Blah, nothing to say here. I guess I was feeling fluffy…

6. Flowers for a Girl

Rating/Genre: PG/General

Pairings: Kiba/Hinata, Shino/Hinata (if you want there to be)

Summary: Hinata's in the hospital and the boys are feeling guilty.

"Let's go again." Kiba is breathing in deep, gasping motions. Each inhale greets him with the thick scent of sweat and exhaustion and guilt.

Shino stands opposite him, his coat and jacket discarded in a rank pile behind him.

"Again," he nods and pulls weary limbs into position. And when he lunges now- for the hundredth time Kiba is seeing the missing-nin lunging at Hinata's broken, broken body and his muscles are screaming as he moves too slow.

Too slow.

A few seconds later Shino is pinning him to the ground and holding a kunai to his neck.

"You're getting tired Kiba. We're tied 54-54." Sweat drips from his face to Kiba's neck as he gets up.

Kiba grimaces, wipes his hand against the back of his neck, then sighs and figures he's never been highly concerned about hygiene anyway.

He'd take winning over being clean any day.

"Again," Kiba says shortly as he stands, ignoring his body's protest. He eyes Shino's rising and falling chest, watching for the twitch of muscles to betray his next move; a trick Hinata had shown him. Shino was doing the same.

But Hinata had never shown them how to stop the bleeding from a too-deep wound three inches from someone's heart or how to keep that someone with that wound alive for the three hours it took to find someone who could do shit about it.

They had been lucky, god damn lucky that Sakura had been in the scouting party they had run into. An hour more and Hinata would be lying in the dirt instead of a hospital bed. An hour more and Kiba would never have been able to live with himself. As it is, he's just barely able to.

He does in the hope that he will never let this happen again.

Because maybe he wouldn't have admitted it to himself before, and maybe he would've kept being loud and unruly and obnoxious around her to stop himself from saying what he wanted to say, but one more hour and she would have never smiled again.

So Kiba's going to move whether it's the perfect time or not, and he's going to become strong enough so this is never going to happen again.

"How 'bout…this time the loser pays for flowers-," he breaks off as Shino's fist comes flying toward his face. He ducks and sweeps his leg out, hoping to knock Shino off his feet. The other boy leaps back, watching Kiba carefully.

"And the winner gets to give them to her," he finishes.

Shino smiles, "Deal."