Lesson.
Benkyo.
Nine-year-old Tenten stuck her tongue out of the side of her mouth as she struggled with her ink brush. Even though she knew how to write very well there was a word that was giving her extreme trouble. She growled as she marked out another misspelled word. She knew that she would get reprimanded for messy work if she continued to make mistakes. And then she would most likely get the 'mistakes mean life or death on a mission' talk from their sensei.
The room was mostly quiet except for a few whispers every once in a while as different students tried to weasel the answers out of their classmates. Tenten bit down on her tongue as she made another mistake and tried to correct it mid-word. It just made her work look even more sloppy. She sighed and leaned back in her chair, looking forlornly at her paper. She couldn't remember how to spell the answer. She glanced over at her desk mate and decided that he wasn't a good one to ask. His paper was completely blank. She looked around the room for someone who appeared smart enough to figure out how to spell her word. There weren't many likely candidates and all of them were too far away except for one.
"Pst. Hyuuga-san," she whispered, leaning over her desk to poke the boy in front of her in the back of the head. The teacher was gone but she didn't want everyone to know that she couldn't spell. He turned slightly and raised an eyebrow. She gulped. She'd never spoken to him a day in her life and now he was giving her a death glare that could kill all death glares.
"What?" he whispered back. A faint dusting of pink covered her cheeks.
"Could you tell me how to spell this?" she asked, shoving her paper over the end of her desk so that he could see it. "I can't pronounce it either but I know that's the answer."
He raised an eyebrow at her chosen spelling and then looked up at her with a blank expression and she felt sick to her stomach for a moment. He was going to tell her to leave him alone and that she was an awful speller and probably something about how fate had decreed that she should never become a kunoichi. He opened his mouth to speak right as the teacher walked back in.
"Tenten-san!" she barked. "Why are you allowing your classmate to cheat off your worksheet?" The teacher's eye started twitching when she saw who was 'cheating'. "Hyuuga-san, I thought better of you! Turn around right now!" Other students giggled quietly as Tenten flushed beat red and Neji turned back around in his seat with an unreadable expression on his face. He didn't even try to defend himself.
Tenten felt horrible as she looked at her still-misspelled word. She hated getting in trouble with the teacher and she had made one of the smartest people in her class get a small reputation for cheating. She buried her face in her arms on her desk as the teacher selected a sheaf of papers from her desk and poured over them for a moment in preparation for the day's lesson. As she turned to write on the board the class erupted into whispers. Tenten caught that most of them were about her and Hyuuga.
"Sorry," she whispered to the back of Hyuuga's head. "I didn't mean to get you in trouble." He said nothing in return and she thought for a moment that he hadn't heard her. He was writing something quickly on a scrap of paper. The teacher had just put down her piece of chalk when he turned and placed the paper on her desk and turned back so quickly that Tenten wasn't even sure he had turned around at all. She examined the paper and was pleased to find that at the very top, in bold kanji, was the correct way to write her problem word and a small note was beneath it.
Sensei will forgive me for 'cheating.' My name is Neji.
Tenten felt a slow smile crossing her face. As far as she knew, nobody was allowed to call Hyuuga by his first name. When she looked at him to see if he was watching her, she found that he was staring straight ahead at the board, ink brush in hand to take notes, as if he had never given her anything. But he had given her something.
He had given her permission to be his friend.
[owari]
Really, really short one shot, I know. It's completely not my style but here you go. I hoped you guys enjoyed it! Just a snapshot from when Neji and Tenten were in the Academy.