Chapter Three: Window Shopping

Tenten was so thoroughly nervous that she did not mind that she had to cling to Neji like a fiancé. In fact, she was glad of the support for she feared that she would probably collapse without him. She had never been in any way comfortable in crowds, preferring any sort of social gathering to contain only her most immediate friends and acquaintances. Upon entering the ballroom on Neji's arm, she was struck by how large a number one-hundred was. It was only a shame that Kuma wasn't the drinking type because Tenten felt she could use a bracing shot of sake or perhaps a gin and tonic.

"It'll be alright," Neji whispered in her ear, appearing as though a lover whispering "sweet nothings" as poets put it. "Just stay with me."

Tenten nodded emphatically. "Can we just find a corner or something?"

Neji put a comforting arm around her. He knew Tenten did terribly with important crowds. He learned that the hard way when he had invited her to the Hyuga family reunion to keep him from going insane with all his annoying relatives. She had a major meltdown within fifteen minutes and not only had the crowd been half the size of this one, but she had also been on pleasant terms with most of them. Thankfully, Neji had still escaped his relatives by taking Tenten home but not without some emotional trauma.

They settled down in a pair of chairs by the windows. Unlike the furniture in Neji's room, these chairs were actually very comfortable. "These shoes suck ass," Tenten said. "They're pretty and all, but very impractical."

Neji nodded, surveying the crowd. Many eyes were turned toward them, several of which looked a bit worried. "Tenten," he said softly, "we're getting weird looks."

Tenten looked off towards where Neji was people watching and saw the worried eyes. "I think they're expecting us to be sucking face," she said matter-of-factly.

"Sucking face?" Neji echoed blankly.

"Kissing."

"Oh," he said uncomfortably. "I guess so…" They stared at each other and Neji cleared his throat awkwardly.

"You look more like you're going to eat me than kiss me," Tenten teased.

"Do not."

"Do too. You look like this," she said, twisting her face to look like a mad cannibal, however it was she presumed that mad cannibals appeared.

"Oh, shut up," Neji said, and to enforce the command he smashed his lips over hers so she couldn't utter a word. Their eyes closed and though they wore the skins of Kuma and Shou it was Tenten and Neji in their minds' eye.

They broke apart gasping.

"Damn, you're good," Tenten said at last. There was little more time for reflection as Artsuma Takeda appeared, placing his hand on Neji's shoulder with "fatherly" affection.

"Shou, my boy," he declared jovially, "you and your lovely fiancé must meet a new acquaintance of mine…"

Neji and Tenten followed after him quietly, barely listening to his incessant prattle. There was a new sense of easiness in the way Tenten leaned her head against Neji's shoulder and the way Neji curled his fingers around Tenten's hip. A few onlookers lost their worried countenances. The tension they had perceived in the couple at their arrival had melted away. Yet other eyes still looked upon them with a less than friendly glance.

The sun began to set and the light that entered the grand, sparkling white room was replaced with the dancing flames of nearly a thousand candles scattered about liberally. Neji and Tenten met Artsuma Takeda's new acquaintance—an equally wealthy man from the next town over named Yoshimoto or Yoshichiro or something like that—with polite indifference. The two were soon swept away onto the dance floor as a small orchestra began playing at one end of the hall.

The evening seemed to blur and they danced with identical grins plastered on their faces. Indeed few could have doubt that Neji and Tenten were engaged to be married.

Tenten's breathing was a little labored. "I'm tired." Neji nodded. "Not to mention, I'm starving like a—"

"I'm afraid of how that metaphor is going to end," Neji interrupted, knowing Tenten's preoccupation with all things morbid when she was particularly famished.

"Simile," she said.

"What?"

"That was a simile. Or the beginning of one anyway. You need to read more."

"Reading is for quitters," Neji said firmly.

"Gasp."

"Did you just say 'gasp'?"

"What if I did?"

"You argue too much. Just eat something, would you?"

Tenten rolled her eyes and approached the large array of food that had taken the kitchen staff the entire day to prepare. She had a hard time selecting, but she reasoned that she would have a great deal of time to eat like a queen on this mission and patience was, after all, a virtue. Neji laughed silently as he watched the mound on her plate grow to rival his own. She glared at him. "Jugdy McJudger."

