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Hinata found Neji in his room exactly where she had expected him to be, standing in front of the mirror with one sleeve pushed above his elbow as he carefully wound a length of bandages around his forearm. They were supposed to meet at the training grounds in less than ten minutes, and although she had considered knocking before entering, Neji had long since stopped expecting her to wait for permission when they had plans together, particularly now that the awkwardness between them had begun to wear away after the Chūnin Exams.
She had barely stepped over the threshold before she noticed he was hurt. There was a dark bruise spreading along the side of his jaw, another beneath his left eye, and the collar of his shirt had been pulled slightly to one side, revealing the ugly purple marks across his shoulder and upper chest. His hair was tied in its usual style, and his forehead protector was in place, and there was nothing particularly off about him except for the injuries themselves.
“Neji?” Hinata asked, and the concern in her voice finally made him look up.
“I am nearly finished,” he replied, glancing toward the clock rather than toward her. He secured the end of the bandage around his wrist with practiced fingers and reached for another strip. “We should still have sufficient time for training.”
Hinata stared at him for a moment, because apparently he had decided that the enormous bruise beneath his eye was not worth mentioning. “What happened to you?” She asked in a quiet voice, taking a few steps closer.
Neji glanced down at himself as though he genuinely needed to consider what she could possibly be referring to, then looked back at the mirror. “Nothing that will interfere with training.”
“That wasn't what I asked.” Hinata responded, though she shrunk back after the words came out. She wasn’t trying to be mean, she just hardly sees Neji hurt like this.
His hands paused. For a moment he simply stood there, his fingers resting against the bandage, before he gave a quiet sigh and reached for another length. “There was an altercation.” He told her, simple, like it was hardly worth mentioning.
“With who?”
“It is not important.”
“Neji.”
He finally looked at her properly, and Hinata found herself unsettled by the complete lack of surprise in his expression. There was no embarrassment, no anger, and very little fear, only a kind of detached patience, as though she were asking him why he had missed breakfast rather than why half of his face was bruised.
“Some members of the branch family,” he said. “They were displeased.”
“Our family did this?” Hinata gasped softly, her stomach dropping.
“They were upset.” Neji replied, giving her a look, eyebrows drawn together slightly. He was not angry, but genuinely confused by the intensity of her reaction. “Lady Hinata, I am fine.”
“And you're still going to train?”
“Of course.”
The answer came so naturally that Hinata almost laughed from disbelief, but there was nothing funny about this. She moved closer, her eyes traveling over him again now that she knew what she was looking for, and the more she looked, the more injuries she noticed. There was swelling along one wrist that he had wrapped more tightly than the other, a faint cut near his hairline, and bruising disappearing beneath the collar of his shirt. None of it seemed to bother him enough to warrant mentioning. “Why did they attack you?”
That question made him hesitate, Hinata saw it written across his face. He didn’t want to tell her. She steeled herself, knowing that whatever it is, Neji thought it would upset her.
“They have been unhappy with the attention I have received from your father,” he said eventually, choosing his words with the same careful precision he used whenever he discussed anything related to the clan. “Since the exams.”
Hinata felt something cold settle in her stomach. She had known some members of the branch family were unhappy. She had heard the muttered remarks in the courtyards and caught pieces of conversations when she walked past, comments about Neji spending more time training with Hiashi, about how quickly the clan head had begun taking an interest in him, about how strange it was that Hiashi seemed to have forgiven the things Neji had said during the exams. She had never considered that the resentment might have gone any further than words.
“They said you were getting special treatment,” she said quietly.
“Among other things.” Neji agreed, finally finishing wrapping his second arm. Generally he only did the one, but considering both were injured…
“What other things?”
“It does not matter.”
“Neji.”
“They said I had forgotten my place,” he admitted after a moment. “That I was becoming arrogant. That your father had made me believe I was something I was not.”
Hinata's hands curled slowly into fists, anger flaring in her chest. “What else, Neji?”
He looked at her with an expression that was almost tired. “It is not worth repeating.”
The casualness of that answer frightened her more than if he had become angry. She had spent so much of her life believing that Neji was simply difficult, proud, cold, and too rigid to accept kindness from anyone, but she was beginning to understand that some of the things she had mistaken for his arrogance were simply habits formed by someone who had learned very young that acknowledging pain did not help.
“Did you fight back?” Hinata asked, but she feared she already knew the answer.
