Itachi scolds gently. “You’re going to lose a hand one day to your carelessness.”

Sasuke snorts and says, “Maybe you’d finally win a spar if I did,” but Hinata thinks in a flash of that other man, who looked like Sasuke but was not him, who wore his hair long and did not have a left arm. His cold, silent stare in stark contrast to the flickering heat of his chakra circulation. He had said nothing, not even when he and the other familiar strangers had been forked over to T&I’s tender mercies for the night.

Hinata shivers.

“Are you all right?” Sasuke asks, and it reminds her that she’s still standing by the front door, only one sandal removed, staring into space. When she looks down at Sasuke, there’s a very small furrow between his brows. “I saw you were called away while you were cooking. Everything okay?”

“Yes,” Hinata says. “Sorry, my mind wandered. Have you eaten?”

Sasuke continues to watch her for a long few seconds, his dark eyes flicking along the line of her body--her cheek, her neck, her hips, her feet--looking for clues in her body language, undoubtedly. Hinata doesn’t fool herself that she can keep secrets from Sasuke, but for the sake of village security she ought to at least make a token effort towards it. She fusses with removing her second sandal and looking futilely for her house shoes. “They’re in the kitchen,” Sasuke finally says. “No, I didn’t eat. Didn’t want to miss out on tamagoyaki.”

“And pickles,” Hinata says, just to be mocked by Sasuke and Itachi saying the same in unison. “You know, I can make other things,” she says. “There was going to be tonjiru--with ginseng, because Itachi doesn’t take enough care of his health--”

“So you claim,” Sasuke says.

“Well, if you wanted a wife who was a master chef, you ought to have put it in the betrothal contract,” Hinata says, sticking her nose in the air as she sweeps into the kitchen. Sasuke’s snort follows after her and Hinata smiles to herself as she makes a beeline for her house shoes, lined up neatly under the open window. When she reaches out to winch the window closed, she sees toes, nails painted black, in a pair of ninja sandals, peeking out from under her neighbor’s balcony. Another one of Nao’s lovers, probably. They’re always having to sneak out of her apartment and hide under the balcony when her husband comes home unexpectedly. Hinata has encountered them more than once, hanging there like a bat with their clothes in their arms until the coast is clear enough for them to escape. It’s both hilarious and embarrassing.

Normally, Hinata would politely pretend to have seen nothing. But something in the shape of those toes, elegant and long, seems strikingly familiar. She’s only just activated the Byakugan when something flies at her face--a kunai? --and she jerks back into the kitchen, rolling under the table as the kunai thuds into the wall above her head.

“Hinata?” Sasuke calls from the living room. But he’s under the kotatsu, so it’s Itachi who is first into the kitchen, a shunshin that deposits him neatly between Hinata, under the table, and the open window.

Hinata reluctantly crawls out from under the table, feeling like an idiot, as Itachi demands, “Who are you?” and is met by chilly silence. Sasuke is there, then, the handle of his katana only half-wrapped, the recently sharpened blade glinting under the fluorescent kitchen lights. He’s so much taller than Hinata that when he does this--stepping between her and danger, like she’s not capable of defending herself--she either has to use the Byakugan or peer around his shoulder like a child. 

The other man, the one who is not Sasuke, is crouched on the kitchen windowsill. Hinata deactivates the Byakugan and leans around Sasuke to get a good look at his face. He’s staring at Itachi, his right eye so wide that she can see the white all around the iris. His face is almost hungry. Like Sasuke at the beginning of tomato season.

“Aniki,” he croaks, finally.

Itachi says, “Sasuke?”

“What the fuck,” Sasuke says flatly. 

They’re all standing there, frozen, for probably five or six seconds. Perhaps they’d all still be there hours later, but the jutsu is abruptly broken by Kakashi landing on Nao’s balcony. “Maa,” he complains, “this is a fucking drag, isn’t it? Because now I have to bring you back to T&I in a box.”

The man who is not Sasuke spares Kakashi one dismissive look. “You can try,” he says, with extremely familiar disdain. “But there’s no need. I’ll return.”

“Really?” Kakashi says. “You’re turning out to be so helpful.”

“What is this?” Sasuke demands. He reaches down, puts a hand on Hinata’s hip, and shoves her, very hard, until she skids back into place behind him. “Don’t move,” he says, low.

Hinata sighs. “If he wanted to kill me, he had a chance already,” she says.

“Don’t pretend I’m paranoid,” Sasuke replies tightly. “You can’t go six months without somebody trying to kidnap you.”

“I’ll go back,” the man who is not Sasuke repeats. “On one condition.”

“Fuck off,” Sasuke suggests.

“By the way,” Kakashi says absently, “this is why we don’t send you on diplomatic missions. If you were wondering.”

“I thought I wasn’t allowed on diplomatic missions because I ripped the liver out of that fucking idiot from Kumo,” Sasuke says. “You know, the one who tried to hurt my wife.” He says this without looking at Kakashi. It’s such an obvious threat that it’s almost embarrassing from a shinobi of his caliber. Hinata feels a hot blush climb its way up her throat. She jabs a thumb into the base of Sasuke’s spine, just to the left of a tenketsu. He doesn’t even flinch, but he does make a little huffing noise in the back of his throat.

“What is your condition?” Itachi asks.

“You,” the man says. “I want to--see you.” He falters a little. “I want to speak with you,” he tries, and this is steadier.

Hinata inches over and peeks out from behind Sasuke’s shoulder. The man on the windowsill is still staring at Itachi. The look on his face has gone from covetous to barely concealed desperation. Surely no one is that good of an actor, to be able to so thoroughly mimic Sasuke. He’s not an expressive man; there’s little he makes available for public observation. 

Itachi tilts his head to the side, the tail of his hair spilling over his shoulder. “Who are you?” he wonders.

Kakashi says, “Uh, maybe you shouldn’t--” and he’s interrupted by the man who isn’t Sasuke saying, “I’m the last Uchiha. Where I came from, they’re all dead, except for me.”

“You’re a descendent?” Itachi hazards.

The man lifts a hand to his face and pushes away the hair hanging over his left eye. 

“Oh,” Hinata breathes out softly. “Is that--”

“It’s the Rinnegan,” the last Uchiha says. 

Feeling suddenly nauseous, Hinata has to squeeze her eyes shut. She can feel the phantom pinch of moist, bony fingers against the back of her neck. You think the third dojutsu is lost? Nothing is ever lost. Mix the bloodlines and you’ll find it again . Her and Sasuke, just two rabbits with desirable traits, shoved together into a cage.

“ Fuck off ,” Sasuke spits. But his hand is back on Hinata’s hip and it’s warm, grounding.

“I’m not your descendant,” the man on the windowsill says. “I’m Uchiha Sasuke. I want to speak with my brother.”

~

Although Hinata can hear murmured conversation while she’s cooking, the living room is very, very quiet when she brings in the last dish--tamagoyaki, made with all of the eggs in their fridge--and puts it down next to the plates of pickles and sliced tomatoes. “Maybe I should make soup?” she says but when she makes to step away she feels Sasuke’s hand clamp down on her calf, hard. “Or not?” she amends weakly, folding herself down into a seated position.

“Thanks, Hinata,” Kakashi says with a curly-eyed smile. Then he turns back to the other Sasuke and says, “Well, that sounds like the kind of thing Shimura Danzo would have done,” dryly prosaic as he picks up his chopsticks and fishes through the shibazuke for bits of eggplant. 

Sasuke is bone-white, like fine porcelain. His hand is still tightly latched onto Hinata’s calf, so she rests her weight forward, closer to her knees, to keep from crushing his fingers under her thigh. She fusses through the tomato slices, picking up the ripest ones and placing them on his bowl of rice. They’ll have the best chance of pricking his appetite.

“What happened after you defected?” Itachi asks. Manners impeccable, as always, he fills his bowl and adds, “Thank you, Hinata.” 

Neither Sasuke makes a move to eat. Hinata waffles for a while on what to do, chopsticks tapping against her front tooth in a bad habit that had gotten her reprimanded more than once as a child, and then she goes up on her knees and very swiftly shuffles some tomatoes and pickles onto the bowl across the table before sitting back down without making eye contact. Sasuke’s grip on her calf tightens, almost painfully. She can feel that someone is staring at the top of her head but she refuses to look. Her ears burning, she picks up a slice of tamagoyaki and nibbles on it.

“I studied under Orochimaru,” the other Sasuke finally says, slowly. “I trained myself to be stronger, so I would be able to avenge my clan. Eventually, I did. And then, too late, I learned the truth.”

Kakashi audibly crunches his way through some pickled eggplant. “That’s rough,” he says.

“We were able to speak briefly, during the war, but I couldn’t--ask,” the other Sasuke says.

“Ask what?” Itachi prods gently. Hinata’s heart feels a tight pinch, as though it’s too full of something. She hadn’t realized how deeply she’d failed Hanabi until she’d seen how Itachi was with Sasuke. He’s always nurturing and supportive; kind, even if he can’t always be nice. Hinata had spent too long being afraid for Hanabi for them to have the relationship they should have had.

The other Sasuke drags in a slow, ragged breath. “Why do it? Why be loyal to this horrible place? Why this choice, of all of the other choices? Why didn’t he feel that anyone could help him? He said it was the only way they would spare my life but that’s only something that matters after you’ve already been backed into a corner. How did this happen ?”

Hinata can see out of the corner of her eye when Itachi lifts a hand to his mouth, rubbing along the edge of his chin. It’s late in the day; his jaw is darkening with new hair. He looks tired, but not as tired as he’d looked back when he was still in ANBU and it’d been killing him. “I’m sorry,” he says softly. “I can’t give you the answers you want. It would only be speculation.”

“I don’t care,” the other Sasuke says tightly.

“Very well,” Itachi says. He straightens up and his voice takes on that patient, didactic tone he’s begun using more and more since he started at the Academy. “I believe that this happened because children were sent to war.”

Kakashi audibly sighs.

“A twelve-year-old shinobi can be trained to kill, and can be trained to think that they know why they must kill, but they are still twelve.” Itachi’s voice is strained. “Are you familiar with the part of the brain that uses logic to make decisions?”

