Summary: Five minutes, five days, and five weeks after Orochimaru blesses Neji with another cursed seal. Neji as he is, but somewhere else. NejiTen.

Disclaimer: Naruto is the property of Kishimoto.

3. minutes

—it was an easy shot, he had a clear opening for the Jyuken, but the chakra pathways had warped and stretched like snakes until the body was nothing but a mass of burning blue lunging at his face—

A bite.

And then Hizashi is there.

"F-father?"

I wonder if this is death, Neji thinks, a quaint little thought, while his venerable and dead father stands in front of him, cutting a proud profile against the back-drop of brilliant blue sky. They were flying or falling or a little bit of both. The ground could have been both above and beneath them—direction is irrelevant but for forwards, towards Hizashi.

Where am I? What am I looking for?

Neji has a thought: there was a forest, but where forests should be mossy and warm this one was black. Lee was down, the Sound-nin had thrown him against a rock, and Tenten was behind him as formation dictated. The Heaven scroll was strapped to her hip and he had dropped down to a brilliant chakra whirl that both protected and hid them long enough for her hands to unclip crinkled paper. There was live steel streaming above him and chakra streaming through him and he had seen it—an easy shot.

Across from him, his father says nothing.

"I'm not sure why we're here," Neji admits. Hizashi is the only person to whom Neji had always been truthful (even if it was only because it was impossible to hide lies from those eyes) and even in this vague world of sunspots with no sun that will not change.

Here is a relative term. Where is here? What makes it different from there, the blackened forest, where he is both less and more than he is here?

His father makes a move towards him and suddenly he is very large and very towering. Hizashi is close enough that Neji can see himself reflected in his father's face as he was so many years ago, a child laughing at the cool kiss of wind brushing against his face, embracing the lusty cry of grief and pain, falling without fear from his first kata because he knew his father's muscular arms would catch him on his descent. When Neji was three he had believed that his father was a soaring eagle and his own fledgling toddler hands would one day sprout into wings—he feels this way again now.

But now he recognizes that the flight of a soaring bird is a false promise. A clan is many while a family is few, but Neji with a family had been so different from the Hyuuga Neji who has nothing but his hated clan. Birds can be easily caged, and cages can take on many forms.

Hizashi's pale hands rise to grip at his face, white eyes melding into white. The bones protrude, the muscles flex, and Neji watches mountains rise from flesh. He abruptly changes his mind—this can't be death, can't be anything less than perfect, vivid, dynamic life.

"My son."

A pause.

"I thought that choosing to let go of my fate would encourage you to let go of yours. Instead you have clung to it, tighter than I thought possible. It has begun to consume you from the inside."

A slight pain churns inside of him. It begins from his temples, little rivulets of pain. It does not stab like a kunai but rolls over him like a wave, the gentlest pain he has ever felt. It bleeds from his veins outwards and then inwards until the gentle pain coats him like a blanket, pain like a warm hug, pain like an old friend. Hizashi opens his mouth to speak and the words tear out of him, rip at the corners of his lips, Neji sees the cracks and splinters sticking to his father's tongue, but they chill in the air and the words sound steady when they come to him.

"Now that I have failed, who will save you?"

Who will save you?

Neji suddenly registers the cursed seal. It hovers between them and above them and within them, unearthing in neon green. The color is almost as unnatural as the straight lines it traces across his father's forehead Neji lives in circles, he does not abide by straight lines, he can not live by straight rules and its straight shadows are more vivid than anything else in this vague world.

Has it always been there?

"Father, your seal—" Neji begins but there are no words, there are no sounds, instead his mouth spews green flames. Suddenly he is breathing his cursed seal out like a flamethrower and he is afire with eerie green light that scalds when it should chill. He had always imagined the seal as cool, as ice, as the glacial chill spreading across his inner world, but the sensation that rocks from his temples down through his spine is nothing but blazing fire.

It hurts.

He has lived with his cursed seal, he has lain with his cursed seal, he has fought for and fought with and fought against his cursed seal. Neji briefly acknowledges that now all he has left is to die for his cursed seal.

How had he never realized it before?

Then he screams, dear god it hurts, it hurts so much, it hurts more than his fourth genin mission where he had taken three fuuma shuriken in the back, it hurts more than when he was nine and refused to bow to his grandfather, it hurts more than when his father died and Neji thought he had fallen sleep and awoken in an unending winter with ice instead of bones—

The white of his eyes turn black.

When he awakens in the blackened forest Tenten is leaning over him with eyes as wide as circles and his only recollection is his father's burning face.

And ice.

