Aphenphosmphobia

: fear of being touched

Raido met him at the front gates of the Hidden Leaf Village looking pensive and vaguely uncooperative, like he might not report to Tsunade after this one or fill out the paperwork in proper format.

This cheered him for some reason and Neji managed a kind of grim smile as he drew near. The older jounin seemed apprehensive of this smile. He asked him seriously if he thought he needed anything else before they left, if there was anything at all he needed to do, people to talk to, equipment to grab, just anything to do. Neji's immediate thought was 'Get my affairs in order?' but realized he had no possessions of his own anyway and that was a moot point to antagonize over. He told Raido he was ready and they took off for the borders of the Fire Country.

Neji's mind was carefully blank, had been carefully blank all morning.

He couldn't face it yet; not without going stark raving mad.

This morning he'd woken up under the sakura tree in the garden, completely alone and feeling surprisingly well, almost as if someone had administered some kind of relaxant or sleeping jutsu. Refusing to think about it for the sake of keeping face, he got up and gathered all his fallen senbon needles, not bothering to touch the kunai scattered in the grass. They didn't belong to him and he didn't want them. He did pick up his forehead protector though, knotting it in place. (When he'd lost it, he couldn't recall.) His skin had the unpleasant stickiness that came with sweating profusely. He didn't remember doing so last night, so he presumed it had happened while he was unconscious, some side affect from…from…

Neji pushed thought away in favor of taking a shower.

In the hot water he experienced his first minor break down. The crash down as he thought of it. Where all those fragile lies you've been convincing yourself of – 'I'll be fine' 'It's not as bad as it seems' 'That didn't really happen' 'It was just a dream' – suddenly plummet all around you and there's nothing but the honest ugly truth:

Not only are you gonna die, you're gonna die crazy, kid.

It was a familiar kind of distress; he'd experienced it before on different missions. Realizing through no fault of his own the rest of his team had somehow been completely incapacitated. To finished the mission alone was basically suicide, but crucial to the survival of some fifty odd men women children. ('In the end weren't they all strangers?') In his time as a ninja Neji had come to realize while some deaths are better than others, there are really no glorious or dignified endings in the shinobi trade.

Usually there is just blood in the dark.

…or a smoldering black char mark. Those were popular too.

The sun was starting to dip into the fall of the mountains as they came toward the Shoumai River, one of the only physical borders between the Fire Country and that of the Sound. Neji pulled up sharply before they broke the tree line however, halting on a high branch. Raido turned around, having already leapt to the next tree. Neji could see something like apprehension in his gaze, a kind of painful determination.

He imagined some commands had been issued in this regard, should Neji attempt to run, he was probably under orders to incapacitate him and turn him over for Hinata. (It was a grace he was being handed over conscious at all.) Whether Raido would act upon those orders depended on his experience with breaking them. If he was anything like Guy, he would probably carry out the order for the greater good and beat the hell out of someone in retribution later. If he was anything like Naruto, he'd just try to talk him out of it... then beat him senseless.

Since he was Raido he waited.

(Briefly Neji wondered if he was the stronger ninja now, if he could really escape, but dismissed it as unnecessarily deviant.)

Neji didn't try to run. He reached behind his head and unknotted his forehead protector. Raido frowned, not commenting while the young jounin loosened the cloth and let the metal plate slide down over his eyes. Across his forehead he'd wrapped an extra black headband to replace the forehead protector, hiding the curse seal. The Hyuuga re-tied the cloth, higher and more tightly at the back of his head this time and lifted his face, now effectively blindfolded. He leapt to the next branch, landing neatly beside Raido who crouched down beside him and frowned out across the shining ribbon of water. He glanced up at his blinded companion. Neji ignored him.

"There a reason you did that?"

"Yes."

"A good reason?"

"Yes."

"Alright then."

The two hopped down to the grassy shore and began the slow process of walking toward the river. The method for this had been carefully instructed. Raido stood parallel to him some fifty meters off and they were to stop at the shore where Neji would proceed on foot from there. The river ran in a slow, steady current here, deep enough to be called a kind of fat pond, perfect for the task of walking across.

Neji quietly activated the Byakugan, the familiar tension at the corners of his eyes and behind the retina coming with a strange sense of both comfort and that guilty, excruciating feeling you got when you did something unforgivable. His eyes found their man immediately, a radiating pillar of chakra almost eclipsing the smaller, fainter figure of his cousin.

The familiar shape of her sent an immediate pang through his chest, then something dark through his gut. He nodded at a thicket of leafy trees across the way, indicating their position to his companion whose eyes flitted his way, indicating he understood. At fifty meters that might have been a bad signal for most partners, but he knew Neji's eyes very well, though blindfolded was a bit new to him.

