A/N: There's not real excuse I can offer for being gone as long as I have been. I'm really sorry. Suffice to say, my life exploded. It's getting better, I guess. A new laptop helps. :D

Disclaimer: Not mine. My time away hasn't earned me ownership of Naruto.

If there's one thing that Tenten's good at, it's keeping secrets. She didn't tell anyone when Neji showed her his curse seal. She never told anyone ever. She didn't tell anyone that she had found Lee once, curled up crying at their regular training ground because Neji had beaten him into the ground for the nth time and Lee was so frustrated and hurt that he couldn't bear it anymore. Lee had cried into her shoulder for a long time, but she hadn't said a word to anyone. She never even brought it up to Gai-sensei.

And Neji's bandages, the ones on his right arm and leg that he never removed in front of anyone, he had showed her what was underneath. And she hadn't told anyone. She hadn't said anything about the warped, dead flesh hidden there, destroyed from the high amounts of raw chakra that Neji forced through them so often. And she hadn't said a word when Lee had worked himself half to death and showed up on her doorstep because he was alone in his house and there was no one to take care of him.

After the battle with Naruto, when Neji hadn't shown up for training, and Tenten had gone to find him, she had held Neji as he cried, too overcome with guilt to bear it any longer. She hadn't told Lee anything. She hadn't mentioned to him that half of the mostly-incoherent sobs that escaped from Neji had involved Lee and frantic apologies for his treatment of him. She hadn't told Hinata that the other half had been about her. And she really hadn't said anything about the self-loathing interwoven through the whole speech. Neji had recovered, and begun to move on. But Tenten remembered what he had said. And she had never told anyone. Tenten has fought to keep her team together in a way that Lee and Neji never have and never will. They fight with kunai and chakra, and she does too, but she does more than that. She holds her team together with the secrets that she keeps and the words she offers to mend her shattered boys. They're hers. They always have been hers, since the first day of academy, and she guards them viciously. Tenten knows how to keep secrets. And keep them she does.