Asperger's Syndrome

Asperger syndrome (AS) is a neurobiological disorder that is part of a group of conditions called autism spectrum disorders. The term "autism spectrum" refers to a range of developmental disabilities that includes autism as well as other disorders with similar characteristics.

No matter how perfectly plush it's shiny spotted coat was, it was still pretty dirty. Even when it's deliciously ferocious alexandrite eyes settled upon him and its whiskered twitched cunningly, it was still very much a stray. And still, despite watching how entrancing the thing's lithe body moved in a predatory-like gait, it was still a cat.

Neji watched with thoughtful eyes as he saw the feline stop slinking in the shadows to pinpoint its mesmerizing gaze on him. Something about this cat told him that even though it was ratty and malnourished, that its fur was icky with grime and muck, and that it was hissing at him with a paw alarmingly ready to slash his face, that the cat wasn't just an ordinary cat.

Like a gypsy the creature noticed his lapse in attention and promptly scampered away - the only thing Neji having being the beautiful devil's image.

With a bereft sigh, the young man continued on his way to school.

:) :) :) :)

"A cat?" Rock Lee's spoon full of leftover chicken noodle soup sat right before his opened mouth, but he was more enamored with his what his best friend has just told him. Quickly taking a bite, as to not be rude, the martial arts-loving boy said adamantly, "I will surely catch it then! A stray cat is a dead one, and one cannot simply leave those to death so cruelly!" He grinned with a goal, sticking the spoon clenched in his fist high in the air before settling down and devouring his meal with renewed vigor.

Neji coughed slightly at this. Lee was always willing to house strays, but he remembered that last time his over enthusiastic nature got him scratched all over and the young man nearly got an infection. Neji weighed his options, to try and talk Lee down from his proposal - nearly impossible - or to stay quiet and let him do what he wants.

Neji took a bite out of his sandwich. The idiot can do whatever he wants.

"C-cat?"

Something in Neji turned ice cold, fractured a bit, and then promptly broke off into the abyss that was his feelings.

Lee, being much more social, smiled and nodded. "Neji found a stray by his neighborhood on his walk to school!" The person in front of them smiled at this, her twitchy yet dextrous hands fidgeting slightly as she listened to Lee beginning to rant about the injustice of neglecting your pets - though she didn't seem to be hearing him. Hinata rarely came to her cousin during lunch, unless he forgot something (impossible) or she needed notes (more likely).

Feeling the good mood turn bitter, Neji turned his attention to the beautiful scenery instead. The school campus was lovely indeed, but going off it and into the woods beside the track field was liberating and invigorating at the same time. It was soothing and placating due to the soft wind that always shuffled between the foliage. The sun was currently shining through the canopy, not strong enough to warm the dew-laden grass but enough to give the area that comforting feeling of being in perfect bliss.

As Neji beheld the spectacle that was nature, he quickly noticed something amongst the trees, climbing along the branches like a caterpillar. At first he accused it of being a freshman, sneaking off campus to play in the forest and be rebellious to impress friends, but upon taking a closer look he found it to be the uniform that only third-years could wear. To his knowledge, third-years had outgrown the novelty of being allowed off campus and no longer came to the forest because it didn't gave them the sweet hubris to disobey the school rules. Most of the time now, they went in the opposite direction to the shopping center just a couple of blocks away. With only freshman bumbling about, the area was relatively quaint and thus why Neji chose to eat lunch in it. Though, since Lee found him last semester he couldn't call it 'quaint' any more.

Neji took another bite of his sandwich and began to watch the stranger.

They were about four trees away, concealing their visage with the thick covering of lively spring leaves. Neji noted that they left their backpack at the base of the trunk, as well as leaving a notebook with the stylized head of some sort of bear on the front. He leaned forward slightly to get a better look, noticing that the book had a name encrypted on the front. He felt his body smoothly tilting away from Lee's one-sided conversation, but was unable to make out the letters until he heard something go thump and a loud crack.

Hinata bolted upright, her eyes widening as she forget entirely about Lee and ran off to where the sound originated. Lee, more stunned by Hinata's take-off than knowing what had caused the noise, looked curiously at Neji.

Neji took a third bite of his sandwich and shrugged. Not his problem he decided as he watched Hinata pick up the foreign backpack and notebook, knowing full well that neither are hers before she jogged to a place neither male could see.

"I-I'll see you l-later!" she spoke as loudly as she could. Lee waved despite the masses of tree blocking his view while Neji did not bother gracing his relative with a verbal response.

