Ominously bubbling redness.
The aromatic, pungent smell of pepper.
Lee yelling "Delicious!" and shoveling down mouthful after mouthful of the meal. Tenten, not yelling "Delicious!", but still downing her bowl with a look of exasperation on her face at Lee's antics. Guy-sensei beaming at Neji expectantly and flashing him a blinding smile and a thumbs-up.
This sucked. Why was this happening to him? Neji was a repentant person. He had fully accepted that over the past several years, he had basically been...a jackass, and was honestly, sincerely, from the bottom of his heart remorseful for his atrocious behavior.
He was truly sorry for his cruelty and murder attempt against Hinata-sama. To make amends with his poor cousin, he'd gotten down on his knees and begged for forgiveness. He'd been helping her practice jyuuken for the past few months and she was improving dramatically, much to his satisfaction. When Neji (stupidly) told this to Guy-sensei, his skull and ribcage had almost been flattened in the hug that the maniac had given him, and then his eardrums followed suit with the explosion of "YOUTH" that Guy-sensei seemed incapable of expressing in an indoor voice.
More than that. Neji had apologized to Lee for his hubristic behavior for the full year that they'd been teammates, for his cutting, casual remarks that since there was no way that Lee could ever become a splendid ninja, he shouldn't even try because Lee would only hurt himself in the process. Another almost-broken skull and ribcage and ruptured eardrums later, and Neji had started to suspect that maybe he was a glutton for punishment.
He'd also apologized to Tenten, even though he hadn't done anything to her specifically, and had been rewarded with...this. First came another horrific, traumatizing mauling that his teammate and sensei insanely called "hugging" and "youth" and "love" (eww), and second came Tenten's suggestion that since Neji had stopped being...(how he regretted his uncharacteristic word choice)..."a jackass," and had decided to improve himself, they as a team needed to "bond" with him, and specifically do things outside of training. "Leisurely" things, like going on picnics to see the flowers during springtime and frolicking in the woods and other nauseating activities. Well...maybe he was exaggerating and blowing things out of proportion, maybe Tenten had only said, "Thanks a lot, Neji! You know, springtime's really nice, maybe we can all hang out together in the park!"
And maybe those things weren't nauseating, and maybe Neji had in fact enjoyed all of those suggested activities quite a lot, but three hours' worth of fun times could be completely and utterly ruined if the next hour was hell; then all your memories of the day would be poisoned, and then you would wonder why horrible things were happening to you even though you were trying so hard to change.
Tenten had ruined the entire day. After going on picnics to see the flowers during springtime and frolicking in the woods, she had declared that she was hungry and that they should all stop for a bite to eat, before dragging them all off to a restaurant serving the spiciest hell food human beings had ever devised. She knew he hated spicy food. And she still dragged him off to eat spicy food.
Tenten was evil.
Back at that one restaurant they'd went to when Lee had mastered Omote Renge, Tenten had absentmindedly dumped shichimi togarashi on his herring soba instead of hers, Neji had absentmindedly eaten it, and the mild condiment had set fire to his mouth.
Unfortunately for him, Tenten had noticed and was just about to comment, but then Lee accidentally drank Guy-sensei's sake, and then they were preoccupied with the horror show that followed.
Tenten had clearly remembered that his mouth had been set aflame, and had drawn entirely the wrong conclusions.
"Hey, Guy-sensei, Lee!" she had yelled, sprinting over to that hell on earth. "Let's go eat over there! Neji loves spicy food!"
Of course this meant that before Neji could even open his mouth to protest, Guy-sensei and Lee, who actually loved spicy food, had once again subjected him to a traumatizing, horrific mauling that they called "hugging" and now he was here, face to face with this ominous bubbling redness from which the pungent smell of red pepper was emanating. He didn't even know what it was. The menu had only named the dish as their "super secret extra spicy special recipe" and Tenten had ordered it for them all. She loved the "mystery," as did Guy-sensei and Lee, and Neji, for the first time in years, felt nearly driven to tears.
Did he have no voice on this team at all?
"DELICIOUS!"
"This is a super special dish indeed, right, my beautiful students?"
"Yeah, yeah, whatever...Guy-sensei, Lee, don't talk so loudly, people are staring..."
Freaks. He was surrounded by freaks.
He would never do "leisurely activities" with these...these maniacs ever again. They all wanted to kill him.
Especially Tenten. Something was wrong with her.
Little did Neji know that he would eat those words very, very soon.
A/N: Hello, everyone, and please leave a review! This was written for Day 3: Leisure, featuring a Neji with quite the volatile stomach, and Tenten torturing him without even realizing it! :)