Work Text:
Six strokes—she breathes evenly as she brushes them onto the new scroll. The poem she’s copying onto it is an older one, one she wrote out on a long mission in their first summer after Neji made chuunin. The cicadas had kept her company on watch, the moon flickering from between the canopy leaves, and below her boys had slept. A collection of new polearms will fit into this poem—two glaives from a mark last month, a naginata from a merchant in Wave Country, an old spear rescued from a market—
“Tenten,” Neji appears before her, a strange look on his face. “You have to stop telling people that I’m fisting you and Lee.”
She hums deep in her throat as she finishes the character. The ink shines in the low library light as it dries. Tenten’s eyes narrow as she examines it—she can’t make any mistakes, or her weapons will get lost in… whereever her weapons go when they’re in scrolls. She doesn’t know how many of her weapons have been eaten by the void. “Tenten,” Neji says, sharp, two fingers brushing over the inside of her wrist.
When she looks up at him, there’s a low pink flush to his cheeks and his arms are crossed over his chest. His luminescent eyes are fixed on hers. “What?”
“Stop telling people I’m fisting you,” he repeats in a harsh whisper.
“But you fisted me just this morning,” Tenten points out, lifting the hem of her shirt to bare the five perfect swirls of his fingers marked angry red, already purpling, into her skin.
Neji yanks her shirt down, casting his gaze over the library. A few people are looking their way. She hadn’t thought she was being that loud, but…
“It’s the Gentle Fist. Not fisting.”
“Gentle Fist is so much longer,” Tenten points out. “And anyway, you’ve never had an issue with it before.”
“That’s because I didn’t know it was a sex thing before!” he hisses, shoulders stiffly bunched up, reaching up for his ears. “Please, Tenten, say anything else.”
“Since when is the Gentle Fist sexual? That seems, I don’t know, dangerous.” She frowns, realizing—the last time she’d gone to the onsen with Ino, Sakura, and Hinata, she’d talked about training… “Is that why the girls were looking at me like that?”
Neji nods, flush dusting his skin rosy. He’s so pale—near translucent—as if she could see through him, unerringly as any Byakugan. “It got back to my uncle, Tenten. He gave me a Talk about… safe sex. Apparently, he overheard Hinata telling Hanabi I was… fisting you both.”
She winces. “What does that even mean?”
Finally, Neji sits down beside her. Her table is piled high with scrolls and scraps of paper and her calligraphy supplies and napkins with her poems written on them. He perches in the chair—leaning over, careful not to disturb any of her supplies, because he knows her—and whispers, breath hot against her ear, “Fisting is…” He holds up his hand and forms a fist. “You… put it… um… inside?”
Oh. She stares at his hand, which has gotten broader over the years, stronger, but still much more delicate that hers or Lee’s—Tenten looks away from his hand, “I’ll try to get Lee to stop too.”
Tenten can feel the heat in her face as she picks up her brush again, and she expects Neji to leave, but instead—instead he watches her work. “Thank you, Tenten,” he murmurs as she applies brush to ink.
Inside? What would that even feel like?