Chapter 1: Introduction

There used to be this running joke in my family that I was too lazy to live but too smart to die, and yet I had miraculously managed both by the waning weeks of summer break. Naturally, I did the first passively and the second accidentally, being altogether too carefree and happy to actually try my hand at either.

I assume so, anyway. I actually don't know how I died.

…Well, that's not quite true.

I can tell you that, as far as I know, my untimely demise had nothing to do with Naruto in any shape or form. I wasn't brained with a volume of Naruto, nor was I assassinated in front of my TV screen while Naruto was playing. I wasn't beaten to death by a crazed Sakura cosplayer, nor was I burned alive by an idiot trying to recreate the Great Fireball Jutsu.

After all, I think I'd remember something like that, and yet I don't: I can't remember a single detail about where I was or what I was doing or even what time it was before I died. Of course, I still remember tons of things about who I am – or, more accurately, was – with startling clarity, even after all these years, but all each memory tells me is that I died after the memory took place.

It's a bit like a dream, really, where you'll end up somewhere but never remember how. And yet I refuse to believe that it was a dream. It was all too vivid, too real. Hurt too much, meant too much, been too much.

The first thing I remember about my life after the Earth That Was, as I've lovingly dubbed my collection of past memories, was the Pressure, like being kidnapped by a vacuum cleaner, compressing me with enough force to turn a human into a grisly water balloon – and crush it.

It hurt. If I'd had a mouth, I would have screamed.

Indeed, had I had been alive, I would have done a lot of things in that scenario I didn't, chief among them determining what killed me. Unfortunately, I was dead, and it's hard to make deductions when you're dead. It's also quite hard to remember exact details.

Returning to my seemingly inane comments about Naruto-related deaths, though, I was reborn, or reincarnated, or whatever the proper terminology is for a situation like this, into the sleepy little ninja village of Konohagakure - the Village Hidden in the Leaves. Had you told me this when I was alive for the first time, I would have (after laughing at you rather rudely) hazarded a guess that I'd be reborn as the son of a Nara, given how I already fit the clan description perfectly. Instead, I found myself reborn on March 9th as a sweet baby girl with no ninjas in the immediate family. My name is Tenten.

Fate, it seems, has a shitty sense of humor.

I never really figured out what my last name was, either, because I didn't spend my childhood with my family. Looking back, I'm sure they probably mentioned my surname at some point when I was dicking around in the crib trying to figure out why my eyesight was shot to hell and why my limbs were stubby and uncoordinated, but in my defense I was somewhat preoccupied.

My parents were fairly decent folk, from what I could tell, even if I only knew them for seven months.

My mom wasn't a smiling woman most of the time, but she always brightened when she saw me. Her round face would split into this crazy grin and her eyes would crinkle up like aluminum foil, and she'd make these sweet cooing noises while I giggled and gurgled under her tickling fingers.

Dad was the opposite, a jovial man who I could tell didn't know how to deal with my sudden intrusion into his life. It wasn't that he didn't love me, because I could see the wonder and delight in his eyes when he snuck furtive glances in at me from the doorway, as if still digesting the fact that he was a father. However, much as his black, bushy beard would quiver with happiness as he held me, the deeply buried panic and confusion at not knowing what to do with me would make itself known in his jerky movements and annoyingly profuse sweating.

Still, I loved my family very much. When it had become clear to me that I had either gone powerfully insane or else swapped places a la Freaky Friday with some girl in Old Timey Japan, I slowly began to replace my old family with my new one. At first, it was the similarities I focused on. That curly beard, the miniature afro on my dad's head. My mom's large eyes, and the way they wrinkled up at the corners just so. The smiles, the mannerisms, the attitudes. I latched on for some semblance of home that I could fill the emptiness in my heart with.

Then, slowly, as if by accident, I learned to love them for who they were. I fell in love that great, booming laugh my old father would have never been capable of pulling off. I grew attached to my new father's clumsiness, to how he would rinse the counter when he used the sink, to how my mother would scold him for it, and to how they would kiss passionately in forgiveness afterwards. After seven long months of confusion and heartache, I had grown to feel that maybe the hollowness in my chest was finally filling up once more.

Then, after those seven months, at once all too long and yet far too short, the Kyūbi struck, and my mom, visiting relatives on the other side of the village at the time, was killed along with her side of the family when their house collapsed on them.

