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As she barely avoids a lightning-fast punch from Lee, Tenten instinctively reaches for a scroll that isn’t there. Taijutsu and kunai are all they’re allowing themselves to train with today (though Lee never uses his kunai, and Tenten suspects he’ll never need to). The reflex slows her down, nearly leaving her at the mercy of Neji’s open palm, which she blocks with a raised forearm before kicking him away.
“No scrolls,” Neji reminds her, and she rolls her eyes, because he can clearly see that she doesn’t even have any on her.
“No Byakugan,” she calls back. When he scoffs, she adds, “Sorry! I thought we were saying dumb things that we all already know.”
He has no opportunity to retort, for Lee is wild, swooping in with a fierce kick that Neji only just avoids. Tenten readies her kunai, charging at them both; Neji manages to knock Lee away with a well-timed blow to his back and sets his sights on her. She swipes, misses, twists to dodge a returning blow, ducks under another –
“Tenten!!”
She freezes in place, looking up at the breathless pink-haired intrusion (...Sakura?) to her spar with her teammates. Neji takes the unsportsmanlike opportunity to lift his kunai to her throat. Annoying, but unsurprising. He’d been a prick at the Academy, but when they’d been placed on a genin team together several months ago, she’d hoped that maybe it was all an act…that Neji’s self-important shell hid a secret, kindred interior.
She’d been right, sort of. Having to spend the vast majority of his time with herself, Lee, and Gai had forcibly softened some of his edges. Neji now only mocks Lee’s exuberance when he deems it absolutely necessary, shares a look with Tenten at Gai-sensei’s madness instead of ignoring her. He even seems to enjoy their presence sometimes – as much as his little smirks constitute enjoyment, anyway.
But goddamn if he isn’t still an opportunistic little punk when they spar.
“You’re out,” he declares, just as Lee catches Sakura’s eye and trips over his own feet mid-charge, which sends him crashing headlong into Neji.
Tenten looks between her teammates, crumpled in a heap beside her (“I’m terribly sorry, Neji, but I am surprised you did not see it coming!”) and Sakura, whose giddy expression makes Tenten immediately suspicious.
“Uh, hi?” she ventures.
Sakura rocks back and forth on her heels. “I wanted to ask you—“
A purple-blonde blur comes flying out of the trees and skids to a halt in front of Tenten, blocking Sakura’s way. “We heard you do palm readings,” cries Ino, holding out her hand, “will you read mine?”
“Ugh, Ino, I was here first!”
“You don’t need to have a palm reading done, we already know that you’re going to be an unremarkable old maid—“
“Guys!” cries Tenten. The girls both turn their heads, looking at her like she holds all the secrets of the universe in her own palm. Off to her right, Neji and Lee are getting back up off the ground. Lee keeps looking furtively at Sakura, unsure of himself; Neji, on the other hand, merely raises an eyebrow at Tenten in disbelief.
Tenten has never been more uncomfortable in her life. “Who, um. Who told you that?”
“Your sensei was bragging about it to my sensei,” answers Sakura. “Something about his genin team having ‘unparalleled skills in a variety of disciplines’.”
How Gai-sensei had gathered that from catching her reading her grandmother’s palmistry guide, Tenten has no idea. She turns a little pink in spite of herself at the thought of her sensei bragging about her to another jounin, but she wishes he’d been bragging about something else, like her marksmanship, or her fuinjutsu.
But palmistry, sure. Of course. “I mean, I’m interested in it, but I’ve never really—“
“Practice on us!” the girls cry in unison.
This is a good thing, Tenten’s grandmother would say. According to her, Tenten should be making an effort to spend more time with kids her age other than “the loud child” and “the other one, with the long hair”. After watching Ino and Sakura fight about…nothing, she determines, Tenten is inclined to disagree. For all their faults, at least Lee and Neji take their studies seriously. Never in a million years would they stop everything, interrupting someone else’s work, for something as asinine as having their fortunes told.
But the worst part isn’t the girls, who will probably be on their way quickly if she indulges them. It’s that Lee and Neji – with whom she will be spending an indeterminate amount of her life – keep looking at her like she’s a complete stranger. At least Lee looks like maybe he’s interested, would ask questions, but Neji…it’s like she struck him, his feathers more ruffled than when she actually strikes him. Tenten knows palm reading is not exactly a standard interest, but she didn’t realize that he would be quite so…judge-y. Or, apparently, offended.
This is exactly why she didn’t tell them.
“I’ll keep it short, guys,” she explains, holding up both her hands and hoping that they just walk away. “Just gimme like, ten minutes.”
Tenten then turns away from them and sits down, gesturing for the girls to follow. They do, giggling all the while, their argument apparently forgotten now that Tenten has agreed to read for them. She ignores Neji as he stalks off toward the trees, leaving Lee to stand awkwardly by himself – not wanting to sit down but, for some reason, not wanting to stray too far.
