Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.

Holding Infinity

This is how it begins.

He watches Tenten retrieve the weapons she's used over the course of a training session, one normal day in late summer and suddenly there is a knot of tension in his chest.

It is a day exactly like every other. There is nothing to determine it special or distinct from any other day, any different than any pearl in a long long string of pearls that were their days together.

Nothing.

But today something shifts and changes.

Something about the way the setting sun hits her hair casts it in shades of gold. Something about the way she turns to him while pulling a kunai out of a target — a bull's eye, how could it be anything less — settles the tension deeper.

"Neji." She says, lips curled up in happy laughter. "You've got leaves in your hair." She raises a casual hand, brushes them away, and he stiffens.

It is barely noticeable, such a little thing, but she notes it; he's certain she does.

He pulls the last of the leaves from his hair himself. "You've improved." He says, by way of conversation because he's at a loss as to how to recapture the moment. "Open handed combat has always been harder for you." Than me. The last two words do not go unacknowledged between them.

There are some things to be said for a conversation without words.

"So have you." She nods. "You can control the size of your kaiten much more accurately now." She's about to say more, but Gai-sensei and Lee burst into the clearing.

"100!" They shout together.

"Yosh!" Lee's energy is always impressive. "Tomorrow I shall run fifty extra laps."

He shares a glance with Tenten as the rest of their team dissolves into manly tears and extra promises to continue to work hard. The set of her mouth says she's annoyed, but her eyes are happy and fond

It is a habitual scene, almost as normal as the many dents and cuts in the targets on the other side of the training field. Perhaps when this all began, he found it annoying, but now?

Now he's fond of the sight as well, even if he would have to die before he said anything about it.

"I see you two have fanned the flames of your youth impressively today." Gai-sensei looks about the training field.

Half an hour of cleanup has not made Training Ground Five any less of a disaster zone.

"There have been improvements." Neji allows.

Gai-sensei nods enthusiastically. "It is good to know that you have embraced your youthful vibrancy, Neji!"

Something about his facial expression must have been funny, because Tenten giggles and starts dragging him away. "We're going to dinner, Gai-sensei. See you tomorrow!"

The settled tension in his chest becomes a dull ache.

Has her hand always been so warm?

That night after dinner he walks her home just like he's done for the past year and a half and bids her goodbye at the door before heading home himself.

The ache is gone and he doesn't think much more of it.

A hard day of training, he thinks. Nothing to worry about. He forgets about it soon after.

This is how it begins.

He finds himself standing over the sink a month and a half later, coughing uncontrollably into his hands. He might have caught the flu sometime during their last mission in the Land of Water.

It has been an unbearably chilly fall. Almost unseasonal really, Konoha is a temperate place, and most winters, it doesn't even snow.

He might have caught the flu, but he doesn't think the flu has much to do with the pale spotted pink petals that he's fishing out of his sink, or the small drops of blood peppering their surface.

He hasn't eaten any flowers that he's aware of, much less ones that he'd be regurgitating so violently.

Still, the coughing fit subsides, and there are only three petals in his sink and a miniscule amount of blood that he has detected only with the byakugan, so there's nothing to worry about.

Nothing to worry about.

He throws the petals in the trash.

Hinata-hime's waiting for him in the garden. He'd promised to oversee her training today.

This is how it begins.

"Umm...Neji-niisan?" Hinata pushes her fingers together in that habitual nervous tic of hers that he's tried to correct time and time again — and she's getting better, truly, it just comes back when she's very, very nervous — without much success. "There's something growing in your chest."

He drops his jyuken stance. "What?" Something growing—

The flowers.

There'd been petals in his sink this morning.

"I-I can't see it very clearly." Hinata shifts uneasily on the balls of her feet. Her fidgeting has gotten even worse. "But it looks like flowers in your lungs."

"Don't be silly, Hinata-hime." Neji ignores the rapid tightening in his chest — the same one that's been hurting on and off for about a month now — He really needs to stop, stop thinking about it. It's nothing to worry about. "How can anyone grow flowers in their chest?"

Hinata looks like she wants to say something else, but he takes a deep breath, just to prove to her that he can — it hurts; it hurts like that one time when he was seven and nearly drowned in the pond in the back garden — and he can still breath just fine.

Hinata looks down at her feet and then looks back at him. "Alright then, Neji-niisan."

Her admission doesn't taste sweet at all.

That he ends the day coughing over his sink again doesn't mean anything either.

He fishes four petals out of his sink and throws them in the trash.

Nothing to worry about. The mark on his forehead burns.

This is how it begins.

