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One day, she exposed his weakness to her world, introduced it to the metallic allure of the weapons she conceals beneath an innocent-looking blouse.
He awaits the day he can return the favor.
Still as the steel in her leather-wrapped hands, she lingers in the tree above. He cannot see her, but he knows where; he cannot discern exactly where, but he knows where, because she exploits his weaknesses at every given opportunity. She--playing with her knife, numbers dangling off her lips, measurements--does not wear gloves like Haruno. Haruno wears gloves to sheath her hands from calluses, the ones gained from wielding an unwrapped weapon.
Uchiha double-wraps his kunai knives in thick, white linen. Makes the weapon easier to bear and twirl and wield. Chafes the fingers.
Tenten wraps her knives once, in black leather. She blames it on personal preference. Leather is lighter and smoother on the fingers.
He suggested silk once, eyeing her arsenal with a small amount of distaste. Hinata-sama likes silk. Is silk, in a way. And he thinks and compares and then dismisses the matter entirely--one, because it puzzles him, and it is not the sort of conundrum he, with his startling intellect, is capable of analyzing. Two, because he doesn't waste his time on useless poetics.
Training is pleasant, maybe fun, in its own warped way. He can see seven birds with his Byakugan activated, with veins discoloring his pallid face.
There are eight.
One little birdie, stationed haphazardly in the trees. Still as the steel in her leather-wrapped hands . . .
"She lingers in the trees," he says with no small amount of bitterness.
He needs no Byakugan to see the rueful smirk that curls her thin lips.
And she surrenders the knife with a twitch of her fingers.
His chakra pulses, torrents of placid energy rippling with every movement, and it rises restlessly around him, laps at his silken black hair, nibbles at the soles of his feet when he spins--and the world turns to color.
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Once upon a time, he was a cardinal in a cage.
Once upon a time, there was a crow at the windowsill.
She bade him good morning, and he bade her farewell.
The key, he tells himself, is in the lock. Forged by Uzumaki Naruto, jangling in the latch because of Hiashi-sama.
The crow can free him--can really free him, he thinks, unclip his wings and thrust him into a cloudless sky. And he--he could ground her, could really ground her, could reverse their positions--she resigned to fate, and he resigned only to sky. He could dictate her existence, make her and unmake her in the blink of an eye and she wouldn't mind at all because he knew she loved him somehow, someway--
She bade him good morning, and her smile is always assured.
He bade her farewell, because it is for the best.
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"It was only one knife."
She gingerly tests the waters, both physically and metaphorically, eyes casually darting to steal a casual glance at his face. Once upon a time, he thinks perhaps she skimmed those waters with her talons.
He remains impassive, and she slaps the waters. "Tch . . .what a waste of chakra."
Once upon a time, he thinks perhaps she drowned in those waters.
He thinks perhaps she already has.
Tactfully, his eyes linger on the riverbed as she fearlessly removes her blouse.
So she wraps her torso in silk. Like bandages, only not, effectively flattening her small breasts.
Silk.
He likes to think that's allegory of some variety.
"Don't swim in that," he tells her, still tactfully looking away. He knows she knows he can damn well see her, but it's the principle and she is still mildly appreciative. "The wraps will loosen considerably once they get wet." She's bizarre and he knows it, because she's wading into the water defiantly, getting her pants wet and discarding her sandals that will soon be consumed by the shifts of the riverbank--and she's bizarre, and even with the Byakugan he can only determine it as an act of defiance . . .
She thinks it's hard being on the same team as an under-appreciated taijutsu specialist with a tendency to blow things out of proportion. She thinks it's hard being on the same team as someone capable of reading your every thought, your every move, capable of revealing you to the world with a flash of insight not hard-earned.
He thinks it's hard being on the same team as Tenten, who habitually hides her habits with an easy smile.
She adjusts the wraps distractedly, and he lies dry as ever on the mossy shores, one eye on the sky and the other ensuring she doesn't drown.
When she submerges herself in the glassy water, he suddenly knows she will be freezing half to death when she returns. He suddenly knows she will brush past him without a word but with a smile, hurriedly adjusting the wraps on her torso and slipping her shirt over her head. She won't shiver, never shivers except when her veins are being emptied, and he struggles to erase the memory of last year's chuunin exam prelims because she's better now and smarter now.
