Between the Trees

If it was going to happen to anyone, Naruto would’ve pegged it to be Kakashi-sensei. He was lascivious and perverted and he always looked a stride away from doing something unsavory when Iruka raised his voice.

Really, it could’ve happened to anyone; Naruto just never expected for it to happen to him.

A fear boner. Sort of. Emotionally, at least.

On the battle field.

Sai was never going to let him live it down.

✧

The morning started ordinarily enough, with Naruto rising with the sun on his back and the sounds of metal clashing outside his tent. The air smelled wet with copper, heavy with anticipation. He changed and readied himself for another hard-fought day, coming out of his tent completely into the sun. It refracted against the mist, a constant here, and made the day seem simultaneously over bright and murky. He nodded to those he passed, his name a familiar kind of awe on their lips.

War changes people. It changes everything.

Naruto still felt unused to it—them. The changes. A fellow shinobi walked past him, ducking his head so quickly he might’ve come away with a mild case of whiplash. At his hip the sun caught in a gleam of charcoal, and Naruto recognized sharp familiarity.

The spiral symbol carved into the iron—it was his.

He tried not to think about it too much, it was just too bizarre.

One of his Captains approached him, nothing more for greeting than a terse nod before he began to debrief Naruto on what the night shift had had to offer. Naruto listened with half an ear, weary and battle-beaten but still kicking. His Captain matched his steps and didn’t have to ask to know where they were headed.

On the border of Mist, visibility was nil and wicked. It helped them prepare, though, for the real fighting. So they carved out a space amongst the thinning trees, bare and blackened—not from fire, but from disease. The moors ahead of them were as unwelcoming as they were unforgiving.

Between the trees, they made space to train. To fight. To keep idle muscles warm and flexible, to keep their minds geared for the unpredictability of war. His Captain stopped beside him when they came to the outskirts of the field and Naruto could feel his eyes on his profile.

But Naruto had eyes for someone else entirely. They may call him Commander, now, and he would do his duty to the utmost esteem, but there were still moments he carved out for himself alone. In these rare times, he was just Uzumaki Naruto again. A young man who could be freely curious; a young man who had learned how to yearn.

He was only a few days past twenty, still growing, the goal ahead of him looming but still out of reach. He’d always had his sights set on becoming Hokage—yet he had never expected to become a war hero on the journey. He’d never expected war, at all. He supposed that’s how it always was. Unpredictable while striking at the heart of nations.

He wondered presently if she shared a similar rupture of surprise regarding her new status and the title that unofficially came with it—or if, somewhere along with mastering medicine, becoming a squadron Captain, and Lording a clan even while on the frontlines, she had come to expect this.

Hyuuga Hinata had always moved like water, effortlessly graceful, powerfully elegant. Slipped right through his fingers.

War had sharpened her edges, brought her to points. She learned to move like the breeze: unseen, but unmistakably felt. She had no need for blades, her palms quicker and nimbler and just as severe. More so.

She leapt away from her assailant’s swift attack, body twisting through the air to avoid a new assault of flying kunai, and came down hard with the blunt end of her palm against her opponent’s neck—and just like that, the spar was over. She had triumphed.

She caught her squad leader’s body before he could fall to the ground. She laid him down carefully and knelt at his side to check his vitals as those around her chattered, hushed and awed, whispering.

Naruto had heard it all before. Frigid. Omniscient. Angel of Death.

Hinata shifted, tucking her hair behind her ear as she glanced over her shoulder. She caught Naruto’s striking gaze and blinked, once, a breathtaking consideration. He had only enough time to realize belatedly that her Byakugan wasn’t even activated. Then she turned away, back to her opponent-turned-patient, and Naruto watched the man come back to consciousness in her arms with an expression of keen wonder.

Something dark inside him swirled.

Naruto thought, bastard never stood a chance.

Whether he was referring to her squad leader or himself, he wouldn’t say.

✧

Naruto should’ve planned for this. An ambush was expected, when it came to the Mist. They were impatient but bloodthirsty; an ambush was never going to surprise them as the Mist expected it should.

But the Leaf had not expected him. Not here, on the outskirts of a dilapidated and abandoned village gradually sinking over time into the moors.

AWarlord, someone cried through the comm. There’s a Warlord here!

Naruto cursed as he weaved away from another sharp-toothed assailant wielding a blade larger then Naruto himself. He’d made the mistake of edging towards the moor and had lost his footing long enough to feel the bite of that blade against his waist—had he moved a second later he would’ve done so in two pieces.

“Retreat,” he hissed through the comm, leaping from beam to beam and pushing through the fragile and broken rooftop to attempt to achieve superior position. His heart thundered in his chest, adrenaline surging. That was Hinata’s squad. “Squad A, retreat.”

