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When Tenten sits quietly in her seat on the day her life will begin, her fingers don’t yet know the way cold steel can comfort, or the way it can kill.
When she pulls the kunai out of her first dead man’s throat, the blood that stains her hands won’t wash out for days. She shakes for weeks, adrenaline roaring, her head filled with images of red smiles and bloodless faces. Dead eyes staring up at her.
She stumbles into the hokage’s smoke-smelling office after the mission is completed, and the third congratulates her on a job well done. She locks herself in the bathroom, buries her head in her knees and hugs herself while she cries. She doesn’t stop until her throat is raw and her eyes are puffy.
When she is done, she scrubs her face, squares her shoulders, and moves on.
She is twelve the first time she wipes warm blood off her hands. She is twelve and still pure enough to feel the guilt sit heavy in her stomach for the life she takes.
Even now, years later, she tries to remember them. The broad-shouldered sound-nin with the feral eyes that almost rips her throat out before her katana finds his heart, the too-young boy with the terrified expression during a civil unrest, the pragmatic missing-nin who prays for mercy with blood on his lips when she finally takes him down. The names and the faces and the ways they die are all burned into the back of her conscience. Their blood is always on her hands no matter how well she cleans them.
During their first training session together as a team, Neji refuses to spar with her. “I won’t waste my time on fighting girls,” he says simply, and Tenten feels something ugly and angry bubble in her stomach. She chucks a well-aimed kunai at the back of his head, and almost takes his ear off. (She makes a perfect throw at his blind spot, but he doesn’t tell her that until months later when he finally trusts her enough to ask her to guard it.)
Their team quickly becomes well-known throughout Konoha. The prodigy, the green beast, and Tenten – always tacked on at the end. Always underestimated. Always forgotten.
It forms her. Shapes her. It lies in her bitter need to prove herself and grow stronger. She is twelve, small and inexperienced, but she stares Neji down for underestimating her and yells at Lee when he pulls his punches. In the end, they all leave practice sore. Lee has a cut across his cheek and several scrapes in his new, green suit (that’s okay though, Gai-Sensei supplied him with a whole crate full). Neji walks away with a bleeding cut on his ear and his clothes sooted from her exploding tags. Tenten limps home with a sprained ankle and a swollen eye that doesn’t go down for days – she lifts her chin and wears it all like war-paint.
When Gai gathers them on a sweaty linoleum couch on their first day as a team and asks for her dreams, she gives him a name. The great lady Tsunade is all she ever wants to be. Strong, beautiful, a legend. Tenten wants to be strong like her. To strike fear in her enemies’ hearts, to break the earth and to watch men shake in her presence.
Then, Tenten is twelve years with dreams too big to fit into her still quietly budding frame. She hates the smallness of her bones and wants to be bigger, broader.
But she lacks the chakra control to be a healer, and she never enjoyed fighting with her bare fists (still, she always envies Sakura for her position by Tsunade’s side). She eventually stops trying to fit herself into Tsunade’s taller figure. She tries to learn how to be herself instead.
She chooses the scrolls. She finds she likes the way, despite their smallness, they fit deadliness inside of them at the cost of only ink and blood. Tenten is small too, and that doesn’t stop her from being blood stained.
On the battlefields, Tenten is dragons and smoke and steel, this skilled mistress of weapons with her scrolls and her death bringing hands. She grows up clutching daggers rather than picking flowers; she grows up and learns all the best tricks to wash blood stains from under nails and on white clothing.
Sakura dedicates herself to healing. Tenten becomes death.
The Chunin exams rear their head between harsh practice sessions and harsher missions. Gai holds them back for a year so that when Tenten walks the halls to the first part, her heart beats steadily and her hands don’t shake. She is ready.
But she is defeated in her preliminary battle, a pigtailed girl from Sand who swiftly blows away every attack she can throw, and fractures Tenten’s back over the top of her fan.
She is mortified when she wakes up in a hospital bed, alone and without visitors. Then, she learns about Lee’s bitter defeat and about Neji’s cruel victory(she hears whispers in the hallways about it, gossiping nurses and curios practitioners), and she feels ashamed for her self-pity. When Neji comes to see her, people clear out of the hallways as he walks. He doesn’t meet her eyes when he enters, and hands her a bag of dango without saying anything.
