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Madly

"It is only easier for a time, and then, it suddenly isn't." - Hyuuga Hinata goes blind. Uchiha Sasuke goes mad. Some lies remain unseen.

They remove the bandages.

For a single, irrational moment, they are genin again – the edges of Hinata's hair brushing her jaw, her index fingers tapping together in hesitance, the toe of her boot digging into the dirt, and he – he doesn't even know her name.

There was never truly a peaceful time he could remember but maybe, just maybe, that was it.

It's a lie he tells himself most nights because it's easier than putting to words the idea that a person could be his peace – it's not something he even knows on a conscious level, only with his hands and his mouth and his heart – only by touch has he ever known her peace.

So it shouldn't matter that her eyes are dead.

(It shouldn't, but it does.)

"Hinata," he says, low and cautious, because cautious is familiar, even with her – especially with her – and they are no longer genin, and she – she is the woman he loves, with her dark hair brushing the small of her back and her neatly folded hands resting in her lap.

His wife blinks up at him – but not at him. At his chin, her gaze hovering somewhat left. She smiles reassuringly.

Blind, they had said.

(She wouldn't be the only one for long.)

He leads her from the hospital they have all spent too many years dying in – but then, that is the end of all shinobi.

Dead or blind.

It is not always such an obvious choice.

The last thing she saw was the tip of a kunai as it punctured her pupil. Sometimes, she still sees it in her dreams, though such dreams are less and less as time goes by, and she thinks maybe it isn't because it is any less haunting but simply because she can no longer recall what a kunai is supposed to look like.

She has long forgotten her attackers' faces.

When she wakes from these dreams, she unconsciously touches her shaking fingers to the harsh ridges around her eyes. They don't recede – it is not the Byakugan.

And Hinata learned long ago that all scars linger.

Hinata folds her knees beneath her and angles her body low – a deep, reserved bow – her hair slipping over her shoulder like a promise she forgot to keep.

"I warned you," Hiashi says on a sigh, more anger than defeat in his voice, and somehow, that is still familiar.

He did warn her, a million times over. But she is shinobi. Or at least, she was. And Hinata loves her village. She loves her clan. From the very beginning, Hinata knew (perhaps better than anyone) what she might lose to this life, this duty, but nothing could have stopped her from taking that mission, and if it's just her eyes she loses, then she can live with that (at least, she tells herself this, over and over and over and –

Sometimes it is easier to pretend she never saw at all.

This world, and the next. She never saw any of it.

It is only easier for a time, and then, it suddenly isn't).

"The Hyuuga protect that which is theirs," Hiashi reminds her, and she knows the nin who attacked her are dead, the secrets her eyes had known, destroyed.

But it is reassurance and accusation in equal measure, because Hinata has not been a Hyuuga for many years now, and maybe that changes everything, or nothing at all. She isn't sure anymore.

She only knows that she is no longer 'theirs' as he so calls it, and somehow that hurts worse than her blindness ever could (in the end, she had always thought to remain a Hyuuga, even when she wasn't).

Still, she has nothing to say, because her father is right (in all the wrong ways) and beside her, she can hear the rustle of cloth that tells her Sasuke is bunching his hands in his kimono.

She has already given up her right to Head of House. What more is this?

(It is so, so much more, but then –

She never sees the way her father's hand grips his tea cup – like the last frost of winter.

And Sasuke never tells her.)

She takes to painting.

One day, Sasuke returns home with their infant daughter in his arms, her tiny hands grasping for his face, and he stills in the threshold of their home, gaze pinned to Hinata.

Something tells him this is only the beginning (or maybe the end), and a cut of light is breaking through the window, landing in slants upon her work (too much red, he thinks, and maybe there's a reason to that) as the door slides shut behind him.

She turns in sudden surprise, her eyes – still white, always white, even when they bled – slightly widened and off-center. She is looking at his shoulder, and this he is used to.

"Where were you?" she asks, brows furrowed slightly – but it is not concern on her face. There is nothing there these days, anyway.

"At Naruto's," he lies.

I stood outside holding our daughter for nearly an hour trying not to scream, he doesn't say.

Hinata hums her acknowledgement, and then a hesitant smile flutters her lips. "Hotaru," she greets, arms opened for the young girl, and Sasuke moves to deposit the squirming child into his wife's hold. It is an awkward adjustment of limbs, Hinata's hand grasping for his elbow when she meant for Hotaru's leg, her fingers trying to find purchase along her daughter's back and throughout this Sasuke watches her face – it is more discomfort than anything, even when she presses the child's face to her neck and breathes her in. Hotaru's tiny hand curls in her hair and Hinata grunts at the unexpected tug.

