03: on the wings of love we falter
for 31_days.
title: Dynamic
fandom: Naruto
pairing: Neji/Tenten/Lee. mentions of Hinata/Neji & Sakura/Lee.
warnings: cursing. drunk!Tenten. oddness in plot.
headphones: "Shut Up and Kiss Me" by Pony Up!
Tenten pulled the kunai from the tree savagely, putting her entire body into it.
“Fuck,” she muttered and walked back to her starting point, throwing the sharp weapon with as much anger as she could summon.
The rift in the trunk, it became bigger as the kunai landed in precisely the same spot.
And again.
Team Gai had schematics. Team Ten had the strategy genius, but Team Gai had one thing that was better than strategy. They had a kickass dynamic. Every team’s was different, and some of them worked better than others.
Team Ten, they had a good dynamic, one burned into them from birth, and it was a dynamic so wonderful that it worked on and off the battlefield.
Team Gai, on the other hand, had no idea how to handle one another without weapons or murderous intent. But in a fight, there was no beating them. Beast, Bird, and...
Broad?
At least when they were fighting (one another, enemies, other friends, it made no real difference) Neji and Lee could view Tenten dispassionately, and her breasts and lack of a penis were not an issue. If she could throw worth a damn, then all was peachy, but as soon as either of the males were expected to have some sort of social grace they both acted like completely buffoons. Tenten knew that both of them knew how to act around females.
She’d seen both of them in action; Lee blowing heart-shaped smoke rings in Sakura’s direction, Hinata and Neji excusing themselves from the training session. Well, the culmination of both relationships maybe proved the opposite, after all. Sakura had never shown Lee the slightest bit of interest (and Lee wasn’t as heartbroken as Tenten had expected when she’d told him very matter-of-factly that she would rather screw a chicken) and Hinata made a point of never allowing Neji to touch her anymore.
But still. That didn’t in any way excuse them from common decency.
Tenten drove the kunai into the tree for a fifth time, and stomped across the tightly pounded dirt to pull it from the oak again.
She replayed the scene again in her head, trying to cool down and see it from their points of view. Neither of them was stupid, after all.
She, on the other hand...
The rage was bubbling; all the kunai in the world weren’t going to stop it from broiling and overflowing. Rather than throw another one against that old tree trunk, she knelt beside it, resting her cheek against its rough, but cool, surface.
Their dynamic, she thought to herself, had nothing to do with love and everything to do with hurting others. Was that a reflection of who they really were? Tenten knew she was no good at philosophical questions, and she wasn’t even sure if that could be considered philosophical or rhetorical, that question. She knew were the hard calluses on her fingertips and the sharply toned muscles on every part of her body, they were fine-tuned for battle. Her body’s perfect physical shape was another thing she knew. Neji’s skill and Lee’s determination, those were two more things. Everything else was vague and tenuous and Tenten couldn’t grip it.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow she’d blame it on the drinks she hadn’t had. Ino’s birthday bash two nights before should have been the perfect excuse to get wasted, and for every person at that party discounting her, it was. Someone, of course, had to stay in control and make sure no one was murdered. Kunoichi in a drunken rage were rather hard to stop sober, much less wasted.
Seeing Ino curled into Choji’s soft folds, and Shikamaru falling over himself to get into that sandwich...that kind of hurt.
Her team, they’d never envelope her like that.
Who was she kidding?
She was playing a kid game, here, and she’d never been a kid. She was playing at being in love, and she’d never been that either.
That sounded nice, complete. It sounded reasonable, and it sounded like something that someone grounded would say. Sound advice, all in all. Tenten rose to her feet, kicking dirt up into the night air.
She really shouldn’t have gone to that bar.
Stumbling in the Lee’s apartment last night, she’d mumbled words that sounded as much like a love-felt confession as an admonition against consuming alcohol. Neji was there, and that was no surprise. They weren’t really together in a way a host and a guest should be, but Neji was in the room that he’d set aside as his own, and Lee was holding his own in the kitchen, imbibing freshly squeeze orange juice at four in the morning.
