Title: Like Cement
Author: creepy_crawly
Characters/Pairings: Hyuuga Neji, TenTen, Rock Lee (gen)
Rating: PG-15
Warnings: Mentions porn. Also, passing mention of sex.
Disclaimer: No own. No money. No shame.
Summary: Team Gai! (the exclamation point, TenTen tells people, is not negotiable) has bonded over the strangest of things, most of which even Lee knows better than to mention in public.
Team Gai! (the exclamation point, TenTen tells people, is not negotiable) has bonded over the strangest of things, most of which even Lee knows better than to mention in public. This knowledge doesn't keep him from keeping track of them in a list, however, cheerfully labeled 'The Bright Fires of Youth Overcome the Darkness of Malice!' with a couple of sparkles and something that rather resembles a rutabaga. This list includes, but is not limited to: cleaning out toilets at a campsite the week after the food delivered went bad, giving the Daimyo's wife's cat an interesting new hairstyle (which involved green and orange in copious amounts) so that she might be easier to find, and making fun of movies.
Really, it's the movies that pull them all together. TenTen suggested it after Gai-sensei gave them the Most Important Mission: Meet Each Other their very first week as genin. Lee had been thrilled—he'd never been invited to someone's house before!—and Neji had simply grunted his acceptance of her idea. No one had expected him to show up at her house on Friday night, carrying a shinobi sack full of science fiction and horror films that can only be called bad.
Neji's taste in bad films is a quirk, a note of personality hidden beneath the drone of Hyuuga Clan. Still, Team Gai (the exclamation point still then a tenuous concept, not even recorded) had agreed; they hadn't had that much fun in a while. Gai-sensei approved of their method of accomplishing the mission, and it became a standing date. (Not that Neji will use that word. He's bound by clan law to remain celibate and unattached until he has a marriage contract. The irony of the fact that he can fool around once he's sworn in matrimony escapes nobody, except maybe Lee, who's too busy focusing on the injustice of it all.)
(TenTen also refuses to use the word 'date'. That might imply that she's looking for something out of the boys other than some really great sparring. And the occasional hair tip, alright, she'll cop to that. But unlike most of the kunoichi she sees around her, she thinks more of the men on her team than to date them.)
It's not until they're all sixteen and chuunin that it gets really fun. Or at least really awkward. TenTen, on a kunoichi-only mission to Sand, discovered that the age of legal consent there was merely fifteen. She'd come back with a happily-laden pack. As close as she is with her boys, she thought nothing of snickering about it with Lee—who had a disturbingly dirty mind beneath that bowlcut—and seeing what kind of reaction she could get out of Neji. (Generally, a threat to Jyuuken out the batteries in whatever she's taunting him with. He usually Jyuukens them back on, however, so it evens out.)
She's not sure who first suggested watching the porno she brought back, but she's glad they did because, hooo, boy.
She's not a moron; she knows men and women have very different approaches to sex. Porn films are more targeted towards men, she knows that, too. She's also aware that she's a little bit flexible on that whole sexuality thing, and Neji's a little flexible too, and heaven only knows about Lee, except that he's entirely Sakura-sexual. So she was expecting a little blushing, maybe a cough, an embarrassed comment or two. At most, she thought it might—just might—devolve into a team circle jerk again. (That was sometime around the time Neji confessed he wasn't even allowed to actually masturbate and TenTen decided it was for the good of the mission so that made it okay and Lee decided that no, the exclamation point really had some Serious Meaning as to the Interconnectedness of Team Gai!, Exclamation Point a Must.)
But they were maybe five minutes into the first film (Busty Blonde Beauties) when Neji started to grin, which was quite an admission on his part, given the iron control he practices. Lee saw this and started to laugh, delighted in his Beloved Teammate's submission to Youthful Humor. That declaration made TenTen chuckle. Her chuckling started Neji to sniggering. That started Lee to howling, which led to TenTen falling off the couch, which startled a full-blown laugh out of Neji.
Lee will never tell anyone just what it is that he does that makes Neji laugh. Not because he's trying to protect Neji's pride or anything, because he, like all of Team Gai!, knows that Neji can protect himself, thank-you-very-much, and not because he thinks that it's shameful to admit that he knows euphemisms like that; he is, after all, a teenage boy. What it really boils down to is that somehow, Lee finds the fact that his teammate can be defeated entirely by the word "meatstick" a little hard to resist laughing at.
Gai still doesn't know why none of his ex-students can look him in the eye after the lesson on how to properly field-dress a snake and eat it.
A short from a fandom I'd almost forgotten. Comments are much appreciated. :D