The World, Made by Hand
Title: The World, Made by Hand
Author: hungrytiger11
Warnings: spoilers for chapter 437 and beyond
Summary:
Disclaimer: I do not own, nor make money off of, Naruto or any related image or idea.
When Yamanaka-san gives her the seeds, they are packaged in neat little envelopes, the paper so fine and soft it would not bend nor crease. If they were poured into her hand, she would have pressed them against her lifeline. It would have made her remember the feel of that moment, a subtle pain to give birth to something new. Life, though, is rarely that poetic, and the gesture would have been overdramatic at best. So perhaps Hanabi does not mind so much that the seeds are sealed away in envelopes instead of freefalling. It is poetic in its own way and much more practical to carry home.
“Its funny, isn’t it?”
Hanabi turns to stare at her sister. She is the picture of a Perfect Lady, something her father never fails to remind Hanabi of. Head bowed, sleek hair hides a pale face and meek manner. It’s only when she looks closer, Hanabi notices the flaws in the image her sister presents. Shoulders are hunched, and there is dirt smudged across the course hands that lie so delicately on her lap.
She’s never understood the twinned failures they’d represented to her father. Their flaws were inverted, each one half of a perfect daughter, neither worth naming heir. But she hungered. She hungered for his love. And Hinata was just the same.
“A-as ninja, all we ever do is take, destroy. I try s-s-so hard, just to prove I’m worth something, and in the end I-I’m left with nothing.”
“Father thinks you’re worth something. You’re the perfect lady, aren’t you?” Her voice is soft, and she hopes it sounds less like a question and more like a statement to Hinata. A question implies that Hanabi is unsure. And their father has never loved things that show their weaknesses, but weakness is something neither she, nor her sister, can completely hide.
“Its not F-father I want to see me…”
The first time Hanabi plants, the ground is too hard, the ground is too cold. Her efforts leave the earth barely scratched. She ends with her hands numb, and streaked with dirt. Each morning the Hyuuga household is woken by a cold wind rattling the paper walls. Days pass, but nothing pushes through the dirt. Nothing blooms.
Konohamaru is not Naruto.
And Hanabi is not Hinata.
Even if she tried to, she couldn’t be. Hinata’s hair is thick and black and like her mother’s. Hanabi’s is thin and, sticking to her head like a veil, falls in the way when she leans in to kiss. Hinata’s thoughts are on a boy’s spirit. Hanabi only wants to know.
What is it Hinata sees?
Chapped lips, hair down her throat, and a week’s worth of awkward encounters, as far as she could tell was all there was.
Back to the flower shop for more seeds and more directions. This time Hanabi tries to pay more attention, and scribbles down the shopkeeper’s words onto the back of the seed envelopes. She doesn’t let her mind stray to the dramatic. It would be too anticlimactic if she did and then this batch of seeds ended up a bust too.
When she stops to visit Hinata in the hospital, she arrives before her sister is even awake. Sunlight shifts across patients’ faces in bars through windows that have had the glass blown out. Usually, shinobi are given private rooms. It’s status quo; ninja just tend to have more severe injuries than regular citizens. It’s not a rule. If it were though, it would be broken now. The space where Hinata sleeps has twenty beds and cots also line walkways. The rest of the makeshift hospital is similarly over run with the injured in wake of a city laid to rubble.
Her sister rates a bed, so Hanabi understands her injuries must be fairly severe, but it doesn’t look like it. She is remarkable unscathed, considering the harrowing tale Hanabi and her father were greeted with when they returned late the night before. The hospital was enforcing strict visiting hours and even they had been forced away. Instead, they had spent the night helping to dig through what once was the Hyuuga compound. Meanwhile, Hinata had slept on, unaware they had arrived back home. She’d gone toe to toe with the monster that destroyed their home, and the only way anyone could even tell something had happened was the IV attached to her arm.
“Hinata…”
The voice is a sigh, and when Hanabi turns to see who spoke, she misses her sister waking, but catches the relief in her father’s eyes.
Watering twice weekly for most things, and daily for a few that needed more attention, it never fails that Hanabi has mud squelching between her toes. In geta, in trainers, it doesn’t matter. She always ends up wet, cold, and grimy, but just when she thinks perhaps she’s watered too much, and flooded the seeds away, there it is. Something small and rather pathetic has poked through the ground. Something has begun to grow.
‘Why’ is a word that has begun every question Hanabi has asked since her return to Konoha, and everyone tells her the same. Even Konohamaru, who was not anywhere near her sister’s fight, recounts the tale to her.