“Me first,” declares Ino. Sakura huffs, but stops pouting immediately when Tenten takes Ino’s right hand. Both girls lean forward, fascinated.
Tenten traces Ino’s palm carefully, trying to remember as much as she can. She starts with the heart line, because that’s what her grandmother always does. She looks to the first major crease in Ino’s palm, closest to her fingers.
“Your heart line is pretty steady,” she says, running her finger along it. “There’s a little break here, near the beginning—“ she points to the fissure on the line, which rests just below Ino’s middle finger. “But after that, it’s basically unbroken.”
“What does the break mean?” Ino asks, inching closer to her. Sakura does the same.
“It can mean a few different things,” begins Tenten, “but it normally means a heartbreak of some kind.”
Tenten doesn’t think she’d imparted anything particularly earth-shattering. She’s heard her grandmother do readings loads of times – most people have all kinds of breaks and forks along the lines of their palms, which shift and change over time, with a myriad of meanings. They aren’t things to be afraid of, they just…are.
(She herself has a distinct island on her heart line – a mark of devastating loss, at which her grandmother had clicked her tongue and sighed – but it’s nothing to worry about. Tenten is not afraid.)
But the dreadful, heavy silence that hangs over them suggests otherwise. Sakura claps a hand to her mouth and lets her eyes go wide, wide, wide, as if Tenten has just sentenced Ino to death. Ino herself is white as a sheet; her hand trembles in Tenten’s own.
“A…heartbreak?” she whimpers.
“Yeah,” confirms Tenten, “but plenty of people have them. It’s not like it means you’re going to—“
But Ino has already withdrawn her hand with a derisive tch that gives Tenten half a mind to slap her across the face. This crop of genin below them, Tenten decides on the spot, are a bunch of brats. “Well, if someone as cute as me is going to have a heartbreak, your heart line must be riddled with them, forehead,” Ino scoffs in Sakura’s direction. “Go ahead. Let’s see it.”
Tenten opens her mouth to fight back, but Sakura has scooted in front of her, arm outstretched. With a groan, Tenten takes Sakura’s hand, politely ignoring Lee’s sudden interest in the conversation (and subsequent pretense of disinterest).
Neji, of course, continues ignoring all of them completely, tossing kunai after kunai at the nearest tree with far more force than is necessary (it does little for his aim, made sloppy by his aggression). His dark hair has come undone from the exertion, shorter strands breaking free from behind his hitai-ate and framing his red face. Tenten has rarely seen him so angry. He must think she’s stupid, probably doesn’t believe in any of the things her grandmother takes so much pride in. Tenten is sure it’s beneath him.
He can shove it, for all she cares.
“Okay, so, we’ll start with your heart line, too,” Tenten says, spreading Sakura’s palm open and running her finger along it. “Your heart line is…”
Tenten pauses, because there’s no way. She looks down at her own palm, to make sure she’s really seeing what she thinks she’s seeing. She gestures for Ino to present her hand again; Ino does, reluctantly. Looking between the two of them, it’s undeniable…
“Your heart line is practically identical to Ino’s.”
Sakura gapes wordlessly like a snared fish, eyes darting between her palm, Ino’s palm, and Tenten’s face.
“That’s impossible!” Ino shouts, taking Sakura’s palm and bringing it just centimeters from her own nose. “How did you manage to copy me like this? Are you using a jutsu or something? Quit it, forehead!”
“I’m not, you little pig!” Sakura spits back at her. “Why would I even do that?”
“You always do everything I do! Even down to liking the same boy—“
“You two are shinobi!” Tenten finally shouts, hands on her hips. “You two should be honing your skills, not whining about boys! Are you kidding me?”
Sakura and Ino blink at her once, twice, before returning immediately to their argument. Rolling her eyes, Tenten strides across the training grounds toward the edge of the woods. Lee walks in step with her, but turns his head to look back at the girls, a suspicious blush on his face.
“Tenten, I had no idea that you had such a unique hobby! Why didn’t you tell us?”
“I didn’t think it was a big deal,” she replies, which is half true. The other half is currently beating the stuffing out of a practice dummy with a not-so-Gentle Fist. “Can we just get back to sparring?”
Once the rest of the genin hear that she reads palms, that’s the end of her peace. Naruto is the most persistent, desperate for evidence that he’ll become Hokage someday (“Yes,” Tenten finally groans, pointing at a random spot on his palm, just to get him off her back.) Despite her initial misgivings, Ino pesters her frequently for more detailed readings, often with her teammates or Sakura in tow. Tenten even catches Ino retaining some of the things she’d learned from her, playing at reading palms herself and trying in vain to make Shikamaru and Chouji care that both of their marriage lines indicate, of all things, “political interference”.
But none of her readings can predict the calamity that is Sasuke’s defection from Konoha. It blindsides them all. Tenten thinks it somewhat of a blessing that Naruto leaves so suddenly to train with his sensei; she can’t imagine what would happen to Naruto had he given himself any time or space to dwell on the betrayal. Sakura and Ino get no such opportunity. Stuck in the village where Sasuke’s memory lurks around every corner, the girls are inconsolable, crying for weeks on end and bemoaning the twin heartbreaks they should have seen coming.
