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Tenten was so immersed in bitter disappointment (both with the fact that an idea of escape had been so quickly crushed, and in herself: of course the genius would already have thought of that, and immediately dismissed it as ridiculous, stupid!) that she didn’t notice how Neji’s shoulders tensed and how his eyes hardened with marred pride. She did notice however, when he barked his Kekkei Genkai into life.
“Byakugan!”
Tenten jumped at the fierceness of the command. She watched him anxiously, twisting her fingers in anticipation, as the veins crackled beneath Neji’s skin like bolts of lightning. Neji himself had reminded her on several occasions that to look through chakra-infused walls was impossible. Since the Byakugan picked up chakra signatures, trying to see beyond such a wall was a similar effort to trying to pinpoint a raindrop from behind a waterfall. Yes they were desperate, thought Tenten, but was there any point in bothering? Rashness wasn’t at all Neji Hyuga’s style, and she wondered what on earth had gotten into him all of a sudden.
After a few minutes of nothing unusual, he narrowed his eyes, a slight tick causing his eyelids to flutter. A trickle of apprehension trailed down Tenten’s spine in time with the first bead of sweat that crawled down Neji’s brow.
“Maybe you should stop,” Tenten said slowly, her eyes raking over the shinobi with growing concern. Five minutes had since slid past. Though not officially an expert, Tenten had seen Neji use the Byakugan over the course of nearly a lifetime. She had seen him use it in darkness and in light, to look through walls of steel and stone alike, in a matter of seconds. This wasn’t normal. The muscles in his neck and face were beginning to bulge, purpling with effort. The shinobi’s breathing occurred sporadically in short bursts. When had he started to shake? The veins about his straining eyes multiplied, running over his cheeks in a rapidly expanding web.
“That’s enough!” the kunoichi squeaked loudly, her gut clenching fearfully. She scrambled onto her knees. Tenten’s shackled hands hovered awkwardly in the air between them: she could feel the waves of chakra rolling off of him in an incredible volume. Her fingertips tingled in time to each swell. If she touched him when he was like this, what would happen?
But Neji stubbornly ignored her. If anything, he increased his efforts to see through the impenetrable walls. His stoic expression cracked, replaced by a grimace. Red spots budded angrily in the whites of his eyes as the delicate vessels burst under the pressure.
Tenten wavered in front of him, wracked by indecision as nerves flooded her system. What should she do? On the one hand, she could shake him out of whatever silly state he’d worked himself up into, but if she let him continue, was it possible that the prodigy might be able to spot a weakness in the structure? A way out? An escape?
Her mind was made up for her when her companion’s entire body shuddered violently, and his nostrils began to ooze thick, dark blood.
Fisting her hands into the collar of his shirt, Tenten shook her team mate like a rag doll.
“Neji! Neji, stop it!” she screeched. She yanked him towards her, rising on her knees so that her frantic brown eyes were level with his glazed and bloody ones. Tenten’s heart froze in terror when for a moment, nothing changed but for his breathing to stop altogether. “Neji!” Then he blinked, gasped, and pitched forward, his forehead slamming into Tenten’s. Their headbands met with a scraping clink.
The kunoichi choked on a cry of relief, gently propping him upright by pressing her hands against his chest. Neji sagged into them, his ragged breathing gradually adjusting to a normal pace.
Tenten’s eyes slid closed. Thank goodness.
“A-are you-“
“Fine,” he wheezed. Tenten could feel his pulse steadying beneath her palm, and she wondered when hers would do the same.
“Fine? Isn’t that a bit of an exaggeration?” she muttered breathily. Neji’s sternum buzzed under her fingers as he hummed in amusement.
When she opened her eyes again, Tenten took in their proximity with a rush of air from her lungs, causing the long dark strands framing her team mate’s face to flutter. Though their foreheads were no longer pressed together, Neji’s nose was barely an inch from hers. She swallowed.
Perhaps it was audible, too, because Neji suddenly raised his eyes to hers, and then she was temporarily lost in their pale depths.
It was all very familiar. Tenten had the strangest feeling that this had happened before.
“You’ve got a bit of… On your…” Neji jerked back a little as suddenly Tenten’s hand had appeared between their faces. Tenten herself was surprised: the words hadn’t even registered as her own until a moment ago. What was I- Her eyes dropped to the dark lines of blood on Neji’s upper lip, glistening gruesomely in the low light. Oh. Tenten pressed her lips together in a firm line as she concentrated on not bopping him on the nose when she moved her fingers to his mouth. The chains made her job difficult.
Somehow, the kunoichi managed to wriggle a piece of her sleeve between her fingers and gently dab his lips clean. Neji probably could’ve licked them free of blood in an instant, she thought dimly, but a quick glance at the shinobi’s face told her that he still wasn’t quite there. Was she, even? The kunoichi was still a little giddy with the prospect that a moment ago one of her dearest friends had stopped breathing...
When she was satisfied with her work Tenten made to lower her hands.
“Stop.”
She froze.
Neji blinked at her lazily. He waited, as if he were discerning whether or not she would pull away. She didn’t. She was slowing being sucked into those very pretty and very distracting eyes of his. Tenten’s world had suddenly taken on a muffled, dream-like haze: the walls could have caved in and her clouded mind wouldn’t have registered it at all.
Neji’s eyes slid shut and he turned his face into her fingers in what faintly occurred to Tenten as a very cat-like gesture. Her fingertips had trailed over the curve of his cheek before she vaguely wondered what they were doing. She felt her face light up like a light bulb as the air began to clear.
“Ne-“
Her mind went blank when he gently pressed his lips against her palm, opening those damn eyes and casting that absurd spell again.
Tenten’s lips parted of their own accord, and though she didn’t possess the Hyuga clan’s optical gifts even she could see how his eyes flickered downwards towards the slight movement.
Her heart pounded in her ears, which was funny, because how could it be in her ears and her throat at the same time?
And was it her imagination, or had Neji just moved a little closer?
Tenten’s breath hitched in her throat, and his eyes dropped to her lips again.
A bubble of adrenaline expanded somewhere in her abdomen, squishing her innards against her ribs so tightly that all of a sudden she couldn’t breathe.
As Neji leaned impossibly closer and Tenten’s chest squeezed itself into a frenzy, her fingers trailed down his face and over his chin to curl once again into the fabric against his collarbone.
An annoyingly sensible little voice in the back of her head gave Tenten pause. Wait. Think. What-
Neji, who must have sensed her hesitation, nudged her hands aside, and then the little voice and any other coherent thoughts were instantly banished as he sealed his mouth over hers.