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orangeflavoryawp · 2 years

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Hinata-centric - “In Spring Rain”

Yes, it’s Sasuhina but that’s not really the focus. This is an exercise in grief.

Post-war AU. Neji lives. Other smaller changes as well. Hinata deals with Hiashi’s death.

“In Spring Rain”

“She looks at her wet, open palm and wonders what her father had been searching for.” - Hinata-centric. What’s born in the spring, and what dies.

Read it on Ao3 here.

* * *

"He was a good man," Naruto tells her, hand on her shoulder.

It's a strange thing to say, Hinata thinks – as though the measure of her father's

goodness only now comes into question when he's dead, as though such reassurance is necessary to make his passing palatable.

But Hinata cannot say whether Hiashi was a good man or not.

She turns to Naruto, hands still held gracefully before her, the sleeves of her kimono perfectly starched. "Thank you, Hokage."

He frowns at her, glances back at the altar where Hanabi kneels. Incense wafts from the urn like languid rivers in the air.

Hinata clears her throat gently, tucks her curtain of hair back behind her ear. "And my husband? When is he to return?"

Naruto meets her gaze once more, his hand slipping from her shoulder. "I've called him back from the mission. He'll be with you soon."

Something of contrition passes over his features then, and Hinata flushes with that familiar need to soothe. She offers him a grateful smile. "I appreciate that, though you needn't go through any particular trouble for me."

Naruto blinks at her, his mouth pursing. He looks back to the altar.

Perhaps if Hyūga Hiashi was a 'good man' - or even a 'bad man' - this scene might look different. But Hinata does not know what Naruto is looking for when he says these things, and she is afraid she couldn't give it to him anyway.

Because Hinata cannot say whether Hiashi was a good man or not, only that he was a man. He was their Head of House, and now he is not. He was her father, and now he is not. He was alive, and now he is not.

He was all these things once, and now he is not.

And perhaps that is what it means to be a man. Perhaps that's all there is.

Hinata pats Naruto's hand comfortingly, and turns to receive the next condolences in line.

* * *

Hanabi is angry. Angry in a spitting, cacophonous way. A way that fills the room whenever she enters it. She sneers at Sakura when she visits Hinata, still staying at the Hyūga compound, the day after the funeral.

Hinata grasps at her sister's wrist, mouth dipped to her ear. "Do not dishonor a guest of this house," she says firmly.

Hanabi tears her arm from her sister's hold. "Some med-nin," she scoffs, eyes tearing instantly. "Couldn't even patch a heart."

Hinata glances to Sakura, finds her chin trembling in her self-control, eyes shifting to the floor in a measure of shame.

She remembers the brilliant green glow of chakra flowing through Sakura's hands over her father's chest as he lay limp upon the study floor. She remembers the heaving breaths the other woman took, sweat beading over her brow, elbows nearly buckling under the force of her urgency, the way she pushed and pushed and pushed, and it wasn't until Hinata slowly took hold of her wrist and tugged, until she pressed her other hand to Sakura's cheek and dragged her frantic gaze to hers, until –

"He's gone. You've done enough."

In a world as violent as theirs, Hinata finds a rather cruel irony to her father's death.

But she figures, sometimes, the heart just gives out.

She watches Hanabi stalk from the room.

* * *

It happens the next morning, when Hanabi and the elders are waiting on the other side of the fusuma doors. Hinata pours a cup of tea for her father.

It's instinct – muscle memory. Her hands know the motions as well as her heart does.

She stops suddenly when she realizes what she's doing, fingers stilling over the rim. She lets out a rueful laugh, short and surprised, her voice catching on the exhale. She stands at the counter, staring at her father's favorite yunomi.

The steam wafting from it looks eerily like the incense they'd burned for him not three days ago.

She presses her hand over her eyes and lets out a shuddering breath.

This is how Neji finds her. After several moments of keen disquiet, she turns to him and presses her forehead to his shoulder, sighing beneath the coming tears.

"I'll pour the tea, Hinata," he tells her roughly, his own voice clogged with unspent tears, his hands going to her elbows to hold her to him.

