Loko: Whee! More 30kisses SasuNeji. Well, okay, I was almost purged because it was so late, but it did slip in under the cutoff, I think. So. That is good.

Disclaimer: Still nope. Such woe.

Summary: Sasuke asks why. Neji has all the answers, and really Sasuke doesn't want to know. SasuNeji, NaruNeji, implied SasuNaru

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Silent Spring

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"This is ridiculous," Sasuke says finally, and stands. His muscles must be as sore as Neji's own, and the bluish bruise just above his collar is deepening to thunderstorm purple, yet his motions are smooth and swift and full of a clean, restrained power.

"Perhaps," Neji says, breaths suctioning in and out ferociously, like the oxygen is attempting to kill him instead of giving him life. "Why now?"

"Why ever?" Sasuke says, snagging his too-long bangs out of his eyes and shoving them behind his ears: harshly, angrily, as if he wants to hurt someone and can't quite reach, so turns on himself. Neji reaches out and puts a hand on Sasuke's foot (white skin on black sandals) and Sasuke's eyes, red moments ago, flash black at him. "Just think about it. This can't go on."

"What's so ridiculous about it?" Neji leans back very deliberately: white elbows (dusty and scraped and bleeding in places) resting against the deeply crevassed bark of the limb on which they are standing, dark hair pooling where his shoulder-blades press into the same bark. He can feel the ridges one by one, imprinting into his flesh like fingernails clawing bloody ownership between gasps in violet, velvet night.

"You," Sasuke snaps; gestures expansively in a motion meant to encompass Neji, the forest, the sky, the earth, himself in one swoop of pale, skinny adolescent arm. Neji pauses only sometimes to think when he is with Sasuke; mostly he lets himself react. It's cleaner, simpler, less complicated, and he suspects that if he did think, he would think much the same thing as Sasuke: this is ridiculous. "Me. This, all of it."

Neji raises an eyebrow.

"Don't give me that look," Sasuke growls, and against his will Neji notices the inadvertent proof of how much time they have spent together. He can't help but wonder: do he and Naruto even know each other's expressions this well? Or is it just that Sasuke knows these things, blood-eyes taking catalogue without even conscious input from their owner? "Think about it, Hyuuga Neji."

Neji's mouth quirks. "Neji," He says patiently.

"That's exactly it," Sasuke says, tossing his hands out in what might be surrender or frustration or threat (ninja, after all) and glaring in a vaguely exasperated way at Neji. "Why do you call me Sasuke? Why should I call you Neji?"

"Those are our names," Neji suggests, tilting his head very slightly and letting a few strands of his black hair slide from the crook of his neck to the tree.

"Don't be obtuse," Sasuke says, and sits with a graceless grace – too loud a motion for true ninja fluidity, and yet as smooth as the swish of water over rocks, every strand of hair and flutter of cloth seeming to settle back perfectly. "What part of the word enemies do you not comprehend?"

Neji's expression darkens, although his white eyes give away precious little. "I claimed truce, Sasuke."

"I never gave it," Sasuke returns. "Unless you surrendered."

Neji's eyes surrender for him forever, blinking white flags; and nothing he does surrenders, ever, flashing white hands.

"Tell me," He says finally. "Would you attack me like this?"

"No," Sasuke says firmly. "But that's what's ridiculous."

"Surely you don't suspect my motives, still?" Neji laughs, coldsharp and bitter as the wind turning winter around them. "I explained them to you in all their gory stupidity."

Sasuke frowns, dark eyebrows drawing together over dark eyes and lips almost laughably a pout, but when he turns his gaze back to Neji, the look is threateningly gloomy as a monsoon, heavy with the promise of bloodshed. There's nothing either of them can say in response. Gory, Neji thinks with a bit of a self-deprecating smirk, is about how to describe it.

"What would you do if the Hokage found out?" Sasuke says finally, and the lines of his body soften into half-relaxation. Neji reflects and realises: he has never, in fact, seen Sasuke fully relaxed, and imagines it must be enticing, that pale body stretched out and languorous against that deep blue cloth and shockingly black hair and eyes. And lips full and slightly parted, an invitation to kiss or ravish or bite. Something about the Uchiha and how they were bred, Neji remembers vaguely, initially an aesthetic clan or something. And the brilliant, violently red Sharingan a convenient accident, maybe.

The Uchiha mon just that, after all: a rounded fan, useless in battle, gules spread perhaps an afterthought.

