A/N: Throwback on an old one-shot that has been revamped because SUDDEN NEJITEN FEELS. So instead of being productive and writing a whole new one, I scapegoated. Although come on, I may be at least a little attached to this. The song that I listened to on repeat re-writing this was "Too Afraid to Love You" by the Black Keys. Good shit, you guys. Go take a listen.
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They were genin, a year into their rank, during the stage when their teamwork skills were shifting from developing to solidarity, their abilities and talent meshing together into something more than promising. It was when the insanity finally settled into a routine among them. It was when Tenten began to take morning jogs with Lee, when Neji began practicing Tenten with her taijutsu, when Tenten began taking them both out to Ichakiru's after long days of training because Gai-sensei was crazy as hell and a bowl of steaming hot ramen could be as good as any professional therapist.
But Neji wouldn't really want to say friends - it was too new, too petty of a word for comrades that he laid his life before countless times, but could barely hold up a conversation with on most days.
They'd just finished a mission on the borders of the Fire Country when Gai-sensei had proclaimed their teamwork as "legendary".
Neji had quietly sulked int the background, a few steps away from where the rest of his team walked forward with his hands shoved into his pockets and his head bowed in thought. They spoke jovially - even Tenten, whereas she was usually trailing behind by his side with mirrored exasperation, she now bathed in the compliments that Gai-sensei was doling out to the two of them…
It was nothing new. It was either the team, Tenten, or Rock Lee receiving praise. Neji was either criticized or left out all together.
And it was infuriating.
The foursome had passed through a town, bright and alive with something called the Crescent Festival, and they'd split into pairs, with Lee trailing after Gai-sensei with a flurry, and Tenten falling beside him.
It would never due to ignore the girl. She bumped his shoulder with her own, a cheeky grin splitting her face. He wanted to wipe it off. Or maybe smack a few chakra-points and make the muscles in her face go lax for a while. Both would be more than pleasing.
"So why the hell are you so moody, Oh Young Prodigy?" Tenten prompted sarcastically, the happy grin still stuck to her face.
"I'm fine."
"And I'm a blonde, right?"
Neji cocked a brow at her in challenge, irritation written all over his face.
"He just doesn't want to inflate your stupid ego anymore, Neji," Tenten huffed, the smile disappearing and being replaced by a pout. She looked like than eight year old but he didn't say anything because he'd probably get something sharp and painful stuck inside his skin. "There's no need to get in a tizzy just because you aren't showered in unnecessary and embellished praise. Like the usual. No one needs to confirm your talent."
Neji blinked, completely startled at her words, but pressed on anyway. "As if. Do you really think I need Gai's approval to-?"
The musicians began to play, and Tenten had easily drowned him out with her gasping. An excited, wide-eyed look melted onto her face. They stood off to the side of the stone path, a small stage nestled between a dango stand and a fried octopus stand. The shamisen player plucked away, notes lulling together into at an old love song that he can't quite place. The rest of the musicians fall into a harmony around the sound.
And she began to dance.
With all the grace he'd seen in team training, and all the fluidity that he'd witnessed a thousand times before, she spun and flowed with the music with a different sort of grace, belonging to a girl instead of a kunoichi. Neji's mouth had gone dry, left staring blankly, pride and arrogance forgotten with the rest of his mental capacities because Tenten was dancing like she'd been practicing her entire life for it.
The song hit a cresendo, the different instruments' sounds crashing together, maintaining their unity and tying the string of notes together, intricate like a physical embroidery through her body, so he watched on mutely as she twierled and twirled and twirled-
Tenten knocked into his chest, and his hands managed to find her shoulders to steady her without the help of his brain. She chuckled loudly as the music ended, looking up along with Neji as a crowd of people around them began to applaud. He nearly sputtered - but Hyuugas do not sputter so he controlled his mouth into a confused scowl because when the hell had they gotten here?
"That was the best. I love that song," Tenten cooed, straightening herself pulling away from Neji's hands to grab his wrist. She looked into his eyes with mirth at his expense. "Promise me you'll dance with me someday."
"What?" he spat. "Dance? I don't- I don't dance, Tenten."
"Why not? It's so much fun. It's sort of like fighting. Except less painful. Very freeing." Tenten shook her head, waving the strands of baby hair that had fallen out of her buns from over her forehead. "Promise me. C'mon, Neji. Please?"
He muttered something that vaguely sounded like an agreement, and he'd never seen her smile so brightly.
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Neji sat beneath the shade of a large oak tree in his usual training grounds, not training.