“…And then, with Naruto pinned down to the ground, Hinata-san jumps in to the fight! Naruto’s screaming at her to get out, but she refuses saying ‘Because I love you!’ Man, woulda sucked so much for him if she’d died. Can you imagine someone dying for you?”
As a matter of fact, Hanabi can. She’s thought of it often since overhearing the tale Hiashi recounted to his nephew at the Chuunin exams. But this memory seems an echo, squeezed and distorted by the anger that is suddenly flooding her brain. She turns to keep from Jyuukening him, and listens instead to the wheezing air blowing through her nostrils, in an effort to keep control.
As if all that Hinata’s life added up to was what Naruto felt.
What grows is a weed.
“Why’d you do it?”
Noise of saws and hammers and shouts drift in through the windows. The echoing noise of rock hitting other rock sounds in the distance. Reconstruction is going slowly, but tomorrow it will have one more worker. Hinata will be released after today.
“Do w-what, Hana-chan?” her sister asks pleasantly. She’s looking like herself today, like a lady.
She shrugs in answer. Hinata knows “what.” Outside the window, people are still pulling bodies out of the mess this “what” left behind. Hanabi has never felt smaller than when she stares out at the aftermath, and wishes her sister had not fought.
Hinata sighs, and folds her hands in her lap. Her father’s voice, repeating, ‘Act like a lady, Hanabi’ is ringing her ears.
“I suppose, you’ve heard what happened? Taisuke told you what happened?”
Hanabi nods, remembering the pale and pained face of their relation as he recounted his failure to protect the heir. Hiashi had pardoned him for the lapse, after listening gravely. He’d told Taisuke that Hinata was no great ninja, but she tried, and no one had ever been able to stop her from trying. Taisuke was not the first to fail at this, and what resulted was not his fault.
“You said you loved Uzumaki-san, and fought Pain.”
“Hmmm,” Hinata agrees, chewing her lip.
“But why?”
“All ninja ever do is destroy. I guess I wanted give, to create something instead. I’ve tried to do this with little things, telling you stories at bedtime, cooking, my garden, I suppose, but I’ve never been able to as a ninja. So I gave love; I created time.”
Her sister is eloquent, lyrical even. And apparently has shit for brains.
“You could have died.”
“Yes,” her voice is serious in agreeing. “I could have.”
Somehow, it isn’t much relief to argue with someone who agrees with you. It makes her even more frustrated and desperate to lash out. “And the end of this great love story? Did you get what you wanted, a happily-ever-after with the demon-boy?”
Conversations happening near by stop, and heads turn. Belatedly, she realizes that, more than just adding a sarcastic edge to her voice, she’d started raising it to hospital patient. After several beats, her sister’s voice rings out, low but clear, over the reconstruction happening outside, “He survived, didn’t he? And because of him, Konohagakure still stands.”
If standing was what she wanted to call it.
A nurse takes Hanabi by arm, and tells her she’s upsetting patients. But Hyuuga eyes are good in more than one way, and a single glare gets the young man to back off a moment, long enough to ask one more question.
“For him?”
Hinata shakes her head as she answers, “For me. And him. And Konoha. I could never have lived with doing nothing; I had to give what I had, even if it wasn’t enough.”
And then the conversation is over; the nurse pushes her out the door.
She hates the repetitive nature of the chore. Weed after weed, after weed. Her hands tear at the leaves, but often miss the root, and so her has to go back, digging deeper. Hearing the definitely snap of the breaking root is the only part she loves. Calluses grow on parts of her hand even kunai practice didn’t provide. Snap. Snap. Snap. One’s mind disengages with such repetition. Snap. Snap. Snap. It is only when her fingers tangle with unfamiliar leaves that she looks down and sees.
A ramen cup filled with daisies sits on floor beside Hinata’s bed when they come to pick her up the next day.
Her father embraces her, and whispers something too low for anyone else to hear into her ear. His fingers hold the back of her head, as if she were something to be handled carefully. They seem to trace her skull to truly ensure she is okay. Taisuke, who vehemently insisted on joining the “welcome home wagon,” as he called it, scoops Hanabi’s older sister up into a bear hug. His eyes are shining, but he doesn’t say anything and his face is dry. It may be that he knows the clan head does not like things that show weakness. Or maybe he is just too happy to cry.
Cousin Neji stands a little further back, shifting his weight ever so slightly from one foot to another, and Hanabi suddenly recalls that his team was the one that found Hinata’s body first. As a jounin, Neji has likely seen people die, and has probably nearly died himself, but seeing someone you love nearly die is something else.