The next day, my dad took me to the orphanage, his eyes red-rimmed with grief and regret, and told them my name. Even with my limited vocabulary, I could listen well enough to know that my mom had somehow been killed. When they asked for a last name, he simply shook his head and told them that I was better off not knowing, and that they should tell me that he, too, had died in the attack.

Those were the last words I ever heard him say, and I understood enough to know that. I yelled and screamed for him not to abandon me, but with my vocal cords underdeveloped as they were, all that he heard was babbling and a series of childish wails.

Dad, after all, had never been all that skilled at understanding what I wanted when I cried.

I can't pretend not to judge him, to hate him for what he did to me - hate him just as much as I love him. I know, on an intellectual level, that he must have had his reasons. Perhaps they were financial, and my father simply didn't have the money to properly raise a child alone after our house was halfway destroyed. Insurance, after all, didn't exist in Konoha, because questions of massive property damage were more often opened with a "how often" than a "how likely." On the other hand, perhaps he left me in the orphanage because he wasn't strong enough, and couldn't bear such a powerful reminder of his deceased wife staring him down with far-too-intelligent eyes for the next twenty years. Maybe he just didn't think himself emotionally capable of raising a child.

Or perhaps he simply hated my guts just as much as I couldn't stop myself hating his.

I never would find out, even though the pain of abandonment and loss dulled with time, slowly replaced by simmering resentment and a kind of dark curiosity.

Partially to distract myself from that initial gut-wrenching pain, though, I devoted my first two or three years at the orphanage to re-learning all the basic functions of a human being. You see, in my second infancy, I had managed to forget everything I had learned on the Earth That Was, from proper bowel control to how to walk. I guess I did have a new brain and a new body, so it did make some modicum of sense - not that it was any less embarrassing when I shat myself on a daily basis.

I kept crying to a minimum, except when I had to get my milk. I had myself potty-trained after about eighteen months, with only one incident of myself accidentally falling into the toilet bowl and needing to be lifted out by an older child. Learning to speak and write the language was harder, as my vocal cords and motor skills were undeveloped and I had never tried to learn Japanese before, but with some concentrated effort I was speaking in short phrases by around fifteen months or so.

(Naturally, I ensured that my first word was 'fuck', if only for the bragging rights I'd have years down the line.)

The simple task of learning how to function like a normal human being occupied me pretty well for around two or three years. It also kept me reasonably happy, but an unfortunate side-effect of it all was that everybody seemed to think I was some kind of prodigy.

Additionally, in my information-gathering endeavors, I came across some rather shocking information. When I was two-and-a-half, I decided I had become biologically old enough to ask the matron about my parents without arousing any suspicion. As cutely as I could manage (since I had been practicing, of course), I looked up at her and asked, "Where's mommy?"

There was a horribly dull pang in my chest as I voiced the question, but I shoved it ruthlessly aside for the sake of information; while I understood that my mom had died, I had never been told why.

Something in her gaze softened at the sight of me and she crouched to face me, sighing resignedly. "Your mommy is dead, sweetie."

That was something I both liked and disliked about Konoha, even though I had no idea that it was Konoha at the time. Because they had no compunctions about training six-year-old kids like Itachi into ruthless, emotionless killers and then tossing them out to fight grown men, the matron saw nothing wrong with telling me that my parents were dead. Death was, after all, practically commonplace in the ninja world, fickle as the weather and unchanging as the climate.

I made sure to widen my eyes at that, however, and act like I was emotionally effected and surprised by 'learning' about the death of my mother. "Why?"

She tried to smile at me comfortingly, but her lips were pressed together too harshly for her expression to be anything but a grimace. I could tell she liked this line of questioning as little as I did. "She was visiting relatives in the village when a big demon fox showed up and attacked. The Fourth Hokage defeated it, but not before she died."

Something tugged at the back of my mind with this statement. Up until this point, I had no idea that I was in the Narutoverse and not Old Japan. Yes, I'd seen men and women walking around with forehead protectors, but it wasn't like those were specific to the Narutoverse, and although easily recognizable landmarks like the Hokage Monument were in plain view, I had never really been outside for long anywhere near them. What little I'd heard about ninjas and samurai was easily dismissible, considering where I thought I was, and the presence of sinks and other fairly modern amenities clearly meant I hadn't been studying my history hard enough.

