She's the prize.
She isn't yet eighteen and her hair is sheared short, barely kissing her earlobes, but it wisps out like feathers and catches the light and burns against the sunlight of the fading day. And the stool where she sits, completely at ease, is a stool she's never sat in before, and never will again, because she's finished a mission; and she's got nothing to do; and she's never going to come to this hole of a village ever again; and the certainty of all these things draws men out of the fretwork to her like nocturnal creatures to shooting stars. She's the unreachable target and she knows it, so she sits at the bar with a drink in her hand and she drinks and bats her eyes and leans forward coqquettishly, because she is angry with him, has been angry with him for so long, and he knows it.
And it isn't fair. Isn't his fault she had to hack her hair off, isn't his fault that she relies more than she should, more than any other shinobi does on physics, on aerodynamics, to stay alive, to win. And it isn't his fault that, unbalanced by a potshot, she chose to slice through the remaining chocolatey coil of hair on her head. But the certainty that he can't tell her this is a certainty that has nothing to do with fate and her irrational speculation is something that he understands none too well and can't help. So he watches her rest her hand gently on another man's shoulder and he watches the man's face light up and it's such a contrast to the looks of the men surrounding her because she's young and alien and will be gone by morning light, and she's a sin walking through the town on five inch heels – and at the same time she is amber wide-eyed and a killer and a girl and some of them saw her break the other day, and the vulnerability, all mixed up like oil and water (always separate, even when they're shaken up together) with the threat of death and worse by her shot glass hands is a potent aphrodisiac. But she's made her choice, and there's nothing the losers can do but pack it in, go back to the minutiae of real life and the banality of wives and children and nine-to-five-jobs and forget the molten look that flashes through her wide amber eyes for a second; when she looks over at the other shinobi by the door.
And he catches her eye when she flashes him that look, and is startled, and feels heat flood his body because he has known Tenten for twelve years and known her for five and she's never shot him that look before, that tells him in a heartbeat allatonce that she isn't yet eighteen and a girl and a killer, and that the tantalising curves of her body that aren't being hidden well by her teeshirt and her long tan legs beneath her miniskirt know what to do – and he thought that she was angry with him because that's all she's been – but she can't be with that look in her eyes. And she must see something in his because a razor sharp smile cuts through her lush lips and she's arrowing towards him and the other men have lost. Shooting stars burn out before they ever touch the ground he tells himself, but it doesn't change anything.
And when they climb the stairs up to the crappy room they're sharing with two others and their lips crash together and their lips and teeth and tongues all get in the way and in on it and his hands slide under her teeshirt and she pulls it off and grabs his hips seemingly in one fluid motion, he forgets that they were even fighting, that she ever blamed him, and that the last thought he thinks outside of what they're doing is a resigned sort of a sigh. And he's drunk too much and it will hurt tomorrow if he needs to use his clan eyes and he can tell because his body feels mellow and liquid and burns for her, too, and he's still holding back because vaguely as he watches her pull his jeans down, he knows that this can only end badly because it only ever does, and that he doesn't want that to happen this time. But she is too mercurial for him to control, the steel of her spending too much time in the air, too close to the sun, and the metal has turned molten and oxidised all at once and this is why she's so volatile and – but the thoughts of why they shouldn't, why they ought not to, disappear when she opens her mouth and his hips jerk forward and his fingers lace their way through her feathery hair. And they're forgotten when he brings her up and gently slides his hand up between her legs, brushing her sex softly so that she shivers, but not with cold.
It's sultry here, on a whole 'nother latitude than Konoha and this is why, when they are naked and shivery and burning and alone and bored and drunk, that they stare at each other for a long moment, why he kisses her softly and whispers to her that 'You're special, Tenten', because he knows that he can't say that other three word phrase to her, (But they kind of mean the same thing) and why, for a second, something more than aching lust floats up into view in her eyes. The heat. The sultry night time air. And as he holds her, pushing her towards him insistently and slides into her it's not imbued with a this is it heart deep knowledge because they're not even eighteen and you're not meant to know things like this, this young.
And they're goddamned killers and children and he knows why she cries afterwards, why he wishes he could cry too, because they've lost so much on this mission, the irreplaceable things, so he holds her and whispers stupid things in her ears and her eyes are squeezed shut and her hair is running with sweat. And she's crying black mascara tears and those tears brush his own hot skin and it's the strangest sensation he's ever experienced, so he gets off the floor and goes into the tiny bathroom and has a long shower. And he isn't surprised to see her when she pulls the curtain back a bit a while later and climbs in with him too.
They stand for a long time underwaterflow as she wipes away the make up and reaches up, because he's so much taller than her now, and washes his long dark hair with the complimentary shampoo and runs her fingers through it silkily. And then, when they climb out dripping wet and clean and grab the tiny bathroom towels to dry themselves off with and she vomits in the sink as her system rejects the liquor, he goes to hold back her hair and then remembers that it's all been cut off; and so he rubs her back in soothing circles until it's over. And he can see let alone feel all the nobbly bones in her spine and it worries him that they're so close to the surface, and he wonders how long they've been that way, but he knows at the same time exactly how long they've been that way, how long the softness of her body has been gone. She changes into the outsize teeshirt she always sleeps in on missions when they have a change of clothes, and slides into her futon, and so does he.
And then, when the sand nin they worked with come back giggly and shtumbling and fall asleep with loud snores, and only then, does she slip over to him silent as the ninja that she is and curls up into his arms, fitting her body into the mould of his like the spoons they need to be. Why her heart hammers next to his, and why she shuts her eyes tightly. Because the memory that slides out of the walls and hangs around them is of when they were fourteen and she got sick and a boy in green and orange with eyes that shone with goodwill held her on her other side and the three of them existed like that until their sensei found them, cold and hypothermic near Mist. And now they're just the leftover parts of what once was and this is why she is the target and the prize and the arrow, and he understands this because this isn't the first time he's lost something precious, and this is why he knows that he can, at least, still, be the bow.
Why he holds her, tight, and tells her that her hair will grow back sooner than she thinks, and kisses the dimple in her shoulder before they finally fall into blessedly black, dreamless sleep.
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/ A..S u b j e c t i v e...O b j e c t i v e
Gare de LyonA/N: Consider it my easter treat for yoooou. A bittersweet one, because you're doubtlessly all going to be eating far too much sugar this weekend anyway. Tonnes of it is double layered, take from it what you will. A quote for the story, that was going through my mind while I was writing this:
"What they shared that night was not happiness, but hideous grief."
Disclaimer: I don't own the rights to Naruto, or anything I may or may not have alluded to. That quote is from The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. Happy easter! I felt like double spacing the title, to make up for the lack of its appearance at the top.
Cheers for reading.