He has a lot to make up for, he knows – from when he was too young, too angry, and she was there, too easy a target for his frustration. It’s for the same reason – his youth, his anger – that he overlooked what was crucial, that frustrating constant that made her so blindingly singular.

He’s eighteen when he realizes that it’s not too late. It’s a seed, something small that roots between his lungs, and all of a sudden he can hardly breathe for it. Hyuuga Hinata has inherited her clan in the wake of her father’s death. It’s spring, and Konoha smells fresh for it when the wind blows east. West brings along the stench of the buried, incongruent – a reminder. The war is six months over, but everything is off-kilter still, and Neji finds himself in a familiar courtyard, facing away from tragedy.

Hinata hasn’t left her offices in two days, accommodating a steady stream of clan elders all the while. Through the shoji screen, he listens as they berate her, undermining her contributions to the war, drawing unfavorable comparisons between her and her predecessors, trying to sand her down small. There’s the matter of Hanabi – it’s too late for her to be sealed, and nobody’s happy about it, least of all the mercurial elders. Hinata went in wearing her mourning clothes. She weathers verbal warfare in the same set, takes food by necessity, eats little, calms with quiet words. She never wrings her hands anymore, never cries when provoked. She’s become strong, but not by choice, and the core of her is still soft, fortified only by time and distance.

And here’s where Neji finds himself, some skulking thing hovering outside of Hinata’s inherited offices. He’s tender about the middle; six months and he’s still numb in places, smarting scar tissue up his stomach. It’s a miracle he survived and they all know it. He braces himself against the wall, careless with his silhouette. It’s warm, nearly unseasonably so. The air is sweet, his lips are still chapped from winter, and he could nearly fall asleep standing up, right where he shouldn’t be. By all rights, he should be in bed, or dead by his injuries. Not here.

He stiffens at the sound of a sliding screen.

“Neji-niisan?” The clan head says, quiet, pinching up in concern. She sits back on her calves, hands in her lap, dressed in striking black that draws the pale of her eyes and skin into sharp contrast. Her hair has been growing out, but she’s cut it again recently, back to just above her ears. It makes her look young in the cheeks she never quite grew out of.

“Hyuuga-sama,” angling his body towards her, bending at the waist to the full extent of his capability.

“Don’t –”

Her eyes are wide when he looks – white and shadowed around the edges. She sighs like a broken thing, hunches in on herself, just a little bit.

“You’re tired,” he says without intonation.

“. . . Yes.”

“You’re being stubborn. They’re testing you – straighten your spine and turn them away so you can get some sleep. They’ll respect you for it.”

She’s shaking her head, quite diplomatically: “maybe that would work for you or Hanabi” with the rest left unsaid.

Their silence is a fragile thing. He draws a labored breath.

“You’re of no use to the clan this way, Hinata-sama,” he finds himself saying. For a moment, the air is sharp in his lungs. Unbidden, he imagines her succeeding, leading gently, shaping them all up for the better. His seal twinges beneath his hitai-ate. He bows again, shallowly compared to before, and flashes up onto the roof without her dismissal.

It’s not a significant exchange in the moment. There’s still bitterness on his tongue that nothing can disguise – his father’s inheritance, perhaps, Hizashi’s unspoken sentiments. Hizashi’s brother passed nonsensically in the line of duty – not during wartime, but in the clean-up, the casualty of unstable, crudely-drawn paper mines. All it took was a step to set them off.

It’s crude at best to draw the comparison between Hiashi’s father’s death and the realization of Neji’s affections, but the ignition is just as simple; nothing more than a step in the wrong place. Hinata falls ill. She’s confined to her quarters where she lies, swallowed up by a coat she outgrew years ago and the unseasonally heavy kakefuton. Her forehead is beaded with condensation, and something in him wrenches like a fist, a sharp pain. It’s another place he shouldn’t be, but he has the sudden, nauseating realization that, in his empowered powerlessness, he’s the only one who could make the choice to stay by her side.

So he mops her forehead dry in a humid room, airs it out as much as he possibly can. He nurses his cousin back to lucidity with a straight spine and dismal bedside manner, leaving only when Hanabi, sometimes accompanied by a flock of medics, comes to check up on her. She’s nominally unattended throughout the day, so it falls on him to feed her bland food and small sips of water, to angle her head so that she won’t choke.

All the while, he’s furious in the quiet way he’s learned; it’s clear to anyone with half a mind that she’s been overworked, chewed up and spat out, her time disrespected and her leadership questioned. She’s been deprived of autonomy, time to mourn, and the option to attend to her health, but there’s little doubt that their clan will take this illness they’ve caused as evidence of her weakness. By all rights she shouldn’t be as sick as she is, but the blame does not lie with her.