The other Sasuke chokes out a laugh. When Hinata peeks at him through her bangs, he has his head in his hands. “You sound like Sakura,” he says, muffled. “ The frontal lobe doesn’t fully develop until the early twenties .”

“Yamanaka-san is one of the smartest people I know,” Itachi says agreeably. He’d been Sakura’s captain for four years in ANBU--ignorance of secret identities are for other people who don’t have the Byakugan--so undoubtedly he’s very familiar with Sakura’s scarily enormous brain. “I do not know your brother, but I remember being twelve. I was very lethal and very, very tired of war. I made poor decisions because I understood killing better than anything else, including how to ask for help.”

Kakashi does not sigh this time, although Itachi has left him the opportunity to do so. Hinata doesn’t know Sasuke’s old jounin-sensei very well, for all that she ends up feeding him multiple times a month when he shows up at their window like a stray cat, but she knows that he’d been a child at war, like Itachi. She also knows that he is listed on the Uchiha registry as a widowed member of the clan, the way Hinata will be one day if Sasuke keeps taking S-rank missions and not remembering to fix the tsuka-ito on his katana handle. By the date, he would have been twelve when Obito died.

They sit there in silence for a long time. Sasuke lets go of Hinata’s calf just long enough to grab her thigh instead and she lets out a low breath, finally able to settle her weight more comfortably on her heels. She puts her hand on top of his. For the first time, it occurs to Hinata to be grateful that he uses these hands, so large and pale and fine-boned, in service of their village and their family. He doesn’t wear a ring--most shinobi don’t; it’s an easy way to break a finger--but Hinata presses her thumb to the base of his ring finger anyway. It is her place, even if it is unmarked.

Eventually, the other Sasuke clears his throat and asks, “Did you marry Izumi?”

Itachi laughs. “No,” he says. “I wouldn’t require Hinata’s care and feeding if I had someone at home.”

“You’re always welcome,” Sasuke mutters roughly.

“Yes, of course,” Hinata quickly agrees. “You know you’re not a burden on us. Although it would make us very happy if you took better care of your health--”

“Don’t fuss over him,” Sasuke orders. He picks up a slice of tamagoyaki from his bowl and puts it in hers. “He’s grown, he can take care of himself.”

“You’re hardly better!” Hinata points out. “Look at all three of you, ANBU teaches you to survive on ration bars so all you know how to taste is sodium. Kakashi-san, you can’t just eat pickles, please don’t leave all of this tamagoyaki sitting here--” and she rises up onto her knees to swiftly distribute the food left in the middle of the table. She puts a heap of kyurizuke in the empty bowl across the table and only recognizes it as such after she’s moved on to pushing some tomatoes on Kakashi. Her head snaps back around before she can stop herself. She hadn’t even heard him pick up his chopsticks.

The other Sasuke is watching her. His expression is strangely hard to read, with his hair back down over the side of his face. Hinata usually relies on the left corner of his mouth to give her clues; she hadn’t realized that until now.

“Thanks,” he says. And then, very casually, he picks up his chopsticks. “You’re a much better cook here.”

Hinata’s whole face instantly lights on fire. “O-oh?” she manages. “Ah, thank you?” But she can’t help feeling like he’s made it sound a little bit like an insult.

When she rests her weight back down on her heels, Sasuke is scowling. The last time he’d worn that expression, they’d been at the Rusty Kunai with Ino and Sakura and a clerk from the mission desk had waylaid her at the bar, asking if she remembered him from the chunin exams; Sasuke had shown up with that tight expression, pretended to recognize him, and asked if he’d still been there (or had he been eliminated already?) during the one-on-one matches when Sasuke had pulled most of the liver out of the Yondaime Raikage’s nephew.

“Please don’t,” Hinata whispers in his ear.

“It’s a great story,” Sasuke says flatly.

“It was a stupid stunt and now you’re not allowed on diplomatic missions,” she replies. “Eat your pickles.”

~

Hinata has known Sasuke for a long time. Their mothers had been friends, before Hinata’s mother had gotten sick, and she has fuzzy childhood memories of chasing Sasuke’s gravity-defying bedhead through the gardens of the Hyuuga compound. They’d drifted apart at the Academy, once it had become obvious that Sasuke was going to be an exceptional shinobi and Hinata was, at best, a mediocre kunoichi, but then the betrothal contract had been sealed when they’d graduated and it had stipulated that they spend at least one hour a week together--supervised, of course--until they married, which could occur no earlier than Hinata’s sixteenth birthday and no later than Sasuke’s twentieth. In fact, the only period of her life when Hinata had not regularly seen Sasuke had been the first two years after they’d married, when he’d basically disappeared off the face of the planet on a mission so classified that, even to this day, Ino doesn’t have the security clearance to know the details. Upon his return, Sasuke had told Hinata that he’d been gardening.

The point is: Hinata has known Sasuke her entire life, so very little he does surprises her these days. She’s nonetheless startled when she flicks off the light in the bathroom, rubbing balm into her lips to moisturize them after a thorough tooth-brushing, and Sasuke appears out of the dark corridor like some kind of vengeful spirit. 

“Are you--” Hinata manages, and then Sasuke has his arms around her, one hand in her hair and another around her waist as he backs her into their bedroom. He’s already kissing her jaw, hunched over to reach, and when Hinata trips on the edge of the futon he just adjusts his grip so she tumbles backwards in a controlled fall. Hinata has about two seconds to stare at the ceiling in confusion before he finds that embarrassingly sensitive erogenous zone in the crook of her neck and her brain turns off.

Some period of time later, Hinata’s upper brain function returns. Her sleeping yukata is hiked up past her hips and Sasuke is laying with his head on the bare skin of her belly, arms under her thighs, breath so ragged that she can feel his ribs shaking between her legs. The skin over her collar bone itches in a way that suggests she’s going to be very red tomorrow and her yukata is objectively disgusting; she’s going to have to change or else she’ll never be able to fall asleep.

But there’s no rush. She rests her hand on Sasuke’s head. His hair is thick between her fingers, surprisingly soft despite its intractable nature. “I’m not going anywhere,” she finally decides to say. 

Sasuke exhales roughly, his breath hot against the thin skin of her hip. “My life would be a lot easier if you stopped being so nice to people,” he says.

Hinata carefully strokes his hair, drawing the motion out as slowly as she can. “Sorry,” she whispers.

“No, you’re not,” he grumbles.

“No,” she agrees, biting back the giggle that wants to bubble free. “I guess I’m not.”

She feels his shoulders tense about half a millisecond before he leans down and bites her inner thigh. “Oh!” she gasps. And then, “ oh ,” as those large, careful hands slide under her butt and lift up her hips.

“You’re going to be,” he says darkly. This time, Hinata doesn’t bother biting back her laughter.

~

“Did you get mauled by a mountain lion or something?” is the first thing out of Sakura’s mouth when Hinata sees her the next day. It’s quarter of eight, and therefore far too early for Sakura and Ino’s particular brand of tag-teaming, but Hinata has taken the D-rank mission to help at the Yamanaka flower shop on White Day every year since she was a genin and it’s a tradition she secretly finds very meaningful.

Hinata tries for a flat, quelling look.

“Is this because of our”--Ino waggles her eyebrows--“visitors?”

“I heard one of them made a break for it,” Sakura says, not looking up from where she’s organizing spools of ribbon behind the front counter. “I had to reset the seal on the holding rooms, so I saw when Kakashi dragged him back. He was pretty smug for somebody that constipated-looking. Did he really break into your apartment? That guy seriously cannot handle being away from you for, like, any period of time.”

“He didn’t break in, he came in through the kitchen window--and anyway it was just for a few hours--” Hinata tries. She definitely did not get enough sleep last night to handle this. 

“He didn’t help do all this, did he?” Ino asks, resting a bucket of tulips on her hip so she has a free hand to gesture to her own neck.

Hinata miserably flushes but she knows better than to try and fix the collar of her shirt; it’s anyway covering what it can. “My husband did that,” she says, jabbing at dignity. “As you well know.”

“I mean,” Ino says, hefting the tulips onto the rack at the back of the window display, “technically, you are a woman who currently has two husbands. And unlike a clone, there’s no risk of popping one during sex.” This insight is offered with an air of experienced confidence.

“I did not have sex with the man who is not my husband,” Hinata says loudly as she goes into the back to put away her coat and fetch an apron. It’s best to be firm with Sakura and Ino about this sort of thing, or else the whole day is going to be miserable. 

When she ducks back into the front of the shop, Ino has a truly evil smirk on her face. “Oh, that’s right,” she says. “I forgot! It’s actually the other one you’re married to.”

Hinata freezes in the act of looping the monogrammed apron over her head. “Ah?” she squeaks.

“The blond jinchuuriki,” Ino says, snapping her fingers at Sakura. “What was it? Uzu Fishcake or whatever?”

“Naruto,” Sakura says, trimming the frayed end of a white velvet ribbon.

“Right! Apparently you’re Mrs. Fishcake,” Ino says breezily. 

Hinata concentrates very hard on looping the apron strings around her waist and tying them neatly into a bow. Even though it’s probably a vain effort, she tries for nonchalance as she says, “Well, I hope no one says anything to Sasuke about that. But it’s a moot point. They’ll be going home soon, won’t they? Once Sasuke-san has recovered his chakra reserves sufficiently.”

When she looks up, Ino and Sakura are staring at her from opposite sides of the shop with identical elated expressions on their faces. “ Sasuke-san ,” Sakura breathes.

“It’s only polite?” Hinata tries.

Hefting a ridiculously enormous bucket of sunflowers onto her shoulder, Ino advises, “I wouldn’t get too close.” She lifts her voice as she disappears into the walk-in fridge. “His number one ambition in life, and I mean, number one by a vast margin, is restoring his clan. We should probably make sure he doesn’t try to smuggle any of your little cousins back with him under that ugly fucking poncho.” She’s just come back out and is wiping her hands on her apron when the front door opens, the little bell jangling loudly. “Good morning! Welcome to Yamanaka Flowers, how can I help you?”

Apparently done with ribbon inventory, Sakura sidles over to Hinata as Ino goes to help an extremely pimply Academy-aged kid pick out something for his classmates. As is her wont, she’s wearing a sleeveless shirt that leaves her tattoos accessible. Today’s is white and made of civilian fabric thin enough that Hinata can make out the layers of her chest wrappings. And there, just below her armpit--“Is that a new tattoo?” Hinata asks.

