A/N: Hum. Chapter 2. Onward we go :D

Disclaimer: If I owned it, believe you me, I wouldn't be writing fanfiction for it. And the whole thing would probably be called Neji or Tenten instead ;)

Vanishing Act

Chapter II

Gare de Lyon

(nox)

Life is cruel and beautiful and so terribly fleeting that sometimes he wants to tear out his hair in grief, once it sets in. For a week they float in a sort of coma, blanketed by shock, and their missions are put on hold. He goes to the training ground to try and do something, unable to stand the sympathy everyone sends his way, even worse than when his dreams were destroyed, and runs around the village, eyes blind to the sun rising and setting, counting in his head. Sometimes they come too, run with him, further, and sometimes they beg him to stop, but Neji and Tenten don't matter at the moment, and the chunin guarding the walls don't matter at the moment and the village doesn't matter at the moment and all that matters is that he keeps running, because if he does, then he can fix this.

Neji finds her watching him, apart from the crowd of spectators, and when she looks up at him, he catches up to Lee.

"Lee…please."

The lone green beast slows down, turning to him, eyes wild and wide and despairing, and it hurts to look at him. He is used to Tenten being this way, but seeing it in Lee cuts him in a way he never thought it could.

"I never did finish my laps, did you know?" he says, almost conversationally. "Always had to shift to another task, but I figured it out this time, Neji. I figured it out. Do you know how?"

And then they're around the village again, and Tenten is still sitting there, curled up, arms bare despite the bite of the autumning air, and then they curve around the walls again and she is gone.

"It's like this: I have to keep running, Neji. I set limits, bounded by time, and that's why I never ever finished, and this time I'm going to keep going Neji, I'm just going to keep going until I get there, till I've done this a million times."

And Neji falters and Lee turns, jogging on the spot. "C'mon Neji! I'm nearly at six thousand!" and Neji grabs his hand, and Lee begins to run again. "Please Lee, it's impossible!" And they're nearing her again and Lee angrily swings him away and he goes flying, caught off balance by the strength and anger in the movement, and when he touches the ground he skids across the earth to a halt and Lee keeps running, calling out angrily over his shoulder. "That's your problem Neji. You always focus on the bars," and then he is gone.

For two days Lee draws a crowd of morbid, avid spectators, and then only Neji and Tenten remain. Waiting. When his pace begins to falter, until even a baby could outrun him, they rise.

All in all, Rock Lee runs for four days, twenty three hours and eleven minutes. And then he blacks out, folding to the ground like a sigh, dead to the world, but still breathing.

When he wakes up, Tenten is cradling his head in her lap, and there are tears in her eyes, and when she begins to say something he wriggles away from her.

And they cease to be who they were.

(trepidation)

There are wanted posters up all over the walls in this part of Hokage Tower, where missions are received and pay collected, and they're standing in the corridor, idly waiting for team seven who were ahead of them to trot out with fuller pockets, and it is then that she sees his picture on the wall.

The image makes adrenalin course through her body and she sits down to keep the world from spinning out of control, and

"What's the matter?" Neji asks her, still standing, eyes sliding over to her only for a second (she doesn't talk to him anymore) before scrutinising the pictures of nukenin that dot the walls again, dreaming of a time when they aren't green behind the ears chunin anymore, and able to be heroes.

She closes her eyes, leans her head against the comfortingly solid green vinyl of the chair back and breathes in and out deeply, feeling her lungs inflate with the air that keeps her alert and awake and alive.

"I'm tired," she tells him and Lee shakes his head sorrowfully.

"You should get more rest, Tenten." He tells her, and he comes over, indicates the crescents under her eyes. "'Fatigue in a ninja costs lives,'" and she knows he cares, from the gentleness in his eyes, even if it is undermined by the Gaiism he's worked into the sentence, making their sensei look up from the magazine he's reading, approval in his eyes.

"Listen to your teammate, Tenten. Go to bed earlier. Your dedication these last few months is commendable, but you shouldn't sacrifice your well-being to train through the night."

She nods, fobbing him off. "Alright Gai-sensei, I will." And she hears Neji's quickly repressed snort and something about it grates on her a bit.

So after they receive their mission (and they're going to Wind Country which is nice) she falls into step beside him and they walk for a while in silence. Eventually he asks her the burning question.

"What do you want?" and she looks up at him, sliding a tendril of hair out of her field of vision.

"Why did you snort?"

He regards her for a moment, staring at her that way that he does, and as usual, holding his gaze feels like she's being punched in the stomach, but she doesn't let it go. And then he says "I don't think you'll like the answer."

It's not the answer she would ever have expected and she frowns. They've stopped now, just standing on some faceless street, neither here nor there.

