To any reader who has followed Chakra Wires, I won't be updating this week because I'm trying to keep up with the prompts. You can find them on Tumblr under the same username. This three-shot also aligns with my Hizashi fic Concepts and delves into the relationship between Hizahi, Neji, and his mother Asuka.

I hope you enjoy

Hizashi and Asuka Hyuga are the first people who introduce the concept of "tradition" to Neji.

He is very young, but he can understand half of what they tell him.

It is a tradition to eat jiaozi and wagashi on the Lunar Year. It is a tradition to wear yukatas during Matsuri. It is a tradition to eat osechi during New Year's Eve.

He understands that tradition is only something enforced by the person who believes it, for it creates a sense of predictability and happiness. Traditions are made because people enjoy having them. They bring others together, connect people in a new way.

There are many more traditions that Neji has with his parents, such as eating soba on their birthdays, though they alter it to herring soba because his mother is so good at making it. Sometimes, traditions are less widespread, like how his mother and father participate in a four-way-spar with their sensei and their other teammate or go to one of their houses for dinner every month. He decides he likes traditions, likes the way they look forward to them, and the way it makes them all smile.

There's one tradition, however, that he has only heard of, but has never celebrated: Obon.

Obon is a holiday celebrated to honour departed loved ones, but his father despises the clan, loves no one who has died from it, and his mother is an orphan who does not know another family. They tell him that one day, maybe someone they love will die and it will be a tradition, but they don't hope for it. Neji doesn't hope so either.

Yet when his parents die, followed shortly by their team, Neji drops all traditions he has acquired over the years. He stops eating soba. He stops going to Matsuri. He stops smiling most of the time.

However, in the late summer following the death of his loved ones, he accidentally stumbles upon a girl who is staring at lanterns. She has two buns on the sides of her head and big brown eyes. Her money, a huge clump of coins she must have saved up the whole year for, is scattered across the ground. He feels slight remorse and watches as she scoops them in her arms, then suddenly smiles up at him.

"Happy Obon!" she cries, full of vivid enthusiasm.

He sees that there is no guardian in sight, similar to his situation. To his surprise, she hands the lantern she buys to him. Neji doesn't know what to do with it.

"I don't have a family," she announces.

He raises an eyebrow. "I don't either."

"Oh," she frowns and thinks for a moment. "Did you have a family?"

"Yes,"

"Well, I never did, so you can use the lantern for your family."

"What do I do with it?"

"Just write a letter to them and send it down the river."

So he does.

It is the first time he finds a little peace in his family's death.

The next year, he studies how to properly celebrate Obon, but it is the only tradition he has. He buys an eggplant and a cucumber and puts sticks under them so his parents come home quickly and go back to heaven safely. Though he cannot see them, he half believes that their spirits are with him.

The girl with the twin buns is at the marketplace and once again, she buys him a lantern.

Over the years, Obon is the only tradition he dares to have, to let the girl buy him lanterns. He finds that she also is in the academy with him, her name is Tenten, and she's average in everything. Neji doesn't make a move to get to know her, she respects it. Yet it is a mutual agreement that the only interaction they will share is that she will buy him a lantern during the festival, but she lingers a little longer every year.

When he is placed into Team Gai, he finds himself gathering more and more traditions.

It starts off as team dinners every month, kind of like what his old family would do. The first dinner is undoubtedly the first time they became a team, then their first completed mission, when Gai sees drastic improvement, and the team dinners are always spaced out by around a month. Maybe it was for the sake of him because they knew that he wouldn't dare admit having such frivolous routines, but it is only announced as a tradition a year into the formation of his team.

Another tradition is the three-way spars every season. It's almost a rite of passage. Sometimes, they spend the week before it training alone with Gai-sensei just to prepare, for it feels like such an honour to win one. The event is unpredictable and sometimes people in the village gather just to witness it. Neji has won half of them, mainly because Lee and Tenten nearly always team up against him for they are better matched than against him. Yet there are occasional times where Tenten has to defend against her boys or Neji and Tenten start doing combination jutsus honed with all their sparring sessions. None of them will admit it, but part of the reason they are so determined to win this spar is that the winner is treated to a shopping spree of supplies.

Then there are the New Year traditions. They go out for sushi, watch fireworks on Gai's roof, count the seconds to midnight, and play cards. It is practically the ultimate form of team bonding, says Gai, but they really know deep down that New Year is really just spending time together as a family. He tells her about how his parents made him herring soba on his birthdays and she spends a lot of her time learning to make it.

Neji knows there are a lot more, but maybe the most meaningful one that Team Gai has brought him is the Lunar Year. His family, though they celebrated it, never did in the way that Tenten insists on. She makes the familiar jiaozi, she makes fish and pork and duck and a variety of roasted vegetables, she gives red envelopes to kids in the orphanage, and she drags the team into doing it with her. He starts looking forward to the Lunar New Year, especially when with the extensive knowledge of explosives, Tenten simply has the best firecrackers.