For the first time, Neji looked almost bewildered by her question. “They are my elders.” He answered simply. Hinata opened her mouth, but nothing came out. Neji continued as though he had given her an entirely satisfactory answer. “I prevented them from doing anything that would cause serious injury. That was sufficient.”
“You're telling me that they attacked you, and you just let them?”
“I did not let them.”
“But you didn't fight back.”
“No.”
“Why?”
His fingers tightened around the bandage. “Because if I had hurt them, they could have reported that I had attacked them," he said quietly. “And the seal could have been activated, as punishment.”
Hinata went still- she knew about the seal, of course she knew about it; she had known about it her entire life. She knew what it meant, what it could do, knew that Neji carried something on his forehead that no one in the main family had ever been forced to bear. What she had not understood, or what she had never allowed herself to consider, was that Neji had apparently spent years making decisions around the possibility of it being used against him. She had thought of the seal as something that belonged to the past, a terrible thing that had shaped his childhood and explained his hatred of the main family. She had not realized that it still governed his every interaction with the people who had been allowed to use it.
Neji noticed her expression and immediately softened his voice. “It is all right, Lady Hinata.”
“No,” she said.
“It is, I am accustomed to it.”
The words were so simple that for a moment Hinata could not understand why they made her chest hurt. He was accustomed to it? To what? Being hurt by people who were supposed to be his family? He was accustomed to it enough that he had been standing in his room wrapping his own injuries before training, apparently never considering that the person he was supposed to meet might be horrified to see him like this.
“Lady Hinata,” he said, even gentler now, “Please. I am truly fine. We can still train.”
Hinata started shaking her head, “You’re injured, Neji. You should rest.
Neji sighed, turning to face her with an unreadable expression. “Please do not make this into something it is not.”
Hinata stared at him. Her cousin was standing in front of her covered in bruises, calmly explaining that members of their own family had attacked him because they resented the fact that her father had begun treating him differently, and he was trying to convince her that she was the one making the situation worse.
“Will you tell my father?”
“No.” Neji answered firmly, and Hinata couldn’t help but stare at him, lost.
“Why?” She asked timidly, her fingers twisting the fabric of her sleeves.
“Because there is nothing he can do that would improve the situation.”
“Father can help.” Hinata argued, not understanding why Neji was so reluctant to go to him for help. Well, she understood that her father was… who he was, but Neji was different. He was special.
“He will only make it worse.” The answer came so quickly that Hinata realized he had already thought through this argument, probably many times before she had ever asked the question. Neji looked toward the floor, and when he spoke again his voice was quieter. “They already say that I am being favoured. They call me your father's pet. His little favourite. A daddy's boy.” Neji’s face twisted at the last one, and Hinata looked at the floor, unable to look at him like that.
“They will only become worse if he intervenes. They already believe that I am trying to rise above my position. If your father punishes them because of me, they will take that as proof.”
“You're just going to let them do this to you?” Hinata questioned, her hands curling into fists once more, as she looked up at Neji.
“I am not letting them do anything.” He responded flatly, as though he had justified this to himself a hundred times before.
“You're not going to tell anyone.”
“That is different.”
“How?”
Neji looked at her for a long moment, and when he finally answered there was something almost painfully sincere in his expression. “Because if I tell Lord Hiashi, it becomes his problem. If he intervenes, it becomes my fault, and that will be another reason to hurt me.”
Hinata felt tears sting unexpectedly at the corners of her eyes. Neji saw them and immediately looked uncomfortable.
“Please don't,” he said quietly. “There is no need to become upset.”
She had known Neji her whole life. She had watched him fight, watched him bleed during the exams, watched him begin to change afterward in small ways that she had not always known how to interpret. She had thought she understood him better now, and had thought the worst was behind him. She had been wrong.
“Fine,” Hinata said eventually, wiping quickly at her eyes before he could comment on them. “We're going to train.”
Neji's shoulders loosened slightly.
“But we're training in the main family training area.”
“Hinata.”
“You said your injuries aren't serious, so you can train. Fine. But we're going there.”
“That is unnecessary.”
“I want to.”
He hesitated, studying her face, but decided there was no point arguing with her when she had already made up her mind. The main family training grounds were hardly unfamiliar territory anymore; he had trained there with Hiashi more than once since the exams, and although he still felt a little strange walking through that part of the compound, it was not enough to make a fuss.
“Very well,” he said.
They left together.