However, this response about a demon fox and a fourth fire shadow seemed almost too coincidental. "A demon fox?" I asked in response.

"Yes. We called it the Kyūbi. It was bigger than a mountain, had nine tails, and was pure evil." She paused, and then continued again, something in her face twitching as she said, "It's dead now."

Reeling from the revelation but dedicated not to draw suspicion upon myself, I asked, "And where's daddy?"

She looked like she was swallowing something bitter as she said, "Daddy is…Daddy is dead, like mommy. Now run along and play sweetie; I've got to meet with some important people in a little bit."

I nodded meekly and ran off to my bed, where I threw myself under the covers. Thinking furiously, I tried to process all the information. No matter which way I rationalized it or how hard I tried to deny it, I simply couldn't ignore the logical conclusion.

I had been reborn into the Narutoverse - or I had gone powerfully insane.

Years four and five in the Narutoverse, when I started taking classes at the public school, were fairly uneventful. I held most of the top scores in my classes, although it was hardly fair considering how old I actually was. Honestly, I probably would have shot for the halfway spot, only the matron was convinced of my genius by then and I had to keep up appearances. It was just a bonus that this gave me a pass for when I spent long hours in the library doing thinly-veiled research on the history and science of the ninja world, trying to grasp what I was up against.

Judging by my age and the date of the Kyūbi attack, I was seven months and one day older than Naruto, which implied I was born into the class just before the Rookie Nine. This, coupled with my first name and lack of a surname, solidified in my mind that I was not just any Tenten, but the Tenten of the Konoha Twelve.

With that in mind, I turned to practicing my chakra in preparation for the trials to come. To my immense surprise, however, it took me a while longer than I'd expected to learn how to use it, even without a teacher of any kind. I had basically no idea how to call it up for around a month, after which I made a stunning revelation.

I wanted to punch myself for not having deduced it before; it was just so obvious once I just thought about it. Why, in the series, did most people always talk about feeling chakra and not, say, smelling it? Why did Karin keep talking about how warm or cold other peoples' chakra was? Why did people talk about the density of chakra, or of how intense and heavy it was? The answer was simple: Chakra sense was an actual sense, with specialized nerves dedicated to it - and it had to work through the skin, for it to be comparable to pressure- and temperature-based sensations. In other words, just like with taste and smell, I had likely been mistaking my chakra sense for my sense of touch the entire time.

See, the thing about taste and smell is that, since both rely on fairly similar chemoreceptors, both can be influenced heavily by one another. Without the sense of smell, for example, bacon is little more than a mouthful of salt.

Going with the premise that chakra sense was similar in mechanics somehow to thermoreception and pressure-based mechanoreception, I tried to think of sensations which had been out of place in my new life and quickly realized that I had been unbearably hot during my entire stay in Konoha, though I had gotten used to it with time. It wasn't a hard leap from there to figure out how to sense chakra from people.

See, other peoples' chakra is easy to sense, because their chakra always somehow different from yours, which you normally feel. Its unique signature, as I quickly deduced, will make it feel hot or cold, humid or dry, and heavy or light relative to yours as you move closer to the source. Your chakra, additionally, has the opposite effect on other people – if somebody's chakra feels cool to you, then yours will come off as warm to them.

(Of course, there were other factors – to highly skilled sensor ninja, texture was often important, for example – but those were the most easily accessible.)

On the other hand, It's always harder for you to sense your own chakra, because of desensitization: prolonged exposure to stimulus results in diminished response to and awareness of that stimulus. Essentially, because I was always feeling my own chakra, I couldn't tell it was there anymore, and I was unable to draw it out. In order to use it, I had to look up a number of exercises which would cause my chakra to fluctuate madly. Between the oscillating highs and lows of chakra output I'd be able to eventually feel the difference and use that to tug on my chakra.

And wouldn't you know it; once I figured out how to feel my chakra suddenly everything came much easier to me.

Much to my dismay, however, when I started refining my awareness of chakra well enough to compare myself with other kids, I realized pretty quickly that I was probably mediocre at best in terms of talent. My chakra reserves weren't much larger than the other civilian kids around me, and although they grew steadily with constant practice, in the Academy I'd have below-average reserves. My control helped balance things out, since I was able to feel and direct my chakra with a little more ease than most, but I knew I would always tire a little faster than I was comfortable with. As if to make things worse, my physical capabilities were only about average, too, and unlike Rock Lee I was simply way too lazy to throw myself into hardcore training until I collapsed every day. Plus, I refused to wear a green jumpsuit and I probably couldn't ever open the Eight Gates the way he could, so taijutsu specialization was out. Then, as if the final nail in the coffin, my civilian parentage meant I probably had no bloodline limits or clan jutsus stored away anywhere.

