[Naruto] With a little help
Title: With a little help
Characters/Pairing: Neji (Lee, Tenten, Hinata; very, very light hints at Neji/Hinata. Or Neji/Tenten. Or Neji/Lee. Yeah, I don't know either.)
Rating: PG
Warnings: off-handed upsetting issues, though no abuse and nothing sexual. Tenten's mother is in the hospital, very sick, possibly dying.
Summary: Just because, as a shinobi, you're expected to be able to take pain - fist-through-the-chest kind of pain - doesn't mean you've got to take the small kind as well.
Notes: For some reason these are in reverse chronological order; the first is In The Future, the second is the missing two-year-and-a-half era, the third is pre-timeskip. hc_bingo, theme 'muscle strains and spasms'. For hungrytiger11. Title from “With a Little Help From My Friends”. So very, very unbeta'd.
1.
Jyuuken isn't as hard on the body as Gouken.
Fights to the death, however, are rough to everybody.
They'd dragged themselves back to camp after unsuccessfully searching the woods for their fallen attacker, discussed her disappearance, and came to the conclusion that she hadn't been alone. Which meant that the mission wasn't over, and they could expect more assassination attempts in the close future.
Tenten was bearing her I Hate Escort Missions Look, and that meant that soon she was going to replace him, for fear that otherwise she might be the one to do something to physically hurt their client.
As the team's scout, Neji did most of the trip preceding the caravan, which meant that he hadn't much opportunity upon which to judge their client's character, but he'd noticed nothing that stood out as a mark of obnoxiousness. No outrageous disregard for his bodyguard's advices. No talking down his nose because he was a wealthy nobleman and they dirty, blood-soaked commoners. Not talkative streak such that it would obscure suspect sounds, or get on a bodyguard's nerves.
In fact, from what he'd seen of the costumer and of Gai-sensei's treatment of him, they might have got the non-existent perfect costumer type.
It was good, because it meant that their only enemies were the people trying to kill their client and Tenten's hatred of escort missions.
He might enjoy a break from running ahead. Someone always stayed with the client in case of an attacks the others had missed; he'd ask Gai-sensei and Lee if that could be him tomorrow. The fight had left him more tense than was going to be comfortable, as the rest of the team, caught in a genjutsu, had been prevented from helping until it was almost over. And she'd been good, easily good enough to be a jounin.
He may have grimaced standing up.
He was positive he hadn't, but he must have, or he'd blinked, or maybe breathed, but he must have done something for Lee to notice he wasn't quite in top form.
“Neji!”
Neji was long past thinking evil thoughts at Lee and Gai-sensei's tendency to TALK REALLY LOUD, and was coming to terms with fact that it would have effects on his hearing as an old man. As it suggested that he would live into old age, he was not at all opposed to the consideration. And if nothing else, seeing strangers jump when Lee shouted provided amusement.
“Lee?”
“I see you're in some discomfort.”
Neji's well-honed alarms pealed. Sliding a glance Tenten's way for some help or distraction would be useless; none would be forthcoming, Escort Missions making her notoriously petty.
“I have a jar of Hinata-sama's soothing oil,” Neji said, in what was clearly a warning tone.
The truth was, he did not know what he was warning off Lee doing yet, and he'd outgrown many control and image issues since he was a teen; he wouldn't have bothered, had he not planned on spending the very next day confined in the same place as their client for one entire day. Could be awkward.
To Lee's credit, he didn't point out that Hinata-sama's ointment was far better a perfume than it was a medicinal product. That was because Lee was polite to a fault, and Tenten's snort said nothing else, but his silence allowed Neji to remain on speaking terms with him.
“I could give you a massage,” Lee grinned. “I'm really good at it, Ino-san says.”
Neji didn't look at anyone else, refused to believe he might be blushing, and made a conscious effort of not noting the description of the servant who coughed.
“LEE.”
Lee shut up.
Later, his refusal to acknowledge Tenten's snickering insistence that it'd looked just like a married couple meant that he was able to remain on speaking terms with her, as well.
2.
“Ow,” Tenten grouched. Her face was clenched in a grimace, and she was leaning on her right leg, visibly straining not to breathe too hard or rest too much of her weight on her left. “Ow, ow, damn.”
Neji dropped his stance and took a step back. “...Do you need help?”
Pain endurance was one thing; starting training in pain when there was no reason for it, that was something to be concerned about. One day he hoped he might be able to get Hinata-sama understand the difference.
