Chapter Text
Sakura knew Hikaru could be odd sometimes, but even for him, this was pretty weird. She sighed as she pushed past tree branches and odd, thorned plants alike. Hopefully he hadn’t run too far.
What the hell made him run off, anyways?
Sakura finally caught a break as the mesh of plants gave way to a small clearing. She was about to plop down for a second and enjoy the open air when suddenly she saw a figure kneeled down, back to Sakura, a few metres away. Was that… “Hikaru? What’s going… on…” Sakura realised Hikaru was making noise. Small and stifled noise, but noise nonetheless. He was…
Crying.
Sakura stopped speaking and instead walked forward, getting down onto her knee beside him. She wrapped an arm around his neck and stayed silent. He leaned into her company, his head now nestled slightly against her side.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have-”
“No, it’s fine, just… what’s up? If you don’t mind, of course.”
Hikaru’s breath hitched as he leaned slightly closer.
“If you don’t want to that’s fine, I just… yeah.”
Hikaru nodded. “I know, I shouldn’t have worried you. I…” He went silent for a minute, appearing to gather his thoughts. “Do you remember… that day when it was just us and Ino, and maybe Tenten… and you were joking about it ‘just being the girls’?”
Sakura was caught off guard. “Yeeeah… why?”
“Well… that was… nice.”
“What do you mean?”
“I… want to be a girl.” The sentence came out quickly, hurried. Not like it wasn’t to be heard, but rather it was to be separated from the speaker as soon as possible.
Sakura was silent. It stayed like that for a while, until eventually, Sakura gathered her thoughts into a coherent sentence. “Why? I know you have to have some reason, you’re not like Naruto who’d just say something like that out of the blue with either no reason or a really stupid one, but… being a girl sucks. You have periods, you get sexualised, you start to sexualise yourself because of other people doing it, and that’s just the small stuff… somehow.”
“I know, I get that, but… Well, would you like to be a guy?”
“Ew, no! They’re so weird and boyish, Sasuke is super cool but I would never… oh…”
“Yeah…”
“But aren’t boys supposed to… not feel like that? Shouldn’t you want to be… boyish, and stuff?”
The response was a shrug, followed by, “I guess, but I just… don’t. I hate it. I wish I could be a girl and be pretty and do girly things, I hate how I look and I hate being called a… boy… I even hate my name…”
“...What kind of name do you like, then?”
“Something like… Hinata, I guess. It sounds nice, even if it is kind of neutral.”
“Then I’ll call you Hinata! So, Hinata, what does this have to do with you running off?”
Hinata felt some sad piece of herself grow just a bit happier hearing the name. “Well… you were all talking about Kiba and how he can be… eccentric… and you kept referring to me as one of ‘the other guys’. You were being nice, I just… it was too much, especially after everything else.”
“ ‘Everything else’?”
“I haven’t told anyone else, but there’s just so much pressure to be… a guy… my father keeps talking about me as ‘his boy’ and mentioning how I’m gonna need to be ‘the man of the house’... I hate it. If anyone but you learned I wanted to be a girl… they’d probably be disgusted. I should be disgusted! You probably should be disgusted! It’s weird and different, I-”
Sakura shushed her by wrapping her other arm around Hinata, pulling her into a pseudo-hug. “I don’t understand it, but how you explained it… I guess I kinda feel it. At least, I’d never want to even think about the idea of being a guy.”