Okay I lied. Didn't manage to get the fluff out of my system so here, have more sap. Heh.

Blindness

Mid-afternoon. The two of them stop for their customary break, tugging at their clothes to lessen the heat of the spar. It’s a warm day, humid and bright; wild lavender sways on the periphery of their clearing and sends a heavy sweetness drifting through the long grass.

Neji carefully settles himself down in the shade, reties his hair neatly and closes his eyes to meditate. Tenten sprawls on her back beside him with a long sigh.

“Isn’t it hot, Neji?”

Neji doesn’t reply. Tenten nonchalantly rolls onto her front, casually pulling scattered kunai towards her with chakra strings that glint thinly in the sunlight. She hums quietly, a ridiculous tune currently popular with civilian grandmothers and completely inappropriate for a kunoichi about to turn eighteen in two months.

“I want dumplings,” she informs him, and lazily slips a stalk of grass between her teeth. Neji remains perfectly still. His eyes sting slightly with the afterburn of the byakugan; for a moment the world is blessedly dark and he cannot see anything. He does not want to see anything. He hears Tenten play with a few pebbles next to him, hears her voice break on the highest note, her light cough. He hears the faint whipping sound her steel makes as she retrieves them and gathers up her scrolls, and he knows when exactly she pauses to untie her hair: first the left bun, then the right, with a quick shake of the head to loosen the coils down her back. There’s a faint rustling as she tucks the ribbons into the dip of her collar, fingers sliding discreetly against her cleavage, and Neji sternly instructs his mind not to go there.

“I’ll make dumplings for us later,” she says.

He still doesn’t reply and his eyes remain shut, but he knows that she is curled on her side now with her head on her arm, facing him, resting and waiting.

“I’ll make it with the sour plum sauce you liked last time, Neji, if you help me tidy up my apartment tomorrow?” Her voice is coaxing, playful. Her apartment resembles the lovechild of an industrial landfill and a weapons museum. (Now children, look to your left to see the biggest war hammer you will never need. Mind the booby traps on the floor, sweetie. Yes, the one in front of the fridge.) “Please?”

Neji refrains from snorting. He is, after all, supposed to be meditating.

A brief moment of quiet. Neji breathes in slowly, counts: one; two; three. He breathes out: one; two; three. Tenten starts humming again.

“Neji?”

His next exhalation comes out as a long suffering sigh. “Hn.”

“Neji, you’re smiling.”

A pause. “Am I.”

He is.