Distinctly though, he heard a hushed conversation as Lee began to slurp up his soup distractedly.

"Does it h-hurt? Oh gosh, I should h-have k-kept a better e-eye on you. Yo-you're all scraped up a-and..." Hinata said tearfully, guiltily.

"He's not up there," was the simply response. Muffled by the trees, it was ambiguous of the gender.

Hinata hiccuped and then said, "No, h-he's not. So don't go doing su-such risky moves. You could have bro-broken a b-bone. I'm w-worried for you." A soft moment of silence, their voices fading away.

"Which word was worry again?" And if Neji bothered to continue listening, he would have heard a soft, watery giggle before his cousin and the stranger's voices drifted too far away to hear.

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A literature test. Perfect. Just what he needed.

Neji sighed but did not complain, he was used to this nonsense as the flimsy piece of paper was seated upon his desk. Leaning back in his chair, lazily rolling an arm off onto the back of the chair, Neji stared down that test like it was a plague upon his house. Nothing could be worth less his time than this.

At least it meant there wouldn't be homework, the young male reasoned. He went to scribbling answers, ignoring everything else because they were far beneath him.

Something disrupted his concentration though in the form of the classroom door opening. He didn't bother looking up, having already guessed that it was the one person in the room who didn't show up after lunch.

The teacher, a calm yet intolerably lazy gray-hair man who was rumored to read adult novels in class, turned to the intruder. Neji tried to steer everything out of his head, but the test wasn't really that important to him so he began looking like he was concentrating with his pencil as he listened.

"Did you 'go bump' again?" their teacher asked, having already been given the excuse before.

"Went bump real hard this time," was the reply, causing a few students around Neji to snicker. He didn't want to be rude, but the vaguely retarded way the student worded things, along with slurring their th's like they had a lisp, was more than enough to make them get fun of. The student continued though, "I bumped and then Blueberry helped me get up but we still didn't find Hui Zhong."

More gurgles full of mocking mirth. Even Neji found it ridiculous. He finally looked up to see the school's most handicapped person: Tenten.

He never bothered to know more about her rather than what was obvious: that she has a disorder yet was so staggeringly smart in academics that she could go to this school. Still, going to a school full of entitled, snobby rich kids did not do her well, and she was always picked on.

Tenten is Chinese. She has dark brown hair tied up in poofy buns near the top sides of her head, as well as those slanted yet wide brown eyes. Her face are rounded, with a small button nose and a petite mouth. Every day she seemed to wear a sweater her grandma's grandma knitted that always had a stupid design on it, which obscures most of her body with the baggy sleeves that covered her surprisingly small hands. Even without the sweater shrinking her, she was pretty small, only about five feet high.

For a retard, she looked pretty normal, cute even, until she started talking or moving. If left unoccupied or bored, she would simply sway and rock in her seat, but if she got even the least bit agitated she would waggle her hands around or get up and begin twirling uncontrollably. At first it was peculiar, but now it was a self-invitation to laugh at her plight. Once Neji heard from Lee that she got so uncomfortable that her face turned tomato red and she accidentally slammed herself against a wall before running off and trying to climb the chain-link around the track field. Though she got pulled off and sent to the office it was not before the story got out and she was jeered at all day.

If she wasn't on an IEP they would have expelled her, Neji thought, feeling somewhat sorry for her as she gave her pink nurse's slip to the teacher and slowly made her way to her seat in the back. He knew that eyes were lighting up beside her as she passed by, gleaming with jubilation at her misery while smirks lit up on pompously pristine faces.

Neji reasoned with himself that even if she couldn't control herself, that he wasn't judging her and outright insulting her, but he knew that he wasn't helping her either. As calmly as he could, Neji went back to taking his test as he saw her walk by him. With his eyes down low, he noticed that the part of her legs left uncovered had band-aid's on them, a myriad of Looney Tunes and Hello Kitty with dabs of purple and blue and grass stains.

Uncaringly, he didn't look up.

:) :) :) :)

Something crashed together and toppled over, making a large racket. Neji covered his ears as he eyed the dirty fence before him cautiously. He couldn't see what was going on behind it, but he was sure that he had an idea.

"Lee, you're going to scare every possible stray around here away," he said dryly once the noise died down.

A shiny round head jumped up from across the fence, eyes bright with fire as the Green Beast pulled himself over the rotted wooden barrier. "I believe that I am on a very good lead here, my friend!" he exclaimed. "Look yonder, 'tis but the sign of scratching about! Oh but a small message, but a big one all the same! If ever love had interest in my liver - !"