He sat despairingly alone, with nothing but the grass and the birds and the leaves on the trees to witness his self-loathing that swirled inside his throat painfully. His thoughts were in a turmoil, boiling and stewing like rotten slime under a hot fire. Nothing felt right.
The Hyuuga compound was too stuffy and restricting for him to even breathe. Unconsciously, he raced here.
His legs were crossed underneath him, with his hands folded in his lap, spastically clenching and unclenching into fists. He'd tried all of his meditation techniques in vain. His hopelessness, fury, anger, and disappointment
He didn't bother to look up when he first heard the footsteps approaching him.
Tenten sat down in front of him, heaving a sigh, as if she were carrying a particularly large weight. Neji's pale eyes stayed obstinately on the ground, ignoring her presence.
"You're always brooding over something. It's getting kind of predictable," she said plainly. Tenten pulled his clenched fists from his lap and smoothed them out like crumpled paper. The stress in his body curled away like tendrils of smoke, fingers going limp inside her hands. "You failed a mission. Big deal."
"The first mission that I personally head...and I botch it," he hissed, fingers twitching up again in hateful fury. "It is unacceptable. I am a Hyuuga. My clan, nor I, do not tolerate anything less than perfection."
"Perfection? Really? Guess what, honey?" Tenten dropped one of his hands and grasped his chin, pulling it up to meet her eyes - brown, brown eyes, like chocolate, like tree bark - with thinly-veiled frustration. "You're never gonna be perfect. It's impossible. And I don't care what rank you are - you're going to be messing up and learning from your mistakes for the rest of your life."
He jerked her chin away from her grasp. "How the hell is that supposed to comfort me?"
"I'm not here to comfort you, idiot I'm here to give you a kick in the ass whenever you need it," Tenten said haughtily, holding both of his hands within hers' once again. "Whether that's metaphorical - or physical - is entirely on me."
Neji looked at her again with a sharp glare. "You're insufferable."
Tenten smiled softly. "And you adore it."
They stayed quiet for a while, Tenten tracing invisible patterns on his palms, when she suddenly spoke.
"You try to carry the entire weight of the world on your shoulders," she murmured. Her hands squeezed his intensely, looking up at him from her thick lashes and worried gaze.
Neji could not meet it fully. There was the tightening in his throat, the stress of pressure that he could not disappoint this girl, even if he didn't really know how to make her proud some days either. "It is not the weight of the world," he murmured. "It is...it is the weight that I am expected to carry."
She squeezed his hands together, almost comforting, but still clinging, still desperate, still worried. "But you're still buckling under the pressure."
He did not speak.
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He watches her a lot.
It's a long time until he realizes this, his meditation long since abandoned in favor of watching her fight against Lee. (It's not because she's abandoned her shirt for just chest bindings, and it's not because the sweat shining against her shoulders keeps catching his eyes.) Neji can find a dancer inside the vicious lines of the kunoichi. He watches the sharp turns and flexes of her muscles. He watches the sharp flick of her wrist as she aims against her target. He watches the wide twists of her arms as she drags out scroll after scroll, handling them all with an ingrained accuracy. He watches her smile at him from afar, giving a small wave as Lee sends a flying kick her way.
Tenten lands in the branches above him, falling roughly into his lap with a loud groan. She shifts against him, sitting up and smiling with an apology that's near mute to him.
Neji blinks hard as she sprints away, trying to remember how to breath again.
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He took deep, even breaths, in and out, inhale and exhale, to try and balance his body. The ache in his muscles had long sinced turned into the burning sensation of exhaustion, pushing with sheer will power. He was dead tired, his eyes ached like hell, and his back hurt from the extra load he was carrying, but there was a sense of peace as the forest hummed with life oblivious of them.
"So," he started dryly, keeping back a smile. "How was your first mission as ANBU?"
"I'm sorry!" Tenten whimpered into his shoulder again. Her mask rested at her hip as she pressed into his skin and muttered lazily. "Really. I am."
"That has to be the hundredth time you've apologized in the last two hours." Neji took another deep breath and continued to trudge through the forestry with his head held high.
He carried Tenten on his back, his arms supporting the back of her knees and being especially careful not to disturb the left ankle, which had been all but shattered from her fall off the daimyo's extremely extravagant house - over six stories. She'd landed on her feet, and promptly fell over, biting back shrieks of pain.
But now, in Fire Country territory, mere miles away from Konoha, there was no worry for Neji. They'd be home before the sun went down.
