Naruto // Ficlet // nightmares
Focus: Neji/Hinata
Genres: Friendship, family, hurt/comfort
Rating: K
Wordcount: 306
Prompt: obvious
Summary: She was not blessed with blindness.
Notes: For eowyn1, drabble request post 9/28/09.
nightmares
If Neji were a mountain, amid his stony roots there would be a vast cavern full of crystal pillars meant to hold his love.
As a boy, it lay empty and sealed, and if he ever knew it was there he made himself forget.
He is an adult now. He has long since given up pretending not to know. Like rain and rivers love keeps trickling in, but he bails it out with what rotting, badly-made buckets he has. There is room for it, room for half a sea of it, but he is so very afraid of drowning.
It is the middle of the night. In the room next door, his lady cries out, deep in the claws of another nightmare. It had taken a year of devoted service for her to trust him with the contents of her dreams. Sometimes, he wishes she hadn't. Now he has nightmares too, just as dark and horrifyingly true to reality as hers.
It is a constant source of wonder to him that he seems to be the only person who sees what is obvious to him: Hinata's courage in the face of her very real fears. She is the only one who sees what everyone should-- all the ways the world sets about the kill them, all the ways their fellow humans set out to do the same, all the million ways they could all die. His self-confidence and willful ignorance had protected him... until she told him about the dreams.
He slips into her room and shakes her gently until she wakes, her face damp and reddened with tears.
"Neji," she whispers, and tilts into his shoulder as if he were her center of gravity. "I had a bad dream."
"I know," he murmurs, and wraps her in blankets and himself until nothing can reach her.
X.x.X
Genres: Friendship, family, hurt/comfort
Rating: K
Wordcount: 306
Prompt: obvious
Summary: She was not blessed with blindness.
Notes: For eowyn1, drabble request post 9/28/09.
nightmares
If Neji were a mountain, amid his stony roots there would be a vast cavern full of crystal pillars meant to hold his love.
As a boy, it lay empty and sealed, and if he ever knew it was there he made himself forget.
He is an adult now. He has long since given up pretending not to know. Like rain and rivers love keeps trickling in, but he bails it out with what rotting, badly-made buckets he has. There is room for it, room for half a sea of it, but he is so very afraid of drowning.
It is the middle of the night. In the room next door, his lady cries out, deep in the claws of another nightmare. It had taken a year of devoted service for her to trust him with the contents of her dreams. Sometimes, he wishes she hadn't. Now he has nightmares too, just as dark and horrifyingly true to reality as hers.
It is a constant source of wonder to him that he seems to be the only person who sees what is obvious to him: Hinata's courage in the face of her very real fears. She is the only one who sees what everyone should-- all the ways the world sets about the kill them, all the ways their fellow humans set out to do the same, all the million ways they could all die. His self-confidence and willful ignorance had protected him... until she told him about the dreams.
He slips into her room and shakes her gently until she wakes, her face damp and reddened with tears.
"Neji," she whispers, and tilts into his shoulder as if he were her center of gravity. "I had a bad dream."
"I know," he murmurs, and wraps her in blankets and himself until nothing can reach her.
X.x.X