Neji hastily strode up to his best friend and bushed him back over the fence, uncaring if he heard a loud yelp and trash cans upturn. Ever since Lee joined drama he wouldn't shut up, his indignation reaching its peak with that asinine last phrase.

Meow

Snapping out of his annoyed state, Neji quickly found the cat from before. He considered catching it, making a grab since Lee would be too late in climbing ove the fence again. But then he hesitated.

That cat was a stray, all dirty and beautiful at the same time in its own mysterious way. It was still starving though. Still not making a decision, Neji simply watched it. The feline slunk around in the shadows of the afternoon, pinpointing it's mesmerizing gaze on him once more. Something about this cat told him that even though it was ratty and malnourished, that its fur was icky with grime and muck, and that it was hissing at him with a paw alarmingly ready to slash his face, that the cat wasn't just an ordinary cat.

Before he could decide, Lee jumped over the fence and beside him with a big laugh of triumph, scaring the elegant creature off. Noticing his mistake, the young man raced after it.

Left by the cat twice that day, Neji turned on his heel and headed back home. He was best friends with Lee but he wasn't willing to become an amateur pet hoarder just yet. Since they had travelled the path he used to go home, Neji easily made it to his little abode. Though no one else lived in the house, Neji peered into the window beside the front door as if wishing someone did.

It was a little apartment building, nothing much. A kitchen connected to a living room, with two bedrooms and a bathroom. The couch was old but comfortable enough, placed in front of a bulky TV he never used. Slipping off his shoes to place them by the door, Neji padded across the soft expanse of navy blue carpet to lay his backpack on the kitchen counter. Grabbing the chair beside it, he sat down and began to do homework. Even if he had a high intelligence, he didn't exactly win it in a lottery.

The lone clock on the wall adjacent to him, seated neatly by the window opposite of the door and by the table that had picture frames and little potted plants jumbled on top of it, tick-tocked incessantly. Tick-Tock Tick-Tick Tick-Tock

Neji tried to drown it out, he had a habit of doing it, but whenever he was home and the sun was setting but he wasn't going to bother turning on the lights, whenever he did his homework knowing that he had to get every answer right, and whenever he had enough time in the world to think about the cat he didn't catch or the retard he ignored... that damned clock would tick and tock forever until he finished and went to bed early.

He took two hours, mostly blaming it on the clock but he knew that his calculus homework was getting aggravating and that he was having problems understanding it. But he got it down with relative belief that it was right. Shoving it back into his backpack with contempt, Neji quickly tried to take his leave from that accusing tick-tock.

BRING

"What now?" he nearly growled, looking over at his conceited bag on the counter as it blared some stupid ringtone he never seemed to recognize until the call had ended. With no one but himself, he knew it was his and he knew who was calling before he checked the ID. "What now?" Blunt, frank, and enough aggravation to get his message across.

He was rewarded with a little shuffling and stuttering, impatiently wanting to go to bed. The clock felt like it was hammering inside his cranium by this point. "U-uhm, th-the c-cat th-that Le-Lee s-s-said you s-saw..." she tried to begin, but she tripped over nearly all of the words that Neji was forced to tell her to repeat herself. The shy girl took a breath and tried to continue despite her cousin's scorn. "D-d-do you know what i-it l-looked like?"

Yes. "Not really."

"O-oh." She sounded disappointed. Who cares? "W-well... w-w-was it or-orange? W-with stri-stripes?"

Yes. "Maybe."

"D-did i-it hav-have gr-gr-green e-eyes?" She was forcing out garbage by this point, but instead of giving up and quietly thanking him for his help before hanging up, she persisted as best she could.

Neji nodded at this one, vividly remembering being enraptured by those eyes. "Nope."

A sad little sigh. "T-thank y-you th-though... Ha-ha-have a-a nic-nice eve-evening, co-c-cousin..." Neji grumbled and she hung up. Good riddance.

That night Neji felt like he was being watched. Sharp feline eyes were peering at him from the bleak darkness outside his bedroom window, and no matter if he pulled the thin blanket over his heat or ducked his gaze under his pillow, he could feel eyes on him. Only, instead of being green, they were brown.

A/N: Yes Highschool AU. I have a habit of exiting out when I see one, but I'm hoping to give this one that 'unique twist' that makes it worth the gut-punching laborious trek of seeing ninjas in school uniforms. Not much of a plot yet, but maybe later when I continue laying everything out.

Edit: Went back and edited this. I have a habit of never actually reading what I write, so corrections are nice.