She nods into his shoulder, not trusting her voice.

Neither of them move for a long, long time.

* * *

It's raining when Sasuke returns to her, days after she's left the Hyūga compound.

She lays curled on her side along the engawa of their house, her back to the shoji doors, her temple resting against the cool wood of the porch, watching the rain coming down.

It's strange, this sideways view of it. The splatters of water against the hard packed earth feel much more futile, like coming up against a wall.

She thinks of her father. Of the way he perpetually frowned at her sparring sessions with Hanabi. Of the way he tersely and reluctantly answered Sasuke's request for her hand. Of the way he pursed his lips in disapproval when she informed him of their decision to live outside the Hyūga compound.

But she also thinks of how she found him one day, staring out past the open shoji doors at the falling rain, a barely-there smile of contentment lighting his face, eyes crinkling at the edges.

What was he looking at? Or what was he looking for? What memory or hope filled him then, to look like that?

Hinata draws her lip between her teeth, eyes fixed to the downpour before her.

A pair of scuffed boots stop just at the edge of her periphery. She tips her head back to glance up at their owner.

Her husband is still in his flak jacket, drenched from the rain, a dark red stain blooming over his shoulder, a smear of dirt under his chin, fresh from a mission. She wonders if he even bothered to stop at Hokage tower, or if he came straight here, straight to her.

His white ANBU mask hangs at his side, clutched in calloused fingers.

Hinata rises up on one elbow to better look at him.

He takes a deep breath, dark eyes fixed to her, mouth thinned into a tight line.

He knows, she realizes. Of course, he knows.

Sasuke's brows pinch together over his gaze. "What do you need?" he asks her lowly.

She blinks at him. The patter of rain is constant and unyielding all around the engawa.

Sasuke swallows thickly. "What do you need from me?" he clarifies, voice rough.

Hinata shakes her head slowly, feeling the grief rise up in her, saturating her lungs. "I don't know yet," she tells him honestly.

He nods, brows still furrowed. He clears his throat, glances out through the rain with a heavy sigh. "Okay," he says. He looks back down to her. "Okay." Kneeling, Sasuke sets his Crow mask along the cool wood, before sitting cross-legged beside her, hands going to her shoulders to urge her back down. She settles with her head over his thigh now, eyes fixed back on the rain.

The material of his pant leg is cold against her cheek. "You're soaked through," she says in concern.

"Sorry," he mumbles, a hand going to her hair, fingers trailing through the strands.

She shakes her head slightly, a soft sound of reassurance brewing in her throat.

That isn't what she meant.

But nothing makes it past her lips. Nothing but a watery sigh, her eyes wetting at the gentle tug of his fingers through her hair, the sound of rain lulling her back into memory, and her father is there suddenly, sitting beside her, that face of his, that face of quiet wonder and contentment she hadn't ever seen on him before, or since, turned toward the rain, watching the water coming down.

Her lungs constrict at the memory. The rain falls and falls and falls.

* * *

She doesn't sleep. Mostly, she lies awake staring at the ceiling. Sometimes, she sits at the edge of the bed, hands gripping the sheets beside her, just breathing. Just... remembering.

Sasuke stirs behind her a moment before he mumbles something sleepily and she feels the warm press of his hand low on her back, just at the curve of her hip.

She dips her head, eyes fluttering shut in the dark. He coaxes her back to bed, and she finds a way to curl her grief into his chest, to sleep scant hours before the dawn comes again – before the day begins anew, as it always does.

Mostly, she is just achingly, numbingly tired.

* * *

The elders call a meeting. Hinata sits dutifully at the head of the low table, legs folded beneath her demurely, hands held in her lap just as her father taught her. Sasuke waits patiently outside the room, uninvited.

"Your father never officially named his heir," they tell her.

Hanabi sits fuming in the seat beside her, eyes wet, jaw clenching.

(Hinata has caught her kneeling at their father's altar more than once, head dipped to the mat beneath her, quiet sobs pressing into the floor.

She is but fifteen and sundered and lost.)

