On Sex

With titles like this, who needs summaries?

By Lotos-Eater

Beta-reader V-chan2k6

Author's Note: Am not big on notes, but it needs to be said: this is not a happy waffy flufftime story, so please do not read it with that expectation. This story will have 3 chapters. Many thanks to my beta.

1

One of the truly annoying things about Kiba (and there were many, many things to choose from on that list) was that it was difficult to lie to him about certain subjects. Much in the same way that it was difficult for anyone to lie to Neji himself. Neji had been trained to recognize the change in pulse, facial tics, microscopic sweat, and other visual indicators that people with ordinary eyes wouldn't notice. Because he was a Hyuuga and their abilities were common knowledge for most everyone in Konoha, people usually told him the truth or didn't talk to him at all. With Kiba, though – you didn't even need to open your mouth and he knew you were hiding something, because he could smell it.

The mission team consisted of Kiba, Choji, and some new chunin named Kojo who appeard to have made that fresh wound on his neck on purpose, possibly so he could look like a real ninja. Neji was captain, and he knew that Kiba was going to be a problem before they got ten feet out of the gate, because he heard him snicker, then whisper. And when he stopped and looked back, Kiba was snickering again, and Choji's face was bright red. Kojo was looking on with deep interest.

"Do you have something to say, Inuzuka?" Neji asked. He had a feeling he knew what was coming.

"Yeah - Since when were you boning your teammate?" Kiba replied, feigning a casual air.

At this remark the chunin named Kojo burst out into short laughter, which was quickly silenced by a stony look from Neji.

Choji's face remained red, although he looked at his team leader with sheepish curiosity.

Neji stared Kiba directly in the eyes. For a dog, that was a challenge. Kiba backed down first. On a very basic level, Kiba knew who was in charge, and he was a ninja – you couldn't have a team of ninja without authority, and you couldn't have that without respect. The whole thing went down silently. The way it would, Neji imagined, with dogs.

But it was a fact that it was no use lying to Kiba, or trying to hide the truth. So his only options were to ignore it and move on, which would leave the topic open to speculation, or acknowledge it and move on, which might be unexpected enough to shut Kiba up.

"If you have a moral objection to premarital sex," Neji said, completely straight-faced, "kindly keep it to yourself."

This time Choji laughed – briefly.

"We are moving out," Neji said, and he turned to lead them forward again.

Although they were moving quickly through the forest, Kiba couldn't let the matter rest for long – it was impossible to remain quiet and to continue being Kiba. "Seriously, dude, are you nuts? I heard she cut off a guy's junk once. With a serrated sword."

Neji, who knew this to be true, didn't reply.

"You a masochist or something?"

"No."

"Then you're either really brave or really, really fucked-up."

Neji wouldn't argue with either one of those assessments. In truth, he found that both statements applied pretty equally to most good ninja.

Kojo spent the rest of the mission regarding his leader with wary respect.

He was fucked-up pretty much from the beginning, psychologically. He'd gotten to a point in his life, now, where he could look back on his childhood and say that honestly. As a small child he'd had complete hero-worship for his father, the only parent he remembered, and that had turned into utter hatred for the unfair world, for the unfair family, when his father was killed. The self-governed nature of his father's death was not clear to Neji until many years after the fact. So, as a result, to repeat: pretty much fucked-up.

He never thought much of his classmates at the Academy – compared to the unmarred perfection of his dead father, everyone paled. He had no friends. In another world it might have been a bad thing to be a sociopath, but here in a ninja village it was the optimal way to go. Get ahead of the crowd: have no emotional attachment to humans. Instead of noting what a strange boy he was, the villagers just admired him for being at the top of his class. Girls liked him for what he was. Obsessive, single-minded, determined: these were qualities of the ideal ninja. An ordinary village might make him an outcast, but to Konoha, he was seen to have great potential.

