Scent of plumeria, and the smell of burning.
Not one or the other, but both. Destruction, and the blossom.
-Marilyn Krysl, 'Warscape with Lovers'
Prologue: Tenten
The return to sanity is a broken road, as usual. Her body jerks and shudders – lips part softly at the warm sting that burns behind her eyes and creeps up the curve of her spine – muddied eyes empty and widen, staring with gradual clarity at the scene before her.
A young mother with dirtied flowers in her hair. Her son, sliced cleanly in half, lying face down by her feet. Two kunai rammed down the throat of the husband. A few feet away, an elderly man stretched bleeding and rubbed raw across a boulder. There's more.
Tenten feels her heart gape wide open when she realizes the blood on her fingertips is still warm. It's supposed to be quiet; the screaming has long ceased from broken mouths but a harsh keening still vibrates in her mind, clawing through the dissipating haze. She wonders where it comes from as she examines the bodies, the corpses scattered like rotting blossoms and ash down the entire length of the sun scorched valley.
One hundred and forty two refugees, slaughtered by the steel scattered amongst them: her weapons, flung from her hands. Recognizing genjutsu had never been her strong point, and Neji - bringing up the rear with the other hundred or so refugees - had intervened far too late. The attackers are no where in sight. She supposes they have long fled; after all, a brief twist of dark fingers and a few muttered words are all it would have taken to complete the justu that had momentarily filmed over her vision, transforming her charges into the very enemy she had been assigned to protect them from.
Tenten blinks dazedly against the glare of the sun and worries that the bodies will decompose too quickly in the acrid Suna heat.
"Neji?" she asks uncertainly, but the Hyuuga's gaze is fixed on the smear of blood on her lips and it is much too obvious that he is thinking: she will be killed for this.
There is nothing he can say anyway, and in the end Tenten only turns away to watch her dead.