“Kami, your eyes are something,” Sakura exclaims, laughing. “I bet Ino no one would notice for a week!” She lifts her elbow and tugs down the already stretched armhole of her shirt so Hinata can see the tiny, delicate strokes of a circular seal. “It’s part of this hiraishin modification I’m working on, so Ino and I can switch places. The switch works perfectly, but Ino still gets motion-sick.”

“Have a great day!” Ino says with artificial brightness as she waves off the pimply Academy kid. As soon as the door closes behind him she drops the fake smile and declares, “It’s so obvious that doing this too much is why Namikaze’s so fucking nuts. I feel like my brain’s always about to come out of my nose.” She slams the cash register drawer shut and lowers her voice. “ Speaking of Namikaze , guess who’s Mr. Fishcake, Senior?”

Sakura picks up the pre-order slips next to the register and begins flipping through them with rapid, experienced fingertips, sorting them into two piles. “I still can’t believe I didn’t catch it yesterday. He’s basically Kushina-shishou on anabolic steroids.”

“Ah, sorry?” Hinata says, taking the pile of slips that Sakura hands her. They’re all simple bouquets, mostly roses and cherry blossoms. After this many years of the White Day D-rank, Hinata can bundle dozens of roses and half-dozens of cherry blossoms in her sleep. “I don’t follow.”

“Fishcake is the secret love child of the Yondaime and the Uzumaki clan head ,” Ino says, vibrating with so much intensity she looks like she’s going to shunshin into the next country. “‘Study abroad’ my ass, that creep is studying the broad that rules Uzushiogakure with an iron fist.” With no sign of any impending customers, she takes the chance to disappear back into the walk-in.

“But he’s only been there for a few years,” Hinata says. “Isn’t the jinchuuriki--sorry, what’s his name, again?”

“Fishcake,” Ino yells from the walk-in, as Sakura says, “It’s Naruto. Uzumaki Naruto.”

“Isn’t Uzumaki Naruto a little old to be their child?” Hinata asks. “Oh, wait, you mean--Sasuke-san’s Uzumaki Naruto is the child of their Yondaime and Uzumaki Kushina, but he’s not, here?” Her head is beginning to hurt, although that’s not an uncommon phenomenon when dealing with Sakura and Ino.

“I sent a team out this morning to find out,” Ino says breezily, appearing out of the walk-in with two enormous containers of cherry blossoms and white roses, “but Billboard Brain over here thinks he must be the same age. Since everybody else is.” She drops the buckets on the counter in front of Hinata and mutters, “Fuck, I left an empty one around here somewhere, I know I did.”

“I just have this hunch that the Rinnegan’s space-time capabilities have an internal logic,” Sakura muses. “They must, right? No matter where you go in three-dimensional space you can still draw a two-dimensional line between two points, you know? So by its very nature multi-dimensional travel across dimensions n can be mapped as n-1. Ergo, logic.” And then she shrugs, like she’s not Konoha’s greatest fuuinjutsu master and already earmarked for Rokudaime Hokage. “Let me get you some fertilizer packets for those. Oh, and we got a new ribbon for the small bouquets. Isn’t it so cute?” She lifts up the roll for Hinata’s inspection; it’s pale ivory satin patterned with little white and gold hearts.

“Oooh,” Hinata murmurs, rubbing it between her fingertips. This is why she always loves working the White Day D-rank. But cute ribbons can only distract her for so long, and a few seconds later she finds herself frowning as Ino hunts around for an empty bucket and Sakura digs under the counter for the box of fertilizer packets. “But surely we would have met him. At a chunin exam? How do you hide a child of two exceptional shinobi?”

“Very carefully, if you want him to live to adulthood,” Sakura suggests, muffled. She looks a little grimmer now as she pops up with a cardboard box of little paper twists. “Uzushiogakure is more vulnerable than Konoha. If they wanted to raise him there, they might have taken steps to make sure he was kept secret.” Her face softens. “I feel a little bad for the kid.”

The door opens again, the little bell jangling frantically, and all three kunoichi turn in unison to chirp, “Good morning!”

Hinata’s father-in-law pauses for a moment, looking a little taken aback, before recovering himself. “Good morning,” he replies curtly, stepping up to the counter. “Yamanaka-sama, Yamanaka-san. Hinata.” 

There’s no need to ask after his order; it’s the same every year. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” Ino asks cheerfully as Hinata tugs half a dozen branches of cherry blossoms out of the bucket and bundles them together in paper with a twist of fertilizer. She eschews Sakura’s cute new ribbon, which might be a little too cute for Mikoto, and instead cuts off a length of a pale green linen.

As she’s tying it into a bow, carefully making sure the loops are the same size, Fugaku replies, “Indeed.” He places some ryo notes on the tray and pushes it across the counter to Ino. Hinata comes around the counter to offer him Mikoto’s bouquet, bowing as she does so. The Uchiha aren’t quite as formal as the Hyuuga, but Hinata has noticed over the years that displays of exquisite manners have endeared her to her in-laws. Considering their poor relationship with Sasuke, she’s willing to do what she can to keep those waters calm.

Fugaku says, “Thank you,” and it’s probably Hinata’s imagination that his voice has microscopically thawed. 

“Have a good day, Uchiha-sama,” Hinata murmurs. She keeps her head inclined until the bell jangles, signaling his departure, at which point Ino and Sakura let out identical guffaws.

“ Uchiha-sama! ” Ino cackles as Sakura mutters, glaring at the door, “I can’t believe he still expects you to do that. You and Sasuke have been married for like a decade! ”

Hinata scuttles back around the counter and starts bundling up roses. Her face feels warm, but, really, when doesn’t it? “It’s only polite,” she says, trying not to sound too defensive. “Ino, do you have an empty bucket for me to put the finished bouquets in?”

“Fuck!” Ino barks, jolting into motion. “Yes, there’s one--” and then she disappears into the back of the shop, probably to scare one up from the greenhouse.

When Hinata peeks up, Sakura is watching her with a careful look on her face. “Is something wrong?” Hinata asks, looping a rubber band around the first bundle of roses and, for want of somewhere else, returning them to their original bucket. She begins to fish out another dozen.

“Ah,” Sakura says, jerking. “Uh, no. Well. No! Well. Maybe?” She bites the corner of her mouth. “Okay, Ino didn’t want to tell you but I feel kind of weird not doing it, you know? But I don’t know if you want me to.”

“I’m not following,” Hinata says.

“You know how you’re married to the Yondaime’s kid?” Sakura says. Her mouth twists. “Well, the extremely muscular version of me is apparently, like. In love.” Here she coughs. “With Sasuke?”

Hinata can feel her eyebrows lift into her bangs. “Oh!” she says, involuntarily. Whatever her face is doing, it makes Sakura moan and collapse onto the counter.

“I know!” Sakura groans. “It’s not--clear that it’s mutual. They’re maybe dating? Ino says his head is a hot mess. But every time I think about it I want to, uh. Die. A little.”

Hinata can’t keep herself from laughing. It feels cruel but she’s helpless against it.

“Hey,” Sakura complains, lifting her head to glare at Hinata. “Stop laughing at my agony! Not only am I apparently only a single dimension away from heterosexuality, I have to deal with the fact that Muscles-Me chose to imprint on Sasuke . Who the fuck would look at Sasuke as a genin and be like, ooh, yes, sign me up for some of that ugly shorts action?” After a second it seems to occur to her that Hinata had in fact been engaged to Sasuke when they were genin, because a guilty look scrunches up her face. “Wait, I didn’t mean it like that.”

Hinata presses the back of her wrist to her mouth. “It’s fine,” she manages, eyes watering. For a second she thinks she’s gotten herself under control, but then Ino dashes in from the back, bucket hefted triumphantly over her head, and Hinata loses it. She laughs so hard she has to sink down into a crouch to keep her balance.

“Some friend you are!” Sakura says, hands fisted at her hips. “Here I am, having an existential crisis, and you’re laughing at me!” 

Hinata gasps for air and waves a hand in front of her face. “I’m sorry!” she squeaks.

“You told her?” Ino demands. “And you didn’t let me watch?”

Although she’s down behind the counter and can’t see, Hinata can hear the bell jangle and the shuffled sound of audible footsteps. Probably a civilian. She tries her best to stifle her laughter and only manages it by sealing her palm flat across her mouth. “Uh,” the civilian says. “Is now--a bad time?”

“Of course not!” Ino says cheerfully, dropping the bucket on Hinata’s head and disappearing around the counter. “Welcome to Yamanaka Flowers, how can I help you?”

“You’re dead to me,” Sakura hisses.

~

Sakura has let go of her grudge by lunch, thankfully. Hinata’s fingers are pruned from handling wet stems and covered in small cuts from the combination of thorns and paper, but it’s nothing a little salve won’t fix. She feels pleased with how many familiar faces she’s been able to see this morning--friends from her Academy class, various members of both the Uchiha and Hyuuga clans, even Iruka-sensei, who’d looked beleaguered from the moment he’d stepped in the door and had only turned even more furiously red when Ino had tried to pump him for information on the recipient of the little potted fern he decided to buy--and when Ino says, “I think you can take your lunch now, Hinata, we’ll probably be slow until the Academy gets out,” at quarter after two, Hinata feels the pleasant ache of having done something strenuous but rewarding.

She exchanges her apron for her coat and slips out the front door of the shop, breathing in the fresh air with real enthusiasm. Maybe it’s a little ridiculous, but Hinata feels proud of herself. She’d been so shy as a child, with her stutter and constant anxiety, the blushes she could never control, that she’s still surprised when she’s able to manage social interaction successfully as an adult.

It’s late for lunch; Hinata puts her hands in the pockets of her coat and wonders what she’d like to eat. There’s that soba stall around the corner--or tempura, which she has so rarely because Sasuke doesn’t like fried foods--

“Uh, hey,” someone says, stepping in front of her, and Hinata jerks to a halt in the middle of the sidewalk. It’s the jinchuuriki. Hinata immediately steps back, defensively, shifting her weight as she yanks her hands out of her pockets and lifts them in front of her. “Sorry!” the jinchuuriki--Uzumaki--says, rubbing the back of his head. “I didn’t mean to startle you!”

