Chapter 10
Uzumaki Naruto had grown used to being ignored when he was a kid. The entire village had been hyperaware of him, of the beast inside of him and what they thought it made him, but still they ignored him. They looked away, turned away, they changed directions when they saw him.
They whispered over his head; words like beast, like abomination.
When he was a young man, there wasn’t a single shadow in the village he could hide in; their attention spotlights that followed him everywhere, curiously, gladly, and he didn’t know what to do with them. He hadn’t saved the village singlehandedly, he’d had help, he’d had a team, he’d had so many resources at his disposal—but it was him their eyes suddenly began to follow. They tracked him like targets, locking on unwaveringly. It was equal parts baffling and unsettling; they had never given him time to get used to attention.
He found, later, that he didn’t much mind the attention. It still baffled him, that people would stop him on the street—him—and want to talk with him like he was anything but the pariah they had shunned just years prior. It never became easy, but Naruto had grown accustomed to getting used to things that weren’t easy. He might even go so far as to say that the challenges were more comfortable to him, more familiar.
It’s a few months after the attention settled around him like an uncomfortable but unalterable second skin that he started to feel distracted.
At first, he thought it was just him getting used to the role change. It’s not the easiest of transitions, moving from abomination to savior, and Naruto still had reservations about the terminology of either.
He noticed it most starkly in the mornings, when there were crowds upon crowds of people lining the streets and there was nowhere for him to hide. It started as a subtle hinge in the back of his mind, making him turn this way and that, over shoulder and into alleyways, always seeking. He hadn’t a clue for what until his eyes found purchase and he realized it was a who.
When was the last time he’d seen Hyuga Hinata? His gaze found her in crowds, and remained. He barely blinked for fear of losing her, the long fall of her midnight hair and the delicate dip of her waist, hindered only slightly by her favorite jacket.
She didn’t look at him, didn’t see him.
And this time, it was all Naruto noticed.
✧
It began as a game of sorts, fueled by Naruto’s confused curiosity. He began to look for her whenever he was out on the streets, or racing over rooftops, headed for who knew what and where. He often found her.
She must have known he was there, he couldn’t help but think at times, but still she did not look.
He started to see less of the crowds and the bustling shops, began to hear less of the incessant buzzing of cicadas and the clamor of voices, and instead focused entirely on Hinata. She was a centering convergence, one that enabled him to hone his senses entirely on the curl of her smile, the fine swipe of her eyelashes.
It had all begun as a game, Naruto looking for her and wondering why she (suddenly, newly) never looked back. But then feelings Naruto could barely recognize began to grow and rumble beneath the swelling tides of his energy, bubbling and bounding, and he had to find names for words he could only remember feeling when he was a child.
Longing, and yearning, and missing.
It hadn’t occurred to him until then to realize that her attention was something he would miss—something he had missed.
He didn’t know the exact moment his feelings had changed, or if they had only shifted into something new and suddenly unnamable, but he started to look at Hinata with more.
More feeling, more curiosity, more need.
Pay attention to me! He thought, as he watched her move seamlessly throughout the crowds, her fingertips grazing shoulders and shoulder blades, gentle and welcoming and everything he’d never realized he needed forever.
There had never been anything in the world that could rival his distaste and intolerance for hatred, for war. But this, he thought (near-frantically), this abrupt and almost purposeful lack of attention from someone he had grown comfortable under the gaze of (a willing specimen pinned and held), had begun a war in him he hadn’t realized he waged.
He looked and he looked and he looked, at her.
And she did not look back.
And that, he realized—
(an epiphany)
—was intolerable.