"Where did you find it?"

She wrinkled her nose, squished her eyes shut, tried to remember, tried to see it in her mind. There was nothing there, however. There was only the waking from a dream turned nightmare, the tears on her cheeks in the dark cut in half by the moonlight's sharp slice through her room and the fragility of the paper folds in her hand.

"I don't know."

It remained miraculous all the same where they held it together between their four pudgy dirty palms.

Sasuke smiled, straightened the paper crane's lopsided little head and looked up to find her looking at him again, like she had seen him before in a dream or a nightmare or both.

"I like it." He said. He meant that he loved it, but she understood anyway.

She smiled.

"What do you mean?" In her chest something was heaving, like the dying breaths of an animal near death. It took her a minute to realize it was her own lungs trying and trying again to breathe and failing.

It was chilly, despite the warm weather of the last few days. Still, she didn't think that was what made the goosebumps rise in protest across her skin.

His dark eyes examined her in the light of the moon, too tired and too old for his young face. "I came… to tell you I am leaving."

Her lips parted in reply, though nothing came out.

In her head the shriek was too loud for any other thought.

NO.

The warning bell woke her, with its pattern of threes. Like the wind chimes in summer breezes it rang, and rang and rang. One ring for danger, two rings for deployment, three for defenses. Hinata barely snatched the crane from under her pillow before a maid was in her bedroom, dragging her out.

Outside the world was a black pitch, starless but for the one shining orb that was the moon. It glimmered and shone, too like a Hyuuga eye for her not to shiver beneath it's gaze, even as she was dragged down the maze of hallways of her family's estate.

"What has happened?" She breathed it out in a huff as she was bustled into the cellars that would hide her and her sister should an enemy plow through their defenses. "What's happening?" And the fear tinged her voice a note too sharp to ignore.

The maid's eyes were sad as she bustled her and the crying thing that was Hanabi into the dark of the cellar's safety.

"An Uchiha boy has gone mad… their Clan has been obliterated."

When the lid of the cellar was placed upon the exit, blocking out all light Hinata barely noticed. She lay down on the cold hard ground, trying to fathom how one could die as she surely just had and still feel alive.

It took years to grow her hair into the mantle it became. Years of combing it gently in the mornings, of watching it reach her chin, her collarbone, her shoulder and down in a cascade of black.

Somehow it became a way to keep track of time.

When he comes back. I will cut it.

"I don't know how you do it." Kiba laughed, watching as she sat cross legged and supple on the other side of the fire's light. "Fighting with that mane seems like a hazard to me."

Hinata endured the teasing with the same grace and ease she endured many things at the hands of her team, offering a wan smile as she combed. "I hardly notice it, Kiba-kun."

At Kiba's side Akamaru growled in consternation at the breeze through the trees, eyeing the darkness beyond their fire with suspicious eyes.

"Akamaru will you stop it? We're in the middle of nowhere. There's nothing here. You're getting old, furball." Kiba grunted, patting his side hard.

On his other side Shino examined the woods once more with care, a frown he couldn't quite erase smudging the smoothness of his brow.

"Shino?" Hinata paused her brushing, reaching back to place the ivory handled brush on the log she was using to lean against only to freeze at the feel of something small meeting her fingers.

"I don't know what it is." He admitted gently. "But I keep thinking I…" He paused, as if listening intently to something in the distance before letting out a sigh. "No, nevermind."

"You're both too tense." Kiba grumbled, thumbing back towards the merchant hiding in his tent who they were escorting through the wild's between villages. "This is easy money. Nothing is out here."

Hinata did not answer, staring at the tiny black crane sitting on the log behind her, it's black smooth surface familiar as her name. It's only imperfection the red and white spheres of the Uchiha fan and the yellow glimmer of the Hyuuga flame that marked it.

Before either of her friends could see it, she snatched it and faced away from the shadows with her heart in her throat.

They said that he had not wept. They said that his unnatural stillness had been more unnerving even than the clean slices his older brother had made in all of his Clan.

They lied, however. Sasuke had wept. He had wept and wept until all his tears were gone, long before anyone found him. There were no more to be had.

Perhaps it might have looked like a lack of mourning to others but to her.

To her it was all the worse.

