It was pride.
It was also shame, pride's conjoined twin; the possession of the one made her more vulnerable to the other. Shame whenever her father's eyes fell on her forehead-protector and then flicked derisively away, and she could clearly hear his thoughts: Just a kunoichi, after all. Shame whenever she pictured the scene of her own birth, painstakingly reconstructed from the hazy recollections of nurses, doctors, and her own mother:
A man stands straight-backed and still outside a hospital room, from which the anguished cries of a woman can be heard. He is tall, muscular, physically perfect save for a slight unnaturalness in his stance; there is something not-quite-right about the bend of his left knee beneath his blue trousers. The woman, his wife, desperately wants him at her side, but he stands firmly planted outside the door. Birthing and babies lie strictly within a woman's domain, and he will not enter, no matter how piteously she might call his name. After some time his wife's voice is joined by the high-pitched wails of an infant, and at last his stony expression shows signs of life as he looks expectantly at the door.
A doctor, young and tired and bloodstained, exits hurriedly and turns left before his progress is halted by the waiting man, who extends a beefy arm to grab hold of the doctor's shoulder.
"Well?" the man demands, unceremoniously spinning the doctor around to face him.
The doctor instinctively tries to pull away but finds that he cannot, that the man's grip is unbreakable. "Are you the husband, then?" he asks. "I was just coming out to find you."
The man nods curtly, just once, and the doctor continues, "Well, your wife is out of danger now. It was a difficult birth, as you both knew it would be. I am afraid that this will be your last child."
The man nods once more, and other than a brief flickering in his eyes he does not react to this news. The doctors warned him that it was inadvisable for his wife to get pregnant, but he and she both knew that there was no question of remaining childless.
"Is he healthy?" the man demands. This is his real concern, the reason he has kept his silent vigil outside this door.
"'He?'" echoes the doctor blankly. "I'm afraid I don't know who you're—"
"My son!" the man barks impatiently. "Is he healthy?"
The doctor's brows knit. It takes him a moment to process the man's statement, for as far as he knows the couple has no other children. Then it dawns on him – the mistaken assumption at the root of the man's question.
"Nono," he replies with an emphatic shake of the head, "you don't have a son. The child your wife just bore is a daughter – a little girl."
The doctor's words affect the man like a blow. His eyes widen, his mouth gapes, and his hand releases its grip on the doctor's shoulder. He stares aghast for a few uncomfortable moments, then abruptly turns on his heel and starts off down the hall. His gait, like his stance, is just a little wrong.
"Sir!" calls the doctor, flabbergasted. "Sir!" But the man either doesn't hear or doesn't care, just continues his awkward retreat from his wife and daughter.
It had taken some time to learn the details of that day, but Tenten had been utterly unsurprised at her findings. Her father had once been a great shinobi of the Leaf, powerful, deadly, and chauvinistic. But that was before the loss of his left leg. His prosthesis was well-made and inconspicuous, but it could not give him the mobility needed to resume life as a ninja. He had retired and opened a weapons shop, and placed his hopes in the next generation, in a son who would carry on his legacy. Instead he got Tenten.
His disappointment knew no bounds, for there was no place in his world for a daughter, no possibility of a man like him reconsidering his belief that women must always be subordinate and docile. He had not even given Tenten, his only child, his name, considering it better to let the name die out than continue in the person of a girl who would only change it anyway. So when Tenten entered the Academy she was single-named and unclaimed like an orphan.
"Why bother with the Academy?" her father had asked her, not looking up as he sharpened one of the shop's many swords. "At best you'll only ever be a backup. In the shinobi world, women play an auxiliary role."
She had felt it then for the first time, the painful stirring of her pride. She was barely six, and until now her brown eyes had always regarded her cold and distant father with something like worship. But as she looked at him she knew, somehow, in a wordless six-year-old way, that he was wrong, that there was something unyielding and indomitable within her.
She seized a kunai from where it lay at her father's elbow, newly sharpened and dangerous, and hurled it with all of her tiny strength across the shop, to lodge in the bulls-eye of the practice target tacked to the opposite wall. Her father did not look up, did not spare either her or the target a glance.
"Do what you want," he said indifferently. "It has nothing to do with me."
So she entered the Academy, where her prodigious skill with kunai served her well. Her pride, that roaring monster inside her, she kept hidden, along with the shame she felt when she looked around and realized that the majority of her classmates, and all the most skilled ones, were male, and that the great shinobi they studied were also exclusively men. She would never have admitted it, not even to herself, but she felt a burgeoning shame at her own femininity.
Then she learned about Tsunade, heir to a great shinobi clan, one-third of the legendary san nin, mightiest kunoichi of the Leaf. Her pride swelled up from her chest to her tongue, and before she knew it she had declared, "I'm going to be as great as Lady Tsunade!" Her classmates laughed at her then, for other than the kunai she had no special talent, but she barely heard them over the singing of her heart.