I was, in short, completely unremarkable.

I strongly considered not taking part in the events of the Naruto storyline, to be honest. Before, it had seemed like a foregone conclusion, from the moment I looked up my birthdate, glanced in a mirror, and realized that yes, I was Tenten. After realizing my mediocrity, however, I started to wonder if I should really become a ninja at all. If I wasn't skilled enough, then even the little day-to-day details of being a ninja would be life-threatening.

Then again, I realized it was just as dangerous, if not more so, not knowing how to defend myself at all in a village that would get attacked twice by S-ranked ninja (thrice, if you counted the one that claimed my mother's life) by the time I'd have reached legal driving age on the Earth-That-Was. And, somehow, I felt that self-study just wasn't going to cut it with these guys.

And that's not even getting into the whole Infinite Tsukuyomi debacle, or the fact that my simple insistence on avoiding the storyline could have tons of negative repercussions I wouldn't even be aware of until they were irreversible.

For example, what if Team Gai failed their team exam after they graduated from the academy because they didn't have me on their team, and got sent back to the academy? What if, as a result, Neji and Lee were weaker, and their new sensei a year later didn't let them take part in the Chunin Exams? Or, even worse, what if they did take part but got killed because of their incompetence and were therefore unable to be involved in any future story events?

And those were just the pre-timeskip possibilities.

With all those things in mind, I realized I pretty much had no choice but to join the academy, as the alternative was risking the apocalypse via the absence of any number of contrived coincidences.

Early on, I noticed that my greatest assets would be my raw intellect and my early head start, both of which would hopefully compensate for my relatively underwhelming physical talent.

I would have to be like Shikamaru, who was, despite his general bodily mediocrity, able to out-think and subdue Hidan, an S-ranker who took effectively no damage from any hits and could kill with a mere glancing blow.

Unlike my peers, I would also be able to research heavily academic technique branches like sealing and medical jutsu when they were focusing on which way to point their kunai while they ran. I was fairly confident about this - in my past life, I'd been pretty damn smart, if I do say so myself. I even took a bunch of college classes as a high schooler, mostly in math, finishing Elementary Differential Equations the summer I died. Granted, I was no Einstein or anything, but collegiate mathematics training does bring with it a number of advantages - creativity, critical thinking, pattern recognition, problem solving, the ability to tackle a situation from multiple angles, a penchant for rigorous analysis... The list goes on. Who knew that learning how to apply eigenvalues and eigenvectors to systems of ordinary differential equations would prepare you for being a ninja?

Well, maybe that's stretching it somewhat, but I did also get something of an intelligence upgrade when I transferred realities. I guess it sort of made sense, since I had a new brain even with the same soul, although I was entirely clueless about how the biology of that played out. Maybe the mind is like a bridge between the soul and the body, and therefore a better brain allows for more efficient interplay and clearer thought? Everything I could come up with just sounded asinine to me, really, since I hadn't even believed in souls (or anything metaphysical, for that matter) until I was reincarnated anyway. Still, whatever the case may be, and whether I was simply born smarter or my brain developed more through constant use in childhood, I definitely got a boost. Old mathematical concepts I'd been struggling with suddenly made much more sense to me. Lots of the names, dates, and places were new to me, but I hardly ever forgot any of them. I had to relearn lots of anatomy and biology due to the physiological differences in the people of this universe, but, surprisingly, it came to me way easier than old biology ever had. Hell, I even found myself enjoying Japanese, a language I would have never dreamed of tackling in my old life.

All in all, I tried not to question it too much. It was just nice to have something go completely right for me when I was born clanless and unremarkable, and I planned on taking full advantage the little boosts I got.

At the age of six, I took the entrance exam to the Academy, and with two years of preparation it was hardly surprising that I passed. In fact, I had over prepared, even going so far as to spend a month tackling the transformation technique when I would have likely passed without any prior training at all. Imagine my surprise when I showed up and was informed that an applicant need only:

1. Love the village and hope to preserve peace and prosperity.

2. Have a mind that will not yield, able to endure hard training and work.

3. Be healthy in mind and body.

In order to pass the first and second, we pretty much had to make a pledge and understand that failure to comply with either of the conditions could easily result in our immediate expulsion from the Academy. The third required a psychological and physical examination from a medical ninja.

