Notes: Hi there. This is a fluke. I'm still on Hiatus.

Disclaimer: Masashi Kishimoto's.

This is ITASHI. Nothing SHI/HINA or ITA/HINA (I can't believe I'm saying this. It's not like ItaHina has been my OTP since forever.)

SPECTATOR

When she is seven, Hinata meets Shisui by accident. Literally.

That morning she'd watched from her half-hidden spot beneath a tree as Neji-niisan left for the Academy. Her hands had been poised dutifully to her chest and, in the time it took Neji to head over from the Branch house to the gate, they had not moved at all. The sight of the snow-white shirt on his back as it winked away from view stayed with her all morning, distracting enough to mark her training performance abysmal, a tepid, tight feeling in her chest.

She is still wondering why things like family, things like cousins, could have a physical effect like a seal that wasn't there – because, even as she felt herself, warm and solid, the twiglike and brittle sensation remained, unfurling in her bones, not understanding why – when someone shouted "Hey!", and the was the last thing she heard before someone barreled into her person and sent them both skidding across and into the Nakano River.

"Damn, I guess it really can't work without my eyes activated, eh?" The man – no, boy – groans self-deprecatingly as he pulls them both out of the mild current. They are slopping wet, she is mortified, and he simply slicks back his longish hair, slack and dark with moisture, and offers her a smile like golden sunlight. "Nice to meet you, I'm Uchiha Shisui. Sorry about that – I mean, girls usually fall for me, but not like this."

She gapes at him, fingers pause in their act of wringing water from her ruined clothes. His expectant expression falters a bit when she just continues to stare at the extended, open hand and tears spring unconsciously to her eyes. Hinata had spent her life living in a house of measured movements and closed doors, and his candidness felt like a cool breeze upon parched skin, comforting and hurtful in its newness.

"Oh, hey," Shisui's voice is a shade jauntier with the awkwardness of apology. "Are you hurt? Should I get someone?" Hinata shakes her head in a jarring motion. "I'm really sorry, I didn't know I'd be flying blind without the sharingan. I – " He stops, looking at something over her shoulder, then smiles half-heartedly. A whine sneaks its way into his tone. "Itachi..."

And this is how she meets them.

Two weeks later, Hinata misses a kunai throw when heated voices carry over to the training yard. It had been a long time since she's been faulted on accuracy, as the Byakugan virtually made it possible to hit a target at thirty paces with needlepoint precision. But, just then, her hands felt sticky, clammy, like someone crushed stale, old eggs into her palm – responsibility, accountability, family – as she listened inappropriately to the conversation.

Her father was firm on Neji staying a full fours years in the Academy.

Hinata rolls his words over and over in her mind that night, trying to understand what it takes to make a decision while treading the fine line between being family and family, because somehow, during the time she'd grown up, she'd learned that everyone imagined was a space like a closed curtain between the two. And only she, the first in line to head the clan, couldn't see it. There was something wrong with her eyes, despite their perfect pearl-sheen whiteness and worth like the lives of uncles.

The next day Neji sends her a look that feels like pinpricks on her skin; nothing malevolent, nothing hostile, he deliberates his eyes to look at her as though there were a wall between them, interminable and endless. It should not affect her so much, she tells herself, still straining to fabricate an illusion of that division for herself.

Shisui criticizes the Uchiha almost half the time, with the air of one who so firmly knows his place as to take it for granted. As she enters his sparse, empty house with its sepia-toned pictures on the walls and fish bowls teeming with many-colored fish – she's walked nearly seven blocks alone until Itachi had passed her on his way, looking very much like thirteen year old captain, and gave her than slip of a smile and let her tag along – Shisui is already defaming at least several uncles as he spreads a severely-charred breakfast on the table.

Yet, somehow, somehow, it's okay for him to say those things, mean them even, when he says harsh, biting words. She can hear the well of gratitude in his voice still, and the steadfast loyalty, and something else. It was deep like rich earth and strong like a barely-controlled storm, and much akin to what she felt for her clan, duty or something more.

Shisui pours her glass of milk, it's cool like the morning air, while he and Itachi sit and talk calmly over the latest. She catches snippets of Sunagakure and Kirigakure and – here, Shisui's tone dips lower into malicious – Kumogakure.

The glass in Hinata's hand shakes a little, and both Uchiha boys reach out to steady it. Her heart feels as though it either caved in or spread out, because she's never been aware of a space there, not until it was filled out.

