A/N: This is the first installment of a rambling multi-chapter fiction I am starting which will be a study in our favorite weapons mistress, Tenten! There will also be a fair amount of Neji, and Neji/Tenten. I'm looking at it to be about 5 chapters, so stay tuned!
This first chapter is Tenten's backstory, which is very likely not cannon, but hey, Kishimoto didn't give us much info about her, so I elaborate. (or, perhaps completely make up) There's no Neji in this one, but he will be in all chapters hereafter.
Warning: This is a dark story. It will have poverty, suffering, drug and alcohol use and possibly torture, as well as sexual situations. You've been Warned.
Rating: M
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.
Pairing: Neji/Ten, with probably a few instances of Lee/Ten, Shika/Ten, or Neji/Naru (This chapter is all Tenten however)
~~~~Little Shuriken Girl~~~~
Chapter 1: Kunai
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And you are so hungry, so starving, waiting with empty hands and bitten nails for something to start
x
When Tenten was small, hardly bigger than the big iron pots she lugged to her mother for wash water, her family fled Tea country in the dead of night. Her mother tied a ragtag scarf around Tenten's curls and smiled with her lips, but not her eyes, whispering that they were going on an adventure. Tenten stumbled over the rough cobblestones with sleepily hurried feet, and the air stank with rain and smoke, curling in the air above the mucky rice paddies where bodies floated face down like wisps of spirit.
They left to start a new life in Konohagakure. It would be a good home, a safe home. Her father promised this to her mother as they raced along the street to the ferryboat waiting on a seaweed strewn dock. It was a ninja village; it would be well protected, even in The War. He could promise it would be better.
Tenten, drowsy with crusted exhaustion, had listened with half an ear to his whispered words, quick and light with anticipation, riddled with sweat. She didn't know what a ninja was. She didn't know where Konohagakure was, and the name when she tested it on her mouth felt clunky, forcing her tongue into new syllables she didn't recognize. Tenten knew only the blaze that had burned their home to rubble, the smell of the rice snap-crackling under the harshly beautiful sun, and the sheen of steel in her father's kitchen blade as he'd sliced the calling draft officer's neck wide open, a sick-sweet smile of red. That is what she knew.
That is all you'll ever know, little shuriken girl, forever and ever…
X
Tenten and her family make it to the towering trees of Fire country, heavy limbed and empty-eyed, and quickly find that war refugees are plentiful here already. They teem in the streets, reeking of lost lives and lost countries and lost homes.
It is a shame that loss has never been attractive.
The natives of Konoha skirt around the hollow cheeks and squalling babies, fearful of contamination from the sadness that reverberates around the clusters of foreigners. The people of Konoha are empty enough, losing more shinobi everyday. Sadness is compartmentalized. Deal with yourself first, others last, if at all. Take your war rations. Shine your brother's hitat-ate. Avoid those who walk alone.
Refugees are what Tenten's family is now, and Tenten knows instinctively, young as she is, that the refugee is one who belongs nowhere. The refugee flits around corners and extends a giving hand to no one. The refugee is a wandering ghost, somehow processing a beating heart. The refugee is not a traveler, an explorer, a vagabond of the road. The refugee is a person without a place. Leaf blown far from the tree, with no roots to put down.
She knows this immediately, on the first day that they see the tall gates before Konohagakure, seemingly gold with the glint of speckled sun. They are not the only ones to arrive that day, (or any day after) and Tenten's father goes to jostle with the crowd in front of the gatepost lobbying for papers, monies, passports, inky tickets into a new world.
Tenten clings to her mother's hand and stares, because she is not old enough to know that refugees have no right to see. Two passing Konoha boys, young merchants' sons with war supplies by the look of them, see her and their faces become closeted, pinched. One slogs a handful of mud, viscous and black, onto the top of her head as they pass through, mouth a yellow sneer. "Muddy lil leecher! Get!"
Tenten is no stranger to bullies, and she gathers her fists to promise dire retribution, but she is stopped by the long fingers of her mother's hand tightening on her wrist. When Tenten looks up her mother's face is stoned, ashen, and her eyes look straight ahead into the air as though seeing nothing. This is how Tenten knows that now, somehow, everything is different.
Her mother would never had stood for such insults at home in the murky air of Tea country where she had a hearth and a place to stand. Tenten's eyes are closed when she reaches down to soothe the crying bundle that is her baby brother, lifting him onto her small shoulder and urging him to shhh, shhh, shhh.
She is a refugee now. She is a person with no place.
That is all you'll ever be little shuriken girl, forever and ever…
X
When they are finally through the pearly gates of the new kingdom there is still an empty face on every street corner, a boarded shop behind every other ornate lamppost. Tenten and her family settle in the remote outskirts of Konohagakure, where the wood is barely a mile away and where the houses are dilapidated, crumbling with shanty walls and backwater streets and where pipes and industrial concrete is the neighborhood playground. She plays in them, and in the garbage dumps, because suddenly they are poorer than they'd ever been before.