She briefly shook her head, and hissed in pain. “No no, I'll be alright, just; let me--”
Cursing under her breath, she hoppled to the nearest tree and turned, with obvious difficulties, until she could rest against the trunk. Her movements were rigid, her muscles too taut for what little movement she was making. Rapidly, Neji switched to Byakugan to check over her for any sign of internal injury, or--
He frowned “I'm not saying anything wrong with your chakra pathways.”
The groan she let out was this time tinted with some irritation, though whether it was because she expected him to stand aside and do nothing while he could make sure his teammate wasn't hurt or because of the inanity of his remark he wasn't sure.
Finally, after what felt like eternities of him doing nothing but standing there foolishly watching his friend suffer, her head fell back against the trunk of the tree. Signs of discomfort hadn't entirely left her face yet, but at least she didn't seem to be in the throes of agony anymore.
She sighed, and only then did she seem to relax entirely. Still propped against the tree, she opened her eyes and looked at him. She wasn't smiling, and the bags under her eyes were definitely more pronounced from that angle, but they held the same almost defiant sparkle they always did. “See? Told you nothing. That was nothing.”
“That's rubbish and you know it.” He crossed his arms. At this stage, glaring wouldn't suffice to make his point.
An expression of annoyance crossed over her face, as though he was the one being unreasonable and he refused to let her talk sense into him. Like she'd done earlier, he gritted his teeth. At the moment, he was more than familiar with the feeling. “I just bumped into one of the crates I was moving around yesterday night, and I dropped the one I was holding. I didn't even realize I'd pulled or strained or whatever, it's not anything, it wasn't anything except getting yelled at by my boss for not being careful. Damn, it's like I've got to justify myself to you.”
Neji had a few choice words of what he thought of taking on a second, physical job when you were already a ninja preparing for a chuunin exam, but he kept them firmly bottled, sealed, and under constant watch left they escape. It wasn't like Tenten had any choice, or like he wouldn't do exactly the same if he was put in her position.
Of course, if his mother ended up needing heavy procedure at the hospital, though she was a civilian the clan would cover some, if not most, of the expenses.
It would be unseemly of the Hyuuga to let one of their own wither to die because her teenaged son couldn't pay the medical bills; Tenten didn't have that recourse. Nor did she have any other family than her mother, for that matter. And she was much too proud to accept charity from Gai-sensei unless it got to the point where she had no other choice but take it, or watch her mother die.
He watched as Tenten carefully peeled herself from the tree. “Ow,” she said conversationally. “Okay, I'm good for real, now. Let's try this again.”
There might be something to that beyond the attitude; he couldn't detect any remaining stiffness as she assumed position again. The rigidness seemed to have entirely disappeared.
“Come on, Neji, let's do this. Lee's supposed to join us in half an hour and I want to have something done by then.”
Still, he couldn't shake remnants of his reluctance as he complied. This had all the markings of a situation he would be livid at Hinata-sama for pushing so much, and Neji didn't relish the feeling of being a hypocrite.
“If you feel that anything hurts more than it should, we're stopping,” he warned.
She rolled her eyes. “Fine.”
“And after the sparring you put on some of Hinata-sama's ointment, it's very effective at relaxing your muscles. I'll give you the jar I have, so you can do it again after training with Lee, and tonight.”
“Fine, Dad, I promise I will! Now can we--” she gestured with her arms, flicking her fingers in a movement Neji had learned to be instinctively wary of coming from her, “before I die of old age?”
He took a breath. “You know, just for today, I think--”
“NEJI. If you breathe one word about skipping training, I swear on my scrolls you will regret it.”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “I was merely going to suggest taking it easy on you.”
They both knew it was a joke. Neji would sooner adopt Lee's clothing, fighting, and hairstyle than fight his teammates at anything else than the best of his capacity. He felt it would be insulting to everyone involved, and would prevent any of them from learning anything.
She looked murderous, probably over the fact that she'd let herself be goaded into pursing the argument longer than necessary.
He smirked, and her fingers flicked again into a summoning seal, and he didn't have the time to concentrate on something else than the fight and the weapons whistling.
3.
When Neji was convalescent in the hospital, he had physical therapy. His body had had a hole put through it; only inches from his heart. It had all been... regrown had been the somewhat disturbing word Tsunade had employed, when summing up the procedure to him in the most succinct terms. Neji didn't like to dwell on picturing what she meant.
