Written for Christmas, for Dragon_Bite.

When Hinata was a child, her mother had an herbal garden. It wasn't anything special, and most women in Konoha had a small herbal garden, if they had room for a garden. It was easier, and cheaper, to have homemade remedies for the common cuts and scrapes ninja got on missions. In her mother's garden, there was a small corner where mint plants flourished, taking over all the other plants.

Hinata used to pick the leaves while her mother weeded and tended the small garden. Hinata would hold the leaves in her small hands, and her skin would smell of mint as the leaves were crushed between her fingers. When her mother was finished, they'd go inside, and Hinata would be set up on the counter. Her mother would boil water, and Hinata would put the crushed leaves into two cups, and together they would drink water that tasted of mint and childhood.

Now, at the edge of seventeen, when her father's talking about an engagement to Neji, and the need for her to grow up, to grow out of the girlish daydreams and childish fantasies, she wishes that she could drink water tinged with green and mint and life with her mother. She misses her mother more than anything. She misses her mother more than she misses Hanabi, or Naruto, or Kiba. She misses her mother, dead and buried and under the corner of the herbal garden. She swallows the bitter tea in the small cup in front of her, and as her father speaks in the slow, calm way of his, she dreams.

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