▸ Column · The Hidden Leaf shinobi era — the Hyuga clan, betrothal households, and kunoichi billeted between villages
NEJI HYUGA replies.
Replied to by Neji Hyuga, with a rebuttal from Hinata Hyuga.
The letter
My closest friend among the kunoichi — I'll call her Reyna — has been promised to a young man for three years now. Last week our squads were billeted in another village, and from a teahouse balcony across the square I watched her betrothed holding hands with a woman who was plainly not Reyna, kissing her twice, his arm around her the whole while. I slipped out before he could mark my face. The trouble is this: Reyna's family has just begun arranging the wedding household, and she speaks of nothing but the betrothal ceremony, certain it comes any day. I cannot stomach the thought of her binding her life to him while I sit on what I saw. But years ago I once hinted to another friend that her husband seemed false — she chose him, cut me off cold, and I did not hear her voice for four years. Do I tell Reyna and risk losing her the same way, or hold my tongue and watch her walk into misery?
Neji Hyuga replies
You have already decided the outcome — speak and lose her — and you have called that decision fate, because a thing once happened to you. I know that move better than anyone alive. I was marked at birth for the branch house and I spent years insisting my whole life was sealed, when in truth I had only sealed it myself and called the wall destiny. A boy with no right to beat me beat me, and proved the cage door had never been locked. So pull your two fears apart. What is genuinely fixed here is only this: you cannot govern how Reyna receives the truth. That is hers. Everything else — your silence, the hinting, the slipping out unseen — is yours, and it is a wall, not a fate. Last time you hinted. Do not hint. State the whole of what you saw, plainly, without softening it into a feeling that "he seemed false." You saw his arm around another woman. Say that. The friend who cut you off four years ago did not prove that honesty costs you people; she proved that some people will choose the wall. You are not obligated to build one of your own to match.
— Neji Hyuga
Hinata Hyuga weighs in
Neji is right that you must speak — but he stops one step short of the part that will actually frighten you. The telling is not the hard thing. Staying is. She may choose him anyway, the way our own family chose old grudges over each other for years, and turn that hurt on you. I know that turning; my cousin once aimed his at me. I didn't fire back, and I never gave up the hope of peace — and it healed. So tell her gently, then do the brave thing: don't disappear, even if she pushes. The man who broke faith is the coward in this story. Not you, and not her. Don't you run from her heart just because it might break.
— Hinata Hyuga
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