Once upon a time, she would have claimed they took their readings too seriously. That was before Lee’s entire left side was crushed at the chuunin exams, before Neji came home on the brink of death from the doomed retrieval mission. Before the island on her heart line became something to fear.
Tenten doesn’t judge them so harshly these days.
Witnessing one of these crying spells with her, Neji fumbles his way through asking Tenten if she herself is alright.
“You know,” he says, when she pulls a face at the question, “because you…found him attractive, I thought perhaps…” He gesticulates vaguely in the direction of everything. “I thought I ought to ask.”
She doesn’t know how to tell him that she’d only said Sasuke was cute to piss him off, and then had promptly forgotten about it. Tenten supposes she was successful since he seems to remember it so clearly. She also doesn’t know how to tell Neji she’d been far more upset when she’d found out how badly injured he’d been on the failed retrieval mission; how she’d spent days complaining to Gai-sensei that for all their brilliance, every time her teammates fight without her, something horrible seems to happen to them; how seeing them in pain makes her wish, so fervently, that she had any aptitude for medical ninjutsu; how goddamn tired she was of walking in and out of that hospital just to watch them hurt.
She doesn’t know how to say these things, so all she says is, “I’m good. Are you good?”
“I’m not sure,” he muses, and Tenten’s jaw drops at how quickly he admits it…but then he adds, “I’m well, I think, but good is another beast entirely” which leaves her no choice but to punch him in the arm.
But she has to admit it’s a nice change of pace to see Neji taking her feelings into consideration – no matter how off-base he happens to be in this moment. She wishes it hadn’t taken a crushing defeat in front of the whole village, a brush with death that was far too close, but Tenten can’t complain. At least he and Lee are here with her, the loss on her heart line kept at bay for the time being. Tenten will take anything she can get.
(After rubbing at his sore arm, Neji chuckles, then leans toward her and lightly bumps his shoulder against hers.)
(It is the first time he has ever touched her outside of a spar.)
Over the coming months, Tenten sees Sakura and Ino’s crying spells come fewer and further between. Then they are sitting together on park benches, then picnicking near the training grounds, then walking arm in arm down the main road…but the kicker is when she catches them kissing each other goodbye in front of the Yamanaka flower shop, pink in the face and giggly.
“Hey, Tenten!” Ino shouts, spotting her and holding up a blushing Sakura’s hand. “Matching heart lines!”
Matching heart lines, she agrees, giving the two a little salute as she walks on.
When word reaches their village that Gaara has officially taken office as the new Kazekage, after two years of intensive preparation by the Suna council, Tenten doesn’t think much of it. She’s not terribly fond of Gaara, despite Lee’s insistence that he’s become “a splendid ninja and true friend” over the past few years.
But Lee is made restless by the revelation. His big, dark eyes scan the skies constantly for messenger hawks, even just hours after he’d sent one of his own off to Suna. Observations like “Gaara-kun probably has little time for this sort of thing anymore” start creeping into Lee’s conversation, no matter whether they’re training or dining out. Neji tells Tenten in private that Shikamaru has been complaining about Lee’s seemingly endless questions about Suna-Konoha political dealings, which proves to be unnecessary, as Tenten has already received a missive from Temari that simply reads “is your friend okay?!”
And for anyone else, it would be difficult to tell, but they have to admit that two thousand pushups between training and afternoon tea is excessive. Even for Lee.
“I knew he would be selected, of course,” Lee pants, mid-pushup – Tenten thinks it may be the fourth time this week he’s said this? “He is the finest shinobi in his village! He’d have been chosen even if he weren’t the previous Kazekage’s son.”
Tenten hums absently as she watches him from the opposite side of his low table, his lithe frame dipping in and out of view behind it.
“I guess so,” Tenten replies, not sure where this is going.
Neji putters around Lee’s kitchenette, his back to them as he prepares their tea. “Where exactly is this going?”
Tenten looks over and locks eyes with Neji, who gives her the tiniest of smirks over his shoulder. She rolls her eyes playfully in response. It’s nice to be on the same page, these days.
Lee stops, which at only seven hundred and eighty four pushups, is a red flag on its own. He takes his time answering, first propping himself up on his elbows, then rolling over onto his back and sighing heavily.
“He’ll be very busy,” he murmurs.
The unexpected tenderness in his voice raises Tenten’s hackles. She knows they’re getting rather close, but he’s never talked about Gaara with quite this much hurt in his voice (not even after the fight he’d been far too ready, in Tenten’s humble opinion, to forgive him for.) Come to think of it, Tenten’s not sure she’s ever seen Lee this low –
“But I am happy for him, of course! His future is bright!” Lee says, sitting up and grinning widely, and oh, he is gone over that little weirdo. Neji sets down his cup, looking to Tenten for guidance as concern draws furrows and creases over his face. He’s always been beautiful in a way that Tenten can only describe as “frustrating”, but there is something in particular about the way he dotes on them both, with his scrunched-up nose and pursed lips, that makes Tenten’s heart do an odd little…fluttery thing, that it definitely didn’t used to do…
“Tenten!”
