Tenten Appreciation Week. Prompt #1
Admiration
He's known her since she was all elbows and hard angles - coltish with eyes too wide and too large and too hopeful for anyone determined to navigate life as a shinobi.
There is a natural exuberance and lightness to her - an optimism tempered with an indefatigable work ethic, and her buoyancy is the fulcrum dictating the balance between Gai and Lee's over-enthusiasm for all things and his under-enthusiasm for all things.
She isn't the prodigy and she isn't the protegee - she is simply Tenten.
But Neji knows that there is an entire universe inside of her, and that they are all held in orbit and from chaos by her kindness and insight and even her gentle exasperation.
The day he wakes in the hospital to find her there, he thinks maybe Naruto saved him once, but she has saved him now - pulling him back from the brink of nothing by being everything.
She flings her arms around his neck and demands that he never do that to them again and he holds her as tightly as his injuries will allow, disoriented to everything but the feel and smell and sight and taste of her.
That day he decides to never let go, and four years later he swears the same in front of their friends and family and Konoha and the chaos and the universe that glows and spins and bursts inside of her.
And when she lays in his arms, warm and pliant and beautiful in sleep, she is still just Tenten.
And that, he thinks, is more than anyone can ever hope to be.