Coming to terms.
Hiromi Tanaka, Neji thinks, knows more than she lets on. He can’t exactly explain it, but sometimes small gestures or certain turns of her sentences will tip Neji’s instinct, and Neji knows better than to ignore his instinct. It has saved him many times in the field, after all.
For a little less than a week, Neji has been recovering and helping Hiromi as best as he could with housework. Call it whatever you might, but Neji is not one to fend off others, and he makes a point to always repay his favors. The old lady has tried many times to get him to sit down, but Neji will not relent.
Slowly, Neji has been getting used to sharing his personal place with the initial stranger. After his father’s untimely death, Neji had gotten used to living alone, and even though everyone in his clan was pretty close-knit (being everyone’s cousin does help in that regard), he was still pretty much isolated for the better part of his childhood. Living with Hiromi is strange, new, and sometimes uncomfortable, but not bad. Hiromi acknowledges that Neji needs some alone time, and respects his space. She doesn’t have to, but she does anyway. Hell, Neji doesn’t understand why she still hasn’t kicked him out yet.
It’s one sunny afternoon when their relatively peaceful routine is interrupted by a knock on the door. Hiromi shuffles to the door and hurriedly unlocks it while Neji retreats to the kitchen and closes the door behind him as quietly as possible (luckily enough, Hirumi keeps her door hinges notably well-oiled.)
Neji can hear muffled voices, but can’t make out words. With a thought, his chakra rushes to his eyes and there, in front of Hiromi on the doorstep, is a man he does not recognize. He towers over her (though towering over that lady isn’t really that hard) and Neji can’t see colors with the byakugan, but he recognizes the patterns of the man’s uniform. He is one of the members of the police force of this place.
At first Neji thinks about suppressing his chakra signature to remain undetected, but a quick look at the policeman’s reserves has him do a double-take. That man has the chakra reserves of an academy student, at best. Neji scrutinizes the surroundings of Hirumi’s house, and finds a…strange looking vehicle with another man inside, with the same uniform. Waiting on Hirumi’s porch is a woman in uniform, likely waiting for her colleague as well.
They all have ridiculously small reserves. Neji is almost tempted to just break down in tears at this depressingly pitiful display, but he keeps his cool. There is a chance, however illogical from his point of his view, that there is something else he’s missing.
Neji focuses back on the man talking to Hiromi, and zones in on his lips to make out what he’s saying. “Are you sure you haven’t seen any suspicious activity in the neighborhood?”
He sees Hiromi shake her head in response. The man nods, hands her a piece of paper, and Neji tracks the movement and manages to see the form before the old lady tucks it away. A portrait of him, so accurate it can only be a picture. Neji furrows his brows and chews on the inside of his cheek. He doesn't even remember anyone taking a shot of him.
“May we take a look around your house? It’s only a part of procedure, of course.” Neji reads on the policeman’s lips. “This is a very dangerous individual, he injured one passerby and my colleague just a few days ago. We’ve gotta make sure he doesn’t put anyone else in danger.”
Hiromi hesitates at this, her uncertainty clear in the tense line of her shoulders. But then she nods and slowly steps aside to let the man and his colleague in. The woman ventures in the messy living room, careful as she steps around the cushions, books and papers littered on the ground. The other checks the corridor and puts a hand on the kitchen door’s handle.
Neji quietly sticks to the wall with a thin layer of chakra under his socked feet, and applies a chameleon jutsu on himself, concealing his body from his place in the corner of the ceiling. The policeman enters the kitchen, and Neji can only see the top of his head as the man glances around and starts searching the room. After a moment of unfruitful rummaging, the policeman rejoins Hiromi, who was watching him in the doorway.
The old woman is picking at her nails, an anxious look on her face though she tries to hide it. Neji can’t exactly blame her, but he’s still irked at her suspicious behavior. He doesn’t know whether the policeman will pick up on it or not, hopefully the latter.
Hiromi trails after the policeman as he meets with his colleague in the living room. There is an awkward, tense atmosphere in the air, and Neji watches as the female agent nods to her companion and subtly glances at the two plates on the table. Neji grits his teeth, because of course.