She jumps. “Lee?!”
“Please!” He nods at her, tears caught in his long lashes. “Will you…read my palm? So that I too may know what my future holds.”
She knows full well that she probably should not do a reading for Lee in his current emotional state. Tenten has seen people storm out of her grandmother’s house in rages, or weep profusely at even the tiniest hint of misfortune in their readings, when they’re as obviously worked up as Lee is now.
But God help her, she can never say no to that face Lee’s making.
“I’d be honored to read for you, Lee.”
She settles across the table from Lee and holds out her hand. Slowly, Lee unwinds his wraps, closing his eyes and releasing a shaky breath. He extends his hand, tensing up as Tenten takes it. Narrow palm; square, even fingers. Fire hands if I’ve ever seen them, her grandmother would have said, which fits perfectly with the competitive, brash boy before her.
Neji watches them with what Tenten thinks may be mild interest. But he couldn’t be interested. Neji has not entertained the notion of having his palm read since they were genin (“Why?” he’d snarled when she offered, so viciously that Tenten nearly clocked him for talking to her that way. “So that you can tell me what you think I want to hear?“) He’s probably as aware as she is that this should not be happening right now, and has resigned himself to supervising.
Instead of opening Lee’s palm, she closes her fingers around it. “You know none of this is set in stone,” she reminds him.
In answer, he squeezes her hand, nodding. Tenten spreads his hand open to read it.
She thought she’d have new information for Lee, but the deep-set lines that cross his palm only confirm what she’s always known about her teammate. “Figures. Double heart lines,” she tells him, tapping both lines on his hand. “You’re a passionate person–”
“I could have told him that.”
She takes the cushion beside her and whips it at Neji as hard as she can. “You’re a passionate person,” Tenten repeats, turning back to Lee, “who falls in love easily, and always makes the first move in a relationship.”
Lee bites his lip. “Is there any…indication of success?”
“Totally. People with double heart lines do very well in love.”
Unfortunately, Tenten thinks, recalling the look of wide-eyed yearning on the Kazekage’s face when he’d last visited; she trusts Lee’s judgment, but there’s still a protective part of her that really hopes she’s wrong. Of all the shinobi the world has to offer…but then, Lee has always liked a challenge.
“You also have what my grandmother would call ‘fire hands’.” Tenten raises his palm up to show him what she means, pointing up and down the length of his fingers. “The shapes of people’s hands can fall under any of the five elements. Yours signify an active nature, a love for competition, warmth, and drive.”
She lays his hand back down on the table. “Plus, your fate line…” She traces the crease that goes from the base of his palm to the top of it. “Hooks to a strong life line. High energy, and even in spite of setbacks – ” Tenten indicates the many, many crosses on the line “– you tend to succeed.”
Lee’s eyes turn watery again. “Are you certain?”
“Honestly,” Neji sighs, from far closer than he was the last time he interrupted, “this all seems abundantly clear even to me.”
Sometime when she wasn’t looking, Neji had set the cushion she’d thrown at him at the end of the table and sat, one hand folded under his chin to prop it up.
“Really, Tenten?” Lee asks again.
Tenten shrugs. “He’s right. You’re easy to read. Physical strength, creativity, hard work…it’s all there. No surprises.”
“None? No heartbreaks? No disasters?”
There’s a distinct island on his second heart line. One that Tenten recognizes.
“Nope,” she lies.
She pointedly ignores Neji’s arched eyebrow, which is easy to do when Lee is hollering the way he is now, leaping up from the table to throw his arms around her. “Thank you, Tenten!” he cries, sobbing into her shoulder.
Neji lazily blinks his cloudy eyes as a smirk tugs at his lips, an expression of his that could mean anything from you dolt, I figured that out ages ago to I have mysteriously forgotten the word for “thank you”, and which currently seems to mean I would help, but I am enjoying your suffering. It’s a favorite of hers, charming and smug and sweet and irritating in a way that only Neji can seem to pull off. She chalks the skipping of her heartbeat up to Lee cutting off her circulation.
Tenten gestures toward herself and Lee. “You don’t wanna get in on this?”
“It’s for you,” Neji replies. Not a moment later, Lee grabs him by the collar and drags him into the hug.
(If she enjoys the feeling of Neji’s arms around her a little more than she should, well. That’s no one’s business but her own.)
In the blink of an eye, they are at war.
In a heartbeat, Neji races to save his cousin.
In a breath, his chest is torn open.
Tenten can only watch. It takes him lifetimes to fall.
