Summary: Vulnerability is only an asset to kunoichi when it's an illusion. Tenten wonders if there'll ever be a time when she isn't.
Ho hum. I should be at school.
This story started backwards. I wrote one line (that ended up near the end), and wondered how I'd gotten there. Hey presto. I suppose that isn't particularly unusual, but I rarely do it myself. I often get lost along the way…Title is from the poem by Hone Tuwhare. There was a brief flicker of connection in my head between the two. For a second.
Disclaimer: ton ti nwo I (because I am cool :P)
No Ordinary Sun
Gare de Lyon
"You sure you're okay Tenten?" He asks her, smirk-mouthed. He knows the answer, knows that he's taunting her, and that she won't wearily rise to the challenge in response.
Her head is too tired to nod on its stalk of a neck anyway.
There are (of course,) kunoichi who are strong and tall and proud, of a certain build that means that they hardly ever play whores or helpless women in missions that require such delicacy. She isn't one of those, hasn't ever been one of those, and there have always been certain types of weight training that Guy has barred her from, to hone her body into places of immense fragility; all sudden plunges and sharp angles and soft golden skin.
Her neck is the weakest part of her body, and sometimes, in taijutsu (the days she feels suicidal, and like going up against Lee or Neji) she is constantly worrying about how easily they will win, if she lets them near those tendons and bones and nerves that aren't covered by a comforting layer of muscle.
She is glad that she isn't on one of those missions that requires such deception now, because that's when she feels most exposed (When her body is confined to heavy silk and her teammates are a long way away (or worse, in Konoha) and her pretty painted neck is bared to targeted men and she can feel their whispers crawling over her skin like centipedes.) and she doesn't feel up to dealing with that right now…
If she'd been an idealist, then she would have put on muscle to avoid missions like that a long time ago. As it is, she isn't; is all too well aware of the bonus her account receives after those missions, and of what she needs that such a bonus goes to cover. Perhaps in another lifetime she'd have refused such missions, or sabotaged them herself. Then again, in another lifetime, Tenten wouldn't have been a shinobi.
As a child, shinobi were her heroes, and when a kunoichi with blonde hair had found her under the bed with a scream locked in her throat, Tenten had made up her mind to be like that. Brave and strong, and able to Change Things. She remembers the feeling of hope that had welled up in her throat when that nin had held her, close, and they'd left the red house behind forever. Back then, she'd figured that the only way to pay back such an enormous kindness as she'd been dealt, was to be that way herself one day.
The sake Neji holds in a sardonic hand is a stark reminder of the day her dreams came crashing down; of the first time she wore the white paint and the beautiful clothes and the jasmine oil combed through her shining hair; and the urge she feels to snatch it from his hands and down the contents of the bottle as quickly as she can makes her ache, in a way that is unlike the dull steady brittleness of her exhausted muscles, or the sharp piercing pain of the cuts that sear her abdomen, from where she didn't jump out of the way in time before a nukenin slashed her in a soaring crescent that the craftsman inside of her finds poetically beautiful, even though she was on the receiving end of it.
That's how she thinks of it now. For a measure of peace of mind. It's a craft. A job. She's an artisan, and poor, and family-less, and so she needs to do what she needs to, to survive. It isn't Guy-sensei's fault that she happens to have bird bones, just as it isn't in her to hide them, the way she suspects Hinata does (or to not factor that extra money into account), either.
If it's anyone's fault, though she knows laying blame is childish, it's whatever brown haired yellow eyed people sired her. They gave her bird bones (and sometimes broke them), compelled a passing shinobi to pluck her from her life, made her that much more ambiguous and exotic and tender to look at.
They weren't from Konoha, and she's never, not on any of the missions she's ever been on, come across the red house again. The shinobi took her at night, and the rush of cold wind on her ears in the dark is the last memory she has of the home she had, the people there only vague shadow-figures that sometimes loved her and sometimes did not.
There was no love in Konoha, but no terror either. Tenten drifted into the academy because that was what orphans in Konoha do and in some ways, she wonders if being found by a shinobi from the Rain would have been better. They were, after all, better equipped to deal with cases like hers. She's grateful that she was set on the path to her wish (of course she is), her thank you, but this is tempered by the knowledge that she only found that out after she had started.
"Neji, I do not know why you bother asking," Lee objects, separating ochoko from shot glass and holding both out for his teammate to slop the smooth liquid, overflowing, over onto his hands. "You know that Tenten does not drink." The lean sinuous muscles in his arms ripple, the movement not hidden by his clothes, as he guzzles the drink down.
She wonders what the boys think, when she comes back, white-painted, dress torn (sometimes), blood spattered (sometimes). When, if they're anywhere near a bathhouse or a river, she washes herself until her skin glows hot and raw and red. It never used to faze her – they were shinobi, and so was she, and that was supposed to be it – but it bothers her now. The way they watch her afterwards, and that she never realised; and that she can recall with perfect clarity the murmured 'Be careful' Lee once threw in after her. To that end, she wonders what they'd do if she actually did say yes, held out her glass and let herself disappear completely.
It's because her neck is the part of her they look at, the most (she very rarely makes eye contact with people; always too busy scouting the terrain, and gauging the body movements of those around her, and making sure that she'll never be surprised by a surprise attack to bother, and she only knows they look at her neck because when she does attempt to look at their faces, they don't notice, eyes riveted to the skin between her jaw and the collar of her shirt) and it succeeds in an instant to undo everyone's image of her as a strong capable woman.
Not even Sakura and Ino possess such a commodity (they sigh after it, if she happens to be in the bathhouse when they are, and lifts herself free of the water. Tell her she's lucky not to come from a clan, and still be able to fit into clothes that small) and the fact that she has always worked so much harder to make herself less weak and still comes out on the other side of strong sometimes makes angry tears come to her eyes (when she got back, that first time, to find Sakura apprenticed to Godaime, she denied the summons to Hokage tower as long as she safely could); though she doesn't ever give them the satisfaction of falling.
At the end of the day, she knows that that's it. That that's all she can do. Not give Them the satisfaction.
"Not even when we're celebrating?"
Even though her dreams have come crashing down, (a long time ago now, or at least, those missions leave her tired in more way than one, and ancient feeling), and she burns with wanting to say no, to take the drink from her team members and let it bear her away from this, and her neck is too weak to nod her heavy head, she summons the strength, plasters a smile on her face and opens her mouth.
"Come on," she says. "You don't really think I'm gonna drink your cheap smelly grog, do you Neji? I've got standards, ya know."
A scowl flickers through his misty eyes, knowing that she's won this exchange, and that her temperate stand hasn't come undone by him. But he shrugs and tips the bottle back, letting the velvet soft liquid (that burns beautifully in the back of his throat, lighting his head on fire) drain down instead.
She doesn't drink, because of that fire in her head. The sharpness of the real world keeps her awake. Alive. Alert to her vulnerability, and of what she needs to do to cover her tracks.
It isn't enough to stop her from watching though. Not until every drop is gone.
/No Ordinary Sun
Cheers for reading