Eventually, a smile graces her face, but Sasuke is too busy studying her painting to see it.

If he stares long enough, it might start to look familiar.

But this too is a lie.

She still takes tea with her sister.

Hanabi quietly watches as Hinata pours her a cup, listening intently to discern when to stop, her fingers threading through the air as though to touch sound.

"How is father?" Hinata asks, setting the pot down.

Hanabi stares at her sister's white, white eyes, lips thinning as she considers. "He misses you," she answers finally, her hands gripping her knees through her kimono.

Hinata offers a dull smile, and Hanabi doesn't need the Byakugan to see through it. "He doesn't," Hinata says without doubt, taking a sip of her tea. "But it is a lovely lie, Hanabi."

Her mouth opens, and air rushes through, and maybe something else – something more – but not enough. "I – "

"Your tea is getting cold," her sister says, motioning to the general vicinity of her cup.

Hanabi does not tell her it is overflowed.

She drinks it anyway.

Sometimes, it seems like she is still wrapped in bandages.

The world is vibrant and thrumming, at the edge of her fingertips, and yet –

Hinata is still gauze-bound and bleeding.

"Fight," he commands in a low breath.

Hinata stays motionless, her fingers curling around the handle of her kunai. "Sasuke…"

He doesn't let her finish, flashing toward her with his katana drawn. In the rush of air that passes between them, she raises her kunai on instinct, but she can't gauge his angle, and when their blades connect, she puts too much weight to her left, her right wrist buckling – a keening whistle of steel on steel, and his katana slices across her forearm. She cries out, pushing him off, jumping back to cradle her arm.

"Sasuke, what are you – "

"I said 'fight'." It isn't shouted, barely breathed even, but it sets her spine to shivering, because she knows that voice (knows it never to be directed to her and she wonders if maybe he hasn't gone a little mad).

Hinata braces her feet in the dirt. "Please, I'm not ready to – "

Again he rushes toward her, silent and deadly. Intent. She barely blocks him again.

"Aren't you shinobi?" This time it is a shout, his face inches from hers, close enough that she can feel his hot breath against her cheeks.

She swallows thickly. "I'm not…I'm not – " but she cannot bring herself to finish.

Sasuke frowns, deep and harsh, and then he knocks her kunai away, his free hand grabbing her wrist and yanking her toward him as he spins them, but she's yelping in surprise, her feet stumbling through the grass and she reflexively yanks back, toppling them to the ground where they stay for long moments just breathing.

Just sucking sweet air into their lungs and trying not to choke on it.

Sasuke is braced above her, one elbow holding his weight over her, his other hand still gripping her wrist tightly. Their weapons are strewn along the ground a few feet away. Hinata squirms beneath him, breathless, her free hand reaching for him, grasping uselessly, fingers curling in his collar.

At one point, he was her steady anchor – her immovable point. But she is flailing now, and he is no north star.

Not in this darkness.

"Aren't you shinobi?" he asks again, still firm, still demanding, but the quake to his voice tells her all she needs to know.

"I'm pregnant," she confesses, the air leaving her lungs in one, instant rush. Her fingers tug along his collar, desperate for him, her fist in his grip shaking as her nails dig half moons into her palm.

Sasuke's head falls to her chest, his mouth hovering over her collar bone, and he undoes his bruising grip of her wrist to grasp at her hair, a single, ragged sob expelled into her skin.

"Sasuke…"

But then he is pushing away, sitting up as he retreats from her, and she lies deadly still in the grass next to him.

"You haven't answered my question."

Truth is, she's just running out of things to say. "I don't know anymore," she answers honestly.

Honest as honest as honest can be because –

She just doesn't know anymore.

His fingers digging into the dirt, Sasuke looks away.

(As though that matters anymore.)

She wakes to find Sasuke already gone from the bed. Hotaru is still sleeping soundly when she sits before her easel.

She grips her subtly rounded belly and paints a face she will never see.

"How's Hinata?" Naruto asks cautiously, bouncing Hotaru on his knee as she giggles maniacally. He chances a look at Sasuke beside him. He's decidedly not looking at him. Decidedly, because Sasuke wants him to know it means something. And not looking at him, because then he'd have to spill all the gruesome little details of his grief.

