ᴛᴇɴᴛᴇɴ

Ah, they're at this point in the evening.

Silence is a comfortable thing between them, soft and gentle instead of heavy or uncomfortable. There's a book held open in one of her hands and the other is idly running through his hair, slipping through and brushing long strands back from his face and he's sprawled across her couch gazing off at things she can't see, cheek warm where it's pressed to her bare thighs.

His breath is quiet and almost ticklish against her skin and she's had to re-read the same paragraph a few times because the relaxing weight of him over her is making it difficult for anything else to occupy her thoughts.

There's never much need to fill the silence that settles so easily around them but clearly his own thoughts have turned over themselves enough times that he feels the need to anyway so she clears her throat, thick from disuse, and pulls her hand away from him just long enough to slip in a bookmark so she can keep her place, setting her reading aside and attempting to refocus her slipping attention.

She feels kind of sleepy, like surfacing from warm bath water, syrupy and lazy limbed.

"That's not entirely true."

Argument for arguments sake, pedantic. Knowledge is simply another tool she can arm herself with and bird facts may not be her favored topic but if she's going to spend lazy evenings with Neji they're a necessary one.

She wonders what he's really thinking about to offer such a seemingly but not really random statement. Himself? Them?

"They are monogamous, but if one dies they can find another mate." A low hum, and then: "Sometimes they cheat, too."

It's a nice thought, that maybe they've found each other and this is it, quiet evenings and companionable musing and stability in a life that offers so little. Maybe they are like pigeons, building a nest to share, content in the knowledge of burdens equally shouldered.

She wants to tell him she would never find another mate, reassure, but that's too much- that's the unspoken tucked underneath the spoken.

Her fingertips return to trace along the curve of his ear instead, brush against the delicate skin behind. Comforting, vulnerability only she knows the shape of.

Neji didn't often give in to insecurity, allow it to bleed into his everyday. He stood tall, confident in his strength and the position it afforded him among his peers. Untouchable, unflappable, he defiantly held his chin high, silently daring objection.

Unfortunately for him he was still human and subject to the whims of emotion like the rest of them and she supposed even if he was only attempting to tease her after the joking questions she would sometimes pester him with (what if i was a worm what if i was a wavelength of celestial intent what if i had a sharingan grafted onto my ass) maybe there was still something there, underneath the underneath, and, well.

It never really took much, for her to want to reassure him, to remind him that he would always, always have her. Her teammate, her partner.

In private, anyway. Here they could both be a little weak, vulnerable, her hands as gentle as her smile as she cups each side of his face, ensuring eye contact before attempting to answer.

"I don't think there's anything that would keep me from loving you, Neji. Cosmic horrors aside, I'd be pretty honored if you couldn't help but haunt me, you know?"

She is, perhaps, not well, but the sentiment stands regardless. She has loved the best and the worst of him and it's rather unfathomable to imagine being anywhere but by his side.