Intertwined
by Ju

Few things have troubled Hinata since she succeeded the leadership of her clan. She knows that this has mostly to do with Neji, who was a silent shadow of support when the clan was divided, who quietly and efficiently smoothes things over behind her back. There is little about him that she doesn't know; she is the first to know when he's promoted to captain of his ANBU team, the first to know whenever he returns injured from a mission. She hears everything, and not just because she is who she is.

She knows that he sleeps only five hours a day, usually between two and seven in the morning; he does so on his back with a kunai in his right hand. He's competent in the kitchen but always eats take-away, because he's too exhausted to cook; he never eats in restaurants because he doesn't like the noise and the people. He spends what little spare time he has reading, hundreds of books and scrolls which he doesn't really have room for. He has no mirrors in his house, which is downtown and not on Hyuga land; Hinata deliberated for days whether to give him permission to move away, but not for the reasons that he probably supposes. There are only three people in the entire world that he considers as friends, and she is not one of them.

Her former team mates are his current subordinates, because he tends to go through them like wildfire rampaging through a forest; sometimes it's because he thinks that they're incompetent shinobi who couldn't rescue a kitten from a rooftop, but mostly it's because they die. His team has the highest mortality rate of any other in the village, but each time he returns and delivers a neatly-written report and demands yet another mission from Tsunade, not pausing for breath as he defies the odds again and again. He is probably too intelligent to be unaware that his team is now the strongest it has ever been because Hinata didn't like the odds, and decided to change them in his favour. But he wouldn't thank her for it, and she made Shino promise never to tell him. She also made Shino promise to keep him alive.

Sometimes they run into each other, in the most innocuous of places; by the vending machine in the lobby of the administration building, outside Ichiraku Ramen when they're both looking for Naruto, at Kiba's apartment just as one is coming and the other is going. Their meetings are rare and never on Hyuga territory, and perhaps that is as deliberate as anything else in their lives.

Hinata-sama, Neji greets with a stiff nod of his head, his eyes staring through her.

Neji-niisan, she replies with a tentative smile that wavers but stays.

And then there is awkward silence until Hinata inquires about his latest injury, and Neji reluctantly reciprocates by asking about the family, and neither acknowledges the other's tangible presence in their respective lives, because putting it into words is the last line in the sand that cannot be crossed. Hinata knows this but isn't sure why, and so many times she just wants to say thank you, but Neji always turns away before the words can form and she watches him until he is out of range.

So nothing changes; he continues to wage empty war against fate, and she continues to improve his odds so that he will come back alive. But each time he comes home, she gets another chance; one day she will say thank you before he turns away.

fin