And that's just – just –

Not going to happen.

"She's fine." Sasuke crosses his arms. It's gotten so easy to lie (it comes naturally in a blind house – no one can really call you out for it – and he thinks maybe he's gotten too comfortable with that).

"She's not, Sasuke."

Well, fuck that, then.

"It doesn't matter. We're…we're…" He clamps his mouth shut and lets the words die in the air around them. Maybe they're better off that way.

"It so matters," Naruto counters, his knee stilling, even when Hotaru pouts in objection. "Of course it matters. I mean she's…she's blind now, and hell, her family won't even talk to her anymore, except Hanabi of course, but who knows how long that's going to last and really, it's not like she asked to be attacked, or didn't try her absolute damnedest to put those bastards down in the process and all this bullshit about cutting her off is fucking nuts – because haven't they been spouting that since she married you? – and you'd think that this would be the time to rally, to really get behind her, you know, show up for his oldest daughter, the bastard, because it's not like Hiashi didn't drive her away in the first place, I mean, we're not blind here, we all saw how – " and then he stops, maybe because he realizes what he says, or maybe he doesn't and just needs to breathe.

He's sure Naruto has a point in there somewhere but he doesn't exactly care anymore.

A sharp, tight breath beside him. "Sasuke, I didn't mean…"

"Just…shut up." He rubs at his temples. It doesn't lessen the noise. The noise in his head that hasn't stopped since Sakura showed up at his doorstep, panting, blood splattered across her chest, arms shaking in exhaustion or rage (he still isn't sure, they've always looked the same on Sakura), her unblinking eyes so, so green and ardent and sad when she had dropped her shoulders in defeat and whispered "It's Hinata".

That kind of noise doesn't ever die.

Sasuke gets up and yanks his door open. "Get out."

"Look, man, I'm just – "

"Get out."

Naruto looks at him a moment, and then he turns to Hotaru, ruffling her short, dark hair and planting a smacker on her cheek. "I'll see you next time, sweetheart," he says on a sigh. And then he sets her down. And then he leaves.

And then Sasuke is falling to his knees before his daughter and bundling her in his arms and –

And he has to remind himself that Hotaru has never had her mother's eyes.

Hinata waits at the window for Hanabi. She likes the warmth through the glass when the sun is high. Her sister is an hour late, or very nearly she reasons, her own hold on time already slipping, already inconsequential.

She doesn't tell time by daylight, or by seasons. She tells it by her slowly growing stomach, and the barren periods where Sasuke is distant from her.

She tells time by warmth and coldness and she is all at once drowning in both when Hanabi finally knocks on her door.

"I'm sorry," the younger woman says, gaze downcast, hands held primly together. "I cannot visit today, Hinata."

Hinata stands there in the warm sunlight of the open door, her hand resting along the threshold, and she closes her eyes (because some habits never die) and when she nods, she thinks she hears a sound from Hanabi – an arrested breath of air as damning as any words their father may have scripted for her.

Hanabi clutches at her chest, the tears sudden on her lids, even as she takes a step back.

But Hinata is only blind to the material, the superficial, the physical. She doesn't need her eyes to understand her sister, or her clan.

"You should go, Hanabi." It seems pointless to tell her she never bothered to set the tea anyway.

It was a foolish wish from the beginning.

"Father will be waiting for you."

Hinata closes the door before Hanabi can release her first sob, before she must wrap her arms around her sharp-boned, callous-palmed sister, before she sinks to the floor with her – because she knows she would stay there.

Down and down and down. There are less and less reasons to rise, these days.

Instead, she braces her back against the closed door and tries to remember Hanabi's smile.

It never comes.

More than wondering if the woman he married will ever again see him, Sasuke wonders if he will ever again see her.

Hotaru has asked for her favorite kimono.

It is Sakura's birthday, and they plan to go out, but Hotaru won't stop wailing, and Sasuke isn't home yet, and Hinata is kneeling before the closet, rounded belly peeking out from her robe, with reams of fabric in her hands that she doesn't recognize.

"The purple one, Mother."

Sasuke finds her like this, fingers curling into the sleeves of kimonos spread along their bedroom floor, her back like a scream, a curtain of hair covering her ghost-white face. She is shaking. Her mouth opens and closes as though to speak but there is only air.

Even still, she is drowning.

