A/N: This is my first fanfiction in years. I hope I've improved. Anyways, I hope you all enjoy it. Remember I don't own anything.
Smile
By: Dimhiriel Taralom
Inuzuka Kiba was fifteen when he first saw Tenten's smile.
Of course, Tenten had smiled all her life. She smiled often, really. But Kiba had never been looking for it before. He hadn't been really looking for her smile then either, but for some reason he had glanced at her and done a double take.
Tenten had Hana's smile, the same quirk of the lips and crinkling of eyes. For a moment, he had thought he was looking at his sister's face. But then he remembered Hana was dead.
Angry with himself, Kiba took Akamaru to the training ground and forgot about Tenten's smile.
But training had only been a distraction. Kiba would lie in his bed at night and wonder why he saw his sister in a kunoichi whom he had only spoken a handful of words to.
I've lost it, he told himself angrily.
But the thought would not go away.
Sometimes, he would stand in Hana's untouched room and sniff timidly, but her scent was slowly fading and his heart broke as he lay his head on the pillow that had begun to smell more like him than it did of her.
Sometimes, when the rain quietly spilled to the ground and left flower-shaped splatters on his clothes, he would seek out Tenten. He watched her, training and talking and smiling and living. He watched her from the shadows for a glimpse of his sister.
He could remember how the same, callused fingers that had killed shinobi had patched up Akamaru and tousled his hair. He could still feel the warmth in her smile that had been a quiet contrast to their mother's wide, hearty grin.
That smile was on the face of another woman.
They were nothing alike. Tenten, with her odango hair and weapons and that smile, that damn smile that she'd stolen from Hana. Why couldn't it have been you, he thought resentfully, No one would miss you if you were gone.
Sometimes, he missed Hana so much he thought he would burst.
Whenever Tenten smiled, he saw Hana, and so he watched and waited and watched some more. He didn't know what he would do if he lost Hana forever.
Tenten knew Kiba watched her, on those cold drizzly days not unlike the one in which the ANBU had brought back Hana's body.
Tenten wasn't sure what Kiba saw in her, but it seemed to comfort him. So she stayed silent and kept smiling.
Odd, huh? But the plot bunny had attached itself to my head and refused to get off until I wrote it. Comments are welcome. Thanks for reading.