“Does someone else live here?” asks the woman, with another significant glance at the plates.
Hiromi seems to catch up fairly quickly. “Oh, no. But my granddaughter visits sometimes for lunch.”
“I see.” The police agents share a glance and they both tip their head politely. “We are sorry for the inconvenience, ma’am.”
“No worries, sweetie. I understand it’s the kind of thing you need to do.” Hiromi reassures and she accompanies the woman back to the front door. Still, the remaining policeman lingers, looking back at the kitchen with a thoughtful expression. After a moment, he makes his exit as well.
“Thank you for your time, ma’am. Please call in the station if anything comes up, even if you think it’s not important. Even the smallest clue can help us bring this individual into custody.” Hiromi nods along and sends them off with no more trouble.
Neji drops back to the ground gracefully. He thinks momentarily that if Hiromi hasn’t kicked him out yet, then it will surely happen in the very near future. She’s had to lie for him to the police, and if they find out that she was actually involved with him, she could get in real trouble. So much for repaying his debts, he thinks bitterly.
Hiromi almost crashes into him when he exits the kitchen. “Good Lord!” she shrieks and puts a hand on her chest. “What– you– where do you come from?! You nearly gave me a heart attack just then!”
“The kitchen.” Neji answers blankly.
“Don’t be a smartass, you know what I mean! Where were you?!” She demands.
“I haven’t moved from the kitchen.” Neji tries again. He puts his hands on Hiromi’s frail shoulders when it becomes apparent that she’s hyperventilating. “... Are you okay?”
“When that man went into the kitchen…I–I thought you were done for sure.” She explains shakily. And Neji must admit that he currently feels like the biggest asshole on earth.
“I am sorry.” It comes off a little awkwardly, but he means it. Hiromi shakes her head.
“Was that your quirk?” Neji doesn’t respond. “Well, in any case, that’s a… a really good one.” Neji isn’t sure what to say, he’d hardly call his camouflage technique ‘quirky’, but maybe it’d seem that way to an untrained civilian. As Harumi’s breathing evens out, he wonders, not for the first time, why she’d go to such lengths to protect him, seeing as they are perfect strangers.
It’s that night that Neji sits up on the couch and stares at a spot on the wall. His heart is pounding in his chest, and his anxiety makes him almost choke on his own spit. He gathers the pillow in his lap and squeezes it until his knuckles turn white. Neji closes his eyes, but he doesn’t try to fall back asleep.
He remembers instances that he’s been ignoring for the past week. Why? Because he’s scared. Alone in this dark room, he has no problem with admitting this fact to himself.
He remembers a conversation he had with Hiromi, one of the rare times the old lady had actually turned on the old TV that sat gathering dust in the corner of her living room. Neji had sat on the couch next to her as they watched the news. He had learned pretty early that Hiromi disliked watching the news, and viewed it as a task more than anything else. She wished to remain informed, even in her old age, but hearing about all kinds of disasters in the world filled her with sadness.
“Villain.” Neji had wondered out loud, and the old lady had turned to him. “What is a villain?” There was a moment of stunned silence on her part, and what Neji thought might be disbelief. He had internally cursed himself and prepared for something–
“Villains are individuals that break the law with the use of their quirk.” she had said carefully. “...People from around here usually know these things.”
“I see.” Neji hadn’t commented on the ‘quirk’ part. Hell, he hadn’t commented on much of anything after that, preferring to remain blissfully ignorant. Now that he thinks about it, that had been pretty foolish. You can’t run from the truth forever, after all.
Another time, not long after he’d first met Hiromi, he’d been left alone in the house as the old lady had gone off for groceries. She’d taken the habit of buying expensive shampoo for him. Neji doesn’t really like thinking about it, as he views it as something else to repay more than anything else, but he does find the gesture… nice.
Neji remembers sitting in the bathtub and scrubbing his skin so hard with soap it had turned an angry red. Then, he had meticulously split his hair in different sections and began washing it with shampoo once, twice. He laboriously ran his brush through his hair until all the knots were gone, and his hair was back into its usual soft, silky state.
