The truth was Tenten still couldn't quite make sense of her memories but she had managed to hold onto some important ones and was trying to put a narrative to them. Also, she had just been so relieved so see someone's face that was just the way it was supposed to be. Nothing off or wrong about it.
Too late Tenten realized the sweaty bedroom was not a very dignified place to bring a former Hokage but it would just have to do. Tsunade sat down on the chair next to the bucket of water Neji had been occupying earlier.
"Lay down, Honey," Tsunade commanded and Tenten laid back down onto the cold wet sheets that were extremely uncomfortable now. Tsunade did some basic examinations and followed it up with some chakra-infused ones that went beyond Tenten's knowledge. Then Tsunade gave her permission to talk.
"What do you remember, Kiddo?"
"The last thing I remember is Naruto prepping me for a mission. So, if we can find him-"
"We already did. He saw you earlier before finding me. He has absolutely no recollection of being tied into this. He's not on a mission with you and, frankly, he still looks the way he's supposed to. His looks have not magically been altered at all."
Tenten frowned.
"My looks haven't been altered," she explained although she couldn't say why she was so sure of that. She wanted to say more, give some kind of arguments for her conviction but she had none. Apart from a really strong feeling. Tsunade saw she was upsetting her primary source of information in this mess and backtracked.
"Regardless of whether it was Naruto or some other blond ninja, you said you were on a mission?"
"Yes."
"What was it about?"
"I don't quite remember. But I…" Tenten was obviously struggling with herself to get it said. "I have this really strong feeling that Neji is going to die. And I also feel this sense of urgency that I can't explain..."
"You think your mission is to prevent his death?" Tsunade wanted to know, her tone very serious now.
"I can't think of any other way the pieces make sense," Tenten admitted helplessly.
Tsunade leaned back in the chair and let her finger go back and forth underneath her nose, thinking.
"Have you told Neji?"
"I'm not sure. I don't think so but my head… my mind… is strange and I don't really know what I'm doing half the time."
"I understand. I think it's better if we break you two up."
That stung Tenten somehow. Tsunade could see the flinch on the other's face.
"Do you think you two should stay together?"
"I … I don't know. I wish I did. I just don't know very much right now. I just … feel a bunch of things."
"Then what are you feeling?"
"I feel as though I don't wanna leave him."
Tsunade looked thoughtful again.
"Whatever happened to you, you survived it. Maybe you know something about how to escape from whatever attacked you. Maybe you'll remember once your colleague is in distress. Now that you have expressed such an inclination, I could see how those might be thoughts that drove you to seek him out after your attack. Do you remember where you were coming from? What part of the woods?"
"No, I only remember standing on the road in the middle of Konoha. And then seeing him."
"Was there anyone around who might have seen where you were coming from?"
Tenten shook her head. Her head was starting to hurt again; the more she tried to remember, the more her head seemed to rebel.
"There was no one around. Just the two of us."
Though Tenten couldn't see it - because she had to bury her head in her hands on her lap -, Tsunade's brows were furrowed.
"Only you two? On a weekend evening in Konoha?"
Tenten nodded without lifting her head.
"Where exactly were you two?"
This time Tenten did lift her head.
"I… I'm not sure. It was at the bottom of the hill though. Because I remember walking up with him."
Tsunade seemed to attach some kind of significance to this. Perhaps she thought she could pinpoint a likely point of attack if she could figure out where Tenten had come from before she had turned up on that dirt road behind her friend.
"I think, it's time we roped Neji into this," Tsunade announced. "But," she continued. "Lets not mention he might be the target yet, ok?"
Tenten nodded and then let the older woman help her up and walk back towards Neji in the den. Tsunade helped Tenten to a seat on the sofa next to Neji, so she could sit in the armchair across and have both of them in her line of vision.
"I still don't know what happened to Tenten. I looked her all over but, to be honest, I can't really find anything that's out of place. She seems like a perfectly healthy… thirty year old."
"But the fever?"
