Perfect Blindness
These Silences Story 3
- the 2nd story of a series I'm planning involving a singular theme, each featuring various pairings I happen to favor. I don't own Naruto, but I have shamelessly borrowed Kishimoto Masashi's characters, and at times liberally added some of my own little concoctions.
- this story contains implied yaoi, and if you are uncomfortable with this, please do us both a favor and stay away. I shall also be alluding to a lot of other works, which are duly credited at the end of this long one-shot. This is set ideally after the series is over, to which I would daresay is, for now, an AU, precisely because it hasn't ended yet. ; And I'm making my own conclusions, literally, but that's not exactly the point.
- set several years after the current things that are going on. Neji x Sasuke. SPOILERS, SPOILERS, SPOILERS, please take heed, especially if you don't read, or are not up-to-date with the manga. If it doesn't matter, yey for you. :)
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Whenever I'm alone with you
You make me feel like I'm free again
. - from "Lovesong" by The Cure
When people saw them together, people talked. It was something inevitable, really, given that they both belonged to the village's foremost families. That alone was cause for them to be put in some sort of pedestal, for them to bear the weight of the village's gaze; a collective, invisible nuisance that made the hair on Sasuke's neck prickle, and made Neji frown deeply in mild agitation. It was like a vexing, dark little imp that waited for them in every corner, that slunk down with them as they made their way down the avenue. It followed them when they made their way to the Hyuuga estates, and it followed them shamelessly up to the hill where the Uchiha ruins still stood.
It was a crow of praise that came from the acknowledging look of their teachers, whenever Gai, or Kakashi for that matter, encountered them in the street. The jounin at the mission desks and at the hospital had prying, inquisitive looks that betrayed the formality of their gestures and words. Their "teammates" (it was a standing uncertainty where both of them stood of course; neither one really took on missions with their cell as often as they should, and it was common for the administrative desks to receive requests slips from one, or the other, asking to be paired up for a particular mission) had gazes that perhaps said the most to them.
Tenten's held a pensive, suspicious question which Neji refused to answer. She had been asking him that for quite some time now, ever since she saw a most suspicious bruise that peeked just above Sasuke's typical bucket-neckline. From time to time, when she angled her head to one side and allowed her gaze to slide evenly towards the white-eyed jounin's direction, she threw her accusations like she threw her weapons: relentlessly, quietly, precisely.
Lee was thankfully not as susceptible as Tenten was to these things, but he did, in a most childish way, detest how Sasuke had come to occupy his supposed status of rival and companion. He didn't quite like how Sasuke had become Neji's finest sparring partner—Neji being, for Lee, a mark to be surpassed—because in Lee's clear-cut and simple logic, that meant that Neji would not take sparring, with anybody other than Sasuke, as anything close to serious. That increased the feeling of being played with for Lee, and nobody else perhaps saw how his large eyes narrowed a little in envy when he watched the two young men mock-fight behind the training grove.
Sakura didn't understand. Her green eyes would widen slightly in a silent barrage of incomprehension, always attempting to lock into Sasuke's avoidant ones when they met at the hospital for the bi-monthly checkup. She didn't understand why Sasuke allowed Neji to be in a place that she had, for the most part of her life, longed to be in—there, only a miniscule space away, a distance that teased and a distance that was telling of how one regarded the other.
Sasuke-kun, why is Neji-kun always with you eve when you don't need a guard any longer? Or she would smile and invite them both to take a seat in the reception area, while quietly haranguing Sasuke, Why is it that you seem happier today, Sasuke-kun? And why won't you let me help you? For this reason, Sasuke hated the bi-monthly checkups. He hated how distraught Sakura would seem at worst, and how he had to withdraw from eye contact, because he knew she would understand the moment she read into his look.
This was an irony that Sasuke disliked the most.
Nobody asked them outright though, even if, underneath the underneath, it was quite a clamour. Nobody asked because, Neji suspected, nobody wanted to know, even if their intentions clearly projected from their stares. Words uttered were just as amorphous and just as final, anyway. And there was something distinctly humanizing about hurling yourself and your soul out, out through to a single glance, and knowing that it would be met halfway by someone else's.
The Byakugan allowed Neji ingress into spaces that people normally kept to themselves: the intricate workings of the human body, the telltale space between heartbeats, the scrutiny of actions and idiosyncracies that probably said most about a person. It all felt like intrusion to Neji, and he often caught the guarded expressions of people in reaction to his white eyes. As if to tell him, You can't see into me, Hyuuga. You and your ilk have eyes that don't understand what you're seeing.
When he looked at Sasuke however, it was never an issue of trespassing. He had by now memorized the restless chakra that coursed through the Uchiha's veins, naturally unbridled but kept in check by a discipline that could only be self-imposed. Neji often thought, in the strangest hours in the morning, that if the paleness in his eyes regressed to blindness rather than omniscient vision, he would still be able to trace, like the intricate patterns of calligraphy, the little highways and byways that drew Sasuke's blood to the different parts of his body. He thought these things when he would awaken first, and see a dark head slumbering not too far away from his. He thought these things in silence, always aware of the manji that throbbed lightly on his forehead.