He's running laps with Lee during the morning a week later when suddenly the ache in his chest gets worse, and he's coughing by the side of the road.

Thankfully, there's neither flowers, nor blood.

Just the concerned eyes of his most youthful teammate when he straightens up again.

"Are you alright?" Lee asks, his heavy black brows drawn together. "This is most unlike you, Neji."

"It's most unlike you to be so subdued." Neji snarks back. It is unusual, unusual for Lee to be serious and concerned instead of effusive and concerned. The subdued nature doesn't suit him.

"You don't normally start coughing not ten laps into our run either." Lee crosses his arms and frowns. "What's the matter?"

"I caught a bout of the flu when we were in the Land of Water." The lie slips off his tongue as easily as breathing. Which is to say, his ability to lie has gotten worse recently. "I'm not a hundred percent yet."

It's likely not what's happening to him, but he doesn't know how else to explain it — doesn't want to explain it, so he won't.

"Ah," Lee takes a deep breath. "You should have said so then, my eternal rival!" He bellows. "We ought to get you checked up at the hospital!"

"It's not serious." Neji looks away. "Don't get so worked up, Lee."

They continue running, Lee taking a slower pace than usual.

His coughing fits don't come back until he is alone that evening.

This is how it begins.

He and Tenten are out to dinner in one of Konoha's relatively more well known hot pot destinations, and he is doing a very good job of ignoring the ache in his chest that's been building all day. Training hadn't been entirely productive. He'd been trying harder not to cough up more petals than paying attention to actually improving.

Outside, it is still unseasonably cold, with a light dusting of snow on the ground.

She has his jacket around her shoulders as they try to warm up a little from the cutting wind outside, rubbing her hands together close to the pot in the center of their booth as he diligently adds mushrooms and tofu. "Neji, was there something specific you wanted something for New Years?"

He looks up at her, and for a moment, can only stare, dumbstruck, at the way the winter wind has scrubbed her cheeks raw and red. She's not supposed to look pretty right now, half frozen as she is, but it's on the tip of his tongue. Tenten, you look nice today.

"Not really." He says and tips the pork into the hot pot as well. He should have done that first, since it'll take longer to cook than the tofu, but he wants to stay here, just here in this moment until this moment becomes the rest of his life, and if improper hot pot use will do that, he'll take it. "Was there something you wanted?"

"Hmmm." She fiddles with an old kunai as her hands warm up, staring off into the distance. "If it's going to be so cold for a while yet, a hat would be nice."

"You don't already have one?" She came to team training that morning without a heavy jacket, a hat or gloves, but he had assumed she'd just forgotten it at home.

She laughs, the sound like warm honey. "The last time I wore my old winter hat was eight years ago. I think it's a little tight now."

He resists the urge to cough and sets his chopsticks down on the table. "Excuse me for a moment."

He notes the worry in her eyes before he goes.

It's more than single petals littering the sink of the men's room in the Golden Dragon. This time, there's no denying the blood. It looks like he cut himself on a kunai and then let the wound drip onto the white porcelain.

There are full flowers clogging up the drain, bell shaped and pink with a hint of dark green stem.

"Neji, are you okay?" She calls through the door.

He braces himself against the sink and doesn't cough again. "I'm fine." He doesn't sound fine.

His throat is on fire, and apparently, he's growing flowers in his lungs.

He gathers up the two pink things in the sink and rinses all the blood away, even if he can't quite wash the iron tang out of his mouth.

He's not quite morbid enough to give them to Tenten and pretend that he left to find her a gift. Instead, he tucks them in his leg pouch. Maybe Hinata will know what they are.

She'd looked like she wanted to say something more the last time they'd discussed this nearly two months ago.

"Really Neji, you sounded like you were coughing up a lung or something in there." Tenten drags him back to their booth, hissing quietly at him all the while. "You need to get that checked out by a medic. Go see Sakura after dinner. You don't sound like you're fine."

He's worried her then, because normally Tenten doesn't outright demand things anyone but herself. Tenten only expects herself to be perfect.

He doesn't want to say no to her though, even if going to a medic and saying something along the lines of "ah yes, I got this mysterious tightness in my chest a few months back and it appears that I've been growing flowers which I now cough up at inopportune times like a dinner out with my teammate" is probably a one way ticket to a psych eval and a padded cell.

"Alright." He says. "I'll go see a medic sometime this week."

The fire in his throat eases long enough for dinner.

It's happy enough, even though Tenten keeps casting worried glances at him. "Are you sure you feel fine, Neji?" She asks when they're done and about to head out.

