A/N: Working on chapter 5 at the moment. Shall update chapters day by day until I catch up with myself! Enjoy!

Self-realization wasn't a grand epiphany that Tenten experienced after discovering that he lived. She was more concerned with the execution of utilizing this realization to change herself. Should she worry about being confronted by him? Or should she do anything and everything in her power to cut off this thorn that's making her skin bleed?

Tenten hadn't the time to think about it after being given a new assignment from their new Hokage. Coupled with having to move whatever belonging of hers that was left of the carnage of the war into her new home gave no leeway to sparing time for herself. Her new place had moved several blocks from where she used to live. She was now farther from the Hyuuga compound and farther from Lee and their teacher coincidentally.

Tenten shattered her doorbell and rendered it mute before she left her apartment. It was by accident that she slammed her scroll directly on it when she started moving her items in. Her lack of improvisation plus reduced time to make her new home as homey as she could, caused her to temporarily hook the shell of the bell button back into place.

She smacked her lips and stared at the broken little piece of a thing. She was not impressed by its fragility. Tenten took a deep breath and sighed. She looked out to the sun surfacing high above her. The weather was becoming hot. The impending celebration would soon consume and swallow the village over. Still, there was not enough time to digest the calamity of the war. Her village wanted to paint the war off as beautifully as it could. And in order to do so, like many, Tenten must embark on a mission to have it done. She closed her door and set off to the front of the village gates. She had been tasked to man the assignment alone.

Neji only saw his comrades once and that was on the battlefield after reawakening from his partial death. Beyond that, they never appeared in his hospital room since. His uncle visited him plenty and so did his cousins.

However, at the end of the day when the red sunset glowed past his window and turned everything dark, Neji was left to recuperate in silence.

Time was abundant at these hours. His mind wouldn't rest and his memories wouldn't stop flashing before his eyes. Through the spectator's window on the hospital door, if anyone was watching, they might expect a shell of a ghost staring right back at them. Neji kept his eyes on it constantly. He wondered why his comrades hadn't come to see him. It was his second week lying in bed.

When he was discharged, his family accompanied him home. Still, his comrades were nowhere to be seen. A part of him wondered if his memory of seeing them after awakening from death was just an illusion. Neji wanted to ask where they had gone but he did not know who to ask. He had learned that his teacher was in intensive care and would continue being watched for the next few weeks. His cousin told him she would be leaving soon for an assignment. Soon, it would be just his uncle and little Hanabi. Neji walked through the door of his clan's newly built compound in silence. He wondered when his assignment would be.

A white week passed. There was nothing of importance for him to do. His uncle told him he needed to recuperate.

Their new Hokage hadn't called for him. Neji felt as if this was purgatory itself. He was a tool to be used. It was not as if he was a broken one. He was even more healthy than he was prior to the war. And yet, he never received a mission to partake.

The blue days passed with the routine settling in. In the morning, he'd meditate and lightly spar with his uncle or clan members. At noon, he'd eat. And for every minute after, he'd sit like a frog in a well by the veranda of his chambers and ponder the instances that had passed by.

It was the longest time that he'd gone not interacting with Lee, Tenten, and their teacher. Neji began to reminisce those days running laps from dawn to dusk with them. Somehow, he forgot how strong Lee's punches and kicks were. He couldn't hear his teacher's hearty laugh anymore.

However, his faded memories of those two green beasts worried him the least compared to Tenten. He couldn't remember how she looked when he cracked his tired eyes to find her amidst being brought back to life. He couldn't recall how she looked before the war when they spoke impromptu. But in the instance of that unplanned conversation, Neji knew she was angry. The words that filled her mouth were menacing. And though he couldn't recall her expression despite staring straight into her eyes on that day, Neji knew he recognized this tone. She was angry, yes, but he knew that underlying it all, she was perturbed because of him. No longer was her words half-baked and unprepared. Unlike all those times they brushed against this topic of his clan, she seemed to have memorized every word she wanted to say regarding it this time. Neji couldn't recall a sweat on her face, but he remembered every word that she said to him before the war.