His body had to relearn how to function as a hole, though. And that was enough of a worry to replace things he preferred not to contemplate.
He couldn't ignore the fact that simple movement hurt, sometimes, in a way it shouldn't. That simply standing upstraight, fixing one point on the wall in front of him, and lifting his arms until his hands were above his hands was enough to tire him out. Using the Byakugan only made it worse; he never actually fell, but he felt like he was on the edge of falling.
Activating it, before the fight with Kidoumaru, had been a joy, something he now realized he had reveled in; like the full dimension of the world was revealed to him, and he revealed his full potential of the world. It was like the third dimension ceased to be a series of planes and layers and suddenly reorganized into interconnections he could follow, glide through, read as easily as he could people's emotions.
Now it set his heart beating so frenetically he couldn't help but remember the way his heart had almost been speared through.
It was horrific; but it wasn't, in spite of what people that barely knew him tended to assume, the first time that he'd learned to think of his body, of his power, as something to be feared. Control over one's emotions wasn't just a matter of classiness or haughtiness or whatever Kiba chose to grumble into Akamaru's floppy ears.
It was control, and it was necessary, because the one time Neji had lost control of his emotions, he had almost killed his cousin.
So relearning all of it wasn't the worst.
The worst was how the shaking would chase him even in his sleep, or his sleep be plagued with so many of the images Tsunade's speech had spawned - so carefully repressed during the day - that he would shake himself to waking.
And when he was awake, Byakugan fully activated without his consent, in the dead of the night alone in his moonlit hospital room, he would try to focus his vision back to mundane, and his hands were still trembling. His limbs, or his jaw, or inner muscles he'd barely been aware he had, would twitch and jerk at random, unpredictable intervals, and his heart was still drumming wildly in ears.
That was the scariest part.
Because. The heart is a muscle.
It would've been untrue to claim that he was alone, blatantly so, so Neji never even considered that as an issue. Had he been, he would not have suffered or resented it as much as many others; even as a child, Neji's disposition had led him to being content on his own as often if not more than in the company of others.
He had comrades - people who were becoming closer to him than simply Leaf - going through their own difficult rehabilitation, at the same time. Maybe Chouji and he didn't have much in common beyond an appreciation for quiet and a tendency to discrete, deadpan humor, but they had plenty of opportunity practicing both.
He had visitors - people who were ingraining themselves to him when he'd never expected. Becoming dear to him.
People he cared for.
Of all of these, none could have surprised him more than Hinata-sama quietly pattering into his room one afternoon.
He was sitting in his bed, staring out of the window and bored out of his mind, the beginnings of a headache and faint nausea from spending the past hour attempting to amuse himself by playing all possible variants of Count the Birds he could think of in a hospital. The last one he'd tried - count the scalpels - had proved to be both exhausting and exasperating (seriously, did all those people have to keep moving these things around? Weren't they supposed to be like weapons, for civilians? Shouldn't they be more careful with them? Even ninja weren't so careless with kunai!) enough for him to stop.
Her shoulders were hunched, her head bent so that her bangs obscured most of her face - a nice trick, if Hinata wasn't dealing with a Byakugan user - and the steps she took n the direction of the bed were minuscule, like she'd rather dash to other side of the hospital, possibly of town, than come any closer, but she was there. Her hands were clutched on her chest - around a small, round jar, he saw as she approached, like it was something precious or a shield.
The wave of impatient scorn he felt toward her then had nothing to do with whether she'd deserved it, he reminded himself. He'd simply trained himself and had had it drilled into him since he was a child that timidity was not traits a proper Hyuuga should display, a fortiori the heir.
Their lives would've been very different if Hinata had learned earlier to conceal her insecurities behind a mask of dignity. But that was neither then nor there.
“Hinata-sama,” he said, and was pleased that his tone wasn't too cold and she didn't jump, “I'm grateful you'd take the time to visit me.”
Her shoulders twitched, but Neji decided he couldn't blame her. He hadn't sooner said the words that he wanted to take them back, too formal and ostensibly shoving back the issue that Neji had issues about their difference in status into her face, and blatant lies.
Control.
He wasn't even angry at her, it had just slipped out. The result of a decade spent mentally directing hatred her way.
“You don't need to be,” she replied, still as soft and hesitant as a child fumbling his first origami.
