Loneliness
It was loneliness.
From the beginning she had been alone, and as she grew loneliness crept into her spirit like a contagion, like an incurable sickness common to all orphans. Her caretakers were kind and good-hearted, but she quickly learned the cruel truth that they had their own lives and families, and to them she was just another assignment. At the end of the day they went home, while she retired to her little room with its single window and scratched-up furniture, a place to which she didn't belong and where nothing belonged to her. In all of Konoha, in all of the Land of Fire, there was not a single person for whom she was really necessary.
While she was still an infant her parents had come to Konoha as immigrants – no one knew from exactly where. Their first night in the village, a fire swept through the wooden building where they had rented a single room. Her mother had tossed her out of a small window into the arms of waiting villager, then perished with her husband in the flames. No one was left who knew their names or their story, and the only clue to the baby's identity was the name embroidered on her hand-sewn clothes: Tenten. Tenten still had the stained dress she had been wearing that night, tucked safely into the top drawer of her dresser. It was the only remnant of her past.
Despite its status as a ninja village, Konoha contained relatively few orphans. There was one boy at the orphanage, however, who took a liking to Tenten. His name was Hideo, and he was much older than her, a student at Konoha's ninja academy. After graduation he left the orphanage for good to begin his new life as a genin. Tenten resigned herself to never seeing him again, but to her surprise he dropped by occasionally to regale her with (much exaggerated) tales of his exploits.
"And then," he was saying to her one afternoon, as they sat together on the low stone wall running around the orphanage, "I threw my kunai straight at the enemy, killing him instantly. Then I freed Fumio and Shizuka. They thanked me for saving their lives, of course." Fumio and Shizuka were Hideo's teammates.
"Wow!" exclaimed Tenten, gazing up at her friend in admiration. He looked completely different from the desperate boy she used to know. His body was taut with new muscle, his chin tilted upward with confidence, his eyes glittering with enthusiasm. Gone was the haggard, hungry look of the unwanted. The golden sunlight reflecting off his forehead-protector seemed to crown him with a radiant halo.
Hideo looked down at his companion, so tiny she fit entirely within his slanting black shadow. He felt a stab of guilt, not for the pack of lies he had just told her, but for the glint of desperation in her wide brown eyes, for the way she clutched at his attention like a drowning man at a life preserver. He had once had eyes like that, too.
"Tenten," he said, suddenly serious, "why don't you go to the Academy next year? You'll be old enough then."
The little girl frowned, looked down at her feet. "I thought about it," she confessed in a soft voice, "but I'm scared."
"Aren't you more scared of staying here, like this – all alone?"
She looked back up at him sharply. Orphans did not speak of their loneliness, for fear of making it concrete, permanent. "Even if I become a ninja," she said slowly, "I don't see how that will change anything."
Hideo reached out to take her small hand and looked directly into her eyes. "It will change everything," he said earnestly. "All the ninja of the Leaf are comrades. They would all die for each other. They need each other, Tenten. If you become one of them, they'll need you too, and you'll need them. You'll be part of something important, and you'll never be alone."
Tenten returned his steady gaze. She was not as gullible as Hideo thought – she knew, for instance, that the mission he had just been bragging about had in fact been a routine cat-catching exercise, not a battle – and she thought that this might be another one of his tall tales. But she was unwilling to contradict her only friend, so she remained silent and filed his words away for future reference.
Six months later Hideo was killed in the line of duty. Tenten was not permitted to attend the funeral.
On the day of his cremation she snuck out to say her final goodbye, and arrived at the crematorium just after they pulled his body from the furnace. She crept silently into a room set with a rectangular table, upon which was laid the gurney containing the hot gray ash and bleach-white bone that was all that remained of Hideo. Three people clad in black stood around the table – a tall man who seemed to emanate power, a short freckled boy, and a beautiful girl with blonde hair and green eyes. All of them wore Leaf forehead-protectors, from which Tenten surmised they must be Hideo's team – his jounin sensei, Fumio, and Shizuka. They did not notice her as she stepped through the open doorway and hid herself behind a cabinet, their attention being wholly occupied with the task at hand.
With long chopsticks they were carefully picking the shards of bone from the ashes, passing them to one another, chopstick to chopstick, before depositing them in a beautifully painted urn. The bones fell in and struck the porcelain with a clear pure ringing noise, the only sound in the room save for the sobbing of the two genin – Shizuka's wails were loud and piercing, Fumio's muffled and hoarse. Fumio's hands shook.