The younger Hidden Leaf ninja stepped out onto the water just as the Sound ninja emerged from the copse, Hinata walking in front of him. She seemed unhurt, her hands bound behind her, with what looked like a paper Chakra Seal stuck to her jacket front. That explained the faintness to her aura. Neji started out across the water. Hinata's eyes, unexpectedly narrowed and determined as she emerged, suddenly grew round and frightened at the sight of her cousin on the water.

Neji stopped less than halfway across the river, his eyes having already told him no traps waited. The pattern against a water jutsu was already bright in his mind.

"Send Hinata across," Raido shouted. "Neji's not going any farther until she gets in the water too."

The Sound ninja wore an ANBU mask and otherwise innocuous traveling gear, similar to the green vest and equipment Raido himself wore. He considered this shortly then pushed Hinata forward, saying something quietly to her that made her say something equally soft. The man laughed, shoulders shaking and she turned away angrily, face a mask of pain as she looked toward Neji. So they had told her the nature of this trade, her for him. He could see it in every line of her body, the horror of what was about to happen mingled with the fear for her own life at stake. This trade off, the privilege of life she'd never asked for.

'It's not about asking,' Neji thought abstractly.

She stepped hesitantly onto the water, swallowing convulsively. Her steps were shaky as she set out across surface, ten meters to his left and started crossing the river. When she reached the same place as he, Neji started across again, meaning to meet her halfway and pass her there. She was looking at him, staring at him so hard that he felt his own gaze slide to her of it own volition.

Something crossed her face, a terrible, tormented expression and she suddenly darted off course, running at him, rather than toward Raido. He instinctively flicked three throwing needles between his fingers, gaze darting to the Sound ninja on the shore. Raido was also tense, hands up for a teleportation jutsu. But the enemy ninja didn't seem concerned. He just watched.

Neji stowed the needles and instead ran to meet his cousin catching her as she stumbled slightly running into him. She buried her face in his shoulder and Neji felt himself fight the recoil, begging – 'Please, please don't let her notice, don't let her sense it. Please! Don't let her find out…' – Hot tears dampened the shoulder of his shirt, seeping through his robes.

"No!" she sobbed. "You weren't supposed to come!" He pulled a kunai from his sleeve and cut the ropes on her wrists. Calloused hands (not the hands of a proper Hyuuga aristocrat, rough and scarred by puppy teeth and shuriken) seized the folds of heavy cloth at his neck, shaking him without conviction. He didn't dare move to stop her (his hands were unconsciously burning up) until she spent her anger and flung her arms around him, hugging him tightly and crying into his neck. "I told you I didn't want you to! Neji! I don't want you to take my place, you…you…"

She fumbled for harsh words and couldn't find any.

She preferred to dissolve into incomprehensible weeping instead. Neji wrapped his arms around her shoulders and placed his chin on top of her head. Even as he held her, his entire body reacted, adrenaline shooting through his brain, suffusing every vein with shivery awareness. His middle seized up, he had to repress the reflexive tension that laced his arms with the conditioned reaction, ingrained, trained, branded into his synaptic reflexes – 'No! Stop! Just focus!' His breathing was getting fast and shallow, like his throat had begun to close, his extremities going cold. Paper birds fluttered through his stomach, origami edges scraping and pushing inside. He squeezed her and pretended he was doing it to comfort her.

"I'm sorry."

She wept harder. "Why?"

He didn't have the nerve to tell her. "You've got to go, Hinata-sama." He pulled back.

The girl snatched his hand before he could get away. "You stopped calling me that."

"You've got to go."

'Just get away from me. Please…don't touch me. Not right now, not while I'm like this, like this…'

She clutched his wrist. "Neji!"

The Sound ninja stirred finally. "Hinata-sama," he called formally, almost sincere. "I told you the nature of the poison, you don't have time to exchange tears with your dear cousin."

Neji spun on her, perversely thankful for an excuse. "Poison?"

"Tsunade is the only one who can cure me," she whispered. Her hands tightened painfully around his, glistening tracks running down her flushed cheeks. "I have until tomorrow morning. I have…to hurry." She gripped his hands like she could save him by just holding them. "Neji…Please. You're m-my cousin. Please don't…"

"You have to go," he said urgently, spinning her toward Raido before she could tempt him. He couldn't let her waste time apologizing and trying to talk him out of this. She had to get to the Hidden Leaf; now. Neji pushed her, stepping back toward the opposite shore where Orochimaru's subordinate stood waiting. Raido darted into the river, catching her arm and tugging her back. Her face swung back to him, torn and afraid. He softened his face for her sake, though he wasn't sure if she could make it out through his blindfold. "Go. I'll join you after."

