The hospital room was quiet. The heart monitor. The distant footsteps of a nurse making rounds. The ventilation was blowing.
Lee lay in the bed wrapped up like a mummy. His eyes were closed. The smile was present.
The door opened.
Lee did not open his eyes immediately. He assumed it was a nurse. The footsteps that crossed the room were not a nurse's footsteps. He opened his eyes.
Neji stood at the foot of his bed. His hands were behind his back. He looked at Lee with a strange expression on his face.
"Neji-kun." Lee blinked. "What brings you-"
"You proved me wrong."
Lee stopped.
Neji did not look away. His pale eyes held Lee's.
"I was wrong." Each word placed down with care. "I called you a failure. A loser. Utter trash." A pause. "A hopeless fool. A smiling dolt. A poor shameful excuse of a shinobi." He held Lee's eyes. "I was wrong about all of it."
Lee said nothing.
This was the thing Lee had wanted since he was five years old. The thing he had gotten back up for over three thousand times. Neji Hyuga, the genius who had spent their entire shared life deciding Lee was beneath acknowledgment, standing at the foot of his hospital bed and saying the words out loud.
Lee should have been smiling.
He was not smiling.
Something was wrong about this scenario. Was he dreaming? Was he under a genjutsu? With his training, he'd definitely know if it was either of those, right? Because Neji doesn't admit he's wrong. At best, he would quietly acknowledge it by never bringing up the subject again if he was wrong. But flat-out admission? No. No. That wasn't Neji.
Neji moved from the foot of the bed to the side of it. He looked down at Lee. And slowly, something that was not ever supposed to be on his face appeared. A smile.
Every instinct Lee had ever developed across fourteen years of fighting and surviving and learning to read danger before it arrived went off simultaneously.
DANGER. DANGER. NOT SAFE.
Neji never smiled. And he certainly had never smiled at Lee. Not once. Not in any direction that could be called toward him. If Neji would smile at anyone, it would never be Lee! Not unless…
"You have surpassed me." Neji's voice was quiet. "Neji Hyuga." He looked at Lee with that wrong smile. "Be proud, Rock Lee."
He raised his hand.
"You can now die in peace."
The index and middle finger drove toward Lee's heart without hesitation.
Lee got his forearm up, barely.
The impact hit the bandaging and hit the bone underneath it and the bone was not healed and the sound that came out of Lee's mouth was a genuine scream. The Gentle Fist didn't need to land cleanly to do damage, the chakra that Neji had pushed into the strike found the pathway system along Lee's forearm and disrupted what was already fragile.
Neji swatted the arm aside.
The arm had no resistance to give. It went where it was pushed, and Neji's follow-up was already coming, aimed past the cleared obstacle at the same target.
Lee kicked him despite horrific pain it would cause him.
A desperate, full-commitment kick from a body that had decided it was not done yet even though the body had very little left to make that decision with. His leg drove into Neji's midsection and sent him backward through the hospital room door.
The door took the impact and kept going.
Neji hit the corridor wall across from it and left a dent.
Lee was already hobbling. He went rolling through the window, glass shattering into the courtyard.
The courtyard below the medical wing was paved stone with a small garden at its center, the kind of low-maintenance arrangement that existed to give patients somewhere to look from their windows that wasn't another wall. Lee landed badly. His legs held him but the landing cost something in both of them, and he straightened slowly with his arms at his sides because lifting them was not currently an option.
He heard Neji land behind him.
"You have perhaps ten percent of your usual strength." Neji's voice was a bit different than usual. Although it was typically cold, there was amusement hidden underneath. He was enjoying this. His Byakugan was active. The smile was still there, which was worse than the voice. "It doesn't matter."
Lee turned to face him.
The punch caught him across the jaw before he finished turning.
It snapped his head sideways and he staggered left, his feet working to find the ground, and Neji was already inside his guard. The uppercut came up under his chin and his vision went white at the edges. He traveled left from the force of it and Neji's palm hit his abdomen while he was still traveling, the gentle fist chakra from it arriving in his stomach like a stone dropped into still water, and the tree at the courtyard's edge stopped his flight.
Lee hit it back-first and slid down it.
He coughed. The amount of blood that came with the cough could almost be considered vomit.
