Notes: Thank you very much to everyone who reviewed. :) Five more Ten-and-Team-Gai-drabbles, ranging from pre-timeskip to random, unspecified times during and after the timeskip.
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Rain
Hyuuga Neji prides himself on being a secretive type of person.
…Which is why he is less than pleased when, during a stakeout mission during monsoon season, none other than his oh-so-beloved teammate Tenten discovers that he seems to have a strong fondness for splashing around in puddles.
"I believe you misinterpreted what you saw," he says in a monotone over a typically repulsive mission dinner that night. Lee and Gai-sensei are taking the night shift today, which makes it the perfect time to bring up this sensitive subject.
Tenten stabs a piece of chicken with her chopstick and smirks. "Yeah, cause there are so many ways to 'misinterpret' the sight of the great Hyuuga Neji jumping up and down in a puddle."
Neji flushes bright red. "I was not jumping. And it was not a puddle. I was merely trying to…prevent my feet from getting trapped into the deep mud at the bottom of the flooded ditch I was in."
Tenten gives him a pained look. "The puddle was three feet in diameter, and the water came up to your ankles. There were no sloughs of deep mud or flooded ditches in the equation."
The white-eyed prodigy takes a bite of his dissatisfyingly sour apple. "In this fog, Tenten, people can see things that they're not quite sure of—"
Abandoning the pathetic excuse for a meal in front of her, Tenten slides closer to her teammate, so that their noses are almost touching over the tatami mat.
Neji's eyes widen in an almost comical manner.
"If that's the case," she whispers softly, taking great care to keep her face straight, "about the mud and the ditch and all – then what explanation can you offer for the overjoyed smile on your face?"
Neji opens his mouth and closes it again, genius mind searching frantically for an answer.
"Ah-hah!" Tenten fairly screeches, all pretenses of composure thrown out the window. "I knew it!"
Before she can emit another similar shriek, Neji fairly pounces on her, stuffing the sour apple in her mouth in a drastic, but effective attempt at silence. "This goes nowhere," he mutters menacingly. "If you say anything, ever, about me and puddles, or rain, or jumping, or mud, in the same sentence—"
Tenten spits out the apple and tosses it back at him. "Yeah, yeah," she says dismissively. "You'll poke me to death."
Neji doesn't attempt argument, instead choosing to crawl over to his sleeping roll glumly, so that he can just lie in bed, listen to the rain pound on the thatched roof, and reflect miserably on how he lost the respect of the only one of his sane teammates today.
…Tenten never says anything to anybody about Neji And The Puddle Incident, as she privately refers to it in the solace of her mind. But she smirks at him every time it rains, and there was once he could swear that she pushed him in the direction of a particularly large and tempting puddle, the evening after he had passed his jounin exams.
(Much later that night, after the streets are deserted, Neji indulges himself by jumping in said puddle. Just a little bit. As a reward to himself for all the years of hard training he had put himself to in order to achieve his current rank. Through pure coincidence, and the fact that Sakura had taken her along to a party that night, Tenten gets a picture of Neji And The Puddle, version two point zero. She frames it and puts it in her photo album, and whenever life looks a bit dark, she takes a look at the picture, and laughs quietly to herself.)
Chocolate
The first real "team outing" they share is a picnic. Each member of the team is instructed to bring their own (consumable) food item to their clearing on Monday morning, where they will train for half a day, and then eat for the rest of it.
When Gai-sensei proudly tells his new team about this plan, Neji rolls his eyes and declares it a waste of time better spent intensively bettering their skills, Lee gushes extensively and wonders aloud and at length whether his cooking skills are up to the "formidable test of feeding his beloved teammates with luscious edible delights", and Tenten wonders if this is the divine retribution she gets for accidentally killing the plants of the sweet old lady that is her neighbor.
Tenten doesn't go right home after training concludes that evening. She wanders the streets of Konoha, looking around forlornly for things that might allow her to develop cooking skills in two days. Times like this, she wishes that she had someone to teach her how to do this kind of thing.
After two hours of fruitless searching, Tenten finally finds herself outside of the Academy headquarters. A great lot of good this building would do her…
Unless. A memory from several years ago hits her, and she blinks at the building, tilting her head.
The next morning, Tenten receives a knock at her door. She's already dressed in her usual pink and green tank top and dark pants, but last night, she had dug out her mother's old apron, which is now tied around her in a rather haphazard fashion. Enthusiastically, she flings the door open, to find just the person she needs – Iruka-sensei, who is holding her note. "Morning, Tenten," he says, smiling a little uncertainly. It wasn't every day he got letters like this. "You needed my help with a chocolate cake?"
On Monday morning, Team Gai brings their assorted edible food items to the training grounds. Neji arrives late, contrary to his usual habits, holding a large platter covered with foil. Lee and Gai-sensei have their green-wrapped platters under the old oak tree, as well as a rather less-suspicious looking offering that he assumes is Tenten's.
Ignoring the questioning look that Tenten gives him, Neji places his plate beside hers, an expression of high dignity on his face. Upon noticing his contribution, Lee and Gai begin to applaud, and he sighs while Tenten laughs.
