"Ah! Hinata!"
Hinata jerked in surprise, eyes skittering guiltily in the direction of that well-known voice. The low-grade blush already on his cheeks revved up. "Ah -- Naruto-san," he said, turning.
He shouldn't have been surprised. He had the Byakugan. He wasn't supposed to get surprised. (He'd just been raised better than to use it in the public baths, was all.) Seeing her standing there, in the corridor between the men's shower rooms and the locker rooms, though...
If only she hadn't been in a towel. A short, strained-at-the-top towel. A towel that looked a second or two away from flying open. He fixed his eyes on the wall over her head and tried to smile.
She smiled back, sort of. Naruto-san's smiles were so lovely precisely because of their lack of self-consciousness, so it was strange to see her so awkward, looking for words and not finding them. Hinata's brow furrowed in worry. "Um, did you need -- oh." Oh, he was slow. "Are you waiting for Naruhiko-kun?"
Naruto's sky-blue eyes widened in surprise, and then sparkled as she smiled again -- a real smile this time, tinged with relief and something like thankfulness. "Yeah. Heh, figures you knew him on sight."
"The resemblance is -- well, it's rather obvious," Hinata replied, rubbing the back of his head as he gave a small, shy grin.
"He didn't do anything weird, did he? Like, uh, I dunno how different it is on your side of the baths."
Hinata's cheeks warmed. "N-no, he did fine."
Naruto made a better man than he did, was what people might have thought upon seeing them together in the spring; brash and open, his laughter loud. That Hinata would l-lo-be interested in a girl like that was one thing -- one of the elders had called it 'sowing his wild oats' within Hinata's earshot with an eyeroll that implied that his wife had better be closer to Neji-neesan's poised, polished kunoichi.
Every second with Naruhiko, every playful splash or shove, made the knot in Hinata's stomach worse. The Hyuuga heir was to be no one's neko, no one's shy, submissive catamite. Hyuuga was a strong clan with a proud history and if, after doing his duty with a wife, producing strong heirs, he wanted a pretty male lover on the side... Well, as long as it was kept discreet, no one would say a thing. But when he thought about the old woodprints the only way it fit was the other way around.
"Um, anyway. He-he wasn't done washing when I" (fled) "left, but he should be done soon enough. So, um."
"Are you okay?" Naruto-san inquired, and she leaned in to peer at him. Hinata jerked his face away, flushing deep red. The towel -- oh gods and ancestors, the towel. "Oh! You stayed in the bath too long, didn't you? You're all red. Sit down, sit down, you'll fall over!"
"Um -- um, it's okay," he protested, but he couldn't bring himself to look at Naruto-san, so the next thing he knew he was sitting on a wooden bench between the men's and women's exits and desperately trying not to look at those smooth thighs disappearing under fluffy whiteness.
It wasn't much better when she leaned down to press their foreheads together to check his temperature, because then he could see nothing but cleavage. He squeezed his eyes closed, praying for Naruto-san's twin to come out of the shower quick and save him.
"What's that?" purred that voice he knew better than his own, in a tone he had never heard. When he opened his eyes there was another girl draped on Naruto-san's back, breasts pressed to a round shoulder and an elegant arm holding her from behind, so that the hand rested negligently just above the hollow between her breasts. Long hair tumbled down until it mingled, red and blond.
"Geroff, Kyuubi, you're heavy," he heard Naruto protest halfheartedly. The redhead Naruto-san purred. "Oops," she mocked, "towel." There was a loud, embarrassed squeak.
Well. There was only one solution to the whole situation. Hinata was never opening his eyes ever again.
Perhaps he could sell it to the clan as a new form of byakugan training.