NejiTen Oneshots And Drabbles

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When Neji turned thirteen, Tenten told him that she was working on a project. On a mission that year, the silk band holding his hitai ate over his Manji seal was torn by an enemy's kunai. And after defeating that very enemy with her personal assortment of weaponry, Tenten asked if she might have the ruined band as he would have to replace it anyway. He had given it to her, thinking nothing of it at the time. A cut on her hand trickled blood onto the dark material.

And he thought nothing of the threadbare handkerchief he nearly threw out when they were fourteen, nor anything of the sleeve of his thick jacket after giving it up in favor of more traditional Hyuuga clothing at fifteen. She had taken the items as though they were gems.

Because her fights often involved sharp items not friendly to weak fabrics, Tenten had ruined various articles of clothing in her time. She once recruited Neji and Lee to help her box some old clothes she had planned to sell at a second-hand store; in adding a pink cotton blouse he remembered from their younger years, she had paused and then taken the shirt out again to store on a closet shelf. He shrugged and caught a carton of old shorts before Lee dropped them all over the place.

Team Gai battled a unit from the Lightning Country when they were seventeen. Neji made sure they were victorious before the dawn arrived, and Tenten's favorite combat attire had taken a shuriken's points. She took a piece of the hanging, burgundy satin in her hand. Neji had heard her murmur something.

"Perfect."

The day Lee became a Jounin, he offered her one of the many green training shirts he had in his possession. Tenten had thanked him, taking it and remarking on how well the color would look with a light blue. Gai just so happened to carry a light blue bandana in case there was an opponent to blindfold. Tenten had nipped it from him, practically giddy.

At Hinata's nineteenth birthday party, Neji had been watching Tenten dance with Inuzuka Kiba and had somehow – and to this day he still could not comprehend how – spilled a pink-colored wine down the front of his stark white dress shirt. Tenten had needlessly begged him for it, and he had wordlessly handed it over at the end of the party.

At twenty, he fell in love with her. She was reclining on a grassy hill in the middle of a summer night, spending time with him before she left on a mission with Sakura. A firefly circled around her head, its golden light gleaming like stars in her eyes, and he kissed her right when the rain started. He missed her for the week she was gone and when she returned, he made love to her in her own bed. Just before the sun reached the horizon, when she thought he was sleeping, he saw her get scissors and snip off a section of the yellow sheet beneath their intertwined bodies.

Two years later they were married. After the wedding, Neji presented her with an extravagant spear made by the Hyuuga family's personal craftsman – and a pair of shining silver scissors. He told her he had know idea why she was always cutting things up, but he would support her in it.

She had proceeded to have him hold up the outer skirt of her wedding kimono while she cut out a square from her underskirt's fabric. She placed it carefully in one of the suitcases she had brought to the Hyuuga compound. Then Tenten turned and allowed him to remove the rest of her clothing.

His firstborn child, a girl, was as beautiful a contrast of light and dark as her father. She needed two baby blankets; one that Tenten went back to over and over again because she swore up and down that she couldn't get the piece she needed from it, and another that the child's mother was not allowed to touch when she held her silver scissors.