Hinata remembers her mother – quiet wisps of memory: her cool dainty hands and her scent and the small mannerisms, never her face – some nights when she sees the ghost moon from the window of her room, when she smells lavender drifting from the garden, Hinata thinks of her. It strikes her how, at times, where the dark is right and fog makes her sleepy, it feels as though that next world, that place where weary souls go to sleep, is more real than this one.

Today, Hanabi had sparred with her and soundly trounced her. Hinata hadn't meant to lose, each time she'd given her all and gave blows as she'd received, but but when she'd faced her sister, Byakugan lighting up all those chakra points like stars so familiar, she remembered two geniuses unwilling to fight, even for kicks, for a reason she couldn't name but felt – and she, the first daughter of the Main House, had been immobilized as surely as though a seal had activated. Her father sent her a questioning look, as perplexed as she'd ever seen him, and even Hanabi looked curious.

She think her mother – there'd been things said, that she would have had stellar career, and she gave it up for a husband and a family and a seal – would have understood. Maybe.

Inter clan meetings do not occur very frequently in Konoha – and so Hinata is caught somewhat off-guard when she is whisked off to one in a manner reminiscent of a last ditch attempt to reinforce the idea of how very important she is. She shifts in her place beside her father, trying to ease the discomfort of sitting still, keeping her eyes to the ground rather than letting them stray to faces. All the adults carry the same austerity of expression, the similar weight of responsibility.

Uchiha Fugaku looks especially imposing, head, after all, of the clan that half-founded Konoha back when the world was still painted in rich streaks of color and everything a wild plain to be conquered. Flanking him are Itachi and Shisui, their backs straight and necks angled just so, looking very much heirs to a magnificent dynasty.

Once, while Hinata studiously listens to words and events and repercussion beyond her understanding, like small lights dancing just out of her reach, Shisui interrupts. He speaks without brashness, respectfully, as a laurel upon a mountain would speak to the boulders that support it, mentions the advantage of providing sanctuary to missing-nin – so long as they do not threaten us – but it is an opinion and, even so young, Hinata knows it is unheard of.

"You can't be a spectator all the time," Shisui explains later, when the Hokage calls for a closed-door, and Itachi cocks an eyebrow in his cousin's direction – missing-nin, what were you thinking. Shisui's cheekbones seem to sharpen in his defensiveness.

He says more meaningful things, rife with politics and importance, but Hinata does not hear. She sees instead, Shisui's hand at Itachi's waist, a touch that shouldn't amount to anything, brief like a breath caught, but it's that moment – not when she shook hands with the Hokage, not when her father presented her as his heir apparent – that remembers the most.

Shisui shakes her out of her slight reverie and leads them on the way out, for dango, he says, my treat. And Itachi takes her hand, and the crown prince of the Uchiha clan – who had, once, blew everyone clear out of the water – allows himself to obediently follow.

(Things like cousins.)

After the first week of the Academy, Hinata sits at the bubbling riverbank while autmun painted the leaves red around her. Hyuuga was a house that jealously guarded its techniques, kept it close from generation to generation, and the Main House, particularly, was often brought up and taught especially according to their Byakugan, a living reposity of knowledge. A Hyuuga heir hasn't been sent to the Academy in many years, Hinata knows this with tight-fisted understanding.

Classes had been interesting, even to those who'd had their noses to the grindstone for years and years, and only a little daunting. Teamwork and camaraderie wasn't something to be found in the curriculum in any shinobi academy, though it should be, if her first days were to be judged according to their worth. Uchiha Sasuke isolates himself, and the girls form groups, there is a merest trace of a line between the shinobi-born and civilian-born kids, and there is Naruto, of course, Naruto, who was in class all by himself.

Somewhere behind her, Shisui has his eyes bleeding red with a new technique, one he refuses to explain until she's older, except that it could possibly be better than the Shunshin. Hinata doesn't know what could possibly be better than the Shunshin, because she's ridden it once, remembers the sensation of space collapsing behind her as Shisui raced with the sunrise, and thinks that nothing could compare.

Shisui is a genius like that, continually putting the laws of nature to shame, bird-like. There is an unconscious confidence in almost everything he does, enough to waylay his antics at being ordinary, enough to set him apart; he would never need to go to the Academy. Itachi is the same – calm, awkwardly-friendly Itachi. There is always a smoothness, a precision, a sureness to their movements, an absolute conviction that no one her age has and that Hinata suspects has been bred by war – she doesn't know, she's never seen war.

