Neji had always known that Hinata loved Naruto. He'd certainly known long before Naruto did.
...Of course, most people knew most things long before Naruto did. But in this particular case, it had been... vexing.
He'd been one of the ANBU stationed in the council chambers when the council members took advantage of the Godaime Hokage's absence on a visit of state. With Tsunade gone, there was no one to object when they gathered all the female ninja of childbearing age and explained certain facts to them.
They hadn't technically violated the ban. They'd never said why the proclamation was in place. They simply announced that if any woman gave birth to a blonde-haired, blue-eyed child with whisker marks, the consequenses for the mother would be severe, involving imprisonment at the mildest; and no one on the council would speak for the safety of the child when the news reached the villagers.
All the women in the room were young enough to have seen how Naruto was treated. Some of them were old enough to approve. Hinata's father, standing in the arch of the council, avoided her eyes.
Hinata had come home shaking, and actually raged at her father. She was informed that while Uzumaki Naruto might not be a bad person, it was the rest of what he was that made any thought of his wedding or breeding with any woman unimaginable and unconscionable. That went twice over for the heiress of the Hyuuga clan. Who was apparently in need of reminding that only outstanding candidates with impeccable and well-documented genetic heritage and noteworthy bloodline traits were ever allowed to marry into the Hyuuga line, and the Hyuuga heir was never permitted to marry one of the out-of-bloodline candidates in any case.
When her engagement to Neji was proclaimed, she looked stunned. About as stunned as he'd felt, actually, though he would never have let the expression show.
Naruto, the gallant moron, had actually tried to comfort her when she burst into tears over a bowl of ramen for dinner. Sakura, whose once-trim figure had begun to round out with her pregnancy, chased the men off and took Hinata to her home and let her cry. Neji kept Naruto away from Sakura's house by sheer force. And he let Naruto's furious and bewildered ranting flow in one ear and out the other, not even bothering to respond. Naruto accused Neji of making her cry. Neji didn't even blink.
What was there to say? That Neji's arranged-marriage fiancee-and-cousin was crying into her ramen because she loved Naruto instead, except for the fact that they'd both have to become missing-nin to love each other, Naruto as a missing nin would be hunted down and killed like an animal gone rabid, and any children would likely be killed at birth?
In a way, "you made her cry, you bastard" was an accurate enough shorthand for the rest of the explanation. And there was nothing Neji could do about any of it, so he let the accusation stand. He'd made her cry because he couldn't find a way to keep her from crying; he supposed he deserved what he got.
It had been expected for the best man and maid of honor to be Hyuuga. In the only gesture of rebellion he was allowed, Neji named Lee his best man; emboldened by the gesture, Hinata named Sakura as her maid of honor, since Lee would be there anyway. And once the two of them were invited, particularly given Lee's (ahem) vocal and effusive nature, then of course Gai was invited, and once Gai was invited, half of Konoha was invited. So rather than being a polite and restrained and matter-of-course Hyuuga ceremony to be held simply to make an arrangement official, suddenly there was an actual wedding being planned. To be more precise, there was an after-wedding celebration being planned.
Sakura was enormous with her child by the wedding, due at any moment; in fact, she went into labor the day afterwards, so conveniently timed that Neji suspected her medical training of having a hand in the fact that the child's birth waited precisely that long. At the wedding itself, Lee was agonizingly torn between Duty As Best Man and Duty To Heavily Pregnant Wife. By the time the reception started, an amused-and-exasperated Sakura ended up slipping a tranquilizer out of her medical kit and into the cup Lee used to make the toast. She spent the evening sitting with her feet propped up in Naruto's lap and babysitting her loopily poetry-spouting husband whose knees somehow didn't quite work the way they were expected to.
Someone had tried to order Naruto away from Sakura, under the theory that exposure to the demonic influence the young man radiated had been responsible for the last Uchiha's madness and betrayal, and that Sakura shouldn't expose her unborn child to such unwholesome influences.
It took weeks of work for the Hyuuga gardeners to repair the idiot-shaped hole in the gardens.
Neji had somehow prevented himself from observing aloud that neither Orochimaru nor Uchiha Itachi had had any particular exposure to Naruto before they'd gone power-mad and left a swathe of destruction in their wakes. Wedding clothes were expensive to repair, after all.
Happily, Sakura had no inhibitions about making those points and more. After driving the imbecile at least twelve feet straight into the ground, she even managed a nearly-convincing little giggle, with one still-slender hand curved to the mound of her heavily distended belly: "Silly me, it looks like I got a little carried away. It must be all these hormones! Pregnancy is such a trying time for a woman. Speaking of which -- Naruto-chan, would you possibly be so kind as to fetch me some more pickles?"
"Naruto-chan? NARUTO-CHAN?" the blonde protested, having completely forgotten how he'd been meaning to try to sneak away from Sakura to prevent her facing any more harassment for his sake.