“Shouldn’t you be locked up?” Hinata asks. She activates the Byakugan and his chakra pathway flares to life, so bright that it drowns out the people around him. It’s like looking at the Godaime.

“Nah!” he says, laughing. “T&I let us out for a bit, Anko-chan said it wasn’t worth the headache.” The us is troubling; Hinata tries to look through his blinding chakra, dampening its effect so it doesn’t impede her ability to spot his teammates. Ah, there they are--Sasuke-san, Sakura-san, Hatake-san, standing in a clump in a nearby alley with direct line of sight. Hinata lifts a hand and gestures to them. 

“You understand if I’m concerned?” she asks. “One of your teammates broke into my apartment last night and Kakashi-san made it clear that he wasn’t supposed to be there.”

The chakra signatures of his teammates roil around for a few seconds before they begin to approach.

“Oh,” Uzumaki says, sounding disappointed. “Yeah, I guess that makes sense. You’re not very trusting, are you?”

“Maa, she’s a responsible kunoichi of Konoha,” someone who sounds like Kakashi says. “You ought to be proud, Naruto.” It’s very disorienting to see them all clustered together like this: almost Sasuke, but without his left arm; almost Kakashi, but without his Sharingan; and that seal in Sakura-san’s forehead! So intriguingly patterned, like many diamonds folded up inside each other. Looking at it for too long confuses Hinata’s brain, which can only think, at most, in four dimensions.

Hinata does not answer and instead raises her hand to flag down a passing shinobi. She calls, “Shisui-kun, could you please help me with something?”

Shisui skids to a halt, a roof tile clattering under his sandal. “Uh,” he says.

Hinata flushes. This is not, unfortunately, the first time she’s unwittingly revealed the identity of a passing ANBU. “Sorry!” she squeaks. “That is, Crow-san!”

He snorts and drops into a crouch. “Not much point now,” he says. “What do you need, Hinata-chan?”

“Kakashi-san, please,” Hinata says.

“On it,” Shisui says and disappears.

Hinata cautiously deactivates the Byakugan. Although Uzumaki is standing in the middle of the sidewalk, lit brilliantly by the sun, his teammates are clustered in the shadow of a nearby alley and both Hatake-san and Sakura-san are wearing hoods over their distinctive heads of hair. Sakura-san looks the most different, with her very muscular physique and straight posture. Her arms, bare of tattooed seals, are disorienting. And her hair is so long! It’s nearly to her shoulders. 

“Your Hokage said it was okay,” Sakura-san tells Hinata. She has very kind eyes, just like Sakura. She jerks her chin towards Sasuke-san; only the pale skin of his right cheek and his dark right eye are visible. “This idiot might be willing to risk a congenial working relationship for a jail break, but the rest of us aren’t that stupid.” She flicks a glare at Uzumaki. “Well. Not all of us.”

“Yeah, Sasuke’s pretty dumb,” Uzumaki says blithely. “But I guess you knew that.” His face falls. He’s an almost overwhelmingly expressive person. She’s a little surprised by how little he acts like the Yondaime, whom Hinata remembers as a very calm person, generally. Terrifying, of course, and occasionally ridiculous, like all shinobi geniuses, but nothing quite this emotive.

“What if we had broken out?” Sasuke-san says suddenly, with sharp derision. “And we attacked you together? You sent away an ally. That was a mistake.”

Hinata frowns at him. “You’re in the middle of the village. If you attacked me, I would have help in seconds.”

“Seconds make the difference between life and death,” he says. This is starting to sound depressingly similar to one of Sasuke’s standard lectures, often delivered to Hinata’s groggy, semi-conscious self from her bedside in the hospital after a recent kidnapping attempt.

Hinata points above Uzumaki’s head, to a bright pink seal painted on the pole beneath the lamp. “Sakura can use the hiraishin and she’s put a seal on every lamppost in the village. Realistically, help is a second and a half away.”

Sakura-san’s eyes go very wide. “Oh!” she says, sounding very excited. “That’s right! I’m a fuuinjutsu master here. I can’t believe I can use the hiraishin--it must be so useful. Imagine the possibilities!” 

Uzumaki clearly does, and then looks queasy. 

“You can’t rely on others to protect you,” Sasuke-san says. This is most definitely becoming one of his bedside lectures, so Hinata preemptively activates the Byakugan, just in time to slap two of the tenketsu in his forearm as he takes a swing at her neck with a kunai he’s holding in a backwards grip. Sasuke is always so predictable. It probably shouldn’t warm her heart this much.

“That was very foolish!” Hinata scolds him as he skids past her. She catches the kunai as he drops it; she’d hit that second tenketsu in his wrist pretty hard. “You only have one arm! It’s even more important that you preserve chakra flow to your hand.”

“Holy shit,” Uzumaki breathes. 

Hinata slips the kunai into her weapons pouch so she has a hand free in case Sasuke-san decides to go for a second jab. But the time for that passes, as Shisui appears suddenly at her left, followed an almost imperceptible handful of milliseconds later by Kakashi at her right. Not for the first time, Hinata marvels that Shisui’s shunshin really is a work of art. 

Hinata tells Sasuke-san, “If the Hokage did release you from custody, I’m sure it was on the condition that you behave yourselves. You shouldn’t pretend to attack me. What if an ANBU had seen, or a member of the Konoha Police? This could’ve turned into a huge mess.”

“Yeah, Sasuke-kun,” Shisui says. He’s still wearing his Crow mask. “What if your dad had seen you get your ass kicked?” And then he cackles.

“It’s all right, Hinata,” Kakashi says casually. “You can stand down, Rin let them out.”

Hinata relaxes out of her ready stance and deactivates the Byakugan. “Then I apologize for the inconvenience.” 

“This is not an inconvenience,” Shisui says with great enthusiasm.

Sasuke-san’s visible eye has narrowed to a very fine slit. He’s holding his hand at an awkward angle; he can still mold chakra out of his palm, but it won’t be strong enough for his most powerful jutsus and perhaps he can tell by how it feels. Hinata has found from extensive experience that most shinobi have a crude but profound understanding of their own chakra pathways. They always seem to know when she’s sealed them enough to end a fight. “You’re ANBU,” he finally says. “Why the fuck are you ANBU?”

Uzumaki flails. Sakura-san gasps. Hatake-san’s scarred eye twitches. 

“She’s not ANBU,” Kakashi says flatly. “She’s just very good at her actual job. Does this have to happen in the middle of the street?”

Hinata’s stomach growls and she immediately puts a hand over it, as though that will muffle the hugely embarrassing noise. “Ah, sorry,” she says, flushing, as everyone turns to look at her. “I-I haven’t had lunch yet.”

~

Cramming everyone into a booth at Ichiraku seems like a bad idea, but Sakura-san assures Hinata that they’ll all fit--“Trust me, I know from experience,” she says wearily--and then the point anyway becomes moot, as Kakashi and Hatake-san look at each other and say, “Chapter 15?” in unison before disappearing in twin swirls of leaves and Shisui reluctantly admits to still being on duty and needed back at the Tower.

When taking their orders, Ayame does an admirable job saying nothing about Sasuke’s missing arm or Sakura’s lack of tattoos. Hinata resolves to slip her a few extra ryo.

“Oi, who was that guy?” Uzumaki wants to know once Ayame has brought them all glasses of cold tea and left again. “The ANBU you sent to get Kakashi. He knew Sasuke, right?”

Hinata looks down into her cup of cold tea. “Shisui-kun?” she says. “He’s, uh,” and then she bites her lip and looks at Sasuke-san through her lashes. Where I came from, they’re all dead, except for me. “Shunshin no Shisui,” she finally decides to say. “After Sakura and the Yondaime, he’s the fastest living shinobi. But he doesn’t use the hiraishin, which makes him unique.”

“He’s my cousin,” Sasuke-san says flatly.

Uzumaki and Sakura-san wince in unison. They’re still silent when Ayame brings a tray of steaming bowls and deposits them around the table. Only Hinata had ordered tsukemen; as she arranges her little bowl of broth to her satisfaction, Uzumaki leans over and with a voice of horrified confusion asks, “What is that ?”

“I find the standard ramen here too filling,” Hinata explains. “Too much broth. Tsukemen is a good compromise for me.”

“ Too much broth ?” Uzumaki echoes. “Oh man. Oh man. Ohhh man.”

“Ignore him,” Sakura-san says. “It’s gonna take him a couple of minutes to work through this. When Sasuke came back last night and told us about you and your, uh, husband, I think Naruto legitimately went catatonic.”

“Too much? Broth?” Uzumaki whispers to himself, stuffing his cheeks with a huge quantity of noodles. “Buth whath doeth thath mhean ?”

Sakura-san spoons up some broth and smiles at Hinata. The expression looks only slightly forced. “So, what is your job?” she asks in Sakura’s bright customer service voice. “Not-Sensei said that you’re good at it. Is it idiot-wrangling? Are you at the Academy?”

Hinata holds her hand over her mouth as she laughs. “Oh, not at all! I definitely don’t have the skillset for teaching. I’m actually a hunter-nin.”

In the silence that follows, Uzumaki’s noodles slither back into his bowl with an audible splash. “Like, those guys who feed missing-nin to birds?” he croaks.

Hinata has never heard her job described as such, but it’s fairly accurate. She’s only used carrion birds a few times; their presence is unexceptional in some environments, like Wind, but she’s found that other methods are more effective in other countries. “Sure,” she finally decides to say. “Sort of like that.”

“Damn, Hinata-chan,” Uzumaki says, his eyes glazed, “you’re kind of a badass.”

Dealing with this informal address feels beyond Hinata’s current capabilities. She’s only just managing to pretend it’s normal that she’s having lunch with a different version of her best friend that is in love with a different version of her husband. Instead of saying anything, she coughs and swirls some noodles in her bowl of broth. “Am I not a hunter-nin?” she asks. “The--other me.”

“Oh, we don’t have hunter-nin in our Konoha,” Sakura-san says. Her voice has relaxed into something more natural-sounding. “We met one from Kiri once, though, and he was an incredible fighter! You must really be something.” She sneaks a look at Sasuke-san, who is powering through a bowl of tonkotsu with zero facial expression.

