VVVVVV
Temari leapt eagerly from her bunk the next morning, which was unusual because she was absolutely not a morning person, in fact, she was not even a late morning person or a somewhere-around-noon person or even a person at all – no wait – well, in any case, she was not prone to gleeful leaps out of bed at ungodly hours like 10:00am but that is what happened on this morning because today she actually had something to look forward to that wasn't Norman the Nudist or bugs: training with that dipstick Neji and hopefully leaving him some bruises to remember her by.
Temari's plans were momentarily postponed by the unannounced arrival of Kankuro, her dear puppet-wielding, makeup-wearing, margarine-eating brother (who, to this day, can't believe it's not butter).
Kankuro burst into Temari's bunkhouse without knocking, providing a fine illustration of his family's celebrated civility and manners. Thankfully, Temari was eating breakfast at this point and not doing anything embarrassing like flouncing around naked and re-enacting Norman's latest escapades because she would totally lock the door before she did that.
"Hey hey hey," was Kankuro's greeting as he swiped Temari's carefully prepared cheez-whiz sandwich. "I'm on a mission – D rank, god can you believe this – and thought I'd drop by to see my favourite sis. How goes border duty?"
The siblings made their way outside – well, Kankuro made his way outside chased by Temari who wanted her sandwich back – and resumed their conversation when the issue of contention had been settled in that Kankuro managed to drop the sandwich and then Temari didn't want to eat it any more.
Kankuro ate the dusty sandwich and looked across the road to where Neji stood with his arms folded across his chest staring down the Konoha side. "So," Kankuro munched, "who's your partner in Loserville?"
"He's Neji, but I call him a knob, mostly." said Temari. "He's blind. Also deaf-mute."
"Wow," said Kankuro. "Isn't he one of them – uh…"
"Who?" Temari turned to study Neji's profile more closely, "I knew he looked familiar but…"
"– Leaf guys?"
"No shit!" said Temari, and she thanked Kankuro for this dazzling flash of the obvious.
"Well okay…" Kankuro examined Neji with growing interest. "He does look familiar. Chuunin exam-familiar."
"Oh… now we're getting somewhere." Temari nodded slowly. "The only thing I remember from that was my blowing that one chick out of the water. Tintin or something."
"Tintin? Naw, that's like a Belgian comic about that reporter with the hair."
"Tonton? Nope, that's someone's pet piggy… Tenten!"
"Tenten! Yeah! She was pretty hot for a Leaf." Kankuro chewed silently for a moment before he added slyly, "I liked her buns."
"Which buns, now?" Temari asked with a wink. They both burst out laughing in a highly un-ninjalike manner.
"I'm so going to look her up next time I'm in Konoha," Kankuro stated and he whipped out his Very Secret Hit List notebook, adding Tenten to the two names there (the others were, in case the reader is curious, Cher and Wonder Woman). "So anyway, back to Mysterio over there."
Both Sand nin turned to look at the straight-backed figure across the road.
"You know what," said Temari after a few moments of contemplation, "he's got to be from one of those old Konoha clans. But not the shadow clan – Shikamaru's – now there's a hot Leaf for you – or the fat guy clan…"
"Or the crazy mind-swapin' time-warpin' sizzlin' blonde bombshell clan…"
"There was that one with the eyes." Temari stated after both had furrowed their brows in silent consternation.
"Yeah but his eyes went red and freaky and then he like, ran away with the pedophile."
"No – not that one – the x-ray vision thing – remember? That one short chick with the black hair? She had eyes like him! I remember!"
"Oh yeah! And she had a nice rack!"
"Ok… ok… I'm remembering this… their family name started with an H…" said Temari, "and they were prone to melodramatic flashbacks…"
"H-Ha-something something? Harvey's?"
"That's a fast food chain."
"Herpes?"
"Mayb–"
"It's Hyuuga," Neji said flatly from his post across the road while struggling to contain the Palmstrike O' Death (TM).
"Hyuuga! Yeah!" the Sand siblings exclaimed, pleased with themselves.
"Mystery solved," said Kankuro cheerily. "Now I'm off to clean out a barn."
Temari reflected that perhaps border duty wasn't all that bad. "Have fun wading knee-deep in manure," she answered, "I'll think of you."
"You do that. Thanks for the sandwich. It was pretty gross."
Then Kankuro was off swinging through trees with his arms dangling uselessly behind him while the camera provided all onlookers with panoramic sweeps of the forest with occasional zooming in on Kankuro's face as he muttered barn-cleaning strategies to himself.
Back at the bunkhouses, Temari sat on her boulder and reflected that she didn't actually know what her own last name was, and that kind of sucked.
She shared this thought with Neji who responded that it was probably a result of her peasant ancestry. Temari let him know that her ancestry was studded with Kazekages like he had no idea and she also informed him that he was henceforth to refer to her as "princess," which he refused to do with offensive rapidity.
"So anyway," said Temari after she had made herself a new cheez-whiz sandwich and eaten it and found it kind of gross, "we were supposed to train together today."
"Yes…" said Neji rather unenthusiastically.
