[Naruto] The Return 4/5
Title: The Return
Author: runespoor7
Rating: PG-13
Summary: In the middle of a war the usual thing is that people die. It's more unusual when they return alive after having been thought dead for three months. Hinata, after being a prisoner in Sound, does.
Notes: in this part: Temari, Neji. And, well, politics, but what else is new?
Part I
Part II
Part III
IV.
The trip from Suna to Konohagakure was expected to last three days. Three days, that was, when there was no war going on, and no enemies to fight and traps to avoid triggering and then to fight their way out of, no detour needed to pick other people up according to someone else's directives, no precautions to take, in a word, no Shikamaru.
Luckily Shikamaru knew the country as well as someone who'd spent a lot of time going back and forth between Wind and Fire during the past four years could (it was unanticipated, as he hadn't, actually, made the trip himself all that often, but she supposed his being a genius must have some uses), so instead of making every possible mistake, he'd have only made about two-thirds if she hadn't been there to put him back in line.
More or less.
Of course the guy was a genius, and not one of those arrogant prodigy-types that Temari had come to associate with the word "genius", when in all actuality they were rather intellectually average people who were just ninja prodigies. Key word, ninja. There was one such example in their group - he'd been the cause of one detour, as they'd had to get him from a particularly twisted war zone.
Shikamaru was a genuine true-to-IQ genius.
That meant he knew when to listen to Temari's plans, something which previously mentioned ninja prodigy didn't always do.
As Shikamaru's best friend Chouji had sensibly reminded after they'd gone through a close encounter following Hyuuga Neji's advice, the Byakugan wasn't an infallible weapon, even Neji's.
Neji's sudden paling had confirmed a lot of Temari's suspicions, best summed up by 'something was seriously wrong with the guy'. A quick glance at Shikamaru had been enough to make sure that he'd noticed too. Not that Temari thought he wouldn't; for a genius, his perceptiveness in human relations was commendable enough.
The trip - twenty-one days so far from Suna to some unmentionable yet all important little fort to Konoha at last, hopefully - involved a lot of technicalities.
At that moment, Temari hated technicalities. Technicalities reminded her of the reason she hadn't been promoted to chuunin on her first try, and four years had indeed passed since then, Temari just felt petty. And resentful. And fed up with, among others, the fucking technicalities. (Kankuro generally said she was 'aggressive', a bitch, and in need of anger-management therapy as badly as Gaara had ever been. Kankuro would have had one more occasion to start smirking if he'd seen her now. Kankuro was currently snuggly holed up in his comfy position on the Suna frontlines. Temari hated Kankuro with the fire of a thousand inextinguishable midday suns.)
Technicalities were the reason she had to negotiate and shuffle around, again, rather than just confer with Shikamaru and then face the rest of their oversized unit and go, 'this is the plan'.
Technically, Temari and Hyuuga Neji were the only jounins in the group, and it made everything a pain.
Usually Temari would get Shikamaru, they'd think a plan up, then they'd have a quickie, and one hour later they'd make sure that everyone had understood what role they had to play, what they were hoping to achieve, and what they should do in the case it didn't work out (Temari left the fine-tuning of that part to Shikamaru; he was terrific at shougi and way more patient with idiots than her).
Hyuuga Neji's presence not only put a serious rein on the sex -
- and dammit, it was even worse now that she'd got Shikamaru to admit the lack of sexual release was getting to him too. It wasn't everyday that he was the one slamming her against a tree, and to have him grouch in a strained tone that she please stop acting so suggestive, because it was distracting him and he needed his wits about him had been, well, both eye-opening and frustrating.
Eye-opening because, though she knew he wasn't exactly reluctant, she was always the one initiating sex, and it felt good to know that she had some effect on him even when she wasn't grinding against him with her hand down his pants - damn she needed to stop imagining how he'd feel, his short breath fluttering against her throat - right. Frustrating because the revelation had made her very hot and bothered, and the others had been less than two meters away, and all Temari had been able to think of was how she wanted to push him down right now.
Plus of course there had been her scoffing reply that she wasn't being suggestive. She was dirty, and tired, and so annoyed the only thing keeping her from throwing a hissy fit was that it wouldn't feel half as satisfying as the blessed silence she forced in her mind when she could stop the running commentary, and she was going to have Hyuuga Neji's eyes on a skewer.
(Temari had, in fact, rarely been in a state of such constant fury in her life. It was a testimony of Shikamaru's genius that he didn't ask if she was having her period. She hadn't been - which was a good thing, as it not only increased her bloodlust in a dramatic fashion and made her overly brisk and snappish, it also made her horny. Very, very, very horny. Which Shikamaru couldn't have failed to pick up with time, of course, so it explained why he hadn't asked.)
It was when Shikamaru had tersely replied that yes, he knew that. His fingers had been digging in her shoulders and Temari had realized then and there that he liked it.
Then she'd cursed the less-than-two-meters-between-them-and-the-others even more than before, as it felt like she'd never wanted anything more in her whole life than having sex with him just then.
The no-sex had obviously done something to her brain.
Okay, end of the digression. Hyuuga Neji's presence. Right.
It was a pain because as a jounin he threw everything off, and not merely the nice plan-then-sex pattern Temari and Shikamaru had had going, but also because technically, Shikamaru was only a chuunin.
It was the sort of technicalities that tended to fall by the wayside during wartimes, as time lacked to make things good and official, but the fact remained that Hyuuga Neji had been a jounin by the time he was fifteen, and that Shikamaru hadn't seemed to give the idea half a thought. It was one of those things that were pure Shikamaru, and which Temari didn't understand but shrugged off.
Once, Kankuro had been especially pissed at her because she'd made fun of the break-up between him and his former girlfriend, and he'd snarled that at least the ones he liked weren't lazy good-for-nothing asses who didn't have any higher aspirations in life than nailing the Kazekage's sister.
There had been silence, as Kankuro was fuming and waiting for Temari's retaliation, and Gaara was reviewing the situation and, maybe, the risk of her whatever-Shikamaru-was-to-her taking advantage of it. Or trying to wrap his literal mind around the metaphor. He'd got better with figures of speech, but he still wasn't going to become a purple prose writer any time soon.
She didn't know why, but she'd just shrugged and said she didn't get it either.
Temari had mixed feelings about Shikamaru's lack of ambitions, but mostly she thought he didn't need it to be a strategist mastermind and an efficient fighter and someone she wanted on her side. Sometimes it rattled, though.
Besides, aside from Neji, Temari knew the other people on her group; there was Shikamaru himself, his two teammates, and the twenty-six Sand-nins she was bringing to Konoha (they'd been thirty, but they'd left two at the place where they'd picked Neji up, as replacements; it wouldn't be enough), all of whom Temari had already worked with and knew well enough to rely on their skills and anticipate their weaknesses, but she had no such closeness with Neji.
Neji got on everyone's nerves.
…Neji, Temari noticed as she gave up on sleeping with a sigh, wasn't sleeping either - his blanket was folded next to his pack as if he'd only pulled it out.
She frowned, wondering what the crazy had invented next to put himself in danger as well as the rest of the group. Shikamaru hadn't been forthcoming with the details, but when they'd arrived to retrieve Neji as had been decided, he'd been taken aside by Aburame Shino, and Temari would have bet her fan it concerned the Hyuuga. She hadn't missed the way the Aburame's sunglasses had seemed to follow Neji when they were getting ready to leave.
Temari couldn't shake the feeling that she was responsible for the group. She couldn't let the carelessness of anyone jeopardize their security, even if that meant taking the other jounin down a few notches. And anyway, she was fed up with walking on eggshells.
Three of her chuunins were standing guard, the way she always instructed when she had to lead a large group - it was near impossible to catch three ninjas unaware at the same time, at least not unless there were card games or powerful genjutsu involved, and they were at war. There would be no card games.
When they saw her, one of them tapped his head, level with his eyes, signaling her about the Hyuuga. Temari nodded; if they'd seen him, then things were under control and she could slip away to find him.
She wouldn't go to sleep until she'd come to terms with Neji's presence.
She couldn't afford to let some unprofessional childish annoyance and some sense of loss of her-and-Shikamaru private time put them all at risk any longer.
