"Fight me like you're trying to kill me, Tenten."
Lee stood in the center of Training Ground Six with his hands behind his back. No stance. No guard. Just standing there, waiting, with that oh-so-familiar smile.
Tenten came at him with everything.
Her fist drove toward his jaw. Lee leaned. The fist passed his ear. She followed with a knee to his ribs. He stepped around it. A spinning back kick next. He caught her ankle in one hand, held it for a beat, and set it down.
"Faster," he said.
"I'm going as fast as I can!"
"No, you're not." Lee's voice was kind but certain. "You're going as fast as you think you can. There's a difference."
Tenten reset. She came again. Harder this time. A combination that started with a feint to his stomach and transitioned into an elbow aimed at his temple. Lee slipped the elbow by a hair. She pivoted into a sweep. He hopped over it. She rose with an uppercut and Lee caught her fist in his palm.
"That's it, Tenten! Let your youth burn ablaze!"
They had been at this for two hours. Tenten's knuckles were raw. Her breathing was ragged. Sweat had soaked through her shirt and her hair was starting to come loose from the buns. Every combination she threw, Lee avoided or absorbed without effort, and every time he told her to go again.
It was infuriating.
It was also working. She could feel the changes in her body from two weeks of taijutsu conditioning. It was strange though. By herself or with Guy-sensei, she couldn't feel herself making progress like this. But two weeks with Lee, she could remember where she started and knows that right now it was noticeably better than where she was.
She was still nowhere near Lee's level though. She wasn't sure anyone their age was near Lee's level anymore. But the gap was smaller than it had been, and that was something.
"Lee." She was bent over, hands on her knees, pulling air. "When Guy-sensei tried to teach us the Eight Gates, why couldn't I open them?"
Lee tilted his head. "You couldn't feel them."
"Right. I couldn't feel where they were. You and Guy-sensei kept talking about a 'limiter' and a 'release point' and I had no idea what any of that meant. It was like being told to flex a muscle I didn't have."
"That's because you were trying to find it with your mind." Lee crouched in front of her. "The First Gate isn't something you think your way into. It's something your body does when it has no other choice. The gate exists to protect you from your own strength. It only opens when you need more than what the limiter allows."
"So I need to be in danger?"
"Not just danger. You need to reach a point where your body understands that holding back means dying. The gate is a wall. You don't break through a wall by thinking about it. You break through it by running at it so hard that stopping isn't an option anymore."
Tenten straightened. She wiped sweat from her forehead.
"Then stop going easy on me."
Lee looked at her.
"I'm serious, Lee. If I need to be pushed past my limit to break through, then push me. Hit me back."
"Tenten, I could seriously hurt you if I-"
"I know. Do it anyway."
Lee studied her face. She wasn't joking. She wasn't being brave for the sake of being brave. She was a girl whose teammates had left her behind in the Chunin Exams, whose best friend had been arrested and taken away, and who had decided that the only acceptable response to all of it was to become strong enough that it could never happen again.
He recognized that feeling. It was the same one that had driven him to punch a tree until his knuckles bled when he was young.
"Alright." Lee dropped into his Strong Fist stance. "Let's go. And we won't stop till you unlock the first gate or something else. Hopefully not the something else…"
Tenten came at him.
Lee blocked her first combination. Then he countered. His fist caught her shoulder and sent her flying. She recovered and came again. He blocked, countered, this time with a leg sweep that took her feet out and dropped her on her back.
She got up. Came again.
Lee's counter was harder this time. A forearm across her guard that rattled her teeth. She stumbled. He was already inside her space, his fist sinking into her chest, sending her flying again.
"Don't fall. Recover. Find your footing before I find you."
She came again. And again. And again.
Each time, Lee's counters got sharper.
Her lungs burned. Her arms ached. Her vision was starting to narrow from exhaustion.
Lee hit her in the sternum with a punch. The impact dropped her to one knee. The air left her lungs in a rush.
"Get up," Lee said.
She got up.
"Again."
She came. Lee's fist was soaring toward her face. He wasn't holding back with this punch. Tenten's heart stopped. It was like she was staring death in the face… Lee's fist was death itself. And it was heading straight for her. Tenten couldn't move her body. She couldn't even scream. It was like she was paralyzed from the momentum, pressure, and strength of this incoming attack.