Then again, when she reemerges, chattering teeth clamped firmly on her tongue, he thinks maybe she's not that much smarter.
"You'll get sick," he tells her with distaste. "You're no good to me sick."
She scoffs, smile unwavering and he fears her, is utterly terrified of her, in that instant. "I've never been any good to you."
She swam and drowned in his temperament's waters, once upon a time.
When she dies, he thinks he will cast her ashes out to sea.
When he dies, he knows she will cast his ashes out to skies.
But for now, he is alive and she is alive, though not for long if she maintains some of her sillier, more unreadable habits. Dissatisfied, he removes his jacket and suspends it from a tree branch, removes his sandals and places them beside hers on the riverbank, and tests the waters with a bare foot. He is unsurprised to find them startlingly placid.
Hm. More allegory.
She's floating on her back now, casually, hands folded behind her skull, and he's walking, the water as stiff as marble floors beneath his feet.
"Unbind your hair," he tells her, feeling the water churn nip at his toes, ice-cold and unforgiving. She ignores him.
He's convinced she could touch the sky, cause the same rippling uneasiness to the sky as she does to him--he's convinced she is the crow lingering in the windowsill, knowing the taste of freedom and never embracing it.
Her song clings to his ears, and when she turns the key in the lock she will establish a debt that he cannot ever repay.
Instead, she watches the sky and beckons him to do the same.
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Five years later, she remembers the woods, has lain at the foot of his bed, overshadowed by the bedposts and at a good angle to scrutinize the half-moon. Weaved her way through trees and encroaching waves of darkness far lesser than this. Yamanaka Ino likes night; each star blinks into a nine-hour existence, the moon births hopeless romantics and the stars birth wishes. She looks out the window, directly at the doorstep, contritely awaits his quiet return, and she always asks the same question: Where?
And then she welcomes him home.
But not tonight.
She counts the solid black commas burnt unto the gentle junction linking his neck and left shoulder. Three. Black as the robes of the Reaper. Black as her hair. And she hates him and he fears her just as well, and she grieves in the tight-net forest of shadows weaved by the darkness of his room.
In the forest lurks a phantom of a bird, and Neji adheres himself to the ground with talons like red roots . . .or red serpents, burrowing.
Serpents. He feels something akin to poison festering in his system, and she wants him to bleed himself dry. Perhaps--perhaps the poison can be drained--and he tells her without words that he cannot drain the poison, just as he cannot bleed her memory from his mind--and she grieves some more, trying to drain her soul with her tears.
Each tear, she tells him without words, is a chain adhering her to reality, and each tear falling is a lock undone.
Betrayed, she asks him a desperate question, breaking free from routine and fixating her focus on the colors drifting and blurring. Not colors, actually. Shades of white and tan and gray and black. Neji's manner of dress.
"Why?"
Kneeling beside her, he grants her a baleful smile and says, voice exuding nothing but calm, "Our secret."
The phantom cardinal takes shelter beneath the wing of a crow, and she hiccups an echo as he ruefully envelops her in his distant embrace. Like being held by mist--and the mist will carry her home.
"Our secret," she agrees, but never completely understands, even as he presses his lips to the salty trails paved on her cheeks and threads his fingers in her hair and kneads the damp corners of her chocolate brown eyes with his shaking thumbs. He reminds her, disillusioned kunoichi she is, that this is not where the world is ending.
"Promise me," he requests as his eyes are inexorably drawn to the shadow-forest at the foot of his bed. It is only then that he permits himself to feel the regret wash over him (like being held by mist).
She nods with a strangled little whimper, because her devotion is perhaps the feeblest chain of all.
"I promise."
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When she dies, he thinks he will cast her ashes out to sea.
When he dies, he knows she will cast his ashes out to skies.
The crow at the windowsill taps the key twice, but the cardinal halts her with a piercing leer and a wave of his wing she looks at him with questions and promise flashing in her eyes.
"Don't touch that, you impertinent girl," the cardinal instructs.
Her bewilderment turns to surprise, and, sequentially, curiosity.
