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Neji swayed with the bus turning, his hand tightening around the pivoted grab handle. With his other hand, he held up his book to shield his face from the harsh setting sun. The bus stirred to an abrupt halt, and he stumbled forward along with the other standing passengers.
Neji shook his head, returning his attention to his book on Mongolians invasions and military strategies.
"Excuse me, young man? Would you mind moving back?"
Neji glanced over his book. An impatient crowd was forming at the front of the bus, everyone craning their neck to search for an empty seat. Despite his annoyance, Neji bowed his head at the man who had spoken.
He snapped his book closed, took his school bag and moved toward the back of the bus.
Sighing, he reopened his book, his eyes scanning across the page to find where he had left off.
The bus turned again, and Neji mechanically lowered the book from his face as the low sunlight was now on his back.
Then, he saw her.
The girl wore the same school uniform as he was, but she had loosened the bow around her neck and unbuttoned two buttons of her shirt. With her forehead pressed on the window, she blew on the window and traced Chinese characters.
'An old Chinese poem,' he thought, but he didn't recognize it.
The characters shimmered faintly when her finger paused, pressing harder on the glass at the end of the last character.
Neji blinked.
'A trick of the light,' he thought, but his mouth dried.
His blood rushed to his head, and his eyes darted across from her, adrenaline pulsing at his temples. His muscles grew taut, his fingers moved toward his hip and found nothing. There, his hand trembled.
There was nothing.
There was no danger, he repeated silently, but there was something about the girl. There was something in the way she had arched her neck, in the sharpness of her cheekbones, in the hard line of her lips.
Slowly, she wiped Chinese characters and mist with her sleeve, and for a moment Neji thought he saw a wide sleeve of gleaming red, over layers of blue, pink and gold.
He shook his head, staring back at his book hard. The description of the methods of invasions for Khara-Khoto blurred in front of his eyes.
'Where was I?' he thought shakily, but his instinct returned to the girl.
His loud breaths invaded his mind along with the faint buzzing coming from her headphones. It pulsed, back and forth. His gaze drifted back to her. She held her Walkman on her laps, mouthing indistinct lyrics and tracing hiragana now.
"What are you staring at, freak?" she traced on the window.
Neji startled and met the reflection of her eyes in the window. They shone wide and dark, slicing merciless through him.
They hurt.
His stomach hurt, sharply.
Neji blinked, gasping. Her twin buns were gone. Her hair flowed to her feet and when she bared her teeth, they shone, black, between red painted lips. Cutting. All of her was cutting edges. She didn't hold a Walkman on her laps, she held a short sword.
The bus shifted and Neji snapped back to the present, hanging on the garb. He glanced once more at her, his eyes widened, an icy feeling spreading in his chest, sinking in his guts.
She was still watching him, but she had her hair up in twin buns on top of her head, her teeth were cutting, but white, her lips bare. The Walkman still lay on her laps.
Neji panted heavily, unable to look away.
Slowly, she removed her headphones and turned to face him.
"Yes?"
Neji faltered, his cheeks paled, his head slowly clearing.
"I thought I saw…" he paused to clear his throat. "I mean," he started again with a firmer voice: "I thought you were a princess."
The girl stared back at him. Neji blinked rapidly at the emotions shifting across her face, sharpening its angle. He froze. Her eyes had darkened.
He thought she was haunted.
He thought she shared her body with someone else, an old beast-like demanding ghost.
Like him.
'She's going to stab me,' the thought echoed, old, decayed, but instinctively his body tensed again. He saw a flash of silver in his mind's eye. And... nothing in front of him.
Neji started at the Walkman still on her laps, catching the light and gleaming like steel.
She still watched him, her head now cocked to the side. She licked her lips slowly.
"How many times have you said this to a girl?"
Neji's head snapped up and he reddened. He opened his mouth, his gaze drifting across her face, her sleeve, the window for a hint of what he had seen, but nothing bled across time now.
"I would never-"
"Yeah, right," she said with disgust and rang for her stop. "This is my stop, don't follow me."
She stood up, grabbed her backpack and replaced her headphones over her ears. Even then, there was something familiar in her gestures, in the way she held her head and walked.
He heard the distant snapping of fan when she bumped against his shoulder.
Neji swiftly turned his head toward the sound, the knuckles of his hand holding the book whitening. He didn't move as she finished brushing past him. He still searched the front of the bus for the fan.