The tradition of celebrating the Lunar Year with Tenten clearly means a lot to her, seeing all the preparations she makes. They know everything that needs to be prepared, helps her prepare it, even if the day doesn't mean a quarter as much to them as it does to her. They always do it for her. But when he is fifteen and it is past midnight while Lee and Gai have to leave because Lee may have accidentally consumed a little sake, he and Tenten are left to clean dishes and the apartment by themselves.

She finds a small pack of sparklers that she never got to use and he suggests that they light them. They head to her balcony and she ignites them, watching as light explodes from them like water spurting from a broken hose. When she hands him one and he smiles, admiring the light that dances on her face. He finds himself captivated by her beauty, so much so that he cannot find words for anything. Yet Neji is too shy to make any sort of move on her so he just watches in content.

And so, this is the development of a new tradition, for Tenten and Neji. He stays with her every Lunar New Year and they ignite sparklers to watch. Each year they stand in silence, unspoken words heavy around them, but they wouldn't have it any other way.

It goes without saying that probably the tradition still most sacred to him is still Obon. The first time she buys him a lantern as a teammate rather than a stranger, he opens up to her, telling her how his family died. Obon is the time of year where he is the most vulnerable and he trusts her with his emotional state. For Tenten guards him as he reunites with his past family. She doesn't say anything as he talks to what appears to be thin air.

She starts accompanying him to put offerings at the altar, to clean his family's gravestones, and to watch the ritual dances.

Tenten doesn't understand how he can feel their spirits and talk to them but she accepts that he can. For his mother and father still have personalities, they tell him they love him, they tell him that she's a good match for him. He always blushes at that statement but wipes it away, saying that they are ridiculous. His father likes Tenten. Neji makes sure she knows. She blushes at that too.

Years pass, wars pass, and there are traditions, even routines that he has to start breaking.

They start off small, like the fact that he can no longer walk Tenten home after a sparring session because he has to go back to the compound very quickly to help train Hanabi. She tells him she's fine with it and he believes her. Then he is unable to go to lunch with her, he doesn't meditate while she sharpens weapons. They start growing apart.

For the ANBU exams, it is a gruelling one-month process and he is pushed to his limit. They cannot have the monthly team dinner, and that one breaks many times more. And on one of his other missions, he is gone for three months, missing the seasonal three-way spar.

The year after that, he spends the New Year with the clan and Naruto, who has just gotten engaged to Hinata. Tenten is disappointed but she says nothing of foul words, even when he can see the hurt burning in her eyes. She tells him that it's ok, that it's just one time, right?

"Right," he says, though they both know they are lying to each other.

The Konoha boys throw him a surprise party on his birthday and he is told that reservations are already made at a sushi bar and a table is booked at a club, even though he is supposed to be with Lee and Gai and Tenten. But Lee just shrugs, saying that they wouldn't refuse to let him go with the others and Tenten says he ought to spend a birthday without her horrible cooking. He is too afraid to tell her that her herring soba rivals the taste of his mother's.

Guilt continues to overwhelm him and during Lee's birthday, he has to leave early because his clan has set up a date for him, a marriage interview with a cousin he has never talked to. Lee is exuberant about it, tells him not to worry, and he thanks his teammate. However, he honestly would much rather celebrate with them than go on a date with someone he isn't remotely interested in. Especially since his heart is set on someone else.

The Lunar New Year comes and Neji is ready to confess his feelings for Tenten. He has been preparing for weeks, is anxious to watch the sparklers with her, and to apologize for how distant he has been becoming.

Yet at the last minute, Hiashi sets him up with another girl and because not a lot of people celebrate the Lunar Year, his mother and Tenten being the few exceptions, he doesn't have much of an excuse. After all, how would his uncle know of his affections for her? Why would he understand?

When he informs her of the situation, he swears he has never seen so much pain in her eyes. But Tenten is a strong kunoichi who doesn't hide her feelings, and she smiles like she usually does, brushes it off as she positions herself in a stance to begin their spar. This is the first time Lee questions him abandoning all their traditions, the first time he questions Neji as a person since the chunin exams.

He has been questioning himself for ages, wondering if it is the right thing. Neji knows it's wrong, he wants to break off the dinner, but that's dishonourable to the girl he agreed to go on a date with. Yet as he slowly eats fancy sashimi with a girl who seems just as unenthusiastic as he is, he realizes how stupid he is being. Instead, he promises himself to see Tenten when it is over, for he knows that she will still appreciate it if he lights the sparklers with her. In the end, he cuts the date short anyways.