For the first few minutes, Neji let her lead the way, not worried about anything when he was walking behind a member of the main family. He was more concerned with the dull pressure building behind his eyes, the ache in his ribs whenever he breathed too deeply, and the way his stomach had begun to turn unpleasantly with every step. He did not think he had suffered anything serious, but he had taken a blow to the side of his head, and it was starting to affect him. Hinata walked beside him without saying much, and after a while she slipped her arm through his.
Neji looked down at their linked arms, then back to her, where Hinata smiled at him. He smiled back, and did not question it.
They passed the first courtyard, then the second, and then Neji began to realize that something was wrong. The main family training grounds should have been to their left, but Hinata continued straight ahead, her pace unhurried and her expression deliberately neutral.
“Lady Hinata.”
“We're almost there.”
Neji slowed. “This is not the way to the training grounds.”
“I know.”
He stopped, their linked arms tugging as she took another step before noticing that he was no longer beside her, then turned around. For several seconds they simply stared at one another. Then Neji understood, and his stomach dropped so sharply that he almost felt dizzy again.
“No.”
“We need to tell my father.”
“Absolutely not.”
“Neji-”
He pulled his arm away from hers, but then froze. There were people around, Neji glanced toward them instinctively, his entire body tensing at the thought of making a scene. He could not argue with Hinata here, could not raise his voice, could not give anyone watching a reason to wonder why a branch-family member was refusing to follow the clan head's daughter. His pulse was pounding hard enough that he could feel it in the seal on his forehead.
Hinata stepped closer. “Please.” She whispered.
Neji stared at her, and when Hinata reached for his arm again, he almost pulled away.
Instead, he looked around the courtyard once more, saw the people moving nearby, and swallowed whatever protest had been rising in his throat. He lowered his head, the gesture automatic, and followed her.
By the time they reached Hiashi's office, Neji was fighting down a wave of nausea.
Hinata knocked, and a voice from inside gave permission to enter. She opened the door, Neji shuffling in behind her, as Hiashi looked up from his desk, his eyes went immediately to Neji.
The silence that followed was brief, but it felt enormous.
“Lord Hiashi.” Neji bowed deeply, hyperaware of how his face was presently bruised. How embarrassing.
“Hinata, Neji.” Hiashi greeted, as Hinata closed the door behind them.
“Father, we must speak.”
Hiashi looked between them. “What has happened?”
Hinata stepped forward, and Neji stood beside her, perfectly still. He knew better than to fidget in the presence of the clan head. His head was throbbing, and there was an unpleasant pressure building in his stomach that made him think he might be sick, but none of that mattered. His posture was straight, his hands were at his sides, and his eyes remained lowered.
“Neji was attacked,” Hinata said.
Hiashi's expression changed from neutral to something darker. “By whom?”
“Members of the branch family.”
“Is this true?” Hiashi asked, looking towards Neji. Neji’s throat tightened, and he looked at Hinata for the briefest of moments. She was staring at him, and there was something almost desperate in her expression. Please.
“Yes,” he said.
Hiashi stood, and Neji’s stomach lurched. “Names.” Hiashi ordered.
“Lord Hiash-”
“Names, Neji.”
Neji swallowed, and answered. Hiashi asked when it had happened? Has it happened before? How many times?
“Several.” Neji responded, because he was not going to lie.
“Since when?”
Neji's fingers curled slightly against his palms, as he thought back. “Since my father died.” Neji ground out, fighting to keep himself from getting emotional. Neji continued because he knew that once the truth had begun coming out, there was little point trying to stop it halfway. “It became more frequent after the exams.”
“When I began training you.”
“Yes.”
Hiashi's hand closed slowly around the edge of his desk. “They have been doing this to you since Hizashi's death?” Neji nodded, his mouth dry. “And you did not tell me.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because telling you would make them angrier.” Hiashi stared at him, waiting, and Neji forced himself to continue. “They already believe that you favour me. If you punished them for attacking me, they would blame me. They would say I had gone to you. They would say I was trying to use your authority against them.”
“And that concerned you.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Neji's answer was barely audible. “Because they would retaliate.”
Hiashi's face changed, and Hinata saw it before Neji did.The controlled anger that had been sitting beneath his expression finally broke through.
“You have been enduring this,” Hiashi said slowly, “because you believed that telling me would result in further punishment.”
“Yes, Lord Hiashi.” Neji answered, lowering his head.
For a long moment, nobody spoke, before Hiashi said, “You will move into the main family compound.”
“No.” The word escaped before he could stop it, and Neji shut his mouth with an audible click when Hiashi's eyebrows rose. “My apologies.”