2. days

All Hyuuga babes are born with white eyes—like the reaches of the clan, it is a dominant trait, endlessly clutching and consuming all in its path. But while the white eyes are effortless the Byakugan must be earned—Neji had spent years prying its secrets from the eyes of his cold, dead ancestors.

(His early childhood is nothing but a stream of humiliations, memories spent doubled over stolen scrolls to study by the light of a gutting lamp. It was a product of necessity rather than choice—he had asked his grandfather once only for harsh rejection to bear rough down on him, the pain of the accursed activated seal on his head fractional compared to the stinging whip of obedience cracking on his back. The scrolls had led to silent nights in the clan dojo, flinching at even a suggestion of noise—afternoons like a common thief, slinking through the compound to observe how his unbranded cousins forced power into the Jyuken—whole weeks locked up alone in his rooms, subsisting on nothing but controlled breathing and the tidal storm of chakra in meditation.

Neji was a ravenous soul, he had been a glutton for years, gorging himself on anything he could get his hands on until he was well-bred, well-read, and above all else, strong.)

Today he is prying secrets from her, slicing her wide open, examining every hidden plane and edge inside her. He is searching for the ways he can make her tick, and will not stop until he knows exactly what she has, can, and will eventually give him.

"Again," he commands. Prickly Tenten has enough blades to arm a legion of men. She is not nearly done. She obeys without hesitation, drawing her treasured blades, and as she slips into her position he slips into his—

—Kaiten, but today is different, today his chakra world is threaded with black, threaded with dark ice, threaded with a low voice that whispers to him are you as strong as you want to be? are you as strong as you need to be? do you want to be stronger?

Today his inner demon whispers back, no, hell no, and the long, snaking yes.

It had only been five days, but Neji had been able to understand. He had been cursed with the potential for strength. The curse has diseased him and left his muscles soft and pliable, his chakra edged and sharpenable, his body as ready as a blade for the whet. His curse was strength limited only by the force of his will—power propelled by the strength of the hatred running through his veins. He was a monster, a blackened monster, a viciously triumphant monster, a monster marveling because was this his first taste of freedom?

And Tenten—if she was afraid of the black fire spreading across his skin, of the black fire burning out his white eyes—hid it behind her constant desire to appease him.

By the time the sun has kissed the horizon in sunset she has begun to tire. Her weapons have finally reached the point of depletion and she resorts to gathering them by hand. Her tipping point of exhaustion comes when she bends down to retrieve a shuriken and only succeeds in falling facedown into the earth. She accepts the defeat with gaunt grace when she turns to him, disappointed but unashamed in her weak inability to continue.

Her eyes are drifting, Neji notes absently, her mind must be wandering. In her black pupils they have returned to the blackened forest—

(Lee had still been down. Tenten had half-dragged, half-carried both of them to the knot of an enormous tree. Cowering in its protection, Neji had seized like a man in his final moments, raptured in delirium and hallucination. His hands had reached out, the bones protruding, the muscles flexing, sightlessly grasping for what seemed to be just beyond grasp. For five minutes Neji had walked the careful line of life and death, everything about him darker than Neji in life—his pale undertones had grayed, his face ashen, skin burning endlessly hot in fever.

His return had been no better. Upon waking he stumbled out of their seclusion like a drunkard, howling in pain. There was something wrong, something off, he clawed at his eyes with unsteady hands, nails raking thin scratches across his cheeks. He had settled only when the looping black markings had reached his hands and he could finally understand—he wasn't crazed, or dead, or miraculously dead and returned to life, but merely cursed, and to that he was accustomed.

Tenten told him later that she had never been more afraid in her life.)

—but she shakes her bangs and he returns to the clearing. Their spar for the day is clearly over (Tenten is making no move to rise again) so he settles into the lotus position, a palm open on each knee, and waits for either his meditative state to be achieved or his companion to provide a suitable distraction.

Neji opens his eyes when he feels the weight of her gaze upon him. When their eyes meet they are looking at each but Tenten is not seeing him—rather, she is seeing through him, or beyond him, or into him, or somewhere within him that flees from her contemplation. She is unabashed in her introspection.

"You are thinking about me." It is a statement, not a question.

Tenten is not caught off-guard by his blunt and forward statement. She has always taken his omniscience in stride and makes no indication towards the contrary. She chooses not to answer but instead extends a palm to pull herself in his direction. Palm after palm, she tugs herself closer, an exhausted Tenten crawling across the dirt towards him. When her head is finally resting in his lap she turns to both look and see him, eyes lidded in fatigue but strangely bright nonetheless.

"Just thinking about the exam."

Neji contemplates the layers of such a simple statement. Thinking about that long night in the blackened forest, maybe, his grayed skin in the shadows of leaves and the tears that dripped from her face onto his. Thinking about his future tournament match, maybe, the ostentatious reason for his continuous training, his continuous betterment, his continuous but sudden need to explore and exploit and demolish every boundary of his limitations.