"Why not?"
"Because," the cardinal tells the crow, "I would like to turn it myself, when my time here is through."
"But," the crow contradicts with the air of the opponent sitting across the chessboard, "the key is out here, and you are in there. You obviously can't do this by yourself, just like you obviously couldn't put this key here by yourself."
Suspicious. "What's it to you I leave this cage? And what's it to you I remain?"
The crow shrugs and ruffles her pitch-black feathers, probing the key a third time.
"I'd like to show you the sky."
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"You aren't going to betray me."
It's not a question; it's the admission of a fact, and her teeth clamp down on her colorless lower lip and she nods, eyes hazy and vaguely determined.
She opens her mouth, and her lips close around a cherry coated in sugar, and she chews languidly but she never once averts her gaze from his eyes.
He doesn't smile, and his tone is bitter and mirthless. "You really are no different from the other girls," he tells her as he shuts the door, once wide-open, still permitting her exit as she pleased, but her eyes betray nothing except for an unfathomable sadness he doesn't want to understand. "Haruno and Yamanaka--they'd betray their own village for the sake of some insipid emotions. And you . . ."
She devours another cherry, and her expression is set in stone, a fact that grates on his nerves for inexplicable reasons.
He rests his head on the doorframe and doesn't look at her.
"You aren't going to die for me."
This time, there's a question shining through the holes in his voice:
Would you?
Silence. Huge, sucking silence, like a black hole, and his fists clench tighter with every passing second but she speaks at last and her voice is gravelly.
"I'm not going to die for you."
He needs to both inhale and exhale at the same time.
She swallows a cherry, and her tongue works at the sugar imbedded in her teeth.
"I'm going to die with you."
A section of the wall crumbles beneath his fist, and he's breathing loudly, very loudly, wheezing and hyperventilating or something and why is she so goddamn calm--
Her eyes are empty, so empty, and it's all he can do not to--
"Asshole," she tells him, as though they were thirteen again and falling into the same witless exchanges of insults and witty retorts. Then she clutches her little plastic bag of cherries to her lap, her fingers sticky and coated in sugar, and her eyes are weary. "I do too much for you, you know. You owe me." A ghostly echo of words etched into his memory. She's said those words a million times before.
Trapped. Exhausted. He's never been--sad before. Not like this, not since his father died and even then hope came to him in the form of vengeance-seeking, but there is no vengeance to be sought here. Pinned motionless by her gaze, except for the tremors of his limbs and fingers, he recites the words as they come to mind, breathing haggard and there's just nothing but despair.
"How," he begins, a tragic actor citing his tragic lines, "will I ever repay you?"
Her posture slackens and his gift of insight tells him that she might, might bury her face in her hands and start crying any minute now--
Don't cry, he wants to say, but that isn't in the script.
What she says next isn't either.
"Don't regret," she says in a very small voice with the barest hint of plea.
Her smile is lopsided and all he can do is regret.
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This is not the ideal foundation for a relationship.
Her eyes are fixed on one little wisp of a cloud moving faster than the rest, and he's sitting on the water now, watching the water cradle her frame. He thinks that if she unbinds her hair, it'll be long, like his and maybe that's some sort of metaphor.
He quashes that train of thought when she brushes her bangs out of her eyes.
"Unbind your hair," he repeats absently, sitting down and crossing his legs.
He'll need new pants after this little escapade.
Her face scrunches up and she turns on her side as though she's lying on a feather mattress rather than a riverbed.
"I don't want to," she says, and sticks her tongue out at him.
Silence. He arches a brow at her audacity.
"You don't want to," he echoes, and she nods.
Then she grins. "Am I boring you?"
Her impish grin is replaced by an awed look as he suddenly, unexpectedly smiles.
"Never," he tells her.
This, he thinks, is not the ideal foundation for a relationship.
She scoots a little in his direction, before quite unabashedly placing her head in his lap, and he shifts a little, applying more chakra to the underside of his legs, and he thinks it's a waste of chakra to support her like this. He's sort of tempted to cheat, use his Byakugan to very carefully watch the blood flow in her cheeks or something. Except that might break the silence, and this one isn't that horrible; he's just tense and she's just calm when it's supposed to be the other way around.
