Archive of Our Own

Tenten walked with her hands behind her back and Neji kept pace beside her with the kind of unhurried ease he only ever had when it was just the two of them. "You went the wrong way," she said.

"I know."

She glanced at him. He was looking straight ahead, but going the long way home was its own kind of language between them by now. The path curved toward the old east bridge, where the river reflected the last of the orange sky in broken pieces. She slowed down without thinking about it, and so did he.

"My dad used to say evening light makes everything look borrowed." she said, leaning her elbows on the railing. "Like the world is wearing something that doesn't belong to it."

Neji stood beside her, looking out at the water. "That's a strange thing to say."

"He was a strange man." She said it warmly. "In the best way."

A comfortable silence stretched between them.

"He wasn't from Konoha originally." Tenten continued, visiting a memory. "He is a Chinese immigrant. Came here before I was born and never really left, obviously." She smiled faintly. "He used to say Konoha had better dumplings than anywhere he'd ever been, which I'm pretty sure wasn't true, but he believed it completely."

Neji made a quiet sound. "What part of China?"

"A mountain village, Lóngfēng Shān" She tilted her head slightly. "You've probably never heard of it."

"I haven't."

"Not many people have. It's... remote. Beautiful apparently, but remote." She said. "He described it like something out of a story. Wildflowers everywhere, mist in the mornings." She paused. "There was a civil war there, a long time ago. Two clans fighting over the mountain. He left because of that."

"Did it end?"

"Eventually." She shrugged lightly. "But the mountain's still strange because of it or it's always strange, and the war just made people more aware of it. I'm not sure which." She rested her chin in her hand. "The whole mountain suppresses chakra. Not completely, but enough that you can't use it freely. No one really understood it but people who lived there figured out that if you held a fresh flower while you were fighting, it neutralize it somehow. Stabilized the flow just enough."

Neji turned to look at her. "Fresh flowers? They're holding a fresh flower to fight?"

She glanced at him sideways, and there was a smile look on her face "Yes. Can you imagine? Full scale clan war and everyone's running around holding bouquets."

"Tactically absurd." Neji said. "And if you didn't have one?"

"Then you fought like a civilian, basically. My father said the flower sellers made a fortune during the bad years." She laughed softly. "War has the strangest economies."

Neji turning back to the river. She could tell he was actually thinking about it. She liked that about him. He never pretended to be less interested than he was.

"Your father told you all of this?"

"Bits of it. Over the years. He wasn't a storyteller exactly more like someone who remembered things out loud." She smiled. "We'd be eating dinner and he'd just suddenly say the mountain flowers smelled like cold water and then go back to his rice."

Neji made the almost laugh sound again.

"There's one flower that grows at the summit." Tenten said. "In Japan we called it Hoshihana. He said it only grew above the treeline, where the chakra suppression is the worst, so hardly anyone ever went up that far. The people who did said it was worth it." She paused. "He promised me once that he'd bring one back someday." She laughed quietly at herself. "He was dramatic sometimes. Selectively."

"He never went?" Neji asked.

"No." She said it simply. "He meant to, I think. But life is long and then it isn't, and Lóngfēng Shān was far, and Konoha had better dumplings." She looked out at the water again. "He died before he ever went back to the mountain at all."

"I'm sorry." Neji said quietly.

"Don't be, I'm not sad about it." She turned to look at him. "He had a good life here, he was happy. I think the mountain was something he carried with him the way people carry the places they come from, not as a wound, just as a piece of them."

Neji held her gaze for a moment. "The hoshihana, what does it look like?"

Tenten blinked, she hadn't expected a follow-up question. "I don't know. He only ever described how it felt to see it. He said it looked like it was made to grow exactly where it was, like the mountain kept it there on purpose." She tucked a strand of hair back. 

She studied his profile for a second, the line of his jaw, the way he always looked like he was thinking about more than he let on and decided, as she often did, to let him have the thought.

"Come on." she said, pushing off the railing. "I want those dumplings my father lied about." Neji fell into step beside her without hesitation. His hand found hers, like it was the most obvious thing in the world.

A week later, they both went on a mission and decided to take a short break before got back to Konoha. The safe house was a modest room above a tofu shop at the edge of the village. Tenten sat cross legged on hers, unwinding the unfamiliar braid from her hair. 

Across the room, Neji was already reviewing the layout he'd sketched from memory, the village roads, and entry points. His hair was tied back low and plain, and without the Hyuga style framing his face, he looked different. The black contacts made him look sharper in a different way.