(It was all the more infuriating because there were other couples in the group who weren't having sex either, and they seemed to be doing alright, even leaning one against the other for comfort. She and Shikamaru just didn't touch each other in public - even with the barest of brushes. It was their private business, dammit, and the sentimentality of the gesture rebuked Temari a lot.)
And if she could use the occasion to make a little more sense of what she'd gathered so far, then the lack of sleep would have been well-employed. (Another ninja would have taken one of the light sleeping pills that most of them carried in the prevision of rough nights, but Temari, after so many years with Gaara, found herself unable to. Better not sleep at all.)
Of course, Temari had some vague idea of what it was all about.
She'd heard about Hinata's death from Shikamaru's team; she'd been sorry for them, since it seemed to affect them a lot, but at the same time she wondered how it could be. It wasn't as if they'd ever been close. But then Temari herself had been oddly shaken by the news.
It was war and a shinobi's life was always dangerous, and Temari had hardly known Hinata from her visits to Konoha and a greeting here and there, but she'd been saddened nonetheless. Leaf-nins had a habit of growing on you when you were least expecting it.
Then the Aburame had told them Hinata was not, in fact, dead.
The Rookies were all supposed to be aware of it already, but the traveling group had missed the previous information points due to unforeseen problems within Temari's ranks - it had taken them a while to find the traitor, as neither Shikamaru nor she had wanted to murder an innocent just to be sure they'd get the culprit as well. Finally they'd realized the two suspects were accomplices.
Temari had felt rather annoyed that her heroic efforts to do the right thing and not follow her gut instinct - kill them both and be done with it - had been wasted on them.
The circumstances of Hinata's death had been pretty clear cut, but even then, it wasn't entirely unheard of that people sometimes unexpectedly turned up not to be dead after all. Temari had filled the blanks to understand that there was something big, and she'd have liked knowing what it was - if it was big, it was relevant.
It had to be big, for anyone to be allowed to go back to Konoha in the middle of the war for no better reason than that.
It had to be a Hyuuga thing, Temari deduced. Because the heir was unexpectedly alive, officially. Unofficially, it had to be a Hyuuga Neji thing - for him to return to the village when Hinata was only his cousin, and Shino was her teammate and he hadn't left the site he was assigned.
There were things in the Hyuuga, and particularly between Hyuuga Neji and his cousin, that made Temari's family look functional by comparison. And Temari was including the previous generation in that statement. At least after her uncle had been ordered by her father to kill her little brother, he hadn't become the latter's staunchest protector - and there'd been no freaky seal and ritual enslavement to the other branch of the family involved either.
Dang, Konoha as a whole was one of the better-adjusted Hidden villages, but its great clans more than made up for it.
She was at that point of her thoughts when she caught the reflection of the moonlight on a hitai-ate - she hadn't been trying to move too silently, so he'd know she wasn't an enemy sneaking up on him. He must've glanced her way. Neji had the Byakugan; he had no need to turn his head if he wanted to look at her, so she took it to mean he agreed on being found.
She was probably pushing it by translating it as a welcome, but she did anyway.
"It's not your turn to stand watch," she remarked as she sat down a meter away from him, because it was as good a way to start talking as anything else, and it was her responsibility that Neji didn't further alter the safety of the mission.
"I'm not standing guard."
Temari accepted that. There were nights, you couldn't sleep. If he wasn't straining himself beyond that, it was none of her business.
Silence fell upon them. Temari regretted she hadn't outlined the conversation.
If Shikamaru caught her like that, damn but would he smirk. She was used to scaring people into submission, and giving orders, and when she was in Konoha she had no trouble communicating with the Hokage, and the only times she had to be careful was when she and her brothers were having an unpleasant discussion, and she could deal with Gaara and could even make it with Kankuro without him refusing to speak to her for more than a few days.
She was trying to estimate whether confronting him head on would make him clam up as badly as she thought when his voice broke through her thoughts.
"You're really not the jealous type, are you?"
Temari blinked, then arched an eyebrow. What did that have to do with anything? …Also, she, not jealous?
Neji gave a jerk of his chin towards what could loosely be called a ninja camp.
"Ino," he added.
That again. She should have known.
Temari shrugged. "So I'm not."
"Most people in a long-distance relationship wouldn't be so comfortable if someone of the opposite sex was so close to their significant other."
His manner was too offhanded. Her eyes narrowed. There was something behind that. What, he was in a long-distance relationship himself and worried about his girlfriend? Would that truly be enough to throw his behavior off that badly?...
She opted for playing along.
"She's his teammate. She's known him since they're toddlers, and she doesn't register him as a male." Ino was probably more aware that Chouji was a boy - even if it was to remark on his eating habits. Of course the three of them were going to have things in common that Temari couldn't share. "And even if she did, I wouldn't much care one way or the other."
Unlike the amount of time Shikamaru chose to spend with his friends when she was in town. Even then, she agreed that it wasn't entirely a bad thing that they both had time to breathe and she could do what she'd been sent to do. It was annoying, but a necessary evil. Also, as far as friends-for-Shikamaru went, Temari would probably have picked Ino and Chouji if given a choice among the Rookies.
"You're not jealous, you're possessive." Neji looked thoughtful, as far Temari could interpret the expressions of a Hyuuga.
It sounded about right, but it still didn't make much sense in the general context. At least to her. Temari wondered if Neji knew what he was trying to get out of her, and debated whether it was worth trying to fish for more information. Probably not, it would only defeat the purpose of the discussion.
He was apparently trying to regroup.
Temari could only hope that he wouldn't pick at whatever was on his mind until it was a festering wound.
"How much longer until we reach Konoha?"
And that was another reason why Temari felt like the one in charge of the group; Neji never acted like he was the leader - or one of the leaders.
Occasionally he screwed things up on his own, as if he was fighting alone, but he never put authority behind what he did. He wasn't a leader in any sense of the word; even when he took a decision, it was as if he was merely making sure that everyone knew what was requested of them. It felt as though he was obeying someone else's orders.
Branch House of the Hyuuga.
"Another two days if we don't run into any more trouble," Temari answered, and if Kakashi's group had cleaned the area, she didn't add.
Neji turned his blank eyes toward her. "That's already what you said a week ago, you and Shikamaru. We were closer to Konoha than now."
They'd also been east of Konoha, whereas now they were southwest. Such were the hazards of shinobi wars.
"Helping Sai out of that ambush was necessary," Temari mechanically said, as if Neji's observation didn't border on the verge of treason, as if he wasn't right and it hadn't been most likely a loss of time, as if Temari hadn't cogitated long and hard before finally deciding that she couldn't spare any Sand-nins to help him reach Kakashi, as if the four days they'd spent escorting him and taking care of his pursuers hadn't glowed red in her mental calendar.
She'd reassured herself by reasoning that she was supposed to help Konoha, and that was what she was doing. Shikamaru hadn't stopped her, neither when she'd decided that they'd take the long way for Sai nor when she'd decided he had to go on alone. It wasn't exactly a comforting thought.
Need to disband the gloomy second-guessing now.
"Why are you so jumpy anyway?" she called, wrapping her arms around her knees. "If it's about your cousin, she's probably been sent off on active duty again. It's been a while since you received word about her, hasn't it?"
For a moment, Temari thought he wasn't going to answer.
"…Eleven days."
He sounded - strained, for lack of a stronger word. Temari quickly calculated that Hinata must have been back in Konoha for two weeks, adding the few days it must have taken the message to reach Neji's unreachable location.
Being out and working again was the best thing that could happen, then.
She addressed Neji a long, silent stare of incomprehension.
"It's about the Hyuuga."
Temari considered.
"Your cousin is the new head of clan?" she checked.
A snort escaped Neji's lips, almost bitter, then he got himself back under control, but his face stayed frozen in an air of utter self-possession.
Please, no. Let it not be about succession matters. No. He was supposed to have got better with the years; supposed to take his role as a protector as if it were his life, according to Shikamaru who couldn't be accused of needless melodrama.
On the rare occasions Temari had had to work with him in Konoha, he'd looked serene, like someone who'd made his peace with his lot in life - ironical since his discourse attested he no longer believed in fate, but Temari wasn't such a hypocrite that she'd point out private contradictions in other people. She had her fair share of them.
