Chapter 5
There had always been something distinctive about Hinata’s touch—something softer, and gentler, and more purposeful behind every motion. Midnight stream movement, with earth-shaking potential.
Naruto remembers her hands, trembling, holding out an offering of healing cream when he’d been roughed up and broken down at the Chuunin exams. He remembers her hand in his, years later, smooth and slight and strong.
He remembers watching her incapacitate enemies with a flick of her wrist, the gentle persuasion of delving fingertips in just the right places. He remembers the coming and going of power and forgiveness in her hands, and the way she held him so carefully the first time they made love.
Maybe it was the way she used her hands for both healing and destruction, for comfort and chaos. The subtle press of her fingertips against his cheek in the morning could so easily rouse him, could bring warmth radiating up and through his skin. Often, she would card her fingers through his hair and gently massage his scalp, her fingers each uniquely powerful in their variability.
Eventually, Naruto truly began to feel that Hinata held his entire world there, in her hands.
Her hands, pressed against the backs of each of their children, nestled against her legs—her hands, reaching out to his, pulling him into the warmth of her open embrace—her hands, tracing the mismatched lines of scars along his body with a lightness to their touch that made him shiver just to remember it.
Now, memories are all he has left of that touch.
Shock still radiates through Naruto in fine currents, his spine ramrod straight, his eyes wide and wild. Boruto and Himawari are with him, now, each with a hand threaded through Naruto’s own. He can feel the warmth of their fingers in his and his heart cries out with a painful lurch, as they step through the hospital room and find Hinata just as he’d left her that morning.
She smiles when she greets them, and there isn’t a flicker of insecurity in her gaze, or the subtle lift in the corner of her lips. It’s as though she doesn’t even recognize the bandages, or what they signify. Naruto waits for her to reach out to them, to welcome Boruto and Himawari into her arms as she so often had, and Naruto struggles to find his next breath.
“My sun, my stars,” Hinata calls softly, eyes dancing from Boruto to Himawari with tender reception. “How was school today?”
And Naruto grits his teeth and thinks: it isn’t fair.
This isn’t their first time seeing their mother since the accident—the accident—but Boruto and Himawari treat it as such; they flit to her sides, hands reaching for her where she can no longer reach for them. They coo and report about their classes, their newfound knowledge, and their cheeks press lovingly to her chest, her shoulder, anywhere they can press close enough to remind themselves her heart still beats.
Naruto watches this with jaded eyes, his vision blurring without the presence of tears. They’re too young for that, he thinks despairingly; too young to mask gestures of comfort and greeting for furtive, desperate proof of life.
Naruto stands over them, and his eyes never once leave Hinata’s smoothed out expression, the gentle way her lips frame words of comfort and joy. He has to catch himself, even so many days into their new routine, expecting to see her hands carding through their hair.
Naruto’s hands curl into white-knuckled fists, valleys of ash and jagged bone. He doesn’t need to close his eyes to see the man’s face in his mind, flashing across his eyelids, grotesque and misshaped. His heart thunders in the coliseum of his chest, a premonition of vengeance he can only remember having felt in lesser shades of shadow and grit. Sasuke, Orochimaru, Kabuto.
Kabuto.
Hinata senses the change in him even before he realizes there is a change—how could he recognize a difference? Every day and night since she’d returned home he has only seen red.
“Naruto-kun,” she says, voice steady. “Come here.”
Naruto barely hears the words. He acknowledges the change in him, now; he feels more than sees that this is more than a simple monotonous cloud of anger shading his vision with red, but a murky flush of scarlet, thick as blood, heavy as hate, roiling through his skin. It flushes out all of his compassion, excretes every relief of his empathy through his pores, and he feels the jagged point of his canines elongate until he’s not only seeing and feeling the bloodlust, but tasting it.
“Bastard,” he thunders, and the room quakes. His unseeing eyes flicker, and his chest feels too tight for the fury inside of him.
“Naruto-kun,” Hinata says again, in the same voice, in the same volume. Nothing about it has changed, but somehow, it catches on him, seeps through and takes hold. His eyes shift to her, trace the stern lines of her expressive eyes and the concerned lines of her pursed lips. Her strength, coupled with her concern, are enough to knock him off his feet on a good day.