"Yes." On some instinctual level, he's always known that Tenten cared about him, that if he pressed it, they could be more than friends, more than teammates, more than two people who trusted each other to watch their back.

But he doesn't press it.

He's not free with his affections, no. He doesn't have the freedom of a choice in the matter.

"You're certain you'll go see Sakura?" Tenten pauses to shrug off his winter jacket at the door of her childhood home. "Absolutely positive you'll get a diagnosis and antibiotics for that nasty cold of yours?"

"Yes."

Tenten's parents are immigrants from the Land of Iron, and her own background is closer to samurai than shinobi. She is their only child, the first in her family to break past an Academy graduation and sprint headlong into life as a chunin.

Perhaps once, he would have looked down upon her without ever seeing her dedication, her steel-forged will, her warmth. Perhaps.

But that is not now.

They stand there for another moment under the porch light until it gets too cold and she has to go in. No words are said, but she doesn't worry any longer.

She knows that he'll go, if only because he hates lying to her.

Tenten is free as she is, and he has never been one to chain swallows down to the earth.

This is how the end begins.

He goes to visit Hinata's room, even if it is rather late. "Hinata-hime?" She's sitting at the table, poring over a scroll.

"Oh!" She hurries to bring out a second folding chair. "Neji-niisan, I didn't know you were coming tonight. All the tea I have has gone cold."

He's startled her. "I didn't say I was coming." He softens just a little. His younger cousin tries too hard to please everyone, is far too kind to deserve this sort of anxiety. "Don't worry about it, Hinata-hime. I'm the one intruding."

Sometimes, he wonders if he'll ever be able to mend the bridges that he broke during the Chunin Exams all those years ago. He'd done is level best to kill her, and he would have succeeded had not three jounin held him back from it.

Hinata's forgive him for her near murder at his hands, but years and years of criticisms, cruel barbs and outright death threats are not so easy to erase even for someone as kind as Hinata.

Perhaps he is meant to build a new bridge instead of trying to mend the old ones.

"I'll go heat up some water." Hinata flies across the room for her electric kettle. "There are tea leaves in my cupboard." She pauses at the doorway before she leaves for water. "You look all frozen through."

It would comfort her to make tea, so he allows himself to smile. "Then tea would be heavenly, Hinata-hime."

She comes back with boiling water from the kitchens and fidgets with the right amount of tea leaves and what kind he'd like at a table a little ways away, but eventually, her hands settle, and her shoulders straighten. "Neji-niisan, why are you visiting?"

"I needed your help identifying some flowers." His cousin presses flowers like his aunt once did in her free time. Surely she'd know at least what he's been coughing up, if not why.

He opens his hip pouch and gives her both blossoms that ended up drenched with his blood in the sink of the Golden Dragon.

"Azaleas." Hinata looks over at him, worry in her lavender eyes. "They're not in season right now." She hands him his tea, wrists straight and steady. "They're a summer flower, Neji-niisan."

She doesn't ask him why he has them though. She'd been the one to note the something growing in his chest.

"What do they mean?" He had only come to see her because he wanted a name for the things falling out of his lips, but now, suddenly, a name is not enough.

"Take care of yourself for me." For a moment, he thinks she's trying to ask him something, but she continues, in that same quiet voice of hers. "Temperance." Hinata pauses for a long, long moment as her throat works and nothing comes out. "Fragile passion."

He has half an idea who these flowers refer to now. Tenten. But he still has no idea why.

"P-please go see a doctor, Neji-niisan." Hinata clasps her hands together so hard that her knuckles turn whiter than her pale skin. "The...the growing in your lungs has gotten worse."

He certainly feels worse these days.

"Don't worry about me, Hinata-hime." He takes his flowers and rises to go. "I already promised Tenten that I would go."

This is how the end progresses.

It's a slow, steady march to the hospital the next morning, like an inexorable pulling in the pit of his stomach. He'd promised. He has half an idea of what this means.

He just still doesn't know why.

"Here to see Haruno Sakura for my scheduled physical." He'd put off going to Konoha General for weeks now.

Technically, he's already missed the time slot for his physical because he didn't want to be here, but he had promised Tenten because not promising Tenten would make her sad and prone to doing rash things like bashing him over the head with a nunchuck and then dragging him to the hospital anyway.

If he's going anywhere, he would prefer to at least have the illusion of free will while getting there.

"You're late." Sakura's standing in the doorway of her office, arms crossed, and mouth in a thin, straight line.

Neji sets the two wilted azalea blossoms on her desk. "I coughed these up in the men's room of the Golden Dragon yesterday."

Sakura blinks. "You what?"