And Sasuke staring at him with those snapping black eyes, expectant, impatient.

"Hide behind Naruto," Neji says with an impertinent shrug. "Watch Naruto take on the Hokage in my honour, I suppose, and roll my eyes and say 'I told you so,' when he gets only the slightest of concessions."

Sasuke rolls his eyes, puffing a few strands of hair out of his eyes. "And I suppose it will work?" He says, all caustic sarcasm, easy and familiar like this: backed against the green of trees (beginning to redden and gild themselves), too-thin face (beginning to fill out again) resigned, hands restless and uneasy against the bark, fiddling with leaves, hair, cloth. Neji suffers a moment of complete lapse, engrossed in the play of thin fingers twirling a single golden leaf and imagining fingers against my scalp, jaw, lips.

"If it doesn't," He says when Sasuke tosses the leaf at him, thoroughly irritated with the pause. The wind picks it up, spins it in dizzy circles hundreds of feet above the ground, and dies suddenly: a flicker of soft yellow vanishing toward the browngreencold earth. "I don't suppose I could come with you?"

"You could," Sasuke says, only somewhat serious. "That snake will take anyone he can, right now. You won't, will you?"

"No," Neji says shortly, and they pause for a moment of utter stillness: no wind, no leaves whispering and giggling amongst themselves, barely a hint of breath shared between them.

"Ah," Sasuke says finally, awkwardly. His right hand reaches for another leaf slowly turning down between them at the same time Neji does, and both flinch back but not quickly enough. They miss the leaf and clasp each other's hands with unexpectedly crushing strength.

"Why don't you trust us?" Neji says, at the same time Sasuke says, "Why do you trust me?"

"I believe in your word," Neji says, at the same time Sasuke says, "I don't trust anyone."

Sasuke tries to pull his hand back and Neji grasps it tighter, fine bones grinding within too-thin knuckles and palms pressed so tightly together they can feel suction. Sasuke digs his fingers into the back of Neji's hand, and they will both have bruises when they finally let go.

"You trust me," Neji says, leaning forward and breathing the words into Sasuke's face.

"I do not," Sasuke says, refusing to look away.

"You're letting me train you," Neji says, moving closer still.

"You're a Hyuuga," Sasuke says. "And I need finer chakra control."

"Which Orochimaru cannot teach you," Neji says, and their hair mingles (black on black and indistinguishable as always) and then their foreheads touch, and Sasuke still refuses to look (move) away.

"Which Orochimaru cannot teach me," Sasuke confirms. "Hyuuga, I use you. Why do you let me?"

"I love Naruto," Neji says, and Sasuke flinches back at last, and the winter sun flashes dazzling white through the falling leaves and purifies the sky above, illuminating a leaf's breadth (a village's, a world's, a soul's) between them and their young, immaculate profiles. Sasuke frowns into the light and that is where the difference is, Neji realises, where Sasuke glares into the world against the brightness of the light and Neji lets himself be blinded.

"Then why are you here?" Sasuke says, pulling at his hand again, and Neji grips even tighter still, forcing Sasuke onto his back (and this would never happen, Neji thinks with a vaguely amused smirk, if Sasuke didn't genuinely want to know – under any other circumstance Sasuke would have had two kunai between Neji's ribs already) and digging the back of Sasuke's hand into the rough bark of the tree. "Neji," Sasuke hisses, sibilant on the 'e' and harsh on the 'i'.

"Because I love him," Neji says, and presses their lips together, and speaks against Sasuke's mouth (into Sasuke's mouth). "And he -- "

Sasuke stretches his long curve of a neck (white in the late-autumn light) and angles his head up, closing that brief space, and there is no room for manoeuvring around Sasuke's lips and teeth and the blood smearing from their dry lips into the kiss, like kissing a pliant copper statue, and Sasuke's thin fingers are winding through Neji's hair and Neji wants to say And he loves you or And he loves me because of you or Because of you or And he loves you he loves you he loves you or mostly And I love you.

And the next day Sasuke is not there amidst the thick rain of dead leaves in the brownredgold forest, and Neji manhandles his way onto the Sound investigation.

There is no escape now, he thinks, and touches his lips still stinging and cut. It is time, he thinks, smiling apologetically at a furious stone-blue-summer-gold Naruto, you understood that, too.

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words: 1547

Feedback will make the flowers grow. Or new chapters. Thanks for reading, and sorry this is late. uu;

Loko