“Understood,” came the squad leader’s warbling voice, and Naruto’s heart dropped to his feet. Where was Hinata? Hers was the voice he needed—the voice he should’ve heard. Was she too busy in the fighting? Was she injured? Was she—

He would not entertain the thought. He twisted through the air with a hiss, releasing a multitude of shuriken to slow his opponents down. The stars took three of them from the roof, but the other two absorbed them like living pools of water. They laughed and charged and even as they swung their mighty swords for the very heart of him, he could not completely focus on them.

It was a foolish thing to do. A Commander would never be so careless. But he was young yet, and he had never asked for the title, and though he would do justice to the weight of it, they had to have known that he would fail it. He had a track record of failures longer and wider than the gulf that ran between Leaf and Sand, still freshly filled with Naruto’s friendship with Gaara. They had expected too much of him, and he had expected too much of his squadrons.

Hinata still had not answered.

He turned and put all of his weight behind his fist and watched the skull of the enemy shatter around his knuckles. The man fell heavily, bounced on impact. Naruto turned to the next assailant and heard bubbling over his shoulder, never a good sign. He fended off his masterful swordsmanship with clenched teeth, forcing himself to breathe through the impacts.

Kurama, a shadow in his mind, whispered: drop low.

Naruto had long since learned to obey that tone of voice. He did as he was told and watched as the Mist shinobi whose skull had shattered around his fist heaved his sword horizontally, right through the space Naruto had stood a moment prior. He had aimed to cleave him in two.

Naruto wasn’t surprised that he was up and fighting again, or that he looked untouched and unhurt. He had been on the frontlines of this war with Mist for years. The tricks of the Mist were many, but he had nearly seen them all.

He lifted his hands and said the words and suddenly he wasn’t outnumbered anymore. The Mist nin around him cursed, turning to fight off his clones, each of which charged with Rasengan in hand.

Hinata’s squad leader’s voice came over the line again, and his words threatened to shatter what was left of Naruto’s hard-fought control.

“Our Captain,” he panted, sounding both panicked and exhausted, a painful conflict of anxiety and fatigue. “She is facing the Warlord alone.”

Naruto lost the breath in his lungs.

A Mist shinobi didn’t get the title of Warlord by favor or mere triumph. They won the title by committing a multitude of atrocities. They were heartless and cruel, cold-blooded and hungry. Beasts made from a different cloth, maws always gaping. Mist shinobi were known for their cruelty, the chaos that ensued from their bloodless fingertips.

Their Warlords were known for nothing less than their pleasure of annihilation.

Naruto knew how strong Hinata was. He trusted her. But buried deep in the folds of his battered and weary soul there was this: an animalistic need to protect those he loved, despite what might stand in his way. Death itself could rise up before him and Naruto would beat it back down, teeth and claws bared, Kurama breathing through his veins.

Naruto had fought too long and too hard to create and maintain a family of his own.

He could see the tinge of crimson around him, the way Kurama’s chakra leaked into the air around them. The Mist nin closest to him gasped, the weight of Naruto’s oozing chakra bringing them to their knees.

He felt the heat of a distant explosion, felt the way the earth trembled and the rickety house beneath him quaked. He thought he heard laughter, loud enough to break apart the clouds. Naruto left his enemies behind him without a single look back, a blur of orange and black. The sounds of his clones crashing against them was soon lost to the wind rushing by him as his feet moved swiftly over the earth, bringing him unerringly to where he needed most to be.

He headed for the flames even as he felt them clawing down his veins.

He hoped he got there in time.

✧

When Naruto arrived, he registered three things at once.

First, the Mist Warlord was more than twice Hinata’s height, and wider around the middle than a pillar of stone.

Second, he was quick. Quick enough to make Hinata’s thighs, fatigued from overuse, tremble.

Third, he was going to lose.

Hinata had cornered him in free space, her chakra a visible, fine-lined stream creating a glowing sphere of restraint around the Warlord, even as he moved. Hers was a moving prison of chakra, the cage of which was as much an attack as it was a defense; it erased every chakra center it touched. It reminded Naruto of the Akatsuki member from Mist whose sword drained chakra when it bit.

Naruto’s eyes caught and held on her bare upper arms, glistening with sweat, defined and flexed in tension. He had always known her to be strong, of a special sort—drawing to his eyes—but this was new.

The way his eyes caught and held and couldn’t look away from the physicality of her form, the way her arms moved in liquid elegance one moment, and then struck viper-quick and critically with stunning designation the next. Her strength silenced in him the roaring of chaos he found so unremitting, and in its absence, something new and equally dangerous lurked.

Desire.

She leapt and twisted, ducked low and dodged, all the while slicing in and carving her way through the mass of chakra centered throughout the giant’s body. His monstrosity of a sword was still clutched in his hands, heavy enough to require both, and it was then that Naruto knew the true strength of the man.

That still he held onto his sword, even after Hinata had struck every one of the glowing spheres of chakra from his arms. He was moving by sheer will alone. His shoulders dragged and he was panting, wounded prey.

But so was Hinata. Blood dripped down from her forehead and already her eyes were swelling deep, mottled blue. A broken nose. She was favoring her right side and Naruto could see the rip in her uniform, a perfect slice over her left collarbone and shoulder. A jab rather than a swing—inches away from her heart. An astonishing move with a sword that large—Hinata must’ve been startled. She was weary, broken and breathless.

