Why hello everyone. I am sorry I have not updated for a while [read: eternity] but I have been somewhat busy with all school and Euregatto [wonderful beta] had some computer troubles. As far as I know, the computer problems are fixed and high school is levelling out for a few weeks, so there will be faster updates for a while.

Anyway, here is the chapter, remember to review at the end. I really enjoy reading your reviews, even if you torch me.

Written by: 7ShadowsUnleashed
Beta-read by: Euregatto
Posted on: 10 February, 2014

Æ

Tenten

The way Shikamaru watched her – studying her with his narrowed, calculated eyes like she was a particularly interesting math problem – made her uneasy. No one, not even Neji with his byakugan, would scrutinize her with such a hollow, lifeless gaze. She knew Neji and Lee had gone out on their mission to retrieve Sasuke Uchiha, and Shikamaru had been the mission's chūnin leader. She knew they were in the hospital being cared for under the careful watch of Tsunade's team of expert healers.

She didn't know why he was looking at her like that.

Shikamaru's stare made questions paw at the edge of her mind with their hooked claws; questions she dreaded asking.

"If you're just going to stand there than you might as well say something," she snapped. "I can't practice with you staring at me like you want me to start on fire or something." She pointed at him with the blunt end of her staff. "Speak, no need to be shy."

Shikamaru leaned against a tree, hands in his pockets and eyes on the ground. "I'm sorry," was all he said, but it was enough to make Tenten drop the staff to the dust on the hard, unforgiving ground.

"Who died?"

Shikamaru's eyes remained stubbornly facing the dirt.

Tenten stormed over to the ninja and grabbed her junior by the shoulders. "Look here Deer-Boy," her mouth was close enough to his ear that she knew he would feel her heated breath on his face. If it made her look like a demon pulled straight from the dark abyss, all the better, let the stupid boy be scared. If it coerced him into admitting why he was standing there at the edge of the training, clearing observing like he did not want to be seen, then she would do anything for that information.

Almost anything.

There were only three people she could never harm.

What if Shikamaru had done something stupid? What if something had gone wrong? What if … what if …

She grabbed his arm and pulled it behind his back as far as she could without making him scream. Even so, his face was taught with pain, lips pressed tightly together.

"So," she began, "what happened on you mission?"

"We … failed," the Nara Clan heir whispered.

"Tell me about it."

"I will … if you let … me go."

Tenten released his arm. "Now tell me," she hissed.

"Ah, Tenten…" Shikamaru stammered. "You should probably sit down."

"Why?"

"Just trust me."

Tenten had never heard the younger shinobi use the tone he used now; it was deeper and more intuitive. She did not question him, instead sitting back on her heels with her staff – recovered from the dirt she had left it lying in when she had grabbed Shikamaru – lying across her knees.

Shikamaru was leaning against the tree again, his eyes once more fixed at his feet, arms crossed over his chest.

He's putting up a wall between the two of us, Tenten realised. She remembered what Neji had told Hinata during the chūnin exams: that putting your arms up in front of you was a reflex for those who were insecure, because it made them feel like there was a wall between them and their adversary.

What sort of news are you going to give me, Shikamaru? Why has it made you so afraid of me? I would never hurt you.

Then Shikamaru whispered the only two words that could ever make Tenten snap.

"Neji's dead."

Tenten felt like someone had turned up the world's volume. Everything was loud: the birds in the trees, that once sounded sweet and innocent, now sang their loud and cruel song directly into her ears, the raging clamour of other practice fields in use: the thunk, thunk, thunkthunkthunk of weapons, fists, and people hitting targets or the hard-packed dirt, even the pulse of her heart and lungs working in tandem to keep her body in motion.

She was aware now, more aware than she had been before, of how the world continuously moved, but she did not want to be. Clasping her hands over her ears to block out the white noise, she screamed and sank to her knees.

Shikamaru Nara

Tenten's scream was the worst thing he had ever heard. Jerked into action by her cries, he dropped to his knees beside the desperate kunoichi. He felt the piercing stares of other shinobi digging into his back.

He looked back at the small, worry-creased faces of the academy-level children and their instructor. "Forgive me," he told them, "something terrible happened to one of her team-mates and I had to break the news. Please ignore us and go back to what you were doing before. Practice is important." He considered telling the children that this was what happened when you didn't practice, but decided against it. They would hear the horror stories later in their education, or, rather, see it for themselves.

As the students moved off, bolder ones whispering to their instructor and more timid students gossiping among themselves, Shikamaru felt Tenten shifting beneath his hands as she re-collected herself.