Yet when he arrives at her house, not even at midnight, she isn't home. Her house is completely empty. When he goes to Lee's house, he's not with her either and they have tea together. His teammate informs him that Tenten wasn't feeling well and she didn't think she should be outside that night, as it would make her worse.

"I didn't really believe her," Lee admits, looking out the window in thought. "But she looked like she really wanted to be alone and I had to respect that."

Neji rushes out the door and activates his Byakugan, searches everywhere for her chakra signature.

He finds it at a bar and he's there so fast that he doesn't remember stopping by a store and picking up a package of sparklers that are supposed to shoot out rainbows coloured sparks instead of warm yellow ones. This isn't a part of the plan, this isn't how he wanted to do this, but it is better than nothing, right?

As a shinobi, Neji should have known better than to have a plan in the first place.

The guy making out with her against a wall is not a part of the plan and the fact that her legs are wrapped around him very tightly certainly isn't either. He squeezes the paper package in his hand and drops the sparklers. He can't hear the sound of them dropping. Bile rises to his throat. His mind goes blurry in regret and jealousy, leaves the bar before he can do something stupid.

When he's home he doesn't feel anything, doesn't feel it until he sees the team picture on his nightstand. Neji suddenly can't breathe until his lungs give out with a frustrated scream because it hurts that he messed up this fucking badly. He punches a dent in the wall so powerful it could nearly be mistaken for an air palm.

Hiashi thinks it was just that his date went badly but Hinata and Hanabi are wise enough to tell him to leave Neji to calm down himself. As far as they are concerned, if his uncle gives him a reason to, he will shred the man into sand. No one knows why Hiashi would ever send him on dates when the whole village knows of his affections for the Weapons Mistress but then again, people are too afraid of him to say anything.

Tenten doesn't show up to training until mid-afternoon and she tells them she felt sick until now. Neji feels a gaze burning into him and he meets Lee's eyes, seeing the look of doubt. He can confidently assume that she's hungover but they don't dare to mention it. The environment between them is strained that day, they all notice it. Yet how do teammates who haven't ever got into a situation like this address it?

He hopes, oh, Neji hopes so badly that things will go back to normal, but deep down he knows that he has shattered a piece of her so how is it ever going to be the same?

From there on, he makes sure that none of his missions overlap with the traditions like the seasonal three-way-spar, but he hasn't gone back to walking her home or having lunch with her. It seems that she no longer wants to see him anymore. This is made obvious when he realizes that she hasn't barged into his room at the compound for months, a habit she always would pull. When she does come to drop off one of his weapons she mistook as hers, he knows that what they had is irrevocably broken when he realizes that she knocked.

Summer comes and Obon does too, but she makes no mention of it. He makes the cucumber horse who brings the spirits home quickly and the eggplant cow who leads them back safely. He brings food to the altar as offerings. He washes and sweeps their graves before sitting down beside them, waiting for their spirits to come back.

Neji meditates like he always does until he feels their presence beside them. His mother and father greet him with their kind smiles, love evident on their faces. He bows slightly and they look to his side, surprised.

"Tenten is not with you this time?" his father asks, already used to the presence of his teammate, even if she cannot see them.

He shakes his head.

"How come?"

"I have not been a good friend or teammate to her."

His parents seem to understand with steady nods and Neji feels tears welling up in his eyes. It wasn't supposed to be like this. He feels like a failure, wonders if they know how much he has failed them. When he lets the tears spill over his face, dripping onto his shirt as he ducks his head to hide his face. It's strange to feel that his vulnerability, though at the same time of year, is now pain caused by her rather than the death of his parents. Funny how roles have switched as so.

They soothe him with comforting words, telling him he will fix it and that things will be fine. It is the first time in a while that he has felt safe, and it makes him regret that they only have a couple of days left with each other. He doesn't realize how alone he is until now and it hurts him all the more.

She doesn't show up to buy him a lantern and he swears that his parents can see his pain. His mother looks like she is about to say something, but decides not to. He ignores their heavy stares as he buys the lantern himself and writes a message on it with his perfect calligraphy.

Out of all the traditions he dared to break, this was the one too precious to him to ever stop and he knows that he deserves the hurt she has caused him

When he places the lanterns on the lake and lights the candle, his mother touches his shoulder and smiles softly.

"When you break something, it's usually hard to have it exactly the way it is again. But anything that can be broken can be mended and I don't believe that it's hopeless, Neji." she kisses him on his forehead where his mark was.

She steps onto the lantern and his father takes her place. "Sometimes, mended things can be worth more than intact. It just depends on what you glue it together with."

He blinks at the metaphor but thanks them anyway, waving as they disappear. Neji has tried unsuccessfully to go back to how things used to be, trying to keep most of the old traditions, making sure to visit on her birthday, buying the sparklers, but he was in the wrong so he can't expect anything back. Only time will tell if he can truly mend what he has broken.