Please see first chapter for disclaimer, etc.

Prompt: Broken

Warnings: Violence

Part: 1/2

Special Thanks: goes out to rao hyuga 18, DarkAnonymous324, naash, BlackRose723, kenzinator, Franoncrack, SeiraXD, and Kaori Takaguchi for all your kind reviews, I love reading them all!

Author's Note: Thank you all so much, first of all, for being patient with me during my recently sporadic updates. I really appreciate it so very much. The idea for this one has been floating around in my head for a while, but I wanted to get the last of the details cemented before I wrote it and posted it. Thank you again so much for reading, reviewing, favoriting, and alerting my story, and I hope you enjoy this piece!

*~Broken~*

Neji approached the gates to Hyuuga House feeling like he could collapse and sleep for a week. He and Lee had been able to execute their ANBU mission without a hitch, but on the way back home they'd run into - complications. Even though the Fourth Great War was officially over, there were still cells of the enemy out scouring the tracks between shinobi villages looking for teams to attack. Unfortunately for the ones who found Neji and Lee, they had decided to strike at the wrong two ANBU. Between them, the cell was easily taken down. But among the mission, the attack, and having to report to the Hokage before going home, Neji felt like he had been training with Gai-sensei and Lee for two days without a moment's rest. It wasn't a pleasant feeling.

The gates opened before he got there, and Neji blinked in surprise. Hinata stood framed by the two tall wooden frames, her face pale, eyes wide. "Have you been to the hospital?" she demanded.

He had never seen his usually timid, shy cousin so vehement before. "No, Lady Hinata," he said. "It was deemed unnecessary for both me and Lee by Lady Fifth. Why?" He glanced down at his clothes, but the only bloodstains he could see were those of the enemy, not his own. Did he really look that awful?

"I've been waiting for hours for you to come back." Ignoring his protests, Hinata closed the gates behind her, grasped his arm, and spun him around to guide him back in the direction from which he'd come. "I'm surprised Lady Tsunade did not tell you."

"Tell me what?" Several things flashed through his mind. Was Hiashi or Hanabi hurt? It obviously wasn't Hinata, though she was acting rather strangely. Or maybe it was Gai-sensei … but if that were the case, why wouldn't the Hokage have told Lee, if not him?

Hinata shook her head, midnight hair flying because the motion was so vehement. "I cannot tell you," she said. "This, you must see for yourself."

"Is it-?"

"I told you, Neji, you have to see before I can tell you anything."

Unease prickled along the back of his neck and made him feel a little sick to his stomach. "Did someone die?" He couldn't help it, he had to keep digging to find some sort of explanation about what was going on.

Sighing, his cousin shook her head again. "No, no one's dead." The unspoken yet hovered heavily in the air between them, making Neji's hand clench into a fist. He wished the hospital were closer, because it felt like they were taking forever to get there.

When they finally arrived, Neji immediately noticed the way people stared at the two of them and whispered quietly as they walked past. As members of the Hyuuga clan, they were often noticed and talked about, but something about this situation seemed different, making him even more uneasy than before.

Hinata seemed to know exactly where she was going. Without looking to the left or right, she passed up all the whispering nurses and med-nin on duty, only turning aside when they reached a certain door. Room number 9, his mind immediately noted, just in case further reference was required.

Placing her hand on the door handle, Hinata paused and looked up at him solemnly. "It is not as bad as it looks," she said softly. Then she pushed open the door, stepped back, bowed her head, and motioned for him to precede her into the room.

The first thing Neji saw was his uncle, but instead of him lying on the bed like expected, he was seated in the chair next to the bed. Hiashi turned when he heard the door open, gaze shifting from his daughter to his nephew. His pale eyes narrowed, and he turned back to the bed, deliberately drawing Neji's attention in that direction.

Neji knew the second his eyes landed on her that it was Tenten, but it took a few more moments for his mind to catch up and accept the fact. Naturally he had seen her with her hair down before during their seven months of marriage, but he had never seen her look so still, so pale, so close to dead it was terrifying.

"What…?" When he and Lee had left, she had just come back from a mission, and been told that she would have some downtime before her next one. Had some sort of emergency situation arisen, and she been sent on another mission before she was ready?

Hiashi stood so he could back away, allowing Neji to come up right next to the bed. He barely remembered to nod respectfully to his uncle before he turned his full attention to Tenten. The ends of four or five bandages peeked above the neck of her hospital-issue pajama top, and the lumps of several more were evident beneath the blankets. Even while unconscious, her features looked pinched with pain.

