CHAPTER ONE

I died on a warm summer night near the end of July. I was on my way to a remote village at the edge of Fire Country to complete a small-scale mission. Nothing special; just a routine mission with my team mates and sensei. That was when it happened. When I died. Or, to be completely accurate, when I was murdered.

Who am I? My name is…uh…I mean, was Tenten. I'd tell you my last name but you'd probably forget it so I won't bother. I used to be a weapons expert. Kunai, shuriken, bladed chains, conveniently-placed tree limbs—you name it I've probably used it at some point. I was reputed to have the most accurate aim in the entire village. Admirable? Maybe. Amazing? Not if you compared it to what my teammates and sensei can do.

Gai-sensei is the most obnoxious, insane, stupidly optimistic man I met in my life. He is also the greatest taijutsu specialist in the ninja world. You want to dispute it, go ahead and take it up with him personally. He'll knock you on your butt and do 500 victory laps around the village before you regain consciousness.

Lee is basically a scrawny clone of Gai-sensei. He has the same haircut, same dress sense, same ridiculously over-the-top work ethic. He is also on track to become an even greater taijutsu specialist than Gai-sensei himself. You want to dispute it, wait until he's drunk and then go ahead and take it up with him personally. If you're lucky he'll knock you on your butt with a couple of broken ribs. If not…well, being able to walk is pretty overrated anyways.

Then there's Neji. Yes, that Neji. You've never heard of him? Prodigy of the Hyuuga clan? Master of the Gentle Fist? Pretty-haired, sexy—I mean…Byakkugan user extraordinaire? He's the strongest member of our team. You want to dispute it, don't be stupid and take it up with him personally. Catch him in a good mood and you might survive. Catch him in a bad mood and you'll wish you'd died.

Tsunade assigned the four of us to the mission at three in the afternoon on a Friday afternoon. It was a no-nonsense investigation mission. Some rich daimyo in some tiny little village way out in the boonies had been murdered. We were supposed to go in, take a look around, come back, report what we saw. Do not seek out the killer. Do not engage in combat. Do not pass go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.

By six o'clock in the evening on that same Friday, the four of us were walking through the main gate. Neji was bored. I was bored. Gai-sensei was raving about how this was a great "team bonding" opportunity. Lee was as excited as Gai-sensei and he was doing everything in his power to make me and Neji excited, too. I rolled my eyes a lot. Neji pretended not to hear him. That's my team.

We stopped about two hours later to set up camp and get some dinner. Actually, as soon as we stopped Lee and Gai-sensei hit their evening training routine, which involves an ungodly number of push-ups, squats, punches, and kicks. Those of us with a little more sanity started getting the more practical things taken care of.

There was stream nearby; close enough to hear the running water babbling over the rocks from our campsite. I took the canteens and went to fill them up.

After I filled the canteens, I scooped up handfuls of the water and splashed it on my face. It was cold—glacial runoff from mountains too far away to see from Konoha—but sweet and clean. I was grateful for the chance to clean up. It had been a hot day and I felt greasy, dirty, and I had a feeling that I stank.

I was wiping the water out of my eyes when I felt the cold, sharp edge of a kunai against the back of my neck. I didn't think, didn't take time to process what it meant. I ducked low and rolled, throwing myself away from the weapon before it could cut me.

I came out of the roll on my back, exposed, vulnerable, but with a kunai in hand. There was a gleam of silver, enough to tell me where the killing blow was about to fall. I jerked my kunai hand up to block and the blow glanced away with a clang of metal on metal. Then I saw who my attacker was and relaxed.

"That's not funny, Neji," I said, tucking the kunai back into its holster. "I was ready to attack you."

He gave me a derisive snort. "Hardly. If I'd have been an enemy, you would already be dead."

I wanted to yell at him. I was half-way there—my mouth was open and waiting for the words to come. Then he offered a hand to help me to my feet and added, "You should be more careful outside of Konoha."

He's right, I thought, and felt a dark flush creep through my cheeks. Of course. Any idiot knew better than to make himself an easy target. It was one of the first things they taught us at the Academy. Alone and blinded, I might as well have hung a sign around my neck that said, "Wide open; easy kill!"

"R-right," I said, reaching forward to accept his proffered hand. There was a funny twinge in the pit of my stomach when my skin brushed against his. I realized as his fingers curled around mine that this was the first time he'd ever touched me outside of what was necessary for training and even though I knew that it was stupid, I couldn't help wondering if there was some significance in that touch. After all, it wasn't every day that Neji Hyuuga bothered to help anybody up.