Attaining the Mangetsu Sharingan opened, as it were, a completely different sort of understanding in Sasuke. It allowed him to uncover his delusion layer-for-layer, in the remarkable way that the Sharingan had the ability to uncover genjutsu. It allowed him to see how deeply entrenched he was in his own misleading search for strength. He had gotten quite adept at interpreting the thin film of cordiality that many of those he came into contact with erected in his presence. Beneath the formal greetings and the respectful nods, they still saw him as the village traitor, and always refused to meet his eyes—perhaps afraid that he would do to them as he did to his brother, and as his brother did to his clan.
When Neji looked at him however, he felt relieved at not having to explain anything. Neji knew these things; and although Sasuke never asked him outright, he understood that the Hyuuga perhaps underwent a similar moment of clarity once, long ago. When Neji looked at him, and when he looked right back, the Sharingan turned not because it needed to see through anything—they turned because they had a new "special condition" for which to turn. When he looked at Neji, he didn't have to deal with the din of the underneath; when he looked at Neji, it was a blissfully quiet gaze that returned his own, that never promised anything, but denied nothing.
This was one irony that both accepted. Neji was the only one who held his gaze even when he would, as the symptoms of the now-faded curse seal would have it, convulse in maddened throes during the harvest moon. Neji was the only one who cleared his reddened vision even as he was being subjected to the restraining jabs of the Hakke.
Naruto understood Sasuke's need for "silence", which was why Naruto always turned away. There was sadness in the glance, one that dissolved into a resignation (acceptance?) when they tore themselves away. Sasuke knew Naruto had his own questions. There was no need to decode Naruto, as it were; the Jinchuuriki had no Byakugan to look into the comfortable tensions that settled between the two foremost doujutsu users he knew, but he saw it, in the blind way that those with a big heart did.
They both weren't without their innermost thoughts about each other, however, and these were often triggered by the incidents of their past that would not quite go away. On the nights when deeper urges moved them, Sasuke would sometimes suffer a relapse of the incident that had happened almost a decade hence. He would feel hands unblocking passages that shot pleasant electricity up his spine, but there would be fear and hate mounting in his countenance, especially when he beheld a pursed-lipped Neji hovering over him.
On those nights Neji would hold Sasuke down, blocking the view completely, and his hair would hang down—long, long hair—to curtain and cut them off from the rest of the world. The Byakugan would glow, small moons in their own right, and it was what reflected there that gave the overall effect a chilling familiarity to Sasuke: his very own Sharingan (now spinning wildly, frantically) mirrored onto the smooth pallor of the Byakugan, making it seem as if Neji possessed the red-eyed trait; the long, long shadows would cast phantom lines across Neji's face, and Sasuke always sucked his breath in and grit his teeth.
Once, Neji thought he heard "Nii-san" escape in a hiss, before he had to apply gentle pressure on Sasuke's nape, right where the curse seal used to burn, a dark and painful mark. He avoided Sasuke for almost an entire week since, very much disquieted, before the latter demanded, with a pointed glare, that they sort it out.
On nights when there was no moon, Neji waited for the compound to quiet down before visiting the unmarked grave where his father's ashes were buried. Sasuke used to watch, from the room, and something sad and ugly would build itself up in his chest until one day, he jumped down from the eaves and quietly took his place beside a rather surprised Neji, as the latter walked the small distance to the courtyard.
Together they stood over Hizashi's buried remains, as the evening crickets chattered and the night patrol changed watch. Sasuke had leapt down from the eaves on those nights since then, and Neji came to expect his presence.
They never really talked about it, because there was nothing to talk about. They had, in their own way, lived out each other's lives: Sasuke very much reminded Neji of Hanabi, whose hot blood ran the course that competition and pressure imposed on her, and who occasionally asked her older cousin—always respectfully of course, even if she knew the secret to stretch the manji's painful claws across a Branch Member's vision—to train her with Taijutsu. Sasuke was a flawed Hanabi; and it was because of him that Neji always consented to the younger kunoichi's requests.
To Sasuke, Neji was eerily like the one other person he had fashioned his life around. When he watched Neji train with Hanabi, there would always, always be that veiled, expressionless look that held a restrained longing and a guarded bitterness. When he stood beside Neji in front of his father's unmarked resting place, he thought he could feel the faintest tremors of a hatred emanating from Neji, that virtually burst out of his brother—a hatred for a family he was bound to serve, and a genius too objectified to be given proper acknowledgment.
When he finished off Uchiha Itachi in the deciding battle not too long hence, Sasuke had shattered his center. Much as he hated to admit it, he had always lived his life around what his older brother thought and did. Neji was not a replacement, but a kind of healing point, a hinge upon which he had begun to re-build his existence. Unlike Itachi, Neji didn't look at him with a guardedness that unarmed. Unlike Itachi, Neji covered up the mark of his bitterness—the Caged Bird mark that looked deceptively like a long slash across the manji, from a distance.