"Tsunade was an exception," her father said dismissively that evening. "There are always exceptions. But most people, including you Tenten, are governed by averages, and on average men make better ninja than women." At his words her joy gave way before the taint of mediocrity.
Then came the assignment of teams, and whoever chose each triplet might as well have known Tenten's secrets and calculated the selection for maximum damage to her pride. Neji Hyuuga, casually brilliant and contemptuous of effort, was a shining standard she could never reach, and in the darkest parts of her mind she couldn't help but wonder if that was because she'd been born a girl.
The presence of Rock Lee might have been of some comfort, for in the beginning she was far superior to him in almost every respect. But Lee's rapid improvement and Gai's faith in him – a faith he had never lavished on her – had the opposite effect. Tenten knew that her muscles would never attain the same brute strength as Lee's, and beside his raw power she felt weak and vulnerable. If even Lee, lacking the ability to perform the most basic ninjutsu and genjutsu, could advance to such a level, how could she ever hope to compete?
Another kunoichi might have quit. Many did, at this stage, when they began to mature into adulthood and discovered that they would never have the same physical strength as their male comrades. Others changed their focus to medical ninjutsu or espionage, specialties that would keep them off the front lines. But Tenten's pride would not allow it, kept insisting, quietly but intractably, that she was the equal of any man and had only to prove it.
So though the most visible competition on Team Gai was always between Neji and Lee, Tenten competed too, no less fiercely but in silence. She warred against her body, her doubts, and the spiraling heights reached by her teammates. She was determined not to be left behind and not to be a burden.
It was a painful time for her, for she both loved and hated her teammates. Loved them, for their courage and friendship, and hated them for making her feel inferior. When she watched them train, when she watched them fight, she felt the desire to surpass them lodge uncomfortably in the midst of her affection for them, like a sharp blade embedded in tender flesh. When she drew breath she could feel it cutting, slicing her up from within.
Just once she let her pride get the best of her. It was shortly after she made chuunin, an accomplishment somewhat dimmed by the fact that Neji was already a jounin. They were on a mission to the Land of Lightning, and suddenly came upon the sight of three enemy Cloud ninja unwisely encamped in a small dip about a quarter of a kilometer away.
Neji's eyes narrowed as he studied them through his Byakugan. "No doubt about it," he said. "These are the same three we encountered before. They must be tracking us." They had narrowly escaped these Cloud ninja the previous day. The three fought with a peculiar style that combined taijutsu and lightning-natured chakra – just one blow to the wrong place and you could go into cardiac arrest or suffer irreparable nerve damage.
"We can't have them following us back to Konoha," said Tenten, and Neji nodded in agreement.
"No, we'll have to stop them here," he replied. "Lee and I will go in. You stay back and get ready to pull us out should we be injured."
Neji, all his attention focused on the enemy, had no time to avoid what came next: Tenten's blow, a right hook straight to his jaw. She had neither Lee's brute strength nor Neji's Gentle Fist, but still Neji tasted blood as he reeled backwards.
He recovered his balance quickly and settled into his Gentle Fist pose, still not quite sure what had happened. Disengaging his Byakugan he beheld Tenten, clutching a fistful of kunai in one hand and a scroll in the other. Her face was livid with a rage he would scarcely have believed her capable of.
"Don't you ever," she snarled, "underestimate me. I'm nobody's backup."
Neji kept staring in incomprehension until Lee stepped between them, his arms spread and an uncharacteristically solemn look on his face. "Tenten is right, Neji. She is our teammate. It is not right to leave her behind. I for one would like to have some weapons cover when we engage the Cloud ninja."
Lee was looking at Neji as he spoke, but his words went straight to Tenten's core. Not for the first time it occurred to her that, of all her comrades from the Leaf, Lee was probably the best equipped to understand her private struggle.
Neji's eyes darted between Lee and Tenten. He was in charge here; the final decision was his. There was a time when he would have been impervious to arguments based on teamwork and desire rather than tactics, but in his ascent to jounin he had left that arrogance behind. "I understand," he said at last, relaxing from his Gentle Fist stance. "Tenten will come in with us, then. We should in fact have weapons cover."
Lee lowered his arms and Tenten stowed her weapons, and they prepared to move out. "Tenten," said Neji in a low voice right before they launched their attack, "I apologize. But never do that again."
She never did. After that it wasn't necessary.
Pride and shame were like two whetstones sharpening her soul between them, driving her mercilessly onward without rest. If she endured long enough, suffered long enough, then surely someday she would emerge fine and deadly, a mighty weapon of the Leaf. Surely, at the end, she would shine.