She drags her battered body out of bed and takes him to see Lee.
“They begged him to back down, but he just kept getting up and up,” Neji says, looking down at Lee’s broken body. He looks too small like this, too vulnerable, Tenten thinks and tries to concentrate on taking calm breaths – the quiet beeping of the heart monitor makes her feel woozy. “Gaara would have killed him if Sensei hadn’t stepped in,” he says.
Tenten looks up from Lee to him then, flitting honey brown eyes to Neji’s own carefully apathetic expression. “Does that remind you of somebody?” she asks, not cruelly.
He doesn’t answer. She agrees to help him train for the next trial anyways.
Neji, at first, is bitterness and tragedy, she knows this. His childhood is an open wound of a pragmatic self-destructiveness and desperate hatred of the blood that runs in his veins. Tenten looks past the self-centered parade of his brilliance regardless, because she admires his ambition. She drinks in the power she sees shining between those milky white eyes.
Lee was the polar opposite. He had brazen determination in every movement. In every blister and bleeding fist(and in every broken bone when he refuses to step down from a doomed fight). In every time he pushed himself off of the ground after stumbling.
Tenten doesn’t recognize his kind of strength until the exams. She sees it every time he sneaks out of the hospital to train when the nurses look the other way. And she sees flaws as well. The weaknesses within Neji when she watches the latter during the third test. She watches this dazzling, skillful, angry, hateful teammate of hers and the way his pride becomes his undoing.
When she visits him in the medical bay after the battle, it is a different person that meets her.
And she is so proud of him.
In the stories we are told, she never reaches the limelight. We hear about Neji’s redemption and Lee’s determination. About Naruto’s growth and Hinata’s blossoming. About Sousuke’s victories over his own demons and about Sakura’s forgiveness for his sins. The stories are never about Tenten. She is a prop in their tellings; unknown and unseen. She cuts with cold steel and leaves her enemies bleeding on the ground in her wake.
Tenten knows their place is not hers. She is not the one prophesized, or the last of an ancient clan. She is not the prodigy, the heir or the apprentice. She is the soldier. The one who dances with cold steel in her hands and death in her veins.
She doesn’t pride herself on the men she has killed.
Tenten is trained to mind her surroundings, to mind her teammates. Eyes always open. Always on target. Be attentive of your allies’ whereabouts. Be strong. Be nimble. Cut, kill, repeat.
In the bitter fury of war, she watches Neji crash and burn. She watches him take a hit for his cousin; the wide-eyed girl he grew up hating. She watches him die a hundred meters away, cold steel in her hands and enemies all around her. She watches him bleed out in the arms of someone else.
Neji Hyuuga will always be remembered for his sacrifice. His courage.
Tenten watches and thinks, you idiot. You wonderful, brave, selfless idiot. I knew it would get you killed someday.
She grips her weapons tighter and doesn’t go to him until the fighting subsides.
When she looks down at Neji’s broken body on a blood stained battlefield, she does not cry.
Lee does. And Hinata, but never as much as Lee. He holds the body tight in his arms, this dead, strenghtless body that is Neji but in a way not at all. Gaping, weeping, choking as if he is strangled by his grief.
Tenten looks down into the eyes she always trusted more than her own, brilliant, milky white, and doesn’t flinch at the deadness in them. She looks into these sightless eyes and thinks that someone should have closed them by now.
She feels bitter, feels angry, feels sick, feels bile rise in her throat and war drums beat in her ears. She does not cry. Eyes blurred by tears cannot hit their target, she tells herself, and clutches her steel until her knuckles turn white.
When the job is done, then she can mourn.
They spend the first few weeks after the war ends burying the dead. Tenten dons her blackest dress, goes to funerals, gives condolences and writes in protocols until her fingers ache in tune with her heart. She leaves her scrolls at home for the funerals, and feels naked without them.
They bury Neji in a grave that is far too small to room all that he had been, and she stays at the back of the procession – Hinata’s grief needs more space than hers, she thinks as she watches her mourn the cousin she spent so many years fearing, in the arms of the man she loves.
The bodies of those whose families had not claimed them, or who could not be recognized, were burned. She hauls bodies on pyres until her muscles scream, and pretend it’s the smoke, no tears, that sting her eyes. The scent of burning flesh haunts her for years after that.