Sakura flexed her fist significantly and said, "Hormones, Naruto-chan. Lots and lots and lots of hormones."
…And then she added another delicate-flower giggle for effect. It mostly served the purpose of making Neji's blood run cold, and upon sober reflection raised his level of respect for Lee a few notches for having survived nine months of that. The likely strength of their coming child was, frankly, terrifying to consider.
Looking down at the faintly smoking moron-chasm in the Hyuuga garden, Naruto had gulped back the rest of what he was meaning to say and brought over an entire plate full of pickles. And Sakura kept him so busy Lee-sitting that he forgot he was going to try to sneak away.
She hadn't necessarily done the young man any favors. She knew he adored children, because in a lot of ways he was still a child who'd never fully grown up; and so she brought the baby whenever she came to visit the academy. Iruka-sensei was always delighted to greet her child, and as Iruka's teaching assistant, Naruto had an excuse to keep the baby happily squealing and bouncing on a knee while their former teacher taught the current class their basics. But Naruto was serving as Iruka's teaching assistant because the council was no longer allowing him to leave the village on missions since Gaara had escaped the Sand's supervision a few months back, and so there was no one else who'd let him work for them. Kakashi would have, of course, but Kakashi's assignments were almost always outside the village; Yamanaka Ino would have let Naruto work in her flower shop, for the sake of her friendship with Sakura, but the thought of Naruto trying to make flower arrangements and sell them was about as appalling as the thought of Hinata-sama trying to take up work as a lumberjack. So the young man faced a choice between Iruka's assistantship and "missions" that were entirely within the village walls, which usually meant menial chores fit only for slow and backwards academy students.
It was, to be blunt, a ridiculous waste of the young man's talents. But Neji had more than enough experience with stupid, petty, political short-sightedness to know that it was futile even to begin the fight.
And then the academy children's parents protested that Iruka was exposing their children to the demon.
Iruka would have kept him anyway; Iruka was stubborn like that. But Naruto kept finding excuses not to come to class, with that stupid silly grin of his -- and he had years of listening to Kakashi's excuses; it would take quite a while for him to run out of bad lies, since he'd been taught by the master himself. So Iruka gave Naruto the students' papers to grade, and paid him more than he could technically afford for the help. But Iruka's teaching salary simply couldn't stretch to cover his apartment, Naruto's apartment, his food, Naruto's food, two separate sets of clothing and necessities and life.
When Iruka was injured taking a B-rank mission during a school holiday because he needed the pay, Naruto drove a fist straight through the wall of the hospital. He proved that he'd been listening to Iruka's howls of outrage and incendiary lectures during their Academy years, because he had the intonation and the fuming outrage down perfectly... aside from when his voice cracked with the tears he was refusing to let himself shed.
Neji heard him because everyone who was within a block of the hospital likely heard him, and he was at the hospital because Hinata was having her first prenatal examinations. They were more cautious with Hyuuga pregnancies than many others; the genetic testing began early, to try to catch any defects of inbreeding that could be corrected within the womb, or to tell whether the child might be too malformed to be carried to term. But when he 'saw' the ANBU starting to swarm Iruka's newly-reventilated room from three floors away, Neji sighed and patted Hinata's hand a little awkwardly and said, "Will you excuse me for a few minutes?"
She'd 'seen' the same thing; she nodded, biting her lower lip hard.
He never was sure how he'd managed to talk them all out of bloodshed. Politics had never been his strong point, to put it mildly. Diplomacy came about as naturally to him as swimming to a concrete duck. But the simple fact of the matter was that he alone of all the shinobi in the room could actually say with confidence that Naruto's seal had not broken and the demon's chakra was not at all in evidence -- no, Naruto's fist had gone through the wall purely from his own frustration and helplessness at the fact that the person he adored most in the world had nearly gotten killed trying to earn enough to feed and house them both since Naruto himself was being placed under virtual house arrest. But there was no expecting them to understand that, so a look at Naruto's chakra signature with the Byakugan served in the place of common sense and compassion.
The seed of the idea planted itself then. By the time he'd chased off the ANBU, managed to extricate himself from Naruto and Iruka without having to reply to the awkward things like gratitude and admiration that they were trying to present to him against his will, and found his way back through the maze of the hospital -- by that time, the seed had already sprouted, and was unfurling leaves in his mind. Hinata noticed that he was quieter than was usual on the walk home -- he really had to hand it to her perception some times; most people didn't know he could be quieter than was usual for him -- and she twined her fingers through his with an odd combination of shyness and boldness.
There was no rational reason for his body to respond with a flush of warmth as though the outdoor temperature had raised by fifteen to twenty degrees, or for his chest to feel tight, or for something to dance in his stomach like butterflies. There was no reason for her understanding and support to make such a difference to him. He was the strong one. She was the weak one. She was the one who needed to be touched and supported and comforted. He didn't. That was how the world worked. So, with that resolved, he held her hand quietly as they walked back to the Hyuuga compound, and told himself it was for her sake.