Or perhaps and most likely, thinking about the preliminaries, thinking about his godforsaken preliminary with his godforsaken cousin (or perhaps he was the cousin forsaken by god). Since the night in the knot of an ancient tree he had known, he had understood, but he had never felt until the damning proof of Hyuuga sin was quivering in front of him, her weak entreaties and tenketsu needles barely whispers across his senses. Neji had felt then, with his pathetic cousin before him, felt so strongly the emotional undercurrent of the looping black hatred that scrawled across his skin and tainted his eyes as dark as night. His white Hyuuga eyes had been black; black with rage, black with hatred, black with the horrifying dark ambition he had always kept caged within himself.

Hinata had panicked then, had given out a stuttered cry, and whether it was from fear or alarm or confusion he did not know. His step forward was met with a slow defense, a kunai so poorly aimed he didn't even bother to dodge. The kunai had grazed his temple and the headband and bandages had fallen away to reveal nothing but white skin, unblemished, underneath, until black ink had unfurled like cursive across its expanse.

And his wretched cousin, her white eyes and lips wide, had said nothing.

"You shouldn't think too much," Neji intones, averting his eyes to her. Tenten closes hers, the pull of closed lids winning her over, but her response, a light smile, is lost in the tense, drawn muscles of her face.

She says nothing.

Eventually, when Tenten falls asleep, brows pinched together even in slumber, he slips out from underneath her. Positioned in the middle of their clearing, he begins a slow, persuasive kata. In liquid circles he glides from one position to the next, one set to another, again and again until the movements build like the flight of a climbing bird. Breathing in, then out, muscles dually tense and fluid, all of his chakra aligned with the three, swirling commas tattooed across his neck.

All these years, and it was now that his time had finally almost come.

1. weeks

"Neji."

I knew this seemed too easy, he thinks, a solitary figure on a long dirt road. She is behind him (as formation has always dictated). Though in reality it is only a few short steps, the distance seems to stretch a thousand leagues. The gate of her (their) village seems excruciatingly wide. She is alone. Her hair and clothes are disheveled, as if she had been pulled from sleep. As if some unknown force had ripped her from between her sheets and drawn her to this inconspicuous gate because she had known this chill in the night air was wrong.

They are mirrored images, polar opposites reflected across the boundary of Konoha's gates. He was born in Konoha but with his feral, abandoned childhood he could never truly say it was where he was raised. She was born in far-flung reaches beyond the land of fire, but it was here that she had gathered her makeshift family and forced a semblance of familial intimacy. Every step he takes leads him farther away from his former home, but every day that passes brings her deeper and deeper into the heart of the will of fire.

"Tenten." He has no patience to stare at each other idly tonight.

"I didn't know you had somewhere to be tonight," she says, lightly, as if he is leaving on a mission and will triumphantly return in a few days.

(But in a way, he is, isn't he? Only his mission had been assigned by his uncle the moment he delivered the fatal blow to a Cloud-nins heart. Only his triumph will be measured in the oceans upon oceans of blood he can spill, both guilty and innocent. Only there is no return from the path he is taking, whether it be a paved with dirt or good intentions.)

"I didn't know you would be seeing me off." Neji volleys back, just as casual. Underlying his words is a challenge. He is taunting her to see how long she can reign herself in until she charges.

She cracks immediately. It is one of the traits Neji had always appreciated about her, her distaste for subtlety. The Hyuuga, in their circular world, can rise and fall, live and die, without so much as a swell or dip (can kill a brother or a son without batting an eye). Tenten moves as directly as her blades, comes at life with a battle-ax when a kunai would have sufficed. It makes her easy to predict. It makes it easy for him to weave his circles around her. Her tanned face breaks down around her laugh lines.

"I know what you're doing. And I've always admired you, Neji, but I'm not going to let that blind me tonight." Her eyes drift to the junction of his neck and his shoulder blade. "I've ignored it for five months, but I've always known it was there. Just under your skin, lying in wait, like a snake."

Something about her tightens, like a clenching muscle. Her strained face poorly disguises her inner battle (he can see every swell and every dip, and the swells rise far above her while the dips drop deep into the dark insecurities of her soul) words are easy but actions are hard; Neji has woven his circles well, and such long-held devotion is hard to overcome. Feeling, such flooding feelings, have built behind her habitual dedication like a dam on the verge of explosion. Back and forth, tossed like a bird in a tornado. Tenten is coming to a decision.