Neji remembers standing with a towel wrapped around his body in front of the bathroom mirror. He remembers his eyes sliding to his barren forehead, and how he’d then rubbed his forehead like crazy, as if it’d actually help him find where his caged-bird seal had gone. He remembers the way his vision blurred, and how the only thing he could feel for a long, agonizing moment, was the way his heart pounded between his ribs.
He also remembers noticing for the first time the oddly advanced technology of this place, the foreign politics and customs, the complete and utter lack of knowledge of anything remotely close to shinobi, or the way the world map of this… of this world was not anything he’d ever seen before.
He remembers meditating, trying every possible technique of the book to break out of an illusion, hitting his head, pinching the flesh of his arms…
Neji goes back to the present with a start. He is still sitting on the couch in Hiromi’s living room, and Lee, Tenten, and Gai are nowhere to be found. The pillow in his lap is still clenched tightly into his fist, and Neji relaxes his hand and makes his joints pop. He shudders and shakes his head.
He needs to get it together. No one has ever achieved anything by wallowing in their own despair. So what if he’s just found himself in a different world (perhaps in a different universe altogether?) at a crucial and turning point during the war against Madara? All he needs to do is…find a way home somehow, rejoin with his comrades and… help put Madara in the grave once and for all.
Neji winces. Right.
In a last second decision, Neji throws on one of the ugly knitted sweaters Hiromi had let him borrow (he’s not sorry and won’t take it back, because seriously, he wouldn’t be caught dead wearing that thing by anyone from home.) He also puts on pants and gathers his hair into a tight bun before poofing out of the living room and onto a random building’s roof.
The clarity of the byakugan helps him avoid the various street cameras with ease, and he stops at a familiar looking alleyway. The night is still young, so he doesn’t linger, but he makes sure to scrutinize the place. He’s not sure what he’s looking for, but this alleyway is the place he first woke up in, before this, he was home. That is the only clue he has, so he’ll have to work with it.
Neji walks around the neighborhood some more, observing anything and everything with his byakugan. He tries to imagine how Ibiki Morino would've approached this in his place. Sure, the man was an expert at torture and interrogation (as expected from the commanding officer of the T&I Force, of course) but after interning with him, Neji knows that a good chunk of the job was actually theories and investigation. Of course, the man worked a lot with the Sensor division, but Neji doesn't exactly have to worry about that (he is one of the Hyuuga with the finest mastery of their byakugan, after all.)
Neji takes advantage of a blind spot of one of the convenience store’s cameras he’s just passed and silently leaps on top of a roof. Step one, define a question to investigate. The goal is to make observations and collect data to come up with a hypothesis, he imagines Ibiki voicing next to him.
“How did I end up here, and how do I go back?” Neji murmurs to himself. He furrows his brows and runs a hand down his stomach, where he remembers getting impaled. The problem is, he doesn’t even remember how, and he doesn’t know if it is real in the first place. He remembers…facing Tobi and Madara with the rest of the Alliance, remembers the scent of blood and ash in the air, remembers standing shoulder to shoulder with Naruto, and Hinata–
A memory flashes before his eyes, the pain in his temples suddenly making him double over. Hinata was about to get killed, and he stepped in to take the blow instead. Then, Naruto took him in arms… and he was here.
Neji exhales sharply, an incredulous laugh bubbling in his stomach and making his shoulder shake. He reels it in, and thinks, a little deliriously: I died. I died, and came back to a different world.
“What the fuck.” Neji thinks the swearing is justified in this case. Probably. If he’s supposed to be dead, then there’s… little chance of getting back to his world, excluding Edo Tensei (which isn’t even an option, God, just thinking about the cursed reanimating technique makes him uncomfortable.)
