Chapter 3: Things Don't Stay Safe in Drawers
She didn't answer him right away. She'd learned that from him too, in a roundabout way: some things deserved more than the first words that came.
Instead she sat up, the silk sliding off her shoulders, and she put her hand flat on his chest, over his heart. She closed her eyes. When she opened them, the veins at her temples had risen and the world had gone strange and luminous, and she was looking at him the way only a Hyuga could.
Most people had chakra like a lamp. Steady, contained, a single color. Naruto's had never been like that. It was a bonfire, gold and orange and impossibly huge, and woven through it, sleeping now in a great coiled shape at the center of him, was the deep red heat of Kurama. She'd seen it on the battlefield, blazing hot enough to light up a valley. She'd seen it on the moon. She saw it every night when he came home, flickering low and ragged, burnt down to embers by a day of other people's problems.
Tonight it was warm. It was moving slow and easy through every channel of his body, pooling where her hand rested, reaching toward her like it knew her.
"I can see you," she said. "I've always been able to see you. That's the whole point of me, Naruto-kun. The stone face doesn't have any chakra. It's a rock." She pressed her palm harder against his chest. "This is what I see. Every single day. Even when you're asleep in the Land of Rivers."
He stared at her. His eyes had gone bright and wet.
"I didn't marry the hat," Hinata said. "I married the idiot who wears it backwards to the ramen stand when he thinks nobody's looking."
He laughed. It cracked in the middle. He pulled her down against him and held on so tight it almost hurt, his face in her hair, and she felt his shoulders shake once, twice, and then go still.
"I do not wear it backwards," he said thickly.
"Ayame told me."
"Ayame's a traitor."
"Everyone you love is a traitor," Hinata said into his neck. "Your clone. Shikamaru. Ayame. Me. We're all conspiring to make you sleep."
"It's a coup," Naruto agreed, and fell asleep on her in exactly ninety seconds, and she didn't move him until dawn.
In the morning it rained. Soft summer rain that drummed on the eaves and turned the hillside to grey-green watercolor, and neither of them cared, because it meant there was nothing to do.
There was breakfast, brought by the old woman on lacquered trays: grilled fish, miso, rice, pickles, a small dish of sweet beans that Naruto ate in two bites and then looked at Hinata's with such open longing that she gave him half. There was a long, lazy hour on the futon where he lay with his head in her lap and she read to him from a terrible romance novel she'd found on the inn's shelf, doing all the voices, and he laughed until he wheezed. There was a moment around noon where he reached for his pack out of habit and she watched his hand freeze halfway, and watched him pull it back, and watched him lie down again with his arms crossed over his chest and an expression of grim heroism, like a man resisting a genjutsu.
"I didn't bring anything," he said. "I want you to know. No scrolls. I checked my pockets. Twice."
"I know. I checked them too."
"When?"
"While you were asleep."
"Hinata!"
She just smiled at him.
In the afternoon the rain stopped. The hills steamed. She took him down the narrow path to the river and they sat on the warm white stones with their feet in the shallows, and she reached into her sleeve and pulled out something red.
He went quiet when he saw it.
It was a scarf. Hand-knitted, a little uneven at one end where she'd dropped stitches and had to fix them in a hurry, years ago. The red had faded to the color of a ripe persimmon. There was a small careful darn near the middle where it had torn once, in a fight, and where she'd mended it by lamplight while he slept off his wounds.
"You brought it," he said.
"You stopped wearing it." She looped it around his neck, even though it was summer, even though it was warm. "You put it in the drawer when you got the Hokage cloak. I understand why. But I missed it."
He touched the end of it with his fingers. The prosthetic hand, the pale one, the one that was also hers. "I didn't stop wearing it because I didn't want to," he said. "I was scared I'd ruin it. Everything I wear to work gets ruined. Blood, or ink, or Shikamaru's tea." He looked at her sideways. "I keep it in the drawer so it's safe."
"Things don't stay safe in drawers," Hinata said. "They just stay in drawers."
He was quiet for a long time, watching the water run over the stones.
"Okay," he said finally, softly. "Okay. I hear you."
That night they did make it to the bath.
The water was hot enough to sting at first and then to melt everything, the stone edge smooth and warm under her arms, the steam rising into a sky scrubbed clean by the rain and crowded with stars. Down the hill, the river talked to itself. He'd hung the red scarf on the railing where he could see it.
She sat in his lap. She hadn't meant to start anything; she'd only meant to lean back against his chest and let the heat soak into her bones. But his arms came around her waist under the water, and his mouth found the side of her neck, slow and unhurried, and she felt him harden against the small of her back, and she turned around in his arms to face him.
"Hi," he said, his eyes heavy-lidded and very blue.
"You keep saying that."
"I keep meaning it." He tucked a wet strand of hair behind her ear. "Every time I look at you it's like I just walked in the door."