When Tenten thinks back to the hazy first days of Neji’s coma, Tenten is sure that at one point, Sakura told them Neji is lucky. A few centimeters over and he would have died in minutes. Sakura will not tell them what his chances of survival are now.
“I’m doing everything I can,” she promises, but her words carry a pity that Tenten can’t bear.
She lives through the next few days as if underwater, utterly disconnected. Mutely, she feels Lee’s presence with her throughout, as shell-shocked as she is. She’s never apart from him, now. Even when they’re awoken by a nurse, gently reminded that visiting hours have ended, Tenten and Lee leave the hospital together, spend each night curled up in each other’s arms, unwilling to let each other go until the sun rises and they can return to Neji’s side.
(Sakura says something to the other nurses one day. After that, even when visiting hours end, no one comes around to collect them.)
Once Gai-sensei is well enough to get himself around, he often joins their vigil. He always wheels himself in with confidence, certain that Neji will wake up good as new any day now. Lee starts coming back to himself sooner than Tenten does, aided by Gai-sensei’s enthusiasm and insistence that they’d better be ready to get back to training when Neji is well again.
(She does not tell Lee when she finds Gai-sensei sobbing alone in the hallway.)
The chairs near the door are too far from Neji, so most of the time, Tenten sits on the floor and rests her head on the edge of his bed. His hand hangs limp by her shoulder. She doesn’t dare look at his palm, recalling his boundaries (and fearing what it will tell her, besides), but she takes his hand in her own, runs her thumb up and down his delicate fingers.
Lee watches her with his chin on her other shoulder and a question on his lips. She can’t bring herself to answer.
Tenten spends night after night like this, leaned up against Neji’s bedside and holding his hand like a lifeline as Lee in turn holds fast to her. She forces herself to stop searching for answers in the lines on her palm, but she contemplates the island on her heart line, the one she shares with Lee, the entire time.
He’s alive, she tells herself. The island means nothing, because he’s alive. It is still the three of them, just like it’s always been. She still can’t shake the feeling of dread that grips her. The aching emptiness that she knows Lee feels, too, at Neji’s absence.
Then the Kazekage starts visiting, and she realizes that maybe her emptiness and Lee’s have come in different shades.
If someone had told her years ago that Sabaku no Gaara would become one of Lee’s closest confidantes – that he would sit at his side in his darkest hour, wiping his tears and murmuring sweet affirmations with the same sand-scraped voice that once called for his death – Tenten likely would have killed them, under the assumption the person in question had caught her in a particularly cruel genjutsu. All their friends visit at some point or another – Naruto and Hinata stopping by most frequently, and for the longest time – but the Kazekage comes and goes from Neji’s hospital room often, having found a frankly alarming number of excuses to visit and stay in Konoha. He’s quiet. Unobtrusive. Sometimes he sits in the chair by the door with a book in his hand. Sometimes he gets on the floor with them, moving a snoring Lee from her shoulder to his own so she can stretch her legs.
Late one night, in the light of the moon that streams in through the window, the three of them sit in a small circle as Tenten quietly reads the faint, branched lines on Gaara’s hand. She finds few strong markers. A heart line that dips low, keeping his relationships few, but close and intense, and the double life line that they take to signify his mother’s protective spirit. He is otherwise malleable, the lines destined to shift and evolve with him like the wind-blown sand. And it doesn’t matter, but of course the Kazekage’s hands are slender, small – hands of air to breathe life into Lee’s will of fire.
The things that matter most are the things Tenten can’t find in his palm: the way Lee curls into him after a long day, how the tension leaves his shoulders when Gaara rubs tiny circles between his shoulder blades, how he sighs contentedly when Gaara presses his lips to the top of his bowed head.
It is a long time coming, but she thinks maybe Gaara is okay, actually.
The first time Neji opens his eyes, Lee wails so loudly that four nurses come running, but according to Sakura, his consciousness is very limited.
“But he can probably hear you talking, which is a great sign, obviously,” Sakura says, as Tenten strokes Lee’s hair to bring him down. That’s embarrassing, because they have talked about all kinds of things in his hospital room; of course he’s responded to them reminiscing about his spice intolerance. “We’ll keep a close watch on him, it seems like he may be coming out of it.”
The news that Neji is engaging with the world around him once again, however minutely, throws them all into overdrive. Lee takes his training to the floor of Neji’s hospital room, talking through his routine and planning out all the challenges he’s going to drag his Eternal Rival through when he’s well (he doesn’t open his eyes, but Tenten swears, she swears Neji groans). She pulls the chair up close to his bedside and shows off her newest weapons, wrapping his hands around them in the hopes that he can feel the weight of them. He seems to prefer her simply holding his hand.
Their comrades come by more frequently – Hinata most of all, often humming a tune Tenten doesn’t know, which Neji leans into (“My aunt used to sing,” she explains shyly). Naruto and Kiba have to be kicked out of the room more than once for being too rowdy; Shino intervenes, but makes no apologies for them (“Why? Because you were aware when you invited them that this is how they would behave.”) And Team 10 can’t seem to agree on how they can best help Neji recover – Shikamaru wins, claiming that he needs rest and strongly encouraging them all to take a nap (they do, in a snoring heap on the floor).