"So..." she said. "Ren."

He didn't look up. "Yes, Haru?"

She smiled at that. "Still getting used to that fake name?"

"You'll get used to it faster if you use it." He set the sketch down and looked at her properly. "The enemy we've fought already knows the name Ren. That means if our cover is thinner than we think, it's my name that gets flagged first, not yours. But there's a good thing they didn't really remember my appearance... I think."

Tenten's expression settled. "You think there's a leak?"

"I think we plan as if there is." His voice was even. "If things move wrong tomorrow, don't wait for my signal. Your priority is exit, not cover maintenance."

"Ren—"

He just nodded and something in his posture eased just slightly. "The secondary route," he continued, turning back to the sketch. "If the east road is compromised—" and he continue to explain their plan to get home through the night.

Morning came grey and quiet. Neji was up before the light fully settled, moving around the room. Tenten was still half asleep when he paused at the door, sandals on, a small bucket in hand.

"Haru!" He poked her to make sure she heard him. "River's close, I'm going to look for a fish" he said. "Thirty minutes." She made a sound into her pillow that he had learned, to interpret as fine, go, I'll be here. The corner of his mouth moved. He left.

A knock came maybe twenty minutes later. Tenten had been sitting at the low table with tea, already clean up, hair down. Two knocks. The kind that expected an answer. She opened the door.

Two men. Big, the kind of big that takes up a doorframe without trying. One had a scar running jaw to ear. The other was smiling, which was somehow worse. "Morning." The smiling one tilted his head. "We're looking for someone. Goes by Ren. Heard he's staying around here."

So they knew that much. Her eyes moved to the empty space behind her. She looked back at the smiling man. "I'm Ren." 

A beat of silence. The smiling man's smile didn't move, which meant he'd already decided what came next before she'd even opened the door.

Neji came back in 32 minutes. He heard nothing from the upper window and didn't think anything of that either. He pushed open the door.

The room was destroyed. Table splintered, one of the window shutters hung open and broken, like something had been thrown through it. Tea and broken ceramic spread across the floorboards in a wide dark blood stain. There were drag marks in it, the kind left by someone who'd fought not to be moved.

And Tenten was on the floor. Not propped up and not sitting. She was on her side near the far wall, one arm stretched out in front of her. Her hair fanned loose across the floor. Her breathing was there, he crossed the room and confirmed that first, but it was shallow and too fast and her face was the wrong color entirely. She was lying in her own blood.

The wound was bad. He'd seen bad wounds before, had catalogued them clinically in the way shinobi learned to, his hands were already moving, already pressing, and there was too much blood on the floor beneath her, soaked into the grain of the wood, and he couldn't tell yet how long it had been.

"Tenten."

Nothing.

"Tenten!" Sharper. His hand cupped the side of her face, tilting it toward him.

Her eyes opened, barely, she looked at him without seem to see him. Then something in her gaze focused. Found him. 

"... It's Haru, not Tenten." she said, barely sound at all. "...They only know Ren."

The full shape of it landed in his chest like something physical, what she'd done, why, the choice she'd made in the thirty two minutes he'd been at the river. Her eyes were already closing again.

"Don't!" he said. They closed anyway. 

"Tenten." His voice came out wrong. Rougher than he intended. His hand was still on her face and he didn't move it. "Tenten, stay with me."

But she was already gone under, her breathing thin and her face slack and still, and Neji stayed very still for exactly two seconds in the wrecked and blood soaked room. He carry her up as carefully as he had ever done anything.

"We're going home." he told her, knowing she couldn't hear him. His voice was steady again. It cost him something to make it steady. 

He bring her home, her breathing stayed shallow against his chest. The wound had stopped bleeding as badly, which he told himself was a good sign and tried to believe. He made it to Konoha's gates by late afternoon. The medics met them before he'd even cleared the checkpoint. 

The hospital was the particular kind of loud that felt like silence. He'd sat down because there was nothing else to do. Neji sat in the chair closest to the door to the surgical ward and did not move.

Time passed. He couldn't have said how much. He was still in his Ren clothes. There was blood on his hands that he hadn't fully noticed until now. He looked at it for a long moment and then looked at the door instead. Neji was on his feet before he'd decided to stand. The medic-nin was someone he didn't know. She looked at him. His whole body went very still.