Something inside Tenten cracked.
Something structural that had been holding everything in place, keeping her muscles at twenty percent, keeping her speed at the level her brain had decided was the maximum, keeping her strength within the bounds that her nervous system had set as safe.
The wall.
She felt it. For the first time, she felt exactly what Lee had been describing. A limiter, sitting at the base of her skull, a gate made of her own biology that existed to stop her from tearing herself apart.
She ran at it with everything. Every ounce of frustration from losing to Temari. Every day of watching Lee and Neji pull ahead of her. Every night spent training alone because her teammates were in the hospital or in a cell. The promise she had made to become greater than Tsunade. The memory of Neji being led away in restraints while she stood there with her hand over her mouth and did nothing. And the threat of dying.
The gate opened.
The effect was instantaneous. Strength flooded through her limbs, her core, her spine. Her muscles tightened and swelled with a force that felt five times beyond what she was used to operating at. Her senses sharpened. The weight of her own body on her feet felt different, lighter, more responsive, like the gap between thinking about moving and actually moving had been cut in half.
Her fist was already in motion before she realized she was swinging.
Lee's eyes widened. Their knuckles connected and Lee's feet slid backward through the dirt. Two full inches.
"Tenten!" Lee's face split into a grin so wide it looked like it might damage his face. "That's it! That's the First Gate! You did it!"
Tenten stared at her fist. Then at Lee's palms, which were red from the impact. Then at her fist again.
"I... I did it?"
"You opened it! You did it, Tenten!"
She looked at her hands. They were shaking, but not from exhaustion anymore. From power. Raw, unfiltered physical power that she had never had access to before.
She turned and drove her fist into the nearest tree trunk.
Her hand went through it. Bark and wood exploded outward and the trunk groaned, tilted, and crashed to the ground.
Tenten stared at the stump. Then at her fist. Then at the stump again.
"Holy..."
"Now close it," Lee instructed. "Pull the feeling back. Like clenching a muscle and then releasing it."
She focused. The surge receded. Her muscles settled. She opened her eyes and pulled it back, the gate opening again, the strength flooding in. Then off. Then on.
"I can control it." She flexed her fingers. "I can go in and out. But I can't feel the others. Just the first one."
"The first one is enough for now." Lee gave her a thumbs up. "You just got five times stronger, Tenten. That's incredible."
Tenten looked at her hands again.
"Lee."
"Yes?"
"Thank you." She said it simply. "For pushing me."
"You pushed yourself. I just made sure you couldn't stop." Lee smiled. "That's what teammates are for."
Tenten's expression shifted into something more determined.
"Now teach me how to throw a proper punch with this power before I accidentally break all the bones in my body. I do not want to end up like you and Guy-sensei after you open the Gates."
"Yes ma'am! It would be my pleasure!"
"Let's do this, Lee!"
They got back to work.
[Teaching Proficiency +2,000 points!]
"Looks like your limit is two Chidori for now."
Kakashi stood with his hands in his pockets, his single visible eye fixed on the damage ahead. Two craters had been blasted into the rocky hillside, each one deep enough to bury a person in, the stone around them scorched and fractured from the concentrated lightning that had carved them.
Sasuke held his right wrist with his left hand. The arm was still flickering with residual electricity, small arcs of blue-white lightning crawling across his skin before dying out. His Sharingan faded, the tomoe receding, his eyes returning to black. He was breathing through his teeth.
"Right now, you only have enough chakra for two Chidori in a single day." Kakashi's voice was matter-of-fact. "You can only safely use the jutsu with the Sharingan active. The tunnel vision at full charge speed would get you killed without it. And using the Sharingan alongside other techniques burns through your reserves fast."
He paused.
"For what it's worth, that's impressive. Even if I use four Raikiri in the same day, I'm completely drained."
"What happens if I try to force a third?" Sasuke asked.
"It won't start. And if you push past that..." Kakashi's eye hardened. "Your chakra hits zero. You know what happens when a shinobi's chakra hits zero."
"Yeah." Sasuke released his wrist. The trembling hadn't fully stopped. "Good thing you told me not to waste this jutsu on that freak."