He felt about his genin team the same things that he felt toward his classmates: they were inferior. So far inferior that he made it a point to interact with them as little as possible. He took turns beating up Lee and Tenten, and when he fought with his sensei, he only grudgingly admitted to himself that the man had strength. But Neji firmly believed that when he grew up and became a full-fledged Hyuuga, his sensei would be no match for him. Fate ruled things like this. Neji was made to feel inferior by his clan, because of his Branch family status, and therefore Neji was only satisfied by showing others they were inferior to him.

And then his first chunin exams came, and everything he'd ever learned about life flew out the window. First he was defeated by someone who was clearly inferior in all ways, and then his uncle slipped into his recovery room and tore apart his world view, word by word. It was a beautiful, horrible day.

Nothing changed overnight. Nothing ever did, not when it was change that lasted. The truth stayed with him, though, and things started to take on different colors. At first he only went on the defensive, analyzing his failure. As soon as he realized how badly he had underestimated his opponent, he decided to never let such a thing happen again. So he studied Lee, and he learned to be afraid of the way Lee didn't stop; because Lee would fight literally until his death, if you let him, and would do so at the least provocation. If it ever got to a point in one of their battles where Neji ran out of chakra, he knew he was a dead man.

And he studied Tenten, to a lesser extent. At first he didn't consider her much of a threat. Like him, she was mostly quiet and single-minded: she wanted to be a good ninja. (Was there anything else worth being?) But in his estimation at the time she didn't have any innate talent like he did, or even like their sensei, and she lacked Lee's borderline insane dedication. Her skills were limited. Back when their team was young, he'd assumed that it was because she'd come from a civilian family – but when he cared enough to look into her background, he learned that this wasn't true. She came from one of the lesser shinobi clans, she just chose not to trade on their name. At her own request, right on their first day as a team, Gai-sensei recorded her name on the ninja registry as Tenten, only Tenten. No one learned why this was so important to her until much later.

They got to be friends.

It was completely unintentional. Although she smiled a lot, she wasn't one of the girls that liked to flirt with him, and he couldn't care less about her, at least at the beginning. They just worked together often, and did so in almost complete silence, communicating whatever needed to be said in as few words as possible. "Tomorrow?" she would say.

"Early. I have a mission with Shino."

"Six, then."

"Fine."

"Taijutsu?"

"Fine. But I have a new ninjutsu to practice as well."

"Okay," she said, and smiled the way she always did, cheerfully and benignly. (You could be fooled by that smile, if you knew her less, because she could kill a person when she needed to. Her smiles were warm and honest and untroubled, and she gave them freely to everyone, friend or foe.)

Their sensei and other genin teammate were not so succinct. It tried their patience. They commiserated, usually with silent gazes of mutual humiliation while Gai-sensei and Lee did something embarrassing in public. Their friendship was, in a way, inevitable. Even so, neither one would have recognized that such a relationship existed. Partly because it would have been so strange to say, "she is my friend," and partly because no one was going to ask.

Time changed a lot of things. He grew out of his angst, mostly, even as a young teenager, and with that out of the way, he started his flight up through the ranks. To help him find his way now that fate was no longer guiding him, he took to meditating for huge chunks of the day several times a week, and as an unintentional result he began to look at his family differently. He sometimes even engaged his cousin in simple conversation. "Have you mastered that technique you were trying earlier this week?"

"No, not yet, Neji-nii-san."

"Would you like to practice today?"

"I would like that very much, nii-san. I am very grateful."

He no longer looked at his uncle with loathing and dread – because when he thought of his uncle now, there just wasn't any of that emotion left. He searched for it in meditation, and he only found the empty stories he'd told himself when he was little – his father the hero, his uncle the demon. The truth was much more complicated – and much more interesting. The primary feeling that he had when thinking of his uncle now was curiosity. He tried to understand what it must have been like to be the man at that end of the Hyuuga world. And when he had considered it, he felt a little bit of pity, too.

And, in time, he turned into a person who could not honestly be described as a sociopath. He was quiet, and he was still single-minded, but he had a better idea of why he existed, why this village existed, why his clan existed, what they were fighting for.