Neji sits stiffly on Hinata's other side, an immovable rock – her only anchor in the present storm.

"My sister was clearly favored as the future Head of House," Hinata says after a moment, looking each of the elders in the eye.

Hanabi curls her fingers into the silk of her kimono, fists shaking over her knees.

A sigh across the table. A quiet grumble through the gathered group. "We must disagree," a coarse voice says.

It is exhaustion after this – arguments erupting around the table, split support of the sisters being voiced, and Hinata glances back through the fusuma doors to see Sasuke's shadow standing straight and still, clearly listening.

By the time they leave that night, nothing is solved.

* * *

She lies beside Sasuke that night, turned into his chest, his arm slung low around her waist.

He sighs into her hair. "What do you want?" he asks.

"To honor my father's wishes," she whispers into his chest.

It seems the easiest thing, and yet, she is already breaking beneath the weight of it.

She thinks of Neji and his branded forehead. She thinks of the children she wants to have with Sasuke.

And still, it comes to this –

Her father's wishes.

(Except she's never been able to interpret his wishes before, and since his death, it hasn't precisely gotten easier.)

She presses closer to Sasuke, a hand curling along his chest.

What do you want?

It's the hardest question she's ever had to ask herself.

* * *

"Hanabi," she says, reaching for the younger woman.

Her sister turns away, a hand wiped over her sweat-drenched brow. She gives a stern look to her sparring partner. "Again," she bites out, already lowering into a ready stance, ignoring Hinata.

Hinata stays rooted at the edge of the courtyard, watching, that word spinning over and over in her mind.

Again, again, again.

She curls her hand into a fist at her side, her father's voice resounding in her head. Her eyes flutter shut.

Hanabi is angry, perhaps for all the right reasons, but maybe also for a bit of the wrong ones. And yet, Hinata has never been good at soothing anger – not her father's, and now not her sister's either.

So, she simply leaves – walks from the sparring yard of the Hyūga compound, and she never sees the way Hanabi's eyes trail her back, saddened and silent.

(Because even with the Byakugan, there is seeing, and then there is seeing.)

* * *

"Your father wanted you to have this," Neji tells her as he hands the worn book to her.

It's a book of poems. The Collected Haikus of Kobayashi Issa, the cover reads.

Hinata furrows her brows in confusion. This is not what she knows of her father.

And then the resentment comes – hot and biting – and then the tears are next, because this is not what she knows of her father and she wishes, more than anything, that she had. That he had let her know him. That there was more of him left to her than legacy and disappointment and yearning. More than the stiff way he always took her offered tea, or the silence he always gave her when she asked about her mother, or the time he took her hands in his, palms up, eyes narrowed in critique at them, a thin frown marring the edges of his lips before he grunted his dissatisfaction and let her go –

"These are not a shinobi's hands."

"Thank you," she tells Neji eventually.

(Because if her father has left her with anything, at least, it's still her manners.)

She puts the book far back on the shelf, pushed away there with her resentment.

She is still trying to love her father, after all.

* * *

"We spoke of this before," Sasuke says lowly, sitting at the table beside her.

Hinata sighs, hands going around her tea cup. "If the elders ask it of me..."

"We decided already," he says, this time more forcefully. "You're an Uchiha now. They cannot have you, especially as their Head of House."

It makes her angry. "Do you think I want my sister branded?" The thought is a hot coal in her gut.

Sasuke leans back in his chair, peering at her. "And our children? Should we have any, of course."

Hinata clamps her mouth shut. That hot coal – it spits.

"Would you want any of them branded?"

"You know I – "

"Why does Hanabi not speak to you?"

His question cuts her off. She takes a deep breath, wetness dotting her eyes already, and she's just so tired of feeling like this. The sob strangles in her throat, never making it to air. "I don't know."

And it's the truth. As much of the truth as she knows, at least. Hanabi trains and trains and trains. Keeps her muscles honed with anger, keeps her brow sweat-slicked, keeps her white eyes clear and tearless.

(Fifteen and sundered and lost.)