"The Chidori was never meant for him. The important part was learning to tap into your innate lightning affinity. That's what will give you an edge against a taijutsu specialist."
"Will it be enough?" Sasuke looked at Kakashi directly.
"Of course not. Not even close." Kakashi didn't hold back. "But it's a hundred times better than what you had at the start of the Preliminaries."
Sasuke's jaw tightened. He looked at the two craters he'd made in the hillside and wondered if it came even close to the crater Lee had supposedly made in the arena ceiling.
"Not even Naruto ever made me feel like this." The words came out bitter. Not hopeless. Sasuke didn't do hopeless. But the gap between where he was and where he needed to be was visible for the first time in a way that wounded his pride more than any lost fight ever had.
He'd heard what Rock Lee did during the preliminaries. Before Kakashi explained, he didn't even know what a jinchuriki was. Or a tailed beast. Now he knew. Jinchuriki were living weapons. Tailed beasts were creatures that could flatten villages. Natural disasters given form and intent.
And his opponent had killed one with his bare hands.
Sasuke didn't know where his brother stood compared to something like that. Was Itachi on par with a jinchuriki? Stronger? Or would someone like Lee tear through him the same way he'd torn through a sand monster? The question sat in his gut like a stone. Because if Lee was that strong, and Sasuke couldn't beat Lee, then the distance between himself and Itachi was even wider than he'd thought.
Kakashi watched his student's face.
He'd been rivals with Guy for decades. He knew what Guy's training produced. He knew what the Eight Gates could do at their upper limits. And he knew that as a man who had lost as many times as he'd won against Konoha's Noble Green Beast, that this fight was not going to go the way Sasuke wanted it to.
The Sharingan held a couple advantages over Lee. But those advantages would be meaningless. Guy had fought against the Sharingan for years, and there was zero chance he hadn't passed on his knowledge to his protege this month.
Which is why Kakashi wasn't planning on relying on the Sharingan for this fight. Give Sasuke tools that Lee hadn't trained against, because anything Guy had seen, Lee had prepared for.
"This will probably be the hardest fight of your life as you are now," Kakashi said.
"Yeah. No kidding." Sasuke's mouth curved, looking forward to the daunting challenge.
If he could beat someone like Rock Lee. Someone who fought a tailed beast and won. Then he was one step closer to the one person who actually mattered.
He flexed his right hand. The lightning had stopped flickering.
"Let's go again," he said. "I want to completely memorize that Strong Fist fighting style."
Kakashi nodded.
Beneath Konoha, in a place that did not exist on any map the Hokage's office kept, a boy knelt on a stone floor.
The room was lit by a single torch on the far wall. The ceiling was low. The air was cold and dry, away from the sun, in a place that had been built specifically to be forgotten.
Neji Hyuga was wearing clothes he did not recognize. Black, close-fitting, with a short midriff jacket that had red straps over the shoulders. A tip-less tanto was strapped to his back. A porcelain mask, plain white with no markings, sat on the floor beside his knee.
He had been here for six days.
The first three had been spent in a cell. Not at the intelligence division. Guy-sensei had been told the intelligence division, and that was where the escort had been heading when they'd left the hospital. But the route had changed two blocks from the building. A turn down an alley that shouldn't have led anywhere. A staircase that descended further than any building in this part of the village should have allowed. A door that opened into darkness and closed behind him with the sound of stone meeting stone.
The cell had been clean. Small. A cot, a bucket, a sealed door. No window. No sound from outside. No way to tell what time it was or how long he'd been there. The chakra-draining seal they'd placed on him at the hospital was still active, which meant his Byakugan and Gentle Fist was useless, which meant for the first time in his life, Neji Hyuga could not see what was around him.
The blindness was worse than the confinement.
On the third day, the door had opened and a man had walked in.
He was old. Frail-looking, with a cane and bandages covering his right arm and half his face. One visible eye, dark and sharp. He wore a white shirt beneath a dark robe that covered him from his feet to just over his right shoulder. He looked like someone's grandfather.
He sat on the edge of Neji's cot without asking permission.
"Neji Hyuga." The man's voice was dry and even. "My name is Danzo Shimura."