"When did liking something ever become a factor?" And he scowls and the wind blows his hair into his face, and he shakes it free, in that way that he does, which is perhaps the single most graceful gesture she has ever seen; that strangely elegant flick that she wishes she could do.

Ever since I started to care is the answer he wants to give her.

"Because I don't think you meant what you said to Gai-sensei." He says finally. She fiddles with the button at her throat and her silence says more than her words ever would, so he walks away, over it.

(recovery)

Who was she? Who could she have been? A jinnchuuriki sent to infiltrate the village. A honey-coloured changeling child, holding the future in her starfish hands. A baby, pillowed on soft dead leaves. Blown out of the forest and onto the road. The Konoha Road. She couldn't answer his questions (What was she doing there? Could she understand him? Was she alright?).

So he sighed, and picked her up.

She was light. As insubstantial as a dandylion seed. And when he began to move she curled into his body. No fear in her wide, honey coloured eyes.

Nothing else, though, either.

When he took her to the orphanage, competent civilian women took over, clucked over the lice in her hair, and the ring of dirt around her waist (she had no shirt, just a fine coating of forest earth tinging her skin a deeper, more ochre brown, staining the waistband of her pants) and she had, as it turned out, when a medic-nin was summoned to examine her, worms.

Learning all this (because he'd yet to leave) was nearly enough to make him regret bringing her here, touching her at all, but then something in her honey coloured eyes would flicker, and he would feel compelled to stay. Watch her. Be by her.

Linger.

(reflection)

When Gai-sensei teaches her exploding tags she has a moment of such sublime clarity – nirvana – that she has to say to herself, for a moment Breathe, Kayo. Neji watches her, the way her pupils have dilated, and smirks. Those who slip in and out of heaven, he thinks and rolls his eyes. Exploding seals are good to know, because knowledge makes you stronger, but it loses its lustre when everything is predetermined anyway. And besides, exploding tags don't pertain to his style at all, and mostly, he mourns the time he's wasting by being a part of this cosy little training session.

Tenten though, shivers audibly when she releases that first tag, churning a crater in the earth as wide as Neji's not-so gentle fists, and the feel of the explosion seems to shudder in that empty space under her sternum, reverberating through the chambers of her heart.

Then Gai-sensei claps her on the shoulder and the feeling dissolves as she looks up at his face, at his sloe-black eyes. "It appears you have an aptitude for ballistics, Tenten-chan." He says, flicking her a thumbs up, and she doesn't know what to say, knowing only that if she tells the truth their reality will cut her to bits. That it feels familiar is something she knows will be crushed by their sympathy, and she'd rather hold onto it as long as she can.

It's been 8 years now, and she's a shinobi and the sort of sense she has of being someone else is fading enough as it is. She has a memory, for instance, of being seven years old in the playground at the academy and watching the wind caress the tops of the trees, and knowing that it was going to rain, despite the clear blue sky.

Looking back, she can't understand it, the certainty she felt then (and the fact that her prediction held true), and it makes her feel a bit woozy, in reflection. As though she's not altogether here, and the fact that she is older now, and has lost that sense, that gift she can barely remember, sometimes makes her feel sick. She feels a bit ill now, releasing seals that gut the earth, but it's different doing this. Churny with energy. As though, if she really wanted to, she'd be able to fly.

When training is over, and Lee and Gai-sensei have gone for an impossible-to-complete run and the training yard is pockmarked all over, she goes up to the edge of that first crater and stares into it. It's the biggest one, the messiest, before she got the hang of it, the surgical precision she needed to contain the force of her chakra, which shows in the later holes, but the rawness of this first one is almost poetic.

She stares at it, and remembers to breathe, and inhales the sweet smell of hot earth and the bitter smoke and it makes her feel whole in the weirdest way. Her lungs fill with the scent and solace rocks her. If it rains, it'll fill with water she thinks, but she has no way (now) to tell if that'll happen, not anymore. Nor why a pothole filling with rain would occur to her at all.

In all likelihood it will be filled with earth, tamped down by the next team who train here, and inexplicable sadness washes over her at the thought of this. She kneels down and rests her hand briefly against the churned up soil, and remembers knowing that the rain was coming.

Breathe Kayo.

(dissociate)

He wants to pin it on that fact that she's a silly girl, her scatter-brainedness.

It isn't the first time she's been late meeting him, but stars have risen now, which shouldn't have, and so he shrugs back into his coat and stalks up from the training grounds through the village until he gets to her apartment building. Walking up the stairs he resolves to break down her door to scare her awake, or something equally as annoying – only to turn the corner to a door that gapes open.

Fear lodges in his belly like an ulcer. He activates his Byakugan. The doorway screams of wrongness, the creak it makes as he rests his hand on it, on the threshold of her space, is creepy, imbued with the foreboding of the night, and even before he has shifted his sight through the flat he knows she isn't there.