She remembered well his fight against his cousin during the prelims of her first chuunin exam, the beginning a little better than the end, when she'd been worried about Gaara's state. She had clear memories of Neji's cruelty when he spoke to Hinata, and she remembered thinking - dazzling like the white dunes glaring in the middle of the day - that the girl had to be mad to needle him the way she did. Temari had known what the wise course of action was because it was the same with Gaara; stand down before he takes any personal interest in whether you live or die.
But the girl had never surrendered, even when it was clear that she was fighting in vain, marking her as even crazier than the boy who later went against Gaara. And she'd survived, proving that she was even luckier than that Naruto kid with his farting attack.
Please let it be something else, she prayed.
Please let it not be that the most important member of the Branch House of the Hyuuga is jealous of the most likely chief of Konoha's premier clan. Please let it wait until we've won before the Hyuuga of Konoha shreds itself up from the inside. Please not in the middle of the war.
Please let her be reading too much into Neji's snort.
"If the council has anything to say about it, she won't be." It looked like he was staring at the sky. "That is the reason we have to hurry," he finished quietly.
Temari removed her arms from around her knees, stretched her legs, crossing her ankles, and shifted so her hands, slightly behind her, were supporting her. She steadily looked Neji over.
She was learning more about the Hyuuga clan politics than she'd ever hoped she would, and she'd be damned if she didn't take advantage of it.
"Care to explain?" Her voice, she noticed, had taken the tone she employed when her subordinates had blatantly screwed up.
Neji's look said that he realized she'd been very untactful, but he let it go. It told Temari that he was judging the situation dire enough to regard her as a potential ally.
A potential ally.
Oh, shit. Now she'd gone and got involved. If she backed out now, Neji would resent her, and Temari didn't know enough about the situation to guess whether he'd be in any position to retaliate later. He was a rising star in Konoha, the youngest jounin of his generation, a ninja prodigy by all accounts, as well as a Hyuuga, so Temari chose not to underestimate his potential influence.
Neji had seemed to sense her inner debate - Temari made a note to remember his analytical skills in the future - and had waited for her to reach a final decision, which meant that it'd be final.
Temari raised an eyebrow. "So?"
Oh yeah she was bragging. She was making what might possibly be her biggest mistake yet in her diplomatic career, with all the political repercussions it could have on the relations between their two villages - it'd have been paranoia if she'd been anyone but the Kazekage's sister and he'd been anyone else but the exceptionally prone-to-disproportionate-grudges Hyuuga genius. She was allowed a flash of hysteria, and damn if she couldn't brag to cover her nervousness.
Neji curtly nodded.
"Hinata-sama is only the head by default, because no-one else has a stronger or equal claim to the position as she does. It wouldn't take long for the elders to devise an excuse why she wouldn't be fit as the head."
"Isn't that what you think?" She refrained from adding he'd certainly made a fine job of looking the part.
She was taken aback by the glare he shot her.
"What I think doesn't matter. Hinata-sama is, by right, the head of the Hyuuga."
"…So that's the reason you support her claim, out of guilt and duty?"
Temari wondered if she was impressed, then decided on the negative. He was just the sort of stick-in-the-mud that'd waste his life for duty, rather than taking chances and making choices to change things the way he wanted. Once upon a time he'd been ready to waste his life for fate, and now what? She'd be nice and assume he wanted to shoulder the consequences of his actions.
It still smelled like guilt.
"Even if it were, it's my choice to make," he remarked, answering more her hidden contempt than her feigned skepticism.
Temari fleetingly wondered if he'd ever given a thought about a career in spying. Then she wondered how it would look if she asked him when he'd known there was something between her and Shikamaru, beside off-topic.
"But it's not really an incentive for me to support you, is it?"
Neji looked at her as if he believed her profoundly dense.
"It wouldn't be me that you would support," he said slowly, as if he was explaining to Uzumaki Naruto that his cousin had a big honkin' crush on him.
Temari nodded.
"Okay. So you're not going to make your cousin the head so you can make her your puppet and be the one with the actual power, then."
She smiled at the way Neji's eyes widened in disbelieving rage, killing intent all over the place, and felt a pleasant thrill rush through her. Ahh, the joys of kicking ass through politics.
"Mind you, not that I'd object much if it were the case, because I think you're the strongest ninja the Hyuuga has to offer, but if I'm going to take a stance in the matter I'd like to know where I'm standing." It was a filthy lie since she'd already noticed Neji would be exceedingly unsuited for a role as a political leader, but it proved that she wouldn't be shocked upon hearing the nasty truth.
"So tell me. Why do you support her?"
She waited.
Neji's body language was screaming 'it is not my place to tell you; this is wrong'. Then it assumed the nonchalance of the shinobi concealing his feelings under a cool guise. Temari had seen Kankuro attempt - and fail - the look enough to know what he was doing.
"I think Hinata-sama would make a fine Head of clan," he said stiffly. He seemed to dare her to mock him.
Temari paused. The girl she'd seen hadn't had a lot to recommend her, not at first glance. She wasn't a bad fighter, and she was dangerous at close-range like all of the Hyuuga, but the adrenalin seemed to make her rely a bit too much on physical instincts, making her swifter and fiercer than her adversaries, but also more susceptible to get hit if her opponent was noticeably faster than she was or could accurately foresee her next reaction - Temari knew because once she'd seen Hinata and Lee sparring, as Hinata sought to improve her speed and Lee never turned down an offer for more training.
(He'd reddened in pride and embarrassment when Hinata has asked him to teach her. Temari had been horrified at the idea of being submitted to Lee's conception of serious training, but she'd been told not to worry about that. Lee, of course, was a master of taijutsu, and had pretty much wiped the floor with Hinata, who wasn't using her Jyuuken for obvious reasons.)
And when she wasn't fighting, she was discreet to a fault, soft and hesitant, a complete reversal of her fighting attitude.
She wasn't spectacular or eye-catching - a bit like the Gentle Fist technique itself, actually.
She never gave up.
Temari remembered witnessing a few exchanges between team eight in Konoha, Kiba loudly trying to impose his opinion, Shino coolly shooting his propositions down, and both minutely turning toward Hinata and waiting. Expecting. And Hinata had quietly found a middle ground, and they'd gone with it.
People tended to stop talking when Hinata spoke, Temari remembered, because her voice was so low and she spoke so rarely. People tended to go with what she'd said, too - maybe because she was always the last one speaking, maybe because she sounded so reasonable, maybe because they feared they'd hurt her. People tended to vaguely like her, somehow.
And people who went against her tended to regret they hadn't taken a longer way around, because the seeming shortcut had in fact turned out to be a wall of fucking diamond.
Hinata, Temari remembered at long last, was stubborn.
It was a dangerous thing in a leader, but she was also cautious in reaching decisions, and clear-headed when she wasn't in a fight, and she could stand her ground when she was.
Temari felt like the proverbial scales had fallen from her eyes, and didn't need to examine Neji's expression to know he was smirking - or the Hyuuga Neji equivalent.
"…Okay, I believe you," she said slowly. She shook her head, a bit dazed, and focused. "Why wouldn't the Hyuuga council approve, and do we know they wouldn't?"
They had to be concerned with the greatness of their clan; they wouldn't dismiss her just because the previous head had been displeased with her. …Sometimes Temari wished she had a clan too, just so she'd have a chance of understanding how Konoha worked, but she only had her brothers and anyway Suna was more oriented toward nuclear-types families.
Before she'd been to Konoha, she'd thought that the upside was that small families were less likely to gang up together and overthrow the village, and that a big clan would make the clan its first priority rather than the village. She'd thought it was more profitable to the Kage, and thus indirectly benefited to the whole village.
Since then she'd come to realize that clans were just too damn bothersome. It sucked the energy out of its members, encouraged rivalries between clans, sped up the creation of an aristocracy vs. the common, caused unneeded tensions, hindered the unity of the village, was clearly the most pathological environment ever, and kept the village paralyzed in its old ways instead of pushing it forward, to new grounds of undiscovered jutsus and better societal care.
Temari had a lot to say about the clan system, but as she was a smart girl, she only ever ranted to Kankuro when she got home and he was busy tweaking his puppets' newest gadgets. She didn't fool herself that he was actually listening, though he sporadically interjected the proper comment, could repeat word by word what she'd said, and ranted back at her when she said he wasn't paying attention, yelling that he was sick, sick, sick of her believing he was still fourteen and he was damn well interested in politics too, so would she please stop accusing him!