Raido scooped the girl up, glancing at Neji. He nodded once and took off. Before he fluttered out of view Hinata's face over his shoulder contorted in despair, her hand extending toward him, then they were gone. Neji felt his comrade's presence and that of his cousin fading toward the Hidden Leaf. Relieved he turned back to the opposite side of the river. He wasn't exactly sure why he was relieved, he'd like to think for the sake of his humanity it was the joy of seeing his cousin safe…mostly he was just too scared to look her in the face.

"You know," the masked shinobi said calmly. "Lady Hinata was adamant that you would not come. That you were too valuable to be traded in for her…even while I gave her the poison she was certain." He pretended to pause. "Perhaps she over-estimates your worth, Neji-kun?"

Neji turned on him. "I'm planning on breakfast at home tomorrow. Let's make this fast."

He flicked four readied senbon needles into his hands and flung them, whistling with their speed. The man dodged them narrowly and landed on the water some feet away, chakra flaring at his feet to hold him on the water's surface. He seemed to consider the best way to come at the younger fighter. Tilting his head, the ANBU mask revealed nothing.

Knowing he had seconds, Neji dropped to a crouch, spreading his palms against the river's surface and leaking his chakra into the water like an iridescent dye. His hands flew through a series of seals and with a flare of chakra, the river suddenly burst into a cloud of thick mist, rolling out in a creamy mushroom front of vapor across the water. Smokescreen in place, Neji waited for his opponent, Byakugan piercing the fog.

'There.'

Neji hurdled three senbon needles into the mist, unblinking. Two hit home in the right shoulder, one striking the paralyzing pressure point, the third needle having struck the dead centre of his mask's forehead. There was a broken noise of startled pain and the crack of plaster. The clay disguise shattered, sliding from his dripping features and revealing the pale face of the man really beneath it. His eyes were a plain hazel color and his hair tarnished silver, but that was just distinctive enough for Neji.

Yakushi Kabuto: BINGO Book bounty-head and spy extraordinaire.

'Dammit.'

"You're not bad with water jutsu." The traitor hissed softly between his teeth, sliding the two needles free of his limp arm, paralyzed and unreactive. "But a thin mist and elementary element manipulation isn't quite up to par, I'm afraid."

Intent on the damage, Neji ignored the dig and pulled two more needles from the cache in his black waistband. He snapped out of perception, molding chakra to boost him through space in a blinking and hurled the second round of needles, both taking his unwary opponent in the throat and he went down on the water. The Leaf-nin landed some twenty meters way, puzzled and uncertain because dead and dying people looked differently than Kabuto did just then.

Neji felt something was wrong.

He hadn't even tried to dodge those.

Falling back to a safe distance, he wondered if he should use some chakra to power his senbon needles. In theory he could knockout sections of the chakra system that way. Kabuto was getting to his feet. He didn't look mortally wounded. Then he started pulling needles out with a kind of cool professional method, tossing them into the water at his feet where they sank. Blood spurted briefly from his neck, having punctured a major artery. Plain hazel eyes studied the blood with the unconcern of a medical-nin in battle.

Angrily, Neji recognized the technique even as it healed the wounded flesh, knitting over with new skin. This was going to make killing him a whole lot harder than he had the patience or the mental capacity for.

'End this now!' an impatient part of him snarled. 'You cannot drag this out! Kill him and run!'

Kabuto smirked, straightening his glasses with his newly healed right arm. "Hmm… This shinjutsu stuff is impressive, but it won't work on a medical-nin, not even one of those fatal blows you've been trying all this time. Your aim is impeccable, by the way." His eyes flickered. "But you'll have to do better, Neji-kun. Much better."

Kabuto smirked and his hands flew through a blinding pattern of hand signs. Neji gritted his teeth. He was moving faster now, he couldn't waste any time. Neji cut to the left, one hard step and shot across the water, blurring…and the liquid gave under him. Neji gasped, sliding, unable to get his chakra to adjust fast enough as Kabuto's second jutsu took affect, the water leaping out of the river and seizing the young jounin, tugging him hard under the water.

The world became a muted, blurry spectrum for an instant, the Byakugan struggling to adjust. The water pressed in on him, roaring in his ears as all sound waves did through liquid, crushing in on his chest. Then he could see the bottom of his opponent clearly overhead, as if standing on air. His hands were going through a foreign kind of seal.

