Title: Still I Rise -- #2: metaphor
Characters/Pairings: Neji, Hinata
Rating: Um, this one would be K, I think.
Notes: Same universe as "murmur" and "2 am". Neji's perspective on the evening.
Neji is not the sort of man who thinks in metaphors. He is not given to flights of fancy nor does he find passages of turgid purple prose appealing. Neji is instead a man of science, a man who thinks in blacks and whites and does not like to think of the indiscriminate grays in between.
So he is suitably unprepared when his cousin Hinata shows up one night, with a suitcase in hand and an ugly bruise purpling one cheek, begging for space on his couch.
"Only for a few nights," she says, in that quiet, meek way of hers, "only until I find some work and a place to live. I don't want to trouble you."
He gazes at her thoughtfully. She is frozen inside out, shoulders trembling and cheeks rubbed raw from the wind as she sits on his couch and curls her hands around a cup of hastily made tea. She is still so small; and even after all these years, her hands are still dainty and fingernails clean and neatly rounded.
He should ask her what drove her to him, what drove her out of the cavernous Hyuuga mansion, and what caused the bruise on her face, but he can guess, and he has a hunch that his guesses are right. He remembers his uncle very well: a stern stranger wearing his father's face, eyes hard and glassy when they should have been laughing, a mouth forever down-turned in displeasure. And he remembers even more his small cousin, fine-boned and delicate and forever clumsy, and forever the object of his uncle's disapproval.
Neji is not the sort of man who thinks in metaphors, but he can't help but imagine birds in flight and cage doors hanging listlessly from their hinges as he looks at her.
"You can stay," he says, "as long as you like."