Written on the plane for Hyperphonic, who has been posting super-adorable domestic NejiTen fic. Go read if you haven't already. ;)

Naruto and its characters do not belong to me.


Herring Soba for the Uninitiated

Tenten discovers Neji's fondness of herring soba quite by accident.

They are thirteen and training for long hours each day, with little break between spars for lunches. (Breakfast is a light meal before they leave home, and dinner occurs only after they've broken from training each day.)

Each member of Team Gai brings his (or her) own bento - Neji's is prepared by the maids in the Hyuuga kitchen (typically sushi rice and some meat), while Lee's and Gai's are some concoction of green or other. Tenten experiments the most in the kitchen, resulting in bento meals that end up delicious, awful, or somewhere in between.

Today, she has an assortment of bowls - one each for cooked soba, soup, and pieces of herring that she got at a discount the day before. Neji looks warily at her as she lays the various bowls out, humming. (He remembers far too well the pumpkin everything the week before - pumpkin cakes, fried pumpkin pieces, pumpkin tempura, pumpkin sushi... It had been enough to make him lose his appetite.)

"Want some, Neji?" Tenten splits the noodles into a couple of bowls (Lee and Gai are somewhere around the village) and tops them off with marinated slices of fish, ladling soup into each bowl at the end. "I made some extra for you."

He looks warily at the noodles, which are lukewarm and don't have a distinctive scent to hint at their edibility. Tenten tries the food first (as she often does, when Lee isn't around to be the voluntary guinea pig). The look on her face is one of delight; with no less hesitation, Neji reaches for his bowl, picking a couple strands of noodles up together with a small piece of fish.

It is surprisingly good.

So good, in fact, that he's finished his bowl even before Tenten's eaten half of hers.

He ends up trading his bento for the remnants of her herring soba.

Tenten grins the widest he's ever seen, and she's back the next day with more herring soba yet. (He barely refrains from stuffing his face like the ravenous homeless his uncle frowns upon.)

(Neji almost falls into a food-induced coma after.)

When Tenten offers to teach him to cook his beloved herring soba a couple of weeks later, he readily accepts (though he puts his foot down at having to wear a fluorescent pink apron during her lessons).


Yes, Neji and his herring soba. ;) might update f/2.8 sometime soon. ;)