They tag-team like this for another week or so, with Tenten, Lee, and Gai-sensei ever-present, but Tenten is somehow alone when it happens. Five weeks after he’d first been admitted to the hospital, Tenten has Neji propped up in his bed so she can comb the knots out of his hair, as she has taken to doing every morning.
“Don’t be a jerk to the nurses later,” she murmurs blithely, “but you’re super lucky I took over for this. You were getting so many split ends in the back.”
Neji’s eyes fly open.
“That gotcha, huh?” she teases, knowing he won’t respond. “I promise you still look pretty.”
But then he turns his head, and she’s sure he’s looking directly at her—
“Tenten,” he groans, voice hoarse from disuse.
She loses her grip on the brush. “Neji,” she breathes, chest suddenly tight.
Because he sees her – really, truly sees her – and even with the bags under her eyes from lack of sleep, the stringy locks of hair that have come loose from her buns, Neji’s eyes rove over her, utterly spellbound. She tells herself that his mesmerized expression is probably not because of her. Sakura had advised that when Neji woke up, he would likely be scared, disoriented, latching onto anything familiar. As he locks eyes with her, it nevertheless feels like they are the only two people in the world.
Too quickly, he looks to either side of her, searching for something. “Lee?”
“Bathroom,” she croaks, her throat inexplicably dry.
“Gai-sensei?”
“Getting us breakfast.”
Some of the worry clouding his pale eyes dissipates. Those same eyes then land on the doorway, and his brow furrows like he’s looking at a fallen snowflake in the height of summer; Tenten turns to see Gaara, frozen in place, unsure of whether or not he should enter.
“Kazekage-sama,” Neji rasps. He inclines his head just barely (loser, Tenten thinks, heart swelling at how unabashedly Neji the formal gesture is). He mumbles something unintelligible that ends with “…here?”
In a couple of days, once he’s able to speak in complete sentences, Sakura will tell them that Neji has temporarily lost several weeks of memory prior to his injury, and that the last thing he remembers is from just prior to the Kage summit – of nothing special, a typical night out with Lee and Tenten, their last one before the war. But right now, a bewildered Tenten and Gaara exchange worried glances, neither one knowing how to respond.
Before they can do so, the tension is broken by Neji, who heaves a great sigh and says something that sounds an awful lot like “fucking tired” (“uncharacteristic speech and behavior are normal for recovering coma patients,” Sakura will explain, biting her lip to keep from cackling) before leaning into Tenten’s touch and closing his eyes to sleep.
Tenten laughs so hard she cries; when Lee returns and panics at the sight of her tears, she shakes her head rapidly and grins. “You just missed him, Lee,” she half-laughs, half-sobs, “but he said hi.”
And that little island on their heart lines is nothing, nothing, nothing, because Neji is going to be just fine.
That he stops cursing after just a few days is almost unfortunate, because Tenten does not think she’ll ever get enough of that (“I said what?!” he moans, burying his face in his hands as Tenten recounts every word of his colorful rant upon discovering the split ends at the nape of his neck) but she otherwise couldn’t be happier with how quickly Neji recovers. She’s still not ready when they have to bring him home, where neither she nor Lee can watch over him.
Apparently, Tenten should have kept this thought to herself as opposed to offering (okay, demanding) to stay with Neji during dinner with the Hyuuga, but she has never been known for tact.
So now Tenten is sitting alone in the courtyard of the Hyuuga compound, the crisp chill of early winter nipping at her cheeks as the words “deeply insulting,” “clan matter”, and most irritatingly, “unmarried” circle her mind. There’s no moon out tonight; instead, Tenten gazes up at the inky black sky and searches for stars. It is clear, but they’re still too hard to see with the Konoha lights brightening the sky. She misses nights spent deep in the woods, flat on her back with Neji and Lee at either side of her, picking out constellations and talking in hushed tones about nothing, everything. Maybe when Neji can stand a longer trip, the three of them can set up camp somewhere for a day or two.
That is, she thinks, grimacing, if the stupid head of the Hyuuga clan can get his head out of his--
“You made quite a scene at dinner.”
Tenten turns sharply, rises to help him over to her bench, but Neji lifts one delicate hand to stop her.
“I just don’t get why he won’t let Lee and I stay with you,” she replies curtly, watching as he slowly crosses the courtyard to sit beside her. “And what was that ‘unmarried’ shit? I mean, he knows we’re teammates, right? He knows we’ve all slept like this–“ She tangles her fingers together. “Like, a million times, right?”
“I know, but…”
“If we were gonna, like, ravish you,” Tenten continues, paying no mind to the strangled sound he makes, “we would have done it by now, and anyway, you’re in no condition to–“
“Be that as it may,” Neji says hastily, “I’m not sure you needed to go into quite so much detail at the table.”