Behind him, she stopped in front of the doors.
Involuntarily, he turned to follow her with his eyes as she got off the bus.
"It's my stop too," he murmured.
He turned away from the window for another glimpse of red, silver or a flapping fan. Nothing. There was still nothing.
'This is wrong,' he thought and his heart squeezed painfully.
Frustrated, Neji shook his head, and rang for the next stop. He would need to walk 15 minutes to get home now.
'This is very wrong.'
At the end of the day, Neji took the bus from stop in front of the school, but the girl climbed on the bus from a stop downtown, blocks away from school. She walked her head bobbing with her music and sat at the same place as the last time Neji saw her.
He focused on his book, Military Strategies during the Great War.
He focused on ignoring her.
His heartbeat had quickened uncomfortably. He felt vibrant hatred, his thoughts coated with centuries of military strategies. Even if he didn't know her, a part of him recognized the danger she represented. A part of him wanted to attack before she did.
His mouth hardened.
'Nonsense,' Neji chastised himself and tried to relax.
After a moment, he risked a gaze toward, and he found her eyes reflected in the window, already watching him. He lowered his book.
"Hello there," she said with a vague smile.
"You cut like a samurai," Neji said with cold irony, but his words, his voice, felt like they belonged to a stranger. He felt pierced. He felt on the verge dying. He felt the chill of her smile.
When he blinked again, he breathed more easily.
He stared down at his chest, expecting blood, but seeing none. 'The hair is wrong too,' he thought wildly, before looking up at her.
Tenten had turned toward him, her headphones around her neck. She blew her hair out of her face.
"That's a new one," she grinned. "Much more my style."
"I wonder if you use your cynicism to remain alone," Neji said tersely.
She grinned like a killer.
She grinned like she knew, like she saw like him the blood that shimmered and blinked out of existence between them.
"Aren't you a little young to be a psychologist?"
"I would rather be a psychiatrist."
She frowned at him.
"For the pay," Neji articulated and shifted uncomfortably. "And prestige."
"Your sense of humour is very weird. Well, your whole package is awkward, to be honest."
She gave him a wide smile and waved her hand, languidly. A hint purple sleeve of the outer layer of a junihitoe dress pierced through time.
'Everything is wrong... the hair, the uniform...'
Neji tensed.
"Hn."
With a heavy sigh, she stood up, kicking her bag from under her seat before bending down to grab it. Watching him with the same intensity, she put the strap over her and the bag dropped heavily at her hip.
"I'm going home, don't follow me."
Neji closed his eyes as the bus slowed. His head buzzed, harassing him with contradictory feelings and timelines.
She got off.
Neji rang for the next stop, feeling cold sweat dripping down his back. Feeling like he had died and come back to find her. Over and over again.
'This is wrong,' Neji thought again.
Later, in his room, he placed his book back on its shelf and his hand, his eyes stopped on Military Strategies of the Kamakura Era: The Rise of Samurai.
His heart stopped.
Time stopped.
'It's the timeline,' Neji thought, dizzy, and reached for the book, 'it's the timeline that is wrong.'
It took a week before Neji saw her again on the bus after school, and he had the distinct impression she was avoiding him. That time, she walked without hesitation toward where his seat, but with her back rigid. She dropped her bag on the seat next to him.
He stared up at her, fighting to remain impassive. She didn't sit down. Instead, she held on the garb, her body swinging with exaggeration at the faintest movement of the bus.
"I'm Tenten," she said and held up her hand.
"There's a war that a Tenten ended during the Kamakura period, according to some sources," Neji recited mechanically, staring at her hand without moving to shake it. "She killed a general," he added in a lower, harder voice.
Tenten tilted her head to the side, her eyes sparkling with amusement. The rest of her face remained impassive. After a moment, her extended fingers curled back in a fist, and she dropped her hand.
"Oh?" she mouthed the word.
"You could be her," he continued in a low voice, chilled.
Her grip tightened on the garb above her head as the bus turned.
Their eyes met, and they both moved instinctively as if to attack each other. Sunlight shifted from one side to the other, carving new shadows out on their faces, erasing old ones. For a fraction in time, they prowled like beasts, once more enemies reaching for their weapons.
The bus finished turning.
They pretended nothing had happened.
Tenten shrugged suddenly, laughing to herself, but it rang hollow and stretched unnecessarily. Her hands smoothed her uniform.
"Why are you laughing," he asked, glaring at her.