Neji manfully told himself he in no way wanted to scream, if only just to cut through what promised to be one of the most awkwardly-worded, emotionally-fraught, weakly-managed conversations he'd ever had.
Even to call it conversation might be doing it, or her, too much credit. He was much tempted by a mercy killing, cutting straight through Hinata's pitiful quivering. Say something horribly nasty right from the start, get her to break down, cry and leave.
Control, control, control. Also, boredom breeds melodrama, he only had to think back to some of Lee's self-imposed challenges to remember that.
“I know it's not very pleasant to be in the hospital alone,” she continued; and she didn't sound apologetic, but matter-of-fact.
Hinata had guts, he was brusquely reminded. He'd do well to remember that.
He had put her in the hospital, had almost killed her, and he hadn't visited her once. Now, watching her out of the corner of his eyes, he considered for the first time why she might be visiting him, after all. It was hardly Hinata's style to look for confrontation; but that she didn't roll over was a lesson he should never forget.
Maybe she didn't show it the way he did, but Hinata definitely had her pride.
He wasn't certain of how to react or even how to feel, by this point. He watched, confused and bemused and wondering if he was supposed to respond somehow, as she set the jar down on his bedside table. It was small and round, one of those small healing oil jars he'd seen her give both Naruto and Kiba after their fight, and on other occasions as well; vague memories resurfacing and interlocking with what he'd already noticed.
“It's ointment. I'm n-I'm not sure it'll do much good, it didn't do much to me, but it's p-pleasant,” her cheeks took flame over the last word, but she pushed on anyway, “a-and it smells good. Hum. Oborozuki. It's a change from hospital smells.”
Stunned, Neji determined, from a distance. What he ought to feel was stunned.
Even more stunned when his timid little cousin that he'd tried to kill failed to run away the way she might have after she was done with her explanation, and stayed there.
Presumably waiting for him to stay something.
“I, ah, thank you,” he ventured.
“It's nothing,” she said with a quick (self-depreciative?) smile.
And only then did she leave.
Neji stared at the door for a long time after she was gone. A chaos of bewilderment was roiling under his skull., only dulled by the shame, profound and acute.
Top of it floated the question, what shamed him most: his past behavior compared to her, or that as long as she'd been there she hadn't met his eyes once?
Characters/Pairing: Neji (Lee, Tenten, Hinata; very, very light hints at Neji/Hinata. Or Neji/Tenten. Or Neji/Lee. Yeah, I don't know either.)
Rating: PG
Warnings: off-handed upsetting issues, though no abuse and nothing sexual. Tenten's mother is in the hospital, very sick, possibly dying.
Summary: Just because, as a shinobi, you're expected to be able to take pain - fist-through-the-chest kind of pain - doesn't mean you've got to take the small kind as well.
Notes: For some reason these are in reverse chronological order; the first is In The Future, the second is the missing two-year-and-a-half era, the third is pre-timeskip. hc_bingo, theme 'muscle strains and spasms'. For hungrytiger11. Title from “With a Little Help From My Friends”. So very, very unbeta'd.
1.
Jyuuken isn't as hard on the body as Gouken.
Fights to the death, however, are rough to everybody.
They'd dragged themselves back to camp after unsuccessfully searching the woods for their fallen attacker, discussed her disappearance, and came to the conclusion that she hadn't been alone. Which meant that the mission wasn't over, and they could expect more assassination attempts in the close future.
Tenten was bearing her I Hate Escort Missions Look, and that meant that soon she was going to replace him, for fear that otherwise she might be the one to do something to physically hurt their client.
As the team's scout, Neji did most of the trip preceding the caravan, which meant that he hadn't much opportunity upon which to judge their client's character, but he'd noticed nothing that stood out as a mark of obnoxiousness. No outrageous disregard for his bodyguard's advices. No talking down his nose because he was a wealthy nobleman and they dirty, blood-soaked commoners. Not talkative streak such that it would obscure suspect sounds, or get on a bodyguard's nerves.
In fact, from what he'd seen of the costumer and of Gai-sensei's treatment of him, they might have got the non-existent perfect costumer type.
It was good, because it meant that their only enemies were the people trying to kill their client and Tenten's hatred of escort missions.
He might enjoy a break from running ahead. Someone always stayed with the client in case of an attacks the others had missed; he'd ask Gai-sensei and Lee if that could be him tomorrow. The fight had left him more tense than was going to be comfortable, as the rest of the team, caught in a genjutsu, had been prevented from helping until it was almost over. And she'd been good, easily good enough to be a jounin.