“I’m part of a three-man team,” Hinata demures. “My specialty is tracking and target identification. I can provide close-range combat support, of course, but ideally my teammates don’t require my help.”

“Go on a lot of missions that are ideal?” Sakura-san asks with a snort.

Hinata laughs. “That’s a good point. Kami, there was this horrible one a few months ago--co-op with Kumo, of course--” she and Sakura-san share a commiserating look--“and their intelligence was bad, so we were very badly outnumbered. We had to follow the targets for a month, picking them off one-by-one whenever we could. I thought Sasuke was going to spit Chidori senbon when I got home, he was so mad. He gave the Godaime this ridiculous lecture after--I still can’t believe she let him do it.” Hinata can’t help shaking her head. “I guess she probably needed a lot of patience, being on a genin team with Kakashi-san, didn’t she?”

“He’s such a nightmare,” Sakura-san says, rolling her eyes. “He’s our Rokudaime Hokage, you know. If I can get him to sit still in his office for five fucking minutes and stamp a seal on two documents it’s a victory. And he had to be begged to take the job. He’s such an ungrateful brat.” She stabs at a piece of chashu with her chopsticks. “I bet the Godaime actually shows up to meetings on time.”

“Sakura sometimes has to bribe her not to murder the civilian council,” Hinata admits. “The three-tails isn’t as aggressive as the other tailed beasts, but even he apparently has limited patience for bureaucracy.”

Sympathetically, Sakura-san asks, “Suzuki-sama?”

“Yes!” Hinata says.

“That woman is stone fucking cold,” Sakura-san says. “Like a kunoichi from an old novel, you know? The ones who spit out a kid and then turn around and stab someone from an enemy clan while they’re still delivering the afterbirth.”

“I love those novels!” Hinata says. “Please don’t tell Iruka-sensei, but Kurenai-sensei’s unit on Senju Murasaki was my favorite class at the Academy.”

“You got a literature unit?” Sakura-san moans. “Oh, that is so deeply unfair.”

Before she can continue, Sakura abruptly appears in the middle of Ichiraku dining room; she still makes a little popping noise when she uses the hiraishin, which never fails to annoy her. “Hinata!” she immediately says. “When we said you had an hour for lunch, we didn’t mean two! What’s with the genin-level work ethic?” And then she seems to notice the other people with Hinata, because she claps her hands together and laughs. “Well, I see how it is. Replaced me, have you?” She puts her hands in the front pockets of her apron and casually strolls over. It’s very clearly a posture she picked up from her jounin-sensei.

Sakura-san says, “Hello, nice to see you again,” very politely.

Sakura laughs and tilts her head to the side so she can see around Hinata. Her long earrings make a soft chiming noise as she moves. “You too,” she says. She flicks the other side of the table a skeptical glance. “Sorry, but Hinata’s technically on the clock. White Day, you know.”

“Right,” Sakura-san says. “At the shop.” She sounds very, very faintly wistful.

Sakura’s eyes narrow for a millisecond, before they soften again into cheerful curves. It’s incredible; even her hair is looking more like Kakashi’s these days, now that she’s letting the top grow out a little bit. She reaches across her chest to scratch the back of her shoulder, pulling up the droopy armhole of her shirt. “You’re welcome to join us,” she offers diffidently. “It’s an all-hands-on-deck kind of day.”

Across the table, Uzumaki and Sasuke-san look like they aren’t sure where to look. Uzumaki keeps staring at Sakura, and then Hinata, and then Sakura’s arms, and then Hinata’s neck, and then Sakura’s arms again--and then Hinata’s neck again, oh no , because Sasuke had mauled her last night like some kind of deranged lunatic. Hinata coughs and puts a hand to her throat, tugging at her collar as though she needs to fix how it’s laying against her skin.

“I really appreciate it,” Sakura-san says softly, “but I’m not sure it’s the best idea.”

“Oh, it’ll be fine,” Sakura says. “We’ll tell everybody you’re a new type of clone. I’m always trying weird shit.” Her eyes have a determined glint. “C’mon, if Ino finds out I left you here she’ll be furious. She has an actual list of all the stuff she wants to ask you; she wrote it down in a little notebook.”

Sakura-san bites her lip. “Oh,” she says. “Well, I mean.” She turns to Uzumaki and Sasuke-san, who don’t really seem to have opinions on the subject. Uzumaki looks strange. Dejected and determined at the same time. Sasuke-san is blank-faced.

“Let me fix your tenketsu before I go,” Sakura-san offers quietly. After a long moment of silent consideration, Sasuke-san grunts and places his hand, palm up, on hers. Sakura-san’s hand glows green, very faintly--Hinata knows enough about medical ninjutsu to be impressed by her control; almost no leakage!--as she runs her thumb along the inside of his forearm.

His skin is pale and smooth, so perfect that it almost looks fake. Hinata’s husband has a dark scar along the inside of his right forearm; when they were twelve, he’d tried to teach her how to blow a katon and she’d lost control of it. Sasuke hadn’t even cried, which at the time had been incredibly impressive to Hinata.

When Hinata looks up, he’s watching her. His eyebrows twitch microscopically closer together; a general inquiry. Hinata doesn’t know what on earth to say. Your skin is too perfect? It’s just another reminder that he and Sasuke are very different men.

Instead of answering, Hinata slips out of the booth. “Lunch is on me,” she announces. “Thank you for the wonderful meal. It was very nice to meet you, Uzumaki-san.” She bows politely to him. “Let me just get this,” she says quietly to Sakura as she plucks her coat off of the hook on the wall. “I can meet you both back at the shop.”

Sakura nods and then calls out, “Hey, Muscles-Me, wanna take the thunder highway?”

“The hiraishin!? Ooh, yes ,” Sakura-san says gleefully. As Hinata winds her way around tables to the front counter, she can hear Sakura and Sakura-san descending into the nitty-gritty details of hiraishin seals in a burble of excited squeals. Nothing breaks Sakura out of her fake shell of Kakashi-esque apathy quite like fuuinjutsu theory.

When Hinata finishes paying and ducks out of Ichiraku, lifting her hair out of the collar of her coat, Uzumaki is waiting for her. His hands are in the pocket of his jumpsuit and he appears to be trying to dig a hole between two cobblestones with the toe of his sandal. Hinata clears her throat and he jumps. “Ah!” he shrieks, and then he laughs self-consciously and scratches the back of his head. “Uh, that is. Can I walk you back?”

If this was a fellow shinobi of Konoha, Hinata knows exactly what to say. That’s very kind of you to offer! But I would prefer to walk by myself . And then, if that didn’t work, she’d spend the whole walk talking about Sasuke. She’s only had to break out the chunin exams liver-removal story once; it had proven almost distressingly effective on one of Kiba’s cousins.

But she can’t help feeling a little bad for Uzumaki, who hadn’t exactly asked to be carted into another universe by a dojutsu his best friend barely understood how to use. And surely he’s well aware by now that she’s married. 

“I suppose that would be all right,” Hinata manages eventually. She winces at the ungraceful tangle of words emerging from her mouth. 

“Great!” Uzumaki says. He immediately turns on his heel and matches his stride to her shorter one. He’s not as tall as Sasuke but he’s close enough--and far enough from Hinata--to need to check whatever his natural speed is. “So, uh, hunter-nin, huh? Not the heiress?”

Hinata says, “Wow,” before she can help herself.

“Was that too blunt?” he asks her, wincing. “Sorry. That was too blunt. I was just curious.”

Hinata wants to say, Isn’t your mother a clan head? Didn’t they raise you with better manners than that? But he seems genuinely good-natured. It must be strange for him to retreat to a place of polite distance; after all, he’s married to some version of Hinata. So, instead, she says, “My sister is the heir. Is your wife the heir to her clan?”

“No,” he says. “It’s Hanabi. Same as here, I guess.”

“Not Neji?” she asks. “The elders were seriously considering him. He’s the strongest Hyuuga of our generation, if one judges by Gentle Fist prowess.”

Uzumaki doesn’t say anything for long enough that Hinata flicks a quick glance at his face. He looks incredibly sad. “Oh,” she says hollowly. “I see.” She inhales sharply, holds the air in her chest, and then slowly releases it. When she feels a little steadier she asks, “What does your wife do, then?” She tries to sound politely interested, the way she might make small talk with a distant Uchiha cousin at the annual Obon festival. “She’s not a hunter-nin, and she’s not the heiress. I did consider the Academy, I admit, but I felt like I lacked the authority for it. Itachi is so skilled at that.”

“We’re having a baby,” Uzumaki bleats, so fast the words run together. Then he shouts, “ Itachi works at the Academy !?”

“A baby ?” Hinata squeaks. She trips on the curb and Uzumaki has to catch her elbow before she plummets face-first into the street.

Uzumaki is still holding her elbow. His blue eyes are just unsettlingly bright, even when he’s wincing and staring over her head. He sets her back down the sidewalk and waits a moment to make sure she’s steady before he lets go. “I mean, we’re trying for a baby,” he amends. “You--she--uh, Hinata took a leave of absence from the active mission roster while we’re--you know. Because she wants to stay home with them.”

“With a baby?” Hinata repeats shrilly. The last few syllables come out of her mouth so high-pitched that probably only nearby ninken are capable of hearing them.

“Yeah,” Uzumaki says. His face is a little flushed. He looks like he’s embarrassed but determined not to be, which is unfortunately an extremely familiar expression to Hinata; she’s seen it in the mirror many, many times.

Hinata blinks up at him for probably a while. Her brain just keeps shrieking BABY over and over, like a confusion genjutsu. “But--the elders?” she says weakly.

Incredibly enough, Uzumaki seems to understand immediately. “No more sealing,” he says. “You and Hanabi, you put those pompous idiots in their place. It was very hot.” His laugh starts off appreciative and then trickles into awkward. “I mean. My wife is hot! Not, like, you .”

“Ah,” Hinata eventually manages.

“You seem pretty surprised,” Uzumaki says. He chuckles--it sounds forced--and rubs the back of his head. “No, uh, little Uchihas running around?”

“Sasuke and I will never have children,” Hinata says reflexively. It comes out coldly firm. She’s never managed to say it any other way. 