Hinata doesn't know how to be a big sister in this After, only in the Before.

Before the staunch pillar that was their father, fell. Before the roof came down on them.

"I don't know," she whispers again, eyes drifting down to her tea cup. Her knuckles are white where they grip her yunomi.

Does Hanabi blame Hinata for not trying harder to save their father? Is she angry that she may take the right to Head of House? Is she simply angry because anger is more familiar? Safer?

Is she angry because it is the only way Hanabi knows how to treat her wounds?

(In the way that Hinata treats her own with sorrow.)

Sasuke sighs, some of the frustration leaving his face. He reaches a hand over to gently pry hers off her cup.

She looks up at him.

"Everyone grieves differently," he tells her, giving her hand a single, sure squeeze. And then he pulls his touch away. "Talk to your sister."

* * *

Some days she finds herself using the Byakugan unintentionally, sneaking a glance at her husband's thudding heart, or her sister's, or Neji's.

Just to be certain.

Just to assure herself that it hasn't given out yet.

The heart.

* * *

She corners Hanabi in the early morning, before most things wake – even before her doubt can wake.

"I don't want it," she says evenly, blocking her path out into the courtyard.

Hanabi blinks up at her, mouth pursed into a thin line.

(How Hinata misses her sharp-toothed smiles.)

"Head of House. Rights to clan leadership. I don't want any of it." She pulls a tight breath through her lungs, licks her lips. "Not if it costs me his memory. And not if it costs me you."

Hanabi pulls her trembling lip between her teeth, brows furrowing sharply. "Hinata..." Her voice is far shakier than Hinata likes.

She steps up, takes her younger sister's hands in hers.

(A shinobi's hands, her father would have called them.)

"If it's that – if you are... upset at this talk amongst the elders, then please, do not be. It should be yours, as father wished. And it will be yours, if you want it. I mean for no competition between us, no animosity. I will step down fully if – "

"I'm trying – " she begins, voice catching, and then breaking completely. Her head dips down, eyes closed tightly as she shakes her head.

It makes Hinata want to weep at the sight of her.

"I'm just... trying to be strong," Hanabi gets out on a ragged exhale, and it seems to take everything of her. She looks back up at Hinata, eyes wet and red-rimmed. Her mouth opens, closes, opens again. "Like father would have wanted," she croaks out, before her face crumbles, and she's tearing her hands away from Hinata, turning fully from her, so she can no longer see her face. She stands stiffly, a hand to her nose, dragging full breaths into her quaking lungs.

Hinata watches her shaking form. The curve of her back is like a howl.

After many long moments, Hinata steps toward her once more, reaching for her free hand. She holds it delicately in her own, swallowing thickly to keep the tears at bay. Her sister's back is still to her when she finally speaks. "Then when you are ready to not be strong," she begins, a thumb arched over her wrist, tender at her pulse point, "I will be there." She lets her sister go, but lingers to brush a loose strand of her hair behind her ear.

Hanabi almost leans into the touch.

"I hope you will come to me," she tells her softly, before she leaves her to the courtyard. To her anger. And to Hinata's sorrow.

But she hopes.

She hopes.

* * *

Hinata reaches out past the porch roof, catching the gentle rain in her waiting hand.

(Like coming up against a wall.)

She looks at her wet, open palm and wonders what her father had been searching for.

* * *

The first time she visits his grave is with Neji. They set the fruit and Chrysanthemum flowers before the stone marker. Hinata bows first, and then Neji beside her. Birds chirp and twit off in the trees. The sun is insultingly bright. She thinks she should be sadder but she is only... wrung out.

"I don't even remember the last conversation I had with him," Neji says after a moment.

She does not miss the way his eyes drift to the twin marker beside her father's, if only for a moment.

"Ours was an argument, if you could call it that," Hinata says quietly, hands folding over each other before her.

Neji glances to her, silently waiting for her to continue. Because he knows she will.

She needs it, she thinks. And she thinks he knows that, too.