He may have grimaced standing up.
He was positive he hadn't, but he must have, or he'd blinked, or maybe breathed, but he must have done something for Lee to notice he wasn't quite in top form.
“Neji!”
Neji was long past thinking evil thoughts at Lee and Gai-sensei's tendency to TALK REALLY LOUD, and was coming to terms with fact that it would have effects on his hearing as an old man. As it suggested that he would live into old age, he was not at all opposed to the consideration. And if nothing else, seeing strangers jump when Lee shouted provided amusement.
“Lee?”
“I see you're in some discomfort.”
Neji's well-honed alarms pealed. Sliding a glance Tenten's way for some help or distraction would be useless; none would be forthcoming, Escort Missions making her notoriously petty.
“I have a jar of Hinata-sama's soothing oil,” Neji said, in what was clearly a warning tone.
The truth was, he did not know what he was warning off Lee doing yet, and he'd outgrown many control and image issues since he was a teen; he wouldn't have bothered, had he not planned on spending the very next day confined in the same place as their client for one entire day. Could be awkward.
To Lee's credit, he didn't point out that Hinata-sama's ointment was far better a perfume than it was a medicinal product. That was because Lee was polite to a fault, and Tenten's snort said nothing else, but his silence allowed Neji to remain on speaking terms with him.
“I could give you a massage,” Lee grinned. “I'm really good at it, Ino-san says.”
Neji didn't look at anyone else, refused to believe he might be blushing, and made a conscious effort of not noting the description of the servant who coughed.
“LEE.”
Lee shut up.
Later, his refusal to acknowledge Tenten's snickering insistence that it'd looked just like a married couple meant that he was able to remain on speaking terms with her, as well.
2.
“Ow,” Tenten grouched. Her face was clenched in a grimace, and she was leaning on her right leg, visibly straining not to breathe too hard or rest too much of her weight on her left. “Ow, ow, damn.”
Neji dropped his stance and took a step back. “...Do you need help?”
Pain endurance was one thing; starting training in pain when there was no reason for it, that was something to be concerned about. One day he hoped he might be able to get Hinata-sama understand the difference.
She briefly shook her head, and hissed in pain. “No no, I'll be alright, just; let me--”
Cursing under her breath, she hoppled to the nearest tree and turned, with obvious difficulties, until she could rest against the trunk. Her movements were rigid, her muscles too taut for what little movement she was making. Rapidly, Neji switched to Byakugan to check over her for any sign of internal injury, or--
He frowned “I'm not saying anything wrong with your chakra pathways.”
The groan she let out was this time tinted with some irritation, though whether it was because she expected him to stand aside and do nothing while he could make sure his teammate wasn't hurt or because of the inanity of his remark he wasn't sure.
Finally, after what felt like eternities of him doing nothing but standing there foolishly watching his friend suffer, her head fell back against the trunk of the tree. Signs of discomfort hadn't entirely left her face yet, but at least she didn't seem to be in the throes of agony anymore.
She sighed, and only then did she seem to relax entirely. Still propped against the tree, she opened her eyes and looked at him. She wasn't smiling, and the bags under her eyes were definitely more pronounced from that angle, but they held the same almost defiant sparkle they always did. “See? Told you nothing. That was nothing.”
“That's rubbish and you know it.” He crossed his arms. At this stage, glaring wouldn't suffice to make his point.
An expression of annoyance crossed over her face, as though he was the one being unreasonable and he refused to let her talk sense into him. Like she'd done earlier, he gritted his teeth. At the moment, he was more than familiar with the feeling. “I just bumped into one of the crates I was moving around yesterday night, and I dropped the one I was holding. I didn't even realize I'd pulled or strained or whatever, it's not anything, it wasn't anything except getting yelled at by my boss for not being careful. Damn, it's like I've got to justify myself to you.”
Neji had a few choice words of what he thought of taking on a second, physical job when you were already a ninja preparing for a chuunin exam, but he kept them firmly bottled, sealed, and under constant watch left they escape. It wasn't like Tenten had any choice, or like he wouldn't do exactly the same if he was put in her position.
Of course, if his mother ended up needing heavy procedure at the hospital, though she was a civilian the clan would cover some, if not most, of the expenses.
