Fair warning, I rated this M because I curse and because this story isn't meant to shy away from harsh things. Be warned. This will be a slow burn romance Neji x OC. It will be long—sorry. That is all, now begone or read at your own pace.
Chapter 1:
"The Gift War Brings"
Waking up from chakra burn out is never a fun feeling. The sticky raw feeling running from the throat to the uterus bleeds into the system like peeled boils under a warm compress. Most shinobi make it out to be this blip on a grand scale, an inconvenience. Those bastards. A single slip of chakra from a fried system felt like hot coals exposed to half burnt flesh. In the world of shinobi, being tough only got you killed or left you haunted. A lot of them had been the perfect little soldiers, dying like they'd been taught to without so much as a look back.
Kairi hated that feeling. That moment when waking up meant the unbearable knowledge that you continued to breathe when others hadn't, and that nostalgically searing pain reminding you that maybe they got the easy way out. Idiots, all of them. Or maybe they weren't. They didn't have to live knowing their friends died horrifically, didn't have to bring home headbands because the bodies were too mangled to ID. Something dull stuttered under her ribs where her heart should be. It was frigid, stuttering, but it still there. Thumping in her chest. Her eyes creaked open.
It then occurred to the young woman that she should still be on the battlefield and not in bed. That a hospital room with clean walls, a neatly made bed, and daffodils at her bedside did not make logical sense. The world was ending. Her comrades were dead. Why in the fuck were there daffodils at the end of the world? What use were flowers and white walls now? What a joke.
She should have died. Should have fallen after pulling that Hyuga into the med tent. That would have at least brought her family honor. An Inuzuka saving a Hyuga, oh how the village would rejoice. Daffodils and lollipops for everyone. What a fucking joke.
Naruto would know how to make this funny, how to make this pale white room dance with colors that didn't exist yesterday but did now because he was funny that way. Kairi strained under her own weight then, pushing through the pads of her fingers into the plush underbed and heaving her torso forwards. Sitting up would help. Maybe if she was upright her head would be clear. Maybe sitting up would make it stop, make her want to die a little bit less.
It didn't.
It did, however, set off the triage alarm attached to the handrails on the bed. A nurse, a very plump nurse with a surprisingly sharp nose, came shuffling into the room.
"Ah, Inuzuka-san! I see you are finally awake."
Kairi stifled the urge to scream, "What was I hit with?"
"A poisonous compound with which we were unfamiliar. It took several days to flush it from your system, we were very luck it wasn't fatal, but it did quite a number on your chakra coils. May I examine you?" She was stepping closer with a caution Kairi hadn't know she wanted from the woman but was grateful she was giving. The slow steady steps, hands raised, with the woman's general plump appearance gave her an unassuming presence that lulled Kairi into compliance.
"Whatever you want boss lady" Kairi grumbled quietly. She allowed the green haired woman to examine her leg, the entry wound for the poison, before moving on to a general wellness check. Physically Kairi was fine. The wound on her mid-thigh would scar, a three-inch zinger that would remind her forever of the kunai she hadn't dodged in time. The bruises would fade fast now that her chakra was recuperating. The circulation of the energy always boosted the healing process over time. The mental scars, however, may never fade. Kairi knew they wouldn't. She still hadn't healed from her time as an active tracker nin let alone from the war they had just finished.
"Where's my ninken?" The woman worked fast, checking her vitals and nerve reactions thoroughly.
"He's been taken back to the Inuzuka compound for R&R, it seems they needed him to help drag some wagons off of the main road earlier yesterday morning. You've been out for almost eight days." She hummed thoughtfully before taking a step back and setting up a drip bag and IV line next to the bed. The woman then gave her a curt overview of the recent events within the week as she continued the examination, their victory and the heavy casualties included.
"We'll have to give you another flush before we let you leave but otherwise, you'll be out in a jiff. Kami willing there isn't any other prevailing damage, a lot of other folks are having a rough go at it" Kairi grunted in response. Of course they were having a rough go at it. It was a fucking WAR. People were dead. She'd had so much blood on her that it could have been paint.
They wouldn't do a psyche eval on her yet, they wouldn't have to until someone got seriously hurt or died because of her mental state. That was hard to prove. Even harder to prosecute. It was hard enough before the war for her to keep whatever this was at bay. She would have to be better about keeping it under wraps, trapping it and muzzling it before anyone noticed.