But then, the refugee is poverty made tangible.
Konoha's mountain gleams high and unconquerable, an unknown fortress behind Tenten as she forages and plays with clumps of mud in tiny hands. It is like the rice mud of home, except the white grain muck there had smelled of earth, of heavy splashing rain and deepening green of waxy leaves. The black slush here smelled of acid, industrial and metal-proofed.
When she is half a year older in this new home by the factory divison, there in the upper areas where shifty eyes and cracked teeth are far more common than hitat-ate and flak vests, her father loses his job in the factories.
Her mother yells, shrill and fearful, hands shaking. Tenten rocks her brother to sleep and thinks that her mother's tear-streaked face looks like starlight when she kisses Tenten goodnight.
Now they are poorer.
She is five, and goes down to the more populated areas of Konohagakure (the word still so strange, coating her tongue like syrup and coming out garbled) in search of money, because money meant food, and food meant that the ache in her belly would undoubtedly grow worse and then ease, blissfully ease.
She stands by the street corner with the other urchins who all fall under that generous titles of "street rat" or "orphan" and blends in, raises her cupped hands in supplication to passerby and turns doe eyes on the storeowners.
Her father was wrong. The war was here. The war was everywhere. That was the thing about war, it had a sneaky tendency to slip in through cracks and dismember you, roast you at the stake until you scream, trickle in slowly and make anxiety root itself deep into the base of your spine, the curve of your neck, the once graceful movement of your hands. War shortens, snaps, chops. War will take years off of you, and Tenten is only five; doesn't have many years to lose. But she loses them all the same. In war, its all the same, all the same;
'Everyone everywhere must always do their share, because we're all the same.'
Tenten wonders if the high walls of the Hyuuga compound, or any of the richly furnished and aristocratic "Clans" that grace this city's streets, clad in colorful silk and ribbon, have ever heard that nursery rhyme sung long ago in the winter-clear days of tea country counting beads for bracelets with her mother.
She doubts it. It is hard to be cynical at five, but it is never hard to be cynical on an empty stomach and Tenten has had one of those for a long time now.
Tenten joins the other ragamuffins in the street as they shove and push one another; reduced to the leeches they are called. They are starving and sucking for the glint of coins thrown into their red and raw gaping hands, open crevices of the earth, never-ending.
Violence means strength and strength means power and power means food. It is an equation that Tenten picks up quick, quicker then the sewing stitches her mother used to make her count that now are fading into the hazy fog of ignored memory.
Strange, but necessity is the quickest rate of growth, and so Tenten bites and scratches, elbow in the eye and knee to the stomach because look! That was a 20 ryou note! The mad dash is some kind of exhilarating, and Tenten talks street slang at 6 years old. She taunts, rough and uncouth at white-eyed gods as they walk by, so far above they are hardly there at all.
That is the only thing she knows. She knows the stink of the city's mud. She knows the cold that seeps into her shallow little stunt bones at night when there is no money for the heating. She knows the bite of blade – more sharp, more real, more exquisite than any other thing she feels that's been dulled by War's edge—when an older child slashes her collarbone open with a stolen kunai, diving for a trash bin that holds a restaurants leftovers.
The kunai is a strange weapon she thinks, as the crimson-tinge of her blood stains her fingers, a stark color against the grubbiness of her skin. Its bite was a line of white-heat, as though her skin was liquid butter instead of the rancid tough covering she knew it to be. It was almost like a caress, stirring memories of a rough sponge washing suds over her shoulders, back when there was such a thing as clean water, and her curls hung in ringlets. Her eyes well without her noticing, her mouth already in a snarl of retaliation.
The rare times she sees shinobi in their quarter of the city, always never longer than an instant because they move sleekly, war panthers in the night with better things to do than loiter in slums, she stops and stares at the way they crouch under the moon on the sloping edges of rooftops, twirling kunai around the knuckles of their fingers. Light spangles from the blades, spreading an aura of shine out like quicksilver, and she wonders if ninja hold moonlight in their eyes.
The clumsy kunai-strike is her first scar, and she fingers it reverently, the raised bridge of skin and the sting as her flesh pulsed, like a miniature heart, right there in her neck.
That is all you'd ever feel little shuriken girl, forever and ever…
X
Tenten would've probably stayed at that street corner, hands extended up, little black-stained birds on the gray sky. But something happened.
There was her father when he smiled, tired crinkling in his crowfeet, chuckling at her big eyes. "Such big eyes Ten-Chan! What will you put in them?"
"Food, Otou-san."
His smile never stayed very long.
There was her mother, hair still rich and dark and rioting as Tenten's own lanky curls, mouth a straight line but tears like starlight, and her cheeks always a galaxy when she brushes wax lips on Tenten's cheek at night.