Neji’s wake is held at the Hyuuga estate, and Tenten almost manages to walk past the training grounds without craning her neck to look for the long haired boy she is so used to seeing there. She holds Lee’s hand tight as he weeps and reminds herself that at the very least, the two of them are still breathing. During the nights following the last battle they crawl together on the same futon, listening to the other’s breathing, their heartbeats. They try to shut the emptiness out.
People tell stories about how Neji Hyuuga died a hero. They speak of his bravery in the face of death, of his humble sacrifice. Tenten listens and wonders why none of them mention how he lived. (She doesn’t tell them. She keeps the stories to herself, wraps her arms around them like they are something fragile).
When she gets home, she pulls off her funeral dress and goes to throw it in the garbage, but then stops herself. Instead she turns around and tucks it neatly into her closet.
Konoha is rebuilt, slowly, meticulously. Tenten rents a small, one room apartment in the cheap part of town, set above a small Chinese-style tea house. The tenant is an elderly woman, an old crone with a wooden leg and grueling battle scars. She presses hot mugs of tea into Tenten’s hands on rainy days and always makes sure her fridge is full when she comes back from missions.
She had fought in the last war, she tells Tenten over tea one day. “I was evacuating citizens from the battle front when a grass nin got me good,” she says, and gestures to her leg with a polished black cane. “Got my whole team as well, Shin and Haru – that was their names, lovely boys – both got themselves killed to give the refugees time to escape,” she continues, eyes clouded with memory.
Tenten sips her tea and tries not to shudder at the bitterness of it.
“How do you move on from something like that?” She asks.
“You don’t,” the tenant says. “Not really.”
Tenten closes her eyes and tries to remember the calm in Neji’s expression, even in the midst of battle. She though about the smile that grew more and more easy as the years went by, the way his shoulders sloped and the way his hair tangled after the kaiten. At night she wakes up bathed in sweat, images of blood red, death-strews battle fields and unseeing white eyes hammering behind her eyelids. It takes her an hour to calm down, and another one to loosen her grip on the kunai she keeps under her pillow.
The Infinite Tsukuyomi was the cruelest of any attack the enemy could throw at you, the way it gave you a taste of your deepest, most desperate desires, and then ripped them all away from between your teeth.
Neji alive, Lee and Gai acting normal for a change, no war, no blood on her hands. In the Tsukuyomi, Tenten didn’t jump at every movement passing her peripheral vision; she didn’t grip her steel, ready to kill at every sudden noise.
When she was freed from it, her fingers shook so badly she could barely hold her weapons.
“Nightmares are perfectly normal, Tenten-san,” says Sakura one day when they gather for tea in Ino’s simple but elegant flat. Ino had taken no time to comment on her dark circles and the tiredness in her movements – and together the two healers had dragged an explanation from her with ease. “We all get them. It’s a normal side-effect of trauma”.
Tenten doesn’t say anything to that; just sips her tea and listens to the two friends chatter away, about fashion and love and the latest gossip. The invasion hung like a heavy weight over all of them, yet here, in Ino’s vanilla-smelling living room, it was as if it had never happened.
After the war, they had all flit to their own directions; Sakura and Ino working long shifts at the hospitals, Shikamaru hurriedly rising in the ranks of the Hokage’s Council, Hinata studying to become the matriarch of her clan.
Both Tenten and Lee are offered positions as leaders of Genin Squads; Lee accepts, with his usual vigor, and a new box of green spandex uniforms from Gai-Sensei under his arm. Tenten doesn’t.
She is twenty-two and has grown into her femininity, but still keeps a sharpened kunai under her pillow at night. She is twenty two and still not brave enough to look a new generation of ninja in their dream-filled eyes and teach them how to kill.
Instead, she chooses the ANBU.
She builds a name for herself, in a way; the Dragon. On the battlefield she is blood and steel and smoke, she is feared. She paints the porcelain mask herself, shaking fingers working carefully. When she puts it on her hands are steady.
But even masks can’t quite hide the scars you wear. Tenten sees byakugan white eyes on a mission to take down a team of missing-nin, and blanches. Blind eyes, not all seeing – how could you be so stupid? Her hesitation is only for a moment, but it is enough. She takes a cut from a poisoned dagger and goes down.
