NaruHina: Postscripts

Fifty-two

Can you please write a drabble in which Hinata wears Naruto's hokage cloak?

Hinata quickly paid the clerk and gathered up the package she'd been given at the cleaners.

"Thank you, again!" she called out while the clerk smiled and bowed to her respectfully.

Hinata walked through Konoha and waved and smiled to all the people who greeted her with theirs.

The Hokage's wife...

She heard the whispers and she had to remind herself that they were talking about her.

Even now, she felt a thrill of pride for Naruto that he'd achieved his dream.

As soon as she got home, she shook his cloak out of the elaborate tissue paper that the clerk had wrapped around it.

This one was the original. At the moment, while Naruto worked, he was using one of the spares that they kept in the Hokage office.

Hinata laid the cloak on the bed and ran her hands over the fabric to smooth it out, her fingers tracing the scarlet flame design on the bottom and then the embroidered kanji of Nanadaime in the middle.

She paused for a moment to inspect that there were no wrinkles over the surface. She was about to hang it up in its usual place, on the wall hook where he could see it when he got home, but something stopped her from doing so.

She smiled to herself. Why not?

Slowly, Hinata unclasped the hook in the front, draped the cloak over her shoulders, and then stared at herself in the mirror.

"Hinata Hyuuga, the Seventh Hokage," she murmured, still smiling.

Then she shook her head.

She wondered why in her youth, she never had the driving ambition to seek out the highest position that a shinobi could ever hope for.

Many people have told her that she was too kind, that she didn't have the strength to be ruthless enough to become that powerful. Even her father had once dismissed her when he'd proclaimed Hanabi as the Hyuuga heir.

The smile stayed on her face because she knew how wrong the thinking was.

Because it wasn't ruthlessness that drove Naruto now. It wasn't being heartless and having blind ambition that had guided him in his quest to become Hokage.

It was love.

Love for Konoha and his desire to be acknowledged for his skills. Love that had given him the strength to forgive and to move on. Love that he'd earned through his actions.

Ambition had become a secondary thing for him now that he was living his dream.

While she had hers.

And love was something she had plenty to give.

Because not many people understood the strength of having to share a husband with the rest of the world. The demands on his time that took him away from the family he'd always wanted. Not many people understood that somebody had to be the one who would lift him up and make sure he would remain steadfast and committed to the task.

This was the one thing she was born to do.

With one final glance at the mirror, Hinata grinned at herself.

The Hokage cloak hung on her body and swayed gently around her. In a different world, she might have dreamt of being the next one.

But in this world, her reality was better.

The Hokage's wife.

She still loved the sound of it.

With one last loving trace of her fingers over the words Nanadaime, Hinata thought of Naruto, smiled brighter, and hung up the cloak where it belonged.