She found him days after, near the pond in the grassy roots of a knotted hazelnut tree. Curled on his side too small to be real. Too fragile to be strong.

His name lingered at the edges of her mouth, where her lips trembled and her breath hitched. In the end she said nothing. There were no tools in her arsenal to communicate the depth of her despair at the thought of his death, the ravaging relief to hear of his survival and then the aching burn of desperation as she fought to find him with time trickling ever onward, torturing her with it's slowness.

Methodically she slid down on her side, watching as a ladybug in a red and black shroud hunted down aphids on the stalks of grass in the miniature field between their faces.

It took a moment for his gaze to go from the ladybug to her, shifting focus with a sluggish pain she understood. The blink he offered was slow, his mouth still even as recognition dimly pulsed in his eyes and faded with a breath.

Mouth parting, Hinata reached out, pressing her sticky young palm to his cheek as her eyes flooded with tears blurring all the world.

When she blinked, releasing the salted water from her eyes she gasped. The lady bug had fluttered away, the red and black splotch she had gazed upon was his iris, rotating in elegant swirls as he studied her back.

"H...Hina-" The croak of his voice was enough to press her forehead to his, closing herself off from the red eyes that had taken away her favorite night sky.

"I am here." Tangling her limbs with his, letting him gasp in the smell of her as his grip tightened she squeezed and squeezed and squeezed.

"Oh, Sasuke I am here."

"Don't leave."

Don't leave me behind.

Don't leave me.

His face didn't change at her words, her supplication, demand, wish.

"You will forget me." He raised his chin, searched her face and seemed to find nothing that changed his mind. "You belong here."

"N-no." It wasn't true, her no. She did belong. Here was her sister, her clan, her friends. What she had meant was no.

There would be no forgetting, for her.

"You are in my way." He continued, walking forward a step across the paving stones that lined the cherry blossom tree's base. "Like that idiot dobe...like Sakura. You're all the same."

She flinched from this, the shake forcing the tears she had held back to spill over her face. "I…" Hinata breathed, pressing her hands to her stomach where a pain was crawling up into her chest and closed her eyes.

"Don't lie. At least don't lie to me."

His hands took hers, forced something fragile into her palm and when she finally looked down she found the crane there, staring questioningly at her face.

"You will forget me." He whispered it, moving to close her fingers over the tiny delicate bird.

"I don't want it." The shove she gave sent him back a step, and for a second the mask so carefully held on his face cracked as his eyes flickered with surprise.

"Take it." It ached, forcing her weak legs to walk back to her house, to the empty room and the endless training that would continue without pause despite his departure. On the surface nothing would change.

Even when everything would.

When she glanced back, he was gone and the crane so precious to her with him. All she could do was sit weeping beneath the boughs of the sakura tree, feeling horribly like she had done this kind of breaking before.

"How can you possibly like that stupid idiot?"

Hinata hid her face, as she always did when this subject came to mind. It occurred more and more of late. His eyes always noting when her face flinched and brightened to a rosy glow, when her eyes lingered on Naruto's back as he gave a riotous laugh.

"Don't pretend." Hinata threw back, trying and failing to match his teasing with her own. "You like how hard he tries."

Sasuke let his mouth twist in disdain, folding his arms behind himself where he lay on the giant tree branch. Hinata sat with her legs draped across his own, hiding her face not just from him but from the sun that shone down upon them, mottling their faces in shade and light in splotches.

"Hina… he is so annoying."

"Th...that's so mean. He is not."

"He never shuts up."

"You never talk."

"I'm talking now." Defensive, he lifted onto his elbows, jostling her leg with his own sharply. "I'm literally-"

"Ouch." Hinata's whimper escaped before she could snatch it back and just as quickly Sasuke was grabbing at her ankle.

"Ouch?" His grip remained, even as her fingers tried to flutter over his in an attempt to dislodge him. "What ouch?"

"Nothing." It was the worst thing to say, and caused the inevitable tug of his hand over her pants, forcing her baggy training clothes up so the first of the bruises and welts showed.

They zig zagged and rose high, disappearing above the knee and to her thigh, hidden when she shoved the fabric back down.

"Sa-Sasu-kun. Don't."