ANBU members are not brought to the healers when hurt. If you die; you are burnt, if you live, you are lucky. The secrets of the state are ever more important than the life of one measly ANBU. They bind her wounds and bring her to a small, off-grid apartment where she spends weeks trying to throw the poison
Ino finds her after the first week, the confident knock on the door before strolling in without a welcome shows that the resolve of even most prominent of ANBU officials crumble under the intimidating eye of Ino Yamanaka.
“Did Sai let it slip?” asks Tenten, not bothering to get up from her position on the bed. Ino kneels in front of her and starts removing the bandages around her torso in a businesslike manner.
“Kiba did, actually” she says in that faraway tone of voice she adopts whenever she’s concentrating. She tuts indignantly when the bandages slide away.
“You ANBU really need to freshen up on your medical skills, I’ll need to clean and rewrap it unless you want to have a substantial infection on your hands,” says Ino, summoning the warm chakra of the healers. “And it’s going to leave a pretty gross scar.”
“Scars are good, they serve as reminders not to-“
“Not to have feelings?”
“- not to be weak.”
Ino sighs, “Tenten, Kiba told me what happened out there, everything that happened out there.” The warming chakra to her torso stops, Ino digs in her bag for clean bandages. “Things like this are perfectly normal when dealing-“
“-when dealing with trauma,” Tenten cuts in, annoyed. “So you’ve said, but I don’t see any of you freezing up on the battlefield because of some bastard with white-blind eyes”.
“Tenten,” says Ino with a patience that doesn’t suit her. “I listened to my father die, I wake up each and every day hearing his last words echo in my mind, I almost killed a man in the medical bay because his hands looked like my dad's, and I shook too badly to –“
She cuts herself off, closes her eyes takes a shaking breath. Tenten doesn’t look at her. She knows she is stupid; the war hadn’t just been hers. They had all left innocence behind when donning those uniforms, when entering that battlefield. They all jumped at loud noises now.
“We’re going to be alright, aren’t we?” she asks.
“Yeah, I think we will eventually”, Ino says, after a while.
Tenten screws her eyes shut, and pretends those words doesn’t sound like a child’s prayer.
Years pass and Lee meets a sweet girl and falls in love, the boisterous one-sided romance with Sakura forgotten for something that is much more deserving of him.
No matter how much Tenten tries to avoid it, when they meet, the first thing she thinks is civilian, and the second thing is not a threat. Only on the third try does she think sweet girl, I can see why Lee likes her.
She brings her weapons bracelets to dinner, her ANBU mask in her bag, and manages to get through the entire meal without her hands shaking once. The girl talks about curtains and awnings and the weather, asks about her weapons. She doesn’t mention wars. When Tenten gets home, she curls up her bed between bottles of ink and scrolls and unsealed weapons and thinks about how she hasn’t seen Lee smile quite so brightly since before the invasion. Before Neji.
When the Lady Tsunade told Lee he might never be a ninja again, Tenten wanted to spit. Her idol, the greatest healer in the nation, did not believe in recovery. It made her sick.
Lee did recover that time, and he recovers now.
Tenten buries her face in her mattress and wonders if that means she can recover as well.
They are all given love stories in the end. Marriage and children and little houses with patios and flower beds and ponds.
Tenten watches her friends stumble and fall for each other, bond over childhood, over scars, over war. Sasuke seeks both redemption and salvation in the arms of Sakura. He finds it, too, in her goodness. Ino marches from one doomed relationship to the other until she finds Sai, equally strong in conviction, and in personality. Temari comes to Konoha for political purposes and stays for Shikamaru. Tenten invites her to tea with herself, Ino and Sakura, a memorable event where Ino makes sure to disclose every intimate, embarrassing detail of her old teammate’s life (she brings a list).
Maybe Tenten falls in love too, someday.
Maybe a strong, square-shouldered ANBU general with battle scars and biting conviction in the field (sloped shoulders and hair that tussles on the battlefield). Maybe Tenten lets him hold her like something fragile. Maybe her mind doesn’t scream threat when he does.
Or maybe it is a bright civilian with blue eyes and a love for books who has never held a blade in trembling hands, who doesn’t know the meaning of her ANBU tattoo, who looks at her mask and just sees a mask.
