A/N: Stuff and cumquats. Happier times ahead. In future chapters, I mean ;) This one is up to the eyeballs in angst, however… Umm… yeah. I'm gonna go and clean up the earlier chapters a bit, too. They's a bit messy. Sentences have been lopped off here and there, because I just reread the whole thing and was like "wtf??" so yeah. I'll do that sometime in the next while. In the meantime…

Disclaimer: D'you know what I noticed? Kishimoto changes the colour of Tenten's eyes, in the anime. Twat. If I owned the rights, at least the changes would be more subtle ;P

Vanishing Act

Chapter IV

Gare de Lyon

(plunge)

There are things she cannot explain about herself, mysteries from the nebula of her early years that won't, she doesn't think, ever fade. Mostly she just forgets that they're there, but occasionally they bubble up to the surface, for anyone to see, and when they sink away again, the world takes a second to right itself once more.

The first time Lee notices, they're on their way back to the village, having stopped briefly at a mixed bathing hot spring, 5 miles from the village, and she is busily dissolving into the steamy, faintly sulfurous water, eyes closed. Her buns, are soaked and dripping, while the top of her head remains dry, her aches and cuts are stinging and being soothed all at once, and it's delightfully easy to block out the sound of her teammates bickering and splashing and being boys. Which she wouldn't mind herself right now. Mostly she forgets that she's a girl at all, but then, when they do things like this, or go out to dinner, she remembers with sudden forceful clarity. Even when they're training, she sometimes catches them staring at her, and not at her face, and sometimes she wants to whack them on the head and tell them to quit it. She knows it's just hormones on their part, and that it'll pass just as soon as they can find themselves some nice civilian girls who are impressed by the whole shinobi thing, but… it's not as though it makes it any better for her, in the meantime.

She sinks a little further underwater, mouth submerged, the breath from her nose sending tiny ripples across the water, making the steam around her eddy and swirl…

Across from her, in the pool, Neji stirs, body shiny with sweat (so what if she's a hypocrite?), eyes closed, his hair gently ghosting under the water like seaweed, making both her heart hammer and a spike of envy lance through her. His hair is long, but hers is longer, and to be able to let her hair pool like water, underwater like that, like a soft dark cloud, temporarily weightless, is a luxury not worth the cold weight of it afterwards, the rivulets of icy water that will slide all the way down her back, to make her shivery all the sooner. And besides, (though she has no way to know) the boys would not-stare-at-her-face again, if she did.

And on that thought, she sighs and turns, placing her hands up on the edge of the pool, lifting herself up out of the water, meaning to dry off, slowly, in the sun, when Lee calls out her name, and she turns. (And maybe because of the way he says it – Tenten… - Neji opens his eyes too.) Worry etched on his beautiful bestial face, her bowl-cut teammate swims over to her.

"Tenten… what's that on your back?"

"Oh!" startled by his initial tone, relief floods her. "Just a scar." Her hand curves around to touch it, seeing with her fingers the two bruise-coloured lines that follow her spinal column, shiny and raised above the rest of her skin, even after all this time.

"But…" his eyebrows are knitted, and Neji swims over too, and, faintly, she worries about the fact that she is 14 and standing directly above them in her bathing suit, (no matter how modest it is,) but moving to cover up feels like it will only make things worse. "…Where from? How?"

And she understands. They know each other's bodies, as all teammates do, and he knows she's never been wounded there. She shrugs. "They've always been there. I've always had them." Trying to ignore the way he and Neji are both not staring at her face and sound nonchalant, all in one go.

But even Neji is frowning, and he climbs out of the water, presses her shoulders lightly to indicate that she should turn around, and she feels his closeness as a prickling shiver all through her body as he examines her back, and there is something like confusion or fear in his voice when he next speaks.

"But Tenten…" and she turns, hating the way they're both saying her name, even if it isn't her real one, and sees his Byakugan eyes soften back to normal, brow creased into worry lines. "There's chakra in it."

(fullsooth)

When Gai receives the genin he is to consider, he goes to the academy, and spends an afternoon looking through their files. Hyuga Neji's is full of grudging praise and the recurring complaint that his attitude is below-par. Rock Lee's is weighty and filled with problems and triumphs that eerily mirror his own childhood, and a long time passes before Gai sets the file aside, consideringly, for the girl's.

Tenten's (no last name… odd, though not uncommon) is different again. The usual comments are competent, works hard, of a satisfactory level, but there, in the margin, written (almost hesitantly) in pencil, is a single underlined word. Volatile. In time, he comes to realise exactly what that means.

Sometimes she trains and fights with a tenacious single-mindedness that's incredible to behold, and ANBU may as well be stamped on her forehead. She calculates what she needs to do and her ferocity is extraordinary. Sometimes, there's even a glee there, when she spins her way through her dragons – not because she has to (not now that she can do so as easily as breathing) but for the sheer pleasure of it. At such times serenity wraps her, in the way Boddhisattvas at temples look, once they've made it into heaven, and her happiness is impossibly contagious.

