This is a little long to be a drabble, but I got carried away.


Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.

When Lee and Tenten first meet, they are immediate best friends.

Their first meeting with Neji doesn't go half so well.

It is four years after Lee and Tenten first met; the three are all nine.

After school Tenten goes looking for Lee so they can walk back to the foster home together (in that dirty, dangerous place, the two children are each other's only solace) and finds her almost-brother being mercilessly tormented by Neji.

In that moment, Tenten doesn't care that Neji is a Hyuuga, that he could shatter her ribs with only a gentle touch, or that he is nearly twice her size. In that moment, all Tenten wants to do is kill him.

Neji only half hears her approach, and looks back just in time to see a tiny fist careening into his face.

He has enough time to see a pathetically scrawny girl with her slightly frizzy hair in buns and her knees heavily skinned before she's on him.

Because they are still on school property, the instructors step in. It takes the combined forces of Iruka-sensei grabbing Tenten and Mizuki-sensei seizing Neji to pull them apart.

With two black eyes, bruised arms and sore ribs, Tenten is jubilant. She sticks her tongue out at Neji as they are hauled off in opposite directions, Lee running after her and Iruka-sensei.

With a black eye, a broken wrist and collarbone and bite marks on his arms that require Tetanus shots later, Neji definitely came off worse in that fight.

Afterwards, Iruka-sensei gives her a sound, shaky scolding while attending to her injuries, but gives her a rib-cracking hug afterwards. He understands full well why she did what she did.

It's all Lee can do not to run off after Neji and try to pound him himself; Tenten stops him because she knows that Neji would beat him bloody. Lee is thankful for Tenten's support, but like a man he is a little ashamed that she had to step in for him like that.

When Neji is seen to by one of the Hyuuga healers, he hears the healer mention, after seeing Neji's fractured collarbone, "That is one strong little nine-year-old. Especially for not being a Hyuuga."

Neji only nods, his disdain for the little girl who'd jumped him dead where it stands after hearing those words.

Later, like a little boy with a crush who doesn't know what to do, he tries to talk to her. Constantly. After a long string of expletive-laden threats (and everyone wants to know where Tenten picked up such words; she says, "From both of the so-called "homes" I've lived in."), his persistence lasts about a week.

It is only a year later that the three begin to become friends.

A group of boys are trying, none too gently, to convince Tenten that girls can't be ninja, and they're using their fists to get the point across. Neji steps in and before he and Tenten begin to fight side by side (their first fight on the same side), he looks at them and coldly says, "She is the strongest person I know."


Who likes it? It's so much more fun to assume that Team Gai started off hating each other (or at least, Tenten and Lee hated Neji who hated then liked Tenten); there was so much obvious friction between the three of them in the show.