It shouldn’t feel like a betrayal. There shouldn’t be betrayal left to feel, much less on her behalf. He breathes through the confusing knot it all makes, practicing simple kata in the sun of her room. He gathers all his patience to stand sentinel. He tries not to feel like he’s doing something he shouldn’t.

She’s already most of the way to wellness on the second day, but her fever hasn’t broken. Her eyes are closed, she’s drifting, so he jumps when she grabs for his wrist. There’s give to her palm, it’s soft, disturbingly warm, lacking calluses in the places they should be.

“Neji-niisan?”

He swallows down the roaring force of his nausea, vertigo plunging him sideways.

“Hyuuga-sama.”

“Please don’t call me that,” she says candidly, pinching her eyes tightly shut. His fingers twitch. He imagines himself smoothing the crease between her brows and inclines his head instead – her pulse thuds against a pressure point, blood, tendon, and bone. Even without technique behind it, it’s profoundly disabling. With great effort, he pulls his hand away.

“There’s nothing I can do for this clan,” Hinata says plainly.

“Resignation is the coward’s way out,” he finds himself telling her.

“I’m a coward, then. I’ve always been a coward, you were the first person to tell me. It’s better that I . . . that I face it. It’s unconventional, but I was thinking that Hanabi –”

“– is thirteen. This is your duty,” it sounds cold, he feels cold, cored, hollowed out for the second time in as many months. He recognizes the burden of his expectations; the only difference between him and the elders is that he wants to see her succeed, wants to see them changed, wants to foster that kind steadiness that’s as integral to Hinata as the color of her hair, the slope of her shoulders, the curve of her neck.

But he’s been selfish, all too selfish.

“I’m not ready,” Hinata bursts out, sitting in a fit of fabrics and limbs. The jacket strains – it used to be so big on her. She’s older – stronger, too, in mind and in body, but she can’t see that in herself, and some part of that is Neji’s fault. “My father is dead, we’re not even – so many of us are dead, and I – it’s just –” she draws a deep, heaving breath, throat scratchy, floodgates thrown shut. There are tears in her eyes, she’s so raw he can’t stand to look. “I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I’m sick, I’m sorry. There’s nothing I can do for us – for the – I mean – Neji-niisan. You know that. You said – and you’re right, you’re right, you’re so smart, you’re always right.”

And there’s nothing he can say that would fall short of scooping into his own messy entrails and delivering his heart to her in his hands. He aches. He stands. He turns. There’s a seed growing into him, cloying, too big to stifle now. There’s no rhyme or reason, no string to pull to unravel the knot in his chest, and he can’t tell where it ends and he begins.

And then it’s summer, and Neji’s wounds have all but healed. He drills with his team to gain back what he lost in taijutsu, range of motion impacted. The way the scar tissue pulls all across his body is new, but everything else more or less falls into place, and Hinata – Hinata isn’t suffering, exactly, but she also doesn’t seem to be thriving. She’s achingly quiet, bone-deep tired, busy, wrung dry. Her body is at rest, but her mind is clearly scattered, and he applies himself with nothing to occupy his mind except for Hinata, Hinata, Hinata.

There’s something painful to the way he loves her, for all the ways they’re doomed. She’ll be wed before twenty, married off to a competent cousin with whom to share the burden of leadership, and it won’t be him. She’ll disappear into it and the elders will finally calm down.

The dreams begin around the time of his nineteenth birthday, itching under his skin. He wakes up with sticky skin and sticky sheets long before sunrise, feeling much younger than he is. He goes for long runs, lending his manpower to the restoration of their declawed village.

It’s a slow unraveling, sour because no matter what he tells himself, it still isn’t too late, not really. Assigning an arbitrary expiration date is an empty platitude to a mind sick with longing. He’ll see her and say the wrong thing again, and he’ll fail, and the burden of failure will fall on his shoulders alone.

The dreams don’t stop.

Summer; late July, a meeting of clans, his presence requested. It’s the closest he’s been to her since she was sick, seated seiza to the right of her, and he can hardly think for the rush of blood in his ears. They’re young, the two of them – among the youngest in the room, and it shows in her over-stiff spine, hungry for the approval he knows she feels is undeserved.

Despite the nagging worry he can never quite quash, she’s good at what she does – a weapon honed for these formal meetings. She nods when she should and murmurs her quiet approval in the places where a nod does not suffice, patiently engaged as the afternoon draws out into evening.

“Hyuuga-sama,” says Yamanaka Inoichi, who has a daughter Hinata’s age. The shadows are long and his expression is unreadable with his back to the shoji screens. “Your input?”