"You said he had stopped." Sasuke snapped, lifting his gaze from her quickly retreating legs to her face. "You said."

"G… Grandfather rarely trains me now- I just… I just...made a mistake and-"

It had been awhile. Their young innocent touches as children had begun to fade, there was the sense of being too close, the awareness of each other's scent, the heady rush of blood to the head when they felt each other's breath.

So his grip on her chin, the stubborn set of his mouth, the glimmer of darkness in his eye flicking from black to red and back stunned her heart to silence. It opened a pit in her stomach and made her wonder what it would feel like they remained as they were, breathing each other's air.

"One day… he will regret this."

It was a bad time to joke, and Hinata had never been one to have a funny bone, but the nerves set her tongue loose and she smiled wanly. "I don't think Grandfather knows how to regret."

It was too adult a response that came from his mouth, too savage to ignore.

"I will teach him."

In bed that night she looked upon their crane on the palm of her hand. He had passed it to her wordlessly, for it would soothe her as it had for years soothed him after his brother inflicted his less visible wounds. And though it's little cocked head did calm the ache of her legs, and the fluttering terror that was the memory of Sasuke's face so close to hers it could not make her fall asleep.

In Hinata's mind she could see only Sasuke's ebony gaze, it's lightless honest hate marring the once star filled black.

And she felt, distinctly how this might be the start of losing a war she didn't know how to fight.

It took more of her training than she wanted to admit, sneaking away from her team. Akamaru alone was a trick and a half, but she was not made for recon for nothing.

Through the dark, with her eyes lined with the lace that was her Byakugan veins she plodded, hiding neither her chakra nor her tracks. At her wrists the looseness only adrenaline can bring threatened to make her aim useless despite her gifted eyes. It was unnerving how his presence could create such a huge disadvantage in a fight.

Not that it mattered… Even as she walked, with kunai ring loosely hugging the tips of her fingers she knew better than to think she would fight him. Neither her will nor ability were up to the task.

In the dark green of the forest, with the smears of blue moonlight his gaze was too bright to be ignored, even when her Byakugan relaxed. Hidden as he was by the shadows he could have been a rose bush, sparkling with dew in the dark.

One step into the light brightened his pale face, destroying the hallucination as he examined her with something like curiosity.

He had grown taller than her by a head, shoulders broad where before his sweaters had fit her comfortably on cold days.

"What are you doing out here, Hyuuga?" When he spoke Hinata started to hear the depth of his voice, the timbre so unlike the little boy's voice she remembered. Mouth dry she clenched her fists at her sides to hide the tremble.

"We… are not hunting you, if that is what you fear."

Sasuke's chin raised slightly, the smirk he offered chilly as the midnight breeze. "I am not afraid of that, believe me."

The insult flushed blood into her cheeks, heating her ears as she examined him, unaware that on the other side those crimson eyes were taking her apart. Where a little girl fluttered through his memory this creature was made of curves and elegance. Long neck held high and back straight, her pale eyes glowed an eerie luminous calm. If she was frightened, she did not show it.

Opening her palm before her to reveal the crane she frowned slightly, aware of his languid approach. "Why did you give me this?"

"I care not to carry it any longer." Sasuke explained, and when he reached out he marvelled that she did not startle back. He lifted a lock of her dark hair, examining it's long strands at the tips of his fingers.

"I…" Hinata breathed, clawing desperately at her determination to stay calm as he shifted his red gaze back to her face. "I told you I did not want it, last time we..."

Sasuke's lips turned then slowly into something of a smile that hurt worse than anything he could have said. She was referring, he knew to the time when he had wandered to her family's compound, informing her against his better judgement of his defection to Orochimaru and the severing of their ties.

Unlike Sakura's painfilled supplications, Hinata's shove had burned where the pressure of her hand had landed on his chest. It sunk deep even as he glanced back to look at the glittering lights of the place he had once called home before turning away with intentions never to return.

"Does it hurt?" He explored her face, noting all the fullness of her mouth, the graceful curve of her jaw, the brightness of her cheeks.

"W..what?"

"When you remember me?"