Tenten's eyes began to swim with tears. She cried them silently, a skill she had mastered early on. Only a few weeks ago Hideo had been so exuberantly alive, and now all that remained of him was carbon flakes and calcium driftwood. She wept for him and for herself, for the boy who had been only person to both understand and care about her.
"Goodbye, Hideo," she mouthed soundlessly.
There are a lot of bones in the human body, and so the bone-picking ceremony continued long enough for Tenten's tears to dry up and her vision to clear. His teammates, though, were still weeping, and with a jolt Tenten saw a tear leak from the eye of the stoic jounin and run down his cheek to drip onto the floor. Their grief was genuine as they performed this ceremony normally reserved for the family of the deceased. Hideo, of course, had had no family.
At least not biologically.
At night, after the setting of the sun and before the rising of the moon, Tenten had often lain awake and imagined her own death. It was a macabre pastime for any child, but common enough among those who had lost their families. She pictured her body lifeless and still, the scalding inferno of the crematorium, a small pile of ashes in a plain white urn. Her grave would be unmarked and anonymous, a monument to propriety and not to grief. No one would visit it on holy days, and no one would mourn. It would be as if she had never lived at all.
This was the death of the orphan, the death of the abandoned.
Except that Hideo's final rites were attended by his team, whose devastation was palpable. In taking up his bones they could not deny his death, could not ignore the gaping hole he had left in the fabric of their lives. Clearly, by their reverence and their pain, he had meant something to them. He might have begun his life in solitude, but he did not end it that way.
Tenten was at last convinced. The following fall she entered the Academy.
There, her natural reticence and good sense served her well, as did her inborn talent with projectiles. Sometimes when the kunai flew from her hand to strike the precise center of her target, she remembered Hideo and his outrageous lies and smiled, and wondered if she was better at this than he had been. She vowed to become as strong as Lady Tsunade, so that everyone might know her and rely on her. She flattered herself that she was well on her way.
Then teams were assigned, and Tenten regarded Neji and Lee with tense expectation. She wanted fervently for them to become to her what Fumio and Shizuka had been to Hideo. They trained together and fought together, and though their efforts produced strength, they did not produce companionship.
Lee was focused entirely on his own struggle, and the only one who seemed truly able to reach him was Gai. Though she didn't know it at the time, Neji was also at war with himself, and he masked his pain with an impenetrable air of aloofness. The result was that even when she was in the company of her team, Tenten still felt isolated.
Had her teammates truly depended on her things might have been different, for you cannot ignore something that is vital to your existence. But Lee and Neji quickly became so strong that the idea that they would ever need Tenten was laughable. She helped them train and did her part during missions, yet never once did she feel really important to them. Her role could have been filled by anyone; she was just a stand-in. Her confidence evaporated and she reflected darkly that if she died now there would be no one to shed tears over her ashes, and hardly any disruption to the efficient operation of her squad.
She kept training, though, hoping to become strong enough to be needed. Only then would she have escaped from loneliness, her oldest enemy.
One spring day found them fleeing over a swollen river, crossing a wooden bridge to the flat, grassy opposite bank. Their pursuers were a party of ten Stone ninja, ferociously skilled and intent on reclaiming the information Team Gai had stolen.
Team Gai was the fastest squad in the Leaf and so they had a sizable lead on the Stone-nin, but their stamina was not inexhaustible and they were fading quickly. A hundred meters past the bridge Neji suddenly came to a stop, hunching over with his hands on his knees, breathing in heavy, harsh gasps.
"Neji!" exclaimed Lee, "We cannot stop now! If we are captured we will die!"
"I know that," panted Neji, straightening up and brushing his long hair back over his shoulders. "But at this rate we'll be overtaken anyway. We have to stop them now."
"How?" asked Lee. "We do not posses any long-range jutsu, and we are badly outnumbered in hand-to-hand combat."
"You and I cannot strike from a distance, Lee. But Tenten can." Neji turned to her. "Tenten, can you hit the bridge from here?"
She squinted back toward the bridge, whose underside was only inches from the rushing water. It was a great distance, certainly, but not beyond her reach.
"Yes," she replied. "But even if I take out the bridge, Neji, they'll just run across the water to reach us." She could clearly make out their pursuers, growing closer with every passing second.