"Yeah, no idea. There's no infection inside of you, there is no trauma, so you haven't been hit on your head. Your chakra is exactly like Sakura said, just the way I remember it for you. Inaccessible to you. But that's nothing new. "
"So, what's wrong with her?" Neji burst out. Tenten took note how careful he was to keep his eyes straight in front of him. She also got the impression that he was sitting next to her stiffly.
"Like I said, don't know. I'm an expert on age manipulation with chakra but I can't find anything unusual about Tenten. So, now I want to focus on Tenten's whereabouts. Where did you pick her up, Neji?"
He looked slightly surprised at this question. Neji looking surprised was unusual in itself but especially so in a situation like this. Surely he must have thought about this in all the time he had been sitting next to her with the wet cloth, trying to figure out what had happened. Right? What else would he have been thinking about?
"Just outside my family's compound. I'd been visiting."
Tsunade seemed surprised. "You're on speaking terms again?"
Neji just nodded. If Tenten hadn't known better, she would have said he was embarrassed.
And then Tenten remembered that Neji and his uncle had had a disagreement. She felt the rough cushioning of the couch she sat on - That's why this couch was so awful, Tenten remembered. Because Neji bought this place and everything in it all on his own instead of with family money. But the memory seemed strangely distant, as though she'd had to retrieve it from a long way.
"Your uncle invited you. He apologized for everything. But he also needed your help," Tenten said right in the middle of a conversation between Neji and Tsunade. Both of them stopped talking immediately.
"How did you know that?" Neji wanted to know.
"Were you in the house?" Tsunade asked, alarmed. An attack inside of Konoha's most wealthy family was not good news.
Tenten tried to remember how she knew this but the effort just gave her another headache. It also didn't help that both Neji and Tsunade were looking at her all expectantly.
"No," she answered Tsunade's question and then followed with an answer for Neji. "I think you told me."
Neji shook his head and was looking more at Tsunade even though he was addressing Tenten.
"I never told you." His voice sounded ominous.
"Are you sure," Tsunade wanted to know.
"Positive," Neji replied, firmly. He was still addressing Tenten, even though his and Tsunade's eyes were locked in a wary state of alarm. "There was no time to have told you anything. You were babbling nonsense right after you spotted me and I didn't see you when I left the house. I saw you when I was already halfway down the road."
"Close to your family's property, that's quadrant A of the Konoha woods. I'll have patrolling increased over there," Tsunade announced, gathering her robes to stand up.
"I'm going to leave Sakura here for another hour or so before she should get home and get some sleep. Neji, I'm putting you in charge of Tenten's recovery. I'll have someone from my office deliver something that should get rid of this nasty fever and I'm going to take care of increased security. Tenten, if you remember anything, I wanna know."
Tsunade gave Tenten a look that made her feel as though she was also in charge of something that Tsunade would rather leave unsaid. Tenten nodded imperceptibly.
"Let me walk you out," Neji offered and basically jumped up off the couch, where Tenten was still slouched, wedged in between a pile of books and a pillow.
Tenten thought about moving back to the bed but after the second time trying to stand up and her legs just refusing to carry all her weight, dropping her unceremoniously back onto the couch, she took a break to catch her breath. By then Neji had returned and silently gestured for her to stay put. He went back into his bedroom and came out with a heap of the sweaty sheets, which he handed over to Sakura. Then he went back into the bedroom. It took him a while before he came back to the couch and Tenten. He gestured for her to get up but she shook her head.
Too tired.
So Neji sat down next to her and this time he sat a lot closer. In fact, so close his hip touched hers and Tenten felt that spark again. Her head, though tired, whipped around to look at him. But he just kept staring at his feet. Somewhere in the kitchen Sakura was rummaging about, being her usual helpful self. Tenten took a hard look at Neji. There was something scratching at the back of her mind. If she could only stop her head from hurting long enough that she could access it. It was important but she just couldn't get herself to remember it again.
"How're you feelin'?" Neji croaked.
"Very cold," she answered honestly, too tired to be tough.