Neji feels a strange sensation stir in the pit of his stomach. It is not anger, as he knows the tide of red anger, or the cool grief that no longer stirs him but curls like a friend between his bones. He recognizes it with a harsh thrill as excitement; he is excited; Tenten's struggle has excited him. She is about to explode.

The blaze that follows is fit to rival the sun. She's bright like a fire, bright like an inferno, shining so vividly and beautifully bright like his father on the day he died. Neji would look away but with his all-seeing eyes there is nowhere to not look and he can't bring himself to lose even a second of the sight.

"This curse is suffocating your heart, Neji!" Tenten is a hellcat, screaming, spitting fire and steel. Where had all those blades come from but there is no time to reflect on anything but the rotation of his Kaiten. This is familiar territory—two steps backwards and a lunge forward, block the three-pronged staff but veer away from the shuriken—the rhythm of their spar, just a spar with weighted odds. Tenten is still screaming. "It will faster kill you than make you stronger!"

Then her tempo changes. If she had ever held anything back she is certainly not doing so now. Tenten is pushing herself, her fingers whisper across steel faster than he has ever seen her go before. Her limits stretch and reforge as they hit every splintering point. He does not pretend to struggle with the change; Neji slips into this continuously retempering Tenten as fluidly as his Jyuken. He will grow with her, or against her, or from her. Or she will grow her hell around him.

And Tenten breaks down.

"I love you too much to let that happen."

Neji snarls. If she is love, she should be foolishly afire with it, and it should bring her burning down but Tenten is spinning, she has ducked into her Soshoryu, her dragons are wrapped like smoky lovers around her and she is aflight, Tenten is all metal and paper scrolls and a bird in the sky.

Flying.

I hate her, he thinks, suddenly, irrationally, his veins have iced over with hatred, I will never stop hating her, hating Tenten who is vivacious and effervescent, Tenten who has unwaveringly devoted herself to him, Tenten with her head cradled in his lap. Tenten who woke up in the middle of the night and dragged herself to an inconspicuous gate, just because she had somehow known this departure was to be permanent.

His chakra pools at the tips of his fingers. Chakra is inherently warm, comfortable, but this hatred has chilled him and settled unnaturally in the palm of his hand. It builds until it overflows and he shoots her down, Hakke Kusho, the wave of chakra like an arrow. She falls from embrace of her dragons; the unnatural chakra has found its mark; the paper tangles between her limbs. He has brought her from the heavens back down to him, back down to this world where everything is both more and less real than she seems to be.

He grounds her with this single shot, and wrecks her upon her descent. Hakke rokujuyon sho.

"You must be desperate, Tenten. Your love is a double-edged weapon, and this last volley of yours has hurt you more than it would have ever hurt me."

His low hiss is meant to injure her in a way the Gentle Fist can not, but instead she laughs. Laughter, weary laughter, like she had taken the strands of their grief and woven it into a thick blanket to keep herself warm. Laughter like her bones have grown to ice and turned in their sockets, but through the chill she can only comprehend a whisper of a sensation. Lying there on the ground, body bruised, chakra drained, a failure beyond her own comprehension, she has the gall to laugh her weary laugh and look happier and duskier than Neji has been in almost every year to his name.

(Neji, gluttonous, ravenous, blackened Neji, gorges himself on her regret, he will keep this moment forever, drink on her devotion and sap her dry because this is the moment he had pried away from her, this is the bright explosion of feeling that couldn't turn the white inside his blackened eyes)

"I wanted to save you, Neji." She laughs another beautifully, brilliantly, grieved laugh. Her fingers spasm, the closest to reaching out to him that her body can manage. "But I always knew that I couldn't."

"Now that I have failed, who will save you?"

I thought that choosing to let go of my fate would encourage you to let go of yours. Instead you have clung to it, tighter than I thought possible. It has begun to consume you from the inside.

Now that I have failed, who will save you?

The moment changes. He is holding a bird inside his fist, it is a weak thing, he knows the easiest twitch will crush it within the cage of his fingers—but he has a weakness for birds and a sour jealousy for their flight. He has a weakness for Tenten and a sour jealousy for her flight, which slowly breaks her and rains the metallic shreds of her down from the skies. Jealous, has he been jealous, has he broken her out of jealousy for her wings? Has trading one seal for another granted him even the slightest taste of airy freedom? Or has he lashed out at her because even she could not give him the choice he had wanted.

(Compassion is a stranger to Neji but briefly her feathers flutter across him; compassion is strange in when she comes to him but her hands take this time to weave some white into his black eyes.)

He removes his headband and it reveals nothing beneath it. The metal is ice beneath his hands. It is representative of a promise, and though he has broken that promise, it is the only memory of it that he has left to return to her.

"There is no one who can save me."

He sets it at his feet for her and leaves.