Neji said nothing.
"Do you know what should have happened to you?"
Neji's jaw tightened.
"The council's recommendation was straightforward. Strip you of your rank as a shinobi. Return you to the Hyuga compound. Let the clan handle its own." Danzo's single eye studied him. "You know what that means, don't you? Returned to the branch family's quarters. The curse seal still on your forehead. No missions. No training. No purpose. Just a boy living at the whims of the main family for the rest of his life. A caged bird with its wings clipped."
The words sat in the air between them.
"Your sensei vouched for you. Your teammates begged on your behalf. The boy you tried to kill forgave you publicly. All of that earned you leniency. Not freedom. Leniency. The council was prepared to execute you. However, Rock Lee's forgiveness would've let you live as a civilian under Hyuga custody. That was the most generous outcome available."
Danzo paused. His cane rested between his knees. His single eye had not blinked.
"I stepped in because I believe that outcome is wasteful."
Neji looked at him for the first time.
"A prodigy of the Hyuga clan. Branch family or not, your talent with the Byakugan exceeds any main family member alive. You have the eyes, the skill, and the disposition of someone who could do extraordinary things for this village." Danzo's voice remained level. "Sending you to waste away in a compound because of a single act of violence, however severe, is a waste of a resource that Konoha cannot afford to lose. Especially now."
"What do you want?" Neji's voice came out rough. Six days without speaking.
"I want you to serve Konoha. Not from the light. From the shadows. I lead an organization called Root. We handle the missions that the village needs completed but cannot officially acknowledge. We protect Konoha from threats that the Hokage's office either cannot see or cannot act upon."
Danzo reached into his robe and produced a porcelain mask. He set it on the cot between them.
"I'm not offering you freedom, Neji. I won't insult you by pretending otherwise. You would operate under my command. You would follow my orders. You would not speak of Root or its activities to anyone outside the organization." He looked at the curse mark on Neji's forehead. "I understand that you have experience with this kind of arrangement."
The silence in the cell was absolute.
"The difference," Danzo continued, "is that under the Hyuga, your talents are suppressed. Under me, they would be used. You would be trained. You would grow stronger. You would serve your village in ways that matter. And you would remain a shinobi."
Neji stared at the mask.
He was not a fool.
He had never heard of Danzo Shimura. But the man had sent operatives disguised as ANBU to extract him from a hospital. He had a facility beneath Konoha that the village's own intelligence division did not appear to know about. He was offering a deal to a criminal that circumvented the council's authority entirely.
This man wanted to use him. He was almost certainly lying about some part of this. Perhaps all of it.
But.
Neji understood what waited for him if he refused. Returned to the Hyuga compound. Civilian status. The curse seal still burning on his forehead, and now without even the dignity of being a shinobi to offset it. A life spent in the branch family's quarters, watching the main house from a distance, growing weaker while the world moved on without him.
Lee would keep getting stronger. Lee would keep climbing. Lee would become everything he had ever promised to become, and Neji would be sitting in a compound, sealed and useless, watching it happen from behind a wall.
Trading one slave master for another.
That was what this was. The Hyuga held the reins over his life with a seal on his forehead. Danzo would hold the reins with whatever mechanism Root used to ensure loyalty. The cage would be different. The bars would be different. But the cage would still be a cage.
Neji set the mask back down on the cot.
"I have conditions."
Danzo's eyebrow rose by a fraction. Most recruits did not have conditions. Most recruits did not have the leverage to set any. But the boy was looking at him with the flat, certain eyes of someone who had already decided he had nothing left to lose, and people with nothing to lose were the only ones who ever negotiated honestly.
"Speak."
"The Hyuga forbid the branch family from learning the main house techniques. The full Eight Trigrams. The advanced rotations. Everything they hoarded behind the seal on my forehead." Neji's voice did not waver. "If I am going to serve you, I want all of it. Every technique they kept from me. No restrictions, no exceptions. If Root has access to forbidden knowledge, I want that too."
"Granted." Danzo did not hesitate. It was exactly what he wanted, a stronger operative, and the boy had asked for the one thing Danzo would have given freely. "A weapon should be sharpened to its full edge. The Hyuga were fools to dull you on principle. What else?"