Neji turned over underwater and kicked for the surface. Kabuto slapped his hand down on the water, ripples radiating from his palm which glowed greenly and chakra blazed across the top. Neji's hands met a barrier, slippery and elastic, spread across the entirely of the river. Byakugan revealed chakra blanketing the water, making it solidify. He crouched against the strange water-skin, inverted, and stabbed it quickly with a kunai but it didn't cut. Slashing furiously at it, the blade failed to get purchase enough to slice. Overhead, Kabuto was just watching him, smiling in a truly frightening manner. He made a cutting gesture across his throat and shrugged. He mouthed silently at the sub-merged Hyuuga.

'You need more training.'

Neji could not believe the amount of ninjutsu this man knew; he used at least three in a row that Neji had absolutely no idea what the hell they were.

He was running out of breath. The rogue medical-nin was waiting for him to drown, once he lost consciousness, he'd pull him out and revive him. 'That's what you hope, coward!' Neji refused to let that happen. The kunai in his hands blazed, his chakra gathering in the metal, igniting it until the water boiled around it. He drew back and sliced the thin membrane open like a veil and the jutsu dissolved, allowing him to hurl the kunai at his frowning opponent. Kabuto lunged away as Neji pulled himself out of the water. Long hair sopping wet, clothes saturated, the teenager darted across the river.

Kabuto met him and Neji swung out to the right, striking at the man's left. Kabuto swept the blow away, letting the burst of chakra miss by inches, before swiping at the smaller ninja. He ducked neatly under the hook and pummeled a series of pressure points across his opponent's ribs. Neji slammed both hands hard against the ribs of his opponent, chakra tearing through the inner cavity of Kabuto's ribcage. The man was blasted back, sliding across the water as he managed to remain standing, though, not for long, Neji imagined. He'd blown out two major valves in the heart and collapsed part of his opponent's left lung.

Kabuto chuckled and shook water from his hair.

He didn't look dead. This annoyed the Hyuuga.

"Well, well. You're quite something aren't you?" he said with far more breath than deserving for a man with half a lung. Neji threw two needles, sharp and fast, spitting chakra and punctured two more chakra points, blood spurting. The missing-nin looked annoyed, but he did not drop. Neji decided to stop throwing his senbon needles as he was obviously wasting them miserably. "Well. I expected nothing less from the Hyuuga's prodigy. But tell me, before we go on, has anyone in your clan ever told you that your form for Juuken is atrociously bad? Really, it's amazing you hit anything at all."

And because he has a reputation to uphold, Neji flew into a furious Sixty-Four Strike. Kabuto, standing innocuously in range for the last couple sentences, threw his arms across his body to shield himself, but it was a half-hearted effort.

Neji slammed the first Two-Strike into his opponent's ribs so hard, the chakra ruptured something inside. He didn't stop; he kept on him, the Four-Strike, Eight-Strike, and Sixteen-Strike. Blood splattered the water, dissolving into the river's greenish current. Thirty-Two-Strike came in a blurred one-handed attack that took the Sound ninja all across the solar plexus. Kabuto was struggling backwards, his breathing a ragged sound, wet and wounded. Neji unleashed the last sixty-four strikes all centrally across his entire chest, sealing all chakra flow completely and the last blow he threw like a punch, the heel of his hand crashing into Kabuto's jaw. He felt it give.

Inwardly he smirked.

'Tell me my form is bad now.'

He went down hard, vanishing underwater and sinking out of sight, though the Byakugan continued to follow the man's coil system, throbbing faintly beneath the river's surface. Neji waited. His opponent emerged from the far shore, gasping raggedly and pulled himself up on the shore, coughing blood and river water. The damage was done, without chakra he couldn't possibly heal himself. Kabuto coughed, vomiting blood and lifted his face to look at the Leaf ninja. His glasses had been washed away in the second submersion and his eyes glowed a sickening reddish color. He smiled again, that twisted, fettered smile that alluded to some form of insanity, albeit a very clever insanity.

"Very good, Hyuuga-san." Blood poured over his lips and he had to stop, spitting it out. "It's something to work with."

He didn't even seem fazed. (If anything Neji felt as if the medic had taken those hits.) He was tempted to say something to the affect of 'You're shit and I'm leaving' but refrained. Talking was something he'd stopped doing when it came to enemies, as it wasted time and his energy and it was more than obvious Kabuto wasn't the kind to fall prey to any words. Besides, that was more of Naruto/Kiba thing. Instead he turned his back on the man and walked right back across the river onto the shore. He glanced back over his shoulder. Not once had he actually set foot in the Land of Sound. He smirked. That was reply enough. Kabuto smiled back at him, coughed once and climbed slowly to his feet.

