Series: Naruto
Disclaimer: Naruto and its characters do not belong to me.
Notes: Just a drabble.
He is short range, she is long, and she still isn't quite sure how to deal with his numbing, open palm blows.
Neji completes his spin, arms akimbo, dirt scattered in a ring around his feet. The early spring breeze sifts through his clothes and finds the thin tears in the fabric, clots the lancets of blood welling up on his arms and legs. How can one deflect something so intangible? This has...never happened before.
Opposite him, she is just as surprised; it is plain enough to see. Her fan rests in an unassuming position on the ground, formerly tensed arms lax, her lips just barely parted. Her eyes, though, those are what betray her the most. For one trained to use the most minute details to analyze an enemy, he cannot ignore the bright blue, widened past their usual sun-in-eyes-slant.
He tells her as much, that she weakens her offensive with such an obvious display. Never show the whites of your eye to the enemy, he explains to her, especially not when you may have an advantage. She takes the opportunity to point out that his eyes are always white. She is right, of course, but that isn't the point.
I have never seen such a defense before, she says, wondering why she hadn't paid attention to his match at the chuunin exam. All she remembers is Uzumaki triumphant, a young man in a khaki jacket born out on a stretcher. The rest are details she often tries to forget.
Well, no one had ever cut through Kaiten either. And they stare each other down, chests heaving.
Later, she would trace the stylized lines of his seal, hesitating on the green embossed manji. He stands rooted, once more shocked by the intimacy inherent in her callused touch.
You mark my shame, he murmurs, gently pulling away her wrist, turning his head enough that his lips almost brush over her radial artery.
You will escape it. She sounds so determined; he wishes he could wrench free her certainty and press it to his chest like a fledgling bird.
He almost starts to believe in it.
Later, when Neji forces Hiashi into a stalemate, when neither can spin anymore and their chakra is exhausted, the wings beat against his breast. When he stalks down the halls late at night, uncaring as to whom he wakes and when, he is not chastized and a song tears free. Neji's strength surpasses the Main House; they have their juin and their jutsu, but he wonders if he could kill them before they begin molding chakra.
Perhaps he will see the eighth bird.
Neji feels he owes her some sort of thank you, a show of gratitude for that which has pulled him from iron bars toward the vast light of something maybe-better. And she's waiting near the tree where they first met on the hill, waiting without her fan, without her hitai-ate, and there is something like pride—for someone else, finally—that soars. She is magnificent, a phoenix rising from the sands. She is no delicate flower half buried in the desert.
Then something bitter unfolds and blooms beneath his ribs, suffocating, when she tips her head, offers a half lidded smile. And Nara mirrors it after slinking through the trees, sinking silently into her embrace.