"Stop worrying about it."
"But you're in so much pain and I ruined everything-!"
"The Hyuuga have an old proverb that has been integral to us over the centuries," Neji said briskly, cutting her off. The sweat rolled down his forehead as he looked out over the trees and into the sun. "Shikata na gai; it must be endured. It has gotten me through many difficult times in my life. This is nothing. I will endure, as will you."
Tenten laughed breathlessly, and then proceeded to make Neji's heart stop.
She brushed his hair away from his ear, and place a kiss just under his neck. Her lips were warm again the sensitive skin, the simple gesture sending his entire body into a flurry. He prayed she didn't hear his breathing hitch. Every nerve in his body went on overdrive.
"I remember when we were eleven and hated your guts," she whispered, as if telling an old joke. The humor in her words made him smirk despite himself. "I thought you never worked for anything like Lee and I did. Especially watching Lee strive so hard to become strong when no one thought he had a chance. Everything came so naturally to you, and...I underestimated your drive, I guess? Your tenacity. I didn't know see it until we actually became friends."
"Miracles do come true."
"But some things are just too strange for reality."
He huffed out a laugh, feeling the urge to jostle her on his back, but the thought of her ankle held him back. "You know, I still don't think I deserved a friend like you."
"Oh shut up. You're not the same person at all," Tenten snapped. She gave him a small pinch on his neck, an almost-sting that could have been a tickle. "But anyway, that's what I just loved about you. There was this drive that I couldn't even compete with. It just wasn't as loud as Gai-sensei's or Lee's. More subtle."
"Thank god," Neji coughed.
"You're all strong men, either way. But I'm a strong woman," she announced, patting one of his shoulders before he felt her chakra glow and envelope his body with sudden strength. Neji felt his body tingle for a much different reason as he felt her energy push him forward. "So we'll endure, alright? Together. Shikata na gai."
"Shikata na gai." So Neji nodded, swallowed thickly, and endured.
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"Are you really sure that you need that many weapons?"
"Oh, I'm sorry. Are you the weapons specialist?"
Neji was damn near pouting, but Tenten continued to open new seals in her scroll and stuff it with piles of shuriken, kunai, smoke bombs, several katana, and a myriad of other things that the young Hyuuga couldn't name. It settled in his throat with worry, the fact that this was war and it was happening and his friend might possibly die. And how could she even sprint with that thing on her hips all the time? Wouldn't it slow her down? She couldn't afford to be slow. Not right now.
(Not that he doubted her strength. He's seen the muscles wrapped under the soft curves of a girl. Tenten was a firestorm of a kunoichi.)
They stood in one of the many, many tents in the Shinobi Alliance campsite, where the soldiers were getting themselves ready. Lee had already bounded off ahead of them. "Calm down. I was just wondering."
"Oh please. You've been nagging since before we passed the border into Lightning Country. I'm sick of it," Tenten said, straightening from the table where she'd laid out all her things to store into her scroll. Neither were dressed appropriately yet: both missing their flak jackets, Neji without his shoes as he sat cross legged on the futon across the tent, and Tenten without her forehead protector. Her hair also was left loose and free, not yet tied into buns. "This is a war, and I did not bring my mother along. Stop acting like one."
Neji rolled his eyes. "I'm just concerned."
"Hyuuga Neji, I am going to be fine."
He sighed, head turning away from her gaze towards the flap of the tent. The second they'd walk out, they'd go separate ways, be separated along with Lee and Gai, and each other, and he hated it.
Tenten walked over to the futon, and dropped onto it gracelessly, her head finding its way to his lap. She looked up into his eyes as he continued to ignore her. "I am going to be fine. I am. Lee is going to be fine. Gai is going to be fine. We'll be fine, Neji. You have to get that through your head."
"Do not belittle my incredibly valid worries," Neji answered gruffly, staring down at the girl sprawled across his lap.
"Fuck off."
"Your vulgar language will do nothing."
"Then why don't you do something?"
Tenten laughed as she reached up to twist her hair into her buns, giving him a rough grin. "Promise then. You know you love keeping your word," she half cackled as she stared at the weapons scroll before her, bitterness pulling at her face. "Promise that you'll go out there, fight for your life, fight for the shinobi world, and then do everything in your goddamn power to come back to me and this team. Do you hear me? I'm much more concerned about you, Mister Hotshot Hyuuga. Which one of us will be a bigger target? Which one of us has to be close and personal to get an attack in?"