Maybe she loves them with every trembling fiber of her being. Maybe she curls up to them at night and watches the way their chests rise and sink, the way their hearts beat with life. Maybe she listens to their breathing, their snores, as sweet as any lullaby. Maybe she swaps the kunai under her pillow for her hand in theirs.
Maybe she stays until morning, maybe she doesn’t.
But maybe love does not become her salvation - no protagonist comes to salvage her broken pieces, no hero saves her lost soul.
Maybe Tenten doesn’t wait for a man to save her. She saves herself. Picks herself up off of the ground, one trembling piece at a time.
The next time the night terrors wake her up she gets dressed and exits her apartment to wander the streets of Konoha.
Even at night the streets are crowded and loud. Tenten is hyperaware of every noise, every shadow passing in the corners of her vision.
The war is over, but she still carries the battles within her.
She leaves the crowded streets and moves towards the crumbled ruins that had been Team Gai’s practice spot for years. On these grounds they had come together. On these grounds they had grown and laughed and fought and wept. Now, it was a smoking ruin that no one – not even Lee – had taken the time to rebuild.
There had been bodies laid out here when the battles ended. Rows and rows of fallen soldiers, and families trying to find their loved ones to give them a last resting place. Mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters. Tenten had managed lists of hundreds of missing ninja, for every mother who found her son there were another three who would never find theirs. She had seen the bodies of children she had sat beside in the academy, a blonde girl who had been horrible at throwing kunai, but had a pretty good handle on the taijutsu, a boy who had pulled her braids on the playground when they were small, a graying sensei of one of the other teams in her year. Tenten added their names to her lists – the ones she could remember. She burned the remaining dead before rot and disease could take hold.
At the outskirts of the grounds, a tree still stands. She pushes her forehead against it, closes her eyes and inhales the scent of old, charred wood, she stays there for a long time. In what had been her sanctuary. Her childhood. Her adolescence.
She shudders and gasps, memories overtaking her. The knotted, scarred trunk where she had rested her tired back after harsh training sessions, where Neji had meditated on calm mornings, where they had shared meals, where they had shared tears and laughter, happiness and sadness. They had spent six years growing older, growing wiser and growing stronger, Neji, Lee and Tenten. Team 9. Team Gai. They had fought and laughed and sparred, from twelve to eighteen. The three of them had said goodbye on the edge of a battlefield, each assigned to a different division, and only two of them had returned from it.
The heaviness of it all brings her to her knees.
Every trivial spat between Neji and Lee. Herself stepping in before it got too violent – she had always taken Neji’s side at first, but as they grew, that changed just like everything else.
When Lee is defeated for the hundredth time, Tenten doesn’t tell him to give up. She sighs, leans down and offers him her hand. “Remember the byakugan’s weakness,” she says. “Make sure to stay in his blind-zone, and you’ll have an easier time landing blows.”
When Lee defeats him, Neji doesn’t talk to her for a week.
It all felt like a lifetime ago. Neji’s anger and Lee’s determination. Herself a twelve year old child who broke down in the bathroom of the Hokage’s tower. Mourning her first kill.
It was a war away. A childhood away.
She grasps her scrolls tight and concentrates on breathing – let’s herself shake it out. Dawn has broken when her legs finally regain the strength to stand, she walks away.
On bad nights, she returns.
As an ANBU she is feared, but she is respected too. Half a year in, she stares down a younger officer when she catches him using torture to interrogate a witness. She chews him out with all the calm terror her mask can induce, and sends him on his way to fetch Ino Yamanaka.
When the boy pipes out a “yes ma’am,” before he flits away. When she turns to the rest of her team, they all stand a little straighter, and Tenten thanks her mask for hiding her grin.
When his son is born, Tenten is there to hold Lee's hand in the hospital waiting room. The day before, she wheels her aging sensei and his wheelchair to a shopping mall where he buys an emerald green spandex suit and orange leg-warmers in baby-size. A crate of them.
Both Lee and Gai cry more than the baby when they are allowed to see mother and child. Tenten giggles and takes pictures that his civilian wife (Misaki, Tenten tells herself, her name is Misaki) offhandedly demands to see later.