He started paying attention to small inanimate things, like the way the maid always folded his shirts with the arms crossing each other at exactly the same angle every day, or the way the light from the screen window slanted across the Hyuuga dojo in the late afternoon. He noticed things about people, as well. His uncle's worry lines becoming more defined, but also the way his uncle's expression when he looked at Hinata slowly changed over the years. Then there was little Hanabi's vibrant blossoming. Hinata's quiet, determined quest for her true love. Eventually, Neji realized that most everything around him was a story, if one looked close enough.

Lee's unrelenting perseverance. His sensei's love for his village, untarnished even after all his experience. And Tenten. Tenten was a lot like him, still. But she tended to slip away when you didn't notice. She was made for the background – she was an excellent spy. She blended into the crowd and vanished with a quiet smile.

And then one day, when they were fourteen, she took center stage in her own story. Gripping the hilt of her sword, she said, "This is my battle." She cast off her teammates and went to meet her fate.

Not too long after that, when they were fifteen, the two spent an afternoon training together, which was nothing out of the usual, and ended the day with a good set of fights – again, nothing out of the usual.

Neji often won, but if they decided to fight without any chakra techniques, Tenten was more likely to win. She was never going to have the abilities of his eyes or hands, but if he was low on chakra, he knew to expect a difficult battle. He had learned the error of underestimation the hard way, many times. Even without a weapon, she was a good match. What she lacked in sheer strength she made up for with creativity, which Tenten had in droves, especially when she couldn't reach one of her usual weapons.

The afternoon ended, they stretched, and they packed up their gear. Then they walked back to the village together. So far, still normal: this was how they ended many days. The sun was going down through the trees behind their backs and Neji decided he liked the golden color it lent the bark, the grass, even the pink of the sky. It was the last warmth before the dark. The path back to the village was well-worn by many generations of shinobi – a comfortable place.

"I want to ask you something," Tenten said.

"Hn," he answered neutrally.

"I want your help with something. Would you be willing to have sex with me?"

… Remarkably, he was able to keep walking forward, his gait even.

She said this without a single catch in her voice, or stutter, although he got the impression that this was due to a lot of effort on her part. He kept his shock well hidden, and his guard was up immediately. A ninja had to learn to expect the unexpected, and this was dangerous and unfamiliar territory. "Why would you want to do that?"

"Because I'm afraid of it. And it's silly, really. Gai-sensei says we have to overcome our fears, right? Face them. Might as well get it over with."

He was very careful about his reply. "Gai-sensei also says that such things can take time."

"Yes, well – we've got time. I don't want to do it all at once. I want to work up to it, like you would work up to any other technique. I think it will take several weeks."

"Hn."

He was silently amazed at himself for not trying to reason with her, but his mind had just been drained of any coherent thought. He didn't say anything else for a minute. Then: "Where?" he asked.

"At my place, of course. Yours wouldn't be practical, with all those prying eyes."

"That is true."

She had her own apartment – she had lived alone, in one place or another, ever since that incident when they were fourteen, when she was shunned by her clan.

This made things convenient. Almost too convenient. He was sure it could not be so simple. "Just sex?" he asked.

"Just sex, I swear. I'm not one of your fangirls, Neji."

He would never accuse her of such a thing. But that wasn't the issue. "If you agree that, regardless of the outcome, we will continue to work together as always, then yes."

"Oh, that goes without saying."

"Very well."

"Okay."

The distance between them as they walked next to each other, he noticed, didn't change, but all of a sudden he was very aware of its value: a meter, almost exactly.

"You want to come over tonight?" she asked. "After dinner?"

"All right."

The day, back when they were fourteen, had been spent on team training, except their sensei hadn't been there – he was on some kind of taijutsu training detail back at the Academy, teaching snot-nosed eight-year-olds how to kick properly. Lee, in his sensei's absence, was repeatedly kicking the training post as if it had slandered his mother. Neji and Tenten were discussing the mission they'd been assigned for the next day. (Guard a convoy. Standard stuff.)

