Long-delayed but actually here. Forgive?

The morning of Hyuuga Neji's sixteenth birthday dawned fair and clear - much to the relief of the Hyuugas, who feared that any other result would cause Tenten and Hayo-san, the cook, to be irritated.

Tenten arrived early in the morning, was greeted by a significant portion of the compound's population, and was very flattered by their courtesy - but she was too focused on the tasks awaiting her to react very much.

And Neji was thankful for this as he watched her from his second-storey room, perched on his windowsill like a brooding eagle. She was currently giving orders to a group of visibly eager Hyuuga boys, the ones who had served as her bodyguards looking as if they considered her their own special property and the ones who hadn't looking as if they intended to make up for this lack. They bristled jealously at each other and Neji, far above, bristled jealously at them all. She was his teammate, his classmate, even, and he had known her for YEARS longer than they had. By what right did they dare speak to her so familiarly - look at her so smilingly?

Tenten looked at the clipboard in her hands much more often than she looked at the Hyuugas surrounding her, and this comforted Neji. But whenever she did look up she distributed smiles and kind looks and "please"s and "thank you"s with a generosity that dazzled the undemonstrative Hyuugas - and this annoyed Neji. Soon she had them scurrying about on errands and tasks, doing things they would have counted beneath them - yea, beneath even the Branch - with enthusiasm and cheer, concerned only that they make her task, which was all to the benefit of their stuck-up prig of a cousin, who did not in the least deserve her, easier.

Hyuuga Heiji established himself as her faithful shadow - he had been very insulted that he was not one of those chosen to be her bodyguard, and he thought that their excluding him just because he was five years old was very unfair - and dogged her steps; the other Hyuuga boys could not stick so close but they kept returning as soon as their tasks were done to swarm around her, and tell her helpful things, and be smiled at and thanked. In consequence things got set up very quickly.

And when nothing remained but to wait for Hayo and his squad - for he ran his kitchen as tightly as any ANBU frontline team - to complete food preparations, the Hyuugas exhorted Tenten to sit down and rest, and they would bring tea and cookies; Heiji clung to her leg and looked up at her with eyes that could melt the heart of a Cloud-nin, and begged for stories " 'bout dragons and things, in Yongland, please Ten-nee." and Tenten had no choice but to sit herself down on a green slope of the gardens, near where the practice-yards were.

Now this was too much for the watching Neji, and he was downstairs and running before he thought about it. It was true that Hiashi had ordered him to keep out of Tenten's way while she prepared things - but, he argued to himself, in the first place this was not the town, and in the second she was no longer preparing things, so it was perfectly all right for him to join her now. She was so conveniently near to the practice-yards too, it might be possible to get in a nice short spar.

By the time he arrived at the gardens, Heiji had established himself in place-of-pride on Tenten's lap, while his elders jostled for seats next to her. When Heiji understood that Neji was there to interrupt the story of the Lightning Dragon and the Storm That Made The Bamboo Creak, his face was awful to behold; and the other boys looked none too pleased either. Little did Neji care, and Tenten was already automatically putting down her cup of tea when a new group of people entered the scene.

"Neji-kuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuun!" came the cry, and Neji choked and turned pale.

The fangirls. Oh gods no.

They stampeded - no other word would suffice - for him, eyes alight with the zealous glee of rabid tigers making for a kill. Instantly his cousins - well-versed in the ways of Fangirl Protocol, Hiashi had decreed it a necessary lesson for all young Hyuugas (apparently there had been a very traumatic experience in his childhood with his own set of fangirls) - were a goodly distance from him.

And then Neji had an Idea.

It must be admitted that in itself, it was not a new Idea. It had been bouncing around in his head, in forms both conscious and sub-conscious, dreaming and waking, deliberate and inadvertent (and, it must be admitted, both innocent and - not) for months - no, years - now. He had examined the Idea from every possible angle, turning it around in his mind like he would turn over a particularly delicious candy in his mouth, sternly limiting himself to one - or two - or three or four or five, but only if She was looking particularly fetching that day - contemplations of the Idea per day, like an athlete limiting his caloric intake.

But he had been thinking of the Idea more and more lately, and all his powers of practiced meditation would not serve to keep the Idea out when It decided to come in; indeed, Neji had of late despaired that he was becoming obsessed.

But now the Idea seemed an eminently good one. It would not only be something he'd wanted to do for a very long time; it would not only warn his cousins away; it also would drive the fangirls away.

This Neji decided in the first half of a moment - in the second half he had spun, grabbed Tenten (all the while pretending he hadn't seen the stampeding horde) and in a move that Gai and Lee would have applauded as Brimming With Youth, dipped her like a flamenco-dancer hyped on sugar, bent his head to hers, and proceeded to kiss the living daylights out of Tenten like he had so often dreamed of doing.

A complete and absolute Silence - one that could not be described without capitalization - one such as may have been on the world when God first looked upon his work, and declared it Good - wrapped around the Hyuuga gardens, fangirls and fanboys and kissing couple all. Except for Neji, whose pale eyes had fluttered shut, every pair of eyes there were round with shock - including Tenten's.

And then the Silence was shattered by the heartbroken wailing of several teenage fangirls whose object of affection had just shown - very obviously - that he was now taken. They fled as quickly as they had come, and later the more spiteful among them would gather and try to hatch dark plots against She Who Had Stolen Our Neji-kun, but for now they, one and all, only wanted to flee to their bedrooms, weep into pillows, and consume massive amounts of ice-cream.

Within a few minutes the gardens were empty of all females aside from Tenten. Neji let her up, no longer looking at her but at the direction to which the fangirls had fled, with a satisfied look in his eye.

Later, they would argue whether it was Bad Luck, Karma, or his Fate. Heiji would maintain stoutly that it was because Neji was a "dam' bash'trd," no matter how his mother gasped (and his father smirked) at his language.

But regardless of the reason, it was an undeniable fact that in the midst of the shocked silence, Neji picked the wrong thing to say.

"Well," he announced, in a tone of supreme self-satisfaction, "That's got rid of them." He did not look at his teammate as he said this, which was a mistake.

"Hyuuga Neji, you unmitigated, unbelievable...ASSHOLE," Tenten hissed, in a tone low and quiet and utterly deadly, right before she hauled back and punched him in the jaw.

Tenten did not do slapping.

And then she was gone, fleeing the Hyuugas with their pale eyes all too much like his own, and disappearing with the speed of a Gai-trained kunoichi before anyone could so much as blink.

More than a dozen Byakugan eyes - even Heiji's activated, for the first time ever - swiveled to stare at a gaping Neji - and their gaze was not friendly.

At that moment, Hiashi - trailed by his two daughters and by most of the Council of Hyuuga Elders - emerged into the immaculately set-up party area.

Author's Note

It's been a while, huh? Sorry about that. I knew I promised to end Neji's sixteenth birthday - I remembered to start writing the chapter on July 3, exactly one year since I began the story -- but it took me so long to write I thought I may as well post what i had up. Heh. Anyone still reading this? Any comments? It's been a while since I've written any fic at all...

Yay wisdom teeth removal for giving me an excuse to stay home and write.