Uzumaki looks genuinely surprised. “Wait, really? But you love kids! And so does that idiot. He pretends not to, but babies turn him into goo. It’s fucking hilarious.”

Mix the bloodlines and you’ll find it again. 

Hinata says, “If the elders of Konoha desire the Rinnegan so badly, they’re welcome to pursue the question themselves--but I’ll breed them one over my own dead body.”

Uzumaki makes a garbled noise. Abruptly, Hinata realizes that she’s sharing intimate personal details with someone who is essentially a stranger in the middle of the street. It’s just after four and the Academy will let out any moment. To pretend privacy anywhere in Konoha is a joke, but the commercial district in the middle of the day? She might as well go up to the elders and spit in their faces directly.

“The shop is right up ahead, so thank you for escorting me,” Hinata says to Uzumaki, pretending that she doesn’t currently resemble a tomato with long hair. The only thing she can think to do is give him a polite smile, which must look ridiculous. His face is so concerned for her that it only takes a few seconds of eye contact for her smile to soften into something real. “I’m sorry, you just startled me. I really do wish you and your wife the best.”

“Thanks,” he says. She nods at him and then steps around him and quickly makes her way to the stoop of Yamanaka Flowers. She’s reaching for the doorknob when he calls after her, “It’s probably pretty weird having us around, huh?”

She turns to look at him over her shoulder. He’s standing down the block, hands back in the pockets of his jumpsuit. He doesn’t look quite so sad anymore, which makes something in Hinata’s chest loosen a little. Sasuke is always scolding her for caring too much about other people’s feelings, but it’s not something she’s ever been able to change about herself. “I’m sure it’s equally strange for you to be here,” she says. “Let’s just be kind to each other, okay?”

He laughs. “Yeah, okay.” He lifts a hand in farewell. “See you around, Hinata.”

“You, too--uh, it’s Naruto-san, right?”

“Believe it!” he says cheerfully, flashing her a thumbs up.

~

Yamanaka Flowers is technically open until seven, but there’s a steady stream of panicked boyfriends starting at quarter of seven that doesn’t die down until eight-thirty, so that’s when Ino finally manages to flip the sign on the door to CLOSED and breathe out a long, ragged exhale.

Sakura is flat on her back on the floor of the walk-in, only her feet poking out through the propped-open door. Hinata is trying to rewind a roll of satin ribbon that a very determined toddler had unwrapped. “I only took my eyes off of her for half a second,” Sakura-san mutters, face-down at the counter.

“It’s okay, Hinata, you can leave it,” Ino says tiredly. She looks at Sakura’s feet, visibly debates whether it’s worth yelling at her that she’s letting the fridge get warm, and then decides it isn’t.

“I’ve almost got it,” Hinata assures her.

Ino says, “Seriously, it’s fine. We’ll probably have to toss it, anyway, since it’s covered in Yumi-chan’s drool.”

Behind her, the bell jangles as Sasuke opens the door and the two Sakuras groan in unison. “We’re closed ,” they both bellow.

“What’s with your hair?” Sasuke asks as he saunters past Sakura-san. When her head jerks up with an audible snap, he smirks at her over his shoulder before he turns back to Hinata. He’s dressed down today in a flak jacket and turtleneck, hair flopping over his forehead protector the way it does when he doesn’t bother with gel. He must not have ended up sparring with Tenten this afternoon, because he’s not wearing his katana at his belt. He loops an arm around Hinata’s waist and drags her in so he can drop a quick kiss on her forehead before turning back to Sakura-san. “I thought you said you’d only grow it out again after Ino’s grandmother died.”

From the floor of the walk-in, Sakura says, “I said it and I meant it. That bitch can bite my whole ass.” Sasuke startles; Hinata can feel it where their hips are pressed together. But it only takes him about half a second to realize what’s going on. He tilts his head towards Sakura-san and flashes a hand sign out of her line of sight. Only? Hinata nods and then is too tired not to rest her temple on his shoulder. It’s conveniently right there.

“Hey!” Ino says, slumping against the empty racks lining the window display. She looks like she’s about to fall asleep on her feet. “My grandmother’s an honored elder of the Yamanaka clan.”

“That honored elder of the Yamanaka clan can bite my entire ass,” Sakura amends. She sighs and sits up, running her hands through her hair and scrubbing roughly at her scalp. When she clambers to her feet, she seems to realize what’s going on; Sasuke and Hinata, Ino, and Sakura-san, staring at Sasuke like someone who has just received significant head trauma. “Uh, doing okay there, Muscles-Me?” Sakura asks.

Sakura-san jolts. “Yes!” she says hoarsely, nodding twice and then twice more. “Honestly, this is significantly weirder than anyone told me it would be.”

“Weirder than me?” Sakura says.

“Weirder than me ?” Ino says. “I think I’m offended. Sasuke is embarrassingly normal.”

“Hey, why don’t you fuck off?” Sasuke suggests.

“Why don’t you fuck off, Uchiha?” Ino replies genially. “He’s pretty, I’ll give you that, but look at this face.” Ino frames her chin between her thumb and forefinger. “There’s more than just good bone structure at work here.”

Sasuke mutters, “Yeah, like a personality disorder.”

“Please don’t be rude to my friends,” Hinata mumbles into his shoulder.

“Yeah, Sasuke,” Sakura taunts. She cocks a hip and leans against the counter next to Sakura-san. The two of them smirk and tilt their heads in unison. Sakura’s earrings chime; Sakura-san’s long hair sways. “Don’t be rude.”

There’s a beat while Sasuke absorbs this, and then he announces, “We’re leaving. Hinata, where’s your coat?”

Sakura laughs, very much not offended, but Sakura-san’s face changes, just for a second. There’s some kind of tenderness there, Hinata can see it now. It’s easy for her to recognize an emotional bruise, the kind you get when your feelings are trampled over and over. Hinata had had so many of them when she and Sasuke had been forced to start courting--the prick to her pride that Hanabi had been selected as heiress, the fear that her father would disown her, the horrible things that the elders had said to her, about how her only useful trait was her fertility--that she’d ended up crying halfway into their first mandatory weekly meeting. Sasuke had only offered to teach her the katon because he’d panicked at the first sight of tears. He’s not an emotionally perceptive individual, and she can’t imagine that the conditions under which Sasuke-san was raised improved that at all.

Hinata is paralyzed for a second by this realization. Should she invite Sakura-san for supper? But maybe that would be more cruel. She shoots a pleading look to Ino, who has always known Sakura best.

“Ya, don’t be such a baby,” Ino drawls. “Sakura, weren’t you thinking about a team dinner?”

“Oh, right!” Sakura says, not even blinking at this blatant lie. “You up for it, Sasuke? Shikamaru’s not on a mission. You should hear the stories from Muscles-Me--apparently some fucking idiot put Shikamaru and Ino on a team together, can you believe it? And she never murdered him.  Sorry, Hinata, but it’s a Team Kakashi exclusive. ”

Sasuke’s arm tightens at Hinata’s hip and his mouth flattens. “You should do it,” Hinata says to him, softly, before he has a chance to refuse.

“Hm,” he says, which is Sasuke for I don’t want to leave you alone .

“You’re literally the only person in this village who thinks Hinata won’t disbowel somebody stupid enough to try and hurt her,” Ino says.

Sasuke ignores this. “Is Neji in the village?” he asks Hinata quietly.

“I’m not sure,” Hinata admits and they turn in unison to Ino, who says, “Yeah, he’s around. Want me to walk her over to the Nara compound? Since your wife, a jounin hunter-nin, apparently needs a babysitter to go five blocks.”

This, Sasuke responds to with a poisonous glare.

“I know, I know,” Ino says, rolling her eyes. She drops her voice into a low register. “ My wife can’t go six months without someone trying to kidnap her . At this point, it sounds like you’re bragging.”

Hinata gives up and puts her face in her hands. Ino and Sasuke always bring out the worst in each other. All shinobi are paranoid, of course, and clans with dojutsu can elevate it to an art form, but Hinata has learned to live with Sasuke’s particular brand of overprotectiveness. He’s hardly worse than her father had been, anyway. After that disaster on her fifth birthday, she hadn’t been allowed to leave the Hyuuga compound for an entire year. 

“You’re gonna have an aneurysm one of these days,” Ino says knowledgeably. “From the stress.”

“Please,” Hinata says, interceding before Sasuke decides to electrocute Ino. “We’re all a little on edge with our, ah, visitors, so let’s just--not be cruel to each other.” And then she pretends to fiddle with a pocket on Sasuke’s flak jacket, her hand pressed to his chest so she can feel his heartbeat. It’s steady but a little faster than normal. “I’ll see if Neji is available to have dinner with me, if it will ease your mind. But you don’t need to worry about our visitors.”

Sasuke says, “Shisui said he tried to cut your throat,” with zero affect, but Hinata can feel that his heart rate has sped up.

“It was a lecture,” Hinata says, smiling up at him. She’s so helplessly in love with Sasuke. Even the ridiculous parts of him make her feel so tender. “A very familiar one, about taking my own personal safety seriously.”

The left corner of Sasuke’s mouth tucks up. “Ah,” he says.

Hinata goes up onto her toes. Sasuke has to lean down so she can touch her lips to his cheek--which he does, very slowly, so she knows that he knows that she’s condescending to him a little bit. “Have a nice time at dinner,” she says. “I will walk myself over to see Neji. If I see Shikamaru, where should I send him?”

When she looks over her shoulder, she sees that Sakura-san still has that slightly bruised look to her. Hinata doesn’t know what to do to help her. For all that Sasuke is overprotective, and sometimes a real nightmare--whatever happened on his two-year “gardening” mission, it destroyed his confidence that Hinata would always be safe in the village--she knows that he loves her enough to temper his instincts. He doesn’t treat her like a child and he never runs roughshod over her, even though he probably could. He trusts her.

Is Sasuke-san capable of trusting anyone? He doesn’t seem the type.

“The Rusty Kunai?” Sakura suggests.

Sakura-san’s nose crinkles. “That place is a dump.”

“Exactly!” Sakura agrees cheerfully. “Everybody knows to mind their own fucking business, so our clone experiment story’ll probably hold.”

Sasuke sighs. “Whatever,” he grumbles.

Hinata kisses him on the cheek again. “Thank you,” she whispers in his ear.