Neji spun back to his cousin, finding himself unable to look at his wife any longer and afraid to touch her for fear she'd break because she looked so fragile. "Now can you tell me what happened?" he asked, voice sharper than he'd intended it to be.

Raising a hand to still his daughter and calm his nephew, Hiashi stepped forward again. "It happened late last night. Someone made it past the guards, into the house, sneaking past all of us to your and Tenten's apartments. We've tried to piece what we know together as best we can, and we think that Tenten was stabbed several times before she was able to defend herself against further attack. By the time the commotion was heard and help arrived, she had already managed to kill her would-be murderer, but she was very close to death herself."

Hinata timidly leaned around her father. "It took Lady Tsunade, Sakura, and Shizune combined to save her," she whispered. Her earlier confidence seemed to have mostly vanished, if her fidgeting fingers and shifty eyes were any indication.

Neji was very glad there was a chair right behind him, because his legs didn't seem to want to support him any longer. He landed with a thump that shuddered up his spine, shock making his mind go blank except for one thought. This is my fault. If I had been there… It should be me lying there, not her.

"We're still not sure who the assassin was, where he came from, or the reason he was sent to kill Tenten," Hiashi continued softly. "I asked Hinata to meet you at the gate to bring you here so you wouldn't go to your apartments and see - well, see all the blood. I also asked the Lady Hokage not to say anything, because I knew you should see her before anything was explained to you."

Unable to speak past the knot in his throat, Neji nodded once, thankfully. At last he turned back to Tenten, seeing all of her injuries in a new light. Now the wounds on her arms - a bruise here, a shallow cut there - made sense. He had only vaguely noticed them before, since he had been so drawn by the bandages. They were defensive wounds, where she had been trying to protect herself from further injury while she tried to kill her attacker.

"We might never know where the man was from, or who he was," Hiashi said softly. "But he is dead now, and both you and Tenten are fine. That is what matters most."

Neji closed his eyes, amazed by the change in his uncle. Hiashi had seemed unmoved at best when Neji and Tenten had announced their engagement, and almost bored at their wedding. But now he seemed truly concerned about Tenten, and had even been keeping watch over her himself when Neji arrived. "Thank you, Uncle," he whispered.

Hiashi's hand closed over Neji's shoulder and squeezed once, briefly - the strong and reassuring grip of a fellow shinobi. "Come, Hinata," he said softly. "I think Neji needs to be alone with Tenten right now."

He watched out of the corner of his eye until the door closed behind his uncle and cousin, then turned back to Tenten. For a moment he just watched her, wishing she would move, or open her eyes, or speak - anything to reassure him that she was going to be all right. "I'm so sorry I wasn't here," he said at length. "If I had been…" If I had been, it would be me lying there, as it should be.

Tenten didn't reply, just as he knew she wouldn't. Letting out his breath in a long sigh, he finally gathered enough courage to slide one hand under hers, cradle it in both of his, and lift it to his mouth so he could press a gentle kiss to her fingers. Her skin felt cool but not cold, which gave him hope.

For a long time he sat still and watched her face, waiting for the first hints that she might be waking up. While he waited, he swallowed back his simmering anger, halfway wishing Tenten hadn't killed the intruder so he could do it himself in retribution. In hindsight, perhaps it was a good thing the man was already dead. Neji would have made his death very slow and painful, and that, undoubtedly, would have been frowned upon. Severely.

Outside the window in Tenten's room, the last rays of the sunlight vanished, swallowed up by the darkness of night. Neji felt the stresses of his mission just past catching up to him, as well as his anxiety for his wife. Exhaustion tugged at his eyelids, and despite how hard the fought, it didn't take long for his head to drop onto the bed next to his and Tenten's joined hands and fall asleep.

She had sensed something, someone, with malicious intent approaching a mere second before the first explosion of pain had burst through her stomach, dragging her out of her sound sleep. It had taken her the span of two more rapid slashes of the kunai to fight past residual sleep and the pain to realize what was happening, find her own weapon, and fight back. Interspersed with these events came the strange impression that she was not the attacker's intended target…

The next thing she remembered was seeing red everywhere, and the body of her attacker lying next to her on the ground, her own kunai sticking out of his chest, having just pierced his heart. His was still sticking out of her chest, dangerously close to her own heart. Then came the shouting, and after that … darkness.