"Father likes the purple one," Hotaru whispers, finally quiet (as though she knows, but it's a secret) when he finds her standing in the threshold of their bedroom staring at the crouched form of her mother.

"I do," he answers stiffly.

Because there is nothing else to say.

Hotaru wears red that night.

"Does she have the Byakugan?" Hinata asks breathlessly, sweat lining her brow as she reaches feebly for her newborn babe from her position along the medical bed.

Ino turns to Sasuke with the wailing infant in her arms, pulling the mask from over her mouth. "Sasuke, she needs rest."

"Does she have the Byakugan?" Hinata repeats, shriller this time, attempting to push herself up along the pillows. Her legs are still trembling in the after-birth, her chest heaving.

Her blank, scarred eyes dart across the room and Sasuke has never wished for stillness like he has in this moment.

Ino frowns at him, even as she hands the newborn over, her jaw tight. "She needs rest." This time it's a command.

If only rest was so easy. If only they could sleep and sleep and never wake up.

To dream at will. Or maybe not at all.

He isn't sure which is better these days.

(He only wants to rest.)

Ino makes her way from the room and Sasuke stares down at his second daughter.

"Does she have…" Hinata is weary and unable to finish the question. Not that it matters.

Sayuri blinks open her pale, milky irises and stares up at him.

Later that night, while Hinata sleeps in the non-comfort of the hospital, curled into a near-ball with their tiny white-eyed Sayuri in her arms – Sasuke comes home and stands in the strange quiet of the living room.

In an instant, Hinata's easel is thrown clean across the room, the wood shattering, paint strung along the far wall, pages upon pages of obscure, almost-faceless paintings fluttering around the dark room.

In the wake of it all, he drops to his knees and screams – a ragged, skin-splitting thing.

And this Hinata never sees –

But not because she stopped looking.

Some days he hates her.

(He can no longer tell himself when he is lying.)

"Hyuuga aren't welcome here." Sasuke comes up to Hinata's hospital room with Hotaru's little hand in his grasp.

Hanabi turns from where she was looking at the closed door, her sister slumbering within, her second niece…somewhere – maybe inside, maybe already smothered away where the Hyuuga cannot find her.

If there is such a place.

Hanabi looks at the way young Hotaru stands unafraid next to her father, and her father –

Her father is unafraid, too. And maybe that has always been the Uchiha's downfall.

But Hanabi is not here for that. "How is she?"

"It isn't your concern."

She steps toward them, her hands hesitantly tugging on the strap of her bag. "I just…I just wanted to – "

"Tell Hiashi that Uchiha take care of their own as well." His hand tightens over Hotaru's and the girl flicks her large, dark eyes up at him, blinking in curiosity.

"Father, who is she?"

I'm your aunt, little one, she doesn't say. Wishes to. Knows she shouldn't.

It doesn't matter in the end though, because Sasuke speaks for both of them.

"No one, Hotaru."

Hanabi doesn't have it in her to say otherwise.

Hotaru looks at her (unknown) aunt, and her eyes catch sight of the jade bracelet along her wrist. "Pretty," she says in wonder, finger raised to point at it.

There's a quiet moment in the midst of the white hallway, where they each wonder how it had gotten to this point, how Hinata became both the bridge and the sinkhole between them, and Hanabi used to think she'd always be there, like Neji was always there (he wasn't, in the end) and she used to think that being a Hyuuga meant something as well (or so their father repeatedly said), and now she's beginning to wonder exactly at what point she stops being 'Hyuuga' and starts being 'Hanabi' – it takes her some time, but she discovers her sister has already asked this question and this was the answer, this moment where she's lying in the hospital with her newborn infant in her arms, her husband just outside with her sister, this sister who is just as much Hyuuga as any of them (or maybe not enough, though Hinata cannot blame her blindness for missing that one) and somewhere in the back of everyone's mind is that sharpened sense of danger because they all know that Hyuuga take care of their own and that means –

That means…

(When she was seven years old, Hinata had given her a jade bracelet, had said it was her promise to protect her, always, her promise as a sister.)

Hanabi has always known Hinata was more than her eyes, even when their father didn't.

"Do you like it?" Hanabi asks her niece (her niece, her niece, her blameless, untouched, never-to-know-her niece). She shakes her wrist with the bracelet and watches the beautiful thing giggle in response (she thinks she knows why Hinata closed that door now, she thinks she knows).

Hanabi kneels down before Hotaru. "My older sister gave it to me, when I was very, very young."