…Mostly he wasn't lying, because what Gaara knew of Temari's bluntest shouting fits had gone through Kankuro's matter-of-fact filter. It wouldn't do if the Kazekage started quoting his sister's tirades.
"The council wouldn't even consider Hinata-sama if they had someone else," Neji muttered.
"Don't they?" Temari looked pointedly at him. "You're their golden child, and you're Hinata's first cousin. It's close enough for succession."
Neji tapped his forehead protector.
"Branch House. My status as far as succession is concerned is that of a dead man." He sounded uncaring. "If the council is throwing my name around at all, it must be that they're playing for time."
Temari frowned. "Time for what? It's been a while since the previous head died. We're at war, and your cousin's reappeared! What can they possibly be waiting for?"
"Three months and a half," Neji mentioned. "I suspect they were hoping for a miracle. Of course," he added, "they got it, now it turns out Hinata-sama is alive."
Now was not the time for a headache.
"Then what?" What's it you're not telling me, Temari wanted to demand, but she didn't, because he'd earned a modicum of her respect. Clan politics. Give her international affairs any day.
Neji settled back more comfortably.
"I'm not sure if the news attained Suna, but the Hyuuga clan was spun out of its axis when our Head died. More than it normally would, without a head and with no heir apparent, I mean."
His hitai-ate caught the moonlight.
She snapped her fingers. It'd been in the reports, the barely coded ones that conveyed only news that enemies didn't need spies to learn anyway, the big big news, those that practically never came. She was a jounin and she had high responsibilities, she'd read them and learnt them by heart, and she'd looked so stupid, so flabbergasted, when she'd read this particular piece of info.
"The seal. The Hyuuga are all wearing the curse seal," Temari feverishly whispered. "After Hinata died - because her body wasn't found. A preventive measure in case the enemy got hold of a member of your Main House, right? Because the Hyuuga couldn't count on getting so lucky that next time a member of the Main House died, there'd be only ashes left."
Her words were stumbling out of her mouth, but yes, now she remembered, she remembered. She could glimpse at the impact Hinata's reappearance would have on the Hyuuga, too.
"Yes," Neji said in a tone echoing with satisfaction, "On Hyuuga Hiashi's orders." Temari noted that the suffix had got lost along the way. "His last order, given before he left the village. His best, too."
Temari, who'd almost-repeatedly lost a brother to seals and curses, took a moment to bask in Neji's sated resentment.
"So now Hinata is the last Hyuuga without a seal," Temari summarized. "How did the council react?"
"To the seals? I imagine they were not happy." Another glee-filled pause. "They must have been frightened by the possibilities of what Orochimaru could do if he could study the Byakugan freely, though, and in the emergency they couldn't request for seal specialists to pick the two folds of the seal apart - the pain it causes at the will of a member of the Main House and the sealing of the Byakugan at death. The complete seal was performed on the Main House en masse."
Neji wore a 'trained hawk who saw the beautiful peacocks end up as feathers in hats because they didn't know how to fly' expression.
Temari was reminded that once upon a time, Kankuro had judged Neji to be a freak - less so than Gaara, sure, but still.
"Wouldn't that make her all the better a choice for head of clan?" she sensibly asked. "If I was going to uphold traditions, I'd pick the most traditional candidate. …And by the way, shouldn't your council jump on the opportunity of having a Head that they could manipulate as they like?"
It was what councils everywhere dreamed about. Unless this was another thing that went differently in the Hyuuga of Konoha.
"…They might, for all I know, but I don't think they'll take that risk." Neji sounded speculative. Last time Temari had seen a similar expression, Kankuro had been trying to gauge whether Hidden Grass' gambit would be worth the blood-thirsty revenge-craving survivors that would emerge. "Hinata-sama never made a mystery of her politics, when you bothered to find out."
"Which the council doesn't approve of, of course. What would they be?"
Might as well get a head start as to what she was committing herself to. (And begin planning ways to delay their return to Konoha if Hinata's opinions clashed too violently with Suna's needs. Doubtful, but Temari hadn't made it where she was now by rushing into things without thinking through. …Most of the time.)
Once more, Neji's look told her he wasn't fooled.
If he was Sand, she'd have recruited him for intelligence purposes a long time ago. Heck, he might even make a half-decent ambassador, with that cultured attitude and what was she thinking? He'd be terrible at it. Rigid and disagreeable and polite in all the wrong ways and devoted to things Temari couldn't even fathom. No, she'd trust him in an advisor capacity, if there was someone above him to take the decisions, or as someone working mostly alone and in the shadows.
And to say he was a jounin.
Yes, because how jounins were chosen had nothing to do with politics. As if Hatake Kakashi and Mitarashi Anko weren't Konoha jounins, the latter one of the Special Jounins of unbalanced fame - besides being living proofs that mental stability was nowhere near a requisite.
Neji's black hair fell like a curtain when he turned his head away, and Temari couldn't see his expression anymore.
"…Hinata-sama's position in the clan has been… unclear… for a long while now. Muddled between the Main House, and the Branch House, and an outsider altogether. I would assume the council fears that Hinata-sama's concern toward the Hyuuga is not as developed as they deem appropriate. Or that she might lack the proper heeding for traditions."
Temari noticed that he didn't say whether the council put the clan above Konoha or not. At a blind guess, she'd assume they didn't - not consciously. But maybe she was trusting Neji's distaste and contempt too much if she was just thinking they were idiots. That said, Konoha's great clans didn't exactly have a stellar history of settling their own problems - not that they should. That was what the village organization was for.
"And according to you?" The hell. He was her only source of information anyway.
"Is this you trying to learn relevant facts to your analysis, or are you merely prying?"
Temari bared her teeth. That was to say, she grinned. Shikamaru would have groaned and complained that if she was going to blackmail him into losing with threats of withholding sexual favors, he'd just put the shougi board away.
"Just answer."
Now Shikamaru would be contemplating the scattered remains of their shougi game - mournful, or smirking, or nonchalant, or smug, or past that stage and already tugging at her clothes.
"It's not my place to tell," he actually said, in a level voice.
…Yeah, that what was why he got on her nerves.
Temari took a deep breath and pushed her irritation down. How could you work out plans with someone who wouldn't even give you his opinion? (She blatantly disregarded that the majority of tensions of the non-fun kind with Shikamaru came precisely from the fact that he never hesitated on giving her a piece of his mind. They were both harsh critics.)
"It's mine to ask."
It looked like Neji was looking down. Temari suspected he was doing it on purpose, to be sure his hair would further obscure him from sight.
When he finally spoke, his voice was low - not a whisper, but the sort of low that came with not wanting to be overheard, and which, given their surroundings, Temari took to be mostly instinct. And paranoia. She welcomed both, and wrote Neji's loyalties down as 'anything relating to Hinata'.
"Hinata-sama doesn't give a flying fuck about 'the Hyuuga clan', and she's going to tear its traditions down."
His voice was low, and urgent, and Temari knew without a doubt that Neji saying the bare truth, and that Hinata didn't know the truth, and that Neji could read his cousin better than she could deceive herself. Temari had already witnessed Neji be wrong about Hinata once, though.
She was going to demand more explanations - yes, demand this time, because damn, one did not just spring things like that, and talk about destabilizing the Hyuuga - and the way Neji talked about it, it sounded like there wouldn't be a Hyuuga clan left and the prospect was Neji's most longed-for wish in life.
He cut her short, and his words were like a promise set in stone, like the silky softness of the desert sand rising up in whirlwinds.
"Hinata-sama supports Naruto."
There were many things that Temari could have reflected upon at that moment, and she acknowledged them as they flit through her mind. The Kyuubi's vessel - Gaara - Kazekage - Hokage - the Uchiha brat oh and Sakura-san - Orochimaru Akatsuki - the war - would be Naruto's fault if you were into these things, except that there'd been nothing and no-one forcing Orochimaru to attack Konoha - the war - right, death, except not - Naruto's a Leaf-nin who's gone AWOL but he's not a missing-nin is he and didn't their Godaime pull something like that - disappearing and leaving her village in time of need - except not to retrieve a teammate and not to do anything constructive - Naruto as Hokage - Gaara - Naruto, Rokudaime.
Temari closed her eyes and thought about the quickest way to reach Konoha.