Awareness drifted toward and away from her from then on like an elusive wind. Every now and then she would become aware of the sharp pains saturating her stomach and chest; then they would fade away, and the darkness would consume her again. Through it all, she clung to the mental image of Neji she kept in the forefront of her mind when he wasn't with her, using it as a talisman to fight back the pain and the consuming darkness she instinctively knew meant eternal sleep. She had to live, she had to come back to Neji…

Eventually the almost overwhelming pain faded into a manageable ache, and she became aware of someone speaking to her. At first she thought it was Neji, but the voice was deeper, harsher and more commanding than her husband's. Even though she couldn't quite place it, the voice gave her something tangible to focus on, so she listened, despite the fact that she couldn't seem to make herself wake and respond the way she wanted.

At long last the voice and presence she had been waiting for arrived. Neji, Neji, Neji… She wanted to reach out to him, to say something to him, to do something, anything, to let him know she was all right. He spoke, and though his words were as unintelligible as the other familiar yet unidentifiable man's had been, his voice was tired and rough, heavy with concern. I'm all right, Neji. She wanted to say it, but she just couldn't seem to make her mind and her voice work together, or to get her eyes to open or her hand to move. She was trapped, and it made her want to scream.

Finally, finally, what she'd yearned for happened. She felt Neji's hands close around hers, his lips brush the backs of her fingers. His warm touch chased away the invasive coldness that had been hanging over her, and she focused on trying to get her fingers to curl, to respond to his touch in kind. They refused to obey, but she tried to console herself with the knowledge that Neji was there, he was all right, he was touching her so everything was okay now.

It was a shock when Tenten finally realized that her eyes were open, and the silver-softened darkness she was seeing wasn't in her mind, but instead a hospital room. She blinked sluggishly for a few moments, accustoming herself to consciousness, before rolling her head to the side on her pillow and looking at the man sitting in the chair next to her bed, head resting next to their joined hands on the mattress, eyes closed in sleep. His features were still pinched with worry, though, and she eased her hand out of his so she could brush her fingers across his cheek. "Neji," she whispered, voice hoarse with disuse. Shifting her hand to touch his hair, she tried again. "Neji."

He snapped upright abruptly, pale eyes almost glowing in the light of the moon. For a moment he looked around wildly, tensed as if expecting an attack. At last, his gaze landed on her, and he blinked. "Tenten!" Neji leaped to his feet, one hand grasping hers again as he placed his opposite arm along the pillow above her head so he could press a kiss to her forehead. He mumbled something she didn't catch, then buried his face in the crook of her neck and shoulder. "Tenten…"

Carefully shifting her other hand over her sore body, she placed it on his shoulder in an awkward kind of hug. "How long…?"

"I've been back for about two days," he said hoarsely. "You've been unconscious for three." Drawing back a bit, he shifted to sit on the edge of the bed, resting their joined hands on his leg as his thumb brushed soothingly across her knuckles.

Three days. Odd, it didn't seem like it had been that long. In other ways, though, she supposed it had felt like forever, so three days was a relatively short time compared to that. She opened her mouth to say something else, but the words immediately fled her mind when she saw that Neji's clothes were spattered with dried blood. "Neji!"

Seeing where her horrified gaze was focused, he looked down, then back up again quickly as he shook his head. "It's not mine," he reassured. "Lee and I ran into a renegade cell on our way back. I just … haven't gone home to change clothes."

"Or sleep, or eat, from the looks of you." Neji had always been athletically slim, but now he looked thin and pale, eyes slightly sunken and shadowed, cheekbones a little too prominent. Tenten fought back the drowsiness pulling at her, not wanting to sleep again now that she was finally awake. "You should … go home … for a while…"

"I'm not going home until you do." Neji set his jaw in that familiar stubborn way of his, eyes narrow. "You might still be in danger, and obviously none of the guards at Hyuuga House can be trusted to protect you."

"Don't blame them," Tenten whispered, finding it harder and harder to stay awake now. "Besides, he wasn't after me. He was after you…"

She remained conscious just long enough to see his eyes widen slightly in shock before she surrendered to healing sleep once again.

*~To Be Continued~*

Author's Note: Please don't kill me! I promise the next chapter will be the second half of this one (entitled Fixed). I've had this two-part piece in mind for a while, but I wanted to hammer out some more fine details before I started writing it. (And no, I promise Tenten is not dead - she's just asleep again, because let's face it, her body's suffered a lot of trauma recently, and she's on pain meds on top of that…) And I know I'm evil with the cliffhanger…and you're all going to hate me now. And this is the first prompt piece I've written that changes POV during the piece. I hope it didn't bother anyone… Thank you for reading, and I really hope you enjoyed it! I plan to have the next part up really soon.