Tenten's OTP

Warnings: Fangirls and all that the word implies


Nobody names real-life pairings that they ship. They just say, "oh, I hope Lee asks Sakura out now that she's not a hateful bitch," or "Do Naruto and Sasuke give anyone else major gay vibes?"

Tenten would have been overjoyed to discover that, in another dimension, there was a whole fanbase of people who were as devoted to her favorite couple as she was.

For Tenten was a NejiHina shipper.

Neji had picked up on this, of course, but he tended to avoid confronting her about it, in hopes that if he refused to acknowledge the pairing, Tenten would forget about Hinata and fall in love with him and they could live not-unhappily ever after and his life would be relatively good. (Puberty had hit Neji like a red-headed stepchild. I'm not sure what I mean by that, but the result was that he just wanted things to sort themselves out on their own. Actually, this had been Neji's philosophy on just about everything. Thus the Destiny Theory.) He felt that if he was meant by the Powers That Be to hook up with Hinata, 1) he wouldn't hate her entire family, including herself on occasion, 2) she wouldn't be related to him 3) she would be on his team, 4) she would have brown hair and brown eyes and wear pink and... well, you get the picture.

Hinata, on the other hand, didn't spend as much time with Tenten, and didn't notice until she happened to run into Team Gai by the river, Konoha's ever-popular swimming hole, where most of her friends were hanging out.

"Oh, Neji, look, Hinata's here!" Tenten exclaimed, waving the girl over before Neji could stop her.

"And you wonder why I hate leaving the house," he muttered under his breath

"Oh, don't be so anti-social! I'm sure that she'd like to talk to you, you just don't let her."

"There's a reason I don—,"

"Hey, Hinata!" Tenten said brightly, grabbing her by the arm when she got within reach and pulling her uncomfortably close to her and Neji. Of course, uncomfortably close for Hinata was what other people consider the average distance required to have a conversation.

"H-hi..." Hinata stuttered. She might have been blushing, or she might have been sunburned. Neji knew which one Tenten saw.

"It's really great to see you!" Tenten babbled eagerly. "We were just talking about you,"

"No we weren't—," Neji started. Tenten stepped on his toe.

"Well, I'd better get going," she said, pushing the pair a little closer to each other and skipping off. "I've got to get home! But you two have fun!"

"So, Nii-san, what's with Tenten?" Hinata asked after Tenten had excused herself. "Is she... in love with me?"

"Nah, nothing like that. She thinks I'm in love with you."

Hinata smiled, like this might be a mildly-amusing joke, but she wasn't sure. "But... we're cousins... and you hate me."

"Yeah, I know."

"Talk about a crack ship," Hinata whispered. She could have said some other stuff, but she figured that Neji would hit her if she said anything too insulting about his teammate. She understood; Tenten was cute, the only girl he talked to, and he was always looking for an excuse to hit her (Hinata) anyway.

"Pure cocaine," Neji agreed.

Naruto, slightly moist from being pushed in the water by Kiba, draped one arm over each cousin's shoulder. "Are you two dealing drugs? Can I get a cut?"

"Tenten's a crack shipper," Hinata explained. Sakura and Ino's heads snapped up a few feet away.

"Tenten likes the crack?" they asked.

"What pair?" Naruto asked.

"She thinks me and Hinata should hook up," Neji explained. He and Hinata smiled and rolled their eyes as if to say, "see, isn't she nuts?"

"She ships Hyuugacest?" Sakura asked.

"If you want to call it that... but yeah, crack."

The rookie eight stared at them. "NEJIHINA ISN'T CRACK!" they yelled.

"What do you mean it isn't crack?" Neji yelled. "The only thing more on crack than that is ChoujiIno!"

Chouji and Ino coughed. Neji glared at them. "Well, all right, but NejiHina's still crack."

"You're joking, right?" Sasuke asked. "I mean, the only pairings with you guys LESS on crack than you together is NaruHina, and that mostly on the basis of," he tapped his fingers together and whispered, "Na-Naruto-kun, when I do this, I'm trying to tell you I like gay sex..."

"And NejiTen," Shikamaru explained, "which comes solely from Tenten thinking about you so loudly at the Chunin exams that you hear her. And I guess that if she ships NejiHina, she can't be in love with you, after all, so I guess NejiHina really is the closest thing to cannon Neji's got going on for him."

"What about NejiLee?" Hinata suggested. Neji gave her a look that could have stopped Chuck Norris. "That's not crack."

The others considered this. "It's more crack than NejiHina," Sakura said. "'Cause Lee and Gaara, well..."

"What about KibaHina?" Neji said. "That's not crack."

"Neither is KankyKiba," Shino said. Kiba hit him.

"Sakura's the Town Bicycle," Hinata said, "Surely NejiSaku's less on crack than—,"

Sakura sized him up coldly. "You've got to be kidding."

Neji shifted uncomfortably. "I'm not that bad... What about Uchihacest? Sasuke, you should be on our side of this discussion!"

Sasuke shrugged. "I'm over it. I mean, Nii-san and his Kisa-kun are happy now, and we all know he wasn't stable, it seems possible he used to..."

"Look, it's perfectly plausible that you two are in love,"

"BUT WE AREN'T!"

"Did we say you were? No, we said you could be."

"She's my cousin!"

"And?"

"He tried to kill me!"

"Sexual tension..."

"Have you guys lost your minds?! We're not— we haven't— we wouldn't—,"

"Methinks the cousins doth protest too much," Chouji quipped, ducking under the water and making a swim for it before either of them could come after him. However, they weren't about to stand for this from the kid from Clan Happy and Well Adjusted, and both of them dove into the water to go hunt him down.

"Try to keep your hands off each other while down there trying to kill him, ok?" Naruto laughed when they were submerged. Because he liked the Hyuuga cousins, for all their bizarre dysfunctionality, and didn't want them thinking that he was into Hyuugacest.

Neji's head popped up above the water. "You're next!"