He does terrible things to her in his dreams.

Things that aren't done and aren't done for a reason, a thousand reasons.

It makes him sad. He can't look her in the eye any more- always, he stares into the middle distance, the place that's everywhere and nowhere all at once, the special place that's friend of abused women and suffering children and too-young soldiers.

She notices, of course. Sees it all with those far-reaching parchment eyes, all her sorrows rippling in the purple depths, until she can't look at him at all.

It makes him even sadder.

"Hinata," he says, voice heavy with all the unspoken atrocities. He's glad her ears are not as good as her eyes; it would be hard to speak a little to her left, the way he looks a little to her right. There's no special place for his voice to rest except ringing in her ears.

Her back is to him but he knows she's listening, because her shoulders bunch up and he smells the salt of tears forming in her eyes.

"Naruto?" She says, crushingly polite.

"I'm sorry for the things I do to you."

The spike in her anger is almost visible in the blurry sky. "But you don't do anything to me."

Ice drips from her cold words. He is humbled; her sweet and kind and shy self has been eradicated by his cruelty- she has metamorphosed from a caterpillar to a hawk. Silk and steel and lightening, that's how she fights now and that's how she speaks.

"I'm sorry for the things I do to you in my dreams." He corrects.

"I don't know what you do."

"I don't want you to."

"I hate you."

"I know."

For a second they are paralysed. A still life, except one person is dead. They're not sure who it is anymore. It's too obscene to be a tragedy and too tragic to be obscenity- it's not quite a farce either.

She cries, and he cries too, for everything that was, and everything that never could have been. They cry together for a while, separate and yet together in their grief, until he stops and then she stops and the moment is gone; caught in painful relief, a blight in the tapestry of their lives.

"I'm sorry," he says again, "I'm crazy."

Her only reply is a single wave of her hand, and he knows which one of them is dead.

It makes him sad.

Drought is over, metaphorically speaking.