Chapter 27
He remembered the cold.
The frigid grasp of it, the relentless hold.
Holes in his tattered jacket, his weather-beaten pants.
What was it that gave loneliness a temperature, a sensation, a feeling without feeling? He remembered losing feeling; in his toes, the tips of his fingers that longed for a touch. The memory of it was a blade that he chose to wield, because it couldn’t hurt him now; the way it sliced into the skin of his palms, those doglegged joints, those furtive fragments. The frigid slice of it could no longer win over the resulting heat, scarlet and beading, and the present reality of real heat pressed against his own.
“What do you think, Naruto-kun,” a soft voice mused, carried on the wind. She moved her free hand over the rounded breadth of her belly fondly, dotingly. “Cyan, lavender, yellow?”
Naruto gazed at her longingly, wanted to bridge the minimal gap between them, to tuck her into the recesses of his comfort and protection. He watched the way she turned to him, a page of their shared life turning, and her smile was a delicate swipe of ink spilling across the page.
Her smile fractured from pure amusement, dipped into an edge of teasing, sly eyes shrewd. She spoke and her words were trapped laughter. “Or perhaps orange?”
Naruto squeezed her hand tighter, his heart a bastion in his chest. He felt his lips curl into a smile of his own, reciprocating her vivacious amusement, and Naruto thought again about heat.
“Lavender,” He said, voice lower than he’d maybe intended. He blinked at her, watching her tilt her head, considering. Fingers of the breeze played lovingly with her hair, obscuring her expression from his view. He reached out to her with a gentleness that stung, that was heated, that flashed him back through memories of cold and blades and the sharp sting of pain that came before the promise of warmth, the promise that he was alive. “He’ll love lavender.”
Hinata allowed him to straighten her hair, to fuss over her in the midst of the thriving marketplace. His calluses caught gently on the smooth skin of her cheek, her temple. Her eyes were brighter than he could ever remember seeing them, luring, capturing.
“Okay,” she breathed, and her breathlessness was catching. She laughed, low and sweet, and Naruto moved without ever intending to. He dipped low, allowed their lips to just barely brush, pushed closer until he could taste the gentleness she gave to him. She smiled against the kiss and said, “Lavender it is.”
Naruto pulled back only so far as to look at her, to study the heat of her flushed expression, the brightened wonder of her gaze. He held her head in his hands, his thumbs moving slowly over her temples, and there would never be a limit to the amount he wanted to touch her. To hold her.
To kiss her.
He thought, do you know?
Hinata lifted herself onto the tips of her toes, and there it was again, her laugh. It chimed freely, without hesitation, openly and beautifully happy. Naruto met her halfway, leaned down to press his forehead against hers, breathing in their shared intimacy, the gap of space he resented between them. Life moved around them, as busy and relentless as time. Chimes sang overhead, tickled by the breeze; store owners bartered, choppy and insistent, compromising; patrons moved through the aisles, the trails of venders and shops; children ran through the streets, kicking up dust and trying their damndest to drown out the sounds of anything above their own voices.
The world turned around them and under them and above them and Naruto stood with Hinata laughing and flushed ever warm under his hands and he wondered once again, do you know?
Her laughter, her joy, her strength and determination; the way she ran her hand so carefully, so protectively over the child they had created together just under her heated skin.
Did she know that she was the reason Naruto knew warmth?
That she kept him warm in her own bloodstream, a figment of heat captured and so willingly, lovingly held? Did she know the power she had over him—that he was a man starved for her—that every one of her breaths steadied his racing heart?
Naruto listened to Hinata breathe, for only a moment, a single blink of his eyes, and everything in him calmed. The life of her, a soothing balm to his soul.
Her breath; the promise of four walls and a roof over their son’s head.
Her heat; the promise of the warmth of a family their son would never have to grow up not knowing.
Home.
In shades of lavender.