“Hm,” he says, but that little curl to the left side of his mouth has deepened.

~

It’s nearly eleven when Neji walks Hinata home, claiming that he wants the fresh air. Considering that they’d enjoyed a leisurely dinner out on the engawa overlooking the forest, Hinata intuits that she’s once more being subjected to misplaced shinobi paranoia, but she doesn’t protest. She finds Neji’s company very restorative; they’re capable of long silences in each other’s company. Perhaps it helps that neither of them are technically members of the Hyuuga any more. If the Nara are putting any pressure on Neji, it’s to be more laid back.

“Shikamaru’s cousin died last week,” Neji announces abruptly when they turn into the Uchiha district. “In service of the daimyo.”

Hinata hadn’t realized that Shikamaru had a cousin who was one of the Twelve Guardians. It’s a very honorable position, but generally a little more strenuous than the average Nara likes their long-term postings. “Please give him my condolences. Were they close?”

“When they were children,” Neji says. He folds his hands together behind his back, the way he does when he wants to tether himself in a conversation he’s worried about. Hinata’s father does the same. “He named Shikamaru in his will.”

“Oh?” Hinata urges.

“He has a daughter,” Neji continues. “She has been orphaned by his death.”

“ Oh ,” Hinata says. She bites the corner of her mouth for a long few seconds. And then, carefully steady, she asks, “Will Shikamaru travel to the capital to collect her?”

“Likely yes,” Neji says, staring directly ahead. “She’s four.”

“So young,” Hinata murmurs.

Neji clears his throat. “It was requested that Shikaku find a home for the child with a suitable family in the clan,” he says.

“Of course,” Hinata agrees. It’s a task that clan heads are called to perform far too often, even in times of peace. She waits for Neji to continue, but they cross one intersection, and then another, and he stays silent. When she peeks at him out of the corner of her eye, the muscles in his throat are tight. 

Hinata and Neji had had a contentious relationship as children, full of fear and spite and resentment. They hadn’t learned to love each other until they were nearly grown, but once they had it was so surprisingly easy between them. It can be difficult for outsiders--even members of other old clans, like Sasuke and Shikamaru--to understand the fraught nuances of Hyuuga clan politics. Neji knows and shares so many of the vulnerable, wounded places inside of Hinata. 

It loosens some of the burden, to know that the future of their clan is much brighter than the past. Hanabi has vowed that she will merge the main and branch houses when she is head of the clan; on her heir’s third birthday there will be no further sealing. She has also wrung a ruling from their father that any use of the cursed seal by a main branch member incurs prohibitively heavy punishment. But Hinata still dreams sometimes of those horrible meetings with the elders when she’d been a child; their shriveled fingers probing at her face, their cold proclamations of her dubious worth. They’d tried to take Neji’s eyes when he refused to marry Hanabi. It had only been Hanabi and Hinata’s threats--extremely unsubtle ones, about self-induced sterilization and how embarrassing it had been when Hinata’s best friend, the fuuinjutsu master Yamanaka Sakura, had so easily broken Orochimaru’s great clan seals--that had gotten them to reluctantly agree that Neji could marry Shikamaru instead.

Despite their wretched history, Hinata has received so much strength from Neji. It always feels right to offer him that strength back when he needs it. His love shores her up against her incipient anxiety. It lets her be the best version of herself.

At the front stoop of her apartment building, Hinata turns and gives Neji a careful hug. “You’re a very good brother,” she tells him. “I think you’ll be a great father.”

Neji wraps an arm around her shoulders. He manages, “We will see,” and squeezes her a little more tightly.

~

Hinata is asleep when Sasuke returns. She jolts awake when she feels that someone is watching her, but then she smells the familiar notes of his shaving soap. He only uses it when he’s in the village, so Hinata can’t help but associate it with the security of home. “Mm,” Hinata mumbles, rolling over and pulling the blankets over her head so he can turn on the light. “How was dinner?”

Sasuke turns on the lamp; Hinata can hear the metal lamp string being pulled and the hiss of the filament in the bulb. She almost manages to drift back to sleep, but something doesn’t quite feel right. Sasuke likes to watch Hinata sleep, but it’s his preference to do it from much closer.

Hinata can’t help groaning. She’s fully awake now.

“Please wait for me in the living room,” she says into the pillow. “I think it would upset my husband to find you here.”

When she hears nothing, she lowers the blankets and blinks at the sudden influx of light. Sasuke-san, the man who is not her husband, is standing in the doorway. He’s eschewed the poncho; the high collar of the shirt he’s wearing under his flak jacket still manages to hide most of his expression, even though his hair is pushed behind his ears and his left eye is exposed. “Why is your jacket too short?” Hinata asks sleepily. It’s cut high, exposing his midriff, which seems irresponsible.

He ignores her, of course.

“This was arranged,” he says instead.

“I thought it was a mistaken application of the Rinnegan?” Hinata says muzzily.

“ This ,” he says. “You two.”

“Oh,” Hinata says. She’s slightly more awake now and she sighs as she pushes herself up into a seated position, crossing her legs under the blankets. It’s now occurring to her that she’s wearing a very thin yukata for sleeping and she’s not particularly interested in clambering off of the futon in it under his cool, mismatched gaze. She tries to look casual about tucking the blankets around herself. “You’re asking if Sasuke and I had an arranged marriage?”

He nods, once.

“Yes,” she says. He’s so much taller than her like this, it’s starting to hurt her neck. She rubs two fingers along the base of her skull, trying to loosen the muscle there.

Sasuke-san drops into a crouch and frowns at her, the way Sasuke does when he’s thinking--so, a barely perceptible downward turn of his eyes. “He’s in love with you,” he says.

“Yes,” Hinata agrees. “That can happen in arranged marriages. Your father is very enamored with Mikoto-san.”

His frown deepens. “And you love him?” he says, sounding much more skeptical now. “He’s rude. He doesn’t treat you very well.”

“My husband treats me extremely well,” Hinata says, and he raises a very cool eyebrow, flicking a look down at her neck. Hinata realizes with acute despair that the neckline of her yukata is loose and he can see all of the bruising at the base of her neck. “T-That was very much consensual,” she says, feeling her face begin to burn, “n-not that it is any of your business.”

It takes her a few seconds to realize that he’s waiting for her to elaborate. She fusses with her yukata for a second, trying to close the neck of it as tightly as possible. “Are you asking because you don’t treat Sakura-san very well?” she asks.

His face goes very hard. “That’s irrelevant,” he says.

“She’s a very generous and loving person,” Hinata says. “I think it can be a little intimidating, how willing she is to open her heart. It’s easier for shinobi when everyone is cautious. Ino says that we have to be tricked into love because we’re not used to sincerity.”

He grunts, probably in agreement. Sasuke had done the same thing when Ino had drunkenly dusted off her Theory of Love for them. She and Sakura had been dating for a few months and Ino was finally willing to admit she was investing more than just sex into their relationship. Sakura’s too scary to love head-on , she had slurred. What kind of shinobi willingly jumps into an ambush like that?

“Sasuke is too protective of me,” Hinata admits. “It makes him short-tempered. But lots of things prick his temper and I’ve learned to live with them, just like he’s learned to live with how anxious I can get. People say marriages are work, but it’s not the kind that you suffer under, you know. It’s the kind of work that you love to do.”

Sasuke-san’s purple eye whirls slowly.

“I don’t know what you need from Sakura-san, or what she needs from you, but you’ll find out,” Hinata tells him gently. “Just remember to be generous with yourself.”

“You must spend a lot of time with him,” Sasuke-san says, almost absently. “You sound a lot like him.”

“Who?” Hinata asks, bewildered.

“Itachi,” he says. His eyes soften in the corners, the way they had last night when Itachi had been laying out all of his arguments against child soldiers. 

“Oh,” Hinata says. “I suppose? He comes over often. He and Sasuke are very close.” She can tell that he means this as a compliment, but it’s a little irritating to have her own emotional intelligence--which she’s worked quite hard to refine--attributed to her brother-in-law. But she can tell that Sasuke-san loves and misses his brother quite acutely, so she decides to just breathe it out and let it go.

“Please take care of him,” Sasuke-san says. His voice is a little hoarse.

“I do,” Hinata promises. “I will.”

He nods in a single jerk and stands. Abruptly, some of the oppressiveness of his presence returns. Hinata hadn’t realized how much he’d tamped it down--how well he’d been mimicking her husband’s warmer, much more pleasant chakra--until now, and she automatically leans back, away from him.

He turns away from her, moving to take a closer look at the photographs hanging above the dresser. Hinata and Sasuke in their wedding kimonos; Itachi and Sasuke as children; Team Kakashi as genin; Team Kurenai as chunin. Hinata doubts he has much interest in her old genin squad; this seems like a way to avoid eye contact for a difficult conversation.

“You never asked how I got the Rinnegan,” he says.

It feels like Hinata has had her lungs forcibly deflated. She manages, “A-ah?”

“It’s not a complicated process,” he says. “The only requirement is Otsutsuki Hagoromo’s chakra. His spirit gave me some--enough to awaken one eye.”

Hinata chokes out, “Hagoromo? Not Hamura?” Not Hyuuga?

Sasuke-san glances at her over his shoulder. His purple eye glints.

“Hagoromo,” he confirms. “There’s a way to make a shitty version of it, but it’s a Senju you need, not a Hyuuga, and it has to be the right Senju paired with the right Uchiha.”

Hinata nods. Her head feels very light, almost as though her skull is full of air. She’s staring at the back of his head, where his hair is long enough to actually grow downwards. It’s too disorienting combined with his words--it’s a Senju you need; Hagoromo, not Hamura--so she squeezes her eyes shut.

“Thought you’d want to know,” he mutters.

Hinata lets out a slightly hysterical squeak of laughter. She puts her head in her hands and collapses forward until she’s face-down on the blanket. Her whole body is shaking. It feels like something is pouring out of every tenketsu on her body. Is it dread? Is it relief? Not Hyuuga , she thinks. Her eyes are furiously itching.

They want to breed us like rabbits, Sasuke had spat at fourteen, when he’d been angry all the time and hadn’t discovered yet that kenjutsu was an appropriate outlet. I’ll kill them all first .