Tenten wasn't sure how she'd moved from speaking to screaming, but that transition occurred and Neji’s steps, not very loud to begin with, were drowned out by her accusations.
“D’ya know that no’un’ll touch me ‘cause they’re all piss scared’a you two? I mean...fuck, there’s a chick who’s got th’fuckin’ strongest guys all over an’ there’s a chick who don’t, you’ll you bang? See the logic? I’M NEVER GETTIN’ LAID.”
And the two of them, they stared at her, their faces an epitome of shocked. Laid?
Tenten, she didn’t worry about sex. She wasn’t a typical female, touching herself on her downtime and screwing guys if she could spare enough time during her missions.
That was what they knew about Tenten’s sexual being, or her lack of one. They’d assumed that she was more asexual than anything else. Lee, he didn’t feel lust as much as adoration, and Neji was just the opposite. Tenten was the simple balancing point, or so they assumed.
“You...need sex?” Lee asked, wary. He glanced at Neij and found no help in that direction. “We...if you really need to let out some of your youthful impulses, Tenten, Neji and I get tested regularly, and I have quite a bit of girth-”
“LEE. I DUN FUCKEN NEED PITY SEX, YOU PIECE OF SHIT.”
And that hurt. Lee had never been called a piece of shit in his entire life. Yeah, pain in the ass was a regular part of Neji’s vocabulary when he was around Lee, but piece of shit was a different level of insult. Especially coming from the teammate who would only refer to him as obnoxious (out loud) under extreme duress. Neji frowned at this, and decided that being drunk was no excuse for wounding Lee. Especially when he was only being...well, Lee.
“Tenten. Sit down,” he told her in his not-taking-your-shit voice, but she ignored him, as she usually did when he began to boss her around.
“FUCK YOU. Oh, mista fucken tightwad tellin’ me what to do jus’ ‘cause y’can fucken screw your cousin into submission don’t mean I’m anythin’ like ‘inata. BUT TRY IT, ASSHOLE. TRY TA RA-”
And he hit her square in the stomach, knocking the air out of her smoothly and shutting her up quickly. He grabbed a fist of her hair and pulled, her neck stretching back painfully. “Don’t you talk about me like that, Tenten. Don’t you dare.”
And she chuckled between gasps of breath, trying to get back all that missing air. “Not...denyin’ it, eh?”
He shoved her away from him, and she hit the wall hard. Her arm hurt, and it felt broken, but she couldn’t be sure. All she knew was that she’d gotten what she’d wanted. Revenge.
Revenge for what, though, she thought now that she was sober. They hadn’t done anything to her, at least not consciously. All the hurt that she’d stored up inside, they hadn’t done it on purpose. And she’d hit them where it hurt the hardest because of it.
God, she was the biggest bitch. How could she face them, even if she’d been drunk? All those accusations, they hadn’t come from thin air, and Neji and Lee weren’t dumb enough to believe that they had. How could she explain that lately, she'd almost been able to convince herself that she hated them.
Tenten knew she couldn’t hide out forever.
The apartment was cool when she slunk inside, and the sun was peeking through from behind the thin fabric of the curtains. It was quiet, and that was almost enough to allow her to leave once more. They wouldn’t exactly be in the best of moods when she woke them up at four in the morning.
But she kept walking, her feet making a drum roll against the wooden floor.
The door squeaked.
Lee was looking at her, his eyes serious and holding more forgiveness than she’d expected. They weren’t hardened into glares, his eyes, and she knew that he knew that she hadn’t meant it.
Looking past him, she saw the lump under the covers that was Neji. And under the covers meant...under the covers. She couldn’t even make out the top of his head, they were pulled up so high. Neji acted so fearless, but in bed he looked more like a frightened child than anything else. His chest rose and fell underneath the blankets.
“He might still be angry,” Lee told her in a whisper.
Her answer was under evaluation; she knew and accepted this. “I know.”