"I swear," she says idly, swirling obscure patterns in the river with her fingertips, "times like these, I think someone kidnapped the real Neji and left me with a replacement all sweet and kind and all that stuff just to piss me off when the real Neji gets back."
He smirks, tentatively. "Sweet and kind and all that stuff'?" he inquires, mimicking her tone.
"Yeah." One of her eyes opens, fixing him with a cool stare. "Problem?"
"Nothing," he says, and doesn't mean it. "Just a little disappointed you figured out my secret."
She laughs and buries her face in his thigh to stifle the giggles--yeah, she's pretty much soaked, and he's pretty much relieved his jacket's still dry and dangling off that tree branch, because she'll be needing it soon.
When he tentatively frees her hair from the poison-tipped ringlets that tie them in thick, almost comical buns atop her head, she makes no move to stop him, and threading his fingers through her hair he sort of knows that she's living through him.
He really does wonder sometimes. Wonders why she's rooted herself to his existence, vicariously fulfills her own dreams through his strength and his gifts and his talents, wonders how she knows everything about him but nothing at all--and that really could go both ways--yes, he wonders sometimes.
This, he thinks, is not one of those times.
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The trees overhead--they whisper stories, even now in the dead night, and half-conscious he astutely observes she is counting the branches and is intimately familiar with the ones on which her blood will spill.
She--she flew there once, under the cover of darkness, and requested he follow.
It is ironic, he thinks, that the one time he did not bid her farewell instantaneously was when she offered to guide him through the edge of the world.
So he left one day . . .
. . .and returned with the assurance that he would die.
And she left . . .
. . .and returned with the assurance that he wouldn't die.
They would die.
As she nudges his shoulder, he silently accuses Orochimaru of clipping his wings.
His fingers curl around the sheets, tightly, and his eyes open, slowly.
He doesn't want to tell her, but he'd die a million deaths if she'd die with him.
"Good morning," she says with a smile. Somewhere there, there's a lie. For starters, it's nighttime, except her smile is real and not sad at all, and he allows himself to think that she wasn't trying to console him or herself when she told him not to regret. "Sleep well?" she asks as she adjusts her blouse. Mandarin collar. Royal blue with silk stitching and floral patterns you'd have to squint to discern.
Her hair is down, silken like the spider web and black like the spider. Her forehead protector is marred, fractured, because she knows that this final act will signify a betrayal.
Her ultimate goal was to have her name etched unto that headstone, that solemnly small memorial.
So.
A goal achieved. One less reason to regret.
Doesn't help.
He grunts and pushes himself upright.
"I'll have all the time in the world to sleep after tonight," he tells her, morbidity in his voice along with ill-concealed frustration.
"Maybe," she says, teasingly, and she leads him into the woods by the hand as though he were a starved, lost, but altogether reluctant traveler, and she a ghost of a memory equipped solely with a lantern.
They retreated to the river alongside their usual tree-lined training ground, their sanctuary of five years and seven months and 14 days and three hours.
"You can still leave," he tells her quietly as black marks like speckled clouds of tar begin to consume his body wholly, starting at the smooth curve between his neck and shoulder.
She traces a thumb along the inky specks on his face, bearing no tremor in her hands, and clips her own wings.
The katanas with serrated edges are her creation, and of her command they rise (once facedown in the grass). He can see her chakra--tendrils of color, white like his eyes--controlling them like puppets, making them kill her.
And him.
But he's far less important, now of all times, here of all places.
curse seal level two, his mind whispers factually but he isn't listening.
His skin changes color. Distinctly, but it does.
His hair frays and splits at the ends and becomes lighter, gray almost, the air crackles with a power he has never earned. Teeth become fangs, like knives, miniscule versions of the weapons hovering obediently midair.
She kisses him, slits her tongue on his fangs.
"I'd like to show you the sky," she whispers into his mouth as he greedily drinks the blood pooling beneath her tongue.
He makes no effort to dodge the steel that hisses in his ears, that which approaches with a finality he cannot defeat.
Here, he became a demon.
And yet here, metal pinning her lithe form to his mutated one, he is more human than he ever was.