Suddenly Neji felt a presence in the woods, approaching the training field, and he knew that Tenten sensed it, too, by the way the muscles in her shoulders suddenly tightened. Lee continued kicking his post, but unbeknownst to an onlooker he was aware of his teammates – he sensed their tension. A keen observer would have noted that, although Lee kept kicking, his occasional exclamations had stopped.

Neji wasn't going to acknowledge the presence. He assumed it was some chunin or jonin of the village coming to check them out – they often did. Team Gai had earned certain notoriety, even at that age.

Tenten, though, stood up after a few seconds of silence and faced it, almost as if she had been expecting the visitor. Her eyes were steely and cool, and a calmness had come over her, one that Neji automatically recognized: she was getting ready to fight. Because she'd acknowledged a threat, he stood up beside her, and a moment later Lee was beside him, too, facing this unknown.

A figure appeared at the edge of the clearing. It was a man Neji did not know. Middle-aged, clearly a ninja. Brown hair thinning at the top, simple clothing. Konoha headband. Neji thought he'd seen the man in the village, once or twice – just another jonin.

He wasn't worried, and he knew Lee was only curious – the boy's posture screamed, even when he didn't – but Tenten changed as the man approached. Her eyes set. Her posture forcibly relaxed. She was definitely getting ready for a fight.

"Tenten-chan," the man said, when they were within speaking distance. "May I have a word?"

She didn't even turn her head to either of her teammates. She just said to them, "Leave us. This is my battle."

Neji was tempted to remind her that they needed to stay in top form for the mission tomorrow, and bouts like this, whatever it was, could wait until after, but he knew that Tenten wouldn't accept it. She could be obstinate about certain things. She was getting ready to fight, and she was going to fight.

For some reason, though, just as he made up his mind to leave, Neji had a terrible feeling of premonition. It was something about the coldness of Tenten's voice, or the heavy, concentrated gaze of the strange man. Neji glanced at Lee quickly, and then both of them leapt back, leaving Tenten to face her enemy alone.

A hundred yards back on a tree limb overlooking the training field, they stopped together. "Do you know what is going on?" Lee asked him.

"No. But I have a bad feeling. Go and get sensei. I will stay here."

Lee nodded and vanished. Neji watched his kunoichi teammate and the unwelcome guest on Team Gai's training field. Neither one seemed to be aware of his presence. They spoke a few words that he couldn't hear, and he didn't think to try to lip-read because he was paying too much attention to their postures. When the man attacked, it was sudden and vicious, but Tenten had been prepared for such a thing all along. She moved fluidly with his strike, like Gai-sensei had taught her. The man was indeed a jonin, and moved like one, and had a katana that looked to be of high quality – being on a team with Tenten, Neji knew a thing or two about weapons. Tenten fought passionately and gracefully, her face a blank slate, instinctive reactions so buried that they could not disrupt her perfect aim. Neji felt a need to help his teammate, but he sensed that this fight was important to her and his intervention would not be welcome. And so far there was nothing to signify that the fight wouldn't end like so many fights on the training fields did – with one party overcome, conceding victory. This was a Konoha jonin, after all, not some foreigner.

When, through slick speed and working a couple minor advantages to her favor, she had overpowered the man, leaving him prone on his back, Neji thought it was over and breathed a very small sigh of relief. Sensei would wonder why they'd bothered him…

But the jonin did not concede – he sprang again as soon as she let her guard down, and suddenly the fight took on a whole new tone. With a start, Neji saw blood and wasn't sure whose it was, but there was plenty of it. He couldn't immediately tell if the man was wounded and bleeding on Tenten or if it was the other way around. He sprang down from his perch on the tree limb and approached them covertly, slowly and carefully, keeping his eyes activated. He finally saw that it was Tenten who was hurt, and it shocked him – she wasn't stopping to concede or bandage the wound, like she would in a spar – she was still fighting, and was pouring as much energy and chakra into it as she would give in combat that meant life or death. Any normal battle on the training field would end with a wound like that. Tenten didn't look like she was fighting a normal training spar, or even a serious battle like she had done recently at the latest chunin exam – the way she was flying full throttle said that this was as critical as a mission fight. There was no practice or show involved in it; they were each out for some kind of kill.

