Disclaimer: Naruto belongs to Kishimoto. Livewire belongs to Oh Wonder.
I've been depending on the overgrown,
too many lovers that I'll never know.
Counting my losses as I let them go,
heavy the water as I sink below.
-"livewire", oh wonder
"I didn't expect to see you here, especially not tonight."
Hinata turns towards the laughing voice, an embarrassed blush on her face. She is dressed for sleeping, not for nocturnal graveyard visits, and feels slightly underdressed in her sleeping yukata. The thin lavender cotton shifts slightly in the breeze. "Oh, Tenten-chan. I didn't expect to see you here either."
Tenten graces her with an easy smile, a brief sparkle of laughter in her eyes. "Well this place has certainly seen enough of me. I always end up coming here when I can't sleep." An owl hoots from the trees around them. The moon, high in the sky, lights up the clearing with a silvery sheen.
It must be fairly late. Hinata hadn't even considered the time when she left the complex, too lost in her own thoughts. "I just wanted to ask for nii-san's approval before the wedding."
Tenten really laughs then, bringing a calloused palm up to her mouth. She kneels down on the grass beside the other girl, both of them facing towards the stone memorial. Hinata catches sight of a kunai handle's ring slipped through her fingers. The older girl must have been training nearby. "Isn't the wedding tomorrow? A bit late, don't you think?"
Hinata warms at Tenten's tinkling laughter. "I thought with all the preparations already in place he might think it too much of a hassle to refuse now," she giggles.
Tenten is evidently very amused at the mental image. The kunai ring slipped onto her fingers begins to twirl. "I can already hear him clawing out of the grave now, all ready to burst in on the wedding tomorrow. Of course the only thing that could bring him back from the dead is the thought of Naruto marrying into his family."
There had been a slew of jokes from their friends recently, Hinata remembers, about how Naruto would fare in the strict Hyuuga atmosphere. Tenten herself, a few days earlier, had quipped that the inevitable conclusion would either be that Naruto would blow up the entire complex or Hiashi -sama would have him served for dinner before the month was up. Hinata softens into uneasy little-girl giggles at the amusing, if not slightly unsettling, thought.
"Nervous?" The older kunoichi offers, a big-sister lilt in her voice.
Hinata smoothes the cotton fabric over her thigh and ponders the question for a brief moment. "Actually, no. I don't think so." She takes a breath. "I've been waiting for this day for a long time." A thoughtful pause, and she carefully traces her eyes over the characters carved onto the stone tombstone. "Nii-san encouraged me to talk to Naruto for years, always telling me that I had to be the one to shape my own destiny. He said that I was fully capable of making my dream come true as long as I took the first step. I guess I just figured that, on the day my dreams finally did come true, he would be there to watch over me. I just wanted him to be…here."
Hinata turns her head to her companion, expecting another of Tenten's easy smiles, but is surprised to find her head slightly bowed. There is an inscrutable look on her face that Hinata can't quite place. It isn't anger, or grief, but rather a soft distortion of her features, usually so easy-going and happy, into something darker. More discontent.
"Tenten?" She says quietly, edging a hand along the soft ground towards the other girl.
"Yeah, I guess we all did." Tenten finally says, lifting her head.
Hinata suddenly feels terribly awkward. "Ah, I'm sorry, Tenten-chan. I guess I have no right to complain to you about this. I bet you must spend a lot of time here as well," Hinata ends up mumbling into the silence. She immediately wishes she could swallow up her words again—the pre-wedding jitters must be getting to her.
An awkward silence stretches between them. Hinata mentally curses her uncharacteristic tactlessness. She is usually quite conscious of her close friend's feelings. After all, the death of her beloved older cousin had wrought changes on both of them. Hinata had grown to fill the gap he had left in her life, adjusting to being her own protector and source of encouragement. She had strived to be a mentor for Hanabi the same way he had once been there for her. Hinata had even begun pursuing the unification of the two Hyuuga houses. It was a lonely struggle, but she had vowed to never falter—it was the least she owed her nii-san.
And Tenten, who once came around the Hyuuga complex at least twice weekly, had stopped making her frequent and colorful appearances around their gate. She was once a common sight at Ichiraku's Ramen, or the Soba Bar, or Minamoto's Desserts, always with a familiar man by her side, their outfits bloodied and tousled from a rigorous training session. Not so much anymore. The night air, despite the warm summer temperatures, seems to chill in the silence.