"When I went to the compound to visit Hanabi. It was my first visit since Sasuke and I's wedding, you see. He berated me for coming back. Said I was no longer welcome there. Said that 'none of my line' would be welcomed there." The words leave her on a shaking breath. Her hands grip themselves tighter.

She remembers the silhouette of his back as he'd walked from her then, and then the sickening image of his crumpling form a second later, body limp as he hit the floor. She called out, ran to him.

His heart had stopped well before she could get Sakura there anyway, her own healing efforts clearly as insufficient as all the rest of her when it came to her father.

(It's always the heart that fails first.)

Neji's soft chuckle brings her back to the moment, and the sound is so unexpected that she swings wide eyes at him, still as glass.

But when he looks at her, it's not amusement that graces his features. It's a sad fondness. He meets her eyes when he tells her, "Even to the end, he protected you."

Hinata blinks at him, mouth tipping open. "What?"

He taps at his forehead where the brand sits beneath his hitai-ate.

Something of realization blooms beneath her skin.

Neji sighs, hand falling back to his side. "The elders would never be able to come for you – or any children you might have – if he struck you from the clan."

Hinata staggers where she stands, staring at her cousin.

"He protected you to the end," he repeats, a reassuring nod sent her way. "Hanabi will do the same."

Her hand comes to her mouth, her sob wells up her throat, and for the first time since she held her father's deadened weight in her arms, she cries. Hinata cries and cries and cries. She falls to her knees with the exhaustion of it, Neji's hands coming round her shoulders as he falls with her, cradling her against him.

She cries for her father.

(Like rain that falls and falls and falls.)

But sometime between the sobs, Hinata realizes she also cries for herself.

* * *

"I miss him," she finally says aloud.

But there is no one around to hear it.

* * *

She's looking out the opened window when she feels the tea cup leave her hand. She glances to the table, finds Sasuke stealing her cup away and setting a bowl of rice between her hands instead. She blinks dumbly down at it.

He settles in the seat across from her, tucking into his own bowl of rice, her yunomi resting along the table by his hand, out of her reach.

"Sasuke," she reprimands gently.

He doesn't look up from his rice when he tells her, "Tea is not a substitute for sustenance."

Her mouth opens, a sound lodging in her throat, his admonition taking her aback.

He stops eating a moment, shoulders tensing. He finally looks back up at her, eyes dark. "You haven't eaten in days," he says roughly.

There's almost a plea to it, and Hinata sucks a sharp breath between her teeth at the sound. She glances around the rest of the table, at the soup and side dishes he'd laid out for their dinner. She lifts her gaze back to his.

She sees then – the dark circles beneath his eyes. A reminder of all the nights her sleeplessness has kept him awake, all the nights he hushed her to sleep with a hand rubbing circles along her back, or simply sat with her until the sun crept through the window into their embrace. She remembers the leave request he submitted to the Hokage the day after he first returned, and all the times he accompanied her to the Hyūga compound when the elders called, and the way he just... just held her.

What do you need from me?

Looking at him now, his skin is dull, his mouth pursed into a tight line. His shoulders are stiff and curved from their load. He looks how she feels. Her grief exhausts him, she sees it now.

She stands from the table, striding round it to come before him, a hand raised to his cheek. "I'm sorry," she chokes out, already struggling to hold back the tears. She sucks a sharp breath through her lips, the sob pitching along her throat.

Sasuke huffs, turning in his seat as he reaches for her wrist. "Come here," he says, dragging her into his lap.

Her arms wind around his neck instantly as she settles into him, her legs hooked over his, her face burying in his neck. She hiccups through a sob, fingers sifting through his hair and then she's leaning back to meet his eyes, but it's their mouths that meet first – urgent and needful. He cradles the back of her head with a firm hand, keeping her fixed to him, deepening the kiss. He breaks from her with a pant, keeps his lips a breath from hers, pressing their foreheads together.

"Sasuke," she whispers, voice trembling, chest aching.

"Just... just stay with me," he tells her, voice clipped and tight. He leans in for another kiss, presses his hot mouth against hers with a desperate, keening need. His chest rises heavy against hers, his breaths coming out in shallow pants when he finally releases her.

