A/N: I'm running out of things to put (in brackets). Can you tell? ;P Also – the bits are getting longer, so it's either that the chapters get bigger, or there are less bits per chapter… oh and HELLO NEW READERS! There are a few of ya lol ;)
Warning: A bit lemonish. Ish. Not smut, but just in case…
Disclaimer: I love MGMT. And the Kings of Leon. And the Pixies. If I could buy rights, it would be to their stuff, not Kishimoto's manga or anime or associated spin offs/merchandise.
Vanishing Act
Chapter V
Gare de Lyon
(detractable)
He wants to ask her why she is here, in his room, sitting on his bed, but he is unable to do so. When he heard the knock on the window, for a crazy moment he thought she was Gai's ghost, come to see him. But then he looked, and it was her, and opening the window, letting her in, seemed the most natural thing to do in the world. So he did. It seems like a mistake now though. He can feel her gaze on him, and, unnaturally, a blush rises to his cheeks.
It's late, and he hadn't been expecting anyone to disturb him at all, much less Tenten, (deep in her own private forest) and he'd taken his shirt off in the warming air, but with her had come the breeze, sending a draught through his room, making goosepimples rise across his body. He gets up off the bed, pulls on a shirt.
"I hope you didn't do that on my account." He ignores her, summoning the barriers he'd put up against the world that she'd always managed to get around anyway, destroyed by her kindness, her enigma. But not this time. He has had five years of this now (more, if you count the academy) and this (in answer to a question never posed, in a world where they have now fought and hurt and killed) is what everything has come to.
"I meant what I said," she says eventually. "And I just… I wish…"
"Wishes are fine for normal people, Tenten." He says, determined to ignore her first comment. "But we're shinobi."
"Don't teach your granny to suck eggs," she shoots back, but her pluck is low. "I don't want this. Nor do you."
He stays silent.
"Look at me," says Tenten, but he can't, has spent most of this past week unable to look at her without feeling as though her eyes were piercing right into his soul, and he shakes his head, and hears her sigh. He knows it's ridiculous that he should feel a shiver crawl up his spine at the sound, but that doesn't stop it happening.
When Tenten fights, everything is reduced to game of calculated risks, and, eventually, this knowledge is what gives him the strength to fight back.
But when he first hears the pop as she undoes the buttons of her shirt, one, two, three, and hears too, the telltale rustle as she slides it off, his eyes widen. All of a sudden he is aware of the exact dimensions of his bedroom, the space between them, the closed door, the fact that he is alone in this wing of the compound. Save for her, at least. At most. At worst.
"Don't Tenten." he tries to say, but his breath is hitching, escaping from him in little silver explosions in the cold air, and the words don't help clear his muddled head.
She leans towards him, hands splayed like starfish on his duvet cover and kisses his cheek, his jaw, the point where his head and neck meet below his ear, feather light lips contrast to her body pressing into his back.
"Don't," she says in a low voice, into his ear, "Ever say that to me again."
His hands are clenched, bunched into fists with the effort it is taking him not to turn around, trigger a reaction they always warned would end badly, and he can't speak, fearing what he might say, and she takes his silence as assent. She reaches for his hand, molding his fist back to softness, and he lets her take it, because it would be churlish to refuse. Lips graze his jawline as his hand encounters the soft swell of her chest, and he gives in.
He gives in, turns into her body, pulls her to him, kisses her as if he is suffocating, as if he will die but for the way they're breathing for one another, and the way she responds, just as urgently, makes him feel good, and the feeling is so alien, so unfamiliar that he doesn't stop, not when she is straddling him, and his hands have strayed to the waistband of her jeans, and the need to be inside of her blocks out everything else.
Her skin is china white underneath her shirt, but for the darker circles of her nipples, exposed when he clumsily unhooks her bra, and he leans up to taste them, and Tenten closes her eyes, body on fire. She has ceased to exist, but for where he touches her, with his hands and his mouth and his hips against hers, and she has never felt more solid, more there in her entire life, and so she pulls off his own shirt, too, and he lets her go for a terrifying moment to help her and his hair pools onto the bed like water when he falls back and she reaches down, unbuttons his jeans to feel the heat of him against her hand,
And then Neji goes still, opening his eyes. And she hates what she sees there.
Reality comes back in drifts, the cold air on her rarely exposed skin, the tanlines they have from training, the urgency of him between her fingers; the something she hates in his gaze. Where usually she forgets when she stares at him, this time, his eyes make her recall exactly who they are, and that awareness stings, as if they had ceased to be all over again.
"Tenten…" The wholeness disappears, and their part-nakedness, their burning skin, the way they've touched each other, (the fact that they're literally getting into each other's pants) seems suddenly absurd. Ridiculous.