Later, after a few hours of hard taijutsu training, they are all more than ready to eat, no matter what the quality of the offered food is.
Predictably enough, Gai's potato salad is superb, and Lee demonstrates his ability to make a mean bowl of soba. To his credit, the cookies that Neji reveals are only a little burnt. "I made them myself," he says unnecessarily, seeing as he appears to have burns on his hands that match the ones on his cookies.
As the moment of truth approaches, Tenten has to admit to feeling a little nervous. The frosting on her cake looks a little haphazard, and half of it is in buttercream, and the other half is vanilla. Despite this, however, her team pronounces the cake delicious. Gai praises the effort and the creative frosting scheme, Lee raves about the perfect flavor, and Neji says nothing, but eats two pieces.
Tenten beams.
Happiness
For Tenten, happiness is a lot of different things.
On one level, it's the feeling she gets when she hits the center of the target without even aiming. When she successfully immobilizes a target. The rush of exhilaration she feels at successfully completing yet another mission. Some days, it's the heady, giddy feeling of simply surviving from one mission to the next. The knowledge that this isn't going to be the last day she meets Neji in the clearing to hone his Kaiten, or the last time she tries to shake some sense into Lee. It's knowing that she'll still be able to suffer through yet another of Gai-sensei's potato meals next week, or next month.
In a way, that's the kind of happiness that only shinobi can experience. That overwhelming feeling of just being alive, when they could just as easily be dead. That feeling of being invincible when she's speeding through the trees, or flying with her twin dragons.
Happiness is smaller, too. Well – not smaller, just different. It's seeing Lee and Neji spar together, not fueled by that intense anger and rivalry, but out of simple friendship. It's being able to have them there for her when she needs it.
Above all, though, Tenten is happy knowing that she has a purpose. Her duty to Konoha, her duty to her fellow shinobi, and knowing that she would gladly lay down her life to protect her village and its people.
(Despite her lack of a last name, she has built an identity here, one that is intricately and irrevocably wrapped around the path she has chosen, and that is something she would not trade for the world.)
Telephone
Tenten's first real relationship is with Kankurou, the famed puppet master of the Sand.
It isn't anything she imagined that her first relationship would be. First of all, Kankurou asked her out when he traveled to Konoha to prepare for and undergo his jounin exams. At the time, she was preparing for her second try at the chuunin exams. Through a mysterious twist in fate (and Sakura's being detained by the amorous Kiba), Tenten ends up training, alone, with Kankurou.
That's how it started – an apparently one-off thing became thrice-weekly sessions in a nearby forest. Before she knows it, Tenten finds herself quite fascinated with the older teenager. She had never really interacted with males outside of her team before, and Kankurou was certainly…unique.
By the time he is a newly-minted jounin and she a chuunin, he asks her out on a date. Tenten accepts gladly.
Now, as all common sense and logic tells her, there is absolutely no need to inform her teammates and sensei about this latest development in her life. She has just turned sixteen, and she has a right to have a life outside of Team Gai.
However, certain people do not see it the same way. Neji storms up to her one afternoon and demands to know why she isn't available to train with him as often as before. One thing leads to another, and thanks to Neji's intimidation skills, Tenten is blurting out the story of her secret relationship with Kankurou.
That day, Tenten experiences the full force of a Hyuuga Glare. And then, to make matters worse, he turns around and disappears in a puff of smoke, and even though she searches for the next two hours, she still cannot find him.
The next morning when she arrives at training, she is greeted with three identical stony glares, and even as she raises her hand to wave to her teammates and sensei, she curses the fact that male shinobi insist on being so damn protective of their female counterparts.
To his credit, Kankurou withstands Lee and Neji being outright aggressive and unbearable to him, and even though Gai acts as friendly as always, there is a hint of steel in his eyes that hadn't been present before, and Kankurou can't help but feel more than a little afraid.
Truly, Tenten doesn't know half of the things that her teammates do to her boyfriend. She doesn't know about Neji 'happening' to corner Kankurou one night in a dark alleyway, and whispering, menacingly, that if "you break her heart, I'll break your face." Or about how Lee volunteers, despite great bodily risk to himself, to be one of the sparring partners against the jounin exam selectees. When Kankurou is taken to the hospital after his third round, he refuses to tell Tenten about who beat him so badly, citing confidentiality reasons. The weapons mistress fails to notice that Lee is mysteriously missing for three days after said match.
Tenten does find out about the time Neji and Lee tap her telephone conversation with Kankurou, though. To this day, Lee blames Neji, because if Neji hadn't snorted at that highly inopportune time of romantic silence, then Tenten wouldn't have found out, and the hugest, and only, fight that Team Gai ever had, could have been averted.
Tenten doesn't speak to either of them for a week after said incident. In response to their more drastic attempts to engage her in conversation, they get sharp, pointy objects thrown at their heads.