Her eyes shone, and her voice was just starting to crack as her hands fell away from her half done hair. She bit down on her lip hard, breathing hard and subtly trembling.
Neji sat up from the futon and walked to the other side of the tent. He sat down at her side, pushed the scroll away, and yanked her close to him. Tenten yelped in fright, but he ignored her. His hand undid the sloppy work on her hair, running his calloused fingers through her scalp and the tresses of thick brown hair that fell past her shoulders, before tying them up into buns.
"I'll come back to you if you come back to me," he whispered.
She nodded slightly. "Deal."
"Good."
Neji looked at his handy work, nodded, and stood. He offered his hand out towards her. Tenten took it and stood beside him, a hard grip on his hand. She didn't let go. For a quiet moment, they stood like that, staring each other down. The very real, very sudden thought that this might be his last chance at standing before this girl had him thinking dangerous thoughts that would probably get him punched.
Not that a dead man would regret it.
Neji opened his mouth to speak again, but a booming announcement sounded throughout the camp, signalling the call of all shinobi out into formation.
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Six days later, when Madara was charred to death with Sasuke's Kirin, Tenten found Neji bleeding half to death with two shards of wood, sharp enough to cut, lodged deeply into his chest. Several slugs attached to his chest as they attempted to close the two large holes piercing through his chest.
Her thoughts ran rampant with a crippling fear, heavy regret, and helplessness, wondering why she couldn't have been on his division and watched his back and kept him safe. While she kneeled down beside his head, wondering if he was conscious or not, the one on her left shoulder reached up towards her face, the sliminess stretching over. It broke her heavy concentration when it spoke to her. "Do you want me to heal this too?" the slug asked in a soft, feminine voice. Tenten blinked, looking at the pale little bug, and then pressed tentative fingers to the long gash at the left side of her face, arcing over her cheek.
She decided she wouldn't mind a scar.
"No," she said aloud. "It's fine. You should go help someone else."
So when it slid away from her, out onto the bloodied battle field, she tapped Neji on the forehead. "Are you awake?" she whispered.
He groaned, long and loud, before answering. He didn't open his eyes once. "I'm not sure," he mumbled.
"That's okay," she said. Tenten reached over for his hand, grabbing it and squeezing hard. "You almost broke your promise, idiot."
Neji squeezed back. "I'm sorry."
Tenten shook her head, controlling the shaking in her chest as she steadied herself. This was not the time and not the goddamned place for tears. She could do that later in a dark, empty tent. Preferably when Neji didn't have giant holes inside of his chest. "You gotta make it up to me. You gotta live a really long time now. Can't die until you have a decent enough amount of gray hair," she breathed out. "I can't allow anything else."
Neji squeezed back, strong and hard compared to the faintness of his voice. "I can deal with that," he muttered.
Tenten reached over and kissed his bare forehead, tasting the sweat on his skin. "Good."
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Neji hated parties.
But he hated Inuzuka Kiba more.
He sat next to Lee begrudgingly, in an attempt to keep him from consuming any of the alcohol laden products that floated around the room when he'd spotted Tenten with Kiba across the room, sitting at the foot of the stairs that led to the front door. They were smiling in a way that twisted his stomach into knots.
And it wasn't at him.
The realization of it infuriated it almost as badly as Kiba.
Maybe it was jealousy, maybe it was anger, or maybe it was just the way Kiba kept leaning in a fraction of a centimeter for every two and a half minutes as they talked, but Neji's eyes were trained specifically trained on their stupid conversation. What would that mutt even have to say? What was so interesting? It was rare for him to see Tenten so enamored.
"Neji-niisan?"
Neji blinked rapidly and snapped his head towards Hinata.
"Hinata-sama," he prompted, scratching behind his head uncomfortably, where his hair had been tied up into a ponytail. He felt a headache coming on, but he knew it couldn't blame it on how tightly he tied his hair. "Do you need me to take you home?"
"No, it's not that…but, I do want to ask you something."
"What is it?"
"Neji-niisan, what are you waiting for?" Hinata asked, pointedly turning her gaze to where Tenten and Kiba sat snugly at the bottom of the staircase and back to him. Neji's eyes followed her path, but did not return. Envy drenched his tongue with bitterness.
What the hell was he waiting for?
With a deep breath, he stood from his seat, and looked back towards his cousin.
"If you will excuse me, Hinata-sama," he said regally. She smiled in return and nodded, walking away with prideful posture, the look of someone accomplishing something. Neji watched as she left, walking deeper into the crowds of people, and felt horridly guilty for what he was about to do.