“You will move into the main family compound, where they will not have access to you.”
“I understand your intention, but I do not think relocating me is the best solution.” Neji tried, but Hiashi ended his argument with one sentence.
“You are not in a position to determine that.”
Neji fell silent. The words were not cruel, just honest. Hiashi was the clan head, and Neji was a branch-family member. This was not a discussion in which his opinion carried equal weight.
“Yes, Lord Hiashi,” he submitted, taking slow, deliberate breaths.
Hinata looked between them, and finally spoke. “Father.”
Hiashi turned toward her, raising an eyebrow, but Hinata pushed onwards. “If Neji moves here, you have to do something about them.”
“I intend to.” Hiashi said dismissively.
“No,” Hinata said, and there was enough force in her voice that Neji actually looked up. “I mean you need to make sure they understand that they cannot hurt him again.”
Hiashi's eyes narrowed. “They will not.”
“They need to know that this isn't something they can get away with,” Hinata insisted, her voice still quiet but carrying a firmness that Neji was not accustomed to hearing from her when she spoke to her father. “I don't want you to simply move Neji into the main compound and assume that solves everything. If they think he has been rewarded for what happened, they'll only resent him more.”
“I understand,” Hiashi replied, his tone suggesting the conversation was already reaching its end.
“No, Father, I don't think you do.” Hinata folded her hands tightly in front of herself, and Neji watched her from the corner of his vision as she struggled to keep her composure. “You know what they're like. You know what they say about him. If you move him here without making it absolutely clear that hurting him is unacceptable, they're going to find another way to punish him for it.”
Neji's stomach rolled unpleasantly as he listened, and the room seemed to grow warmer by the second despite the fact that there was no change in the temperature. He could hear Hinata speaking and Hiashi answering her, but their voices were beginning to sound strangely distant, muffled as though he were listening to them from the other side of a closed door, and when he tried to focus on what they were saying, the words seemed to slip away from him before he could make sense of them. His vision blurred around the edges, and it took him several seconds to realize that he had been holding his breath. He drew in a careful breath through his nose, but the air did not seem to make it all the way into his lungs.
“Neji?”
He blinked and looked up. Hinata was watching him, concern immediately replacing the anger that had been directed toward her father only moments before. “Are you all right?”
“I am fine,” he said automatically, because it was the answer he gave every time someone asked him that question and because, at this point, it was easier than trying to determine whether he actually was. Hinata frowned, clearly unconvinced, and Hiashi's attention shifted toward him as well. Neji straightened instinctively beneath the clan head's gaze, forcing his shoulders back and his posture into something proper even though the movement sent another wave of dizziness through his head. He swallowed hard, waited for the room to stop tilting, and
kept his eyes lowered as though nothing had happened.
The rest of the conversation happened around him after that. He heard Hiashi discussing arrangements for his belongings, heard Hinata asking where he would sleep and whether he would still be permitted to use the training grounds he had been accustomed to, heard Hiashi mention that the elders would be informed and that the people responsible would be dealt with appropriately. Neji answered when he was spoken to and otherwise remained silent, because there was nothing left for him to say. He had told them what had happened. He had given them names and dates and answered every question Hiashi had asked, and when Hiashi had told him that he would be moving into the main family compound, Neji had protested once before remembering that his protest did not actually change anything. The decision had been made, and his role in the matter was simply to obey it.
It should have been a relief, perhaps, to know that he would no longer have to worry about being cornered in a quiet corridor or approached by people who knew precisely how much they could hurt him without leaving anything that would be considered serious, but instead all he could think about was what would happen now. He could already picture the looks he would receive when the news spread through the compound, the whispers that would follow him whenever he walked past. They would say that he had gone running to the clan head. They would say that he had manipulated Hinata into telling him. They would say that he really did think he was better than them now, that he had forgotten his place, that Hiashi had made him
soft.
His stomach twisted, and he pressed his fingers more firmly against his palms in an effort to ground himself. He did not want this. He had never wanted this. The attention from Hiashi had been unexpected enough, and although part of him had come to appreciate the training and the strange, tentative relationship they were building, he had never wanted the rest of the clan to notice it. He certainly had not wanted to become the center of a conflict that would ultimately be decided without him.
Then Hinata reached for his arm, and Neji looked down at her hand before raising his eyes to
her face.
“Come on,” she said quietly. Neji hesitated, but Hinata gave him a small, tired smile that told him she was pleading with him to not argue about it. “You're coming with me.”