"True," he conceded. "That is why I want to you wait until they are on the bridge before destroying it."
Lee let out a soft oh of comprehension, and Tenten drew four kunai from her pack. She tied explosive tags to their ends, and gripped them tightly in her right hand. "I'll use the kind that detonate on impact," she said. "If I throw now and detonate with a hand sign, they might see the tags before stepping on the bridge."
Neji nodded his agreement, and all three of them turned to wait.
It wasn't long before the Stone ninja had reached the bridge. They stopped momentarily and stared in confusion at their quarry, clearly surprised that they were no longer fleeing.
"They suspect something," said Neji.
"Then we must make them believe we have decided to turn and fight," said Lee. He stepped forward a pace and waved his arms frantically over his head and jumped up and down in place. "Hey, Stone-nin!" he shouted in a booming voice. "We are done with running! We will fight you and defeat you!"
Across the river, Tenten saw one of the Stone-nin point at Lee. She could not hear their conversation from this distance, but it looked to her as if more than one of them was laughing.
The first Stone ninja stepped confidently onto the wooden planking of the bridge. His comrades followed.
Tenten held her breath. If the lead Stone-nin reached the near bank before the hindmost stepped onto the bridge, their plan would fail. But that didn't happen; there soon came an instant when all ten of the pursuers were strung out along wooden planking, suspended over the water.
"Now!" she hissed, and her arm shot forward like a catapult, releasing four kunai to arc up into the sky, glinting sliver and trailing flapping paper streamers. She was so skilled she needed only one throw to send four projectiles at four different targets, and though the paper tags changed the flight of the kunai that was no impediment to her. Each kunai landed squarely on its intended target – two on the far side of the bridge, two on the near side.
A split second after impact, they exploded.
For an instant the light of the sun was overwhelmed by a brighter, whiter flash, as though ball lightning had somehow descended from the cloudless sky to envelop the Stone ninja. A great tearing boom reached their ears, and wood splinters, gouts of water, and chunks of mud were thrown high into the air.
"You got them!" said Lee.
Neji had his Byakugan engaged and was peering into the scattering debris cloud. "Three survived," he reported. "They are struggling in the water now, but it will only be a matter of time before they manage to stand on the river's surface."
"Their heads are above water?" asked Tenten.
Neji nodded.
"About where are they?"
"Fifteen meters downstream."
She drew a handful of shuriken and released them with one sweeping motion of her arm, sending a line of whirring steel stars toward the location Neji had identified. She spread them over a wide area but spaced them only ten centimeters apart, a gap too small to encompass a human head. They flew low and fast, passing through the windblown grass and skimming just a few centimeters above the roiling water. A few halted their progress once they reached the river, embedding deep into enemy skulls.
"That's the last of them," said Neji after a moment. "You killed the last three."
"All right Tenten!" said Lee. "You saved our lives!" He grinned and gave her his ridiculous thumbs-up. Just now, she didn't mind so much.
"Hn," grunted Neji. "We could have taken those last three hand-to-hand. But … it was just as well we didn't have to, given our condition. And—" he paused, struggling with his natural tendency never to give praise or express enthusiasm " –the bridge was well done."
Tenten felt a warmth in her chest, and a lightness like she was being lifted off the ground. This time, she had been at the center. Her skill had saved them, and no other would have sufficed. For the first time she knew what it was to be an integral part of something, to be needed.
It was glorious. It drove the loneliness from her heart entirely.
The feeling did not last, of course. Like all emotions it was soon buried under other sensations, other experiences. And the loneliness returned, creeping up when Tenten returned to her empty little apartment, when she found herself unable to sleep in the hours before moonrise, when Neji or Lee departed for a mission without her. But now she knew it as a temporary affliction, one whose remedy she had the means to obtain. Her skill was the key; it made her important, reliable, and above all necessary.
Neji and Lee were indeed strong. But there were things she could do that they could not, gaps in their lives only she could fill. To enlarge that gap, to entrench herself more firmly in the lives and hearts of her comrades, she would risk anything, sacrifice anything. She would train until she had cut out a Tenten-shaped hole from the fabric of the village, that she could slip into perfectly, weave about her permanently. Enmeshed in a great web of trust and companionship, she would escape the loneliness forever, and be an orphan no more.