Oooooooo, another chappie...review onegai! (laughs)

Chapter 12: Things Gone Wrong

Semaruku Apartment Complex

It MUST have been something in the food he'd eaten earlier. The room did a corkscrew in front of his eyes and he lurched to the side, hanging on to the wall for dear life. Neji fluttered his eyelashes in a feeble attempt to clear his muddled head, but to no avail; the room flipped upside-down and seemed to mock him with an air of derision. He slid further down the wall and closed his eyes, sending black and pink spots dancing across his vision. Whatever he'd eaten, by the gods it was destroying him from the inside out.

Fingers scrabbled and skittered across the coffee table, found a small, silver spoon, and closed around the utensil. With a greatly labored effort, Neji stabilized his mental sanity just enough to get to the bathroom, though something had apparently gone severely wrong with his balance. He leaned over to the toilet, managed to shove the spoon down his throat, and gave it a mighty jerk, which only served to churn the contents of his stomach, leaving him weak and sucking in huge gulps of air. He retched, hawked, and spat, but the food stayed stubbornly into his stomach, leaving him feeling queasier than ever. Neji slid limply off of the rim of the bowl, leaning heavily on his elbows on the smooth, cool linoleum of the bathroom floor.

Three grenades exploded with large, successive bangs at his feet and he jerked backwards, backpedaling on his wrists.

It suddenly occurred to him that the bombs might have been someone knocking on the front door. Cursing himself and his distorted mind for mistaking such a sound for something so ludicrous, Neji crawled to the bathroom door, turned it, and staggered out of the bathroom like some sort of maladjusted drunk. The room did the tango in front of his purple-spotted vision as he wobbled to the front door. Halfway across the room, the Hyuuga tilted and fell, just managing to snag the doorknob with the tips of his fingers. He pulled and the door gave way, swinging open, which, unfortunately, took him with it in the process.

Naruto's face swam in and out of his erratically blurring vision. The blonde looked murderous, or at least he seemed that way; Neji couldn't tell, since there were suddenly four Narutos dancing spasmodically in front of his sporadically blinking vision. He tried to speak, but what came out of his mouth was nothing more than a slurred gargle.

"Na…Naruto….what are…you doing…here?" The words had barely made it out of his mouth when a distant roaring began in his ears. Dimly he heard Naruto's voice cry his name, but he didn't think he could trust himself; the blonde's voice sounded more like a scratched disk than anything else.

The cacophony in his ears decided to peak in its volume, which sent him spinning off the cliff into the yawning darkness below.

Naruto watched in horror as Neji collapsed on the floor, his limbs sprawled haphazardly over the cream-colored carpet. He uttered a sort of muted, choked cry, and in less than a second the blonde was by his side, kneeling gently as he tended to the Hyuuga. What had taken place so many times before now reversed itself, and suddenly Naruto was the one cradling Neji's flaccid form. Once clear, azure eyes were now clouded over with storm clouds and fury.

"Neji…Neji, what has she done to you…."

He bent and tenderly brushed his mouth across Neji's forehead, gently nuzzling the smooth, glossy wisps of black that floated across the Hyuuga's brow.

The door burst open with a thunderous bang, and a tall man stood in the doorway, eyes frantic with alarm.

"Neji! Neji, are you—"

Pearl eyes lit on Naruto's kneeling form, then widened in shock. Hizashi's opalescent orbs traveled with maddening slowness over Neji's comatose form, sprawled so lifelessly in Naruto's arms. The older man gritted his teeth, eyes livid with fury.

"What have you done to him?" Naruto stood, Neji's body still enfolded in his arms. He spoke with a measuring, powerful calm that seemed to magnify the imposing aura that flowed about him in waves.

"This was not my doing. I just found him here on the floor." He turned and walked to the window with a slow, commanding stride.

"Now if you will excuse me, I have business to attend to." He murmured, then soared catlike out the window with a burst of brilliant scarlet. Hizashi blinked in amazement, his mouth slack with astonishment.

"He can control it…"

"He seems fine…I don't believe there's anything wrong with him…"

The doctor pushed his glasses up his nose and made a small tick on his chart, then ran a hand through his grayish-white hair.

"He'll need plenty of rest, since he's still quite weak; I think it's best to keep him in here for the time being." He said gravely. The man opposite him gave a short inclination of his head.

"Thank you, Kabuto-san." A small, graceful smile slid across the good doctor's face.

"You are most welcome, Hiashi-sama." He bowed, then quietly slid open the door open just enough to fit his lanky frame, leaking out of the room like water out of a cracked jug.

The pleasant look of formality abruptly slid off Hiashi's face and shattered like glass on the floor the very minute Kabuto's presence had disappeared. Hizashi's stern countenance portrayed severe agitation as he paced restlessly to and fro in front of Neji's bed, his hair rustling distractedly in front of his face. Curse it…he had no idea the drug Neji had ingested had done so much damage. Granted, it was a trifle potent, but Neji, being beyond perfection, should have withstood the side effects. He allowed himself to think about the numerous possibilities though…perhaps something the girl cooked caused a chemical change in the drug, or perhaps, Hiashi thought with a wry sense of unwonted humor, the girl's cooking was just plain ghastly.

