The scroll was small, only three centimeters in diameter. It bore no decorations. It was standard by all means except for the color: charcoal black.
Tenten ground her molars, thinking of how many of these paper coffins had been distributed. They had been given to ninjas who specialized in fuinjutsu, the art of sealing away into paper. She was called into a tent with around twenty others. Upon the table laid a basket full of those scrolls. Everyone was quiet. They knew the significance. It was a mass grave minus the bodies.
Her job would be easy. By now she could seal objects into a scroll with her eyes closed. Hell, she had done so once during a battle with a genjutsu user, eyes scrunched tight as she reloaded her scroll with discarded shurikens. However, sealing a dead body was foreign to her. Body recovery missions were required after her work, done by chunins with spare scrolls and time.
Regardless, Tenten refused to be daunted by this task. War was a time to prove her prowess. A body was just a body after all. Once life left, it was nothing special. It required the same seals as a kunai to be transferred onto paper.
When the time came, she was prepared after all. While the rest of her squad hunkered back in the night of ceasefire, she and other fuinjutsu ninjas walked through the blood and scattered metal tools. Her first body was a middle-aged Iwa nin. She formed the seals, placed one hand in the open circle upon the paper, the other on the body's shoulder, and poof. There was more where that came from.
This was different though.
This body had a name. She knew this body, how it fought like a dancer, how its arms crossed in irritation or deep thought. She remembered every scar on this very body. She excruciatingly recalled in perfect detail the texture and pressure of that skin on her own- in more ways than one. A punch, a hand in hers, a kiss on the forehead. Before she saw a corpse- another coffin job- she saw her teammate. Just looking down at Neji's face, Tenten could have envisioned the lifetime she spent with that mass of skin and bone. But that did not matter anymore. A body is a body.
The only time she came close to crying was when she rolled up the scroll and held it in her palm, and it felt no heavier than before.