But sometimes she's far from heaven. Tenten doesn't lose her temper, which is perhaps a relief, because like everything else to do with the teenager, it would probably be beyond her to contain it. But her apathy…

Sometimes Tenten stops playing the game. Stops heeding the rules, and sometimes it terrifies him. One day when they're out on reconaissance, looking down into a valley from a high shoulder of land, she tells him that when the wind blows in a certain way, it sounds like it's telling her to let go, to fly away, and he is petrified that she will listen.

He breaks the rules himself of course, the ones that say that he is their teacher, there to train them into being ruthlessly efficient killers and that that is as far as their relationship is meant to go, but he can't help it. He is a human, before he is a shinobi, and this has always been his greatest weakness. He can't help but want to love them, celebrate their joys and grieve their losses, be everything to them, and sometimes, it is right for him to hold up their sky, and the creases at the corners of Lee's smiles, the way Neji's eyes light up in clarity are physical responses that Gai treasures. But then there are times when they trust him, and should not. Tell him things they shouldn't ever tell a soul, that scare the shit out of him. Things that he, at 31 and a living weapon, is terrified of making worse.

So when that happens, when they stand on a high ridge of land above a valley as dry and dead as the moon, and he recognises that strategies and tactics have all been blown out the window, when she is living heartbeat by heartbeat, he takes Lee's hand in one of his and Tenten's in the other, and feels Neji standing on her other side, and

"I'm never going to let go," he says, and means it.

(current)

The worst thing is that I understand when she says things like that – like being lost in the woods in the middle of the night is because she forgets to breathe.

I think I felt that, the first time I performed the jyuuken in one perfect, fluid sequence. When, for a second, I was struck by a memory of my father, helping me through the stances, when I was about three years old, and the sound of his laughter rattled around in my body, deep and rich, and for a second, I forgot to breathe. Didn't know if I was alive or dead.

I think that everyone has moments like that, when, for a precious few seconds, they fall out of time, and cease to exist in the real world – but that's just it. It's a… a permanent condition with Tenten, and doesn't make much sense, at that. How she forgets to breathe when she has nowhere to disappear to is one of the many mysteries that seem to flicker around her like moths around light.

And that's another. Her lightness. Sometimes there's a passion in her that defies everything I could ever begin to dream about, enough so that it even tempers the other thing in her, that I think I'm seeing more and more, the less and less she looks at me. People are taken to hospitals sometimes, for the way that she disconnects, as if there's something wrong with her. But not Tenten. She is a good actress, a better shinobi, and an innocuous teenaged girl, and these facts make her the most lethal member of our entire team.

But it is just an act. Sometimes when she stares into the middle distance, just for a second, her mask cracks and there's this vulnerability to her that I don't even think she's properly aware of. Days when she gets like that (speaks to no one, removes herself from the world) the urge I feel to touch her, tell her I'm here, Tenten. And so are you. Is so strong that it's hard not to grab her bony wrists right then and there, and tell her so. But Gai has forbade it.

And I want to help her, and I don't know how to, and sometimes I don't know if anyone can save her at all. So I watch her, and it's as if she's blocked by hazy green trees, and all I can think is that it isn't supposed to be this way…

(definition)

The day she finds him, she soars like a shooting star, arcing across the sky, lighting up the whole world.

They're in Wind Country, on the way to Suna, in the final permanent settlement before the desert begins for many thousands of miles, on the way home, and, for once, she feels happy. It's a sensation she isn't used to, one she wants to share, and Neji is there, because they are training and so she does. She shares it. She takes his hand in hers, laces their fingers and he turns to her, betraying no flicker of emotion in his calm silver eyes.

"I'm just… happy." She tells him, and she smiles.

It's a loaded thing, so bright and beautiful that he feels his heart ache just looking at it, burned by her brightness, and at the same time, there's a clumsy sort of fire burning in his body in response, and he is grateful for his Hyuga blood, that keeps him watermelon cool, able to stare at her and hope she can't hear his heart hammering.

"I'm glad Tenten."

It's a good training session, albeit one where they're utterly stalemated, and even though they attack and parry and move almost as if they('re dancing,) had planned it in advance, her happiness makes his own face ache from grinning by the time they're warming down, when he is moving through the slower, more ancient Tai Chi Chuan he uses to calm his heart, sending chakra flowing through every part of his body at a slower, more sedate pace. Rejuvenating. She joins him, stretching out her body, once she collects all her steel again, dismissing the weapons back into her scroll, biting her thumb for some blood, to readjust the way several shuriken will fly, next time, and he averts his eyes when she does so (because that would be cheating) and when he is still, has performed the finishing move, arms settling the power within his body by sealing it off in a fluid stop, he comes over to her.