Tenten shifts. Hinata's sharp eyes fly to her, ready to gauge her reaction, another apology already pressing against the back of her lips.
"We weren't, you know," Tenten finally says. She makes the statement clinically, like a doctor observing a nameless patient or a student reading from a textbook.
Hinata's eyes widen incrementally. The words she had prepared die between her lips. "Y-You weren't?" Hinata is years beyond her stuttering phase but sometimes she regresses. She tends to fall back on old habits when she's uncomfortable or surprised. "B-but I thought, e-everyone thought—"
She stops before she can feel any more horribly intrusive. I thought the two of you were in love, she had meant to say, everyone had thought it was inevitable.
Tenten hums, "I bet everyone did, didn't they." Her voice is still curiously flat.
She produces a white chrysanthemum from her pockets and lays it across the grave. The petals are slightly ruffled and the flower is a little dirty. It slightly reminds Hinata of the older kunoichi herself—slightly unruly, a little beaten from training, but always beautiful. Always a flower in and of herself.
"I would bet my favorite set of kunai that's what any normal person would think." Finally some emotion begins to color Tenten's voice, a raw sort of wry wit. "But they would be severely overestimating Neji's emotional capabilities."
"Nii-san always held you in very high regard," Hinata hesitantly speaks up, defending her cousin. "Neji always told me and Hanabi that you were a model kunoichi…that we should aim to be more like you."
We thought he loved you, is what she really wants to say.
A slight intake of breath, like the air had hitched in Tenten's throat, draws Hinata's attention. There is another inscrutable look on her face, the same dark look of discontent. But this time, Hinata can finally place it, and recognizes it as the somber expression of regret.
"You loved him." A statement, not a question. "Do you regret not telling him?" The words have slipped out of Hinata's mouth before she could even think about them. But she had thought they had both known, that they had been something—the shock of being so wrong must still be wearing on her.
Tenten looks at her plainly. "Of course he knew," she says, easily, "as if I could hide anything from him and his damn perceptive eyes." She opens her mouth to say more but ends up sighing. Hinata feels a wave a regrets washing over her, as if Tenten has just exhaled every pent-up what-if she had never voiced.
"I just regret never asking if he loved me too. I figured he had needed time, time to process or time to understand. Love was so foreign to him." Tenten laughs under her breath. "And I had told him I had all the time in the world to wait for his answer."
Tenten is so uncharacteristically frail, so delicate, in that single moment. The sight of her breaks Hinata's heart—it is only with the inner strength that Neji had instilled into her that she is able to pull it together. When she speaks it is with the conviction of two people: herself, and her deceased cousin, who was as close to her as a brother.
"Neji loved you, Tenten. He may have never said so, but he was never a man for words—it was always his actions that were the most truthful. And everything he did told me that he loved you."
Surprisingly, Tenten does not protest. The older kunoichi, known for combative personality, drinks in her words like a man dying of thirst, and the sheer desperation forces Hinata to continue.
"If Neji-nii-san was here, I am completely sure that he would agree with me. He had loved you more than any words he had known."
Tenten suddenly bursts into tears.
The flare of conviction that had burned within Hinata dies down to an ember. "T-Tenten-chan! I-I didn't mean to u-upset you—"
She laughs, a full-blown, larger-than-life laugh. The tears run in rivulets down her cheek. "Of course not, silly Hinata-chan. I've tried for years not to think about that cold-hearted bastard and it turns out he might not really be that cold-hearted after all. It's funny, y'know. It's funny that I believe you."
"You do?" Hinata says, hopefully. Hoping she could help her friend salvage even one part of a doomed love.
"You're a hopeless romantic, I hope you know." Tenten says, matter-of-factly, wiping away the last of her quick-lived tears. "And that's the only reason I believe you. If you're this much of a sap your cousin must have at least a little bit of it in his genes as well."
A weak joke. Hinata takes the bait and smiles, tentatively, like a flower on the cusp of blooming. Tenten heaves another sigh, but this one is lighter, like she has shrugged off much of the weigh of her shoulders. In the silvery sheen of a moonlit graveyard, she grasps one of Hinata's hands in her own, the calloused fingers tightening around pale digits.
"I'll always regret not asking him, not knowing for sure. But I believe you, Hinata-chan, I want to."
An easy smile.
"I think Neji loved me too."