PROLOGUE: TODAY, WE ARE...
She was down to her last pouch of Shuriken. Again.
Pressing her back into the tree trunk behind her more firmly, Tenten allowed herself a muttered curse as she went about patting down her pockets for something, anything she could use to her advantage.
And then Neji's chakra signature was almost next to her. She let herself fall from the branch purely on instinct and barely avoided the jabbing hand of her teammate.
'Shit, when did he get here? I didn't feel him approach at all!'
Cursing she tore through the underbrush, not caring about stealth anymore as Neji had located her so easily even without the use of his kekkai genkai.
Weaving, jumping, ducking. It was all her daily routine, she was good at it. She was agile and fast and flexible. And still she only managed to break through the foliage onto their usual training ground, before the Hyuuga was on her.
Her stumble, after his first strike landed between her shoulder blades, saved her from the second and third strikes. The fourth one struck home again and catapulted her body around in a wide arc, so she now faced her opponent.
Already the numbness spread from where his last strike had hit her shoulder. In a few moments, she knew, she wouldn't be able to use her left arm at all, rendering her last option of summoning more weapons from her discarded training pack, which she had hoped to reach before he could close her tenketsu, useless.
This meant they were down to hand-to-hand again. And again she was only left with about ten measly weapons to fend against the Ultimate Defense.
She was about to open her mouth to surrender quietly, but Neji rushed at her again, before she could even begin to form the words, leaving her no option but to defend, lest she got hit in even more vital points.
So she ducked.
They easily fell into their routine after that: The Hyuuga prodigy pushing her all over the place, gracefully spinning to attack her chakra-system, in the process bruising a few of her muscles and bones as she tried to avoid the even greater pain of a numbed tenketsu. And her, Tenten, desperately trying to keep up with him, to pose at least a bit of a challenge, to push past her limits and onto greater deeds.
And as always in their routine, it didn't work.
After only eleven tenketsu strikes, she had avoided the remarkable number of thirteen this time, Tenten felt her right leg give out and she stumbled to the ground, panting.
Neji gracefully slid out of his stance and nodded to her.
"Twenty-one minutes, Tenten, you're not improving at all!"
She threw him a dirty look, but he had already turned to go pick up his pack, looking for his water bottle.
Tenten felt the tell-tale prick of tears in the corners of her eyes and concentrated on cursing up a storm in her head to keep the tears from spilling over.
'He could at least have put it in a nicer way!' She growled in her head and pulled herself over to her duffle bag, right leg dragging uselessly through the dirt.
It wasn't that she hadn't improved at all, she reasoned with herself as she rummaged through her things for water and the ointment Hinata had given her, to help speed up the recovery rate of clogged tenketsu points, because Neji wouldn't close them entirely in a mere training match, they would have to regain functionality on their own.
She HAD improved, just as he had yet again. He probably didn't realize it, but she trained like mad to be able to keep up with his and Lee's insane improvement rates.
But that seemed to be the extent of her abilities.
Wincing, she applied the soothing balm to her left shoulder first, she would need her arm sooner than her leg anyway, and then set to the task of smearing the stuff on her leg, without taking off her pants. At least she had worn a tank top, a small blessing on this god-awful day.
Neji meanwhile, had taken up his usual spot underneath her old target practice tree and looked like he didn't even remember just sparing with her, so relaxed was his posture in his meditative stance.
She sent another dark glare his way, he didn't even care about her anymore!
Sure, it came with the routine, she got hit by his Juuken almost on a daily basis and knew how to take care of herself after that, but would it hurt him to at least pretend that he cared about a teammate in pain?
Apparently so. She sighed and rolled up her pant leg a little more, already her arm was feeling all prickly, a sign that the ointment was working its wonders.
She hardly could blame Neji, though. After all he had dedicated most of today's training to her new weapon's technique. No wonder he was in a pissy mood after being disappointed by her yet again.
Hell, even SHE was disappointed with the ineffectiveness of it. She would dismiss this technique, though it was quite flashy and fancy, from her repertoire as soon as she got home.
It was almost sunset, when the final two members of their team returned from their daily crazy-whatnot, cartwheeling into the clearing, full of enthusiasm.
Tenten was already up again and almost done storing her wayward weapons back into her scrolls from today's Kaiten warm-up, which she had also failed at miserably, she dryly remembered.
"Yosh! We are back, friends! And we set a new record in pull-ups on the first Hokage's hitai-ate!"
Aha, so that was what they had been up to today.