He's really going to kill me.
The thought was not panicked. It arrived as a simple fact. Lee sat against the tree in the courtyard and looked at Neji standing ten meters away with that smile still on his face and assessed the situation honestly.
He had nothing. His arms were not arms in any functional sense. His legs had carried him here and might carry him a few more meters before they stopped cooperating. His chakra network was too damaged from the gates to access anything. He could not use his Body Supremacy jutsu to rapidly heal himself. It didn't work like that. He could not use his precise chakra control and utilize enhanced strength. He could not wrap Neji up with his bandages and stop him.
He was a shinobi who only had taijutsu, and the taijutsu was temporarily gone. He didn't even have access to his ninja pouch.
I might actually die here.
Neji walked toward him. "Where is it." Not a question.
Lee looked at him.
"That smile." Neji stopped a few meters away. "You used to face me in that clearing behind the academy with it. Bleeding. Broken. Both arms sealed. Knowing I was going to kill you." His voice had something in it now that the flat tone tried to cover but didn't entirely. "You looked at death and kept smiling. That fool's smile." He looked at Lee against the tree without the blood. "Where did it go. Is it because you finally accomplished something? Because you proved me wrong? Because you can be more than a subpar shinobi?" Something moved through his expression. "Because fate can be changed?"
Lee got his feet under him.
It took longer than it should have. His legs shook terribly as pain wracked throughout his body. He got up anyway and faced Neji and looked him in the eye.
"You're afraid of me, aren't you, Neji-kun?"
"What." The flat voice cracked slightly on the single syllable. Neji's eyes narrowed. "Me. Afraid of you." He looked at Lee, at the blood on his lip, at the arms that weren't lifting, at the legs that were shaking with the effort of holding him upright. "Look at yourself."
"That's why you want to kill me." Lee's voice was steady in the specific way that voices are steady when there is nothing left to save them for. "You're afraid of what I can do. Of what I said I want to become." He held Neji's eyes. "You're terrified that I can actually do it."
"Keep rambling on your way to hell." Neji moved.
From the courtyard wall, a flying kick came in hard and fast from the left.
"Dynamic Entry!"
Neji read it. He was always going to read it. He stepped inside the arc and redirected it, and Tenten landed past him in a roll that brought her up between Lee and Neji with her hands out and a nervous smile on her face.
"Funny running into you here, Neji." Her voice cracked as her body subtly shook. "Visiting hours, right?"
The killing intent coming off Neji's body was not something Tenten had ever felt from him before. She had seen Neji and Lee fight multiple times, some being quite dangerous and required Guy-sensei to step in and break up. But this… Guy-sensei wasn't here! She doubted the medical staff could stop him either. Which left Tenten to be the lucky one…
Her smile stayed on her face through visible effort.
"Get out of my way," Neji said.
"Something tells me you're about to do something worse than usual to Lee." Her hand was already at a scroll on her waist. "Something a little worse than what happens during morning training."
"Move. Or I'll move you."
He came forward. Tenten's hand came up with the nunchaku from the scroll, and Neji's step broke for the first time since the fight started, just barely, just a half-beat of disruption at the sight of that specific weapon in her hands, and his face twisted as he came in anyway.
His hand drove toward her collarbone.
She flicked the nunchaku up. The rod knocked his hand skyward and his hand stung from the impact, his eye twitching at it, and Tenten's left fist came straight through the opening she'd made and hit him across the nose.
Blood ran from Neji's nostril.
He looked at her. Something dangerous crossed his face.
She came at him again. She was good. She had been getting better for a year and a half of daily training against two people who could easily push her to her limit, and she was fast and she was committed and she knew his style better than almost anyone outside of Team Guy. She hit him twice more before the Gentle Fist found an opening and a palm to her shoulder sealed three tenketsu and sent her skidding across the courtyard stone.
She hit the wall and crumpled.
She pushed herself up on one arm, her shoulder hanging wrong, and looked at Lee with an expression that said she had bought what she could buy and it was not enough.
Neji was over Lee in three steps.
A hand closed around his wrist.
Neji pulled against it with everything he had. The hand did not move.
Guy stood behind him with his fingers wrapped around Neji's wrist and his face carrying an expression that Lee had never seen on it before.
