A/N: Hmm. I wanted to dabble a little in Tenten's beginnings as a ninja, and I'm not sure what I did. This will possibly be expanded into further parts.
Disclaimer: Naruto doesn't belong to me.
Photometry - measurement of the intensity of light
-o-
She misses the first time she tries.
It's not like she'd been expecting to hit it – watching the Academy students, two years older than her, throwing metal at the wooden target posts in the Academy has taught her that much. There's a big tree in the corner next to the recess yard where the students spend their lunchtimes, and she's learned to climb in and crouch in the branches, watching. She calculates the statistics in her head: roughly one – or occasionally, none –out of every ten students can hit all the markers. About four or five can hit at least half their marks. Three or four miss most or all of them.
She wants to be that top ten percent. She wants to be better than that top ten percent. She wants to be the only one, the one percent that hits every single mark she aims for.
So she stands under the shade of her tree one day, when all the students and most of the teachers have gone home, eyeing the target at the other side of the yard. Small fingers are wrapped around a battered old kunai found in her attic once upon a time, a long time ago. Its handle is worn and rough and cold in the smooth softness of child's palm. She judges the distance (awkwardly, clumsily, because she still doesn't know how) and throws.
The effort tears at her shoulder muscles. The kunai bounces off the ground to the left of the target.
And that's the first time, but it's not the last.
She tries again that day, and again the next, and again and again and again until all the teachers on this side of the building are used to looking out the window at sunset and seeing a little girl with plain brown hair and determined eyes facing wooden posts that bear twice their share of scars because of her practice. She is small, and precious, and innocent, and no one will take that from her. The teachers smile at her; occasionally their hands brush her shoulder and their teeth glint with a soft murmur of praise.
She nods back and sometimes she smiles a little but she never speaks.
When the first day of school arrives the next year, she is there first in line with rusty hair pulled in two sloppy buns and a smile that is simple but radiant. "I'm Tenten," she says. Her eyes are clear liquid amber. Her voice is steady; her gaze does not shake.
The first Academy instructor to welcome the year's new students bows his head quietly under the weight of a child's simple determination, welcomes her with a nod. Everyone comes here with ambition and no one comes here without a reason; but few come here only as themselves with nothing more to do than to accomplish something because they want to see how far they can go.
"Welcome," he says. "Welcome to the Academy."
She smiles. "Thanks," she says.
And as she steps fearlessly inside, the bright morning sunlight glints off the shiny metal handle of a kunai in her back pocket.