She kissed him. Last night had been hunger, long-held and finally fed. This was something slower. She kissed him the way she'd learned to throw a perfect Gentle Fist strike, with patience and precision and total concentration, and felt him melt under it, his hands sliding up her back, his breath going shallow. Under the water she reached between them and wrapped her fingers around him, stroking slowly from base to tip, and he groaned against her mouth and his head fell back against the stone.
"Hinata," he said, strangled. "You're gonna kill me."
"I'm a trained assassin of the Hyuga clan," she said, very serious, and did it again with a twist of her wrist at the end, and he laughed and swore at the same time.
She rose up on her knees, the water streaming off her shoulders and breasts, and she held his eyes as she lowered herself onto him.
He held very still and let her. His hands rested on her hips, not guiding, just there. She took him in by slow degrees, savoring the stretch and the fullness, the heat of the water and the deeper heat of him, until she was seated all the way down and they were pressed together chest to chest and the only things moving were the steam and their breathing.
"Okay?" he whispered.
"Mm." She rolled her hips once, experimentally, and watched his whole face go slack. "Very okay."
She rode him slowly. The water lapped at the stone in time with her, little waves spilling over the edge. She set the rhythm and kept it, unhurried, deep, grinding down at the end of each stroke so that the base of him rubbed against her where she was most sensitive. His hands roamed. They slid up her ribs to cup her breasts, thumbs dragging across her nipples until she gasped. They slid down to grip her hips and then lower, to the curve of her backside, pulling her closer. They tangled in her wet hair. He kissed her throat, her collarbone, the hollow of her shoulder, murmuring things against her skin that were half her name and half nonsense and half, she was fairly sure, a list of everything he loved about her, in no particular order.
"Your laugh," he said into her neck. "The one you hide. Your stupid ice feet. The way you hit Shikamaru with cinnamon rolls instead of a fist."
"That was a bribe," she gasped.
"It was a great bribe. Your eyes when you look at me with them. The Byakugan. You know it's the prettiest thing I've ever seen? I've seen the Tailed Beasts. I've seen the moon up close. It's your eyes."
She lost her rhythm. He caught it for her. He planted his feet on the bottom of the pool and began to thrust up into her, meeting her as she came down, and the slow build turned all at once into something else, sharp and climbing. She braced her hands on his shoulders. Water slopped over the edge of the bath in waves now. She could hear herself, the high broken sounds she was making, and couldn't care.
"Look at me," he said, the way he had the night before, and she did. She looked at him with her own eyes, not the Byakugan, just her, and saw him, all of him, the idiot and the Hokage and the orphan nobody had wanted and the man everyone now needed, every version of him in his face at once, and every one of them was looking at her like she was the answer to something.
She came with his name in her mouth, clenching around him, shaking. He held her through it, held her tight against his chest, and then with three more desperate thrusts he followed her, burying his face in her shoulder and groaning her name against her wet skin, his arms locked around her like he'd never let go.
They stayed like that for a long time. The water slowly calmed. The stars wheeled overhead. The red scarf stirred on the railing in a breeze that came up from the river.
"I've been thinking," Naruto said eventually, his voice muffled in her hair.
"That's dangerous."
"I know. Shikamaru says so too." He lifted his head. His face was flushed from the heat and from her, his hair plastered flat and dark, and he looked more like himself than she'd seen him in a year. "I'm gonna make a rule. When we get back. One weekend a month, the Hokage goes home. No clones. No hawks. Shikamaru can handle it, or Kakashi-sensei can come out of retirement and complain about it, or the whole village can burn down for two days. It won't. They'll be fine. They're stronger than they think." He took a breath. "And if anybody argues, I'll tell them the Hokage's wife will hit them with a Gentle Fist."
Hinata looked at him. Then she started to laugh, softly, and kept laughing, until she had to rest her forehead on his shoulder.
"What?" he demanded. "What's funny? It's a good rule! It's a great rule! I'm the Hokage, I'm allowed to make rules!"
"Naruto-kun," she said, wiping her eyes. "You already made it."
He blinked.
"The leave order," she said. "The one you signed on Tuesday without reading it. Did you think it was only for this weekend?" She reached up and kissed his slack, astonished mouth. "Shikamaru and I wrote it together. It's standing. One weekend a month. Your own seal. Effective until the end of your term."
For a long moment the Seventh Hokage just stared at her, water dripping off his chin.
"You conspired," he said at last. "With my advisor. Against me."
"For you," Hinata corrected.
"That's a coup. That's an actual coup."
"It is," she said serenely, and slid her arms around his neck. "And we have one more night before you can do anything about it."
His grin came up slowly, the big one, the one the whole world knew. The one only she ever saw from this close.
"Then I guess," Naruto said, standing up out of the water with her still wrapped around him, "I better not waste it."