"She's stable for now." the medic said. "But I want you to understand what that means before you take any comfort from it." She held his gaze. "The wound compromised more than we'd like. We've done what we can in there, but she's in a critical state. The next 24 hours are going to determine a lot." 

"Will she..." He stopped.

The medic didn't look away from him. "Honestly? She's strong but whatever we do, I still couldn't guarantee she'd make it so I can't give you a number right now. I'm sorry." Neji said nothing.

"You can see her." the medic added. "She won't be conscious, but you can sit with her if you want." If you want. As though there were any other answer. "Yes," he said.

He followed her through the door and down the corridor, and whatever was happening behind his face he kept very controlled and very private. But his hands, were not entirely steady. 

Two days later, Tenten doesn't get better in the hospital. And before dawn, Neji lay on his back in the dark of his room, he didn't trust himself to close his eyes. When he closed his eyes he saw that. The overturned table, the drag marks in the spilled tea. The way her arm had been stretched out in front of her like she'd been reaching for something and hadn't made it.

He opened his eyes. She had heard them say his name. She had looked at the empty space where he wasn't. She had made a calculation in whatever seconds she'd had, and the calculation had been better me than him. He put his arm over his face. Better me than him.

He thought about her voice. They only knew Ren. Barely sound at all. Like she'd been saving what little she had left to make sure he understood. So what? They only know Ren and you decided to say you're Ren? The thought that didn't even reach her.

The sky was just beginning to separate from black to something almost blue when he got up. He washed his face. Changed into fresh clothes. He packed light. What he needed, nothing more. 

The hospital was dim and hushed in the early morning, the night shift moving slow through the corridors. He found the room and he went in. Then he crossed the room and sat in the chair beside her and took her hand. Her hand was warm. He held it in both of his and didn't say anything for a while.

For once, he just sat with her in the light that was coming, and held her hand, and let that be enough for right now. He stayed until the ward started waking up around him. Then he set her hand down gently, and stood. He looked at her for a moment longer. Then he picked up his pack, and walked out of the room, and kept walking.

He walked out of the village. He traveled fast for the first two days. That was the easy part, open roads, familiar terrain, the kind of distance that responded to speed and discipline and didn't ask anything more complicated than endurance. 

The third day the roads thinned. Villages became smaller and further apart. The terrain started climbing without announcing it, somewhere in the afternoon, that he'd been going uphill for hours. The air changed. Cooler. The trees grew different here, older, the kind of forest that had been standing long enough to develop opinions about the people moving through it.

He kept going. On the fourth day the road disappeared entirely. Not all at once, it narrowed first, became a track, became nothing. He was navigating by the map he'd memorized before leaving and the position of the sun. The forest floor was uneven and root crossed. He moved through it without complaint.

He crossed a river on the fifth morning, cold enough to take his breath when he waded through it, the current pushing hard at his knees. He came out the other side wet to the thigh and kept moving because stopping to feel it seemed beside the point. He thought about her. He couldn't help it and had stopped trying. He thought about the evening on the bridge.

The sixth day, he almost reached his destination. In front of him was clearly visible.

Lóngfēng Shān.

He came over a ridge in the early afternoon and it was simply there. He stood at the ridge and looked at it for a long moment. He could feel it from here, faint, but present, like a pressure at the edges of his chakra. Not painful, just noticeable. Like the mountain was already setting the terms before he'd taken a single step toward it. He looked at the top, hidden somewhere above the clouds. Then he adjusted the pack on his shoulder and started down the ridge toward it.

The village at the base of Lóngfēng Shān was small and weathered. The trail, if it could be called that, it was more of a suggestion worn into the earth by whatever few people had come this way before him. The air was cooler here than at the base, carrying the smell of pine and wet rock, and the light came through the canopy in long pale shafts that moved when the wind moved the branches.

He noticed the chakra suppression around the second hour. It didn't arrive all at once. That was the thing about it, it was subtle enough at first that he almost dismissed it. A slight heaviness. A sense of his own system being slightly less responsive than it should've been. He ran a quick internal check, confirmed it was external rather than injury, and filed it away.

By the third hour, his Byakugan, when he activated it, flickered. That had never happened before. The activation itself had always been immediate and effortless, natural as breathing. Now it came with resistance like pushing against a current, and the range was wrong. He could see perhaps a third of what he normally could, the vision patchy at the edges, the detail unreliable. He deactivated it and kept climbing.

