11:31

It’s late- I am having trouble writing chapters to ongoing fics because of some issues with plot but words keep coming to mind and so I keep throwing them at you people here. 

Here’s another. 
No idea where this is going. Just following the ink spill. 

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Half an hour. He was going to talk to her for half an hour. 

His eyes were burning with the lack of sleep. Absently he rubbed at his face and let his head hang against the back rest of the couch, breathing air deep into his lungs and releasing it with trepidation. 

She had yet to come out. His eyes flickered to the door at the end of the hall of the apartment, the glow of a lamp sliding gold and soft from beneath. 

Warily he checked his phone for the time and counted. If it was 11:31 pm then that meant that it had been exactly four hours and 15 minutes- give or take- since they had had their first actual fight. 

They had had disagreements before, but this he counted in a whole different category. Never in his entire life did he think he was going to get a chance to stand in front of Hinata Hyuuga and have her actually raise her voice at him. 

This event had been followed by the unprecedented shove to his shoulders and then her storming into her room and slamming the door with enough force to shake the hall wall and make a frame jump from it’s hook to shatter on the floor. 

He had meant to clean it up, had even grabbed the broom and dust pan to do it and then, still viciously annoyed had thrown the items on the floor along with the glass and left it there. 

Let her deal with her own damn mess since she was suddenly so freaking independent. 

That was of course four hours ago. More than four hours ago. It took that long for an Uchiha to calm from a full on fury. His hands had been shaking and his voice had taken on that frightening sharp edge that he recognized from his father and his brother when they were really in a sulky underwear knotting mood. 

Now he just felt tired. Exhausted even, and his chest hurt like her shove to his shoulders had been an actual fracturing blow. 

Unlocking his clenched jaw Sasuke gathered himself from the couch like being pulled by puppet strings, feeling disconnected and mechanical as he wandered, hands in his jean pockets towards the door. 

She had been quiet for some time and it was possible that she had fallen asleep. If she was sleeping he didn’t want to wake her but the possibility of going to sleep himself would be out the window. He had never fought with his best friend before and leaving it overnight felt like it was giving the thing rights to a pattern. 

Swallowing hard he knocked and when she didn’t respond pressed his forehead against the smooth surface, eyes closed, hand on the door knob as he thought. 

“Hinata?” His voice was a wreck, hoarse and stinging he cleared it and tried again. “Hinata?”

Nothing. The silence hummed with the refrigerator’s mechanical whine and the high pitched usually muted sound of the electricity passing into the light bulb of the lamp in the living room he had been reading by. 

Damn it. He was not going to sleep like this. 

Half an hour. Just…talk for half an hour.

Biting the inside of his cheek he turned the knob and peeked past the door, freezing at the feel of her eyes on his movement. 

Her room was chaos, or at least the floor was. Tidy alphabetized books lined the shelves that decorated almost all the wall space, and among them cactus plants and flowering herbs in tiny pots stretched. From the ceiling hung rows and rows of herbs drying in neat little bundles tied with ribbon or lace strips. But the floor, usually free of debris was covered in photographs. He could recognize himself in many of them, Hinata, their friends, smiling or running or jumping off diving boards. Happy memories. Like the scent of her room was happy.

It smelled clean and earthy and organic. It smelled like Hinata. 

The scent was making a knot rise to his throat and with the inside of his cheek pinched hard by his teeth he stepped into the room and closed the door, leaning against it hard so that his shoulder blades ached a bit. 

She didn’t move from her bed where she lay curled in fetal position in her clothes, unchanged into her usual lavender pajamas. Instead she still wore the sweatshirt she had asked to borrow from him and her work jeans from the green house stained with dirt and pollen. 

“I thought you might be asleep.” He said it dismissively, a little bit vexed still although he mostly wanted to let her know he cared enough to resolve this before the morning. 

Hinata looked back at him, her gaze unchanging from her position on the bed, peering at him through the loose tired fingers of her hands by her face. 

The silence wore on for several heart beats and Sasuke dragged in a deep breath through the nose, looking back at her with growing effort. Keeping eye contact was something he excelled at, and Hinata in fact struggled with. So it was unnerving to feel her gray gaze stabbing into him with the precision of a thrown knife while his own usually unerring stare wavered. 

“We can’t leave it like that.” He finally snapped, the anxiety he was starting to feel getting the better of him. “You can’t just storm off and leave it like that.”

She should have moved. This was the pattern. He would grow irritable, she would try figure out why he felt this way, she would ask questions and they would figure it out together and when he finally realized what bothered him he would say it and either apologize for it’s stupidity or she would apologize for not realizing what she was doing and they would watch a stupid show together or make breakfast at 1 in the morning and the argument would be over. 

That was the pattern. 

But she didn’t move. She didn’t sit up and look at him with her face earnest and her eyes apologetic and caring. She looked at him from her place on her bed and her shoulders shook slow at first then with more force as tears streamed from her eyes. 

He didn’t know this dance.

Paralyzed by the liquid escaping her face he breathed in slowly, carefully, focusing on the action of air coming in and out of his throat while he also felt his hands tighten and his blood turn cold. 

“…Hinata… what…the hell is happening?” 