"Did your sparring yield a bountiful amount of new strength, my dear students? What about your new technique Tenten, will it be a useful asset for our future missions?"
She flinched at Gai-sensei's booming voice, almost involuntarily, as Lee cartwheeled over to the tree to bother Neji, who had yet to even acknowledge their presence.
Tenten only sighed and wrapped up her last scroll before stuffing it into her bag and shouldering said cloth container.
Gai had stopped hopping from foot to foot almost as soon as Tenten failed to reprimand him for his round-about way of speech or uttering a biting remark about how her techniques always saved their asses on most missions.
Though he was as loud and flamboyant as Lee, Gai had the distinct advantage of age on his side. His intense nature didn't stop him from sensing subtle changes in those close to him.
And so he looked at his only female student with slight concern.
But if there was one thing he knew about his youthful flower it was that she hated being treated carefully, especially in front of her teammates, so he put on his best serious teacher face and coughed loudly into his palm, to get her attention.
Tenten's head jerked up at Gai-sensei's sudden coughing fit.
But he didn't seem to be in any discomfort, as he beckoned her over with a serious expression, or a serious as Gai could get. He looked more like a constipated penguin.
Somehow she found a disturbing sense of comfort in that thought, as she trotted after him, away from the clearing.
He stopped out of earshot of her two remaining teammates, which made Tenten uneasy. He wasn't going to try to explain something "delicate" to her again, right?
She vividly remembered the day he had tried to explain menstruation to her and seriously wished, she couldn't. It had been a disaster, considering she'd had her period for almost a year already at that point.
"So, Tenten." He began and she sent him a suspicious look.
"Did you become stronger today?"
She had been ready to defend any over-the-top accusations about her springtime of youth, but somehow this simple question threw her off balance.
She kept silent and stared at her sensei, who sighed as if the crux of the world rested on his shoulders.
"I know you sometimes feel inadequate, Tenten. It is only natural. You are, after all, in the company of a genius with a priceless bloodline limit and my number one student of the springtime of youth!"
He threw her a nice-guy pose, hopefully to tell her, he was only joking. She didn't want to have this conversation.
"Way to make me feel special, Gai-sensei!" She grumbled and turned to leave, "Now, if you're done making me feel even more down and unremarkable than before, I would like to go home and drown in my bathtub."
"Tenten! Stopstopstop! You know I didn't mean it this way!"
"Or do I?"
He sighed again and placed a hand on her, thankfully uninjured, right shoulder.
"What happened?"
And suddenly, the tears were back, pricking insistently at her periphery. She pushed them back with all her might and only managed to send Gai a shaky smile.
"Nothing happened, Gai-sensei. Nothing at all.
Even though I desperately try every single day to become stronger, to finally be able to best one of the boys, to show them that they are not the only special ones, all I can do, all I AM, is to be able to keep up like a weak copy of their determination. I may be stronger than yesterday today, but then they are stronger than the me of today every time. I…"
"Tenten, hush!" Gai-sensei carefully pulled her a little closer and she let herself be dragged into his tentative embrace.
If he wanted to, her sensei could be a very tactful and empathic person and she was thankful for that.
Gai awkwardly patted his female student's back as she tried not to cry into his shoulder, still her body shook slightly.
He was a bit floored at how hurt she sounded about it. He had known she had always felt slightly left behind by Lee and Neji and even him for favoring Lee, but he had always thought she was the most mature of his students and could easily deal with it.
Apparently he had been wrong and it made him feel bad as a teacher not to have noticed just how bruised her ego was by how little her hard work yielded for her in comparison to her teammates.
Because Tenten was not weak at all, had she been on any other team, or even in comparison of what he knew of the other kunoichi in her age group, she was easily the strongest, most hard working and diligent to ninja life.
And even though she seemed to value herself so little, he knew that, without her, their team dynamics would be out of sync. She was an important part of their team and if she wanted to prove her individual importance…
He had to do something, before she lost all that to her insecurities, he resolved to talk to the only one, whom Tenten would listen to now, because she obviously wouldn't listen to his advice.
Carefully he pushed her shoulders back a little, holding her at arm's length.
"Maybe they're already on their day after tomorrow strength wise, but that just means you have to up the ante, Tenten. You'll have to learn to already live in the future so that yesterday will become your today and your today your tomorrow!"
She sent him a little smile and rubbed her hand over her eyes.
"That didn't make very much sense, sensei…"
He only chortled his trademark boisterous laugh and steered her back to the clearing.
"Who knows, what tomorrow brings, Tenten?"