He let go of my hand as soon as I was standing and I curled my fingers, missing the solid, warm feel of his hand in mine. Some crazy corner of my imagination expected him to say something romantic. Instead, he said, "We should get back to camp." Then, with a cringe, he added, "They were talking about telling ghost stories."

"Oh no," I groaned. Gai-sensei is a horrible storyteller and Lee isn't any better. They always forget the important details that make the story make sense so that by the time they get to the end you're so lost you don't even remember why the story is scary anymore.

That night was no different. By the time Lee finished his story with, "And they never saw him again" I didn't know if "he" was a ninja, an animal, a monster, or a bowl of talking tapioca pudding, although I was sure he'd mentioned all of those things at some point.

Even Gai-sensei looked confused. His grin was too wide to be natural, and his eyebrows were bunched down towards the middle as he said, "Well done, Lee! I'm sure all of us will be having terrifying dreams tonight!" Then he turned to me and said, "All right, Tenten, let's see if you can best that!"

I sighed, but told the obligatory story. If it was any good I'd repeat it here, but it was just one of those urban legends that everyone's heard a thousand times. Everybody knew what was coming as soon as I started to talk, but at least I managed to get through it without confusing everybody.

After I'd finished with that we settled down to sleep while Neji took the first watch. Nobody made him tell a story. Gai-sensei had made the mistake of doing that only once and the story that he told was the most disturbing thing I have ever heard. I have no idea where he heard it or if he made it up himself, but I did not sleep that night, and I don't think Lee or Gai-sensei did, either. Needless to say, Neji was not asked to tell another story ever again. The lucky dog.

We didn't keep a campfire. If there were any enemy ninja in the area the light would draw them straight to us. Another "wide open; easy kill" signal. Besides that, the midsummer full moon was bright enough to see clearly without any fire. Even under the canopy of trees, the landscape was lit with a silvery blue that made everything look dreamy. I could see Neji's outline at the far end of camp, sitting with his back to me. His pale skin seemed to glow silver in the moonlight, but his long hair looked black. It was a sharp contrast, like a black and white photo without any of the shades of gray.

I didn't realize I was staring until he shifted and made a noise that was something between a cough and clearing his throat. That was when I realized that he had probably activated his Byakkugan and yes, he could see me looking at him even though his back was turned. I turned away, glad that the moonlight would help hide the blush that I felt creeping onto my face.

As I closed my eyes, I wondered if I would ever pluck up my courage and ask him out, or if—by some miracle—he would ask me out. I dropped off to sleep thinking about all of those dumb things that every girl thinks about at the prospect of a date—What would I wear? What would he wear? Where would we go? Would we kiss?

And that was when I woke up to somebody clucking their tongue and saying, "What a shame, what a shame."

I opened my eyes, yelped when the bright sunlight scorched my retinas and squeezed them shut with tears seeping past my eyelashes. During those few seconds of blindness, my train of thought went like this: The sun is up. It's daytime. Somebody is standing over me. He's not on my team. Nobody woke me up for my watch. Something is wrong. The guy standing over me is the culprit.

Of course, my train of thought went a little quicker than it takes to read it all written out. In the time it took you to read all that, I was already up off the ground with a kunai in hand, bearing down on the intruder with every intention to kill first and ask questions second.

I was still half-asleep and feeling pretty disoriented from the rude awakening. Imagine how much more disoriented I felt when my arm met no resistance and the momentum sent me stumbling through the man's body.

Thinking he had somehow managed to move, I executed an embarrassingly graceless turn to check his position. He was standing right smack dab in the middle of where I'd been aiming. My kunai should have been smeared with his heart's blood. Instead, he was just standing there with a vaguely annoyed expression on his face.

"Are you finished?" he asked.

I tried to say "Where are my teammates and what just happened?" It came out as "Whaaaaaa?"

He grinned. "I'll take that as a yes."

I tried to talk again. This time I actually managed to form real words. "Who are you?"

His grin faltered just the tiniest bit. "You mean you don't recognize me?"

I furrowed my brow. I would have guessed him to be in his late twenties, but he had a spark in his blue eyes that made him seem younger. Looking at his blonde hair, I realized I'd seen that messy style before. Weird, I thought. He looks like an older version of that Uzumaki kid…. What's going on?

He sighed and said, "I guess I'm going to have to give you a hint. Oh well; gives me an excuse to have a little fun. Hang on."

