Midnight Sun

Side; Naruto IV

Naruto don't know how long he has been languishing around in his tower after Hinata had left him on Sai's bird. He didn't know what he told Sakura or Ino to explain why they had walked in on Hinata slapping him. Physically, it didn't hurt. But he felt it all the way to his soul. Like she had taken hold of his heart and slaps the shit out of it. Even though there was nothing on his face, no bruising or anything, the sting of her slap echoes even now long after she had left him.

He couldn't stop the tears from falling either. His lips trembles beyond his control, his emotion too strong to be swallowed back. He simply does not have the energy to go to school and instead sent his Shadow Clones to attend classes for him as well as to keep an eye on Hinata. Sasuke stops by now and then to take his homework for him but even he couldn't get through to the heartbroken Incubus.

Because this is heart break, right?

He simply has no energy to do anything.

He has been spending his days sleeping, wake up, do whatever homework his shadows brought back from class, let Sasuke pick it up, lie around, and sleep some more. He couldn't remember the last time he eat anything. He didn't even bother drinking. He's just...wasting away.

Most of the time he found himself staring at the ceiling, remembering her telling him that she wished they had never met. Feeling his soul wither inside him as it felt like rejection. His eyes will keep crying until his head began to pound but even then, he didn't even have the energy to care. So what if his head is in pain because he cried an ocean of tears and his brain is shrinking from the dehydration? Nothing compares to the scalpel cut pain of his soul.

He knew this will happen.

He was a coward for trying to pretend it could be better if only he hold back from coming clean.

But when she cried because they treated her like a child, completely disregarding the fact that she had not been able to be a child for so long, that the reason she is even in their school is precisely because she can't remain a child despite her age, when she begged him to just stop stringing her along in a world of illusion, something in him break for her. He had told her that he knew how she felt, knew what she had gone through. He had told her that he understood her. But look at what he was doing? Children like them had long left behind the sweet ignorance of childhood innocence.

Her with the amount of predators around her.

He with the bloody battlefield and the mountain of corpses.

She was right, he was cruel to her.

A mature body can still be hidden with the right clothes. But how does one hide a mature heart? Treating her like a child despite the fact that the Sinners around her had long unveiled the ugly world of adults to her is an insult to the adversities she had been forced to face. The mental scars that she carries are enough to elevate her into the status of a young adult. After all, children are not jaded. Adults are.

He remembered hating being treated like a child even though he hold a high soldier rank in the army. Not through his father's connection but through his own blood, sweat, and tears. He had killed his scores of enemies. At one point had even been painted a solid red of their blood. The day he was told to at least graduate high school, graduate Konoha, to be accepted as an adult, he had rebelled. He had pulled the ancestor of all tantrum and destroyed the army base he was told the order at.

Because he was already a man on the battlefield and yet they wanted to force him into a high school student's uniform just to make things 'official' for him. He had hated the way they had talked over him and...he did the exact same thing to Hinata. It must have felt like betrayal to her because...because that was what he had felt when they told him that he's still a kid. Not even a 20.