He didn't say anything.
He didn't have to.
Neji knew.
He threw his free hand forward in a palm strike at Lee. Guy deflected it with his forearm and released the wrist in the same motion, throwing Neji sideways by his own momentum. Neji turned with it and came back with a kick that Guy swayed away from, knocking the leg up with his forearm, and countered with a straight punch.
Neji got both arms in a block.
The block held. It moved him six meters across the courtyard.
He came back.
He always came back. Lee had been coming back for years and Neji had spent years watching him do it and he understood the mechanism in his bones even if he had never applied it to himself until this moment. He was not going to stop. He was not going to stop until something stopped him, because the alternative was accepting what accepting it meant.
Guy took him apart.
With the quiet, absolute strength of someone who knew every technique Neji had and had substantial experience and power over him. Each palm strike redirected. Each Gentle Fist sequence interrupted at the second step. Neji utilized ninjutsu. Guy had the response to the new approach already assembled. Neji switched again. Again.
Again.
He was not landing anything.
He was landing nothing.
His breath was ragged. His legs had started to feel the cumulative damage of this fight and the months of training that had preceded it. His hands were shaking from the exhaustion of a body that has given everything it has and found that everything it has is not enough.
He came at Guy again.
Guy's hand caught him by the collar.
Neji struck at him with both palms and Guy absorbed the strikes against his forearms with the expression of a man in a light rain and released the collar and hit him once.
The punch was something that only a student of Team Guy could handle without requiring intensive medical intervention. Neji left the ground and crossed the courtyard and hit the far wall and came off it and hit the stone.
He did not immediately get up.
He lay on the courtyard stone and the shaking in his legs moved upward through his body and his breath came in a way he could not entirely control. The Byakugan was still active. He could still see clearly. He could see Lee against the tree. He could see Tenten against the wall. He could see Guy standing in the center of the courtyard looking at him.
He could see all of it with the crystalline clarity of the dojutsu that the heavens had given him, the gift that was supposed to mean something, the proof that he was above the people he had spent his life looking down from.
That loser can't be stronger than me.
He tried to rise.
His arms did not cooperate fully. He got to one knee.
If so, what has been the point of it?
He got to both knees. His hands pressed against the stone. Blood from his nose hit the courtyard in a slow irregular pattern.
All of it. Every morning before dawn in the Hyuga compound, every drill until his hands bled, every spar pushed past the point of pain, every hour spent becoming more than the branch house mark on his forehead said he was allowed to be. Everything he had given to the goal of standing above the world that had decided he was born to serve it.
What was the point of any of it?
He put one foot under him.
If fate isn't real.
The foot held. He straightened one centimeter at a time, and the courtyard tilted around him, and his vision had something in it he had not experienced since he was young and the world still had the capacity to surprise him with its cruelty.
If fate isn't real, if you can change what you were born to be, if a nobody can become something the history books remember…
He was crying.
He was not aware of when it had started.
Then what am I…
What was Neji Hyuga, who had submitted to every chain placed on him, who had decided the chains were not chains but simply the shape of the world. What was he, if the shape of the world was a lie that a talentless orphan in a green jumpsuit had simply refused to believe?
"NEJI!!!"
Guy's voice hit the courtyard like a physical thing.
Neji looked up.
Guy was standing over him. Not looming. Standing. The expression on his face was not anger. It had moved past anger into something that cost more than anger to produce.
"ONLY YOU CAN DETERMINE YOUR FUTURE," He shouted with all of his love and being. "YOU FOOLISH NUMBSKULL!!!"
His fist of love connected.
The courtyard rotated. The stone came up. The last thing Neji's Byakugan showed him before consciousness left was Lee, still against the tree, still upright, still looking at him across the courtyard with dark eyes that held something Neji had never wanted to see in them and was seeing anyway.
Not triumph or satisfaction, nor was it the smug acknowledgment of someone who had been proven right. Not even a smile. Something that looked, from this distance, through this light, in this moment that was the last one available to him before everything went dark, disgustingly like concern.
If that trash, Neji thought, from the bottom of a long well that was getting deeper, could break free of a fate that everyone agreed was absolute…
The stone was cold against his cheek.
Then maybe…
The courtyard was quiet.
Maybe…
I can too…