Every family has their dirty little secrets, things they try to hide. Hinata is ours. She is the rotten apple that hangs upon our family tree. Tarnished in every way. Our tree is strongly rooted and many shiny green apples hang yet there is Hinata, red and sweet. Not like the bitter, tart apples we Hyuga's are. She has always been that way since I can remember. Too kind, too delicate, so small and so weak. Like a porcelain doll. I see posters of her, apparently, she is missing. I don't care, its most likely for the best for the Hyuga family. That Inuzuka kid struck my face, insolent son of a bitch…literally. One day I'll get even.
-Neji.
Neji rolled up the scroll and locked it away. These were his memoirs, his journal entries, and his diary if you will. He went into the forest only be greeted by a poorly drawn picture of his cousin. He took his Kunai and stabbed it in the face of the picture. Little tremors of pain riddled his inner self.
"Damn you! I hate you! And yet…You torment me so!"
He hurriedly wiped away the salty tears that formed in his eyes. It would damage his image as a Hyuga and a man if anyone saw, so once again he let his pride sit there in his throat without swallowing it. He looked up at the stabbed picture and realized it looked like it was bleeding because of the sap running out of the tree and onto the paper. His little cousin, always so sweet and shy and well-mannered. A perfect example of a polished Hyuga on the outside but once you knew her, she wasn't what she seemed. Too timid, too weak, too breakable like a clay pot. Hinata wasn't heiress material, at least not in this household, not in their pupilless eyes. He removed the Kunai with great ease and swiftness then cleaned off the sap. His eyes met the picture once again and then his hands met the paper. His fingertips drummed along the surface of the now sticky paper.
"Damn you Hinata! Why did you have to go and run away like the idiot you are!? Why must you be so weak and trembling like a kicked puppy in a corner? Why do you make me feel conflicting feelings of love and hate? Admiration and disgrace? Why must you be the cure and the poison? To hell with you! I wish you would go die already and stop haunting me!"
He punched the picture and began to cry again. His pride didn't let the tears go very far. He regained composure and sighed.
'I will look for you. As unfitting as it is to whom I am, what I've become, I will find you. I will let Hiashi-oji-san take care of you in his own ways.'
Neji went off leaping from tree to tree with his Byakugan activated. He remembered something he had told his cousin not too long ago.
"Neji-nii-san why does that man act so grouchy?"
"He's old."
"A lot of people are old and don't act like that."
"A lot of people aren't him. Maybe he's really a nice guy and can't show it because something happened to him, maybe he feels like he has to act that way because his true nature is even worse. A lot of people do that, they don a mask to hide who they truly are. Now quit bothering me Hinata, I'm busy."
"Hai Neji-nii-san!"
Back then Hinata was still a nuisance but she didn't stutter like a broken record. It was about two years ago, back when Neji was starting to turn very much like Hiashi, a little before the hard-core training for Hinata started, before Hanabi was old enough to overpower her sister, before everything it seemed. Now, in the present, Neji was off to find his cousin, unbeknownst to everyone, and now he realized he too wore a mask to prevent Hinata to know he truly cared about her, despite all his stubbornness, pride, anger and discontent, and to put on a disguise so he was the best contender to pass on the blood line, and all his friends thought he was steely and frozen to the core and he was but deep down he could get scared and nervous and even worried about his teammates. Neji's mask was forever glued to his face until nobody could differ between the masked Neji and the real Neji, they were one and until Neji swallowed his mass of pride it would always and forever be there on his face, apparent only to him.