It would be unseemly of the Hyuuga to let one of their own wither to die because her teenaged son couldn't pay the medical bills; Tenten didn't have that recourse. Nor did she have any other family than her mother, for that matter. And she was much too proud to accept charity from Gai-sensei unless it got to the point where she had no other choice but take it, or watch her mother die.
He watched as Tenten carefully peeled herself from the tree. “Ow,” she said conversationally. “Okay, I'm good for real, now. Let's try this again.”
There might be something to that beyond the attitude; he couldn't detect any remaining stiffness as she assumed position again. The rigidness seemed to have entirely disappeared.
“Come on, Neji, let's do this. Lee's supposed to join us in half an hour and I want to have something done by then.”
Still, he couldn't shake remnants of his reluctance as he complied. This had all the markings of a situation he would be livid at Hinata-sama for pushing so much, and Neji didn't relish the feeling of being a hypocrite.
“If you feel that anything hurts more than it should, we're stopping,” he warned.
She rolled her eyes. “Fine.”
“And after the sparring you put on some of Hinata-sama's ointment, it's very effective at relaxing your muscles. I'll give you the jar I have, so you can do it again after training with Lee, and tonight.”
“Fine, Dad, I promise I will! Now can we--” she gestured with her arms, flicking her fingers in a movement Neji had learned to be instinctively wary of coming from her, “before I die of old age?”
He took a breath. “You know, just for today, I think--”
“NEJI. If you breathe one word about skipping training, I swear on my scrolls you will regret it.”
He raised an eyebrow at her. “I was merely going to suggest taking it easy on you.”
They both knew it was a joke. Neji would sooner adopt Lee's clothing, fighting, and hairstyle than fight his teammates at anything else than the best of his capacity. He felt it would be insulting to everyone involved, and would prevent any of them from learning anything.
She looked murderous, probably over the fact that she'd let herself be goaded into pursing the argument longer than necessary.
He smirked, and her fingers flicked again into a summoning seal, and he didn't have the time to concentrate on something else than the fight and the weapons whistling.
3.
When Neji was convalescent in the hospital, he had physical therapy. His body had had a hole put through it; only inches from his heart. It had all been... regrown had been the somewhat disturbing word Tsunade had employed, when summing up the procedure to him in the most succinct terms. Neji didn't like to dwell on picturing what she meant.
His body had to relearn how to function as a hole, though. And that was enough of a worry to replace things he preferred not to contemplate.
He couldn't ignore the fact that simple movement hurt, sometimes, in a way it shouldn't. That simply standing upstraight, fixing one point on the wall in front of him, and lifting his arms until his hands were above his hands was enough to tire him out. Using the Byakugan only made it worse; he never actually fell, but he felt like he was on the edge of falling.
Activating it, before the fight with Kidoumaru, had been a joy, something he now realized he had reveled in; like the full dimension of the world was revealed to him, and he revealed his full potential of the world. It was like the third dimension ceased to be a series of planes and layers and suddenly reorganized into interconnections he could follow, glide through, read as easily as he could people's emotions.
Now it set his heart beating so frenetically he couldn't help but remember the way his heart had almost been speared through.
It was horrific; but it wasn't, in spite of what people that barely knew him tended to assume, the first time that he'd learned to think of his body, of his power, as something to be feared. Control over one's emotions wasn't just a matter of classiness or haughtiness or whatever Kiba chose to grumble into Akamaru's floppy ears.
It was control, and it was necessary, because the one time Neji had lost control of his emotions, he had almost killed his cousin.
So relearning all of it wasn't the worst.
The worst was how the shaking would chase him even in his sleep, or his sleep be plagued with so many of the images Tsunade's speech had spawned - so carefully repressed during the day - that he would shake himself to waking.
And when he was awake, Byakugan fully activated without his consent, in the dead of the night alone in his moonlit hospital room, he would try to focus his vision back to mundane, and his hands were still trembling. His limbs, or his jaw, or inner muscles he'd barely been aware he had, would twitch and jerk at random, unpredictable intervals, and his heart was still drumming wildly in ears.
That was the scariest part.
Because. The heart is a muscle.
It would've been untrue to claim that he was alone, blatantly so, so Neji never even considered that as an issue. Had he been, he would not have suffered or resented it as much as many others; even as a child, Neji's disposition had led him to being content on his own as often if not more than in the company of others.