It had been, he had to admit, like being struck by a falling star seeing her through the pillars of the trees. He had known it was her inexplicably. The way she cocked her head, the way she fiddled endlessly with her kunai, with the ends of her hair, with the tips of her bangs.

There were few enough beautiful things in his life for him to recognize when he bumped into a long treasured old memory made new.

In the silence he dared to slide a hand over the curve of her cheek, to feel the pulsing blood at her neck beneath his thumb.

Hinata could not hide her shiver as her eyes closed, and although a part of her whispered that she was naive or foolish or both she could not help but answer honestly, even in her vulnerability.

"Always."

Sasuke breathed in deep, felt her replying sigh and let his gaze linger on her mouth. "Yet you do not ask me to return home."

"I know better." She said. She meant that she knew him, but he understood anyway.

He smiled.

"I know you really like him."

They had not touched in months. The idea of his hand on her body, on her hand even frightened her in a way she had never feared before. With their feet in the pond's water she measured the varying lengths and realized he was taller than her by several inches.

The beginning of many differences.

Sasuke didn't have to say who he was referring to. There was only ever one option, and Hinata found herself strangely unperturbed by his statement. They had discussed it so often it hardly made her flinch anymore.

"You like him too." She replied easily, tapping her toes together. "Not the same, but you know what I mean."

Sasuke didn't even bother getting riled up at the thought of what she accidently implied before she corrected her statement. There was a heaviness in his heart that left no room for being indignant.

With eyes focused on their bare feet in the shimmering water of the pond in late evening he swallowed hard and whispered, "He should like you too, one day. If you ever manage to talk to him."

Hinata blinked at him over her shoulder then, puzzled. "What?"

"That idiot. Naruto. You know who I'm talking about." Sasuke grumbled, tapping her foot harder than usual with his own. "I'm saying… if you ever do get over it enough to just talk to him he will like you."

Lips parting as she thought, Hinata squinted at him through the haze of the sun. "No he wouldn't."

"Don't be stupid." Sasuke's grunt was more than his usual mild vexation, savage in it's delivery. "He would. He doesn't even know you're capable of talking at this point, probably."

Still squinting, Hinata frowned. "Sasu-kun, I can't talk to him. He's a boy-"

"I'm a boy." Sasuke snapped, surprising her again.

"I… I know, but… but you're different than-"

"How?" Sasuke snapped, eyes down. "How am I different?"

Uncertain now, for this was a conversation she had never thought to have Hinata shifted, sitting up from her slouch. "I...I don't know, you're… you're...you're my Sasuke."

His dark eyes pierced her when they finally lifted. "Am I?"

Her shaky breath was the only reply she could offer, dumbfounded as she was by the hurt on his face, so clear it may as well have been a blooming bruise on his skin.

"Sasu-kun, I-"

"He would like you, Hinata." Sasuke interrupted, before she could say something that would hurt all the worse. "Just talk to him. Just say something."

It was the last conversation they had, that summer. When Itachi found him alone shortly after on a mission that should have been simple Hinata never would have guessed it would end the Sasuke she knew.

There was nothing poetic about the war. All the poems had lied, all the glory gone. There was only death.

"Get down!"

The volley of exploding tags threw more than just dirt and debris. Blood and bone, screams and heat. Hinata winced, lifting to her knees to ease the pain of her lungs trying to breathe through the rib she was fairly sure had been cracked by the impact.

"Damnit, Hinata." Neji's hand on her arm had her on her feet before she knew which way was up. "Medic!"

"I'm fine." Hinata frowned then, wondering if this was true. Her voice echoed from a great distance to her ears, ricocheting like the blast through her head. "I just need to catch my breath."

"Shut up." Neji said, his pale gaze shooting around them before waving Tenten over. "I think she busted a rib."

"Forget the rib." Tenten pushed Hinata's hair back, revealing the bleeding mess that was her forehead. "She took something to the head."

"Hinata." Neji took his cousin's chin in his hand. "Hinata, can you hear me?"

But Hinata could not.

In the distance the ten tails raged, before it, Naruto crumbled.

Soon, he would take something to the heart.

There were moments when choices were movement, when a decision manifested as it was made. In the heat and chaos, with her body aching and in her ears nothing but a high pitched screaming she moved.

She was not the only one.