Part V
Author: runespoor7
Rating: PG-13
Summary: In the middle of a war the usual thing is that people die. It's more unusual when they return alive after having been thought dead for three months. Hinata, after being a prisoner in Sound, does.
Notes: in this part: Temari, Neji. And, well, politics, but what else is new?
Part I
Part II
Part III
IV.
The trip from Suna to Konohagakure was expected to last three days. Three days, that was, when there was no war going on, and no enemies to fight and traps to avoid triggering and then to fight their way out of, no detour needed to pick other people up according to someone else's directives, no precautions to take, in a word, no Shikamaru.
Luckily Shikamaru knew the country as well as someone who'd spent a lot of time going back and forth between Wind and Fire during the past four years could (it was unanticipated, as he hadn't, actually, made the trip himself all that often, but she supposed his being a genius must have some uses), so instead of making every possible mistake, he'd have only made about two-thirds if she hadn't been there to put him back in line.
More or less.
Of course the guy was a genius, and not one of those arrogant prodigy-types that Temari had come to associate with the word "genius", when in all actuality they were rather intellectually average people who were just ninja prodigies. Key word, ninja. There was one such example in their group - he'd been the cause of one detour, as they'd had to get him from a particularly twisted war zone.
Shikamaru was a genuine true-to-IQ genius.
That meant he knew when to listen to Temari's plans, something which previously mentioned ninja prodigy didn't always do.
As Shikamaru's best friend Chouji had sensibly reminded after they'd gone through a close encounter following Hyuuga Neji's advice, the Byakugan wasn't an infallible weapon, even Neji's.
Neji's sudden paling had confirmed a lot of Temari's suspicions, best summed up by 'something was seriously wrong with the guy'. A quick glance at Shikamaru had been enough to make sure that he'd noticed too. Not that Temari thought he wouldn't; for a genius, his perceptiveness in human relations was commendable enough.
The trip - twenty-one days so far from Suna to some unmentionable yet all important little fort to Konoha at last, hopefully - involved a lot of technicalities.
At that moment, Temari hated technicalities. Technicalities reminded her of the reason she hadn't been promoted to chuunin on her first try, and four years had indeed passed since then, Temari just felt petty. And resentful. And fed up with, among others, the fucking technicalities. (Kankuro generally said she was 'aggressive', a bitch, and in need of anger-management therapy as badly as Gaara had ever been. Kankuro would have had one more occasion to start smirking if he'd seen her now. Kankuro was currently snuggly holed up in his comfy position on the Suna frontlines. Temari hated Kankuro with the fire of a thousand inextinguishable midday suns.)
Technicalities were the reason she had to negotiate and shuffle around, again, rather than just confer with Shikamaru and then face the rest of their oversized unit and go, 'this is the plan'.
Technically, Temari and Hyuuga Neji were the only jounins in the group, and it made everything a pain.
Usually Temari would get Shikamaru, they'd think a plan up, then they'd have a quickie, and one hour later they'd make sure that everyone had understood what role they had to play, what they were hoping to achieve, and what they should do in the case it didn't work out (Temari left the fine-tuning of that part to Shikamaru; he was terrific at shougi and way more patient with idiots than her).
Hyuuga Neji's presence not only put a serious rein on the sex -
- and dammit, it was even worse now that she'd got Shikamaru to admit the lack of sexual release was getting to him too. It wasn't everyday that he was the one slamming her against a tree, and to have him grouch in a strained tone that she please stop acting so suggestive, because it was distracting him and he needed his wits about him had been, well, both eye-opening and frustrating.
Eye-opening because, though she knew he wasn't exactly reluctant, she was always the one initiating sex, and it felt good to know that she had some effect on him even when she wasn't grinding against him with her hand down his pants - damn she needed to stop imagining how he'd feel, his short breath fluttering against her throat - right. Frustrating because the revelation had made her very hot and bothered, and the others had been less than two meters away, and all Temari had been able to think of was how she wanted to push him down right now.
Plus of course there had been her scoffing reply that she wasn't being suggestive. She was dirty, and tired, and so annoyed the only thing keeping her from throwing a hissy fit was that it wouldn't feel half as satisfying as the blessed silence she forced in her mind when she could stop the running commentary, and she was going to have Hyuuga Neji's eyes on a skewer.
(Temari had, in fact, rarely been in a state of such constant fury in her life. It was a testimony of Shikamaru's genius that he didn't ask if she was having her period. She hadn't been - which was a good thing, as it not only increased her bloodlust in a dramatic fashion and made her overly brisk and snappish, it also made her horny. Very, very, very horny. Which Shikamaru couldn't have failed to pick up with time, of course, so it explained why he hadn't asked.)
It was when Shikamaru had tersely replied that yes, he knew that. His fingers had been digging in her shoulders and Temari had realized then and there that he liked it.
Then she'd cursed the less-than-two-meters-between-them-and-the-others even more than before, as it felt like she'd never wanted anything more in her whole life than having sex with him just then.
The no-sex had obviously done something to her brain.
Okay, end of the digression. Hyuuga Neji's presence. Right.
It was a pain because as a jounin he threw everything off, and not merely the nice plan-then-sex pattern Temari and Shikamaru had had going, but also because technically, Shikamaru was only a chuunin.
It was the sort of technicalities that tended to fall by the wayside during wartimes, as time lacked to make things good and official, but the fact remained that Hyuuga Neji had been a jounin by the time he was fifteen, and that Shikamaru hadn't seemed to give the idea half a thought. It was one of those things that were pure Shikamaru, and which Temari didn't understand but shrugged off.
Once, Kankuro had been especially pissed at her because she'd made fun of the break-up between him and his former girlfriend, and he'd snarled that at least the ones he liked weren't lazy good-for-nothing asses who didn't have any higher aspirations in life than nailing the Kazekage's sister.
There had been silence, as Kankuro was fuming and waiting for Temari's retaliation, and Gaara was reviewing the situation and, maybe, the risk of her whatever-Shikamaru-was-to-her taking advantage of it. Or trying to wrap his literal mind around the metaphor. He'd got better with figures of speech, but he still wasn't going to become a purple prose writer any time soon.
She didn't know why, but she'd just shrugged and said she didn't get it either.
Temari had mixed feelings about Shikamaru's lack of ambitions, but mostly she thought he didn't need it to be a strategist mastermind and an efficient fighter and someone she wanted on her side. Sometimes it rattled, though.
Besides, aside from Neji, Temari knew the other people on her group; there was Shikamaru himself, his two teammates, and the twenty-six Sand-nins she was bringing to Konoha (they'd been thirty, but they'd left two at the place where they'd picked Neji up, as replacements; it wouldn't be enough), all of whom Temari had already worked with and knew well enough to rely on their skills and anticipate their weaknesses, but she had no such closeness with Neji.
Neji got on everyone's nerves.
…Neji, Temari noticed as she gave up on sleeping with a sigh, wasn't sleeping either - his blanket was folded next to his pack as if he'd only pulled it out.
She frowned, wondering what the crazy had invented next to put himself in danger as well as the rest of the group. Shikamaru hadn't been forthcoming with the details, but when they'd arrived to retrieve Neji as had been decided, he'd been taken aside by Aburame Shino, and Temari would have bet her fan it concerned the Hyuuga. She hadn't missed the way the Aburame's sunglasses had seemed to follow Neji when they were getting ready to leave.
Temari couldn't shake the feeling that she was responsible for the group. She couldn't let the carelessness of anyone jeopardize their security, even if that meant taking the other jounin down a few notches. And anyway, she was fed up with walking on eggshells.
Three of her chuunins were standing guard, the way she always instructed when she had to lead a large group - it was near impossible to catch three ninjas unaware at the same time, at least not unless there were card games or powerful genjutsu involved, and they were at war. There would be no card games.
When they saw her, one of them tapped his head, level with his eyes, signaling her about the Hyuuga. Temari nodded; if they'd seen him, then things were under control and she could slip away to find him.
She wouldn't go to sleep until she'd come to terms with Neji's presence.
She couldn't afford to let some unprofessional childish annoyance and some sense of loss of her-and-Shikamaru private time put them all at risk any longer.