There was a noise behind him, and Hiashi swept a piercing glance at the newcomer.

Tenten stood tall, meeting his gaze with a powerfully unwavering glare of her own. Without a trace of fear she walked up to the man, stopping two feet away from where he sat. The two exchanged stares, Tenten's dark, walnut eyes steadily handling Hiashi's white-frothed glower with a quiet, calm control. The tension seemed to escalate almost to the point where it hurt to breathe, but then the girl sank into a bow and the silence disappeared.

"I have done as you requested; however, I did not know the consequences would be so great." Her speech had gone from the flimsy, flippant average dialect to a complicated series of words. A ghost of a smile flickered across the other's face.

"Do not trouble yourself. The antidote will work in time." He said stiffly.

Tenten executed a short nod, then walked over to where Neji noiselessly slept. A hand reached out and hovered like a breeze over his forehead, then floated almost lazily downwards to stroke his smooth cheek. Tenten ran the pads of her fingertips slowly back and forth across Neji's left cheekbone, a sickening parody of a steel-saccharine smile slithering like a serpent across her face, contorting it to the point where she looked like a tigress lusting for the blood of her prey. Umber eyes glittered with an odd combination of spiteful malice and longing as she brushed fingers over his lips.

"When you are through with him…would it trouble you if you could give him to me?" Each word bore a thrumming chord of calm, fatal madness. Though never would he admit it, Hiashi felt a phantom feeling of foreboding.

"We shall see what condition he's in after I'm through with him."

How like Naruto. How so very like Naruto to dump half the ocean's share of frigid, icy water right smack on his face. Neji sputtered and gasped and nearly had a coronary as he felt the frosty liquid splash rudely onto his face. He sat up, wished he hadn't, suppressed a yelp of pain, and lay back down on the sopping wet pillow, a scowl pasted on his features. Naruto just laughed and set down the pitcher of water, neatly dodging the half-hearted blow Neji sent to his head. The Hyuuga exhaled a harsh breath of exasperation then turned to face the blonde with a chagrined, scandalized look on his countenance. Naruto faked a lovely, beautiful expression, which, ironically, only served to form a huge, comfortably uncomfortable knot in Neji's general abdominal cavity.

"You've been sleeping for three days now. It's high time you woke up." He said chidingly. Neji stifled a groan.

"You could have woken me up like any other normal person." To his faint surprise, Naruto actually laughed.

"I could have, yes. But then again, I could have done a lot of things in my life."

He kept on talking, but Neji suddenly lost interest, for something very weird was going on in his head. The room seemed to contract, and a blinding flash of white seared across his memory. The boy sitting on his bed….the boy…what was his name again?

Naruto, deliberately oblivious to his surroundings, kept on blithely chattering away until Neji uttered the four small words that nearly stopped his heart and sent him reeling into the yawning depths of hopelessness that cried for his blood.

"What is your name?"

It shocked him. Killed him. Flayed him alive, tacked his skin to a bed of staples. Hyuuga Neji, his best friend, his one and only confidant in the world who knew more about him than he did had just asked what his name was. He tried to shake off the massive feeling of foreboding, tried to assume it was all due to the fact that Neji had fainted dead away in the middle of his apartment, but then he remembered the cause of the fainting and nearly passed out himself right then and there on the bed. When he spoke, the voice that slid out of his mouth didn't sound like him at all. In fact, it didn't even sound human. He turned and faced Neji with sheer terror in his eyes.

"What. Did. You. Say?" Please oh please oh please oh PLEASE let it be just a common mistake…

But no. It was not to be.

Neji repeated his question.

Ironically, as he mouthed out a feeble "Uzumaki Naruto", the only coherent thing that ran through his head was that Lady Luck wasn't lusting after his ass anymore. In fact, the buxom blonde herself was now lusting after his blood. And it wouldn't feel good after she was through with him. It certainly would not feel an ounce like a walk in the park.

"Uzumaki Naruto….oh yes, Naruto! Can you believe it? I actually forgot your name for a second." Neji laughed lightly, smiling as if the error were highly amusing as he lay back among the sheets. A loud, roaring silence noisily resonated from Naruto's thin frame.

"Naruto? Are you okay?"

The blonde turned to face him, and in that very instance, he was hit by the full power of Naruto's sky-chiseled eyes. Those eyes were marked through and through with despair, anguish, and desolation, twin orbs that reflected the galaxies and the moons, stars, suns, and celestial bodies in all of their fiery, magnificent despondency.

"Neji." The word slipped out almost involuntarily out of Naruto's immobile lips, a wisp of sound that silently dissipated like a silver thread in the air.

"Naruto?" Neji's eyes were narrow, shot through with concern.

"I-I'm sorry, I have to go…" The blonde abruptly stood and fluidly slid out of the room, leaving the Hyuuga behind with a most perplexed expression on his face.

Naruto?