“He might always be angry.”
“...I know.”
“But he probably won’t.”
“I know. Neji, look at me.”
He hadn’t been sleeping, and Tenten had known that, too.
He slowly withdrew the covers, and faced her, his eyes outlined with a dark shadow, as if he hadn’t slept. For the first time Tenten realized that...Lee and Neji were in the same bed. And that Lee...
He didn’t have a shirt on. While that wasn’t really the oddest thing she had ever witnessed, Neji didn’t have one on either.
“I’m sorry,” Tenten told him, trying to brush away the bitterness that rose in her throat like bile. This wasn’t about what they’d done; this was about what she’d said.
And Neji nodded, accepting her apology in one swift movement, and then went under the covers again, perhaps this time to sleep. Lee looked at him, and then looked back up at Tenten, who mirrored his expression of awe. Those Hyuga, there were none like them.
Tenten bent over and took off her shoes, realizing too late that she’d trampled dirt everywhere. She left them against the wall, and padded over to the bed, sitting down beside Lee. I’m sorry wasn’t as easy with him, with whom words wouldn’t be quite good enough. So she took in a quick breath and leaned over to hug him. He was warm against her, and his arms wrapping around her were tender and caring, and this was not a Lee hug in the sense that suddenly couldn’t breath anymore. If was different from the ones she was used to.
This particular one was telling her he cared.
And.
She drew away slowly and looked at him. He opened his mouth to speak, and she shook her head. Tenten kissed him, in the awkward way of someone who’d thought about it but never gone through with it, and he indulged her in his own Lee way.
There were some things that talking out wouldn’t solve. Some problems that couldn’t really be explained with messy verbalization. Occasionally, you could just step forward and a thousand words could be expressed through one action.
Or was that a picture, Tenten wondered as she nudged Lee with her hand, slipping between the two of them. She was dirty from sitting on the ground, and she knew that Neji would make a fuss about that once he woke up, but Tenten was prepared to deal with that. It was warm.
title: Dynamic
fandom: Naruto
pairing: Neji/Tenten/Lee. mentions of Hinata/Neji & Sakura/Lee.
warnings: cursing. drunk!Tenten. oddness in plot.
headphones: "Shut Up and Kiss Me" by Pony Up!
Tenten pulled the kunai from the tree savagely, putting her entire body into it.
“Fuck,” she muttered and walked back to her starting point, throwing the sharp weapon with as much anger as she could summon.
The rift in the trunk, it became bigger as the kunai landed in precisely the same spot.
And again.
Team Gai had schematics. Team Ten had the strategy genius, but Team Gai had one thing that was better than strategy. They had a kickass dynamic. Every team’s was different, and some of them worked better than others.
Team Ten, they had a good dynamic, one burned into them from birth, and it was a dynamic so wonderful that it worked on and off the battlefield.
Team Gai, on the other hand, had no idea how to handle one another without weapons or murderous intent. But in a fight, there was no beating them. Beast, Bird, and...
Broad?
At least when they were fighting (one another, enemies, other friends, it made no real difference) Neji and Lee could view Tenten dispassionately, and her breasts and lack of a penis were not an issue. If she could throw worth a damn, then all was peachy, but as soon as either of the males were expected to have some sort of social grace they both acted like completely buffoons. Tenten knew that both of them knew how to act around females.
She’d seen both of them in action; Lee blowing heart-shaped smoke rings in Sakura’s direction, Hinata and Neji excusing themselves from the training session. Well, the culmination of both relationships maybe proved the opposite, after all. Sakura had never shown Lee the slightest bit of interest (and Lee wasn’t as heartbroken as Tenten had expected when she’d told him very matter-of-factly that she would rather screw a chicken) and Hinata made a point of never allowing Neji to touch her anymore.
But still. That didn’t in any way excuse them from common decency.
Tenten drove the kunai into the tree for a fifth time, and stomped across the tightly pounded dirt to pull it from the oak again.