"Nice to have you back," Shikamaru said. The surprise of Tenten's reaction was wearing off and his normal sarcastic self was making its appearance.

Tenten punched him in the shoulder.

Okay, maybe he should not have returned so soon.

"Where is he?" Tenten whispered, leaning against the tree with her knees pulled up to her chest and her face tipped down so her cocoa eyes were hidden in shadow.

"At the hospital."

"Can I see him?"

Shikamaru pondered her question, weighing the rights and wrongs, and then said, "Yes."

Tenten

She walked into the hospital with Shikamaru by her side. He took her wrist and led her first to Lee's room, where he and Master Guy sat talking wistfully between them. He looked at Tenten for a second before she nodded and knocked on the wooden door with her free hand.

"Master Guy? Lee? It's me." Idiot, she told herself, get a hold of yourself already.

She tried again. "I was wondering if we could go see Neji together … one last time together as a team."

The door swung open slowly with Lee standing on the other side of the threshold, his hands clenched tightly into fists by his side. "Let us go, Tenten." He held out his hand.

She stood confused, not even realising that Shikamaru had long since released her wrist and was now waiting at the end of the hall, looking as disinterested as he possibly could.

"Are you not going to take my hand, Tenten?" Lee asked, shaking her out of her dumbstruck state. Part of her was waiting for his usual comments about their youth and the opportunities it provided, but she knew it would be a long time before she heard such comments from Lee or their master. Youth no longer made their team feel invincible.

She took the offered hand, sweaty bandages and all, and Lee led her down the hall, down a staircase, and through a door on one side of the hall, to Neji.

He appeared peaceful, to be sleeping. It looked wrong, so wrong in her eyes, that his body should seem that way. It was as wrong as the lively sounds in the woods were wrong. Why did Konoha not mourn the loss of a genius? Why did her world continue to turn when its grounding factor lay dead before her?

Maybe the world thought he was sleeping, too.

She had never imagined what Neji would look like without the manji-like seal inscribed in his forehead. Maybe she never thought she would see him without the green marking, so she had shoved the thought from her mind? Now she stood and stared at the body before her, unable to connect it to her friend and team-mate.

He had been dressed in a long white robe tied with a thick black sash under his ribs, clothes she remembered his uncle and other Hyūga clansmen wearing. His hands were crossed over his stomach with care and precision: fingers gently interwoven and thumbs touching tip-to-tip some distance away.

Tenten fell to her knees and cried at her team-mate's death bed, all of her memories rising to the surface in a sudden flurry of images and sensations.

The team sitting together on a balcony the day they formed. Master Guy asking them what they wanted to do with the live's laid out before them. Lee wanted to prove that blood wasn't everything in the ninja world and Neji admonished him for it, reminding his over-exuberant team-mate that the boy had no ninjutsu, only under-developed taijutsu. Lee declared Neji to be his rival that day.

What of you rivalry now, Lee? Tenten wondered, tears dripping slowly down her face, leaving trails in the dust caked to her skin. She thought she had cried for them all before, but there were a few left to shed beside her friend instead of out in the forest with the Nara Clan boy looking on.

She remembered Neji sitting under her target meditating as Tenten threw her deadly kunai and shuriken centimetres above his head. Lee wondering if they had heard about the rookies in the Chūnin Exam. Of course they had, but it was probably just some Jōnin rivalry. The rookies would be out of their hair soon enough.

I wonder why you never wore your hair tied closer to you head again after that, Neji? Tenten wondered.

Neji verses Hinata … Tenten had been asleep for that fight, knocked-out by Temari.

Neji …

Why did it always come back to him: back to Neji?

Æ

Well, that was the chapter. I don't really have much to say ... wait, I have a question for you: who do you want to see? What other points-of-view do you think would be interesting? Come on now, don't be shy. Let's hear your voices, three hundred - odd viewers. Currently there is less than one review for every one hundred of you. How am I doing? Do you like the direction this story is taking or is there somewhere else it should go?

Well, that is all I have to say here, am I not pathetic today? I actually have a very, very good idea for the funeral, probably because I just went to my younger cousin's funeral last Saturday and sat through five or six speeches. Guy is going to sound interesting to say the least.

This chapter is dedicated to my younger cousin, Beau Thomas,

born and given into the arms of God on 30 January, 2014.

"Even though I never breathed your air or looked into your eyes does not mean I never 'was' ... and angel never dies."

- Author unknown