(It was all the more infuriating because there were other couples in the group who weren't having sex either, and they seemed to be doing alright, even leaning one against the other for comfort. She and Shikamaru just didn't touch each other in public - even with the barest of brushes. It was their private business, dammit, and the sentimentality of the gesture rebuked Temari a lot.)
And if she could use the occasion to make a little more sense of what she'd gathered so far, then the lack of sleep would have been well-employed. (Another ninja would have taken one of the light sleeping pills that most of them carried in the prevision of rough nights, but Temari, after so many years with Gaara, found herself unable to. Better not sleep at all.)
Of course, Temari had some vague idea of what it was all about.
She'd heard about Hinata's death from Shikamaru's team; she'd been sorry for them, since it seemed to affect them a lot, but at the same time she wondered how it could be. It wasn't as if they'd ever been close. But then Temari herself had been oddly shaken by the news.
It was war and a shinobi's life was always dangerous, and Temari had hardly known Hinata from her visits to Konoha and a greeting here and there, but she'd been saddened nonetheless. Leaf-nins had a habit of growing on you when you were least expecting it.
Then the Aburame had told them Hinata was not, in fact, dead.
The Rookies were all supposed to be aware of it already, but the traveling group had missed the previous information points due to unforeseen problems within Temari's ranks - it had taken them a while to find the traitor, as neither Shikamaru nor she had wanted to murder an innocent just to be sure they'd get the culprit as well. Finally they'd realized the two suspects were accomplices.
Temari had felt rather annoyed that her heroic efforts to do the right thing and not follow her gut instinct - kill them both and be done with it - had been wasted on them.
The circumstances of Hinata's death had been pretty clear cut, but even then, it wasn't entirely unheard of that people sometimes unexpectedly turned up not to be dead after all. Temari had filled the blanks to understand that there was something big, and she'd have liked knowing what it was - if it was big, it was relevant.
It had to be big, for anyone to be allowed to go back to Konoha in the middle of the war for no better reason than that.
It had to be a Hyuuga thing, Temari deduced. Because the heir was unexpectedly alive, officially. Unofficially, it had to be a Hyuuga Neji thing - for him to return to the village when Hinata was only his cousin, and Shino was her teammate and he hadn't left the site he was assigned.
There were things in the Hyuuga, and particularly between Hyuuga Neji and his cousin, that made Temari's family look functional by comparison. And Temari was including the previous generation in that statement. At least after her uncle had been ordered by her father to kill her little brother, he hadn't become the latter's staunchest protector - and there'd been no freaky seal and ritual enslavement to the other branch of the family involved either.
Dang, Konoha as a whole was one of the better-adjusted Hidden villages, but its great clans more than made up for it.
She was at that point of her thoughts when she caught the reflection of the moonlight on a hitai-ate - she hadn't been trying to move too silently, so he'd know she wasn't an enemy sneaking up on him. He must've glanced her way. Neji had the Byakugan; he had no need to turn his head if he wanted to look at her, so she took it to mean he agreed on being found.
She was probably pushing it by translating it as a welcome, but she did anyway.
"It's not your turn to stand watch," she remarked as she sat down a meter away from him, because it was as good a way to start talking as anything else, and it was her responsibility that Neji didn't further alter the safety of the mission.
"I'm not standing guard."
Temari accepted that. There were nights, you couldn't sleep. If he wasn't straining himself beyond that, it was none of her business.
Silence fell upon them. Temari regretted she hadn't outlined the conversation.
If Shikamaru caught her like that, damn but would he smirk. She was used to scaring people into submission, and giving orders, and when she was in Konoha she had no trouble communicating with the Hokage, and the only times she had to be careful was when she and her brothers were having an unpleasant discussion, and she could deal with Gaara and could even make it with Kankuro without him refusing to speak to her for more than a few days.
She was trying to estimate whether confronting him head on would make him clam up as badly as she thought when his voice broke through her thoughts.
"You're really not the jealous type, are you?"
Temari blinked, then arched an eyebrow. What did that have to do with anything? …Also, she, not jealous?
Neji gave a jerk of his chin towards what could loosely be called a ninja camp.
"Ino," he added.
That again. She should have known.
Temari shrugged. "So I'm not."
"Most people in a long-distance relationship wouldn't be so comfortable if someone of the opposite sex was so close to their significant other."
His manner was too offhanded. Her eyes narrowed. There was something behind that. What, he was in a long-distance relationship himself and worried about his girlfriend? Would that truly be enough to throw his behavior off that badly?...
She opted for playing along.
"She's his teammate. She's known him since they're toddlers, and she doesn't register him as a male." Ino was probably more aware that Chouji was a boy - even if it was to remark on his eating habits. Of course the three of them were going to have things in common that Temari couldn't share. "And even if she did, I wouldn't much care one way or the other."
Unlike the amount of time Shikamaru chose to spend with his friends when she was in town. Even then, she agreed that it wasn't entirely a bad thing that they both had time to breathe and she could do what she'd been sent to do. It was annoying, but a necessary evil. Also, as far as friends-for-Shikamaru went, Temari would probably have picked Ino and Chouji if given a choice among the Rookies.
"You're not jealous, you're possessive." Neji looked thoughtful, as far Temari could interpret the expressions of a Hyuuga.
It sounded about right, but it still didn't make much sense in the general context. At least to her. Temari wondered if Neji knew what he was trying to get out of her, and debated whether it was worth trying to fish for more information. Probably not, it would only defeat the purpose of the discussion.
He was apparently trying to regroup.
Temari could only hope that he wouldn't pick at whatever was on his mind until it was a festering wound.
"How much longer until we reach Konoha?"
And that was another reason why Temari felt like the one in charge of the group; Neji never acted like he was the leader - or one of the leaders.
Occasionally he screwed things up on his own, as if he was fighting alone, but he never put authority behind what he did. He wasn't a leader in any sense of the word; even when he took a decision, it was as if he was merely making sure that everyone knew what was requested of them. It felt as though he was obeying someone else's orders.
Branch House of the Hyuuga.
"Another two days if we don't run into any more trouble," Temari answered, and if Kakashi's group had cleaned the area, she didn't add.
Neji turned his blank eyes toward her. "That's already what you said a week ago, you and Shikamaru. We were closer to Konoha than now."
They'd also been east of Konoha, whereas now they were southwest. Such were the hazards of shinobi wars.
"Helping Sai out of that ambush was necessary," Temari mechanically said, as if Neji's observation didn't border on the verge of treason, as if he wasn't right and it hadn't been most likely a loss of time, as if Temari hadn't cogitated long and hard before finally deciding that she couldn't spare any Sand-nins to help him reach Kakashi, as if the four days they'd spent escorting him and taking care of his pursuers hadn't glowed red in her mental calendar.
She'd reassured herself by reasoning that she was supposed to help Konoha, and that was what she was doing. Shikamaru hadn't stopped her, neither when she'd decided that they'd take the long way for Sai nor when she'd decided he had to go on alone. It wasn't exactly a comforting thought.
Need to disband the gloomy second-guessing now.
"Why are you so jumpy anyway?" she called, wrapping her arms around her knees. "If it's about your cousin, she's probably been sent off on active duty again. It's been a while since you received word about her, hasn't it?"
For a moment, Temari thought he wasn't going to answer.
"…Eleven days."
He sounded - strained, for lack of a stronger word. Temari quickly calculated that Hinata must have been back in Konoha for two weeks, adding the few days it must have taken the message to reach Neji's unreachable location.
Being out and working again was the best thing that could happen, then.
She addressed Neji a long, silent stare of incomprehension.
"It's about the Hyuuga."
Temari considered.
"Your cousin is the new head of clan?" she checked.
A snort escaped Neji's lips, almost bitter, then he got himself back under control, but his face stayed frozen in an air of utter self-possession.
Please, no. Let it not be about succession matters. No. He was supposed to have got better with the years; supposed to take his role as a protector as if it were his life, according to Shikamaru who couldn't be accused of needless melodrama.
On the rare occasions Temari had had to work with him in Konoha, he'd looked serene, like someone who'd made his peace with his lot in life - ironical since his discourse attested he no longer believed in fate, but Temari wasn't such a hypocrite that she'd point out private contradictions in other people. She had her fair share of them.