"Why don't you talk to me at school?"

Sasuke made a noise like a scoff or a cough or a choke. It made her laugh, despite the fact it showed his distress at her question.

The rain trickled from the branches of the trees, rained upon their heads, soaked their skin and dripped down their chin, and still they lingered, pressed together at the base of the hazelnut tree.

"I can't." Sasuke finally managed, watching as her laughter quieted to a soft smile of understanding. "I...just can't." The silent I am sorry lingered between them like a hot breath and she shrugged her shoulders as she hugged her knees to her chest.

"It's okay." She admitted, thinking of sitting next to him in class, of having his dark gaze flick to her when someone said something funny, of the laugh that would bubble in her throat and how much she would have to work to staunch it. "I was just wondering."

"They all want something from me." He whispered then, when the pause only sang with the tip tap hush of the spring rain. "Everyone."

Hinata lay her head down on her arms, pale eyes watching as he ripped up bits of grass at the roots, tossing them aside without paying attention.

"I don't." She lied, hopeful that he might believe her. Sasuke slid his gaze to hers, his lashes heavy with the rain and she watched as the raindrop grew fat at the corners of his eyes before falling like tears but so unlike all at once, especially as he smiled.

"Liar."

"I don't!"

"No? You want nothing at all?" He leaned forward then, bopping her nose with his finger and making her swat at his hand, her giggle cut off by the sudden tangle of his fingers in her hair at the base of her neck and the quiet study he suddenly made of her face.

"Just… be my friend." The words came out of her unbidden, offered like a present in the hush. "Just stay."

It was the one request he wanted to hear, and the one he would not be able to grant. Sighing he turned away, pushing himself to his feet before reaching down for her hand. He had never once spoken about the itch he felt beneath his skin, the ticking count down of what he could not name but which he felt was a pull to the wild dark places where his brother hid, where power beckoned. Still, despite his lack of articulation, she had sensed it enough to request this one thing.

"Perhaps I will just come back." He tried to joke, offering her a wayward smile. Hinata allowed herself to laugh, despite the feeling that it was not like him to joke and not like him to lie.

They told him she died in passing.

"It rallied the Allied forces, I heard." In the dark he had to tell who spoke by the voice. Karin's forceful femininity, Suigetsu's gravelly tones, Jugo's warm depth. Karin continued, unperturbed.

"There's a rumor that she was the sweetheart of the nine tails." Her hands stopped where they moved to replace the dressing across Sasuke's eyes, his grip on her wrist harder than it had been in some while.

"Who told you this?"

It had been a test nearly unbearable, being blind. More than once the listlessness of the darkness threatened to consume his sanity but for the fact that at the other end of the black a great strength lay.

Now he was unsure if anything much else existed, besides the murky dark.

"They're… talking about it everywhere." Karin began, tugging feebly on his grip, uncertain with their rocky history still fresh on her mind. "It took her and her cousin down. The handsome one with the serious face. The Nine Tails was a force to reckon with, after the fact."

Sasuke understood.

With the cold spreading in his chest, and the tingling at his fingertips he could feel the chaos starting to build beneath his skin, desperate to get out.

Even if finding his brother's reanimated body had not changed the trajectory of his life, this one bit of news would have derailed it enough.

"We're heading out at dawn."

There was blood he had to shed.

"Hina-chan."

"Sasu-kun."

Sing song memories, of bubbles, of ponds, of petals and warm fires, of dirty little hands, of the soft smell of soap at the nape of each other's necks where they nestled together when one or the other ached by the beatings of nightmares, or training or memories.

"Am I your best friend?"

Hinata's laugh, like crystals jostling together as it rang.

"Of course, silly."

She was the only one who was allowed to think him silly, ever, anytime.

It didn't seem to matter that the blood was splattered and cleaned and done with. Their wounds had been savage, the healing was more so and yet he remained ever quiet, looking off to a distant place Naruto could never understand.

"Why would you not want to come back?" He shook his head. "Sasuke, you've paid your dues. Come back to Konoha… come home."

The smile offered was small, and more like the young Sasuke of Naruto's memory than he had cause to remember seeing in many years. It smarted, how much it relieved Naruto to see such a simple upturn of lips.