"What's your hurry, Itachi? Afraid I'm not going to wait for you?"

"Hardly."

Hinata watches as Shisui deactivates his eyes and Itachi unslings his gear. They talk, amusement and friendship like an undercurrent beneath their words, almost in each other's faces. Shisui smiles much like a loon, some days there is a sharp quirk in his lips which necessiates a second look from every kunoichi they pass on the the streets, and he directs it solely to Itachi now, who flicks it away with affectionate calm.

Hinata watches, the scroll pressing against her chest, there's something there, she knows, suddenly wary, something that wasn't hers to see, and she leaves. Or tries to.

Shisui comes up from behind her, scoops up her Academy scrolls and goes through them with a wry grin. I should be your jounin instructor, he says, how about it, sweetheart? Can you say Shisui-sensei? I'll teach you everything I know. You'll kick ass at the Chuunin exams.

And he spreads his arms wide and gestures to the Nakano.

"I taught this river how to float, and look at it now," he says, almost seriously, with an arrogant tilt at the mouth, proud as any father, as though he himself controlled that elementary flow and taught the water how to defy gravity. Itachi's mouth curls at the corners with an exaggerate amount of fondness. Hinata laughs, and the ball of resentment drops from her hands, and the Nakano washes it away to far distant shores.

That summer, rumors of a distant war surface in waves, unrest rears its ugly head, and Konoha closes its formidable gates. There is tension in the air, and unexplained aggressions sneaks its way into the streets, and Hinata sees the ANBU and the Police Force and the Jounin and everyone else as they succumb to forces outside themselves.

Those days the air between Itachi and Shisui is sudden-sharp as a knife's edge.

Shisui, who taught the river how to float, was found ruining the languid flow of the green waters. His stark hallowed face, tinged blue with cold, had been almost peaceful as the waves of the Nakano lapped against him and kissed his face, apologetically, sorrowfully.

And Hinata – quiet, silent, thoughtful Hinata – screams.

Hinata only vaguely registers what Neji is saying as they face each other across the arena, like skewered mirror images of each other. Her mind blurs to the past, and to another place, and to another family, and to another set of cousins, and everything comes full circle in her mind.

Strange she's never realized it until now, the bonds she'd been trying to put a word on so desperately, the thing beyond family and beyond duty which kept people together even as the first two grew weak and brittle with time, and it breaks her heart in a different way entire from Neji's blows. Because Shisui is dead, and Itachi is gone, and she didn't know until it was too late.

She wonders if she could have done something, maybe, anything to have stemmed the gears of politics and history and destiny coaslescing in Shisui and Itachi's direction. Hinata has nothing to teach rivers, but she knows people an awful lot, sees through them so cleanly it was terrifying; she had felt it, the way they broke the rules, should've looked more closely, and she chose not to. She had been a child, and it was her right, and it was not her story.

But now, Neji's eyes are dull with bitterness and she's right in the middle with him. Someone had once told her to choose her own battles, that there's nothing wrong with walking away gracefully, but she had also once been told – you can't always be a spectator – and, because she knows she is staunchly in the right, she breaks her silence.

Maybe this time, history won't repeat itself.

Many years later, Hinata stands at the same riverbank, thoughtful of Neji waiting for her a distance away, ever dutiful even when she'd set him free, of that short instant when she'd seen them again – Shisui, Itachi – before the world tugged her back, of seconds and days and years passing by, of beginnings, of endings.

Family and duty and love, she thinks, are like strings entagled with one another, like roads that cross at the same places, like rivers, like stories, like lives. She knows this, she's known it since she was a child, standing on the fringes of something, something that would have been beautiful.

The Nakano shines as sunlight catches in its ripples, and Hinata smiles.

I am a flower quickly fading,

Not because of who I am.
But because of what you've done.
Not because of what I've done.
But because of who you are.

(Who Am I, Casting Crows)

Notes: In case you didn't get it (not underestimating your intelligence but rather my coherence), this fic is about Hinata navigating family and duty and love and mixing up all three because she's young and no one's explaining anything and thus learns by observing. Too bad for her that love, as she saw it and felt it and believe it to be, is something worth dying for. Hence the jumping-in-front-Pein act.