The Observer

"Why?" You've never heard so much anguish in Naruto's voice, even though he is speaking in little more than a whisper. "Why, Hinata?"

Your chakra is depleting at a fatal rate and there is not enough remaining to keep your Byakugan functional, so your vision goes completely dark. Even raising your arms for one final embrace is exceedingly difficult, but you still manage to answer in a voice full of confidence and determination.

"Because I love you, Naruto-kun."

As your consciousness fades away for the last time, you nonetheless sustain a faint smile – there are far worse ways to die than bleeding out in Naruto's arms.

When you awake supine on a surprisingly comfortable surface, there are no puncture wounds in your torso and no dirt or bloodstains on your spotlessly clean clothes. You sit up to take a brief look around – your vision is fully restored – but your heart sinks ominously when you spot a head of blond hair that you would never miss anywhere.

If Naruto is also dead, it means that you must have failed, and by extension, the world has ended. You immediately leap to your feet and break into a chakra-enhanced sprint, but as you approach closer, you realise that the man is in fact not Naruto but rather someone whose face you have only seen in textbooks back in the academy.

"Yon...yondaime-sama!" you stutter as you instinctively drop into a deep bow, but the legendary Yellow Flash simply chuckles modestly.

"You can just call me Minato," he says courteously, "and this is my wife Kushina." He indicates the tomato-haired woman seated opposite him. You don't remember ever hearing anything about the Fourth being married, but you decide to keep your surprise to yourself for now.

"We are Naruto's parents," continues Minato as if it is the most obvious fact in the world. "And you must be Hinata Hyūga," he finishes with a warm smile.

"Yes," you reply slowly, your suddenly overloaded mind unable to determine how the Fourth Hokage could possibly know your name.

"We saw what you did on the battlefield, how you died," he clarifies upon seeing your confused expression. "That was a very heroic sacrifice. Thank you for saving our son."

Just as you begin flushing crimson, Kushina speaks up. "That's not the main reason we know about you," she asserts loudly. "You've been watching Naruto for many years ever since you were children, haven't you? That means that you must have plenty of stories for us, dattebane!"

At this point, you are ready to faint with embarrassment. However, you cannot do that because you are already dead, so you settle for matching Kushina's hair colour with your face and being unable to speak for several minutes. Eventually, Minato pulls out a crystal ball like the one that the Third Hokage had once used, and you wonder idly whether every Hokage actually had his own copy.

"Here, we have a limited ability to observe what is happening in the physical world," explains Minato as the crystal ball begins to render an image. "As you can see, the war has ended and Naruto and the rest of your friends are all alive and accounted for. There is not much that we should be worrying about right now, so how would you like to tell us some of those stories?"

There is clearly no way out of this situation, so you take a deep breath and begin.

After a few days (or perhaps months? Time seems to work differently in death than in life.), you ask Minato whether you can borrow the crystal ball. He responds by telling you that you can keep it. Since there is little else to do, you spend most of your time awake peering into the orb's depths. Years go by in the physical world, which you track by counting the seasons.

Aside from observing Naruto himself, you check on your peers from time to time. You watch your old squad, Team 8, drift apart with Kurenai-sensei on leave indefinitely and Kiba and Shino assigned to more and more missions without each other. Even Team 10, the famed Ino-Shika-Chō trio, disbands in the end, its members each moving on to a different role elsewhere.

You watch Sakura, who despite possessing the strength of a hundred men eventually relegates herself to being an ordinary housewife while Sasuke wanders the world alone. Occasionally, you contemplate whether or not you would have done the same had you survived the war, but each time you also remember that you had always chased Naruto in order to be beside and not behind him.

You watch Tenten, who fights side by side with Neji through the entirety of their long and illustrious careers; they are exceptional partners in all respects. Their balanced relationship, you eventually conclude, is considerably closer to the type which you would have wanted for yourself.

You watch as the title of Hokage passes first from Tsunade to Kakashi, and then from Kakashi to Naruto, the person to whom you have paid attention most of all. You cannot help but be overjoyed yourself when he achieves his lifelong dream. However, there remains one problem: you are certain that he will inevitably find some other love interest, someone more suitable than a girl who only confessed her feelings on the verge of death. After all, he attracts plenty of female attention given his position and fame. You do your best to suppress such thoughts, but in the back of your mind you know that it is only a matter of time before he finds someone else.

He never does. On the other hand, you are never truly at ease because you cannot ignore that the possibility still exists.

Many years later, you watch Naruto fall in battle while protecting his comrades. He is not as old as the Third Hokage was at the time of his final clash against Orochimaru, but his speed and reflexes have dulled sufficiently that he can no longer avoid every potentially fatal mistake. Nonetheless, you are proud, as are his parents. Naruto has indeed lived a life true to his ninja way.

"He'll be here very soon," declares Minato with tears in his eyes. "I don't think you'll need that any longer."

You hand him back the crystal ball. "Thank you, yondaime-sama."

When Naruto arrives not long afterward, he does not appear as the grey and aging Seventh Hokage, but instead as the orange-clad teenager in whose arms you died decades ago.

"Hinata-chan?" His voice is half disbelief, half delight.

This is the moment for which you have waited fifty years. "Hello, Naruto-kun."

You are finally done with watching passively – now you can pick up where you left off.