Neji decided that whatever was happening, it had to be stopped. He started looking for openings. But even when he saw them, he couldn't quite bring himself to interfere – because it was Tenten's fight, whatever it was, and it was clearly important to her. It made him think of the first time he'd really sparred with his uncle – the feeling of years and years of hatred boiling out of his gut and giving him energy. And the sensation when he had gained the upper hand for a moment had been such an incredible blast of victory.

Tenten was clearly winning now, and Neji felt less and less inclined to stop the fight… although she seemed somewhat out of control. She'd let go of her careful composure and her face had stiffened into a totally unfamiliar mask of rage. She was fighting with one of her own katanas now, and her moves lacked their usual finesse – instead of precise and graceful, she was clearly fighting mad, and with malicious intent.

When she won, finally and definitively, it happened too fast for Neji to do anything about it, although he probably would have hesitated anyway. Suddenly there was much more blood - and screaming so intense and piercing that even Neji blanched. Tenten seemed to be in shock, staring at her reddened blade and shaking, while her foe writhed on the ground in blind agony.

And Neji wasn't sure whether to help his teammate or help the man who was possibly dying. Luckily, that was when Gai-sensei appeared.

The man was her uncle, the heir of her clan, and as a result of the fight he was left permanently castrated, and she was shunned and disowned.

It didn't seem to matter to her father or the other select members of her clan who heard her story that her uncle had been using her body since she was a little girl at the Academy. Nobody wanted to hear anything like that, of course. They were not willing to admit that it was even possible. They said she was lying because she wanted to avoid punishment. It was this flat-out denial, this refusal of even the slightest doubt, that convinced the Hokage of their corruption. Not that Tsunade could do anything about it – it was a clan matter entirely, and that was exactly where the Hokage's jurisdiction stopped.

But regardless, Tenten was done with her family – all of them. Apparently she'd always known that they wouldn't help her against her enemy. And maybe for that reason she'd assumed that she could depend on no one but herself. As soon as she knew she was strong enough to fight her uncle, she'd stood up to him and threatened to expose him to his wife and his father. And it was shortly after that that he went after her on the training field, tried to corner her, because he thought it was necessary to remind her of her place. His mistake was in underestimating her strength. And her anger. She wasn't a little girl anymore who could be fooled into thinking that men, especially clan heirs, were allowed to do whatever they wanted.

Nobody knew the truth, of course, except for her teammates, the Hokage, and a select few members of her clan. Gai-sensei had been red with rage when the Hokage explained to him that the matter of Tenten's accusations fell to her family to address, and they would hold their own inquiry. Everybody involved knew that the clan would do nothing of the sort. They knew that the clan would bury this story hard and well, and no one outside one very inner circle would be the wiser, and Tenten's uncle would inherit as soon as his father died, and life would go on. Neji knew about the situation and Gai-sensei's anger because he'd watched everything unfold from beginning to end. He wasn't specifically allowed to use his Byakugan to spy on his own countrymen, but he had to know what was going on. He suddenly had to know everything he could.

Tenten came away from that incident no worse for wear. She didn't seem to be bothered at all by the fact that her clan had disowned her, and felt fully justified in the physical damage that she had done to her uncle. She left her immediate family behind her without a second glance. Her father was not a man who thought much of women. Her mother, two years dead, had been her father's second wife. The first wife had had sons, now grown men with whom Tenten had only a nodding acquaintance, and her father was on his third wife already, a woman barely more than a teenager. Tenten didn't have a real connection to any one of them, beyond blood, and that meant little to her. Team Gai was her family, as far as she was concerned. So she lived in the village barracks for a few weeks, and then in a boarding house, and finally her own apartment, when she'd saved up enough money for the security deposit and some furniture. And by this time, by all appearances, she'd gotten over whatever there was to get over. She smiled and laughed like she always did, untouched by any malaise as far as Neji could tell. And six months after the fight with her uncle, she made chunin.