"Still happy?" Neji asks her wryly, and Tenten smiles more widely, nods once before resuming her task. It's only been two weeks since she swapped her twin dragons for a single Mother of all Dragon Scroll dragon scroll, and it's still a novelty, a movement she's yet to become familiar with. So caught up is she in her task that she doesn't see his sandalled feet by her until she hears him clear his throat.

"Tenten?" Her hair is spiling out of her buns and she shakes it a little, out of her eyes, to look up at him.

"Yeah?" She can barely see him, silhouetted as he is against the sun, and so she shrugs when he doesn't continue, and keeps going with her work.

Speech had failed him in that instant, watching her.

Training has left her cheeks flushed, the same colour as the clouds at sunset, and her skin holds some sort of luminous quality, shining like caramel. Under the sun she has become extraordinarily vibrant, as if she's a whole other person, and even her eyes…

They aren't usually that colour. He's willing to bet that he's never seen them that colour before, that deep almost-hazel colour, (like tiger's eye) in all their lives together. Staring into them (her pupils have shrunk to specks from the sun behind him, and he is prepared to bet, that she doesn't know that their eyes are locked at all) it takes him a moment to register the need to fill his lungs with air - to stay alive – at all.

The spell breaks when she shrugs, shoulders hitching, so that her shoulder blades briefly stand out against her skin, shifting her shirt across her back, like wings unfurling. And he gulps down air gratefully as he tries to remember what he'd wanted to ask her. "Are you hungry?"

She turns back to him again, voice imbued with mock seriousness for a moment. "Honestly Neji? I could well eat an ox right now… why? Do you have one?"

"What? No! I-I mean," he's stuttering. He's stuttering like Hinata. "I'm h…ungry too," he ploughs on, drawing out the 'H' to force his speech back to it's usual smoothness. "And so… do you…maybe… do you want to go into town? And go somewhere? For food?"

For a moment he thinks she'll refuse, but her deep eyes curve up into crescents of dark lashes, and he catches his breath again, more subtly, willing his heart to stop thumping so loudly, and she says "Sure. We're ninja, after all. Why make our risk of dying any higher by not eating? Let's go survive."

They did not know, then, the way the words would ring on through their lives, like a supernova. Dazzling their waking eyes and leaving them all the further in the darkness.

(gravitas)

She is meeting my eyes. It's the thought he tries to keep at the forefront of his mind, that she is looking at him again, but as it is, that stare – so full of fatigue and anger and disappointment and blame (and guilt) – ensures that it is only afterwards, when the feelings have been dulled by his memory that he is able to reflect on the changing ochre colour of her eyes without regret.

Back in the village now, and in training. Sixteen years old and chunin both, they still spar as they always have – in near silence, save for the sound of their heavy breathing and the sing of steel cutting the air – but nothing has been right since the night she brought tigers into their sleepy teenaged world, and they know it.

For 8 days they have done this, pretended, and Neji has begun to think that it will just become yet another warped thread in the fabric of their lives, until, under the midmorning sun, Tenten drops her scroll, cancelling the jutsu, and folds her arms.

"I'm done," she announces. "With this. Either you get over yourself or I go find Uzumaki and train with him instead."

"What are you talking about?" he demands, straightening up out of his stance (knowing exactly what she's referring to) with a scowl.

"Ever since we came back you've been acting all weird, Neji, and I can't handle it anymore. I told you that it wasn't going to be pretty… it's not my fault that you got creeped out." She is glaring at him, panting slightly, and her eyes are flashing golden accusations in the hazy morning world.

The cloud cover is being burned away by the sun and everything seems to be edged in milk as a result, and she is fuzzy and ironically confrontational all at once, and Neji stalks away, knowing she will follow him. "Don't you dare turn your back on me!" she snarls, and grabs his shoulder, and grateful for a fight, he turns.

"That's rich coming from you," he snaps. "You keep everyone away and then as soon as you get a taste of your own medicine you try to get out of sleeping in the bed you, yourself, made!" Dimly he is aware that he has mucked up the colloquialism, but he is too angry to care, and she understands what he means anyway, and her eyes crackle with fury.

"Look. I didn't ask to be this way, okay? I didn't say 'Kami. Please make me a freak with no home and no life and – and – '"

"No one asks! Stop acting like you're so alone and everything, because you're not!" And she looks at him, face scrunched up by whatever she's feeling – and he can see disgust there, and sadness, and a million other things he has no name for, and she shakes her head, as if to despair at his naivety, his lack of understanding and his next words are steeped in anger.

"Screw you, Tenten. If you do something to yourself, you do something to all of us." And the way she is looking at him, with so much pouring from those hazy eyes, makes him want…something he knows he cannot have, and it is then, shouting at her, feeling as though he is dying inside, that Neji realises something that devastates him.

That he loves her.

Because his heart is breaking in his chest.

-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-.-

Cheers. TBC.