She replayed the scene again in her head, trying to cool down and see it from their points of view. Neither of them was stupid, after all.
She, on the other hand...
The rage was bubbling; all the kunai in the world weren’t going to stop it from broiling and overflowing. Rather than throw another one against that old tree trunk, she knelt beside it, resting her cheek against its rough, but cool, surface.
Their dynamic, she thought to herself, had nothing to do with love and everything to do with hurting others. Was that a reflection of who they really were? Tenten knew she was no good at philosophical questions, and she wasn’t even sure if that could be considered philosophical or rhetorical, that question. She knew were the hard calluses on her fingertips and the sharply toned muscles on every part of her body, they were fine-tuned for battle. Her body’s perfect physical shape was another thing she knew. Neji’s skill and Lee’s determination, those were two more things. Everything else was vague and tenuous and Tenten couldn’t grip it.
Tomorrow. Tomorrow she’d blame it on the drinks she hadn’t had. Ino’s birthday bash two nights before should have been the perfect excuse to get wasted, and for every person at that party discounting her, it was. Someone, of course, had to stay in control and make sure no one was murdered. Kunoichi in a drunken rage were rather hard to stop sober, much less wasted.
Seeing Ino curled into Choji’s soft folds, and Shikamaru falling over himself to get into that sandwich...that kind of hurt.
Her team, they’d never envelope her like that.
Who was she kidding?
She was playing a kid game, here, and she’d never been a kid. She was playing at being in love, and she’d never been that either.
That sounded nice, complete. It sounded reasonable, and it sounded like something that someone grounded would say. Sound advice, all in all. Tenten rose to her feet, kicking dirt up into the night air.
She really shouldn’t have gone to that bar.
Stumbling in the Lee’s apartment last night, she’d mumbled words that sounded as much like a love-felt confession as an admonition against consuming alcohol. Neji was there, and that was no surprise. They weren’t really together in a way a host and a guest should be, but Neji was in the room that he’d set aside as his own, and Lee was holding his own in the kitchen, imbibing freshly squeeze orange juice at four in the morning.
Tenten wasn't sure how she'd moved from speaking to screaming, but that transition occurred and Neji’s steps, not very loud to begin with, were drowned out by her accusations.
“D’ya know that no’un’ll touch me ‘cause they’re all piss scared’a you two? I mean...fuck, there’s a chick who’s got th’fuckin’ strongest guys all over an’ there’s a chick who don’t, you’ll you bang? See the logic? I’M NEVER GETTIN’ LAID.”
And the two of them, they stared at her, their faces an epitome of shocked. Laid?
Tenten, she didn’t worry about sex. She wasn’t a typical female, touching herself on her downtime and screwing guys if she could spare enough time during her missions.
That was what they knew about Tenten’s sexual being, or her lack of one. They’d assumed that she was more asexual than anything else. Lee, he didn’t feel lust as much as adoration, and Neji was just the opposite. Tenten was the simple balancing point, or so they assumed.
“You...need sex?” Lee asked, wary. He glanced at Neij and found no help in that direction. “We...if you really need to let out some of your youthful impulses, Tenten, Neji and I get tested regularly, and I have quite a bit of girth-”
“LEE. I DUN FUCKEN NEED PITY SEX, YOU PIECE OF SHIT.”
And that hurt. Lee had never been called a piece of shit in his entire life. Yeah, pain in the ass was a regular part of Neji’s vocabulary when he was around Lee, but piece of shit was a different level of insult. Especially coming from the teammate who would only refer to him as obnoxious (out loud) under extreme duress. Neji frowned at this, and decided that being drunk was no excuse for wounding Lee. Especially when he was only being...well, Lee.
“Tenten. Sit down,” he told her in his not-taking-your-shit voice, but she ignored him, as she usually did when he began to boss her around.
