Nevermore

“I wonder what it feels like to sleep on a bed of clouds?” Her eyes swept over the crowded blue sky with a sense of wonder that only a child her age could possess, endlessly inquisitive to the bright world around her. “Do you think it’s soft?” The innocent question was directed to the boy that sat to her left, the exact opposite of the radiant child. His dark eyes shifted towards her in an almost bored manner before he opened his mouth to speak.

“I imagine it would be wet and cold. Not to mention, you can’t sleep on a cloud.” She challenged his answer with a frown before turning away from the boy who seemingly took pleasure from ruining the small things that made her smile.

“You’re no fun Itachi-chan.” For a brief moment he stared at her, a curious expression on his young face. The seven year old boy narrowed his eyes at the sudden question that burned into his mind, he couldn’t help but ask. No matter how rude it might of seemed, his mother wasn’t there to scold him anyways.

“What kind of Uchiha are you?” She kept her eyes glued to the air above her, every now and then her deep charcoal irises flickered from cloud to cloud trying to catch any small movement they made as they shifted in the wind. Coffee colored locks shivered in the breeze, wrapping around her shoulders in soft curls that glowed in the warm sunlight, “Hinamei?” He wasn’t sure she had even heard him. Sometimes she got so lost in her own head she wasn’t aware of what was happening around her. But that was Hinamei, head in the clouds and eyes in the stars. A strange girl.

Finally, she broke away from her sights to settle her eyes back on the brooding boy. In all seriousness she softly replied, “whatever kind you want me to be.”

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Itachi was always criticizing me. According to him I couldn’t do anything right or better yet, I did everything wrong. He even had the nerve to tell me I walked like I was blind, that boy was so proud. But it was to be expected, after all most Uchiha men were full of themselves.

All for the wrong reason, but it didn’t matter. He would always think he was better than me.

In his own words, I gave the Uchiha clan a bad name. It was a shame I never had the courage to tell him that the Uchiha’s had given themselves a bad name from the start and that I had nothing to do with it. Maybe it made him feel better, judging every action I took. Maybe he wanted me to say something back, for once in his life have someone tell him he wasn’t perfect. Because no one else ever dared to say he wasn’t. Not to his face anyway.

But that was all fine, I didn’t mind.

I was happy enough just knowing he was my friend. Not that he would ever admit it, being friends with Uchiha Hinamei was like being friends with a rock. It didn’t make sense and well, you just didn’t do it. But I knew we were friends. He made that plenty clear by sticking around me for so long as it was. As much as he complained, I knew deep down he yearned for my company just as much as I yearned for his.

He was my complete opposite, but maybe that’s what balanced us out in the end. It was just enough madness to create a sort of makeshift utopia between the two of us. But if I ever told him that he would only tell me in return, “you never make any sense, can’t you stop doing that?” In truth, I couldn’t. That was who I was and the reality of it all was, that was the person he ended up falling in love with.

If you could even call it love.

Of course, this was all before Itachi decided to see the world in neutral colors. He told me once he was moving forward but to the rest of us it all just seemed like he was losing his mind to some crazed ideal. What that ideal was we never knew, it’s not like he talked to anyone. He was, how do I say it, a thinker. He kept to himself and stole his secrets far away into the back of his mind. We became distant and soon I started to realized that maybe Itachi wanted it like that. He didn’t want a burden, he even treated Sasuke-kun like he didn’t have the time. I blamed it on the clan, they were all born with a natural arrogance that made them want to be better than everyone else. Like the world was beneath them and every person on that inferior planet were nothing but worms. Disgusting creatures that were better off buried under dirt. Dare I say that’s how each one of them thought, all of them except Itachi. Towards the end he started to resent his own people, and that led me to believe that was the reason he sought me out for comfort in the end.

Because I wasn’t like any Uchiha he had ever known, I was the worst of them all as he would say.

Shisui once told me, ‘Uchiha men don’t fall in love.’ But I really shouldn’t be quoting him, he was a terrible example considering he fell in love time and time again with every girl that ever batted their eyelashes at him. And trust me, there were plenty.

Then again, this isn’t a real love story. It never was and no matter which way I twist it, it can’t ever be one.

In the end we both saw the truth. He saw the light I had been pressing him to find and I saw the darkness that had sheltered his ill thoughts. And when I asked if I would ever see him again, he left me with few words to remember-

“Never again.”