Tenten knew that she was someone who was easily looked over. In the presence of powerhouses like Naruto and Neji, a mere weapon-based fighter seemed inconsequential.
When she was a genin, she hated it. She'd spent her entire youth screaming for attention, fighting her way to the top of the rankings. She clung to the idea of Tsunade, to the idea of a blazing kunoichi. What brought death could also strike awe. She would carve herself into the world and never be forgotten.
(She was already forgotten- a child left alone when her foreign family faced the wrath of the Kyuubi, as her mother and father were torn from her life in those few blood-sheared seconds.)
(In an orphanage spread too thin, she faded.)
Her fall in the chunin damaged far more than her back- it struck her to the core with fear. Her peers, her teammates, all surpassing her and leaving her behind. Leaving her forgotten. She was another face in the crowd. She was what she had always been. Never changing, always stagnant.
It was her closest secret, the despair she had fallen into during those dark days at the hospital. She could never give up being a shinobi- but what was the point if it never brought her the triumph and recognition she so desired? All it had given her was shattered vertebrae and stretches of solitude, the walls as gray and dismal as her.
(In a hospital still with death, she faded.)
She had never expected it. Of all the people that she ever thought to visit her, Neji was the last. The two of them never talked outside training, and the topics were about the team. She could not name any of his interests, his life outside being a shinobi. With Lee, she shared a sort of camaraderie at least, and Gai was her teacher. She could speak easily with them. Neji was hard to read, so she decided not to even try.
But Neji had sat beside her bed, hands clenching and unclenching into fists as she stared faintly at him. Finally he had spoken. He had asked her to train with him.
Tentatively, she agreed.
After her isolation, Tenten was surprised by how much Neji had been paying attention to her. He knew nearly all of the weapons she owned, how she preferred to use them in battle. He knew how to read the signs of her discomfort, and while her spine healed in those early days training together, he would stop for breaks when the pain was too much for her far before she would have spoken up.
(He knew how much she liked dumplings. How they ever got on the subject she never remembered, but he knew how much she liked dumplings.)
By the time the chunin exams had ended- still a team of genin, but perhaps that was best- she was friends with Lee, and a step above being teammates with Neji.
(It wasn't friendship between them, not yet. But it was close enough, some days.)
So she could fade. She could be overlooked. That meant that no one would see her coming before it was too late. There was subtlety in steel, and Tenten was a blacksmith. She would make it bend to her, when she was ready.