She closed his eyes in response, bringing her relaxed fingers closer to her face until she was mostly hiding from view, her shoulders shaking although no sobs rang through. This silent crying was worse than a sob, or wail. He watched it like one watched the amputation of a limb performed by one’s own hands. 

They had known each other for so long. Their personalities so compatible that any notion of friction had always been so easy to diffuse. She was flexible about anything that he found irritating. He was generally so low maintenance it was hard for her to find a fault in his behavior. And when they did disagree… well it never lasted.

That was why they had been friends in elementary, in high school, room mates in college and now entering into their desired fields.

It was the easiest relationship of any sort they had ever been in. Easier than being around their parents, their siblings, their friends. It was like breathing.

Except for right then, he was suffocating. This was not going according to plan.

“You can’t just lay there and cry.” He was being an ass and he knew it but somehow that wasn’t enough to keep him from talking. His voice shook as he realized the terror that was manipulating his actions and words. “You have to tell me what is happening. Because, as far as I know I was just letting you know I find something irritating and usually our policy is that we tell each other that shit so we don’t have these kinds of….disagreements.”

He was rambling, the words tumbling out of him in a torrent. Hinata’s eyes opened at the end of his speech and she didn’t have to say anything for him to see her irritation flaring again. It was such a strange expression on her face, so unfamiliar. Usually so soothing she set her jaw hard and even with her tears frowned.

“Why are you looking at me like that? I didn’t do anything wrong. He’s annoying as all hell. I don’t bring irritating friends over here all the time to bug you.”

Her breathing was getting heavy, he watched as her side rose and fell beneath his sweater and felt the pinch of a frown that was likely turning his gaze into a glare. “You stop this. Stop giving me the silent treatment. I can decide who comes here and who doesn’t too. This is a shared space.”

That damn blonde with his damn laugh and his damn tickling. How could one human being be so irritating? Hinata hated being tickled. Why would she have allowed that moron to do such a thing? She had laughed and pushed him away. She had blushed.

Why the fuck was she blushing?

Hinata didn’t blush at home. Home was where she was most herself. The blushing stuttering thing most people knew was always left at the door.

“Are you going to be seeing him? Is that what this is? Because if that’s what’s happening then I need to move out.” The words were out of his mouth as he pictured her with Naruto, smiling and cuddling on the couch watching a movie or walking in from a day at work to see them kissing in the kitchen. He felt his stomach tighten painfully and his eyes itch.

Fuck no.

Hinata was however sitting up now, her jaw working like she was trying to grind her teeth away, gray eyes a glittering mess of tears and fury. Fists clenching hard around the covers of her bed she set her shoulders tightly.

“You just say the word and I’ll get the hell out of here.” How had it come to this? He had never thought much about when they would part ways but he sure as hell had not pictured it being over someone like the idiot Naruto. He should have never introduced them in the first place. If there was anyone to blame it was himself.

Her chest rose and fell with the contained agitation within her and he watched, rubbing at his eyes again tiredly, feeling the irritation of the late night and the reading more acutely even as he glared at her.

“Why won’t you talk to me? Why won’t you tell me why you’re so angry?” His voice sounded so strange, even to him.

He blinked several times, wiping at his now tearing eyes with frustration. Of all the times to have his eyes water it had to be now, when he was feeling like he was suffocating. His chest tightening until it ached and his hands shaking as she stared at him. In the middle of a fight he had to get something in his damned eyeballs.

She just looked at him then, her lips pressed into a thin line and her brow although furrowed a moment before smoothed slowly. Her hands relaxed on the covers and sighing heavily she just looked at him.

It took him several breaths and a lot of blinking to realize. He rubbed at his eyes over and over, confused by the sheer amount of water coming out of his face until something began to dawn on him. Something awful.

Oh shit… no.

Breathing in deeply he stared at his fingers, wet with moisture and trembling, rubbing at his cheek with the back of his hand.

“Sasuke.” It was the first time she spoke in nearly five hours now. Swallowing hard he turned his startled dark eyes from his soaked fingers to her face trying to decipher the arrangement of her features.

The only thing he could figure out was that she looked… soft.

With the same depth of feeling as her expression she sighed. “Why are you crying?”

It was so irrational that she should be asking him such a thing. God damn it she had been laying there weeping a second ago. If anyone should be asking that it should be him, right?

But even as he made a face bred from disgust and revulsion he wiped more tears from his cheeks and sucked in air hard to try to calm himself. 

It was monumentally disorienting not knowing why his body was doing what it was doing.

She stood then, taking the three steps from her bed to him with her hands in her back pockets, her chin wobbling as she stared at him, cocking her head to the right. He loved it when she did that, when her hair cascaded down the side of her body and her bangs slid along her cheek and forehead like an ink spill along the curve of her pale skin.

His chest was heaving and his throat was tightening and if she touched him he wasn’t sure what he was going to do, so he just looked at her and tried to get a grip on his sanity because it felt like it was slipping rather quickly out of his tear soaked fingers.

What had she asked again?

Sasuke, why are you crying?

Goddamnit, goddamnit.