Neji was quiet for a moment.
"I cannot return to my old life. You have made that clear. I disappear into the dark and I do not come back."
"That is the nature of Root."
"Then let me end it properly." Neji looked at him. "Let me write a letter. To my team. To Lady Hinata. Let them receive it. I will not tell them where I am or what I have become. I will give them an ending they can close. After that, I am yours, and I will never speak their names to anyone in this organization again."
Danzo studied him.
A lesser man would have refused on principle. Attachments were a liability. Root severed them, did not indulge them. But Danzo had spent a lifetime reading the ledgers of human motivation, and he saw the arithmetic of this offer clearly enough.
A boy publicly remanded to the Hyuga compound as a civilian was a problem. He existed. He had an address. He had relatives who would expect to see him, a sensei who would come asking, teammates who might visit a compound gate and demand answers. Maintaining the fiction of a living civilian was an open thread that could be pulled.
A boy who was dead was no problem at all.
A letter framed as a final message, a suicide after a disgraced branch member's failed attempt on the heir's life, was tragically plausible. The village would believe it because the village wanted a clean answer to an ugly story. The Hyuga would hold a quiet funeral and be relieved to bury the embarrassment. The team would grieve and move on. And the operative they buried would be standing in this room, breathing, with no public identity left to maintain and no one in the world looking for him.
A ghost. The cleanest asset Root could ask for.
"You may write your letter," Danzo said. "We will see that it is delivered. And we will provide the rest of the arrangement."
Neji understood what "the rest of the arrangement" meant.
"My family will need a body."
"That will be handled. You needn't concern yourself with the details." Danzo rose, his cane taking his weight. "Write it tonight. Make it convincing. If a single word reads false, your sensei will know. The man is a fool about many things, but not about the people he cares about."
Neji picked up the mask.
"Welcome to Root, Neji."
The door closed.
Neji sat in the cell with the mask in his hands. He turned it over. The porcelain was smooth and cold and featureless. No identity. No name. No clan markings. Just a blank white face that could belong to anyone.
He put it on.
It fit.
Neji wrote it that night by torchlight, on a single sheet of paper, with a brush a Root operative had left without comment.
To Hinata,
I begin with you, because you are the one I wronged most.
What I did to you in the preliminaries was unforgivable, and I will not insult you by pretending otherwise. I told myself it was about fate. About the gap between the main house and the branch. About strength. It was none of those things. I was angry, and you were the easiest person in the world to be angry at, because you wore the face of everything that had been taken from me. My freedom. My choice. My father.
None of that was your doing. You never built the cage I was born into. You were never my enemy. I took my hatred of the main family, and my own bitterness toward a boy who proved every excuse I ever made was a lie, and I put all of it onto you, because you could not fight back the way I wanted the world to fight back. That was the act of a coward.
I am sorry. Become the person you were always meant to be. Do it free of the shadow I tried to cast over you.
To Lee, Tenten, and Guy-sensei,
This is not your fault.
I need you to read that line twice before you read anything else. You did everything right. You stood for me when no one else in the village would. You forgave me when I had earned nothing but a cell. What I have chosen is mine alone, and I will not have the three of you carrying it on my behalf. Do not wonder what you could have done. There was nothing. The fault was never yours.
Lee. You cracked my entire world open with nothing but your fists and a refusal to stay down. Become the shinobi we both know you can be. A man spoken of in the same breath as Madara Uchiha and Hashirama Senju, achieved by a ninja who can only use taijutsu. Prove that the body alone is enough to reach the top of the world. I believe you, out of anyone, can do it.
Tenten. You never once let me watch you quit. Surpass Lady Tsunade. Become greater than the legend you measured yourself against every single day. You were always closer than you allowed yourself to believe. Closer than I ever told you. I should have told you.
Guy-sensei. You told me once that a person can decide their own future. You were right. I have decided mine. Not in the way you hoped, and not in the way I once swore to you I would, and I am sorry for that more than I have the words to say. You were the greatest teacher I could have asked for. If there is anything after this, and I am given a second chance, I would like to learn under you again. I would like to start over and do it right.
Lee. Tenten. Guy-sensei.
Thank you for being my friends.
My only friends.
I will see you again in the next life.