Those words echo in his ears whenever it was a red evening. It was always when the sky was this color that her words rang loudly. It then piqued his mind that they conversed on this topic whilst the sun was setting down.

Neji hadn't seen Tenten in a while. He knew she was being assigned missions back to back. He couldn't make sense of why he wasn't on the roster of active shinobi. The anxiety at the apex of his heart was beginning to tremble through his limbs as the sun went down for the ninth time. Back then when Tenten uttered her opinion on his familial matters, it did not bother him whatsoever. But now, with her seemingly gone like the seasons and leaving him with the bitter taste of their friendship, Neji had allowed uneasiness to crowd his 'once' lucid thoughts. A deep shudder resonated through his core like the scrape of a bass violin at the lowest of its timbre.

Why was she right?

It was because she wasn't carrying the might of the Hyuuga's name. Neji's pride belonged to one of Konoha's oldest and, in a way, strongest clan. He too, was the clan's pride himself.

Somehow, in his fight to battle fate, he seemingly lost his way and gave in to destiny itself. As a bearer of the curse mark, there was nothing he could do under the scrutiny of the main branch. As long as this curse was marked on him, he'd remain bound to his duties. Neji knew long ago that he was powerless in fighting this form of fate. It was why he chose to die not by the hands of his clansmen, but by his own decision.

Yet somehow, his death, as short as it was, was unsatisfactory even to him. If he was unhappy with his own death upon thinking about its circumstances, Tenten would probably be fuming with enough steam to power the nation herself.

Upon dusk arriving, he brought himself to his feet. Neji rejected dinner and headed out of the Hyuuga compound. It was time to stop confining himself in his cage when the birdcage door was wide open.

Lee and Tenten weren't in the village and Neji did not want to travel far. He didn't want to step outside of the village gates and thus opted to pay a visit to his former teacher, now perhaps a retired squad leader.

The first thing the aging man did was give him a hearty chuckle. The man was bedridden. Neji sat beside his bed as they caught up to things, meandering around the ballpark of life and death.

"The world continued moving on. If we died during battle, we wouldn't live to see everyone flourish," his teacher spoke with a pint of sorrow in his throat.

Neji refused to understand his teacher's feelings. What would he know about losing the life of a student? "We could only hope," he said generically.

"That's right."

"But nothing has changed," Neji attuned. He turned to face the window bearing the night sky. "We could only hope that they'd flourish, but shinobi across the land have been thinned. Tools of war have been sent on missions without rest. We could only hope that they'd make use of their survival in the war, but we don't even know if they'd make it back home now. What use is it to live if we're to die the next?"

"Neji," Gai stared at his student's back. The boy with long hair had grown a whole lot whilst he gave his time to his favorite student. Despair and regret filled Gai's chest. "Life is precious. We all must live our lives to the fullest."

A shooting star whizzed past him and disappeared into the moon. Neji held breath in his lungs, "The current state of affairs would never allow that. Shinobi fought to survive today. We're not living, we're merely doing what we can to survive."

"Don't look at things bleakly, Neji. We've passed this obstacle once before. It sounds like you've reverted back to your old self."

"Many nights have gone by and I have thought about my fate," Neji's chest wrangled up. "I've come to realize that putting my faith in someone like Naruto, believing in his words was all just a setback. I see now that I was right all along. I can never change my fate just as Naruto couldn't. But even before that, I did nothing to alter my path and deluded myself into thinking I'm changing my clan. Truthfully, I haven't done a single thing. I could have died thinking I made the right choice to sacrifice myself. I should've died believing I changed my own fate-"

"You promised me never to look back on these things, Neji. You told me there will never be another day where you'd succumb to this nonsense."