This is not a good day.
He is not knocked off his feet at the reminder that there is someone in the world that looks at him and sees worth, sees light, sees hope. Her steady gaze, unflinching and kind, does not calm the thundering of his heart, or the smoke in his mind that manages to cast every source of light into shadow. It does not move through him in waves, usually so gradual and stunning, stopping every process in his mind and body in its tracks.
She stares at the monster in him with love and concern and her gaze slices through him quick and hot as a stroke of lightning, and he is not knocked off his feet.
He is brought to his knees.
He barely feels the impact, barely sees the scrunched faces of his children, pressing close to their mother but looking on at him in frightened alarm. That steady gaze of hers levels the rage in him, flares it out like a blast zone, leaves him a barely pieced together survivor, breaking at the seams.
He wants to move closer to her, to press against her in the same way that their children have, wants to feel the subtle pressure of her hands moving rhythmically over his back, up his neck, into his hair. He wants to take back the time, to any and every moment he has ever encountered Kabuto, and he wants to wipe him from this earth.
He wants, and he wants, and he wants.
He feels tears sting his eyes and overflow, racing down his cheeks and off of the trembling line of his jaw.
“I’m angry,” he cries, responding to that stare, knowing the demands of it—that they do not lie to each other. “That word, anger, it doesn’t even cover it. Not the half of it. What I feel,” he sobs, air trapped in the pit of his throat, vision blurring; “What I feel is more than hate.”
That someone as gentle and giving as Hinata had been the one to fall into hands so unlike her own, so cruel and vindictive and careless—there was no outcome more undeserved.
“Come here,” she says again, with the first sign of a tremble in her voice. Her eyes leave his for only a moment as she mutters quieting words to Boruto and Himawari, ushering them with nothing but her voice to seek the nurse at the front desk, and ask where the snack machine is. Boruto understands the need for this gentle dismissal better than Himawari, but is stubborn enough to part his lips in protest—yet, Himawari had always been more perceptive of the emotions of others, and so slipped her fingers through Boruto’s, guiding him towards the door.
Naruto remains on his knees, fists clenched on his thighs, ever-shaking. He blinks a fresh wave of tears down his cheeks and tries to swallow around all of the undirected rage caught in his throat. He feels like a bomb, slowly ticking away, with no destination set but the very heart of him.
He glances away from his fists and finds Hinata’s gaze once more, and something there has him rising to his feet, moving closer. Her eyes have always been powerful, mysterious in their abilities and their potential, and he has never been weaker to them than now.
He is the strongest shinobi in the village, the one with the most power, the one who makes the greatest decisions. He is feared and revered and spoken of in hushed whispers in every country, and he has never once backed down from a challenge. He is formidable; he is a stronghold.
He looks down at Hinata, her body so still, the spaces where her arms should have been now as empty as he feels inside, and he can do nothing but crumble against her.
“I’m sorry,” He whispers, and it becomes a chant pressed into the skin of her throat.
I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.
He can feel the phantom touch of her fingertips carding through his hair, knows the weight and the press of them more intimately than the feel of a kunai in his hands, and he weeps.
She hums against him, and he feels a wetness against his upturned cheek that is new, and sudden. He pulls away from her with heaving breaths, and finds tear tracks sliding down her cheeks. She is unashamed of them, wears them openly. The shock of seeing them has him stilling, his breaths calming into something of a restful pace for the first time since she’d returned.
This is the first time she had cried, since.
Since.
“It’s going to be okay,” she says, and Naruto feels the hand of shame strike him. Here she is, lying in the hospital, recovering from surgery, trying to come to terms with the loss of her arms, and she is the one comforting him. What more can he say to her that he hasn’t already? How many times is he going to have to apologize to her for being weak—too weak to stop this from ever happening, too weak to be strong for her when she needs it most?
“Hinata,” he breathes shakily, eyebrows dipping in despondency. He does not say the words again, I’m sorry, but he feels them, and he presses them into her through his lips against hers. He pushes their foreheads together for the briefest of moments, and when he pulls away, her cheeks are flushed with red.