Because… that moronic blonde had tickled her and he hated that his hands had been on her. The idiot had made her blush and Hinata didn’t blush at home, or hadn’t in so long it was foreign and it made him wonder if maybe she was nervous and if she was nervous then maybe it was because this wasn’t just a friend it was something else and what kind of something else could it be that made a girl blush?

And he didn’t want to move away, he didn’t want to go anywhere, but he couldn’t even think about walking into the apartment to see them holding hands let alone anything else. The thought of Naruto spending the night in her room was enough to make him light headed.

This was his fault, for introducing them. This fight was his fault because he had started by telling her she was being slutty which was not only untrue but also unkind and Hinata didn’t deserve it. And when she had asked him why he was so upset he had snapped at her that she should know. Even as she tried to convince him she and Naruto were just friends. 

How could she know what upset him if he didn’t know?

“Just… don’t lie.” And now her own eyes were filling with tears again, although they were more bearable since her voice accompanied them. “Don’t lie, okay? Why are you crying?”

There was that damned question again. Why are you crying?

He glared back, swallowing the growing knot in his throat again and again. 

Why are you crying? 

I don’t want you with him. 

I don’t want you with anyone. 

I don’t want to see it.

I don’t even want to imagine it.

I don’t want to think about it as a possibility. 

I just want…

I just want you.

“…I love you.” 

She didn’t move or respond, just smiled sadly an unaffected. It had been a long time since he said that. Somewhere along the age of 12 saying they loved each other had been out of bounds. But they had said it in other ways and so she didn’t really bat an eyelash, just gazed at him. 

But this wasn’t the kind of I love you that he had been saying to her by bringing her coffee to her room when she was extra exhausted on a weekend, or allowing her to pick the movie they were watching on a Friday night. 

This I love you made him reach up with both hands into his hair in a panic, watching as something flickered over her face as she read his eyes. 

Slowly straightening she took a step back, lips parting in surprise even as he began to pant with something that felt shockingly similar to horror. 

“Oh god.” He choked. There were no more tears at least, he could thank his lucky stars for that. instead he laced his hands behind his head and tried to keep from passing out as he stared at her and watched the color drain from her face. 

“…y..you what?” 

He was doing a lot of blinking, over and over. His eyes were a rapid shutter camera taking stills of her gaping at him, the horror that was in a dog fight with ardor in his chest captured candidly in his lens. 

It was out now though. There was no taking it back, and so he swallowed and let the burn rise over his skin, setting him slowly but surely on fire. 

“I love you.”

And when he said love he sounded like he wanted to say adore, need, want, desire, cherish. 

Her eyes were swimming again, bright and sparkling in her face by the dim light of the lamp and he waited, unable to breathe for her guillotine of a reply.

Instead she let out a soft wet laugh, rubbing her face with the sleeve of his sweater. 

“F..finally.” 

She had not quite finished saying the single word before he had his lips on her, his breath a rapid painful gasp against her skin where he trailed from under her jaw up, along the curve of her cheek. He almost asked if it was okay. 

She didn’t let him though. 

It was hard to get a grip on the electric shock that ran up and down his spine as she pressed her mouth to his, as his tongue felt the smoothness of her bottom lip. How many times had he ripped his thoughts from her mouth and chided himself for ever even allowing them to enter his head? 

She stole his air, her fingers in his hair and her moan caught between his teeth as he pressed her hips hard against his. 

Of course he loved her, he always had. Of course he was furious, jealous, shaken by a new flirting friend. Of course he was a the real moron. 

Gasping against her mouth he felt her fingers beneath his shirt, pushing the fabric up. 

“I’m sorry.” His voice didn’t sound like himself. This creature speaking was young and scared and drunk. Fragile. 

“Shush.” Hinata panted back and her mouth recaptured his, pulling him by a belt loop against her body again. He wasn’t sure he recognized her either. When had she ever told him to be quiet before? 

Fingers fumbling, hair a disarray she pulled his shirt over his head and heart writhing in his chest he realized what she was doing too late to even decide if he wanted to protest. 

Although it was rather unlikely that he would have been able to manage the moral fortitude to stop her as she pulled his sweater and then her tank top over her head. 

“Wait.” He just managed, even as he kissed her, again and again, bruising the delicate skin of her lips with the increasing desperation and force of his onslaught. “Wait- tell me you’re sure.” 

Soft chest rising and falling fast against the hard planes of his torso she cocked her head and kissed him back with the same desperate hunger he could feel already overtaking his limbs. Without faltering her hands, small around his pulled him closer, pressing the palms of his trembling hands up along the small of her back to the tight strap of her bra. 

“Undo it.” 

Blood pumping in an ocean crash through his ears and his forehead pressed against hers he breathed, allowing himself one second to glance at the clock on her nightstand.

12:01 am. 

It was a new day. 

As his fingers undid the clasp of her bra he shook, sliding his hands along her skin to release her from the slack folds of the fabric.

So many years of being her home. So many years of holding her hand, and making sure he never wanted more.

And then half an hour.

Her voice was sending goosebumps along every exposed inch of skin, even as she pulled him and he pushed her down against the softness and warmth of her bed. 

Just half an hour. 

And the whole world changed.