Neji Hyuga
The Konoha Cemetery sat at the village outskirts, where the buildings thinned out and the trees took over. A stone sculpture stood at the front, carved in the shape of the village's Will of Fire, the kanji for Hokage cut into its base. Past it, the grave markers ran in quiet rows under a grey sky that had not decided whether it would rain.
The funeral was small.
The Hyuga had wanted it that way. A disgraced branch member who had attacked a main family member and then taken his own life was not a death the clan wished to dwell on in public. They came, a handful of them, in formal dark robes, and they stood at a careful distance from the grave with the stillness of people who were present out of obligation rather than grief.
The casket was closed.
Inside it lay a body that had Neji's face. The same long dark hair. The same pale features. The same lean build of a boy who had trained every day of his short life. The eyes were sealed shut, the way every branch family member's Byakugan sealed at the moment of death, the curse seal doing its final work to lock the bloodline away from the world. No one would open the casket to look closer. No one needed to. The eyes were sealed, the clan mark was on the forehead, and grief asked no further questions.
Hanabi stood beside her father at the head of the grave. She was young. She did not fully understand what had happened, only that her cousin was dead, that he had done something terrible to her sister first, and that her father's face had not looked the same since the news had come.
Hiashi Hyuga led the service.
He stood at the head of the grave in his formal robes with a single folded sheet of paper in his hands. His back was straight. His expression was the same controlled stillness the Hyuga wore for everything. But his hands were not still. The paper trembled, just slightly, at the edges.
He unfolded it.
"Neji left a letter," Hiashi said. His voice carried across the small gathering, even and quiet. "I will read it, as he asked."
He began to read.
The grey sky held its rain.
By the time the service ended, most of the gathering had gone.
The Hyuga filed out first, their obligation met. Hanabi was led away by a branch family attendant with a hand on her small shoulder, looking back once at the grave before the trees swallowed the path. The few others who had come, Iruka from the Academy, a clerk from the mission desk who had processed Team Guy's paperwork a hundred times, drifted out in twos and threes until the cemetery was nearly empty.
Four people remained at the grave.
Guy stood at the foot of it with his fists clenched at his sides and tears running freely down his face. His student. His responsibility. A boy he had taken at thirteen and sworn to guide, and who was now in a box in the ground while Guy stood above it with nothing left to give him.
Lee was beside him, and Lee was worse.
Lee cried terribly, his whole body shaking with it, his hands pressed over his face. The promise he had made in the hospital was still fresh enough to taste. We're going to find a way to remove that seal. I'll figure it out, however long it takes. He had meant it. He had believed it. And now there was a grave where the person he had promised it to should have been, and the promise had nowhere left to go.
Tenten stood between them. She was not loud like the other two. Her tears came quietly, sliding down her face while she stared at the headstone with her arms wrapped around herself. She was the one who had watched it all happen. The prelims. The hospital. Neji being led away in restraints while she stood frozen with her hand over her mouth. And now this. Of the three genin Guy had trained, two were left standing at this grave.
Hiashi had not left.
He stood apart from them, the folded letter back in his hands, watching the three of them grieve in a way his own clan had not, would not. After a moment, he crossed the distance and stopped a respectful step away.
"You are Team Guy," he said. "Neji's teammates."
Guy wiped his face with the back of his hand and turned. "We are. I am Might Guy. This is Lee. This is Tenten."
"I know who you are." Hiashi's white eyes moved across the three of them. "My nephew did not speak of many people. He was not a boy who let others close. But the names I heard, in the rare moments he spoke at all, were yours." He paused. "You were his friends. I think you may have been the only friends he had."
Lee lowered his hands from his face. His eyes were red and swollen.
"He was our friend too," Lee said. His voice cracked on it. "He was our teammate. We were going to,"
He could not finish. He looked at the grave.
Hiashi's jaw twitched.
"I am ashamed to stand here," he said. The words came slowly, as if each one had to be pulled out against resistance. "I am the head of this clan. Neji was my brother's son. The last piece of my brother left in this world. And I failed him at every turn that mattered."
Tenten looked up.