It takes him hours to find her, and it's luck more than anything else that he does at all. Luck that the night is frosty and the sky dusted brightly by stars, and that the light glimmers off the edge of her as he passes her, 2 miles away. When he gets to her, curled up on the forest floor, he doesn't have time to consider why she is there, sinking his vision into her chakra channels.

To make sure she's still alive.

And he's leaning over her, sinking his power into her body to see what's wrong and her eyes flicker open, and she's (thankfully) there. For a moment there's a yearning in her eyes that he doesn't understand, and she's a little girl, not a chunin and he remembers watching her stand at the academy gate, hugging one of the posts as though to save herself from being blown away. Then it's gone, like lightning, and she looks at him guiltily. "I'm sorry I didn't come to training," she says, in a voice still laced with sleep. "I forgot to breathe."

He doesn't ask her what she means, because he knows that her answer will only scare him more.

(disclosure)

"If I tell you a secret, would you tell anyone else about it?"

They're lying on the packed earth of the training ground, heads together, exhausted. The sun is filled with summer, and in the evening it still warms his skin, lying on the baked earthen floor.

"That is completely subjective," he says.

The sky is a deepening ocean of blue, beginning to tinge orange at it's edges, and it's always this sort of day (a warm one) at this sort of time (after training, when their bodies are thrumming with fatigue and the world is changing) that Tenten is most happy, most open. He doesn't think she realises just how the sorrow shines in her eyes sometimes, when she stops, lost in her thoughts, and he is grateful to whatever force out there makes her so open to elation, on red weather days.

She laughs, reaching up with a hand to cuff him gently 'for being prosy' and he closes his eyes to better bottle the sound, commit it to memory, and store it next to his soul. Sometimes she is the most alive person he knows, and just looking at her, or being by her (because, technically, he can't see her at the moment) makes him feel good, glad to be alive with her. She rolls over onto her stomach, propping herself up on her elbows, and the edges of her face (her nose and cheekbones and chin, resting on her hands) are turned to gold by the sunlight streaming out of the west. "Well…y'know how I was found? By someone on a mission?"

"Hn?"

"I went and asked Godaime, who it was." He opens his eyes, the maziness of the last half-hour replaced by her soft-voiced seriousness.

"And?" She goes still, and he tries to see more of her than just her gilded edges, but he can't move without her noticing, and moving will worry her, so he doesn't. She doesn't speak for another second, as though she regrets mentioning it at all, until

"It was Mizuki-sensei." She says, and he feels a chill crawl up his body.

Once he sought Naruto out for an answer to the red chakra, disbelieving the conclusions he'd come to himself. The boy had looked at him with his wide blue eyes and hidden nothing. The news of Mizuki's treason had rippled through the village, but never the circumstance, and he had wondered why, 'til he had heard the truth from Naruto himself. And the idea that it had been that man who'd taken her…

He rolls over onto his stomach, pillows his cheek on his folded arms, desperate to look at her, knowing he can't.

"Are you okay?" He feels her lift up the strap hanging down the side of his hitai-ate and twist it through her fingers.

"Yeah," she says, but there's a tightness to her voice, as if she wants to cry, and he wonders how much Godaime told her. "Just… he used to take me out sometimes, y'know? For dinner, when I was at the orphanage. He's the one that gave me that weapons rack in the corner of my room, as a graduation present. I thought it was normal, the sort of thing he did with everyone. How thick am I?" She tries to laugh.

"Tenten, you're not an idiot. If he didn't want you to know…"

"That's just it, though." Her hand, playing with the strap of his hitai-ate shakes, and she tightens it into a fist.

So he takes it, her hand, shaking in his own, pulling himself up cross-legged. She moves too, until they're both sitting, and he takes her other hand in his, and holds them to make the shaking subside.

"Don't kill yourself over this Tenten." He says, making sure his voice is firm and leaves no room for doubt, because if that leaks in, she'll be swamped. "If he didn't want you to know… he would have had his reasons. He used to take you out, right? Gave you your weapons rack?" she nods, eyes lowered to their hands. She usually shies away from physical contact, unless they're sparring, which is different, or she herself initiates it, and he is relieved that she hasn't broken away yet. "He wouldn't have done that if you didn't mean something to him."

The day is fading. There are a million holes in the picture of their former teacher as he has painted it, she knows. But she is grateful for the story, and her hands have stopped shaking, and his hands are so rough from training and his voice so carefully matter-of-fact that she holds onto him longer than she really needs to before letting go. Because he makes her want to believe him, and it has been a long time since she believed in something, so

"Thank you." Says Tenten, and for the first time in a long time, she breathes easy.

/End Chapter… Cheers for reading