Neji looked at her with alarm.

"That's right. I said it."

He shook his head and followed her to one of the elegant tables by the windows. Neji felt incredibly uneasy. He and Tenten had been thrown into very few situations in which they were supposed to know the people they were conversing with. Paranoid or not, he was suspicious of the lack of challenge in the evening. He doubted that Kuma and Shou ever spent an evening like this without being surrounded by people and he refused to chalk it up to people letting the engaged couple have as much "alone time' as possible.

Neji considered relating all this to Tenten, but he couldn't tell who was possibly listening to every word they said. Not to mention the mission was already putting Tenten under a great deal of stress due to its social complexities. It was not to say that Tenten was delicate. He was one of the fiercest women Neji knew (and he knew quite a few) and he held her in the highest esteem. Tenten was easily intimidated in social situations though, and at times Neji blamed himself for he was constantly a stand-offish cold fish.

He reached out and took Tenten's hand in his own and smiled reassuringly. Tenten smiled back and he could feel her grow less tense as she breathed deeply for a moment.

"Oops, sorry." Tenten blinked, realizing that a large, busty woman has spilled her glass of water all over the table cloth and onto the floor.

"Oh, it's fine," Tenten said. "I'll just get another—"

"Oh no, Lady Kuma, please take my glass." The woman hurried away before Tenten could refuse.

She looked over at Neji who shrugged. "Weird. Well, at least I don't have to get up now," Tenten said, sipping from the busty woman's glass. Neji nodded and gazed off into space as he often did when he had nothing else better to do.

There was a small door made of glass that blended well with the windows since they stretched all the way to the floor so that few people had noticed it. It led out into a pretty little garden that was normally kept in perfect shape by the staff of gardeners at Artsuma Takeda's command. Neji was one of the few people who had seen the well-camouflaged door. "It's a nice night," he said. "Would you like to go for a walk?"

"Think we're allowed?"

Neji smiled. "I don't see why not."

Tenten grinned. "I won't tell if you don't."

It was probably about mid-spring as far as Neji could guess. He didn't tend to keep proper track of time. The night air was fresh and pleasant. It was neither too hot nor too cold. Tenten held onto his arm in case they should run into anyone on their walk, but the chances of that were very slim.

Tenten sighed deeply. "Oh, Neji, how can you be so calm about this?" she asked, uttering his name very quietly.

"I know it's stressful for you," Neji replied, "but remember, you are a Konoha kunoichi, a jounin at that. You can do anything and it is duty to your village that drives you. It is this honor that drives all of us."

Tenten grinned. She was listening to Neji's "honor speech" which he usually delivered to his genin team when they did something silly and particularly as a motivational tool for his troublesome charge, Zei.

"I'm just glad you're here," Tenten told him. "I… I don't think I could pull this off with anyone else… I wouldn't want to…"

Neji stared at her as if trying to see past Kuma to the Tenten underneath. He felt a deep desire within him to cast aside the genjutsu and stand simply as Neji and Tenten, but logic tossed this idea by the wayside. Tenten's words seemed to linger in the air and in his mind. He needed to respond, but Neji could not think of any good words worth saying.

He stopped and took Tenten's face in his hands and Tenten realized he was contemplating kissing her. She panicked. "Neji, no one is watching us," she said. She hated herself for being afraid in that moment, but Neji was part of the illustrious Hyuga Clan, and even though he was a branch family, he was still expected to marry well, not a girl with no clan name to speak of. Therefore, not Tenten.

Neji felt the color rising in his cheeks as he surveyed her discomfort. He sighed and removed his hands. He didn't want to be the cause of her pain. Disappointment washed through him. "Sorry," he said softly. He could feel his heart breaking in his chest and wanted only to be alone, but his own words about honor and duty rang painfully in his head. "We should go back inside."

Tenten wanted to go drown herself in one of the fountains in the garden that filled the quiet night with their soft, bubbling gurgle. Instead, she linked her arm through Neji's again and replied, "Yes, I think you're right."