"Well, lets get you into bed. To sleep," he added hastily but Tenten wasn't even listening. There was something very comforting about having Neji so close, as though she'd been missing him for a while. But if his account of her day was to be believed, then she'd only been gone an hour before she'd found him on that road. Instead of helping her get up and get her to bed, like he suggested, he traced a shiver up her arm and neck with his eyes and suddenly seemed unable to stop the impulse of wrapping an arm around her. Carefully first, almost scared to touch her but then he nestled her into his side where his body heat created comfort. Tenten closed her eyes and enjoyed the feeling. Just for a moment. Just until she could remember something helpful. Then she would jump right into action.
When Tenten cooled off even more, Neji helped her up. Supporting her with both of his arms, he helped her stumble back to a freshly made bed. Tenten crawled into bed after he lowered her onto it. Then he took his old seat next to the bed and just stared at her in a way Tenten couldn't really remember him doing ever before.
But then again, she couldn't really remember much of anything at the moment. The eerie stare didn't change when he leaned slightly forward on his stool and reached out a hand toward her body.
"May I?" he asked.
"Check for injuries?"
"Yeah."
"I thought you already did that."
"No, I just let Sakura do it all."
"Oh." Tenten did not ask why he wanted to check for himself now when he already knew Sakura's verdict. But she nodded and his hands carefully came down on her body. His right hand held her hip steady and his left hand slid up her left leg, all the way under the cloth of her robe until he was up at her waist. She was wearing underwear but she still felt as though the lifting of the robe somehow gave him an intimate view of herself. But he wasn't looking at it. Instead his gaze seemed glued to hers.
"You're different today, somehow."
Tenten wanted to say that, duh, she'd been attacked and was suffering from memory loss and a mysterious fever. Oh, and apparently she'd aged 7 years. But she didn't. Either because she knew there was more to the story than what everyone kept thinking or because she knew that wasn't what Neji was talking about at all. Something else was different between them.
His hand slid higher to her ribcage and he actually had to get up off the chair and lean over her in order to do it. The hand, still holding her steady, grew tighter; his thumb was grinding into her hip bone. His face looked like he really wanted to ask for something but didn't know how to get it said.
Then Sakura walked in.
"Yeah, definitely, no bruising on the left leg," Neji remarked. He had ceased to meet her eyes but he didn't pull back quickly. However, the quality of his touch changed. Now there was no connecting quality to it anymore. The strange pulling sensation it had been eliciting in Tenten's center was less strong, as though Neji was holding back somehow. He retracted his hands in a controlled fashion and Tenten understood.
If he had pulled them back quickly, it would have meant he'd been doing something he shouldn't have. And he didn't want to give that impression in front of Sakura. Or perhaps Tenten had just imagined the pull.
Indeed, Sakura seemed unfazed. She'd only thrown them a frown when she'd first come in but after seeing Neji's controlled manner and hearing his matter-of-fact words, she just asked:
"Don't you trust my judgment by now?"
"Tsunade put me in charge, personally. I just can't have anything slipping through the cracks on my watch. You understand, don't you?"
Sakura nodded, begrudgingly. It was clear they weren't the best of friends and she could have easily taken offense at his double checking her assessment but she also seemed to understand how duty-bound Neji felt and respected him for that.
"Tsunade sent this over to take orally every 30 - 45 minutes until the fever drops. And then you should be able to get some sleep. I also got good news, we don't think whatever you have is contagious, so you'll be able to leave Neji's place as soon as you're feeling better."
Sakura delivered the news smiling and then, after some kind of mental self-talk, she inserted herself right between her and Neji and ran a hand over Tenten's hair.
"I know we're not very close but I'm kind of honored that when you didn't know what was what, you still remembered me… and that you had so much trust in my abilities that you would ask for my medical assistance after such a huge attack even though I'm still just in training. I never knew you felt that way about my capabilities and it means a lot." She smiled in a way that made it clear she meant every word she'd said. "I'll make sure you get better."
Tenten nodded her thanks and touched the other woman's hand lightly.
"You're a great doctor," Tenten reassured her but Sakura just waved it off, bashfully.
"Hopefully, one day, but thanks again. I'll come check on you as soon as I can. Meanwhile," and here her whole demeanor changed into one a lot more brusquely. "Neji, you're on fever patrol. If it spikes again despite the meds, you come and get me immediately, 'kay?"
He nodded and Sakura waved as she left the room.