"Hinata-hime says that I have something growing in my chest." He might as well say it all and hope that Tenten doesn't have to come and visit him in the long term care ward of Konoha General's mental breakdown division. Knowing her, she'd try too successfully to break him out and then he'd spend the rest of his days hiding in her parents' basement or somewhere equally insane.

Sakura drops her clipboard. It skitters over the linoleum floor between them. She looks paler than usual.

He bends over and picks it up. "You should be more careful of your things, Sakura-san."

"You said you have something growing in your chest?" Sakura accepts her clipboard from his proffered hands with nerveless fingers. "How long have you known?"

Neji considers it. "Three months or so."

"Three—" Sakura's mouth snaps shut into a thin, hard line. "Get on the examination table, Hyuga. We're going to get to the bottom of this."

He takes a deep breath — as deep a breath as he is capable of taking at the moment — and gets on the table.

It doesn't take long for Sakura to stop probing his lungs with her chakra, turn away from him, and shriek several choice words at the opposite wall. She turns back to him with some strange cocktail of fear and sorrow in her eyes. "Who do you love, Neji-kun?"

He blinks. "I fail to see how that has anything to do with my medical status, Sakura-san." Not exactly true. He suspects the flowers he's been coughing up have something to do with—It's not important.

"You have Hanahaki Disease." Sakura's emotional cocktail has switched straight back to rage once more. "You have late-staged Hanahaki Disease."

He blinks again, although this doesn't help much. "I have a disease that makes me throw up flowers."

"Because of your unrequited love!" She throws up her hands. "Just make a confession or your only other options are a completely terrible operation or death."

Love.

Tenten.

He swallows, hard. "Why is the operation terrible?"

"You'll never be able to love again." Never—what does it mean to never love again? Does it mean that he will change? He'd rather not be as he was during the days where he vowed that only destiny mattered. "You'll forget that you've ever known them." Unacceptable.

He has not cultivated this friendship, has not been joyous with her successes and and depressed with her stumbles, has not lived the past six years of his life just to forget them. "No."

Sakura looks over her clipboard at him. "Why don't you want to confess? I don't think they'd reject you, if that's what you're afraid of."

"No." Neji smiles rather sardonically. Tenten, kind, wonderful, worried Tenten, tell him his feelings are silly? He might as well try to hold the moon in his hands. "But I would rather not confess."

He might be a caged bird, but Tenten deserves the vibrant life that she's now living, deserves only good things and far more than he could possibly offer her.

Things are changing within the Hyuga Clan, but that does not mean that life is good, only that it is better. There's a world of difference between better and good.

Thus, it is best if his connection to Tenten remains something like favorite teammate rather than a burgeoning romantic relationship. The Clan cannnot use something that just plain isn't there.

"Then I will warn you that if something doesn't change you'll be bedridden within three months, and likely dead within the next six." Sakura sets her clipboard aside and sits down on the floor. "Why, Neji? Why won't you confess if you aren't afraid of rejection?"

"I think my reasons are my own, Sakura-san." He rises and heads for the door. "Thank you for your time."

Since the available operation is...unacceptable, he's left with two options, of which neither one looks particularly appetizing.

Well, he's never been afraid of dying even if without this disease, his life has been comfortable for the past few years. At one point, he thought it was his destiny to die for something trivial. He just never thought it would be for something like unrequited love.

Take care of yourself for me, Tenten.

Temperance.

Fragile passion.

So that's why it's fragile. I won't be here to enjoy it.

Well, there's no reason that anything has to change right this moment. At least he's identified the raw ache in his chest now.

The end progresses something like this.

There are firecrackers going off in front of Tenten's house when he visits for New Year's Eve. He is obligated to spend New Year's Day inside the clan compound, observing the necessary rites, which means that he has to leave before midnight, but it's only early evening, so there's still time to give Tenten her present and stay awhile.

Yingyue-san welcomes him into the foyer as he slips off his snow covered shoes.

"Tenten!" Yingyue-san calls over her shoulder. "Neji-kun's here." Tenten's mother smiles pleasantly at him. "You're here just in time; the sesame dumplings are ready."

"Neji!" Tenten crashes through the hallway in her old cloth slippers, hair loose and wet down her back in a shower of cascading water droplets. "It's so good that you made it again this year." She looks radiantly happy as she does every New Year's that he's ever seen her.

It is a tradition from the Land of Iron to wear red for the New Year, and practically every surface is covered with that same shade of bright red.

He holds up her wrapped present. "I promised I would come."