"Let's lay down some ground rules." said Temari, "one: we aim to incapacitate and not to kill."
"Does putting you a coma for the next two and a half weeks count as incapacitation?" Neji asked very seriously.
"…No," said Temari after she had considered it. "Because I'll look like a corpse and that's, like, the same thing as being dead. Duh."
"Rule number two," Temari continued, "we're going to have to fight on the road and keep on it, too, because that's no-man's land–"
"– or woman's"
"– or woman's-land, and besides the Leaf side is totally a swamp and it would ruin my shoes."
"Fair enough," said Neji.
"Also, let's not use special killer jutsus or anything because if I used mine I would get another nasty letter from those hippies at the Konoha forestry department for damaging their trees. Anything else I'm not thinking about?"
"No," said Neji, who was nefariously planning to put Temari in a coma for at least twenty four hours, "let's go."
They circled and had at each other on the narrow stretch of road for a few minutes before they determined that their fighting styles were completely antithetical to one another's, which was kind of dumb, because it meant that Temari back-pedalled madly most of the time to keep Neji in range of her fan while Neji pushed forwards furiously to get her in range of his Eight Trigrams.
"This is stupid," said Temari finally when both were moderately sweaty and neither had managed to land any real hits.
"It was your dumb idea," Neji pointed out in mid-lunge. "If you would just stand still –"
"I don't think so –" Temari side-stepped neatly and aimed a vicious blow at the back of Neji's head with her still-folded fan, which he blocked just as neatly.
"How could you have seen that?" Temari asked incredulously. "There is no way –"
Temari interrupted herself to gasp in horror. "Oh my god!" she cried.
"What?" Neji asked while edging sneakily closer.
"Do you have problems with high blood pressure?" Temari enquired apprehensively before she swung her fan murderously towards him.
"No…" said Neji, ducking swiftly and grabbing the fan with an internal promise not to let go until he had flung it far away.
"Because your face has gone all weird and veiny," Temari said with her usual delicacy while she yanked forcefully at her fan.
"That would be," Neji explained patiently without relinquishing his grasp on the fan, "the Byakugan. My bloodline limit. Stupid."
"Oh yeah…" Temari said before snapping her fan open, forcing Neji to release it and narrowly missing his groin with its razor edge. She whirled the fan above her head while considering Neji with a critical eye. "It's ugly."
"It's useful," said Neji defensively while thanking the hokages past and present for the reflexive dodge that had allowed him to keep the family jewels intact.
"Like how?" asked Temari.
"Like I can see that you have a weird scar-tissue build-up in your left lung. You should get that checked."
Temari was scandalized by this revelation of a very personal nature. "If you must know," she said, "I inhaled a shuriken when I was twelve, okay?"
Temari slapped her fan around a quickly-dodging Neji a couple of times and added, "don't be Byakugan-ing people without permission. It's not manners."
"Hold," said Neji suddenly, "somebody's coming."
Both nin froze temporarily, then spilt to their respective sides and sat looking coolly and collectedly at a figure detaching itself from the gloom of the Konoha forest.
"Hello, good morning! Cheer and youth to all," said the figure, which on closer inspection revealed itself to be a young man in a green outfit sporting orange leg-warmers, "beautiful day, isn't it?"
Temari was immediately suspicious of him because he was so happy. "Please declare any weapons, drugs, lawyers and/or military vehicles you may have concealed on your person," she demanded imperiously.
"Oh," said the man, "I am not here to cross the border but merely to greet my Hyuuga team-mate with the Effusion of Youth he has probably been missing sorely."
"Oh," said Temari. "Then please continue. Your hair is fascinating."
"Thank you very much," said the man in green politely and he turned towards where Neji sat facing the Sand desert resolutely.
Temari watched the man go with narrowed eyes because she had just recognized him as the guy who had almost beaten Gaara at the chuunin exams whose name was Crotch Lee or something.
Temari wondered if she should hold a grudge against him for that but decided, very magnanimously she thought, that with a name like Crotch he could be forgiven for his past misdeeds.
Temari watched the two Leaf ninja converse, or rather one converse while the other looked anywhere but at him and seemed pretty annoyed. She caught such interesting phrases as "Gai-sensei," "new training regimen," "everlasting youthful vigour" and "Viagra".
Crotch Lee then shook Neji's hand with a tearful "I knew you would approve of our idea with so much youthful enthusiasm!" and turned to make his way back down the Leaf road, declaring in passing to Temari: "I will now drag myself back to Konoha using only my teeth!" which he presently began to do.
Temari watched him inch away on his stomach.
"Maybe," she suggested to Neji, "you should warn him about the scorpions."
"If you warn him about the scorpions," said Neji, "I'll kill you."
"Fair enough," said Temari, and together they watched Lee haul himself by the teeth around the bend of the road and into the Konoha forest.
VVVVVV
A/N: The rest will be up in smaller instalments lest I alienate everybody with enormous amounts of chapter spam.
This is the first pairing I've written where the protagonists don't have to try and kill each other on sight. Still comfortably in the realm of crack, though. The best place to be!