The thoroughly enraged kunoichi would have been glad to avoid them for a month, really. However, Neji and Lee do not share that same outlook. Through sheer desperation, they enlist the help of one Nara Shikamaru, and as a result of the ensuing plan, Tenten ends up hanging upside down by the ankle, suspended by the branch of an old oak tree, while her two teammates watch regretfully, albeit from a safe distance.
Once the screaming and yelling have worn out her throat, she simply dangles there. "…What have you boys to say for yourself?" she manages at last.
"Anything that we do for you, Tenten—" Neji says finally, catching her gaze.
"—We do it out of love." finishes Lee dolefully.
"And we are sorry if our actions on the telephone upset you in any way," Neji mumbles in a similar fashion.
Tenten watches the two sorry figures, one austerely clad in Hyuuga robes, and the other wearing hideous green spandex, with an inscrutable expression in her eyes. "Let me down," she says at last.
Feeling no small amount of trepidation, Neji severs the rope with his kunai, and he and Lee both steady their female teammate before she can topple to the ground. Before they can step away slowly, Tenten surprises them both by pulling them into a tight hug.
Neji and Lee blink at each other over Tenten's head.
"You're…not…mad?" Lee chokes out at last.
Tenten gives a muffled giggle against Neji's shoulder. "I was mad enough to castrate you both and hang you upside down on Konoha's gates. But…well…how could I have stayed that angry, knowing that you guys just do these twisted things because you care?"
"Right," Neji and Lee chorus weakly.
She breaks away from them, and pats them both on the shoulders. "…But if you ever do that to any of my other boyfriends, I will hurt you. Now, let's go get some ramen and put this whole nasty incident behind us."
The other two follow along dutifully, although the entirety of her words doesn't hit Neji until an hour later, when they are all seated at Ichiraku. "…Other boyfriends, Tenten? If that's the case, I believe we need to set down some ground rules—"
Neji is rewarded with a noodle to the ear for his troubles.
Ears
As a rule, Team Gai doesn't go out drinking much, despite the fact that Tenten, for one, holds her drinking very well. Her teammates, on the other hand, are a completely different story. Neji has a tendency to pass out after a relatively small amount of anything but the mildest cocktails, and on the occasions he resists fainting, he becomes such a ridiculous drunk that it's safest for all involved that he be locked away from humanity until he is in his right mind again. And Lee…well…Drunken Fist. Enough said.
Tenten is convinced that the downfall of the great Hyuuga Neji will be his inability to drink reasonable amounts of liquor and remain sober. And if another bar is destroyed thanks to the Drunken Fist, Lee will be driven out of Konoha by the enraged owners of eateries and their patrons alike.
They will never admit it, but both Neji and Lee despise Tenten for the fact that no matter what, the kunoichi just does not get drunk. She never has to be dragged home, or have Sakura personally brew her up a nasty-tasting anti-hangover solution. She hasn't spilled any embarrassing secrets, stories, or pet names, a la Neji, and she certainly hasn't caused widespread destruction while under the influence, like Lee.
What her teammates don't remember, thankfully, is their first time going out for a drink. They had all been sixteen (underage), and should have known better. But they had successfully completed an A-rank mission without any great injury to their persons, an occasion that merited celebration. It was Tenten's idea, and Lee jumped into it enthusiastically. Neji was just dragged along to make sure that the two of them didn't get into any trouble.
Within an hour, Neji was in a dead faint, Lee was prancing around from table to table doing taijutsu demonstrations and scaring patrons, and Tenten was attracting a large amount of young male jounin, most notably, one Shiranui Genma.
Tenten doesn't remember most of her initial drunk pick-up lines toward Genma, but, knowing her, she just knows that they related to weapons, specifically senbon, in some way. And it just happened to be her luck that Genma was a pervert almost as notorious as the great Jiraiya-sama.
Nothing happened between the two, of course, except for Tenten's telling Genma that he had extremely sexy ears, and they were so much cuter than hers.
"I would die for your ears," she told him mournfully, downing yet another shot of vodka. "Mine are…are…-hic-…panda! I have p-p-panda ears and they make me want to die!"
At that point, Tenten passed out into his lap.
She woke up the next morning in her bed, having been deposited there by the very considerate Genma. Neji and Lee had been dropped on the floor, with Neji snoring up a storm, seemingly unaware, and a note on Lee's chest saying that the spandex-clad teenager had to be knocked out before being dragged to Tenten's, and that Tenten owned Genma for the loss of three senbon.
Tenten spent the next day with a killer hangover. She spent the days after that raiding Sakura's medical library in search for any way possible to increase alcohol tolerance. Tsunade-sama found her during one of those exploits, and upon listening to the blushing Tenten's explanation, the legendary Tsunade shrugged and told Tenten to do it the old fashioned way – just get drunk every week until your alcohol tolerance edged higher and higher. "It's how I survived, anyway," the blonde Sannin told her with a smirk.
That is how Tenten achieves her current level of near-imperviousness to alcohol. It's something she's extremely proud of.
(Every time she sees Shiranui Genma in the streets, though, he smirks at her mischievously and whispers, "Panda," and Tenten feels like she could go die in the nearest ditch out of sheer mortification.)
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