"You have a sister?" Eyes wide and unknowing and so, so not-white. (Small mercies, Hanabi thinks, but not enough).

"Yes." She chances a glance to Sasuke above them but he is silent and dark and everything she had always known of him (but then, she never really knew him at all).

"I have a sister now, too!" All glee and pride, and more than anything Hanabi wishes she will never lose that joy in her voice.

"I know," she says, her voice suddenly cracking, her eyes wet without her bidding. She shakes her head and looks down at her wrist, where she removes the bracelet, holding it out to the young girl. "It's a promise, you know? To always be there. To always protect each other."

Hotaru cocks her head in question and Sasuke frowns but doesn't say anything.

"Maybe one day, you can make the same promise to your sister." And then she deposits the bracelet into her tiny, yielding hand.

In some ways, Hanabi thinks it might have been easier to never have a sister at all.

(But then she remembers, and then she remembers, and in the end, they have always just been 'Hanabi' and 'Hinata' to each other.

Never 'Hyuuga'.

If anything in this life means something, she's sure it's that.)

Hanabi closes the young girl's fist around the bracelet and then stands, bowing once to Sasuke, stiff and lingering, and then she walks away.

Sasuke stares down the empty hallway long after she has left it.

Behind the door, Hinata muffles her tears in her pillow.

He finds her in the darkened kitchen, her face to the window, as though she can feel the moon's light, dim as it is.

She hears his approach, has always known it was him, and still, she folds her arms around herself. "What's my name?" she whispers.

For a blaring, split-right-down-the-middle second, Sasuke is filled with ripe panic, stilling just behind her in the shadows of their home.

She turns to him slightly, her gaze over her shoulder, but her eyes are still off-center, still leveled at his chin and he is just so tired of being unseen (even when he knows he is selfish for it, but – he always has been, and even she knows this).

"Sasuke," she pleads, and he knows she has broken him, or maybe he has broken her, or perhaps they were never whole to start with, and somehow that seems to hold more truth than anything but he's gotten so used to blaming blindness when he was the one who stopped seeing that he doesn't think he can remember how she looked when he was in love with her.

"What's my name?" she asks again.

He is half a second away from saying 'Uchiha', because they have fought for it enough in this lifetime, and she deserves a name that wants her too but then –

Those pale, steady eyes stare back at him, and he thinks maybe he owes her this. He owes her 'Hyuuga', even if he hurts for it.

"What's my name?"

It comes to him like a memory, like something he's always known but hadn't thought too hard about holding onto, until it suddenly wasn't there – until it suddenly became the most important thing he's ever had to learn, the sound of it on his tongue, the way the word felt in his mouth, the taste of everything he's ever fought for and yearned for and bled for –

"Hinata" –

Like an aborted breath, his lungs full of it, choking on it, doused in it.

"Hinata".

She turns fully to him, and now – now the moon is bright, he thinks.

"Thank you," she says, her hand reaching for him, fumbling for his chest, moving higher, bracing against his cheek. A soft, grateful smile. "Sometimes I forget."

He always has been selfish, he thinks, as he moves to kiss her, hard and unforgiving. Her sound of surprise is muffled by his mouth and after that, it is silence, all but for their breathing, his hands gripping her waist, pressing her back into the counter.

He is greedy with her, but she welcomes it, only sighing softly when he pulls hastily at her robe, his hands digging into her flesh, her lip caught between his teeth.

"Sometimes I forget."

Sasuke tugs her hips forward with a low growl, his mouth trailing down the smooth column of her throat, and he has never needed her like he has now.

"Hinata," he breathes against her skin, in the hollow of her collar bone, at the juncture of shoulder and neck, in the valley of her breasts, at the inside of her wrist, against her breathless mouth (between the beats of her heart).

"Hinata."

(Madly.)

"Remind me," she sobs against him.

He does.

From across the room, he catches sight of her. She seems to have stopped mid-motion, as though she has forgotten something, her glass held halfway to her mouth.

All at once he remembers what she looks like when he is in love with her, and it isn't very different from now.

She turns to him, and for the first time, her eyes land directly on his. Something almost like recognition crosses her face (or very nearly does), and in that brief moment, Sasuke finds sanity.

But then she is moving again, her gaze averted.

The world continues on, and she with it.

But perhaps that is the lie.

(Sasuke is finally learning to discern them.)

They never truly remove the bandages.