Without chakra you're fighting like a civilian. Tenten's father had said that, more or less. Standing here on the slope with his system muffled and his Byakugan unreliable, Neji understood it with a new precision. He had trained for most of his life in a style that was, entirely chakra dependent. The Gentle Fist had no form without chakra to drive it. He kept climbing.

After a few steps, he heard them before he saw them. Three of them stepped out of the mist. They were dressed for the mountain. No headbands, no identifying marks he could read. They moved with the unhurried certainty of people who had done this before and expected it to go the same way it always went.

The one in front looked at him. Then she said something, Mandarin. Fast, flat, no inflection that gave him anything to work with. He caught nothing, not a word, not a root he recognized, nothing. The language was a wall and he was standing on the wrong side of it. He kept his hands visible and his posture neutral.

She said something else. Same tone, same flat certainty. He doesn't understand any of that but he could tell by their expression that they're consider him as a threat. He moved first and closed the distance to the nearest one in three steps, driving an elbow toward the man's chest with the form that didn't need chakra to work, just mechanics and speed and the knowledge of taijutsu he learn. The man wasn't where he expected.

He'd slipped left, faster than the read Neji had taken on him, and the counter came in from the right, a strike to Neji's shoulder that had real weight behind it, more than the man's frame suggested. Neji rolled with it.

Faster than they look. All three of them. He couldn't reach for his chakra. The mountain shows its power to his face, pressing it down to something distant and inaccessible. No Byakugan, no Gentle Fist, just his body, which was considerable, and his mind that has to think very fast.

He fought them the way he hadn't fought anyone in years, without the architecture of his clan's techniques underneath him. He used what he could. He gave ground when he had to, and took it back where he found openings, and it was harder than anything he'd done in recent memory because they were good, fighting without chakra, developing something that was entirely their own.

The taller man caught him with a sweep he didn't see coming, perfectly timed against a moment when his weight was wrong and the air went out of him completely. The man grabbed his collar and throw him afar. He hit the rock and skidded.

For a few seconds he was silent with his face slammed to the ground. Blood was seen flowing from the stone stuck to his forehead. He tried to look up with difficulty, blood flowing from his temple to his right cheek and eye. His vision blurred for a moment. But then, he saw it.

A flower. He immediately plucked the flower. Suddenly, a heavy flow of chakra come through his body, up to his eyes. He looked back to see that three enemy behind him, didn't even realize they just slammed his body a few seconds ago. Then...

Hakke Kushō.

He throw the jutsu in a focused burst, not at them, not to injure, just enough to put distance between them and him, enough to buy seconds and the three of them scattered back from the force of it, and Neji was already turning, already moving up the slope, his Byakugan sweeping the terrain ahead, his chakra humming steady and restored in his hands.

He climbed fast, the flower held carefully against his chest, incase he needed his chakra again and he didn't look back. The clouds broke somewhere near the top. The sky was a pale impossible blue that looked like it belonged to a different world than the one below. The wind had dropped. The mountain, this high up, was almost quiet.

Neji cleared the final ridge and stopped. The top mountain was a wide, flat shelf of rock, and it was covered in them. Then, he saw it.

Hoshihana.

Not the single stem he'd grabbed in on the slope, but dozens, growing from every crack and hollow, carpeting the edges of the rock shelf in violet blue. Bell shaped, nodding in the thin air, he thought a mini human can use this flower as a cup to drink. They looked as Tenten's father had apparently said, like they'd been placed here on purpose, like the mountain had grown them specifically and wasn't sharing them with anywhere else.

He first found the freshest flowers, fully bloomed, their color saturated to the edges, and cut them neatly at the stem, ten flowers. He wrapped them carefully in a damp cloth he had brought, as he had read about how cut flowers should be transported, and sealed the bundle inside a scroll with enough chakra to slow down decay. The scroll was tucked into an inside pocket of his bag, so it wouldn't be compressed.

Then he looked for dried flowers, weren't hard to find, they were clusters of older flowers whose petals had turned papery and brown, and whose stems were brittle. He's turning the dried flower heads with his fingers and scooping out the seeds into a second cloth bag he had brought. Small seeds, lighter than he expected. He wasn't sure how many would grow in Konoha's climate, but he took as many as he could and sealed that bag as well, tucking it next to the scroll.

He was closing his bag when he felt it. Not chakra, not a voice. Something older than both. He felt like he was being watched by something enormous and had been here for a very long time. He turned around.