"Lee," he called over his shoulder. "Could you make sure that Hinata-sama makes her way home tonight with you?"
Rock Lee jumped up enthusiastically, gleaming his thousand-watt smile. "It would be a pleasure, Neji!"
He nodded, and then proceeded to make his way over to Tenten. Through the crowd of people, the blare of the music began to fade away the farther away he was from the speakers, placed at the back of the room. The second his shadow cast upon the two, Tenten looked up with her doe-like brown eyes, heavily lined with kohl.
Neji, with all the rudeness he possessed, grasped her by the wrist and yanked her up from the foot of the staircase, opened the front door, dragged Tenten outside with him, and shot Kiba his most ruthless glare from over his shoulder.
The stark fear in his eyes eased away his jealousy.
Once he'd slammed the door closed, Tenten had turned on him viciously.
"What the fuck?" she shrieked, slapping him in the chest none too gently. Neji stared at her up close, taking in the violet minidress, strappy sandals, long hair parted in the middle and curling at the ends, eyelashes that were longer than he remembered them to be, and the vicious snarl pulling at her red-painted lips. He wasn't surprised that it dizzied his attention with an acute consciousness of her. "Who do you think you are? You can't drag me around wherever the hell you want, you neanderthal!"
"I do apologize for interrupting your flirting," Neji said dryly, sarcastic and unsympathetic. For however rude he was going to be, there was nothing he was no room for apologies right now. Maybe later. Maybe when his blood wasn't burning so hot, trying to burn out of his skin. "I do wonder why you're pretending that mutt had something interesting to say."
"You-y-you- ugh! Who are you even to talk, Hyuuga!?" Tenten shrieked, jabbing a finger into his face and glaring with fire in her eyes. "Don't think so highly of yourself You have nothing interesting to say to me! To anyone! At all! You're like a corpse half the time! Silent and stiff and unresponsive! Don't pretend like you have something interesting to say to me!"
"Don't I?" he said questioningly. His heart was thundering an unfamiliar rhythm that couldn't have been healthy - and maybe he was about to drop dead right then and there because the way her eyes flashed when she was angry made him loose a damn good bit of common sense - but on the outside he was all calm, cool, and collected.
Neji grasped her by the upper arms and pulled her closer, bending down so that he was eye-level with her. Their foreheads grazed together. "I've been trying to figure out what the hell goes on inside your head since we were genin. Nothing's worked. I want to figure out how you always know what to say. I want to figure out," he rasped, suddenly breathless. Close enough to touch, close enough to smell. Close enough to feel his breath fanning against his neck. "I'm not supposed to be the jealous type."
Tenten breathed in sharply, eyes widening, paying no mind as Neji's hands trailed to her wrists. "I want to dissect your brain, your heart, your body, find what makes you tick."
His hands lifted, cradling the smooth skin of her face with the rough pads of his fingers. His thumb pressed against the scar running down her left eye before finding her chin and tilting it up towards him. "I want...to know what your skin tastes like in the morning."
Tenten blinked at him, a beat of silence trailing on for a second in Neji's head, before she caught his lips with her own Without thought, he kissed back, moving his lips with hers, and invading her personal space further until every angle of him was pressed into her.
She reached up and roughly undid his top knot, making him flinch in pain, letting his dark hair fall over his head. She ran her hands through them, making him shiver. Her nails ran through his scalp long enough to turn his spine into a shivering mess.
It was a long time until they parted for air. "I want you," he murmured. His hands settled at the curve of her waist, his chin resting at the crown of her head.
"I want you," Tenten murmured, mouth pressed into his clavicle. Neji blinked in an almost painful wonder, the feeling of her lips whispering secrets against the pale flesh of his throat. If there was ever such a thing as his most vulnerable position - sharp teeth against soft skin, heavy words against a exposed heart - he decided that this was it. For a second, he was glad that it was going to be with her. "I've always wanted you and I'm always gonna want you. I'm always gonna chose you over everyone else. Please remember that."
Neji kissed her then, hard on the mouth and gripping her tight on the hips.
They stumbled back to her apartment together.
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Neji loved bonfires.
The shochu bottle grasped lazily in his right hand hung low, close to brushing against the grass. He sat on an old, broken down log surely filled with dirt and greenery and rot, but he was wearing his jonin uniform instead of his usual Hyuuga robes. He'd tossed away the flak jacket and rolled up the sleeves when he started feeling hazy and warm from the alcohol, but he didn't mind the extra body heat when Tenten laid out on his lap.