This is not an unfamiliar reaction, and the familiarity of it has Naruto’s heart, a wild beast in its cage, finally beginning to settle. He reaches forward and strokes her cheek with his thumb, staring down at her and hoping beyond hope that she can see and feel every ounce of the love that he feels for her. He doesn’t know if it’s possible to voluntarily radiate love, like a chemical released within one’s body, but he tries. For her, he tries.
“It’s going to be okay,” he echoes her words back to her, knowing now that they should have been his all along. He strokes her hair, touches her face, and carefully leans against her. “It’s going to be okay.”
“It is,” she agrees, breathing around the fingertips he presses lightly to her lips, exploring the soft, rosy skin. “Now they need to hear you say it, too.”
Confusion fractures a line across his expression before he turns over his shoulder, finds his children in the doorway, expressions an amusing blend of hesitant and insistent. Boruto has Himawari in his arms, hitched on his hip with her arms around his neck, and his eyes never waver from Naruto’s. Himawari’s oceanic gaze sweeps over him and finds her mother, and concern falls under the wayside when she sees Hinata’s smile.
“Come,” Naruto says, curling a finger. Boruto doesn’t hesitate. He moves until he and Himawari are at Naruto’s side, and his wide eyes study the tears slowly drying on Naruto’s cheeks. He does not wipe them away.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and it’s okay, because Boruto and Himawari deserve to hear it, need it said only once. “Not for crying, but for getting so angry. I frightened you, huh?”
Boruto purses his lips, obviously not wanting to admit to it, but not wanting to outright lie, either. Himawari slides off of his side and moves until she’s standing beside Hinata’s shoulder, and Naruto’s hip. She glances up at him with her too-bright gaze, and she says, “You did. You really did.”
Naruto feels his heart lurch in his chest, and he glances to Hinata for strength. She gives it with a smile, with a softening of her expression, and he breathes easy once more. He knows that his outburst, the first of such an uncontrollable caliber that he’s ever shown before his kids, needs to be turned into a lesson. He knows that Hinata needs it to be, and he’s grateful that he knows her well enough to know that he needs it to be, too.
“Anger like that,” he begins, locking eyes with Boruto and Himawari in kind. “Is dangerous. You’ve seen it firsthand now, right? It hurts the people around you—the people you love. It’s important to control it. If your mom hadn’t helped me, I could have seriously hurt you.”
“But you didn’t,” Hinata joins in softly, her voice soothing. “Naruto-kun, my world. You didn’t. That’s important, too.”
“Yeah,” Naruto agrees, after a pause. He watches her, as her voice lulls them all into a sense of comfort; the way that the tension in Boruto and Himawari gradually fades out, until they’re lying on the bed on either side of Hinata, nestled close.
Hinata takes over the lesson, because this is what she’s always been so good at—leading those with questions, to answers. The loss of her arms, of nearly her entire fighting technique, is not something that simple words can make up for, or make right. Kabuto’s enduring existence, and the fury that Naruto feels towards him, are not so easily cowed by simple words. But they are impeded, locked down and settled in with control, and that makes a difference. It makes all the difference.
What has happened to Hinata is traumatic, and it will change her, change all of them. But they have experience with this—Sasuke had lost one of his arms not so long ago, after all—and they will get through this. Naruto had known years ago, when he had looked at her and seen everything good in the world in the slight curve of her smiling lips, that he would be there for her always, no matter what.
He will be here for her, through this harrowing change full of questions and uncertainties, just as she had been for him. He knows that she’s going to come out of this even stronger than before, knows it just by looking at her; sees it in the softness of her acceptance, the strength of her determination, shown in the strained lines of her brows. My world, he thinks, before his eyes flicker over Boruto, and then Himawari.
My world, my sun, my stars.
He watches Hinata teach their children how to fight hatred and anger with control and with compassion, and his heart reignites with warmth and power, a surging comet lighting up every corner of the darkness that resides within him.
They will have so much to learn, in the future. But they will do it all as a family.
Hinata will do what she has always done, effortlessly, beautifully; she will teach them.
And she will mend what, and whom, are broken.
The gentleness of her touch transcends physicality, after all.