“What? I do know every mark on your body already.”
“Again,” he groans, pinching the bridge of his nose and turning slightly pink, “the issue is not so much the argument as the table.”
“The issue is that he won’t let us take care of you.” Tenten leans back on her palms. “Hanabi agrees with me.”
“Hanabi enjoys watching people squirm. She’s already hounding me, wondering when you’ll be back. I imagine it’ll probably be a while before her father gets past it.”
Still her father, not my uncle, after all this time. Tenten grits her teeth, glaring at the strip of cloth that covers his cursed seal – as if her hatred of it will make it disappear. But Neji’s less bothered than she is by it, these days, or at least he gives voice to it less often.
“She also wants to know if you’ll do a palm reading for her, next time.”
“I’ll read for her anytime. As long as it’s okay with His Lordship.”
Neji makes a little hum of amusement. “I’ll be sure to let her know.”
Tenten turns her attention back to the night sky, and they sit in comfortable silence for a spell. When Tenten finally looks back at him, Neji is staring down at his right hand, eyes narrowed as he contemplates it.
Tenten knows this look. She’s not sure if it’s Hyuuga politeness or if it’s a personal hang-up, but Neji never asks for the things he wants. Not the dango that catch his eye at festivals, not his sensei’s praise, not one last stroll around the village before they say goodbye. He just gets this far-away look on his face, waiting for them to be offered, or for himself to stop wanting them.
So she holds out her own hand, beckoning for him to face her. “I can read for you, too,” she offers.
Neji only meets her gaze for a second before turning away from her again. “That’s not necessary.”
“I know,” Tenten says casually, as if the idea of reading Neji’s palm doesn’t make her pulse race. “Just for fun.”
He hesitates, but eventually holds his hand out and open for her to take.
Everything Tenten sees on his palm is…well, it’s exactly what he would have expected, so many years ago. A massive break in his short, chain-linked life line – a catastrophe that follows a lifetime of melancholy. His head line is deep-set, unwavering, stretching end to end across his entire palm – clear indications of his intelligence and hard-headedness. A forked heart line, damning him to stand forever at a crossroads between his own desires and his duty to his clan. He doesn’t have a clear fate line, which is curious, suggesting an aimlessness that doesn’t line up with the steadfast man she knows.
But maybe she’s looking at it wrong.
“Your heart line starts here,” Tenten begins, tracing the line, and suddenly she hates that she always starts with the heart line, because now that it’s Neji’s she’s reading, her own heart won’t stop pounding. “It ends in this fork. That’s conflict, between what you want and what others expect. But it’s curved up, which means that you…”
Are a romantic, highly sensitive and sensual. It makes sense considering his upbringing and refined taste, but Tenten is suddenly certain that having to say the word “sensual” to Neji, about Neji, will make her burst into flames. Determined to be as unhelpful in this regard as possible, apparently, those pale eyes of his glance down at her lips as he waits for her to continue.
“…have a great capacity for love,” she says instead, and moves on before Neji can question it or ask for clarification. “Your head line is deep and long, which means you’re smart, and stubborn – don’t laugh at me, you know that’s true!”
For now he’s gotten himself laughing – that low, breezy chuckle that he only lets out when he’s with her and Lee. “Cut it out, dummy, you’re gonna hurt yourself,” Tenten commands, but a grin sneaks its way onto her face. “It’s sloped – are you paying attention? It slopes, which means a willingness to change. Eventually.”
“Because I’m so stubborn.”
“Yes,” she agrees, unable to suppress a laugh of her own. She traces the broken line around his thumb. “Your life line is chained at the beginning – that’s stress, generally – and it has a pretty big break, see, right here.” Tenten circles it with her index finger, takes a deep breath. “That’s…an interruption, illness or...”
She stops, tears prickling at the corners of her eyes. Neji takes his free hand and rests it on her knee. There’s a steely glint in his eyes, a determination that reminds her that he’s not going anywhere. She lets go of the breath she’s holding.
“You don’t have much of a fate line,” she says, once she’s brave enough to move forward. “In most people, that’s a lack of direction, but I know that’s not you.”
Neji cocks his head to one side. “Oh?”
“I think it’s freedom. Forging your own path.”
His fingers twitch, and his breath catches in his throat – for a second, she thinks he’s going to snap at her like he did when they were kids, and she would really rather not have to kick his ass in his current state – but his eyes are wide with hope, his lips parted in surprise. Once her words have landed properly, Neji sits with them, then blinks slowly and smirks – I have mysteriously forgotten the word for “thank you”.
“You’re welcome,” she says cheekily.
He grins wider, then nods in reference to Tenten’s own hand. “Let me see yours.”
Reflexively, Tenten pulls her hand back; she has to stop herself in the middle of the motion. No one but her grandmother has ever read her palm. After her moment’s hesitation, however, she flips their hands, resting her hand face up in his.