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It was a cool summer morning that found them both languidly fixing their shinobi utility kits. They had a mission that afternoon, a very brief and intense A-class that had to be undertaken in the utmost silence and in the cover of pure darkness. The village had several espionage experts in the field (Yamanaka Ino had lately grown in prominence among her peers), but to assign a group of jacks in lieu of a pair of aces was illogical and inefficient.
It made perfect sense to the Godaime, who secretly believed that the young men worked inexplicably well with each other, given their initially very rocky beginnings. She had assigned Sasuke (then recovering from the agonizing removal of Orochimaru's curse seal, a hazardous figure) to the protection and the monitoring of the Hyuuga house, her gut gambling on the very unlikely pair.
Her intuition, as always, was astoundingly accurate on all things except the gambling board.
They were a curious match, and from behind, a lot like inert go pieces: Sasuke, his ensemble mostly black, the crest of his dead clan still stubbornly stark on his back, his hair springing to a tousled, spiky hedge as he fastened the forehead protector; Neji, mostly in white, carefully winding the bandages around his arm, aligning them to the vertical flow of his blood. He had not tied back his hair, and a lock of it slipped from where he tucked it behind his ear.
Hanabi rounded the garden, and on quiet feet, walked toward where her cousin and his partner sat on the elevated floor, and seated herself some distance beside him in a quiet gesture of permission. She swung her feet slightly and gently let her hand stray to her kunai holster; she was asking him to help her "review" for an advanced kunai-handling practical exam.
Neji hesitated, before continuing to bind his arm, at a slower pace. Beside him, Sasuke risked a short glance, which was not lost on his companion. Hanabi obviously didn't know that they were, albeit languidly, preparing for a mission; A-ranks were very confidential after all, known only among jounin-level ninja, or higher.
How strange, it seemed, this destiny was. She was ironic, and she played a nasty hand. Almost a decade ago, Sasuke remembered, he had approached his brother too, clamouring to be shuriken-trained, even while the other was carefully fastening his sandals at the threshold of their house, also preparing for a mission.
They both "heard" the plea in the child's gaze: I want to be like you, and one day I shall become perhaps better than you. For now, I wish for you to train me. Hanabi sat rigidly, the strict training of the house she belonged to apparent in every little movement of her hand, of her eyes. She waited.
"Only for a short while," Neji's voice broke the silence, and brought Sasuke back to the present. Neji didn't even turn his head towards Hanabi's direction; he continued to wind the white cloth over the upper length of his arm, taking care to make the layers slightly overlap one another.
But that was enough for the fiery little Hyuuga. Eyes widening in a barely suppressed expression of joy, she merely nodded in the perfect impression of a formal request and walked back around to where she had come from. Her proud lift of the chin was very much there, but so was the apparent admiration that she held for her cousin; despite the things she had heard about him from the Elders and from her father, she wanted very much to become like her Neji-niisan.
Neji followed her movement through the walls of the house, seeing her perch herself in position on the training ground. He deliberately finished his bandaging, and pulled back his hair, before standing and picking up three kunai to train with.
"The…mission."
There was a very light tug on his sleeve, but it was enough to arrest Neji completely. It was an excuse, but a lame one, they both knew; underneath the underneath, it clearly said, wait.
Sasuke didn't know what made him do it. Perhaps it was the sight of someone's back walking away from him that reminded him of some long-ago memory that shamelessly returned. It was also a bright summer morning, back then, and he too had a bit of time in his hands.
But Neji was Neji. And he knew why Sasuke had pulled him back, in a limp but measured grip—knew and understood more completely than Sasuke cared to admit for himself. What had happened, happened, and shaped what they had become now. And the "now" that they shared was comfortable, was quiet, and was all they thought they never wanted. A little reminder of the past was small price; they allowed each other their moments of uncertainty.
"I said only for a short while," Neji repeated, allowing a bit of amusement to creep into his tone. A smile hovered about the edge of his mouth when he was met with a slightly bratty little glare for his remark. Ah, that was one trait the Uchiha were also known for—stubbornness and impatience. So he brought two fingers up and gently poked Sasuke on the forehead—right where the manji would be if the latter had been a Hyuuga, and right where the Konoha crest on his forehead protector would have been scratched across—pushing him away and loosening the grip on his sleeve.
Sasuke watched as Neji rounded he garden, to meet with his little cousin. He watched, but he dared not smile (although it was strangely difficult not to), the irony of the moment dissipating to a strange and amorphous joy the kind of which he had forgotten how to bear for quite some time now.
It exhilarated him. It frightened him, a little. A part of him still thought that he deserved no such joy. The fingers on his forehead had not been accidental, and because Neji was Neji, he had of course touched a nerve that sent a strange shiver down Sasuke's spine and that, despite his best efforts to seat himself properly, made itself known every other second or so.
"Damned Hyuuga," he snarled weakly under his breath, letting the smile, that had (much like himself) squirmed under his serious mien escape soundlessly in the upward curve of his mouth.