But Hinata had never let herself be a victim. Protective of her squadron and present on the warfront, she was a predator sensing a kill; she did not hesitate. She moved in close, allowed herself to be caught. The Warlord’s hand swallowed her throat whole and his laughter blanketed the entire area, a booming thunder—Naruto could just barely hear someone screaming her name—realized too late that it was him.

Hinata was quicker than the threat at her throat. She kicked out and Naruto saw it: the streamline lethality of her chakra control.

From the toe of her sandal a stream of chakra radiated, ever blue, thinner than thread. It sliced through the big man and brought him to his knees. She brought her hands up—Kakashi’s voice, suddenly, ruthless and clinical in Naruto’s mind: a foolish mistake to have allowed a Hyuuga to keep them—and sliced through the chakra in his wrists. Her biceps contracted, glistened. Naruto’s stomach filled with heat, and fear.

The sword clattered to the ground, heavy enough that Naruto felt the vibration of it fifty feet away. Hinata did not pause to see if the man would fall completely. She leapt over him and secured her win with deft fingers, the veins alongside her eyes pulsing with heat. Her hands moved so quickly over the Warlord’s body Naruto had to strain to see them, catching only afterthoughts of fatal blue. She leapt into the air and twisted, and Naruto knew this attack, too.

A beast of her own making, a single sapphire creature of chakra and fangs surrounded her palm and slammed into the Warlord’s back. The big cat did not stop where her palm did. It ran through him, taking and taking until every light within him was gone. Naruto watched Hinata fall to her knee, not moving her eyes from her quarry until she had watched the final light in his eyes flee.

Naruto could see her squadron on the outskirts and he wondered idly how long they’d been there, if she’d ordered them away. Behind the Warlord there were waves of fallen Mist, freshly silent. Of course, Naruto thought coolly, the Warlord had not come alone.

When Naruto had arrived, the Warlord had already appeared quite wounded, as though Hinata’s squadron had intercepted him and done their best before parting around what he presumed to be Hinata’s order. She must have wanted them safe. Naruto could see now that they were in awful shape, some hunched over, some being supported by others, all of them bleeding. Far lesser in number than he knew them to be. Naruto turned his eyes back to Hinata and knew without question, without doubt, that she had challenged the Warlord alone to save the remains of her squadron.

It was unlike Hinata to not use her adept mind for strategy to defeat an enemy. Naruto wondered for only a moment why she hadn’t kept her superior numbers, why she had isolated herself to singularity. But he knew what it meant to need to protect those you cared about. Hinata had done just that, as best as she could.

The Warlord had seemed an easy man to challenge, arrogant and cocksure. A young woman standing before him, provoking him into single combat must have amused him; enticed him. He’d probably thought it a game.

He probably never expected to lose.

Naruto moved.

“Hinata,” he called, parsed segments of awe and fear interspersed into something of a sigh. He felt breathless and weary, and he ached for her. For what the war had taken from her; for what it would continue to take from them all. “Hinata.”

She turned to him and he could see the collapse in her, the battered spirit. He lost his breath when she turned to him, tears in her eyes; a surprising softness. Before the war had begun, when he had allowed himself to think about her apart from all others, he would think first of the gentleness of her curves. She had no angles to her. Every deceptively delicate slope of her had humbled him.

Even on the front lines she had somehow, somehow maintained that softness. She guided her squadron kindly, gently, quietly. Taught them of strategy and of survival. She was a wraith in the darkest moments of night, tending to the wounded, still wearing her armor. She sat under veiled canopies in camp with those who could not be saved, and she told them stories, hushed and secretive, theirs and theirs only. Like war, her kindness had changed him.

But he had not seen her cry for years. She was the strongest woman he knew, right there with Sakura-chan, and though her tears didn’t make her less so, they shocked him for their rarity.

“Naruto-kun,” she breathed, and this was a breach of protocol, but Naruto savored it. He let her voice curl around his name and bring him home; it had been so long since he’d been there. So long.

He guided the sentiment behind her voice into the deepest and warmest parts of him. His heart called out to her, beckoning.

“It’s okay,” he whispered, and he was the one who reached for her.

She came willingly, gladly, into his arms. Hinata allowed her tears to fall stoically, silently against him. It was Naruto who trembled. Shock, maybe. Desire was there too. But all the more surprising was this: the fear.

Despite it, his desire only grew.

In another moment, another time, maybe he would’ve kissed her.

But the beast she’d slayed still breathed slowly behind them, unconscious but alive, awaiting a secure trip to Ino’s shadowed quarters. Blood ran down Hinata’s cheeks. The skin under her eyes swelled with color, rosen eggplant.

Now was not the time for romance.

Soon, though, Naruto couldn’t help but to think. It resonated within him, the first drop in a rippling effect; the ocean of their beginning.

Soon.