Neji is snapped out of his thoughts by movement a few paces away from him. He hides from view and watches as three people, dressed rather suspiciously in his opinion, gather in front of the convenience store’s door. One of them pulls out a… small object, metallic by the look of its texture. It looks vaguely like the hilt of a sword, with a tiny lever and a hole in its extremity. Neji has never seen anything like it before, but judging by the way the unidentified person handles it, he’d be willing to bet it is a weapon. That, and the fact that the group is crouching next to a store’s door wearing relatively baggy, concealing clothes, is rather telling.
Neji takes one look at them and ultimately decides that it is none of his business. He’s got better fish to fry. Neji quietly slips back into Hiromi’s living room and locks the window from the inside, still keeping an eye on the soon-to-be robbery further away, because, even if he doesn’t feel all that threatened by whoever that was, one is never too prudent (he’s also slightly curious about the small device.)
A sharp, banging noise comes from outside, like the sound of fireworks, but there is nothing in the sky. Neji knows it comes from the weapon, and his eyebrows shoot up when he notices the little holes left in its wake in the shop’s ceiling. The cashier hurries and empties the components, his hands shaking so bad it takes a few tries to get it right. That was a warning shot, he supposes. Looks like a destructive weapon, but not very discreet. Neji gives it a solid four out of ten (it seems impractical.)
Neji sees Hiromi falling out of her bed before he hears the muted thump coming from her bedroom. He rushes to check on her.
“What was that?!” Hiromi yelps, scrambling to stand back up. The tremble in her limbs is so bad Neji has to grab her by the armpits to stabilize her.
“Neji, are you okay?!” He nods, and follows her when she darts to the window. The old lady pushes out the curtains and peers out nervously.
“It’s okay.” He placates, keeping an eye on the whole interaction from afar. Seems like the thieves got away.
Hiromi whirls around on him, eyes wide as saucers. “Okay? What do you mean it’s okay! That was a gunshot!” Neji raises an eyebrow at the new word, but the old lady doesn’t notice. She quickly dials something on a black device (a smartphone?) and reports the incident to the person on the line.
Then, there’s a long moment when Hiromi is just standing there, staring anxiously through the window, one hand grasping at the tissue covering her chest, and the other hovering above her mouth. Neji feels bad, so he offers to make tea, but she declines and goes back to bed.
The next morning, Neji and Hiromi sit as usual on the couch. The news is replaying the part of the robbery Neji has already seen through his byakugan, and Hiromi watches with a grim expression. There are bags under her eyes, and her wrinkles seem more pronounced. Her pepper gray hair, usually styled into a neat braid, is a tousled mess on her head.
“... Three robbers armed with loaded guns entered Naruhata’s local convenience store, Tokyo, on Thursday morning at around 3 AM.” The woman on the news says, standing in front of the store encircled by bright yellow tape. “The intruders shot one warning shot, and threatened the cashier to bring out all the cash. Luckily, no customers were present at the moment of the crime, and the cashier was not injured. The police are actively investigating the case as of now...” As the reporter talks, there is a grainy footage of the altercation taken by the shop’s security camera playing in the background.
“So that's what happened.” Hiromi whispers next to him. “Where is the world going, seriously…”
Although Neji has learned Hiromi is a pretty tough old lady, he can see that she’s shaken by the news. It is concerning, since the convenience store in question is only a few minutes away, and in a relatively calm neighborhood. It’s also where Hiromi usually goes for errands…
For the next few days, the old lady has been distracted. Knocking into things, tripping, forgetting the pan on the fire… She also absolutely refuses to step a foot outside, and has been living with the news channel practically always on. It’s gotten to a point when Neji actually worries for her safety.
After Hiromi almost fell down the stairs, Neji decides to go out again.
It’s almost funny how easy it is to find the culprits. Neji beats them up so badly he doubts neither of them will have the nerve to so much look at a shop the wrong way in a very, very long time. He aims for the painful spots, a strike to a man’s shoulder has his arm go completely numb, and he brings the palm of his hand flat against another’s chest, sending him crashing to the wall in a cloud of dust. The last one ends up a wheezing mess on the ground after Neji buries two fingers in the delicate flesh of his stomach, knocking the breath out of him. He makes sure to spare their legs and makes no move to run after them when they flee. Hopefully they’ll spread the word.