She remembered well his fight against his cousin during the prelims of her first chuunin exam, the beginning a little better than the end, when she'd been worried about Gaara's state. She had clear memories of Neji's cruelty when he spoke to Hinata, and she remembered thinking - dazzling like the white dunes glaring in the middle of the day - that the girl had to be mad to needle him the way she did. Temari had known what the wise course of action was because it was the same with Gaara; stand down before he takes any personal interest in whether you live or die.
But the girl had never surrendered, even when it was clear that she was fighting in vain, marking her as even crazier than the boy who later went against Gaara. And she'd survived, proving that she was even luckier than that Naruto kid with his farting attack.
Please let it be something else, she prayed.
Please let it not be that the most important member of the Branch House of the Hyuuga is jealous of the most likely chief of Konoha's premier clan. Please let it wait until we've won before the Hyuuga of Konoha shreds itself up from the inside. Please not in the middle of the war.
Please let her be reading too much into Neji's snort.
"If the council has anything to say about it, she won't be." It looked like he was staring at the sky. "That is the reason we have to hurry," he finished quietly.
Temari removed her arms from around her knees, stretched her legs, crossing her ankles, and shifted so her hands, slightly behind her, were supporting her. She steadily looked Neji over.
She was learning more about the Hyuuga clan politics than she'd ever hoped she would, and she'd be damned if she didn't take advantage of it.
"Care to explain?" Her voice, she noticed, had taken the tone she employed when her subordinates had blatantly screwed up.
Neji's look said that he realized she'd been very untactful, but he let it go. It told Temari that he was judging the situation dire enough to regard her as a potential ally.
A potential ally.
Oh, shit. Now she'd gone and got involved. If she backed out now, Neji would resent her, and Temari didn't know enough about the situation to guess whether he'd be in any position to retaliate later. He was a rising star in Konoha, the youngest jounin of his generation, a ninja prodigy by all accounts, as well as a Hyuuga, so Temari chose not to underestimate his potential influence.
Neji had seemed to sense her inner debate - Temari made a note to remember his analytical skills in the future - and had waited for her to reach a final decision, which meant that it'd be final.
Temari raised an eyebrow. "So?"
Oh yeah she was bragging. She was making what might possibly be her biggest mistake yet in her diplomatic career, with all the political repercussions it could have on the relations between their two villages - it'd have been paranoia if she'd been anyone but the Kazekage's sister and he'd been anyone else but the exceptionally prone-to-disproportionate-grudges Hyuuga genius. She was allowed a flash of hysteria, and damn if she couldn't brag to cover her nervousness.
Neji curtly nodded.
"Hinata-sama is only the head by default, because no-one else has a stronger or equal claim to the position as she does. It wouldn't take long for the elders to devise an excuse why she wouldn't be fit as the head."
"Isn't that what you think?" She refrained from adding he'd certainly made a fine job of looking the part.
She was taken aback by the glare he shot her.
"What I think doesn't matter. Hinata-sama is, by right, the head of the Hyuuga."
"…So that's the reason you support her claim, out of guilt and duty?"
Temari wondered if she was impressed, then decided on the negative. He was just the sort of stick-in-the-mud that'd waste his life for duty, rather than taking chances and making choices to change things the way he wanted. Once upon a time he'd been ready to waste his life for fate, and now what? She'd be nice and assume he wanted to shoulder the consequences of his actions.
It still smelled like guilt.
"Even if it were, it's my choice to make," he remarked, answering more her hidden contempt than her feigned skepticism.
Temari fleetingly wondered if he'd ever given a thought about a career in spying. Then she wondered how it would look if she asked him when he'd known there was something between her and Shikamaru, beside off-topic.
"But it's not really an incentive for me to support you, is it?"
Neji looked at her as if he believed her profoundly dense.
"It wouldn't be me that you would support," he said slowly, as if he was explaining to Uzumaki Naruto that his cousin had a big honkin' crush on him.
Temari nodded.
"Okay. So you're not going to make your cousin the head so you can make her your puppet and be the one with the actual power, then."
She smiled at the way Neji's eyes widened in disbelieving rage, killing intent all over the place, and felt a pleasant thrill rush through her. Ahh, the joys of kicking ass through politics.
"Mind you, not that I'd object much if it were the case, because I think you're the strongest ninja the Hyuuga has to offer, but if I'm going to take a stance in the matter I'd like to know where I'm standing." It was a filthy lie since she'd already noticed Neji would be exceedingly unsuited for a role as a political leader, but it proved that she wouldn't be shocked upon hearing the nasty truth.
"So tell me. Why do you support her?"
She waited.
Neji's body language was screaming 'it is not my place to tell you; this is wrong'. Then it assumed the nonchalance of the shinobi concealing his feelings under a cool guise. Temari had seen Kankuro attempt - and fail - the look enough to know what he was doing.
"I think Hinata-sama would make a fine Head of clan," he said stiffly. He seemed to dare her to mock him.
Temari paused. The girl she'd seen hadn't had a lot to recommend her, not at first glance. She wasn't a bad fighter, and she was dangerous at close-range like all of the Hyuuga, but the adrenalin seemed to make her rely a bit too much on physical instincts, making her swifter and fiercer than her adversaries, but also more susceptible to get hit if her opponent was noticeably faster than she was or could accurately foresee her next reaction - Temari knew because once she'd seen Hinata and Lee sparring, as Hinata sought to improve her speed and Lee never turned down an offer for more training.
(He'd reddened in pride and embarrassment when Hinata has asked him to teach her. Temari had been horrified at the idea of being submitted to Lee's conception of serious training, but she'd been told not to worry about that. Lee, of course, was a master of taijutsu, and had pretty much wiped the floor with Hinata, who wasn't using her Jyuuken for obvious reasons.)
And when she wasn't fighting, she was discreet to a fault, soft and hesitant, a complete reversal of her fighting attitude.
She wasn't spectacular or eye-catching - a bit like the Gentle Fist technique itself, actually.
She never gave up.
Temari remembered witnessing a few exchanges between team eight in Konoha, Kiba loudly trying to impose his opinion, Shino coolly shooting his propositions down, and both minutely turning toward Hinata and waiting. Expecting. And Hinata had quietly found a middle ground, and they'd gone with it.
People tended to stop talking when Hinata spoke, Temari remembered, because her voice was so low and she spoke so rarely. People tended to go with what she'd said, too - maybe because she was always the last one speaking, maybe because she sounded so reasonable, maybe because they feared they'd hurt her. People tended to vaguely like her, somehow.
And people who went against her tended to regret they hadn't taken a longer way around, because the seeming shortcut had in fact turned out to be a wall of fucking diamond.
Hinata, Temari remembered at long last, was stubborn.
It was a dangerous thing in a leader, but she was also cautious in reaching decisions, and clear-headed when she wasn't in a fight, and she could stand her ground when she was.
Temari felt like the proverbial scales had fallen from her eyes, and didn't need to examine Neji's expression to know he was smirking - or the Hyuuga Neji equivalent.
"…Okay, I believe you," she said slowly. She shook her head, a bit dazed, and focused. "Why wouldn't the Hyuuga council approve, and do we know they wouldn't?"
They had to be concerned with the greatness of their clan; they wouldn't dismiss her just because the previous head had been displeased with her. …Sometimes Temari wished she had a clan too, just so she'd have a chance of understanding how Konoha worked, but she only had her brothers and anyway Suna was more oriented toward nuclear-types families.
Before she'd been to Konoha, she'd thought that the upside was that small families were less likely to gang up together and overthrow the village, and that a big clan would make the clan its first priority rather than the village. She'd thought it was more profitable to the Kage, and thus indirectly benefited to the whole village.
Since then she'd come to realize that clans were just too damn bothersome. It sucked the energy out of its members, encouraged rivalries between clans, sped up the creation of an aristocracy vs. the common, caused unneeded tensions, hindered the unity of the village, was clearly the most pathological environment ever, and kept the village paralyzed in its old ways instead of pushing it forward, to new grounds of undiscovered jutsus and better societal care.
Temari had a lot to say about the clan system, but as she was a smart girl, she only ever ranted to Kankuro when she got home and he was busy tweaking his puppets' newest gadgets. She didn't fool herself that he was actually listening, though he sporadically interjected the proper comment, could repeat word by word what she'd said, and ranted back at her when she said he wasn't paying attention, yelling that he was sick, sick, sick of her believing he was still fourteen and he was damn well interested in politics too, so would she please stop accusing him!