A dragon.

The dragon was enormous. Just from its size, the way it occupied the space, it was as if it had always been there. It curled up at the edge of the mountain, half covered by clouds, dark and red, its head lowered to about Neji's level. Steam came from its nostrils. Its eyes were the color of the sky through the clouds. He stared at it. 

Neji's hand went to his pocket, taking out the stem he had tucked into it, the flower he had picked and held during the fight and the climb. He held it in his fingers. His chakra remained steady. He stood perfectly still and stared into the dragon's eyes without reaching for anything. Just silence.

The dragon stared at him for a long moment. Then he exhaled and looked away. Toward the edge of the peak, to the view below, and to everything he had seen in his hundreds of years here. He understood somehow, he understood that he was allowed to leave. He bow down and carefully plucked three more fresh flower from the nearest cluster. 

He looked at the dragon once more. His eyes were still fixed on the horizon. "Thank you." Neji said, to the mountain or the dragon or whatever was listening here. No one answered. He turned and began to descend. And went to Konoha, as soon as possible, as soon as Tenten should've get better, if she survive.

He reached Konoha's gates on the fourteenth day. He didn't stop. Bow to Izumo and Kotetsu before ran away. He was halfway to the hospital when he saw it.

The procession. Dark clothes, white flowers, the special silence of the people gathered around the cemetery. His footsteps slowed without his permission.

No.

He kept walking. Faster.

It's not. It's not her. It's someone else. It's not her.

He was almost running by the time the hospital entrance came into view. The staff member at the front desk looked up when he came through the door, travel worn, fourteen days of mountain and road on him, probably looking slightly insane.

"Tenten." he said. "She was admitted two weeks ago. Critical. Wound to the—"

"Oh." The woman checked her register. "She was discharged, actually. Four days ago."

Neji stared at her. "She was discharged?!"

"Yes. Recovery's going well, from what I understand."

He was back out the door before she finished the sentence. He ran away, fast, to Tenten's house.

He knocked three times.

Waited.

Knocked again.

Tenten opened the door and stared at him. He looks terrible. There was a cut healing badly on his forehead, dirt still in the creases of his knuckles, and he was looking at her like she was something he hadn't been completely sure would still exist.

"Are you okay? You look insane😭" she said.

"You're home." he said.

"...Yes?"

"You're standing."

"Neji-kun, come inside."

She made tea because it he looked like he needed something warm. He sat on the tatami floor from her low table and she settled beside him, and it was only then, she got a good look at him. 

"How's your condition?" he said. "Actually."

"Better than I was." She shifted, "Tsunade-sama came in on day three. I don't know who called her.

"Lee." Neji said, with the confidence of someone who didn't need to verify it.

"Probably Lee." She looked down at her hands. The bandaging on her left side was still visible above her collar. She looked back up at him. "I'm okay, Neji. I'm actually okay."

Something in his face shifted. "Good.That's good." 

"Where did you go?" she asked. "Lee didn't know. Gai-sensei didn't know. Nobody knew, you just—"

He reached for his pack. She almost didn't understand what he was seeing at first. Then, a small bundle of flowers, wrapped in cloth that had been damp once and dried since, tied with a cord that looked like it had been repurposed from something else. The blooms faced outward in a way that someone had placed rather than bundled. Violet blue, bell shaped. Delicate in a way that seemed improbable for something that had clearly traveled a long way. 

He held it out and handed it to her. She took it without thinking, both hands, and looked at him.

"It's hoshihana." he said.

"What?!" she said.

"The flowers your father described." His voice was even. "From the summit of Lóngshān."

She looked down at the bouquet in her hands. The blooms were real, she could feel the stems, slightly cool, the texture of the petals. 

"I designed the arrangement on the way back." Neji said. "I was going to redo it properly before I came. The proportions aren't right on the left side and the cord hasn't—"

"Neji-kun..."

"—improved, so I was going to—"

"It's perfect."

He stopped. She was looking at him, let the flowers sit in her hands and hoped he could read the rest of it because she wasn't sure she could say it without embarrassing herself completely. He seemed to get it. He looked away first, which meant he was also in danger of the same thing, and she loved him very much for that.

"Neji-kun... Thank you." she said. He nodded once, and picked up his tea. 

"My Byakugan wouldn't activate." he said.

She blinked. "...What?"