Neji also thinks his skills might have gotten a little rusty in his week-long convalescence. He hates it.
Dinner with Hiromi is quiet. On the TV, they see a report of mild vandalism in the neighborhood. Some walls were destroyed in an alleyway not far from the convenience store. Locals report having heard noise around 1AM, but the police has no trail as of late. Neji watches idly, knowing they have little chance of linking this back to him lest they interrogate the people he beat up, since he made sure to avoid any security cameras.
Neji knows his host’s worries aren’t at all appeased, but at least now she’s safe to go about her daily life with no trivial little delinquents getting in the way. It’s the least he can do, after all.
Around the time they begin clearing the table and taking back the dishes to the kitchen, three knocks sound on the door. Hiromi goes to answer, and Neji sees a… young woman with dirty blond hair standing on the doorway. It takes him so aback that he just stands there in the middle of the corridor, unmoving.
She’s tall, taller than him, and is wearing a plain jacket with cargo pants. Her blond hair is let down, falling in frizzy strands, and there’s a slight smile on her face at the sight of Hiromi. Hiromi is smiling too, though her expression looks mostly surprised.
“Rika! I didn’t know you were coming.” The old lady steps aside to let her in.
‘Rika’ hums. “Yeah, well, I was in the neighborhood, so.” She looks around, not noticing Neji. “You been okay?”
“I’m alright, how about you?” Rika nods quickly.
“Hey, granny…” The woman clears her voice. “... Listen I kinda need some cash, like, right now. It’s kind of urgent.”
The smile slips off Hiromi’s face. “What happened to the money I gave you?”
The woman shrugs. “You know how it is.”
“No, I don’t know ‘how it is’. Are you in trouble?” At this, Rika’s temper seems to flare. Her features twist in an unhappy frown.
“I’ve told you I can’t tell you about my job.” She says, clearly wanting to let the topic drop. At this moment, she seems to finally catch sight of him.
Brown eyes snap in his direction. “Who the fuck is this?”
“Rika, please…” Hiromi speaks, helpless. Rika strolls to face him, looking him up and down. From this close, Neji recognizes the strong smell of tobacco coming from her.
“Oh, this is great.” Rika scoffs, eyeing him dangerously, then turning back to Hiromi. “You’ve been, what, taking care of some random guy you found instead of helping me? Look, I’m just asking for a little cash here, is it so difficult?”
“It’s not like this. You know I’m always willing to help, but I can’t give you money right now.”
“Why, because you’ve been too busy taking care of the homeless?” Rika snaps. “It’s fine, I’ll handle it myself, like always.” Without leaving anyone the time to speak, she spins on her heel and exits, the door slamming behind her.
In her wake, the house falls silent again. Hiromi lets herself fall on the couch, looking wary and unhappy. Neji gives her an uncertain look, unsure what to do with himself. “...Who was this?”
The old lady drags her hand down her face, sighing. “This was my granddaughter, Rika. Please don’t listen to anything she says…”
“She’s right.” Neji retorts.
She looks up. “What?”
“She’s right about me living off you. You’ve been taking care of me for more than a week, and all I’ve been doing is eating your food with no means to repay you back.”
“You’ve been really helpful with housework, Neji.”
He frowns. “That’s not enough.”
“Isn’t it?” Hiromi smiles at him. “You know, for an old lady like me… The company isn’t so bad.”
Neji doesn’t answer.
She gets up, approaches him, and looks up at him with a gentle look. “Child, you don’t need to repay anything, you hear me? I chose to have you here, and I don’t expect anything in return.” But that’s the problem, isn’t it? Neji thinks. She’s too kind.
“What about money, then?” He asks, and as soon as the words leave his mouth, a hard look crosses her face.
Hiromi shakes her head. “Don’t worry about that.” Still, there's uneasiness in Neji… If he felt guilty before, then that guilt has swelled, if anything, after Hiromi’s granddaughter’s visit. He’s dragging her down, and he knows it.
Maybe it’s time to start actively repaying that debt of his.