"Nonsense or not, there is no way out of this curse mark, Gai-sensei. I've been sitting at a dead-end for this long and I still don't know what to do." Neji's breath mildly fogged the cold window. In it, he saw his own reflection staring back at him.

"In the end, all of our fate is the same. We all die regardless of what choices we make. You shouldn't be hellbent on the prominence of the end. That will get you nowhere, Neji."

"What do you mean?"

"Sometimes, fate isn't just about immovable death. You and I both know we'll perish at any time. You shouldn't keep your eyes focused on the endpoint. Choosing how we die means nothing because when we cease to live, we'll never experience the aftereffects of our importance. This isn't the way to make our choices. We can never justify our deaths with our last breaths. We will always regret every single part leading up to our demise." Gai paused, staring out to the same window but seeing only a blur. "Neji, the path you take towards death is more important. Even if you cannot escape your curse mark, you must find any means to make you believe you have. This is the path that keeps people living. They don't survive just to see the next day. They do what they can to live so that the next morning, they'll see people precious to them, people, who keep their will to live strong. It is this will that compels the living to fight despite knowing that one day there will be death." Gai's jaw tightens and he turns away from his pupil. "When you're dead, you'd never know what the living does next. When you fell in Lee's arms, he cried until the mountains heard him. Only the belief that your will of fire will live amongst us all kept him fighting for the future. Do not forfeit your will to live. As you said, there are more lives hanging upon Naruto. You cannot die yet. You carry other people's lives on your shoulders including mine."

Neji's eyes falter and his breath expelled shallowly and rapidly. His hands curled into fists until his knuckles resembled the color snow. "That may be so, but so far, it feels as if there's nothing on my shoulders with the exception of my family and you." He turned to his teacher and met his eyes. The aging man's hearty laugh was all but a bygone. "The two people I care about may be gone temporarily, but it feels as though I've vanished from their memories. I expected their lives to hang upon mine, but it seemed I was reaching far beyond my thoughts."

Gai snickered and grinned. "I know you three can't go a single day without the power of youth! But with Konoha recovering and undergoing construction, Lee and Tenten can't be here."

"Have they visited you?" Neji asks out of curiosity.

"Sparsely, whenever they return from their assignments. But mostly, Lee. He wanted to visit you many times but spent his able hours tending to me instead."

Should Neji ask about her at all? What was her excuse for not visiting him?

"And Tenten, well. I rarely see her. My beautiful blooming flower's exceptional skills are in high demand. It looks like we won't be seeing her anytime soon."

It was her sealing capabilities that they needed. Neji came to learn from his teacher that she visited him once earlier last month. His teacher told him where they all now resided. He was told she complained about her backaches and bruised fingers. He was told she even showed their teacher her bandaged fingers from biting them in order to summon her needed arsenals. From what he was told, it looked like Tenten hadn't changed. Neji would like to think she didn't, but a large portion of him knew they no longer resembled the same people from before the war.

The night was not over. Neji walked the dirt road in his layered kimono in hopes of catching his comrades returning home. The chances were as slim as a toothpick but he made that excuse anyway. He did not want to return home yet.

Passing by Lee's new apartment, he tilted his head up to the friend's window. It was dark and there was not a single soul from within that he could feel. It was quiet, even the streets had gone grim. Neji did not linger for long. His feet chiseled the dirt and he continued walking.

Neji did not tell his teacher that his regression into his former ways of thinking was Tenten's doing. When it came to her and him, he found it best to conceal everything done and said between them despite it being so minimal. Neji walked a winding path to her new residence. He supposed he should outline the things he wanted to say to her too. That is, if he ever found the courage to admit his defeat and that she was correct.

Tenten was, in a way, a charm to him. Through their three or four years of friendship and comradery, he found solace in her.