The child looks like Lee (even at a few moments old, with the same wide eyes and bumbling smile), he wraps his tiny fingers around hers when Misaki asks (insists, rather) that she holds him.
Tenten watches this tiny, innocent child wrap its hands around her own death-bringing ones like she isn’t made up of sin.
And she clutches him to her chest and thinks that yes, this is what we lived and died for.
Steel and blood. That was what she was. What she had shaped herself into. But here in this sterile, bright room, she was more. She was a godmother (Lee had cried so much he couldn’t even get the question out between happy sobs, when Tenten could finally make sense of his words, she had cried too, just as much) she was a sister, a soldier and a friend.
She watches the tiny bundle in her arms fuss. Watches his mother beam. His father wipe joyful tears. She watches, and as she does, the war slips further and further from her mind.
When a clumsy nurse drops a tray outside their door, her hands don’t fly to her scrolls. She doesn’t even jump.
When her tenant dies, it is not due to enemies or battle, but to a spring cold. Tenten pulls out the funeral dress that she keeps dry-cleaned and wrapped in a dust sleeve – she has needed it on far too many occasions over the years. This time, she is the one in the front of the funeral procession, who weeps with her hand grasped tightly in Lee’s.
The old woman leaves Tenten with all of it. The house, the store, and a mind full of an old lady’s wisdom. Tenten rolls up her sleeves and cleans out most of the things in the dusty, old shop (she leaves the woman’s old tea set on a tray on the counter, stocks up on bitter tea for cold nights).
Then she sits down in her own room, between boxes of weapons and old scrolls. She sorts them in two piles; the ones she can live without, and the ones she cannot. Weapons created by her owns hands, ones she had collected over half a lifetime – she arranges them neatly on shelves and in display cases – she sets her treasured tools on shelves on display for curious viewers.
If someone were to tell her story, they wouldn’t start here, in this dusty old shop with weapons all around her, with no battle to be fought. Tenten grows up, and as she grows older the war in her chest calms down.
Her hands don’t tremble any more. Not when she hammers out steel, and sharpens shipments of tools for the academy or the ANBU. She doesn’t lay down her mask for good when she opens the store, she doesn’t think she will ever be able to do that. When the special ops request her expertise on missions, she agrees to only some of them.
Her chest stings when she watches her first kunai leave her stores in the hands of an excited genin, but there is calmness there. The same calmness that has her tell the genin to stay safe, rather than to shoot straight, as he walks out the door.
It is the same calmness that keeps her from summoning her weapons when a frightened young man holds a katana to her throat and demands the money in her register. Instead, she sighs and says gently, “kid, I can kill you in seventeen different ways from this position alone, please walk away”.
She doesn’t let him walk away, though. She gives him a job hauling metal and running errands and watching the shop when she is out on missions.
Tenten grows and fights and creates weapons to sell in a world that is far too peaceful to need them. Because it is her passion, and maybe a little bit because she can never really leave her wars behind.
Maybe this is her story. Maybe not at all.
Maybe she meets Hinata one rainy afternoon, both bringing flowers to graves, and invites her back to her shop. Maybe she serves tea in old, cracked mugs and tells her all about her cousin, and the way he had lived. Maybe she keeps some stories for herself, tucked carefully back into the back of her mind to remember on dark days.
Maybe they cry together, about their victories and their losses.
Maybe the seventh time she is asked to train a Genin cell, she tells the Hokage she’ll consider it. Maybe the children standing in front of her will know nothing of the war they had all carried with them. And when Tenten sees those budding, nervous, excited children look up at her, she offer them a steady hand and shows them how to throw a kunai. How to guard. How to protect.
This is what they had lived and died for, after all.
War lived in her bones, once. And it still does in every ache and battle scar, in every line under her brown eyes, in the way she still stops when she sees white eyes on the street. She carries it just like everyone else. The friends she buried, the people she killed. Old deaths and cruel nightmares live in her head. In her chest. But she squares her shoulders, and moves on.
At twelve, she had wept in a bathroom over her first kill. At eighteen she had wept over burnt bodies and lost innocence. Lost friends on bloodied battlefields.
Decades later, she is still breathing. She moves and she lives. She lives on a soldier, a godmother, a shop tenant, a friend, a sensei. A steady stride and the future ahead of her.
And oh, what a beautiful future it is.
End.