There was her baby brother, who cried long and wailing each day, lungs screaming for more, more, more. But that made Tenten's lips twitch, made her pump his feet and thumb his scrunched cheeks when she peeked at him. He cried more each day, but Tenten worried when he didn't cry, worried when he was sleeping with small little shallow breaths, and woke him up to hear his gusty yells if he slept too long.
They were there together in a shantyhouse apartment with no heating and pipes that dripped and a cracked linoleum floor that Tenten heard things scurrying under at night, but they were there.
Only, something happened.
It happened like this; One day her father came home, rough and leathery and smelling of sweat from foraging in the outer wood belt all day, and the next day he didn't.
"War casualty." Said the masked men who show up at their door instead, bearing nothing but the anklet her father had always worn, red-dyed and twined with root from the Tea Country. It is no longer a circle, merely an unfinished string, and Tenten's mother takes it mutely.
"Accidental encounter with a planned ambush." They said.
"Condolences." They said.
Tenten wonders how they can speak like that, like words were taking too much time from their mouths, but then, she knows that war shortens everything, and she is focused on the dirty weave in her mother's palm.
She knows that rough band better than she knows her name, but not much longer. Her mother burns it. Her mother yells and screams, shakes Tentens shoulders with vice-grip hands, locks the door to their house and moans like she is the last woman on the earth, but doesn't cry. No more starlight tears sliding tracks from a smudged face.
Tenten rocks her baby brother because their mother is screaming, and pretends she remembers the words to lullabies.
For a week there is nothing but waiting, and gnawing on the last crust of bread and giving her brother her fingers to suck. Nothing but waiting for father to come home.
He doesn't, but on the eighth day Tenten's mother stops moaning. She straightens, eyes emptier than Tenten's stomach. She walks out the door and down the street and two blocks to the left and knocks on the door to a whorehouse.
After that, there is money.
Not much money, but maybe enough, and ironically, stupidly, ridiculously, maybe a trickle more than they had. The brothel is not a high end establishment, nor even a medium one, but Tenten's mother can cry like starlight and her hair is a beautiful mess, a wild dark frontier that men love to lace their fingers through.
Tenten's mother never cries in front of Tenten anymore.
Tenten sits on the steps outside, sometimes for a long time, sometimes not very long at all, and rocks her brother. The passerby leer at her big eyes, at the riot of her curls around her face, at the baby in her arms.
"Little whoresdaughter, lil' leechy, when will you start taking clients darlin'?"
Tenten is 6, and she doesn't know how to respond. But she is also a refugee without a place and now without a father, and so she just tightens her fingers around her little brother's swaddles. The money notes her mother gives her are stained and smell of sweat, of unwashed sheets.
They buy food all the same though.
"All the same, all the same, all the same." Tenten shivers on the steps and listens to her mother weeping and panting inside.
The mud of Konohagakure stinks of sex, but Tenten is a whoresdaughter, and she breathes the air deep.
That is all you'll ever hope to be, little shuriken girl. Forever and ever…
X
Tenten joins the ninja academy for three reasons: Konoha offers a compensation present for selling your soul out early, her mother has drunken herself into incoherency for the 7th day straight and is using the money only for more bottles of yellow-glass schocchu, and her little brother finally stopped crying.
Tenten knew he wouldn't have cried for much longer, that it was a matter of time at the most, and that she should realize she barely even knew the bundle that she rocked so many times back and forth as his eyes screwed up and his face grew red, purple, white. Still, it cuts into that scar on her collarbone as she sees his small body buried and his swaddles put away, needles an ache that illogically won't go away with food.
She can hear his cry echoing around her head verbatim of all the nights he had never slept, and remembers all the times she put her face into that downy-soft cap of hair to breathe in something other than the rot around them. He had smelled the same as she did; dirty and neglected as only a refugee war child is, but he still had a hint of newness, the baby skin of sharp-soft milky pungency.
He smells of gravedirt now, and Tenten goes to the ninja academy after kissing her mother goodbye. (She didn't think her mother knew of the little bundles death, or, as Tenten reflects bitterly, that she cared. Tenten's mother had clients to see too, and sake to drink, the ashes of a red weave bracelet to mourn.)
Tenten sends her the compensation money and doesn't return home. The ninja academy has bunks for those deemed war orphans fit for ninja training. Tenten is a war orphan in everyway you could be but one, and there was no need to clarify to the proctor when she appeared before him, solemn and scarred and hair cut to her nape.
She was admitted to the bunks, because when you see a child with empty eyes and no smile, you know they are a war orphan, and do not think to ask otherwise in Konohagakure these days. Everyone moves on, cleans up, gives the kid a bed and expects them to do their part. Everyone must always do their part.
The mud of Konohagakure reeks of death, but Tenten is a war orphan who will be a shinobi, and she knows how to plug her nose.
That is all you ever can do little shuriken girl, forever and ever…
X
End of Chapter One.
All feedback is appreciated.
Next chapter will introduce Tenten's gennin team.