"The seal on his forehead. The cage he lived in. The bitterness he carried." Hiashi's hands closed around the letter. "There was a truth I should have told him years ago. A truth about his father, about why his father died, that would have changed how Neji saw everything. I told myself I was waiting until he was old enough to understand. I told myself there was time." His voice dropped. "There was not time. I waited too long, and now there is a grave, and the words I should have said to a living boy are words I can only say to a stone."
He looked at the headstone.
"I blame myself for this. I will blame myself for the rest of my life."
The silence stretched.
It was Guy who broke it.
Guy, whose face was still wet, whose grief was as raw as anyone's at that grave, stepped forward. He put a hand on Hiashi's shoulder, and the gesture was so unexpected from a man to a clan head that Hiashi did not pull away from it.
"Lord Hiashi." Guy's voice was thick but steady. "I did not know Neji as long as you did. But I knew him every day for the last year, and I will tell you something about my student."
Hiashi waited.
"Neji carried a great deal of anger. You are right about that. But underneath the anger was a boy who wanted, more than anything, to be seen as more than the cage he was born into." Guy's hand tightened on Hiashi's shoulder. "If he could hear you now. If he knew that the head of his clan stood at his grave and blamed himself, and grieved him, and regretted not telling him that his father chose his own fate, that neither you nor the main family took Hizashi from him,"
Hiashi's breath caught.
"He would forgive you." Guy said it with the absolute conviction he brought to everything he believed. "I knew him. I know he would. The anger was never what he wanted to be. It was only what he had. Give him the truth, even now, even here, and the boy who heard it would forgive you. I am certain of it."
Hiashi did not respond.
He could not.
His mouth opened and nothing came out, and his white eyes, which had held their composure through the entire service, finally broke. He turned away from Team Guy, toward the grave, and he lowered himself to his knees in the dirt in his formal robes.
He bowed.
He bent forward until his forehead touched the ground in front of the headstone, the deepest bow a man could give, a bow that the head of the Hyuga clan should never give to a living branch member, given now to a dead one.
"Forgive me, Neji," he said into the earth. "Forgive me, Hizashi. I let your son down. I let both of you down."
He stayed there for a long moment, forehead to the ground, in front of his nephew's grave.
Then he rose. He brushed the dirt from his robes with hands that were no longer steady. He folded the letter and placed it inside his robe, against his chest.
"Thank you," he said to Guy, without quite looking at him. "For knowing him. For that."
He turned and walked back toward the village, his steps slow, an old grief and a new one walking with him, and he did not look back at the grave again.
Team Guy stood alone with their teammate.
The grey sky finally let go, and it began, softly, to rain.
Beneath Konoha, in the dark, Neji Hyuga sat against the wall of a stone room and watched his own funeral.
His Byakugan was active. The veins stood out along his temples and the room opened up to him in every direction, the corridors, the cells, the operatives moving through the base on their own silent errands. He did not stop there. He pushed the range outward, past fifty meters, reaching up through the earth toward the surface where he knew they were standing.
Stone gave way to him. Earth. Roots and pipe and the foundations of buildings older than he was. And then the cemetery came into view.
He found them.
He saw Guy at the foot of the grave, fists clenched, face wet, the loudest man Neji had ever known reduced to silence. He saw Lee shaking with the force of it, hands over his face. He saw Tenten between them, quiet, arms wrapped around herself. He saw Hiashi read the letter. He saw the head of his clan kneel in the dirt in formal robes and press his forehead to the ground in front of a stone, the bow Neji had wanted his entire childhood and would now only ever receive as a corpse.
He watched all of it.
He did not look away once, because this was the last time he would ever see their faces and he was not going to spend it with his eyes closed.
When it became too much, he let the range collapse. The cemetery vanished. The stone closed back in around him.
The torch on the far wall flickered.
Neji pulled his knees up and rested his arms across them and stared at the wall where the light could not reach.
"I'm sorry," he said, to no one, in a room where no one would answer.
The rain fell on the surface, far above him, where he could not feel it. He had seen them, but he had not been able to stand beside them, or feel the rain on his face, or step out into the grey light that was the closest thing to the sun on a day like this.
He still could not see the sun.
But he had seen them. And one day, however long it took, he would stand in front of them again, in the light, with his own face.
Not for a while.
But he would.