Hinata feels a touch on the top of her head. Fingertips, two of them, tapping against her skull. When she sits up, the room is blurry through her tears but she can make out enough to see that it’s empty.

“Thank you,” she says. It comes out as a mucosal mumble. “T-thank you!” she shouts, before the tears begin to bubble up again. 

She can identify the feeling now. It’s joy.

~

When Hinata goes by the mission desk in the morning to drop off her report for her White Day D-rank mission, Iruka is the only one on duty. “Good morning, Hinata,” he says, smiling kindly at her and accepting the mission scroll.

“Good morning, Iruka-sensei,” Hinata greets him. “It seems very quiet today.”

“You’ve missed the morning rush,” Iruka tells her, unrolling the scroll and scanning it quickly. “Ahh, your neat handwriting is always a pleasure.”

“Thank you,” Hinata replies. Iruka scans the whole report, thorough as always, even though Hinata is a jounin who’s been writing mission reports for over a decade and has written this exact mission report every year since she was twelve. Iruka nods at the end, stamps it as received, and turns around to put it on the shelf marked COMPLETED; APPROVED. 

There’s a very large bite mark on the back of his neck. It looks the right size to be human, although the canines seem a little larger than normal. Underneath it, to the left, Hinata can just about make out the edge of another one disappearing under the high collar of his flak vest.

As soon as she realizes what she’s looking at, Hinata immediately tries to convince herself that she hasn’t seen anything. Maybe Iruka just burned himself in the shower this morning.

“You’re all set,” Iruka says, turning back to Hinata. “Can I help you with anything else?”

Hinata ducks her head in a quick bow. “No!” she squeaks. “Thank you!”

She hightails it out of there as quickly as she can, which means she nearly runs over the Godaime Hokage in her haste. “Ah, good morning!” Hinata manages. Her face is so hot it feels like it’s going to melt off.

“Hinata, good to see you,” the Godaime says, smiling at her with what seems to be genuine enthusiasm. She must not have any meetings scheduled with the civilian council today. She’s flanked by Sakura and Kakashi, who give Hinata identical two-fingered waves. “Good work with our visitors, I’ve been meaning to let you know. We saw them off just now with no problems.”

“That’s great,” Hinata says, as that seems to be the only possible response she can give. “I’m glad I was able to help.” It’s probably ridiculous to feel a little sad that she didn’t get the chance to say goodbye to Sakura-san, but maybe that’s for the best.

The Godaime continues, “We’re reaching out to Minato about the particulars, if you follow.” Presumably she means the existence of Uzumaki Naruto; Hinata nods in acknowledgement. “Great. Yamanaka-sama mentioned in her report this morning that your presence elicited a particularly favorable response from the subject in question. There could be some personality compatibility there that we might need to exploit if we have to follow up in Uzushiogakure.”

Hinata thinks of and then immediately rejects four possible responses. She settles on, “I will provide assistance in any way that I can to my village,” which seems appropriately non-committed to the specifics.

“Obviously we’ll need to make sure your husband doesn't feel the need to rip out anybody’s liver, but we can work out the details once we know more,” the Godaime says blithely. 

Hinata manages an awkward, stuttered chuckle. Somehow that story feels even more embarrassing now that she remembers that the Godaime had been there to witness it, and had in fact promoted Sasuke to chunin afterwards. 

“I’ll need to meet with you to discuss your impressions--can you put together a quick report for me?” the Godaime asks. Her mind is clearly already moving on to other business; in the middle of her sentence she starts making for the stairs up to her office. “Sakura has my schedule for the next week, you can arrange it with her. Kakashi, where do you think you’re going?”

Kakashi pauses in the act of slinking out the front door of the building. “I have to water my fern,” he says, his single visible eye blinking innocently.

“Nice try,” the Godaime says. “I know better than to give you a week to weasel out of writing a report. My office, now.”

She and Kakashi disappear up the stairs, Kakashi at a slow shuffle, presumably in deference to the fact that the Godaime is half his size. Sakura rifles through the mess of scrolls and notebooks piled in her arms. “I’ve got her calendar--ah, here it is--uh, her only real availability is Friday morning at nine, is that okay?”

“That’s fine,” Hinata says. “How did it go, this morning?”

Sakura gives an elaborate shrug as she scribbles in the notebook splayed open in the crook of her left elbow. “Fine. The Rinnegan’s portal-opening is not exactly what I would term a flashy jutsu. They were there one second and gone the next. Or are you really asking how it went last night? Because that was also fine, if a little sad. I did my best to explain compulsory heterosexuality to Muscles-Me and Sasuke sat there as a shining example of why I’m right.” Sakura slaps the notebook closed and slips her pen behind her ear. “How was dinner with Neji?”

Hinata bites her lip. “Did Shikamaru mention his cousin?”

Sakura sighs. “The Guardian? Yeah. God, it’s sad--he was so young! I wouldn’t wish Shikamaru on a normal kid, but another Nara should probably be okay. Besides, Neji will be able to instill an actual work ethic in her.” Sakura grins and leans forward to nudge Hinata with her shoulder. “Auntie Hinata sounds pretty cute, I think.”

Hinata flushes. “I think Shikamaru will be a good father,” she admits quietly. “He fell in love with Neji, didn’t he? And that turned out to be quite troublesome for him, but he never let it get in his way.”

“Guess you Hyuugas are worth it, huh?” Sakura says. She winks at Hinata and then jostles all the paperwork in her arms and groans. “I wish I had all those muscles right about now. Did you know that Muscles-Me punched a god in the face once?”

“Here,” Hinata says, pulling a dozen scrolls into her arms, “I’ll help you, I don’t have anywhere I need to be. What do you mean by a god?”

“I mean, the Mother of Chakra,” Sakura says, making for the stairs. “Like, a god . Speaking of which, apparently Mrs. Fishcake almost married somebody on the moon. Did you know that there are shinobi on the moon? One of them is in love with you.”

Hinata, trailing behind her, can’t quite bite back her reflexive moan.

“Don’t worry, I got all the details,” Sakura assures her. “If that creep comes for you, I know exactly how we’re gonna kick his ass. Unfortunately, it’s not totally clear to me if he’s human, so I’m not sure he has a liver. Sasuke’s trademark move might not be effective. We’ll have to improvise that bit.”

~

Although she’d told him about the Rinnegan right away--it was the only way to distract Sasuke from immediately taking off into the night and Chidori-ing a hole through Sasuke-san--it takes Hinata a few weeks to build up her courage for the rest of the conversation she wants to have.

It feels like Hinata rolls back and forth for hours, but realistically it’s probably only twenty minutes before Sasuke heaves a long, full-bodied sigh and wrestles her into place, one hand on the back of her head and the other on the ball of her shoulder. “What is it,” he says flatly, once she’s been tucked in against him, her temple against his shoulder and one of her knees crooked between his. 

Even though she’s always found it much easier to talk to Sasuke in the dark, especially when they’re snuggled into bed and he can’t look at her directly, Hinata feels a pulse of preemptive anxiety. But she still manages to open her mouth and whisper, “The Rinnegan,” before her throat tightens up enough to choke the rest of her words back.

Sasuke’s shoulder tenses, jostling her head. “Ah,” he says, and then nothing else.

“If it requires Hagoromo’s chakra, then,” and Hinata chews the inside of her mouth, trying to think of how to say it. “Then, it’s not--it’s not like we could, could we? Even if we wanted to. We know that they wouldn’t have it. We’re sure of it.”

Sasuke says nothing for long enough that Hinata begins to feel dizzy. She feels so incredibly foolish for bringing this up. It had been a foundational tenet of their marriage that they would never give the elders the satisfaction.

But Hinata wants, now. She wants in a way that she hadn’t let herself before. She wants badly enough to actually have this conversation with Sasuke, even though she’s so anxious it feels like her teeth are going to rattle out of her skull.

Abruptly, the world tilts as Sasuke rolls them over. Hinata throws her arms around his neck to keep him from hitting his head on the wall and they lose most of the blankets. His Sharingan is active, Hinata notices, and for a second she’s worried that Sasuke has spied some threat that she hasn’t--he’s always so fast --but before her heart rate has more than half a second to speed up, he murmurs, “What happened to no little rabbits?” and she realizes that this isn't a response to a threat.

The tomoe of his Sharingan spin, hypnotically slow.

“I think I want a baby,” Hinata whispers. Her heart feels like it’s beating in her throat, between her teeth. If she opens her mouth widely enough, Sasuke’s Sharingan will probably be able to see it there. “I’m sorry. I know we agreed we wouldn’t.”

“We were kids, full of spite,” Sasuke says quietly. “Things are different now.”

“No Rinnegan,” Hinata says.

“Rinnegan’s off the table,” Sasuke agrees. “You’re different, now. You told those ancient skeletons to fuck off when they tried to force Hanabi to marry your cousin.”

“You’re different, too,” Hinata says softly, running her thumb under his ear and along his sideburn. “You’re not as reckless, trying to prove yourself with all of those dangerous S-ranks. And your relationship with your parents is better.”

“Hard for it to get worse,” Sasuke says, but it’s spoken absently. His eyes are on her mouth now. He leans down, with predatory slowness, and kisses her. His breath is hot. He tastes like toothpaste and Hinata’s rosehip lip balm and he kisses her like he wants to eat the whole of her mouth in the same mindless, consuming way a raging fire tears through a forest. His arms are firmly locked around her. She can feel from the way that the skin of her nose prickles that his eyes are open and he’s still watching her.

Hinata winds her left leg around his hip and the right one around his calf. For a second she’s distracted by how deliciously heavy he feels, pressing down between her thighs, and then she uses her leverage to roll them back, so he’s pinned underneath her and no one is in danger of concussing themselves on a wall.

“Sasuke,” Hinata whispers between kisses, pulling at the tie of his yukata, “I think I’d like a baby. Please.”

Sasuke pushes her back a little and holds her head firmly in place between his two hot palms. His eyes are still red, glowing like twin coals. His expression is a jumble of things, all scared and determined and disbelieving and still somehow full of love. He loves Hinata so much that it’s almost gravitational in its force. She feels the corresponding tug pinching at her chest. She wants to eat him whole. 

“Yes,” Sasuke says roughly, and then he pulls her down for another burning kiss.