He pulls her hand gently into his own, shifting his hips, lacing their fingers.
What's wrong? she wants to ask, and tries to kiss him, tries to fathom the fact that she can feel how he wants her back, and that he doesn't want to go there.
"Tenten…" he says her name again and the word is laced with hurt, cutting her to the core. "What do you want from me?"
The words hang between them like a cobweb for a moment, until she pulls her hand from his, pushes herself from between his arms, grabbing her top, pulling it on, inside-out. Angrily she takes it off again and he sits up, with a stupid look on his face as she shakes it right-side out, and he hops up but she pulls the door open, and he stalls to hide his disarray from any watching Hyuga and she turns back to him, eyes the colour of a tiger's soul, sparkling with anger.
"Something you're obviously not prepared to give." And then she is gone with his heart buffeting away in her slipstream.
When Tenten fights, everything is reduced to game of calculated risks, whether her opponents know it or not.
But not even she can pull the wool over his eyes.
(superimposition)
After Shikamaru finds them on the bridge, Neji quickly employs one of the jutsu Gai had taught them in preparation for the chunin exams, and calls her. Seconds later and she is there, her hair still out and falling down past her waist like a wave, still bare of feet and clad in an old singlet and stripy cotton shorts because Tenten doesn't bother with buying conventional nightclothes.
"What's going on?" she says, and he is grateful that she is sharp as the steel she handles and perceptive with it, so that all he needs to say is
"It's Uchiha" for her to understand.
She looks at Lee, and then her eyes slide back to him and quietly she says;
"What have you got on you?"
"My standard kit." She looks away, reaching behind her back.
"I'll swap you. Please, Neji," taking his hand to silence his protests. "You look after your gear, I know, but mine… don't look a gifthorse in the mouth, okay?" He can feel her hand in his, the coarseness of the blisters and callouses that stripe her skin, testimony to the metal that passes so frequently through her hands. Tenten in the morning, with sleep in her eyes, giving him the only gift she can.
Only because she said 'Please', thinks Neji, and nods, procures his own kit in exchange. And it would be discourteous to refuse. "Thank you." He says, and she nods in turn, tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, as nonchalant as always, but when she meets his eyes again there is fear in them.
"I'll come back," he blurts out clumsily.
"Of course you will." she parries quickly. "I know. You will. You're strong and clever and… stuff, but…" for a second she closes her eyes, sleepy and fourteen, and then she steps forward. Reaches her arms up around his shoulders, and hugs him.
And despite the spontaneity of the gesture, and the fact that he has never been touched like that before, since his father died, he relaxes. She is soft, and smells of sleep yet to be burned off by the rising sun, and he can feel her shoulder blades, pressing against her skin like wings beneath his hands.
"Stay safe," she says, into the crook of his neck, making a shiver creep up his back. "And I know that that's a stupid thing to say, but – "
"I will."
And then there is nothing left to say.
When they make it back to Konoha, two things happen. Tenten spends more time in the hospital than she ever has in her life, (and the nurses and doctors (and Hyuga) get used to her presence, exotic skeleton leaf waiting quietly on the window sill of his private room, perched on top of the hot air vent to keep warm as the seasons change) and Sakura requests not to be put on wards during visiting hours. She knows she is being irrational, because the older girl only ever looks at her, doesn't ever speak to her, but the phrase if looks could kill runs through her mind, and fear rakes its claws up and down her back. She avoids the dark haired kunoichi for more than half a year.
(nova)
My heart hurts, Tenten realises, to no one in particular one fine training morning.
At the time she is not numb, but the memory of the fight that nearly killed him is fading, and the residual physical ache it has left behind is curiously disconnected from the event, so she examines it, pressing a hand unconsciously to her breastbone, and Lee (Neji, in trouble, has been taken by Gai to run with youthful vigour while they speak about Neji's "Youthful, but somewhat misdirected passions". As if knocking out a girl he'd found stalking him wasn't justified) turns from the training dummy he has nearly reduced to splinters.
"What is wrong, Tenten? Are the new weights…" he casts around for a way to say 'Too heavy', knowing full well how hard his teammate works to keep up with he and Neji. "Hard?"
She shakes her head, searching for a way to explain. It's one of those rare snatches of time, like when the sun bursts through rainclouds, when she wants to be… understood. "No, it's all good… except…"
"Except…" he prompts, and she turns to him, at a loss for words. She wrinkles up her nose, dislodging a pebble from the earth with her sandal, putting her hands in her pockets with a fluidity that makes him want to flinch.
What Lee likes about Tenten, best, is the way she moves. He is coiled like a spring, ever ready, energy bunched up and rearing to go, but she has the predatory smoothness of a born hunter, able to launch an attack from nothing in a heartbeat, and her gestures are, though he would never tell her, one of the many things he feels envious about, that his other team members have and he does not. She would probably scold him if he ever told her so though – that the grace with which she moves, like a wolf, or perhaps a tiger, is, in his eyes, on a par with the legacy Neji can sink into as easily as breathing.