Time moved horribly slow. Neji and Tenten wished only for the night to end so they could each seek the safety and solitude of their own minds, but the guests showed no inclination towards leaving and the party no sign of ending.

"Sometimes I want to steal a lighter from a chain smoker and set things on fire," Tenten muttered to herself. She didn't realize that Neji had heard her.

"Pyro," he breathed.

Tenten turned red and tried not to glare at him. I wonder if I should just bail now and risk facing Tsunade-sama's wrath, she thought miserably. It couldn't possibly be worse than this. I can't imagine things getting worse.

Tenten was usually a quick study and tended to grasp most concepts with ease. But Tenten was also a human being and therefore prone to various faults and shortcomings. One of these faults was the inability to learn certain life lessons no matter how many times she paid for them. There were three life lessons that eluded her most frequently.

The first was that going drinking with Lee and Neji was a bad idea. She had the tattoo (or as Neji teasingly called it "the tramp stamp") to prove it.

The second lesson was that saying she could not accomplish something in front of Gai-sensei meant fulfilling one of his ludicrous, self-imposed rules.

The third and most important lesson to date was when she admitted that things could not possibly get any worse, they did. Always.

Neji and Tenten both knew that when a cold wind swept through the ballroom, extinguishing every last candle and eliciting screams from several of the guests who were faint of heart, that despite the shouted reassuring statements of Artsuma Takeda, something was horribly, horribly wrong.

Tenten's fingers fumbled wildly as she felt for the kunai and other bladed weapons that she had hidden in her sash as the maids left her room. The metal of the shuriken quickly warmed between her fingers.

An earsplitting crash of glass on tile echoed through the room as the windows shattered inward. People screamed, some in pain from the flying glass and some out of fear that they would suffer next.

Neji muttered "Byukagan" harshly amidst the chaos. The veins bulged out from his face and Tenten gripped his arm tightly. "What do you see?" she whispered in his ear. Her breath was hot on his neck.

"There are so many people I can't tell if any of them are to blame," he answered quietly.

"Neji—" But he never heard what she had to say. Someone in the panicking crowd crashed into them and drove them apart.

"Tenten!" he shouted, not caring who heard. Everyone was screaming anyway. Pansies.

"Damn, Hundred People," Tenten spat, shoving a person off of her. "Where is that man?" An unfamiliar hand gripped her arm. She twisted, but this wasn't the grip of a panicking partygoer. Tenten lashed out with her kunai. She was blinded by the darkness, but she could make a good guess as to where her assailant was.

Sure enough, she felt the kunai tear into flesh and heard a gasp of pain followed by a coarse man's voice muttering, "Damn bitch."

Another hand came out of the darkness and took hold of her other arm. Tenten felt herself struggling far too much as her kunai was forced out of her hand. Something wasn't right. She was a jounin. How could she already be tiring at a point when a genin would be sparking with indomitable energy? Something's draining me, she realized, trying to shake off her attackers.

"NEJI!" she screamed.

"Gag her, dammit," her first attacker said roughly.

"I have a better idea," the other replied.

Tenten tried to get her elbow into someone's gut as a rag was pressed over her face. What's that smell? Ammonia? Bleach? Whatever the fuck that chemical is that they use to make you pass—Tenten went unconscious.

Neji miraculously had heard her scream. He ran, shoving over everyone who stood in his way. Even in the dark, he could see a large black lump that look like maybe three people huddled together, moving quickly towards the windows, or what was left of them. "Stop!" he shouted.

One of them looked back and laughed as they ran out the windows. Neji followed, crunching broken glass into more fragments beneath his feet. It had started raining outside and water spattered across Neji's face. Tenten and her abductors were gone. Neji could find no sign of them anywhere. If Neji's heart had been broken before, now he was surely dead.

Author's Note: First of all, I'd like to thank everyone for waiting longer for Chapter Three while I went away on vacation, getting sunburns and remarkably tanner than my older brother (never happens). Speaking of my older brother, I would like to give some sort of credit to him. It's thanks to him that I get a lot of my jokes, so here's to my brother for being the best inspiration I could ask for. And so before I get emotional and rambling, I bid you adieu and ask that you leave a review, because it will probably bribe me to update faster (I never said I was a saint).