find your balance
. o .
There's something lovely, Tenten thought, to the idea of normalcy.
Given, she mused, dodging Neji's tenketsu strike and sending a kunai back at him as she flickered away, my concept of normal mostly involves training to exhaustion around far more green spandex and declarations both enthusiastic and existential than is strictly, probably, healthy. Still.
Like any kunoichi, she studied the history of the hidden villages, and dreamed of ascending to legendary status like the Lady Tsunade. It didn't take a genius to see echoes of the Lady and the other Sannin in others: in Sasuke, lost (and unforgiven, as far as she was concerned), in boisterous, wandering Naruto, and Sakura - well.
In Sakura, sitting across the training field. Alone, half-buried in textbooks, and with a set to her jaw that Tenten recognized even at a hundred paces. She had worn the same scowl when an exuberant Gai-sensei and Lee bounced through her window two hours earlier than promised this morning. Gai's rival, naturally, was nowhere to be found, and Sakura had to have been waiting for at least the last hour.
Distracted, Tenten came back to herself as Neji's kick whistled past her shoulder. With a muttered curse and a half-baked idea — too close, that one, and he knows it — she substituted out for a small twig before reappearing beside the other kunoichi.
Sakura shifted, surprised. "Tenten?"
Tenten smiled. "Join us!" Spinning, she flung out the weighted end of a kusarigama as Neji approached them. The long chain tangled around his arm, and Tenten pulled, blocking Neji's strike with the handle of the attached scythe, its blade not angled to draw blood but catching Neji's sleeve and ripping it neatly in half.
"I'm waiting for -" Sakura began, stifling a grin at the affronted look Neji gave the remains of his shirt. She raised her eyebrow in surprise as Neji changed his momentum, sliding into a new, static stance.
"Rejoin Kakashi-sensei when he arrives, then," Neji said, calmly deflecting Tenten's wave of senbon.
"Wasting daylight is unwise for one of Konoha's brightest flowers," Gai added from across the field, where he and Lee were going into minute five of handstand-pushups. "I shall keep an eye out for my greatest rival, and should I miss his arrival, I shall run up the Hokage monument on my hands. Twenty times."
Tenten looked from the kunoichi rising to her feet, over to Lee, who shot the girl a big thumbs-up and blinding smile, and back to Neji, whose hand beckoned Sakura to approach. Years of teamwork —years of looking, not that she'd admit it — alerted her to the tiniest of smiles quirking the edge of her Hyuuga teammate's lips, and she readied a scroll as he spoke.
"Perhaps," Neji said, "Sakura-san has more respect for others' garments."
Sakura clenched her fists, visibly offended. "How do you feel about others' bones, Neji-san?"
"They heal," Neji replied coolly, casually tracing the edge of his dangling sleeve. "This was Bombyx mori silk."
Too late, Tenten remembered that while Sakura's family held little sway in the shinobi world, they had extensive ties to the village's trade network, and were well aware of silk trading prices.
As if on cue, Sakura's eyes widened. "Like destroying a masterpiece," she said. "Tenten, how could you?" she added with an overdramatic frown.
"Easily," Tenten quipped, leaping backwards to put more space between herself and the pink-haired kunoichi. With a flick of her wrist, the scroll she held unravelled, whipping a handful of throwing knives at the two approaching ninja. "He was too slow, and it's just fabric." Seconds later, Sakura's retaliatory punch was intercepted by a flash of green.
"I shall stand with you, my teammate!" Lee beamed, deflecting Sakura's roundhouse kick with his other arm.
Tenten's smile grew to match Lee's. "Let's do this, then."
Let them have their legends, she thought, as the weapons flashed around her with familiar grace. I like my definition of normal. Still, she mused, as Sakura caught a kunai and sent it back towards the weapons mistress with a wicked grin, that doesn't mean I can't share it.
. o .
finis
. o .
Sabe's Scribbles: Something small, sparked by a 100_prompts table including the prompt "normalcy." Tenten seemed a good place to start, and before I knew it, in came legend, Sakura, and a lot of green spandex. …I grew up with my own Team Gai, of sorts, so here lies a bit of nostalgia, too.
Disclaimer: Settings and characters present and referred to belong to Masashi Kishimoto; I just like to borrow them occasionally.