so undeniably yours,
as long as i'm losing it so completely
- Must Be Dreaming, Frou frou
Tenten was rethinking her plan. Neji had not reacted at all. Maybe he…maybe he didn't care? She winced.
If that was the case, she had two options: dropping the plan entirely – and being faced with the disappointment of three very determined kunoichi, or at least two very determined and one stammering, kind, don't-hurt-her-poor-thing kunoichi.
Or, she could flat-out tell Neji that she was head-over-heels for him, since he wouldn't expend the effort to figure that out for himself.
Neither option seemed particularly appealing.
"Who?"
Startled, Tenten whirled to confront the object of her recent thoughts. Neji was standing over her, pale eyes burning. She gaped at him. "Wh-what?"
"Who. Is. He?" Neji enunciated clearly, every word absolutely flat and without inflection. "Who is…the one you're in love with?" Subtly, so subtly she wasn't quite sure it had actually happened, Neji's voice cracked at the end.
Inwardly Tenten rejoiced. He did care! Fighting off the urge to do a series of backflips clear across the field, she looked down at her hands, clenched in her lap, and grinned wildly for a moment. Composing herself, she looked up at Neji from under her lashes. "Oh, you know him," she purred.
Neji reeled for a moment. He had never seen Tenten look so…so coy, sooty eyelashes veiling suddenly smoldering eyes, her voice pitched to a sultry deepness. And then he realized she was thinking of…of that guy while being so…nn, gah…and now he really wanted to kill him goddammit.
He narrowed his eyes at her, silently demanding more explanation.
Tenten let her lips curve into a small smile. "He's a genius…" She blinked. Where had Neji gone?
Shikamaru heaved a sigh of absolute contentment. A quiet hillside, a cool day with just the right amount of clouds in the sky, and best of all no blonde kunoichi(s) agitating at him to get off his lazy arse and do something - anything! Bliss.
Thoughtfully he chewed on a stalk of grass. That cloud looked like…a dog. A little like Inuzuka's overgrown mutt, actually. That one looked like a bowl. Then there was a fluffy stag, with two streamers of cirrus for his antlers, and a baby deer beside him – Shikamaru, who was actually rather fond of his family's charges, smiled a little – and those two patches of white looked like a Hyuuga's angry eyes in full-blown Byakugan.
Then he realized those were a Hyuuga's eyes in full-blown Byakugan, and they were glaring at him from the tense-jawed face of Hyuuga Neji.
"Can I…help you?" Shikamaru said slowly, raising himself up on his elbows. Any other shinobi, picking up on the killkillKILL vibe from the furious Neji, would have run; but Shikamaru disliked physical exertion.
If he'd known what was going to happen, he would have sprinted. He would have sprinted around Konoha a hundred times, if necessary.
"HAKKE KUSHOU!"
Neji returned to his training-grounds, all but strutting. Now that he had proven how unworthy a match Nara was – honestly, what did all the girls see in that lazy jackass – Tenten would drop him like a hot potato. She would never consider someone so inept in combat, of course. Only a true warrior could keep up with the mistress of blades, someone strong, and powerful, and swift. Someone who could fight her head-to-head. Someone, perhaps, with the ability to see in 360 degrees?
Also, he had saved her the inevitable heartache of when Nara returned to his blonde harem. Really he was being very thoughtful.
And then he realized, when he got to the training grounds and saw Tenten carving a dragon out of a hunk of wood - while giggling - that nothing had changed after all.
The dragon was holding hearts in its cartoony claws.
Tenten knew that Nara was in the hospital. All of the members of their little clique did, what with Yamanaka's ranting and raving about it, and the veritable mountains of flowers she had enlisted her girlfriends' aid to carry to his room. (This consisted of Sakura getting Naruto to help – predictably he had conjured up a battalion of Kage Bunshin).
And yet here she was, still lovesick, and not seeming to really care about her supposed lover's convalescence. Which meant…
He'd gotten the wrong guy. Neji cursed underneath his breath.
"So…" Neji coughed, congratulating himself on his ability to act so casual. "Who is he?"
Tenten stared. Number one, hadn't he figured it out yet? Number two, why was he acting so weird? She sighed a little and decided to drop a few more hints. "I told you, he's my genius – best in his class…" She stared at him expectantly.
Neji nodded. It wasn't Nara.
"What do you want, Hyuuga?"
"HAKKE ROKUJUUYON SHOU!"
And Uchiha Sasuke, never even having the time to activate his own doujutsu, went sailing off with all his tenketsu closed.
Neji glared, irritated, as Tenten absent-mindedly doodled hearts and flowers and the odd weapon in the dust with the tip of her kunai. She was out of it. She was so out of it she was willingly exposing her weapons to unnecessary wear-and-tear and dirt. If someone had told him that last week he would have laughed and told him to pull the other one.
Alright, so he wouldn't have laughed.
Or spoken.
But he would have stared flatly.
So it wasn't Uchiha. It wasn't Nara. Who in all hells was it, then?
"He's the pride of his clan…"
This time it was a multiple job, just to make sure. He took out Aburame and Inuzuka at one go, ambushing the two boys while they were sparring – and the satisfaction of protecting Hinata-sama from their unholy attentions, as well as Tenten, was icing on the sweet sweet cake of bodily harm.
Then he struck at Akimichi…a little surprised at how much of the bigger boy's bulk actually was muscle, as he kept saying, but victorious nonetheless. Furthermore, the tenketsu he'd struck effectively kept the boy from eating except through a tube, thus lowering his style-dependent combat effectiveness for quite some time – and the monthly income of most of the convenience stores and groceries of Konoha. They proceeded to curse the name of Hyuuga Neji…
Silently, though.
He'd already taken out Nara, but if Yamanaka and the sand-fan girl hadn't been mounting vigorous and glaring guard on his doorway, he would have gone and loomed threateningly over the mostly comatose boy's bed too.
It wasn't enough. Tenten still persisted in her mind-numbingly cute romantic sighing and cooing, gazing into the sky abstractedly.
She was so involved with daydreaming about her mysterious beloved that she looked annoyed when Neji asked about him. She was annoyed at him?
This guy had a lot to pay for. Tenten had never been annoyed at him before. (Neji had a very selective memory)
"He's got these extraordinary eyes, rare eyes, eyes you can get lost in forever…"
Neji had to go away and think about that one for a while. Rare eyes? She might have been describing Uchiha Sasuke, with that blasted Sharingan of his, but he had already taken care of the brat. And every other candidate had the dark eyes common of Konoha, so they couldn't be described – not even by a lovesick girl – as rare.
Neji was pondering this in his room, pacing, when he saw his cousin walk by with an abstracted expression. He was struck by how similar that expression was to Tenten's today, when she was looking into the sky, and was therefore annoyed. He strode firmly over to his open door, intending to remind Hinata of the training-session Hiashi-sama had scheduled for the two of them - and to beat that look out of her eyes - when Hinata, glancing around herself furtively, took out a small photograph and sighed over it.
Neji, Byakugan activated, peered through her at it. He realized it was a picture of Uzumaki Naruto and scoffed – then stiffened, remembering the bright blue eyes that blazed out of that tanned, striped-cheek face.
Blue eyes.
Bright blue eyes, like no one else in Konoha had.
Rare eyes.
tbc