The focus shifts to his left and the air is gone from Neji’s lungs. Hinata is finely strung tension, hands on the hem of her sleeve. All eyes are on her, greedy koi to the surface of the water. He sees her in every insignificant moment leading up to this – ruddy cheeks and stammered agreement, not knowing anything else. Tripping over her own feet, falling, picking herself up. Bright eyes, determined for the first time in her life at twelve years old, beaten from the inside out, spirit left unbroken.

“It’s an effective way to strengthen the village while keeping the clans’ autonomy in mind,” she says with a resolute strength that, for all his faith in her, he did not expect. “On behalf of the Hyuuga clan, I’m in favor – on the condition that we may withdraw at any point.”

He exhales in puffs of breath, tripping over himself as the muttered agreement is returned. Her eyes dart to him and he nods his approval without thinking, pulse skipping. Ridiculous. The corners of her mouth quirk up and he’s gone, lost to the sunset slanting sideways through the shoji screens and the way it paints her gold.

Not long after, the meeting is adjourned, and they’re excused to eat and drink in the repurposed cafeteria of the Hokage tower. With most of Konoha’s funds funneled towards restoration, it’s a simple meal, nothing better or worse than what anyone gets at home, but it tastes sweeter as a symbol of solidarity, new and maintained. At one point, their Hokage slips in through the window, apologizing for being late.

“Maa, you know how it is,” he says, gesturing with the pornography marked with his thumb to his place.

Neji is pulled away from the proceedings by a gentle hand on his wrist, leading him out of a side door into the quiet circular hall. It’s Hinata, he knows without looking – knows the pattern of her breath, knows the network of her chakra, knows her right down to the soft center of her, but more than that, she knows him – she leads, trusting he will follow. He lets himself be led to the limits of her bravery, which ends up being an alcove in the wall where the festivities are little more than distant clamor.

“You did well today,” Neji says, once again unthinking. He finds himself paralyzed in place, mollified by the palm-span between them – the alcove isn’t small by any stretch of the imagination, but neither are they.

“You think so?”

It’s his turn to trip, to stumble, “Y-yes, I do.”

Perhaps he’ll stumble through the next eighteen years, perhaps they’ll be even.

“I have so much to make up for,” she says quietly. “I’ll repay you, Neji-niisan – Neji. Our clan is broken, but so is Konoha. I was thinking – I could – I could maybe use this as a chance to regrow. To give a voice back to the branch family.”

He nods – it draws his face down towards hers. There’s warmth radiating off of her skin. Still, he can’t quite bring himself to duck his head down the remaining distance, to wash away their history and clear the slate. There’s still anger in him, and want for other things.

“It won’t be easy,” he warns. He gropes around in the dark, feeling out the shape of her resolve. He can play the devil’s advocate, if it serves to show her independence. “We’re an established clan. We’ve only gotten this far because of the measures we have in place to protect ourselves – from the outside world, and from each other.”

She shakes her head.

“There’s a way forward that doesn’t put us at odds with each other – there has to be. I’ll find it. I’ll make the Hyuuga clan something you can take pri–”

The distance is bridged, and that first, harsh press of lips snaps something inside of him, something that’s been tenuous and taut and oh-so-close to breaking since the war – since before the war – since he was the angriest boy in the entire world, and before that, since Hinata was his little cousin, the gentle heiress in such stark contrast to his hard planes and sharp edges.

She meets him now and bests him – his mind is fuzzy, hot from cheeks to chest, he’s shaky on his feet. She leans forward, again and again, with a hunger he didn’t know she had, but is quickly learning to covet for himself.

“Neji,” she chides when they finally part, but there’s humor to it. She’s pleasantly flushed, smiling wide. “You interrupted me.”

He doesn’t know how to meet it, yet, doesn’t know how to accept it. If he gives himself over, he’ll lose his mind.

“I will be proud,” he whispers instead. He’s already proud. Her straight spine, upright posture, gentle strength, gentle fist. “I’d be honored to be a Hyuuga in your clan.” It’s as far as he can go without faltering, but she already knows everything of importance. He’s hers. It goes without saying.

She pushes his hitai-ate up on his forehead in lieu of response, tracing the lines of the seal with the crescent-moon of her thumbnail – and she raises herself up on her toes, braced against the wall, breath on skin he can hardly stand to think of as his own. They’ve always been better in the absence of words, but he tries again in spite.

“You’re not alone,” he promises, dizzy with it, breathless. Her mouth slants, unbearably soft, spit-swollen against his forehead. “I’ll share the burden. It’ll get easier with time.”

“I know,” she tells skin that never sees the light of any sun except for hers, clasping his hand in hers, a quick pulse of chakra between them. “For all that’s happened, you’ve never left me to be on my own.”