He had comrades - people who were becoming closer to him than simply Leaf - going through their own difficult rehabilitation, at the same time. Maybe Chouji and he didn't have much in common beyond an appreciation for quiet and a tendency to discrete, deadpan humor, but they had plenty of opportunity practicing both.
He had visitors - people who were ingraining themselves to him when he'd never expected. Becoming dear to him.
People he cared for.
Of all of these, none could have surprised him more than Hinata-sama quietly pattering into his room one afternoon.
He was sitting in his bed, staring out of the window and bored out of his mind, the beginnings of a headache and faint nausea from spending the past hour attempting to amuse himself by playing all possible variants of Count the Birds he could think of in a hospital. The last one he'd tried - count the scalpels - had proved to be both exhausting and exasperating (seriously, did all those people have to keep moving these things around? Weren't they supposed to be like weapons, for civilians? Shouldn't they be more careful with them? Even ninja weren't so careless with kunai!) enough for him to stop.
Her shoulders were hunched, her head bent so that her bangs obscured most of her face - a nice trick, if Hinata wasn't dealing with a Byakugan user - and the steps she took n the direction of the bed were minuscule, like she'd rather dash to other side of the hospital, possibly of town, than come any closer, but she was there. Her hands were clutched on her chest - around a small, round jar, he saw as she approached, like it was something precious or a shield.
The wave of impatient scorn he felt toward her then had nothing to do with whether she'd deserved it, he reminded himself. He'd simply trained himself and had had it drilled into him since he was a child that timidity was not traits a proper Hyuuga should display, a fortiori the heir.
Their lives would've been very different if Hinata had learned earlier to conceal her insecurities behind a mask of dignity. But that was neither then nor there.
“Hinata-sama,” he said, and was pleased that his tone wasn't too cold and she didn't jump, “I'm grateful you'd take the time to visit me.”
Her shoulders twitched, but Neji decided he couldn't blame her. He hadn't sooner said the words that he wanted to take them back, too formal and ostensibly shoving back the issue that Neji had issues about their difference in status into her face, and blatant lies.
Control.
He wasn't even angry at her, it had just slipped out. The result of a decade spent mentally directing hatred her way.
“You don't need to be,” she replied, still as soft and hesitant as a child fumbling his first origami.
Neji manfully told himself he in no way wanted to scream, if only just to cut through what promised to be one of the most awkwardly-worded, emotionally-fraught, weakly-managed conversations he'd ever had.
Even to call it conversation might be doing it, or her, too much credit. He was much tempted by a mercy killing, cutting straight through Hinata's pitiful quivering. Say something horribly nasty right from the start, get her to break down, cry and leave.
Control, control, control. Also, boredom breeds melodrama, he only had to think back to some of Lee's self-imposed challenges to remember that.
“I know it's not very pleasant to be in the hospital alone,” she continued; and she didn't sound apologetic, but matter-of-fact.
Hinata had guts, he was brusquely reminded. He'd do well to remember that.
He had put her in the hospital, had almost killed her, and he hadn't visited her once. Now, watching her out of the corner of his eyes, he considered for the first time why she might be visiting him, after all. It was hardly Hinata's style to look for confrontation; but that she didn't roll over was a lesson he should never forget.
Maybe she didn't show it the way he did, but Hinata definitely had her pride.
He wasn't certain of how to react or even how to feel, by this point. He watched, confused and bemused and wondering if he was supposed to respond somehow, as she set the jar down on his bedside table. It was small and round, one of those small healing oil jars he'd seen her give both Naruto and Kiba after their fight, and on other occasions as well; vague memories resurfacing and interlocking with what he'd already noticed.
“It's ointment. I'm n-I'm not sure it'll do much good, it didn't do much to me, but it's p-pleasant,” her cheeks took flame over the last word, but she pushed on anyway, “a-and it smells good. Hum. Oborozuki. It's a change from hospital smells.”
Stunned, Neji determined, from a distance. What he ought to feel was stunned.
Even more stunned when his timid little cousin that he'd tried to kill failed to run away the way she might have after she was done with her explanation, and stayed there.
Presumably waiting for him to stay something.
“I, ah, thank you,” he ventured.
“It's nothing,” she said with a quick (self-depreciative?) smile.
And only then did she leave.
Neji stared at the door for a long time after she was gone. A chaos of bewilderment was roiling under his skull., only dulled by the shame, profound and acute.
Top of it floated the question, what shamed him most: his past behavior compared to her, or that as long as she'd been there she hadn't met his eyes once?