Distant Echoes

11 - Mirrors

The sky was now indigo, he, Sasuke was sick and she had to run to him. The sight of blood had returned the magone in her stomach. She was thinking about herself two years earlier. Before the war she was a naive girl with a suitcase full of dreams who looked with admiration at a blond boy with whom she had never really managed to talk, thinking she loved him. Over time she had realized that she had a heart in love not with Naruto, but of the love, probably with how she would want to be loved.

Who was Naruto really?

She didn't really know him.

That was clear to her the day it all fell apart.

Then.

He then erected fortified walls, recognizing Neji's blood in his sin.

Reality cannot be changed.

She had told her Neji a long time before and now a few years since he died to save, because her who could not protect anyone, not even herself. Every night on the day of her departure she took on new nuances, appearing before her with that seal of submission to her house that disappeared from her she forehead as he ceased to live. She only went to the cemetery when they buried him. The ceremony ended after a few hours. In silence, all the people around Hinata had left the place. Only Naruto was left at his side, for a moment Hinata had felt the pat of him on the shoulder, and she had turned, lifting her eyelids and reliving her past. Neji that to protect her who wanted to save Naruto, he had himself killed at his place. 

Naruto had immediately rushed to Neji's aid, he seemed more desperate than she was for her cousin. He was a good man. She Hinata wasn't one of them. Breathing loudly that day had greeted him with a bow and looking at him had heard nothing, his heart was atrophied. She would never see Neji come and call her again, she would never train with him again, there was so much silence in the house.

Your own weakness will be your undoing.

His own weakness, too. The wind had lifted her hair, pricking her swollen and clear eyes. He dreamed of it every day after the end of the war. Long brown hair, fair skin and eyes identical to his. Neji appeared before evanescent when kneeling on the grass she saw him. Standing barefoot, he tried to reach him, his feet were wounded with thorns rising from the ground, he never forgot that he had died.

- Neji tell me something, please, where are you now? - asked him in tears.

Sometimes he'd put the back of her hand on her cheek. He couldn't talk to her anymore, he just saw it, the words he heard were just memories he'd told her alive, then in his dreams he'd always been silent, because he was dead, because he had no connection to anyone who breathed. When he woke up, he opened his mouth, trying to scream, but only a dull and suffocated sound came out of his throat. Hinata had lost her word, lying tired and weakened. It was much better for her to go back to sleep and stay in bed. She wasn't interested in training, she wasn't interested in drawing, she wasn't interested in dancing on water, she didn't care about anything in her gray world.

You are too weak.

After a year of silence and nightmares, she left the house like she died with her cousin, like a ghost. In the woods he heard the wind hissing like a deadly song. The naive and dreamy girl had departed, crumbling in the awareness of her superficiality. The crush she had as a girl had become the worst repentance, it had become a nightmare. When she met Naruto, remembering how she had treated her cousin, her throat was blocked and the vomit was rising.