The sunlight stabbed at her eyes and the sharp granite of the rock tore into her scraped palms. Beads of sweat dripped through her hair and her muscles had long since become jelly. She inched her way forwards like a turtle crawling to the finish line.

The other two were in the same boat. Lee's white kimono-shirt was shredded at the shoulder and Neji's hair had come loose from his ponytail. Where her shirt had been soaked through with sweat, Lee looked like he had been running in a rainstorm. Only Neji seemed to have no pores in his body from which water could escape. Freak.

"TEAM GUY! FIGHT!" Guy-sensei yelled far above them, one hand tied behind his back, the other hand flashing a big thumbs-up at them.

Tenten sighed at the typical scene and then blinked as her mind registered what she had just witnessed.

Both of his hands. Neither of them holding on to anything.

Oh no.

The scream was terrifying, and the fact that Guy-sensei had escaped a grisly death by channeling chakra to his feet and sticking to the cliff face was galling.

"Can you believe that Guy-sensei?" Tenten grumbled, chugging from her canteen at the top of the cliff. "I mean, how could he? Scaring us like that?"

"But Tenten!" Lee piped up, adjusting his torn kimono-shirt. "You know what this means? Guy-sensei can climb a cliff with no hands! He's such an amazing ninja, the essence of youth!"

"Idiot, he almost fell and died," she snapped. "Didn't you hear him scream?"

"Guy-sensei!" Lee said. Guy looked up from his vantage point a little ways away, beaming down upon the deep-cut, verdant valley as though he had personally created the scene himself. "Were you ever scared that you would fall and die? Tenten said that was what your scream meant!"

"Now listen here, Lee!" Guy-sensei said in his half-normal voice, half-yelling voice.

Tenten averted her eyes. If she saw his "nice guy" pose again, she would get brain damage. "Making mistakes is all part of youth! So never be afraid of falling and dying!"

And there it was. The brain damage. Tenten tuned out the rest of the inane conversation and turned towards Neji. He still hadn't said anything. Big surprise.

In fact, in the three weeks since Team Guy's formation, she had been observing the amount of time he had spent in actively participating in any conversation that they all had, and had done some mental calculations. Her conclusions shocked her.

Hyuuga Neji, she had estimated, only contributed 4% of the dialogue in any given conversation. This dialogue consisted, in the main, of grunts, mumbles, and a handful of one-word responses such as "yes" and "no" and sometimes "okay." The rest of the time, like now, he preferred staring off into space, gazing at everything and nothing.

It wasn't good for him to be so isolated and cut-off from the rest of the team. Guy-sensei had almost died and he had shown no reaction.

"Neji?" she asked. He shifted his gaze from the blue horizon and on to Tenten.

"Yes?"

See? One-word responses, her mind muttered.

"Weren't...weren't you worried? About Guy-sensei falling and breaking his bones, I mean."

He paused, remaining as still as a cat fixated on its prey. It wasn't a verbal response, but it seemed that he was considering her question. That was...good, right?

"No," he finally said.

She blinked. "No?"

Neji's lips twitched in a rare fragment of a smile. "Guy-sensei's bones are so hard, he would break the rocks he fell on, not the other way around."

She blinked again, and then a laugh bubbled from her throat.

Wait, she thought. That wasn't a one-word response.

When she looked back at Neji, the fleeting smile was gone and his face had assumed its usual stoic look. He had gone back to staring off into space, and there was no hint at all that they had ever had a conversation.

But she knew better. And she had some mental calculations to adjust.

A/N: Written for Day 28: Hiking, set during the era before Lee got his green jumpsuit. Sometimes, I have a hard time believing that he ever wore anything else, ha ha.

Please review! :)