…Mostly he wasn't lying, because what Gaara knew of Temari's bluntest shouting fits had gone through Kankuro's matter-of-fact filter. It wouldn't do if the Kazekage started quoting his sister's tirades.
"The council wouldn't even consider Hinata-sama if they had someone else," Neji muttered.
"Don't they?" Temari looked pointedly at him. "You're their golden child, and you're Hinata's first cousin. It's close enough for succession."
Neji tapped his forehead protector.
"Branch House. My status as far as succession is concerned is that of a dead man." He sounded uncaring. "If the council is throwing my name around at all, it must be that they're playing for time."
Temari frowned. "Time for what? It's been a while since the previous head died. We're at war, and your cousin's reappeared! What can they possibly be waiting for?"
"Three months and a half," Neji mentioned. "I suspect they were hoping for a miracle. Of course," he added, "they got it, now it turns out Hinata-sama is alive."
Now was not the time for a headache.
"Then what?" What's it you're not telling me, Temari wanted to demand, but she didn't, because he'd earned a modicum of her respect. Clan politics. Give her international affairs any day.
Neji settled back more comfortably.
"I'm not sure if the news attained Suna, but the Hyuuga clan was spun out of its axis when our Head died. More than it normally would, without a head and with no heir apparent, I mean."
His hitai-ate caught the moonlight.
She snapped her fingers. It'd been in the reports, the barely coded ones that conveyed only news that enemies didn't need spies to learn anyway, the big big news, those that practically never came. She was a jounin and she had high responsibilities, she'd read them and learnt them by heart, and she'd looked so stupid, so flabbergasted, when she'd read this particular piece of info.
"The seal. The Hyuuga are all wearing the curse seal," Temari feverishly whispered. "After Hinata died - because her body wasn't found. A preventive measure in case the enemy got hold of a member of your Main House, right? Because the Hyuuga couldn't count on getting so lucky that next time a member of the Main House died, there'd be only ashes left."
Her words were stumbling out of her mouth, but yes, now she remembered, she remembered. She could glimpse at the impact Hinata's reappearance would have on the Hyuuga, too.
"Yes," Neji said in a tone echoing with satisfaction, "On Hyuuga Hiashi's orders." Temari noted that the suffix had got lost along the way. "His last order, given before he left the village. His best, too."
Temari, who'd almost-repeatedly lost a brother to seals and curses, took a moment to bask in Neji's sated resentment.
"So now Hinata is the last Hyuuga without a seal," Temari summarized. "How did the council react?"
"To the seals? I imagine they were not happy." Another glee-filled pause. "They must have been frightened by the possibilities of what Orochimaru could do if he could study the Byakugan freely, though, and in the emergency they couldn't request for seal specialists to pick the two folds of the seal apart - the pain it causes at the will of a member of the Main House and the sealing of the Byakugan at death. The complete seal was performed on the Main House en masse."
Neji wore a 'trained hawk who saw the beautiful peacocks end up as feathers in hats because they didn't know how to fly' expression.
Temari was reminded that once upon a time, Kankuro had judged Neji to be a freak - less so than Gaara, sure, but still.
"Wouldn't that make her all the better a choice for head of clan?" she sensibly asked. "If I was going to uphold traditions, I'd pick the most traditional candidate. …And by the way, shouldn't your council jump on the opportunity of having a Head that they could manipulate as they like?"
It was what councils everywhere dreamed about. Unless this was another thing that went differently in the Hyuuga of Konoha.
"…They might, for all I know, but I don't think they'll take that risk." Neji sounded speculative. Last time Temari had seen a similar expression, Kankuro had been trying to gauge whether Hidden Grass' gambit would be worth the blood-thirsty revenge-craving survivors that would emerge. "Hinata-sama never made a mystery of her politics, when you bothered to find out."
"Which the council doesn't approve of, of course. What would they be?"
Might as well get a head start as to what she was committing herself to. (And begin planning ways to delay their return to Konoha if Hinata's opinions clashed too violently with Suna's needs. Doubtful, but Temari hadn't made it where she was now by rushing into things without thinking through. …Most of the time.)
Once more, Neji's look told her he wasn't fooled.
If he was Sand, she'd have recruited him for intelligence purposes a long time ago. Heck, he might even make a half-decent ambassador, with that cultured attitude and what was she thinking? He'd be terrible at it. Rigid and disagreeable and polite in all the wrong ways and devoted to things Temari couldn't even fathom. No, she'd trust him in an advisor capacity, if there was someone above him to take the decisions, or as someone working mostly alone and in the shadows.
And to say he was a jounin.
Yes, because how jounins were chosen had nothing to do with politics. As if Hatake Kakashi and Mitarashi Anko weren't Konoha jounins, the latter one of the Special Jounins of unbalanced fame - besides being living proofs that mental stability was nowhere near a requisite.
Neji's black hair fell like a curtain when he turned his head away, and Temari couldn't see his expression anymore.
"…Hinata-sama's position in the clan has been… unclear… for a long while now. Muddled between the Main House, and the Branch House, and an outsider altogether. I would assume the council fears that Hinata-sama's concern toward the Hyuuga is not as developed as they deem appropriate. Or that she might lack the proper heeding for traditions."
Temari noticed that he didn't say whether the council put the clan above Konoha or not. At a blind guess, she'd assume they didn't - not consciously. But maybe she was trusting Neji's distaste and contempt too much if she was just thinking they were idiots. That said, Konoha's great clans didn't exactly have a stellar history of settling their own problems - not that they should. That was what the village organization was for.
"And according to you?" The hell. He was her only source of information anyway.
"Is this you trying to learn relevant facts to your analysis, or are you merely prying?"
Temari bared her teeth. That was to say, she grinned. Shikamaru would have groaned and complained that if she was going to blackmail him into losing with threats of withholding sexual favors, he'd just put the shougi board away.
"Just answer."
Now Shikamaru would be contemplating the scattered remains of their shougi game - mournful, or smirking, or nonchalant, or smug, or past that stage and already tugging at her clothes.
"It's not my place to tell," he actually said, in a level voice.
…Yeah, that what was why he got on her nerves.
Temari took a deep breath and pushed her irritation down. How could you work out plans with someone who wouldn't even give you his opinion? (She blatantly disregarded that the majority of tensions of the non-fun kind with Shikamaru came precisely from the fact that he never hesitated on giving her a piece of his mind. They were both harsh critics.)
"It's mine to ask."
It looked like Neji was looking down. Temari suspected he was doing it on purpose, to be sure his hair would further obscure him from sight.
When he finally spoke, his voice was low - not a whisper, but the sort of low that came with not wanting to be overheard, and which, given their surroundings, Temari took to be mostly instinct. And paranoia. She welcomed both, and wrote Neji's loyalties down as 'anything relating to Hinata'.
"Hinata-sama doesn't give a flying fuck about 'the Hyuuga clan', and she's going to tear its traditions down."
His voice was low, and urgent, and Temari knew without a doubt that Neji saying the bare truth, and that Hinata didn't know the truth, and that Neji could read his cousin better than she could deceive herself. Temari had already witnessed Neji be wrong about Hinata once, though.
She was going to demand more explanations - yes, demand this time, because damn, one did not just spring things like that, and talk about destabilizing the Hyuuga - and the way Neji talked about it, it sounded like there wouldn't be a Hyuuga clan left and the prospect was Neji's most longed-for wish in life.
He cut her short, and his words were like a promise set in stone, like the silky softness of the desert sand rising up in whirlwinds.
"Hinata-sama supports Naruto."
There were many things that Temari could have reflected upon at that moment, and she acknowledged them as they flit through her mind. The Kyuubi's vessel - Gaara - Kazekage - Hokage - the Uchiha brat oh and Sakura-san - Orochimaru Akatsuki - the war - would be Naruto's fault if you were into these things, except that there'd been nothing and no-one forcing Orochimaru to attack Konoha - the war - right, death, except not - Naruto's a Leaf-nin who's gone AWOL but he's not a missing-nin is he and didn't their Godaime pull something like that - disappearing and leaving her village in time of need - except not to retrieve a teammate and not to do anything constructive - Naruto as Hokage - Gaara - Naruto, Rokudaime.
Temari closed her eyes and thought about the quickest way to reach Konoha.
Part V