“Naruto stopped by, then?” He asks, gesturing to the flowers on the floor.
Hinata voice is warm when she answers, “ Yes.”
“Did he say he loves you?” Neji asks, and even Hiashi waits for his daughter’s reply, though Hanabi cannot imagine him agreeing to a demon-container playing any major role in Hinata’s life. Though, all things considered, maybe it’s too late for that at any rate.
Hinata shakes her head, “No. Or r-rather,” Hinata’s stutter still slips in when she gets nervous like she is now, as a blush begins creeping up her cheeks. “He only sees me as a friend, a very brave and selfless friend, but just a friend. He s-said he might change his mind, but… I don’t think he will.”
“Why?” Hanabi blurts out.
Her sister shrugs, and avoids eye contact.
“Sakura.”
And then, staving off what would most likely have been a very awkward silence, Hinata moves towards the door. Running a little to catch up, Hanabi does something she’s never done before. She slips her hand into her sister’s.
“Are you sorry?” She whispers.
“N-no. Giving love, even if its not returned, i-it m-means I’ve been true to myself. It means that that love is out there in the world, and somehow, in some way, is doing good.”
That didn’t seem right.
“How?”
How could that be? Hanabi does not know, but Hinata, in that soft, strangely far-seeing way of hers, takes the question seriously and answers, “Who knows? Perhaps it gave him drive to stop Pain. P-p-perhaps it will get S-sakura to notice him, or for him to say s-s-something to her. Perhaps the time I took allowed for Leaf ninjas to regroup. Perhaps something else we don’t even see.”
Perhaps, is what she leaves unsaid; it gave you the impulse to put your hand in mine. Perhaps, it allowed us to grow.
The air smells like sunshine, her sister, and dirt. It’s a good smell, Hanabi decides, as she kneels down, to finger the soft, green leaves of the plant. Her hands smell like dirt, and this twisting plant, stretching for the sun, does too. Tiny leaves are ready to uncurl to the sunlight. Buds are pushing toward the sky. It has been a lot of time and effort for something so small, and worth so little. Brushing a nail against the small hairs on the leaf, she smiles a little. It was worth though; something has grown.
Author: hungrytiger11
Warnings: spoilers for chapter 437 and beyond
Summary:
Disclaimer: I do not own, nor make money off of, Naruto or any related image or idea.
When Yamanaka-san gives her the seeds, they are packaged in neat little envelopes, the paper so fine and soft it would not bend nor crease. If they were poured into her hand, she would have pressed them against her lifeline. It would have made her remember the feel of that moment, a subtle pain to give birth to something new. Life, though, is rarely that poetic, and the gesture would have been overdramatic at best. So perhaps Hanabi does not mind so much that the seeds are sealed away in envelopes instead of freefalling. It is poetic in its own way and much more practical to carry home.
“Its funny, isn’t it?”
Hanabi turns to stare at her sister. She is the picture of a Perfect Lady, something her father never fails to remind Hanabi of. Head bowed, sleek hair hides a pale face and meek manner. It’s only when she looks closer, Hanabi notices the flaws in the image her sister presents. Shoulders are hunched, and there is dirt smudged across the course hands that lie so delicately on her lap.
She’s never understood the twinned failures they’d represented to her father. Their flaws were inverted, each one half of a perfect daughter, neither worth naming heir. But she hungered. She hungered for his love. And Hinata was just the same.
“A-as ninja, all we ever do is take, destroy. I try s-s-so hard, just to prove I’m worth something, and in the end I-I’m left with nothing.”
“Father thinks you’re worth something. You’re the perfect lady, aren’t you?” Her voice is soft, and she hopes it sounds less like a question and more like a statement to Hinata. A question implies that Hanabi is unsure. And their father has never loved things that show their weaknesses, but weakness is something neither she, nor her sister, can completely hide.
“Its not F-father I want to see me…”
The first time Hanabi plants, the ground is too hard, the ground is too cold. Her efforts leave the earth barely scratched. She ends with her hands numb, and streaked with dirt. Each morning the Hyuuga household is woken by a cold wind rattling the paper walls. Days pass, but nothing pushes through the dirt. Nothing blooms.
Konohamaru is not Naruto.
And Hanabi is not Hinata.