"On the mountain. I knew it would be bad but I didn't anticipate that bad. I couldn't activate it at all for most of the climb. And then there were people—" He paused. "Guardians? Some kind of group. They didn't say anything intelligible, they just... attacked. And they were fast Tenten, which I was not prepared for—"

"Wait, what do you mean your Byakugan wouldn't—"

"I'm getting there. I couldn't use it, so I was fighting without it, which was fine, except they were better than they looked and I didn't account for the one on the left and she—" He stopped again. "I hit the ground quite hard."

Tenten was staring at him. "Is that what happened to your forehead?"

"My temple hit the rock faster than I anticipated."

"Neji—"

"But that's when I found a flower in front of my face, and when I grabbed it my Byakugan activated immediately. Immediately!" He leaned to her shoulder. "I could feel the chakra come back the second I touched the stem. I've never felt anything like that in my life."

"That's what it does." Tenten said softly. "That's what my father said."

"I understand that now." He exhaled. "And then I ran."

"You ran?"

"I used Hakke Kusho to create distance and then I ran up the mountain, yes."

She pressed her lips together very hard.

"And then at the summit." he continued "it was... there were so many of them. More than I expected. I took what I needed." He stopped. "But then." 

"Then." he said. "there was a dragon!"

Tenten went very still. "A dragon??"

"A large one." Neji added, "Very large. Coiled at the edge of the summit. It was... looking at me."

She stared at him.

"It didn't attack." he said. "It just... Looked. And then it looked away, and I understood that I should leave, so I left." He paused. "I said thank you. To it. To the mountain. I'm not sure which."

"You said thank you to a dragon?😭"

"I don't know, it just seemed appropriate."

She started laughing. She set the flowers down carefully first because her hands weren't reliable.

"You always make fun of Lee and Gai-sensei." she managed, between laughing "for being scared of ghost stories—"

"This was not a ghost—"

"You literally said thank you to a dragon?!"

"I was being respectful?!"

"Neji-kun." She looked at him, still smiling. "You believe in the dragon?"

He was quiet for exactly one second. "I have seen the dragon." he said, "Belief is no longer a matter."

She laughed again, and reached across the table and took his hand, the one with the healed scrapes on the knuckles and held it. He let her, and turned his hand over, and held hers back. She looked at the flowers for a long moment. 

"My father promised me this." she said. Her hand came up and touched one of the bell shaped blooms, just lightly, just the tip of her finger against the petal.

"I didn't even— I wasn't even... I wasn't asking for anything, I was just talking."

"I know." Neji said.

She looked up at him then, and whatever she'd been trying to keep composed gave up quietly and gracefully, and what was left was just her face, cheek slightly pinkish.

"Thank you." she said. "I mean it."

He looked at her that still sit beside him and said nothing, he doesn't need to. He just leaned in and pressed his lips to her. 

The next day in the morning. Neji had shown up at her door in the morning. She didn't ask where they were going and she'd pulled on her shoes and followed him without question. He led her to a small patch of ground at the edge of the Hyuga compound. Someone had turned the soil recently. It was dark and loose and carefully prepared. She looked at it.

"What am I looking at here?" she said.

"I planted them this morning." He stood beside her. "The seeds from the summit and two of the bulbs from the dried stems."

Tenten looked at him.

"I don't know if they'll grow." he said. "The climate here is different. Hoshihana prefer cooler conditions." A pause. "They're biennial, so even if the conditions are right, the first year will just be growth. No flowers until the second year at the earliest."

"Okay." she said softly.

"I'll adjust drainage if the rainy season is too heavy. The south position should give enough light without overexposure." He was still looking at the soil. "I've done what I can. The rest depends on the plant."

Tenten looked at the small dark patch of earth and thought about a flower that took two years to bloom, that grew on a mountain where no one could use chakra, that her father had promised her once a long time ago and never been able to give. She thought about Neji coming back with scraped forehead and an unpolished bouquet and a completely sincere account of thanking a dragon. She thought about fourteen days. Both directions.

"Neji-kun." she said.

"Hm."

"Thank you." She said it the way she'd said it the night before. "Really."

He looked at her then. And he nodded once, the way he did when words felt like too much and not enough at the same time.

They stood there together in the morning light for a while, looking at a patch of earth that was just dirt for now, and wouldn't be anything else for a long time yet. It didn't matter, they had time. 

Because even if I wasn't gonna continue this fanfic more, we all know the Hoshihana flower is gonna bloom anyway. In two years... And more.