“FUCK YOU. Oh, mista fucken tightwad tellin’ me what to do jus’ ‘cause y’can fucken screw your cousin into submission don’t mean I’m anythin’ like ‘inata. BUT TRY IT, ASSHOLE. TRY TA RA-”
And he hit her square in the stomach, knocking the air out of her smoothly and shutting her up quickly. He grabbed a fist of her hair and pulled, her neck stretching back painfully. “Don’t you talk about me like that, Tenten. Don’t you dare.”
And she chuckled between gasps of breath, trying to get back all that missing air. “Not...denyin’ it, eh?”
He shoved her away from him, and she hit the wall hard. Her arm hurt, and it felt broken, but she couldn’t be sure. All she knew was that she’d gotten what she’d wanted. Revenge.
Revenge for what, though, she thought now that she was sober. They hadn’t done anything to her, at least not consciously. All the hurt that she’d stored up inside, they hadn’t done it on purpose. And she’d hit them where it hurt the hardest because of it.
God, she was the biggest bitch. How could she face them, even if she’d been drunk? All those accusations, they hadn’t come from thin air, and Neji and Lee weren’t dumb enough to believe that they had. How could she explain that lately, she'd almost been able to convince herself that she hated them.
Tenten knew she couldn’t hide out forever.
The apartment was cool when she slunk inside, and the sun was peeking through from behind the thin fabric of the curtains. It was quiet, and that was almost enough to allow her to leave once more. They wouldn’t exactly be in the best of moods when she woke them up at four in the morning.
But she kept walking, her feet making a drum roll against the wooden floor.
The door squeaked.
Lee was looking at her, his eyes serious and holding more forgiveness than she’d expected. They weren’t hardened into glares, his eyes, and she knew that he knew that she hadn’t meant it.
Looking past him, she saw the lump under the covers that was Neji. And under the covers meant...under the covers. She couldn’t even make out the top of his head, they were pulled up so high. Neji acted so fearless, but in bed he looked more like a frightened child than anything else. His chest rose and fell underneath the blankets.
“He might still be angry,” Lee told her in a whisper.
Her answer was under evaluation; she knew and accepted this. “I know.”
“He might always be angry.”
“...I know.”
“But he probably won’t.”
“I know. Neji, look at me.”
He hadn’t been sleeping, and Tenten had known that, too.
He slowly withdrew the covers, and faced her, his eyes outlined with a dark shadow, as if he hadn’t slept. For the first time Tenten realized that...Lee and Neji were in the same bed. And that Lee...
He didn’t have a shirt on. While that wasn’t really the oddest thing she had ever witnessed, Neji didn’t have one on either.
“I’m sorry,” Tenten told him, trying to brush away the bitterness that rose in her throat like bile. This wasn’t about what they’d done; this was about what she’d said.
And Neji nodded, accepting her apology in one swift movement, and then went under the covers again, perhaps this time to sleep. Lee looked at him, and then looked back up at Tenten, who mirrored his expression of awe. Those Hyuga, there were none like them.
Tenten bent over and took off her shoes, realizing too late that she’d trampled dirt everywhere. She left them against the wall, and padded over to the bed, sitting down beside Lee. I’m sorry wasn’t as easy with him, with whom words wouldn’t be quite good enough. So she took in a quick breath and leaned over to hug him. He was warm against her, and his arms wrapping around her were tender and caring, and this was not a Lee hug in the sense that suddenly couldn’t breath anymore. If was different from the ones she was used to.
This particular one was telling her he cared.
And.
She drew away slowly and looked at him. He opened his mouth to speak, and she shook her head. Tenten kissed him, in the awkward way of someone who’d thought about it but never gone through with it, and he indulged her in his own Lee way.
There were some things that talking out wouldn’t solve. Some problems that couldn’t really be explained with messy verbalization. Occasionally, you could just step forward and a thousand words could be expressed through one action.
Or was that a picture, Tenten wondered as she nudged Lee with her hand, slipping between the two of them. She was dirty from sitting on the ground, and she knew that Neji would make a fuss about that once he woke up, but Tenten was prepared to deal with that. It was warm.