Even if she tried to, she couldn’t be. Hinata’s hair is thick and black and like her mother’s. Hanabi’s is thin and, sticking to her head like a veil, falls in the way when she leans in to kiss. Hinata’s thoughts are on a boy’s spirit. Hanabi only wants to know.
What is it Hinata sees?
Chapped lips, hair down her throat, and a week’s worth of awkward encounters, as far as she could tell was all there was.
Back to the flower shop for more seeds and more directions. This time Hanabi tries to pay more attention, and scribbles down the shopkeeper’s words onto the back of the seed envelopes. She doesn’t let her mind stray to the dramatic. It would be too anticlimactic if she did and then this batch of seeds ended up a bust too.
When she stops to visit Hinata in the hospital, she arrives before her sister is even awake. Sunlight shifts across patients’ faces in bars through windows that have had the glass blown out. Usually, shinobi are given private rooms. It’s status quo; ninja just tend to have more severe injuries than regular citizens. It’s not a rule. If it were though, it would be broken now. The space where Hinata sleeps has twenty beds and cots also line walkways. The rest of the makeshift hospital is similarly over run with the injured in wake of a city laid to rubble.
Her sister rates a bed, so Hanabi understands her injuries must be fairly severe, but it doesn’t look like it. She is remarkable unscathed, considering the harrowing tale Hanabi and her father were greeted with when they returned late the night before. The hospital was enforcing strict visiting hours and even they had been forced away. Instead, they had spent the night helping to dig through what once was the Hyuuga compound. Meanwhile, Hinata had slept on, unaware they had arrived back home. She’d gone toe to toe with the monster that destroyed their home, and the only way anyone could even tell something had happened was the IV attached to her arm.
“Hinata…”
The voice is a sigh, and when Hanabi turns to see who spoke, she misses her sister waking, but catches the relief in her father’s eyes.
Watering twice weekly for most things, and daily for a few that needed more attention, it never fails that Hanabi has mud squelching between her toes. In geta, in trainers, it doesn’t matter. She always ends up wet, cold, and grimy, but just when she thinks perhaps she’s watered too much, and flooded the seeds away, there it is. Something small and rather pathetic has poked through the ground. Something has begun to grow.
‘Why’ is a word that has begun every question Hanabi has asked since her return to Konoha, and everyone tells her the same. Even Konohamaru, who was not anywhere near her sister’s fight, recounts the tale to her.
“…And then, with Naruto pinned down to the ground, Hinata-san jumps in to the fight! Naruto’s screaming at her to get out, but she refuses saying ‘Because I love you!’ Man, woulda sucked so much for him if she’d died. Can you imagine someone dying for you?”
As a matter of fact, Hanabi can. She’s thought of it often since overhearing the tale Hiashi recounted to his nephew at the Chuunin exams. But this memory seems an echo, squeezed and distorted by the anger that is suddenly flooding her brain. She turns to keep from Jyuukening him, and listens instead to the wheezing air blowing through her nostrils, in an effort to keep control.
As if all that Hinata’s life added up to was what Naruto felt.
What grows is a weed.
“Why’d you do it?”
Noise of saws and hammers and shouts drift in through the windows. The echoing noise of rock hitting other rock sounds in the distance. Reconstruction is going slowly, but tomorrow it will have one more worker. Hinata will be released after today.
“Do w-what, Hana-chan?” her sister asks pleasantly. She’s looking like herself today, like a lady.
She shrugs in answer. Hinata knows “what.” Outside the window, people are still pulling bodies out of the mess this “what” left behind. Hanabi has never felt smaller than when she stares out at the aftermath, and wishes her sister had not fought.
Hinata sighs, and folds her hands in her lap. Her father’s voice, repeating, ‘Act like a lady, Hanabi’ is ringing her ears.
“I suppose, you’ve heard what happened? Taisuke told you what happened?”
Hanabi nods, remembering the pale and pained face of their relation as he recounted his failure to protect the heir. Hiashi had pardoned him for the lapse, after listening gravely. He’d told Taisuke that Hinata was no great ninja, but she tried, and no one had ever been able to stop her from trying. Taisuke was not the first to fail at this, and what resulted was not his fault.
“You said you loved Uzumaki-san, and fought Pain.”
“Hmmm,” Hinata agrees, chewing her lip.
“But why?”
“All ninja ever do is destroy. I guess I wanted give, to create something instead. I’ve tried to do this with little things, telling you stories at bedtime, cooking, my garden, I suppose, but I’ve never been able to as a ninja. So I gave love; I created time.”
Her sister is eloquent, lyrical even. And apparently has shit for brains.
