Drabblette
Another little drabble that will never amount to anything. This is crappy and not meant to be happy.
When she first met him, he was four years old, and on vacation with his family. They recently bought her house as a summer home. The location was beautiful, right by a lake, deep in the woods. There was only one path up the mountain way and one path down. As a home itself, it was quite secluded, the perfect getaway.
She watched him as he slept at night, through the windows. He was cute, in an adorable child-like way, always tagging behind his older brother. His name was Sasuke. Uchiha Sasuke.
And what about her you ask. Her name was Hyuuga Hinata.
Rustling came from behind her, causing her to turn at the intrusion. A round-faced boy rolled from under the bush. She gasped and turned to run. She got but a few steps when his voice stopped her.
“Wait,” a soprano voice that only belonged to a child called from behind her. His hand was reaching toward her as if he was asking for her to help him up. Hinata hesitated before she turned to face the child on the floor. When she didn’t show any sign of helping her up, he picked himself up and stared curiously at her. “You’re the girl I saw outside the window. I knew you were real. Nii-chan kept saying I was imagining things but I was right.”
He didn’t know what else to say and she didn’t know what to do in this situation.
“What do you want from me?” Hinata finally whispered, her fearful gaze locked on the child’s. “You’d be safer going back to the cottage. These woods are dangerous.”
“You’ll play with me won’t you?” He asked her, but she only shook her head. “Why not?”
“Because I’m not someone you want to play with. You should go back.”
“You can’t make me,” He pouted, crossing his arms.
“Sasuke! Where are you?” A voice called from the distance.
“You better go.”
“What’s your name?” Sasuke asked before turning to leave.
The girl looked taken aback by the question. After a moment, she replied, “Hinata. Hyuuga Hinata.”
And then the first summer passed. Sasuke left, bidding Hinata good-bye with a promise to come back the following year.
When Sasuke was 8, he finally dared to ask the girl the question that plagued him since he began school.
“Hinata, how old are you?”
The girl stared at him before answering.
“I’m sixteen.”
“Wow,” Sasuke murmured in awe, “You’re older than Itachi.”
Hinata giggled.
When the boy was 12, just leaving elementary school, he finally got the nerves to ask her.
“Hinata, how did you die?”
“I took my life,” Hinata replied, her gaze lying across the lake. “I drowned myself, in this lake.”
“Why?”
“I was supposed to marry my cousin. But…”
When Sasuke was 14 he didn’t want to visit that vacation house. He wanted to spend time with his friends and his new found girlfriend.
When Sasuke was 15, he stayed at home, preparing for his summer practices. At the end of that summer right before school began again, Sasuke broke up with his girlfriend.
It was the summer when he was 16 that he finally returned.
But he couldn’t find her.
He looked all over, yet he couldn’t find her. When he returned to the cottage, he decided to finally get the older books in his room’s book shelf cleaned, and he found a journal. He opened it and black and white photos fluttered to the floor. They were photo of her and who he assumed to be her cousin. Then there was a photo, just of her in a kimono. He flipped to the entries near the end her death.
It gave a detailed recount about what she’d told him. Though, the journal was different from what she’d told him. The language and emotion that carried across the pages seemed much more lonely and morose. Scrawled at the bottom of her last entry was one more entry. It was not so much an entry as it was a note.
Sasuke…
There was always something I wanted to tell you, but you weren’t old enough to understand. But you haven’t come for the last two summers and I’m running out of time. I hope you will find this. I just wanted to tell you, live your life through the ups and downs. Life is worth living so don’t throw it away like I did. I cherished each of our summers together and it’s a pity I won’t see you grow up. Take care. Good-bye.
~Hinata
Sasuke stared at the note and when a drop of water fell onto the blank parts of the page, he realized that he was crying. He wasn’t sad. But never in his own life had he regretted something more. He read the note again, a third time, memorizing the words. He briefly wondered how the ghost was able to write the note, but he remembered that one time that she picked up a flower and even moved a log off his leg.
At that moment, Sasuke realized that Hinata always had a physical presence with objects, but she never touched him, not once.
Two summers. That meant that it wasn’t long ago when she wrote him this note, possibly sometime between that last summer and the present. And because of that, the entire situation seemed wrong, so very wrong. If he hadn’t decided to compete in the national kendo competition last summer with the club, if he hadn’t been so pre-occupied with his ex-girlfriend, perhaps he would’ve seen her once more.
“How can you just leave when I never even told you,” Sasuke mumbled. Although the words were lodged in this throat, he still thought them wondering whether there was any possibility of her getting this last message. I love you, Hinata.