I didn't even break a sweat.

When I returned to the orphanage that day with my test results, I immediately broke the happy news to the matron. Given that we lived in a society where skilled ninjas were glorified on roughly the same level as presidents and prime ministers, and with higher incomes to boot, I fully expected her to clap in delight and sign me up for the academy first thing next morning. To my great surprise, though, she completely refused to let me get within a mile of the place for as long as I stayed in the orphanage.

Years and years ago, before the Kyūbi attack, I would have considered heeding her advice. After all, she was a very kind woman, and since I had unwillingly abandoned my first mother and my second had died on me, she was the closest thing I'd had to a mom in years. However, losing all semblance of a family twice in under a year had taught me not to let people get too close to me in this world, and so I had no compunctions with excusing myself from the orphanage to go live on my own.

The only problem was that, being an orphan and all, I had pretty much no income, and I had saved up very little money over the years. Using a transformation to disguise my age and gender, I took out a couple small loans from the shadier assholes who didn't ask for legal identification - basically enough to keep me afloat for a month or two, until I could find a way to get my own income - and then moved into the cheapest apartment I could stomach, a tiny little run-down thing with just a bedroom and a bathroom.

In the Red Light district.

Konoha is a wonderful village full of wonderful people, but even it has its dark spots. The Red Light district is one of them, the kind of place that you always imagine shrouded in the inky blackness of nighttime, with cigarette smoke twisting lazily through the air and drunken shouts emanating from every half-opened door, the flickering lights from inside casting sharp reliefs on the unkempt streets. The whole place was, rather fittingly, located almost as far away from the Hokage Monument as possible, where the village leaders couldn't easily watch over it, symbolically or otherwise. However, due to the depreciated property values stemming from extra crime and unsavory businesses, I was able to snag an acceptable apartment for a much more affordable price than normal.

Don't get me wrong, I knew the dangers when I rented the apartment, but I also knew that I could likely scare off most muggers and rapists by transforming into assorted leaf chunin (jonin rank being too suspicious). Besides, after a year or two at the Academy, I'd probably become skilled enough to take on most of the drunken idiots dumb enough to mug a ninja.

It wasn't perfect, but it wasn't terrible either, and it was no more risky than any of the other shit I'd likely be doing in a few years. Besides, I couldn't really afford much else without a solid income.

So with that taken care of, I was basically set for the Academy.

Plot, here I come.

A/N: So there you have it: chapter one of my obligatory self-insert. Well, if I'm being precise and honest, I can't really call it a self-insert, because if I were actually in Tenten's shoes I'd be just freaking out and fucking up on so many levels. This Tenten, because of that, is really more an idealized (and feminized, for obvious plot reasons) version of myself, so that the important base elements are all there, but she's way more mentally suited to her role than I would have ever been. To quote Topher Brink, I "wove more than one thread of unflappable in there." Now, that being said, this version of Tenten still does share her Earth That Was backstory with me, so you can think of her as a self-insert with Hero Upgrades.

For now.

Tenten as a character will be similar to her canon portrayal, but not the same. For example, I've introduced lodgings in the Red Light district to connect to her dependence on weapons, as she'll need them to defend herself earlier against the bigger and stronger opponents in the area. However, because she has the advantage of knowing all the weaknesses in the original Tenten's abilities (her lack of adaptability, her low penetrative power, her lack of prominent tactical variety), this Tenten will be likely only borrowing a few aspects of the original's combat style. You'll get more details on that later, though, because I'm not in the mood to spoil anything right now.

If you squint carefully, you may notice one or two details just ever so slightly off. They'll look like plot holes at first, but they aren't: I'll be covering them in the future. Most likely towards the very end of the fic. Consider this a bread crumb on the trail to the true nature of Tenten's reincarnation.

The title will probably make sense later.

Anyway, I hope you enjoyed. Because this is my first fanfiction, I'm using this chapter as more of a trial run than anything else. Future chapters will be meatier and more important. I appreciate all reviews, as they help me decide how to change and improve upon my writing style.

- YSPM