“You could have died.”
“Yes,” her voice is serious in agreeing. “I could have.”
Somehow, it isn’t much relief to argue with someone who agrees with you. It makes her even more frustrated and desperate to lash out. “And the end of this great love story? Did you get what you wanted, a happily-ever-after with the demon-boy?”
Conversations happening near by stop, and heads turn. Belatedly, she realizes that, more than just adding a sarcastic edge to her voice, she’d started raising it to hospital patient. After several beats, her sister’s voice rings out, low but clear, over the reconstruction happening outside, “He survived, didn’t he? And because of him, Konohagakure still stands.”
If standing was what she wanted to call it.
A nurse takes Hanabi by arm, and tells her she’s upsetting patients. But Hyuuga eyes are good in more than one way, and a single glare gets the young man to back off a moment, long enough to ask one more question.
“For him?”
Hinata shakes her head as she answers, “For me. And him. And Konoha. I could never have lived with doing nothing; I had to give what I had, even if it wasn’t enough.”
And then the conversation is over; the nurse pushes her out the door.
She hates the repetitive nature of the chore. Weed after weed, after weed. Her hands tear at the leaves, but often miss the root, and so her has to go back, digging deeper. Hearing the definitely snap of the breaking root is the only part she loves. Calluses grow on parts of her hand even kunai practice didn’t provide. Snap. Snap. Snap. One’s mind disengages with such repetition. Snap. Snap. Snap. It is only when her fingers tangle with unfamiliar leaves that she looks down and sees.
A ramen cup filled with daisies sits on floor beside Hinata’s bed when they come to pick her up the next day.
Her father embraces her, and whispers something too low for anyone else to hear into her ear. His fingers hold the back of her head, as if she were something to be handled carefully. They seem to trace her skull to truly ensure she is okay. Taisuke, who vehemently insisted on joining the “welcome home wagon,” as he called it, scoops Hanabi’s older sister up into a bear hug. His eyes are shining, but he doesn’t say anything and his face is dry. It may be that he knows the clan head does not like things that show weakness. Or maybe he is just too happy to cry.
Cousin Neji stands a little further back, shifting his weight ever so slightly from one foot to another, and Hanabi suddenly recalls that his team was the one that found Hinata’s body first. As a jounin, Neji has likely seen people die, and has probably nearly died himself, but seeing someone you love nearly die is something else.
“Naruto stopped by, then?” He asks, gesturing to the flowers on the floor.
Hinata voice is warm when she answers, “ Yes.”
“Did he say he loves you?” Neji asks, and even Hiashi waits for his daughter’s reply, though Hanabi cannot imagine him agreeing to a demon-container playing any major role in Hinata’s life. Though, all things considered, maybe it’s too late for that at any rate.
Hinata shakes her head, “No. Or r-rather,” Hinata’s stutter still slips in when she gets nervous like she is now, as a blush begins creeping up her cheeks. “He only sees me as a friend, a very brave and selfless friend, but just a friend. He s-said he might change his mind, but… I don’t think he will.”
“Why?” Hanabi blurts out.
Her sister shrugs, and avoids eye contact.
“Sakura.”
And then, staving off what would most likely have been a very awkward silence, Hinata moves towards the door. Running a little to catch up, Hanabi does something she’s never done before. She slips her hand into her sister’s.
“Are you sorry?” She whispers.
“N-no. Giving love, even if its not returned, i-it m-means I’ve been true to myself. It means that that love is out there in the world, and somehow, in some way, is doing good.”
That didn’t seem right.
“How?”
How could that be? Hanabi does not know, but Hinata, in that soft, strangely far-seeing way of hers, takes the question seriously and answers, “Who knows? Perhaps it gave him drive to stop Pain. P-p-perhaps it will get S-sakura to notice him, or for him to say s-s-something to her. Perhaps the time I took allowed for Leaf ninjas to regroup. Perhaps something else we don’t even see.”
Perhaps, is what she leaves unsaid; it gave you the impulse to put your hand in mine. Perhaps, it allowed us to grow.
The air smells like sunshine, her sister, and dirt. It’s a good smell, Hanabi decides, as she kneels down, to finger the soft, green leaves of the plant. Her hands smell like dirt, and this twisting plant, stretching for the sun, does too. Tiny leaves are ready to uncurl to the sunlight. Buds are pushing toward the sky. It has been a lot of time and effort for something so small, and worth so little. Brushing a nail against the small hairs on the leaf, she smiles a little. It was worth though; something has grown.