He's been here for enough New Year's celebrations to know that the wrapping ought to be red tissue paper. "Is Lee or Gai-sensei here yet?"

Tenten's face falls. "They've been called away for a last minute mission. Tsunade-sama's afraid that there are people raiding Orochimaru's old bases in the Land of Rice."

He had been distracted enough in the recent days not to notice. "I see."

Tenten gestures for him to follow her to the living room. "How was your trip to the hospital? We never did have time to talk about it."

"It's fine." Not a lie, just an omission of the truth. "The cough will go away within the next half year." Presumably because he'd be buried by summer, but New Year's Eve is not the time to speak of such auspicious things.

"Half a year?" She side-eyes him. "Neji, don't be so dramatic about it. Covering your bases gets you nowhere." She shakes a finger in his direction. "It better be gone by this time next week, you hear?"

He laughs and nods.

"Neji! Tenten! The dumplings are ready!" Liushan-san pokes his head in around the door. "And to celebrate how well the forge is doing this year, I bought specially imported erguotou from back home." He smiles while holding up a bottle of something that could only be the Land of Iron's most famous white wine export.

Tenten slides off the couch. "Tou-san! You shouldn't have!" There in that moment, with her hair in disarray and her laughing dark eyes, he is sure that he's never seen anyone as positively radiant.

Which is of course, why there is suddenly a stabbing pain in his chest and three flowers trying to make their way up his throat.

"Neji?" Tenten's turned back to him now. "Neji?"

His vision's fading. "Neji!"

This is how it ends.

He wakes up in the hospital to Tenten pacing the length of his bed with the energy of a caged tiger. Her hair's still loose, and it flies out behind her rather impressively. Sometimes, he forgets that Tenten's hair is about as long as his own since she wears it up so often.

"Sakura told me everything." She says before he can even open his mouth. "And then I went and bullied your sweet cousin into telling me everything else Sakura couldn't possibly have known about."

"Tenten—"

"How could you do something like this, Neji?" She throws her hands into the air, something like a sob in her voice, but that's impossible, because Tenten never cries. "How could you just sit around choosing death for months at a time without ever even talking to me?"

"Tenten you deserve more—"

"I sure as hell deserve more than an idiot who would kill himself before telling me that he is literally dying of unrequited love!" She buries her face in his chest. "But I don't want it."

"I didn't want to worry you." He settles for that instead. I didn't want to chain you down. I didn't want to make your choices for you.

When she raises her head again the front of his hospital gown is wet.

He's made her cry. "Not telling me made it worse, Neji." She says watching him with her red-rimmed eyes. Tenten's an ugly crier, which is one of the reasons why she never cries. Her cheeks are red and splotchy, and she looks like she rubbed her nose too many times. Neji doesn't care. "I don't get to chose you if you don't tell me that you're a choice."

And he'd always known that it'd end this way if she ever found out about it. "The Clan." He says sighs with more lung capacity than he's had in months. "Will not be pleased if I want to become just Neji." Tenten doesn't have a family name.

Liushan-san once had a title that passed for a last name before he had moved his family to Konoha, but that had been left behind in the Land of Iron.

Leaving the Hyuga Clan without being dead is not a done thing.

Tenten stifles a laugh. "Then we'll hide you in the basement until they stop trying to find you." She twists her hands together in her lap. "It's me, isn't it?" She doesn't sound certain, which is halfway silly, because she's one, already volunteered to hide him in her basement, and two, who would he love half as dearly as Tenten?

"Of course, it is." As if it could ever be anyone else.

"You were coughing up my favorite flower." She says after a long pause. "Azaleas meant homesickness, from before, you know, but whenever I saw them, I'd think of home. So they were my favorite."

"I see." So they had meaning for her too. "Hinata-hime said that they meant take care of yourself for me." And fragile passion, but this love isn't fragile. Not in the same way that other first loves are fragile.

He'd hurt her by hiding the reason for his sudden descent into illness, but still, here she sits by his bedside anyway.

She sighs. "Will you let me love you?"

The corners of his mouth turn down. "Will you hide me in your basement?"

"Of course." She takes his hand. "Don't be an idiot again, Neji."

Tenten rarely demands anything from him that she wouldn't be able to do herself.

"I won't."

It begins like this: a bitter bent boy meets a girl with a fire in her eyes and steel in her spine, and somehow they grow up to be better people for it.

A.N. The first contribution I'm making to NejiTen Month 2018! (Also the first time I've written for this pairing and Hanahaki Disease in General.)

You guys will have to tell me if you like it. Regularly scheduled fanfiction will commence updating after I fight through all the NejiTen feels.

~Tavina.