He knows how much she admires Neji.
"Tenten?"
"Mmm?"
"If something is wrong you can tell me," he says, "And I swear to you that I will not tell!" Fire muted in a sudden rush of consideration and awkwardness. "Unless… is it, well, that time of the – "
"No!" she interjects hurriedly. "Lee, don't worry, it's... not, but… please let's not go there."
"Alright!" he says, heartily relieved. "But then what is wrong? Are you ill?"
She shakes her head, but he can sense the words trembling on the edge of her lips like beads of water about to fall from the edge of a branch or roof, and he waits, busying himself with the strap of his sandal while she brims with whatever is eating her. They are 16 years old, and words get in the way more often than they don't.
"Lee?"
Voice carefully absent-minded, knowing she will baulk otherwise, he looks up at her briefly (delicate eyebrows knitted, hand back at the base of the base of her throat) before turning back to his perfectly secure sandal. "Yeah?"
"…" While not as chatty as other girls their age – Ino or Sakura, for instance – reticence is not Tenten's natural state of affairs. Silence maybe, sometimes, but not hesitance.
"How easy do you think it is to..." again she falters, and he waits a while, but gives up.
"To what, Tenten?" he asks carefully.
"...Disappear."
(desolate)
The desert is cold at night, and the sand, once it loses the heat of the day, below the carpeted floor, is hard. I can't sleep in places like this, but Tenten is a different story. When she sleeps in the cold or on the earth or just generally somewhere less than comfortable, she has a look on her face sometimes, that makes you want to be wherever she is. Tonight though, she is still awake, and the awareness of our awakeness hangs between us unspoken. She's trying to wait me out, but I have the night on my side, and the harsh terrain, and the sky is bright with stars and it's getting later.
Eventually she gives up, and pulls her futon apart, standing up to lightly pick her way over the slumbering forms of Lee and Gai, slipping into the night. Don't follow her, I tell myself, trying to count to ten slowly, to try and stay where I am, let sleeping tigers lie. Eleven. My hand doesn't so much as make the cloth whisper when I close the tent flap.
The man had spoken about Tiger Lands, and it had struck some sort of a chord in me, one it has no right to. All I know about tigers comes from a mixture of mythology and science; the forests around Konoha are empty of most wildlife, because of the roads that the poachers use, the battles that rage in the undergrowth between shinobi, riddled with humanity. Tainted. At last count (before the Sound Invasion), there were three left. In all those hectares of forest...
The tiger lands though, are another story entirely. The lands where the people are too spiritual or too few to have hidden villages, much less be players in the Secret Wars that sometimes tear the Elemental Countries apart at all. There, in the remnants of the old world, lie everything we take for granted, and Tigers fall most squarely into that category. Speaking of them in the desert, in the silky tent of a wandering man seemed to be twice-removed from their reality, and yet wholly appropriate at the same time.
Following her footsteps, standing out as pools of shadow through the sand, heading towards the light of the caravan city that has sprung up below the walls of the Sand Village, just adds to the surreality – the super-reality – of the whole thing. When I reach her she is standing beyond the circle of firelight, between two tents, stock still. And she turns back to me as if she expected me to come, and says,
"I want you to promise me something," in a whisper, and it puts me on guard. But we aren't in Konoha, lying in the summer sun, and her sudden seriousness makes me jerk my head up and down in consent.
"Don't tell Gai-sensei." And I only just manage to keep the incredulousness from my face.
When do I ever tell Gai-sensei anything? I want to say, and I'm relieved that whatever happens tonight, it's probably not even worth the effort it took to slip away.
Even if I'm going to stay.
So I nod, although it doesn't particular matter.
She's not wearing her hitai ate, and her hair is slept on (but not), and less militarily neat, and stray wisps of it brush the edges of her face, kissing her forehead, framing her cheekbones, themselves thrown into relief by the night and the firelight, and it feels like I'm treading on hallowed ground, just being by her. I don't know when she came to embody so many vainglorious things, but, in the deserted night, she's …almost sacred.
And then she takes a breath and the man, the trader from the morning is there, silent as any shinobi, and without a word the two of them begin to walk out into the desert. I follow behind and want to ask her what she is doing, but I don't know whether the man she's with knows I'm here, and I'd rather keep it that way. So I let them get ahead and only when they stop where the ground is hard and bare (I never knew, until I came here, that the desert isn't wholly made of sand), I move closer.
"There's no music," Tenten apologises, and the man takes the knife from his belt and offers it to her without a word.
/Chapter. TBC…