He followed her without protest. Hinata took him to her room rather than allowing him to return to his own. She sat him down on one of the cushions near the low table and disappeared for several minutes before returning with tea, which she placed carefully into his hands before settling down beside him. “You're not going anywhere for a while.”
Despite himself, the corner of his mouth twitched upward, though the expression disappeared almost immediately when the ache in his jaw reminded him why they were sitting here in the first place. Hinata watched him over the rim of her own cup, and after a moment she asked, more quietly, “Does it hurt?”
Neji looked down at the tea between his hands. “A little.”
“That isn't what you said before.”
“I did not want you to worry.”
Hinata's expression softened. “You're allowed to make me worry.”
He looked at her, uncertain what she meant.
“You're allowed to tell me when you're hurt, Neji,” she continued, and there was no accusation in her voice now, only a quiet sadness that somehow made it more difficult to dismiss. Neji lowered his eyes again because he did not have a response for that. They sat quietly for several minutes, the only sound in the room the occasional clink of their cups against the table. Neji's headache continued to worsen, and the exhaustion that had been lurking beneath the surface since he had first woken that morning was finally beginning to catch up with him. His hands started trembling sometime after that, so subtly at first that he did not notice, but Hinata did.
“Put that down.”
“I am fine.”
“Neji.”
There was enough authority in her voice that he obeyed without thinking, lowering the cup to the table before his hands could betray him further. The trembling did not stop. If anything, it became more obvious now that there was nothing to hide it, and Neji stared down at his fingers as though they belonged to someone else.
Hinata reached over and carefully took one of his hands.
He flinched, his shoulders tightening and fingers twitching beneath hers. Hinata felt it immediately, and the expression on her face crumpled in a way that made Neji's chest tighten.
“I am sorry,” he said at once.
“Don't apologize.”
Neji looked away, his jaw tightening as he tried to ignore the sudden pressure behind his eyes. Hinata did not let go of his hand, though she loosened her grip enough that he could pull away if he wanted to. He did not. For a while neither of them said anything, and the silence was strangely comfortable despite everything, until Neji finally spoke so quietly that Hinata almost missed it.
“I really thought it was better not to tell him.”
Hinata squeezed his hand. “I know.”
“They would have stopped eventually.”
“No, they wouldn't have, Neji.”
Neji did not argue with her, which was perhaps the clearest indication that she was right. He sat there with his gaze fixed on the tea cooling on the table, his expression distant again. Hinata moved closer until their shoulders touched, careful to avoid the bruising along his upper arm, and after a moment she said, “You don't deserve this.”
For a long time he said nothing, and when he finally spoke, his voice was so quiet that it was almost lost beneath the sounds coming from outside. “I know you believe that.”
Hinata's chest tightened. “Do you?”
He did not answer, and she didn’t ask. Instead, she leaned her head carefully against his uninjured shoulder and remained there. Neji closed his eyes, and for the first time since Hinata had entered his room that morning, he allowed himself to stop holding his body so rigidly. His head hurt, his ribs hurt, his wrists hurt, and there was a deep, exhausted ache running through muscles that had already been tired before anyone had decided to teach him another lesson about his place in the clan.
Neji had spent years learning that survival meant being quiet, obedient, useful, and difficult to punish, and he had learned very young that there was a certain kind of safety in never giving anyone a reason to think he was causing trouble. If someone older told him to do something, he did it. If someone insulted him, he ignored it. If someone hurt him, he only defended until they stopped, because anything more could be twisted into disobedience, and disobedience meant the seal. It had become so deeply ingrained that he had stopped thinking of these choices as choices at all.
Now Hinata had dragged the truth into the light, and Hiashi had responded by making decisions for him. Neji knew that Hiashi meant to protect him, and somehow that made everything feel even more complicated, because he did not know how to accept protection without immediately wondering what it would cost him. He should have felt grateful. He should have been relieved that someone had finally noticed, relieved that the burden was no longer entirely his to carry, relieved that the people who had hurt him were finally going to face consequences.
Instead, he felt sick.
Hinata seemed to understand that without being told, because she did not ask him to be grateful and she did not tell him that everything would be fine. She simply stayed beside him, her hand still resting loosely over his. He sat quietly in Hinata's room with her, his head resting lightly against the wall behind him as exhaustion slowly pulled at his consciousness.
(Elsewhere in the compound, Hiashi Hyuga was making very, very certain that everyone responsible understood precisely how serious a mistake they had made.)