Disclaimer: Taking a break from The Princess and the Puppet, which I highly recommend you all read, I'm posting a little one-shot. I got a review to throw in some NejiTen, and this is my response. Thanks to Maya-chan2007.
TenTen lives alone.
Lives alone in the not so nice side of Konoha in an apartment that she could afford ten times over from all the missions she takes as a Jounin. But that's why she takes them, so she doesn't have to spend any time at a house that isn't a home, with no one inside. If she liked her empty house, that is the definite sign that it's time to move.
But the kitchen is her secret space. It's Shikamaru's could watching spot, Naruto's Hokage Mountain, Gaara's seat on top of the roofs, watching the moon, all in one room. She can cook, and when she has just gotten back from a month long A-rank mission, with the blood of a little boy and his mother still splattered on the front of her vest, she trudges home to create a masterpiece with things that look plain alone, but make something beautiful together.
The symbolism isn't lost on her. Team Gai was the strangest of the strange, and she knows that without her ice block sparring partner, and tag team duo of spandex master and pupil, she wouldn't be here today. She'd be dead, or living as a civilian. Which might as well be considered dead, in her book.
She's cooked for her teammates before, on the one year anniversary of Team Gai, she woke up early and packed a picnic basket full of things she had quietly asked regular civilian that they would bring on a picnic, like chicken, cupcakes, and potato salad. Gai and Lee wolfed down everything like they hadn't just even a breakfast for ten, and TenTen nibbled on a piece of chicken, and chased it down with a cupcake.
Neji stared at everything, from his sensei and his protégée who were racing to see who could do three hundred pushups the fastest, to the checkered table cloth TenTen had borrowed from Ino. He sat in his meditation state for at least twenty minutes, until he spoke without opening his eyes to make sure she was still there. She was.
"Why did you do this?"
"It's our anniversary; a whole year of being together, and not having anyone get hurt or die. Some teams never make it past their first mission. Be glad for what you have Neji."
He opened his eyes, and stood up, looking down on her with a gleam in his eyes that she couldn't name.
"What do I have TenTen?"
She wasn't quite sure. But every year, she would make a basket, and they would go to the hill, and Lee and Gai would be sick the next day, from all the food and all the training. And Neji would meditate. Once, he ate some potato salad. Once.
"This is…very good TenTen. Very good."
She smiled,
(and he thought it looked like love)
"Thank you!"
And they talked about their missions, because they weren't always placed together anymore, and this was a day that they finally were together, so it seemed right. She finally worked up the courage that year to ask him about how the clan was progressing with Hinata leading and no elders. He gave her the tiniest smile.
"Change is coming, but it's still slow. Hinata-sama still needs my help as a member of the branch family. I want to help her however I can."
She punched him in the shoulder playfully,
(and he leaned into her touch, instead of away, but she ignored it)
"Just ask me if you ever need anything, ok?"
But when the picnics end, she has to go back to her apartment, carrying an empty basket, with a smile remaining from all the fun and laughing at Lee and Gai-sensei. And as she washes the dishes late at night, putting everything away in its place to delay going to her empty bed as much as possible, she is grateful for how special those picnics are.
So the irony that they end almost kills her.
While doing one of his formidable exercise routines, and just because he really was getting to old to continue this sort of life, Gai-sensei had fallen into the abyss. Lee stopped training so religiously, and tried to work with Sakura to develop his chakra, despite the often quite audible growls of Sakura's darkly possessive husband.
TenTen remembered teasing her friend a few weeks before the wedding. She was going on nineteen, and Sakura's eighteenth birthday had only past a few days earlier.
"How can you be so ready to commit with one man for the rest of your life, when you're barely eighteen? Are you really that sure?" Sakura grinned.
"TenTen, when you find the right guy, it's like he's always been there, just waiting for you. And he waited too long for me, so this is really the only thing left to do."
TenTen mused on her friend's words for days, then dismissed them as utter crap.
So on the next anniversary of Team Gai, she decides that going to the hill might be too much for Lee, and herself, but that thought it ignored, so she scribbles a quick note to Lee and Neji, inviting them to a little supper at her a)house, b)home, c)place, d)none of the above.
Neji showed up a solid hour and a half late, fifteen minutes after Lee had left, holding a bottle of wine. TenTen glared at him, but once she had seen the price sticker on the bottom, she threw open the cupboards.
Only to find that, since she really didn't drink wine or anything like that, there were no wine glasses. Only coffee mugs.
So well into the night, TenTen and Neji sat on her beige sofa talking, laughing, and sipping forty dollar wine from two chipped, mismatched mugs. The bottle grows lighter and lighter, along with TenTen's head, and when Neji tells an old Hyuuga joke that she must've heard a hundred times on long missions, she laughs hysterically, throwing her flushed face back, and when she finally stops grinning at him, her twin buns are getting loose, and so is Neji's tongue.
"You are so beautiful." She blushes, and playfully slaps his arm. He moves closer.
"You're drunk." Neji stops his gradual shifting and ponders her words, nodding slowly.
"Yes. Maybe. I think so. I'm dr-hic-drunk. But you're still beautiful."
And he kisses her, and she kisses back, and all the looks and little touches and secret smiles when no one was looking (they think) all fall in place. And she winds her arms tighter around his neck, and he slips a hand up the hem of her old pink shirt. And she looks at him, and he looks back, and she shows him her bedroom.
When they lie together, naked and tangled in the pale blue sheets, she cries when he kisses her. She's scared that tomorrow he'll pretend that he was drunk and didn't mean it, or that it was just a fling, but then he starts tracing patterns onto her clavicle, and her brain turns off.
"Neji, will you be here when I wake up?" It's dark, and the only light is the sliver of moon peeking through her window, and he can see the shine in her dark eyes, and the way it makes the dusky skin of her shoulders and between her breasts seem to glow silver.
"Of course." And he tucks her into his arms, close to his chest, making sure that tomorrow, she will still be here too. She nuzzles her nose against his broad shoulders, and it tickles, and so he pins her down, and all the bad thoughts are chased away again.
The next morning, she slips out off his warm arms, and kisses him on the mouth softly, and then puts on a pair of sweatpants and an old shirt, which he gave her long ago, and goes to make pancakes. Neji only emerges from her room when the smell of coffee and cinnamon threatens to overwhelm him. He kisses her hair,
And it smells like sweat and lust and him.
and she is scrapping at two pancakes still in the griddle, stuck together by a tiny splatter of cooked batter. Chopping it decisively down the middle, she flips the pancakes expertly onto a serving platter, and he takes one, and she spears another with a fork, but they're still stuck together.
And he laughs a little and kisses her a lot, because some things are unbreakable, whether it's pancakes or a romance that began almost a decade ago. And since they're both unbreakable, he decided that he was going to enjoy both of them to death.
AN: Meh. That ending sucked, but I needed a little distraction from The Princess and The Puppet. I haven't written much NejiTen, so I could use the practice. Not my best, but it just came to me. And for whose reviewers begging for NaruHina, you should a)vote for it in my poll, and b) chill, because I wrote down a prompt for it, which I WILL eventually write. It'll be cute, so don't worry.