"Kabuto," a new voice said coldly. Neji stopped. The cant and tone of the words were familiar, though somewhat deeper since their last meeting, mature and unruffled. "That was quite a mistake, inviting him to fight so close. If you hadn't already gathered chakra in your organs, you wouldn't have been able to regenerate."

Kabuto laughed. "I suppose so."

The Leaf ninja was irritated to see him capable of breathing, much less talking.

"Though…I hadn't anticipated…his arms? Did you see it?"

"You're babbling," the voice said, bored.

Neji turned, water dripping from his hair, soaked through his clothes, his blindfold still hanging across his eyes. Uchiha Sasuke leveled a familiar red-ringed stare at him, eyes a thin, angular shape. His features were slight, almost effeminate, but like his brother those eyes made him too terribly murderous, too hard to be mistaken for female. His style of dress had changed since he'd last seen his former Leaf ninja two years ago. He'd gotten taller, maybe taller than Neji himself, his hair still black and jagged, framing a cold, calculating expression.

He ignored his wounded ally, who was coughing hard next to him.

"Hyuuga Neji," he addressed him formally, though his hands rested idly on his hips, his posture relaxed. He was conversational. "I recognize you from the Chuunin Exams." Those eyes took him in lazily. "Hmm…you haven't changed much." There was sarcasm in that last word.

Neji narrowed his eyes, though his new enemy could not see.

Sasuke waved a hand to his eyes, tilting his head. "Your forehead protector's fallen. Did you know?"

"Your friends are still looking for you, you bastard," Neji said at last.

The young Uchiha regard Neji with a stare, exuding killer intent. For a moment Neji anticipated a sudden attack, his fingers curling up to pull another set of senbon needles from his sleeves. The wind hissed through the trees, making a soft rustling sound, like a muted roar all around them and the other teenager sighed, lifting hand to his forehead in exasperation. The arrogance was nothing new, but Neji hadn't like it when Sasuke was twelve and it sat with him far worse at age fifteen. Sasuke smiled, his hair flinging across his eyes.

"Your choice in words is quite a mistake on your part," he said mildly. "You were rude last time too."

Neji glared. "Why would I be polite to you?" Said like 'dog-shit'.

Sasuke looked puzzled for a moment, gazing at the Hyuuga with wide crimson eyes. Then he merely shook his head. "I guess most people are polite to their betters."

For a moment Neji relished the thought of putting a not so Gentle Fist through the other boy's face. Above all he wanted to blame the rogue ninja, blame him for the horrible things that happened to him over these past seventy-two hours. If not for Sasuke, he could have at least come here and saved his cousin with a clear conscience, rather than looking at her and feeling the unfriendly need to vomit, or maybe pitch himself screaming to the ground. He seethed. It was a small, but consistent pattern: so far he hated every Uchiha he'd met.

"I don't see any," Neji retorted. His head ached too much to be original with his words.

"It's because you've got that blindfold on, Hyuuga."

"I'm leaving. If you try to stop me I'm going to fight you. Then I'll kill you."

Another cold, unfeeling look. "Let you go?" Sasuke leapt easily across the river, landing neatly on the grassy shore only thirty meters off, out of range for a Juuken technique. He gazed emotionlessly at the Leaf ninja. "You're misunderstanding. You're whole purpose here is to fight me, not Kabuto. Besides, I've always wanted to see what a Byakugan can do. I'll try not to mangle your face too badly. Kabuto will want to study your eyes, I'm sure."

"That you were ever a Hidden Leaf ninja is repulsive," Neji snapped.

Sasuke reached behind him and meticulously unsheathed a wicked black sword, thin and glittering mutely in the cool sunlight. His expression had taken on that emotionless slack, eyes lidded, mouth bland, no facial muscles bothering to move. He spun the blade expertly and leveled it at the young jounin. "Orochimaru says to kill you if you don't put up a fight. So, for your sake, put up a fight."

Neji fingered the edge of a single senbon.

"I'm through talking," he said.

And threw the needle.

Author's Note:

Ha! More fighting! I'm probably stupid for having this many chapters be nothing but combat, but I so do love a good battle-scene. Next chapter: Byakugan vs Sharingan. I've wanted to write a scene like this for soooo damn long. Enjoy. Drop a comment. I love your feedback and complaints equally. (Lies, but I still appreciate my reviewers.)

Just to clarify, I am totally making up landmarks. Yes I am.