I wanted to say, "Hang on to what?" Before the words could leave my mouth, the bright light began to dim down to something slightly less eye searing. I only then realized that the place I'd woken up in had been…nowhere. No trees. No ground. No sky. No up or down. Just that bright, bright light.

The next thing I knew we were standing in the middle of the main road that cuts through Konoha. It's a big, open thing with shops packed in on both sides and a great view of the Hokage monument. He was standing in front of me with his back to the monument, with an expression that was a perfect caricature of the serious expressions carved up in the stone.

I took two seconds to look back and forth between the two. Then I took five more seconds to gape like an idiot. Then I stuttered, "You're the—the—"

"Yeah, yeah, I know," he said. "Yellow Flash. The Fourth. You can call me Minato, though."

"B-but you're…you're—"

"Dead," he interrupted with a bored wave of his hand that said he'd had this same conversation more times than he cared to remember. "I know. So are you."

I reacted to those words pretty much the same way you or anybody else would have. I laughed and said, "No."

He quirked an eyebrow and replied, "Yes."

"No."

"Yes."

"N-no…"

"Yes."

"Oh, no," I groaned. "When? How?"

"Actually, that's what I wanted to talk to you about," he said, and if I hadn't known any better I'd have thought that the great vanquisher of the nine-tailed fox looked sheepish. "See…a few very important documents got stuck together up in management and to make a long story short, a lot of things happened that shouldn't have happened—"

"Wait, wait, wait," I said, waving my hand about two inches from his nose. (And don't you dare try to tell me I should have been showing the man a little more respect. Would you have stopped two inches short of slugging him in the nose if you were in my position? Yeah, I didn't think so.) "Are you saying I died because of a couple of misfiled papers?"

He backed away from my hand, just outside of convenient punching range before answering, "I'm saying you're dead now. But that doesn't necessarily mean you have to stay that way."

"Wait…what?" Gee, I'm starting to sound like a broken record, I thought.

"Remember how I said that a lot of things happened that weren't supposed to have happened?" He waited for me to smile and nod to show that I understood. I smiled and nodded and thought, What the heck is going on? Apparently my nod was convincing enough for him to go on with, "There's still time to prevent those things from getting out of hand. If you can find the people who murdered you, I'll pull a few strings and see to it that you get to come back as well."

I frowned. "I was murdered?"

He flinched. "Yes."

"Who did it?"

"What?"

"You said I needed to find the people who killed me, so who did it?"

He took a deep breath, let it out and said, "I can't tell you that."

"What? Why not?"

"My influence only reaches as far as the realm of the dead. Delaying your trip to the great beyond is easy enough, but I can't do or say anything that directly affects the world of the living or the people in it. It's…not allowed."

"By who? God?"

He frowned. "You might say that. Look, all I can tell you is that you were murdered and that you have to find the people who did it. There is a reason. You'll know it when you find them. I promise."

"But…what am I supposed to do once I find them? If you can't affect people who are alive, how am I supposed to do anything?"

"You'll find a way. But you have to do it before the sun sets tonight."

"What? Why? What will happen if I don't—"

"Nothing bad will happen to you. You're already dead. It's just…." He clenched his jaw and balled his hands into angry fists. I could tell he was casting around for some way to say what he wanted to say without breaking The Rules, and I realized then just how frustrating his position must have been. Watching over the village he loved, probably knowing of every impending disaster, and having just enough power to have a sliver of hope to stop it. Finally, he said, "If you don't figure it out by then there won't be any reason for you to keep looking."

I frowned, trying to decode the meaning behind that ominously cryptic answer. Whatever secret lay behind those words, I knew he was dead serious. Pun intended. Yes, I am that dorky.

I wasn't puzzling long before he said, "Do we have a deal?"

I shrugged. "Sure." Not like I've got much of a choice, anyway.

He smiled, relief flooding those eerily familiar blue eyes. That Naruto kid, I thought. If he ever makes it to his twenties, I bet he'll look exactly like this. "Good," he said. "Remember, you've got until sundown."

And with those benedictory words, he disappeared, leaving me standing in the middle of Konoha's main road with the first rays of morning sun peeking over the Hokage monument.

Author's Notes: I know I should be working on Cadence of the Leaves, and I do plan to update it as soon as possible. I just needed a bit of a break from it, and this plot bunny attacked. Besides that, I figure since Tenten is the only member of the Konoha twelve who doesn't appear in Cadence of the Leaves, I owe her a story, right? Hope you enjoyed this. Updates will probably be sporadic—Cadence of the Leaves still comes first.