They were farther away from the bonfire, enshrouded in the shadows of the trees above them, but they could see clearly enough. Ino sat cross-legged on the forest's grassy floor, plucking away distractedly on a shamisen in a half-recognized tune, while Kiba sat next to her, talking lazily with Chouji and Shikamaru. Naruto and Hinata were up, dancing around to the airy tune with loud, dizzying laughter than his mind couldn't keep up with. Shino spoke sharp and sarcastically to Hanabi, who could only flip her hair and return jab for jab, smirk for smirk, looking over her shoulder at him every few minutes with nervousness. Sasuke was hiding up in the tree above him with Sakura, the two of them speaking in almost-silent tones.
But it wasn't quite silent. There was their low murmuring, and the music, and the flicker of heat from the large barrel of chakra-birthed fire with lighter fuel, and Naruto's laughter making an amphitheater of his skull, and Hinata's laughter making a nighttime garden of his chest, and the warmth of the girl in his lap.
Neji took another long drink, practically breathed in the sharpness of the shochu, before breathing hard.
"I like the view," he murmured, looking down at Tenten. She lazily swirled a kunai in one hand and played with the ends of his hair with her fingertips in the other.
"Really?" she asked, just as quiet. She frowned, shifted around on his legs to look at the canopy above them, enshrouded in blackness and leaves. "Come off it. You can't even see the stars."
He shrugged, taking another swig before answering. "Stars are nothing new."
Tenten scoffed audibly, clearly offended. "Stars are so beautiful, though - my favorite part of the night. They're one of those things that just...transcend humanity. They stay stagnant, no matter what happens to us," she breathed out, dropping the hand playing with his hair and stared him in the eye. "I like that."
"You like feeling insignificant?"
"I like that I can rely on the stars."
He shrugged and nodded, trying to wrap his mind around it, but failing quite miserably. What was so good about stars? Who cared about their stagnancy? There was life right here. This had so much more life injected into every single splash of color in his dulled sense of vision. This view, with his friends looking alive, his the love of his life waxing poetic about lights in the sky, and still nursing half a bottle of alcohol with no one demanding to share...nothing beat this.
He could scan the world, follow every detail of every skyline, and find nothing more beautiful than this.
Maybe he was more drunk on this happiness, this peace inside of him that was so transient of any ill will that he's ever known before.
Tenten reached up, hand falling onto his jaw and falling down his neck. He breathed low and quiet. "You know you'll always be prettier than all the stars, Neji. Don't get jealous," she whispered mockingly.
A smile crept onto his face before had the conscious thought to shove it back down. "Look who's talking," he drawled back.
She shrugged. "True."
Neji chuckled lowly, leaning into her hand that cupped his jaw, and decided that he very much liked the view when Tenten was staring him down with the sharp scar along her face and the sharp grin pulling at her full lips. "I don't like vain girls," he whispered against her forehead, pressing a kiss onto it. "But I think you'll do."
"That's fine. I love vain boys," she shot back. Her grin didn't falter for a second. "Even if they'll always end up borrowing my blow dryer in the morning."
He groaned. "That was one time."
"One time that I will never, ever forget."
He couldn't help but laugh again, but Naruto started shouting gleefully when Ino's plucking picked up, a love song that he still can't quite place, outside a festival and a young weapon's kunoichi who still dances as well as she can fight.
Tenten was already shooting up from his lap, grasping onto one bicep and sprinting towards the sound. Neji followed her drunkenly, not quite firm on his feet, but he still let her. He knew what was coming next.
"Remember that dance you owe me?" she said, hand falling into his free palm. Neji gave it a hard, warm squeeze. The way her callouses held stiff and unrelenting against his own made him smile absently again.
"I remember."
So they danced; the dark haired girl tossed away is alcohol to a very willing Naruto as his hands magically found her waist as her's clasped at his shoulders. They swayed, and she led, twirling and tripping and guffawing like the tipsy idiots they were. Sakura cheered them on, loud shouting along with other giggles and shrieks and whistles he couldn't place. Tenten was much more graceful than him, but he followed well enough, egging Ino on to fall into another song after the first one ended. Hinata sang along to it, giving the whole forest pause as her soft voice carried over the light of the fire and the black of the shadows that whispered around them. The warmth in his blood held steady with his heartbeat as Tenten swayed mindlessly along with him.
Neji remembered the first time, when she'd caught him stupid for the first of many times to come, even though she was still so young and breathless and held up right by his arms - he just hoped he would remember this, too.