She frames his face in both hands, eyes shifting between his, that ache in her chest blossoming out, out, out – until her skin is singing with it.

"Stay with me."

(What she needs.)

Hinata surges toward him again. A short, breathless kiss. Another. Another. She brushes her thumbs along his cheeks. "I promise," she agrees, the tears hot on her lids.

Sasuke drops his head to her shoulder, breathing deep, holding her pressed tightly to him as she wraps her arms back around his broad shoulders.

* * *

When Hinata opens her door to the knock, it's Hanabi she finds on the other side.

"Hanabi," she greets, a note of surprise in her voice, eclipsed only by the relief.

Hanabi's brows knit together, her throat flexing with her tight swallow. "I'm scared."

Hinata's hand stills on the threshold.

"I'm scared, Hinata, and I don't know what I'm doing, but – " She bites her lip, takes a breath. "But I want it – Head of House. I want it."

A hesitant, resilient smile tugs at Hinata's lips, watching her younger sister.

"I want to be the leader father believed I could be. And then I want to be more."

Hinata raises a hand to Hanabi's cheek. "I know." The words are a tremulous exhale, her smile broadening.

"Father told me to come to you."

Hinata blinks at that, her hand slipping from her sister's cheek.

"He told me if I was ever lost, or I wasn't ready, or the weight became too much – he told me to come to you."

Hinata's smile wilts slowly, her eyes shifting between her sister's. "What..." She swallows back the words. She cannot find the right ones anyway.

Hanabi cocks her head as she looks at her, the uncertainty finally leaving her face, a bright resilience following in its place. An earnestness that makes Hinata love her all the more for it. "He told me you would guide me. That you would never lead me astray. He said if I looked to you, I would know how to make our family proud and how to keep them safe. He told me your help would be invaluable in the days to come."

Hinata's chest swells, her mouth tipping open with no sound to come. She reaches a hand along her collar and grips at it, her heart rending beneath her skin.

(She wants more than legacy and disappointment and yearning.)

She wants... she wants –

"So," Hanabi says, swallowing back the quake, "Will you help me?"

She looks so young to Hinata then. So young and earnest and hurting.

Her sister. Her little sister.

(Hinata was the first to light the incense, and Hanabi was the last.

What she starts, her sister has always known how to finish.

Even this – their father's wish.)

She could never leave her to it alone.

Her hand returns to Hanabi's cheek, a teary chuckle making it to her lips. "I will," she promises.

Hanabi breaks. Perhaps for the first time since their father died. Her face crumbles in pain, her head hanging low, both palms going to cup her face as the first sob racks her.

Hinata doesn't let her break for long. She draws her into her arms, cradles her in the crook of her body, melds her to her chest, as easy as breathing, like pieces that have always fit, and always would.

Hanabi sobs into Hinata's embrace.

"I'm here," she tells her, and like that – like the instant lighting of a match –

The pain is less.

Her sister hugs her back just as tightly.

* * *

Hinata takes her father's book of poems from the shelf, a hand smoothing reverently over the cover. She sits and reads into the late afternoon, until she comes upon a page with her father's handwriting.

It's her name, inked upon the bottom of a page, and a date beside it. She recognizes the date as sometime in her first spring, when she was only a few months old. Her eyes flick to the poem just above her father's hand.

In spring rain

a pretty girl

yawning.

Hinata stills. She thinks of that day, that day with the rain pouring outside the open shoji doors, and her father's contented smile as he watched the water coming down.

She thinks of the faded ink beside the poem.

Hinata, in her father's hand.

She presses her hand to her mouth, eyes fluttering shut with the first tears.

Hinata cannot say whether Hiashi was a good man or not, only that she misses him.

She lost him in spring, when all things are born, and yet some things die. But when she closes the book, she thinks she finally understands what her father had been searching for –

Not a shinobi's hands, but a daughter's.

#hyuga hinata #hyuga hiashi #hyuga hanabi #uchiha sasuke #sasuhina #sasuhina fic #hyuga neji #naruto fanfic #my writing

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