Sometimes Kairi wondered if it was a symptom of the Inuzuka DNA, the hyper-animalistic blood, passed onto the main line heirs like her and her cousin Kiba that made her feel like an animal trapped in human skin. Like she was an entirely other being forced into a too tight container. Sometimes it felt like there was something boiling just beneath the surface of her skin, waiting. And sometimes, just sometimes, it felt like it might just escape. As this woman pressed on Kairi's skin she wanted to tell her, to share the secret, I can feel my soul in my body and it feels wrong. The words never left her lips, Kairi's mouth remained tightly shut.
As far as Kairi had heard, none of her cousins had any idea what that felt like. Kiba, an idiot with a dick, had never been in heat before and was blissfully unaware of what being a female Inuzuka actually felt like. Hana even though she knew Kairi's pain couldn't grasp that too familiar feeling of being the wrong sized soul for your flesh mech. Full blooded Inuzuka, or close to it, have certain genetic traits. Specific traits were omitted from the public record. Everyone knows that Inuzuka clansmen speak to their ninken, that they have heightened senses of smell and hearing.
Genetic diversity in the pack had prevented the concentration of Inuzuka traits to accumulate for generations. Kairi was one of the first Inuzuka in a hundred of years to be born with green tinted hair, blue eyes, and bright red fangs clawed into her cheeks. Tsume knew what that meant, Kairi knew what that meant, but Kiba? Pfft. Kiba could lick his own ass and still wouldn't know what shit tasted like. Not that it would do him any good, he was a genius in his own way. He had his own brand of man that made him valuable, a friend, a brother, a son. So, Kairi lived. She lived long enough to find herself passively suicidal in a hospital room with a woman she was tempted to poke to see if she jiggled.
Kairi shuttered in a deep breath keeping the intrusive urge from moving her finger forward. More than once she had been caught checking the consistency of the people around her. This particular human being seemed to be gummy, like mochi. The sick fascination had landed her in more than one meeting with angry civilians. It wasn't a coping mechanism that had lent itself to subtly and had been discouraged by her superiors.
"When will I be cleared for discharge" Kairi said instead.
"This afternoon." The nurse said with certainty after picking up the chart tethered to the foot of Kairi's bed. "This IV should be through your system within the next two hours. Hang tight, an attending will be in to see you soon." With that the nurse smiled and dropped the chart with a clack, leaving Kairi in a bright white room with only her thoughts and the offensive sound of thick liquid dripping in a bag next to her bed. The shadows looming into the room the only indication that it was closer to noon.
14,728 drops later the bag was dry, Kairi was annoyed, and the room was still empty of the attending physician. At this point they could've mailed the damn discharge papers and I'd have gotten them already.
It took another hour and twenty-nine minutes on the dot for the attending to visit. He didn't even look at her before signing a paper, shoving it in her lap and telling her they needed the room for another person ASAP. Figures, only thing worse than a lawyer is a civilian doctor on overtime pay.
A couple of stumbles and haphazard shuffles around the hospital later, Kairi was a free woman. There would be the business of writing her mission report but as far as she knew that particular building was still under construction. Mission reports from chunin like her, admittable low on the totem pole, weren't necessarily needed at the moment. Not like they'd ever hunt her down for not finishing a report for a battle she was mostly unconscious for, right? Kairi shrugged on her freshly pressed chunin flak jacket and black uniform before signing out of the hospital. God, she hated hospitals. Smelled like antiseptic and murder.
They'd washed her uniform. Kairi sniffed her shirt, absently wondering what type of detergent the hospital used. She wasn't sure how she got back to Konoha, wasn't really sure what had happened entirely at all. The last thing she could clearly remember was a stupid man with an eerily beautiful face dying in her arms. He'd had long brown hair and rough fingers but Kami, he'd been beautiful.
Her legs drew numbly still and yet within her ears something rang. It hit her like a freight train halfway between shallow breaths. He was dead. He was a corpse somewhere in the Konoha graveyard and she missed him. She missed a man she knew nothing about, someone she had watched die. That was crazy. Absolutely insane right? She couldn't miss him. There was nothing Kairi knew about that Hyuga except that he was an idiot. A brave, dead, idiot. Maybe she did need a psyche eval.
Her fingers flexed and released. She pressed one fingertip into another, one by one, step by step. She continued to walk. If her hands continued their odd methodical pace and her steps seemed suspiciously spaced, no one said anything. Kairi would get through this. She could handle it. This time it would be better, had to be better. Kairi nodded, and wearily her feet took her back to her house on Inuzuka land, back to pack and home.