"I always meant to ask you something." Sasuke began, uncertain. Soon, Naruto would begin the journey back to the place where the dead would be buried. The graveyard would be rife with the people he knew, and had a right to mourn. There was no place for Sasuke there, among the honourable fallen.

He would have to do his own mourning elsewhere, in the shadows of the trees when her voice would echo in his memory.

"Always answering questions with more questions." Naruto sighed, hands on hips as he realized he wasn't going to get a reason why his friend wouldn't return home. "Fine. What is it?"

"Did she speak to you, finally?" It took a moment for Sasuke to find it in himself to say her name, to clear the confusion from Naruto's face.

"Hinata, I mean."

Naruto's blue eyes froze, stunned to stillness on his face as he breathed.

"You knew too? How did…?" He bowed his head, sighing hard. "I am..such an idiot."

Sasuke waited, letting him absorb the length and breath that had been Hinata Hyuuga's unspoken affection. It ached, however to hold his breath and let the seconds tick by without a proper answer. It stung to even say her name.

"If only for that, I wish you would come back home with me." Naruto whispered, looking up to reveal a face too young for the weight on his shoulders. "If only to help me through it."

Sasuke's gaze flickered to Sakura in the background, busy like the rest packing up camp, organizing the chaos of a battered military back to their homeland.

"You have all the help you need." And, more importantly, there was no way he would be able to stand there listening to a eulogy that spoke of a girl he would never be able to face again.

"No, you don't get it." Naruto shook his head. "I have to say no to her… I can't... " He swallowed, bowed his head again and breathed hard.

"You know how I have felt about Sakura all along. How do I turn down someone like Hinata, though?"

Perhaps it was the moment when the light of the sun splintered the world to a thousand pieces, coming over the edges of the trees to set everything on fire with it's glow. Perhaps it was that the light had come back when he had thought it was gone forever, blinding in it's roaring shine. Either day, Sasuke didn't move… dared not breathe, even as he whispered.

"She's alive?"

Naruto rubbed at his neck hard. "It was a close call. Neji took the brunt of it. Sakura and the team she had working with her lost her twice, Neji once. The Hyuuga had been working non stop all that morning, shielding most of us from the Ten tails. I was a goner." He sighed heavy, looking up to find Sasuke's dark eyes wide. "She and Neji… they saved my life. Listening to Sakura trying to keep them alive nearly ended me again." He smiled. "But even after, when I was feeling the most like giving up Hinata was so angry at me."

"I nearly gave my life, for yours. That's what she told me. And you're just moping?"

"You would be a fool to say no to her." Sasuke breathed, unsure if he was speaking to Naruto or himself.

"You've always said I was kind of dumb." Naruto smirked gently, reading something of the beautiful catastrophe happening on his friend's face. "But you know, it takes one to know one."

It annoyed Sasuke to no end that despite everything, despite all his inadequacies Naruto was almost always right.

Besides the day he found them, all in heaps of blood and death he never cried. His mother's body had drawn all the tears from him in a rush, had swelled his eyelids to near closing and hid the red of the woken sharingan so that no one knew for days what he had become.

Still, Hinata would find him on occasion sitting silent as the trees, looking out to a place she could not see even with her pale eyes.

Those days, even in the privacy of their hazelnut grove he would not speak. It was the way he mourned, that silence. She understood it's depth and thickness, felt it like a blanket around her shoulders she loathed and loved.

It was hard to watch him hurting. Sitting at the edges of his world, she would count ladybugs, collect hazelnuts to roast in the fires they had learned to set in the sandy flatness of the pond's edge, worked to carve holes where they could hide their favorite shiny stones.

At the end of those long days he would come back, waking from a slumber deeper than regular sleep, his lips bitten raw, his eyes sad.

"Sorry," He would mutter, and it would encompass all of it. The long hours of ignoring her, the chilly silence of his countenance, the wasted time.

Hinata would shrug and smile blandly, she had felt such mourning herself before. "You came back."

He always did.

That was what mattered.

Taka flew low on the clouds, flaring wings to land upon the arm of the Hokage's outstretched arm.

The scroll was concise as always, a scrap of paper barely an inch wide. There were only a few words on it.

I'm coming back.