She stopped, her face, distant.
"I'm getting out, don't follow me."
Neji rubbed at his forehead, debating with himself whether he should also get off the bus.
Tenten stepped down on the first stair to the back of the bus exit before turning her head toward him. He stared back at her.
"My mother named me after that Tenten."
His heart burst, fast and hammering, in his chest.
She smiled wider, and put her headphones over her ears with mocked slowness.
"So don't follow me or I'll cut you," she said a little louder above the volume of her music.
A part of him, an old primal part of him, smirked.
'As you wish, princess.'
Tenten climbed on the bus at the stop in front of the school at the same time he did. She sat in front of him. Grinning, she half-turned her body toward him, throwing her arm over the back of her seat, her back against the window.
"My name is Neji," he said flatly, without looking up from his book.
"Cute, you say that because I'm Tenten? Like, I've never heard that before."
Growling, she grabbed his book.
The muscle of his jaw twitched, but he didn't stop her.
"It's annoying when you're named after a killer," she said frowning, but her voice was filled with laughter. She held his book up and twisted the cover toward her, so she could read the title.
"The Invisible War during the Second World War..." she read slowly and tsk-ed, glancing up at him. "What are you? 50? It's not healthy for young men to read only books about wars. That's like the fourth military book I've seen you read."
She handed the book back to him, and he took it back, his lips pinched.
"There's a lot to learn from past wars."
"Spoken like a true psychopath," Tenten inclined her head. "Now, come on, what's your name?"
Neji merely stared at her.
She rubbed her chin, her eyes wide, mouthing 'no.'
His glare intensified.
She glanced away, then swiftly reached across him to shake her finger under his nose.
"ID or it didn't happen."
Neji pinched his lips harder to quell a groan and reached in his pocket for his wallet. He opened it to retrieve his driver's licence, but before he could, she took the wallet from him. Leaning back against the window, she shifted through his IDs, her eyes furrowed.
She looked at each card carefully, replacing them such as slowly.
"You trust no one, I assume," Neji said.
"You assume correctly," Tenten said, detached, frowning at his ID before glancing up at his face. "Damn, you're a real Neji."
She replaced the last card inside the wallet and returned it.
Without a word, Neji put it back in his pocket.
"I suppose we've to be friends now," Tenten said after a moment, bouncing in her seat.
She smiled at him.
His lip curled back in a snarl.
"Why?"
"For my karma, since I killed you and all centuries ago," Tenten winked and reached up to ring for her stop.
Stretching her back, she grabbed her bag and slid off her seat.
"See yah!" she called over her shoulder.
Neji hesitated. At the last moment, he gritted his teeth, put his bag on shoulders and got off the bus.
As if she sensing him, Tenten turned her head, her eyes calculating. Her body naturally fell back in a fighting stance, her hand tightening around her Walkman.
Neji clenched his fists.
The bus drove away, the silence thickened between them.
"Look…" she started through clenched teeth.
"It's my stop too," Neji announced coldly and brushed past her.
Once her surprised receded, she took her headphones off, frowning, then jogged to catch up with him.
"So many coincidences," she said with fake cheerfulness as she dropped her Walkman in her bag, "it's like fate wants us together."
Neji narrowed his eyes at the road in front of them.
"I don't believe in fate," Neji replied stiffly.
"Touchy…" she grinned.
They walked side-by-side in silence until they reached the next intersection. There, Neji stopped, angled toward the left, her angled toward the right. She looked back at him, frozen too.
A shiver ran down his spine. He couldn't help but think there had been more crossroads where they had parted only to come back together later.
Neji bowed his head stiffly, gazing away from her.
"Bye."
She grinned, then turned fully toward the right before she started walking.
"I'll see you around, love," Tenten said in a sing-song voice and waved over her shoulder.
"Don't call me that," he called after her, the tip of his ears red.
She smiled, bitter and sad and amused. Thousands of years before this moment, their doomed timeline ruptured, coming full circle.
"I'll call you General then," she shouted before disappearing from view.
He stopped walking and looked back.
His lips quirked up, and he started walking again, his hand still holding his book.
With each step, Neji felt the old familiar presence recede, detaching itself from him in a dry pull until his mind cleared. The sharp pain in his stomach loosened. The red tint of his vision faded, curling up, to pink, to nothing.
Neji looked up at the sky invaded by birds as he walked home.
He had finally stopped bleeding across timelines.