In the beginning, there wasn't much she could offer but an ear. Out of Lee, their teacher, and Tenten, she understood him most. She almost always stood as his shadow, listening to his problems as the seasons came and went. The days would turn to nights and the shadows would grow. Still, she listened. She was the person he could trust his secrets to, although he never told her any secrets. Regardless if his decisions weren't the best, she'd reason for him against others.

Before he could admit finding comfort in a friend, she already became a part of his shadow, an extension of his invulnerability, his charm.

Tenten wasn't a strong person from the beginning. After all, she was just a petite woman with nimble fingers and a keen eye. She would never amount to anything of her greatest idol, Lady Tsunade. Strength wasn't her forte; Tenten suited strategies and tactics most. She complained too, perhaps overzealously at times to which Neji must crawl under and give in. But despite her flaws, she had become one of the closest people he'd let around himself. She was his consolation in secrecy.

Neji believed if Tenten wanted to speak about herself, she would and so he'd never ask. And now that she's absent from him with all the things he told her about himself, it was as if she had taken a part of him along with her disappearance.

At the base of Tenten's apartment, Neji found a bright white fluorescent light bleed through the blinds of her window. His heart solidified and his thoughts cemented. He wanted to speak with her if she was available. One foot after the other, he climbed the stairs.

Tenten always had a superstition that her good luck would increase if she lived in any building higher than a story tall. Climbing the stairs, Neji wondered why she chose this tenement. There were plenty of others that fit her requirements. Her last residence placed her right above the first floor. This time, Neji walked four flights of stairs until he reached her apartment. She had doubled her distance from the ground, residing at the top of this structure. He could only deduce that she wanted more luck.

Neji stared at the white fluorescent light escaping the curtain of her window. His heart was still, beating slowly. His index finger poked from his long-sleeve and reached for the doorbell. He wanted to resolve their misunderstandings. She was his one-sided charm after all. He couldn't afford to lose a precious friend.

There was no sound echoing from the other side of the door. The doorbell was in his palm; it had easily fallen. The phantom sound of a kunai hitting a target board shaken him. It brought him back to when they were fifteen:

On the training field, she was target practicing. Lee and Tenten finally agreed to share their addresses in the case that the bird informant couldn't reach one of them. The 'thunk' of the kunai never stopped until it hit the bullseye above Neji's head. It was only then that her smile formed on her lips and she glanced down to meet his eyes before they strayed to Lee's.

"Pray thee spare my door your knuckles," she eyed the short-haired man seriously.

"Huh?" Lee was taken aback. "Why are you speaking like that?"

She waved her last kunai toward the genius, "Neji would get it. You speak just like that, don't you?"

"I do not."

She then chuckled, "I said, knock on my door over my dead body! Don't you guys know about that superstition?"

"What superstition?" Lee asked.

Neji brushed her off as a lunatic back then for her explanation. But now, it was instilling insurmountable fear in his body.

"They said knocking someone's front door is akin to knocking a coffin. You see, when we die, a coffin is our final resting place! Knocking the door disturbs the peace in the home. If my doorbell ever breaks, which will never happen, I'd rather you shout my name than knock!"

Could it be an omen? Neji stared at the broken piece in his palm. He scavenged the recesses of his mind for any recounting of an omen tied to this doorbell, albeit, her trivial doorbell. Nothing came to mind. Yet still, Neji wondered if she was at all safe or even alive.

"Over my dead body!"

"Tenten," his frozen lips parted slightly just to expel the slightest breath of her name. My shadow. Neji's eyes widened and he gripped the piece tightly.

"I'd rather you shout my name"

"Tenten," he said sternly. The nuances of his intonation were filled with presence and command. He would not leave without an answer. Urgently, he called to her again, "Tenten!"

"Neji?"

Neji spun his head around to the corner of the building where he came from. Arriving at the stairs was Tenten. His friend was not in her home? With her presented before him, he cowardly hid the doorbell piece with the length of his long sleeve, swallowing his fist whole. He looked at her like a frightened cat.

"What are you doing here?"