Neji is gentle as he examines her palm, caressing each line with his index and middle fingers. She knows what they all mean – the loyalty and practicality in her long heart line (and the island, the island), the insecurity in her chained head line, the ferocity, vitality, persistence in her curved life line – but Neji has no way of knowing these things. He nevertheless bends lower to look more closely. Tenten stiffens as she feels his breath ghost over her skin.
“Do you even know what you’re looking at?” she teases, flushing pink at the breathlessness in her own voice.
“No,” he admits, tracing patterns at random into her palm.
She can barely move, entranced by the feeling of her hand in his. Almost meditative, like he’s using the idle touch to ground himself. Tenten is anything but calm, her back ramrod straight as Neji “reads”, willing her stupid self not to swoon.
He pauses as he turns her hand over, pushes her sleeve up and traces a long, unfamiliar scar that starts on the back of her hand and climbs up her arm. He scrunches up his nose and purses his lips, and then his eyes light with understanding.
“This is from the war,” he says definitively. “How did you get this?”
His near-death had made her merciless. She’d barely even flinched. “I was protecting you,” she says simply.
Neji runs his thumb over the scar. He lifts her hand closer to his face, as if to inspect it further…but instead, he presses his lips to it, whispering a “thank you” against her skin.
It was hardly anything, if she’s being honest. A very perfunctory sign of respect, one he’s probably shown to the ladies of his clan a million times, so soft she’d barely felt it. But the kiss leaves Tenten burning, and Neji, having realized what he’s done, has turned a shocking beet red, a deep blush that could rival Hinata’s spreading rapidly from his collarbone up to his hairline. They sit almost perfectly still – holding their breath, holding each other’s hands, holding on as long as they can to this last moment before everything changes.
It’s Tenten who finds the courage to move first – it has to be, because he never asks for what he wants. She reaches up to caress his face, brushes her thumb along the corner of his mouth.
“Kiss me again,” she whispers.
Neji turns redder, somehow, but being granted permission makes him bolder, too. He takes her by the wrist and turns his head slightly to kiss the pad of her thumb, then brings her hand down so that he can kiss her fingertips. He brushes his lips across her knuckles, leaves firmer kisses at the center of her palm. Tenten is certain, for a fraction of a second, that he begins to trace one of her bracelet lines with the very tip of his tongue – thankfully she’s seated, because her knees almost certainly would have given out – but he loses his nerve, pressing a final kiss to her wrist as he opens his eyes and meets her gaze.
The hand receiving his attention cups his face as Tenten’s other hand fists itself in his long hair. She pulls him close to her – his hand still grips her wrist, fingers closing tighter around it as she draws closer.
They cling to each other, already breathless – and then she kisses him.
She has no idea how they will ever get anything accomplished again, because if it’s left up to her, this is all the two of them will be doing for the rest of their lives. They are clumsy from inexperience, their noses bumping, their hands unsure, but it’s like a massive weight is lifted from Tenten’s chest the moment their lips meet. The sensation of his mouth on hers is intoxicating. He draws out each press of their lips for as long as he can, giving a little frustrated huff when he doesn’t get his way. She can’t help the sigh that escapes her, can’t help but tilt her head to deepen the kiss.
Neji tastes like green tea and dusting sugar when Tenten parts his lips with her tongue (this is what finally breaks him, making him whimper into her mouth; he is vocal, doesn’t that pleasant little surprise just sear itself into her memory). He releases her wrist and reaches blindly for her waist, her hips, the small of her back. His touch is feather-light, but her heart races like he’d bruised her – a heated thought that sends a shiver down her spine before she can stop it. Emboldened, losing herself, Tenten cradles the back of his head before gripping his hair tighter and tugging experimentally. The moan that escapes him could almost be called shameless, but she can feel the way the indignity of it has intensified his blush.
The sound reminds her that they are in plain view, in the courtyard of the Hyuuga compound, and that the surest way for her to be permanently banned from the premises is to be caught with her tongue halfway down the throat of their beloved prodigy.
Reluctantly – so, so reluctantly – Tenten pulls back and breaks their kiss. Neji leans with her, dazedly chasing her lips. He kisses her again, just before he realizes she intends to stop, and it takes every last ounce of Tenten’s willpower not to follow his lead. With a soft groan, he drops his head and nuzzles at her neck.
“I believe you said something before about ravishing me?” Neji pants, playing at his typical arrogance to make up for the way his voice wavers.
Tenten tries to laugh, but doesn’t have the air for it. “I said you’re in no condition.”
He hums his disapproval into her shoulder. “You’ll be the end of me.”
“Didn’t see that anywhere,” she replies playfully, squeezing the hand that rests on her thigh, the hand she’d read.
They’ve been out here for some time. Someone is surely going to come looking for him, or to escort her out, any minute now. But instead of separating from Tenten, which is what he ought to do, Neji lifts his head, positioning himself to kiss her again.
“No,” he sighs, “I just know.”