It's been a while huh? Well, my finals are over and everything is much less hectic, so I should be finishing up this challenge pretty quickly here. Only 3 more prompts to go!

I had a strange idea, and here it is. I'm sorry, I went pretty light on the DeiTen pairing in this, but it's still there! I wrote it in Tenten's POV. Incase you didn't notice, I love writing in first person. Anyway, I hope you guys like it!

Title: Clean Slate
Fandom: Naruto
Prompt: 4:04 Ring
Character/Pairing: Deidara/Tenten
Word Count: 510
Summary: Tenten just needed to start over.
Rating: PG 13 for violence.
Author's Notes/Disclaimer:
If I owned Naruto, you would've seen Kakashi naked five times already.

At first I thought he was looking back at the village, but he was really looking me. He looked impatient. I nodded, and pulled a kunai out of my pouch. Without a second thought I threw it into a tree trunk, hitting my target square. BOOM! I leapt out of the way of the falling tree just in time. The seconds dragged as I listened out for the sound of more explosions.

It should be right about…now!

It turns out that the total destruction of a village does have a distinct sound. To me it sounded like loud, sharp thunder. I stayed on the ground and covered my head with my arms to shield myself from any flying debris (if there was any.) Deidara, however, stood and watched with a self-satisfied grin stretched across his face. He didn't look like a maniacal criminal: he looked like an artist that was simply admiring a masterpiece.

After I felt the shockwave from the explosion stampede across the earth and over me, I looked back to see Konoha drowning in intense red and gold swirls of fire. Onetwothreefourfive explosions on the cliff and I was watching faces of the Hokages melt into the flaming inferno below.

Amazing! And it was so simple to pull off, too.

So simple that it was a little disappointing. It didn't take me long to figure out Konoha's weak spots and discretely set up explosive notes in them. My ingenuity startled me.

As I watched the chaos unfold before me, somewhere in the back of my mind I knew that the loss of my entire village, my friends and family, would hit me. I didn't know when it would happen, but I knew it would happen. When it did happen I convinced myself that it was Konoha that betrayed me, not the other way around.

But I wasn't concerned about that now. Right now I was living for the moment, that fleeting moment when I heard Konoha collapse and felt my life start over.

After the flames settled I met his blue gaze. He knew what I was asking. "Not bad for exploding tags, Tenten. Maybe you do have a chance, yeah."

So this is what it feels like to have a clean slate, I thought as Deidara placed a ring in the palm of my hand the next day. I inspected it, letting my fingers slide over the smooth warm metal. I paid close attention to the way the symbol for "north" was carved into the pendant. I tightly clenched my fist around it as if I was trying to imprint its shape into my hand. My new life was just beginning. I now had the ring as well as a deep gash that had been carved through the leaf symbol on my hitai-ate hours ago. They were symbols of a new and stronger me. I felt the corners of my lips tug a little as I got on my knees and bowed before Sir Leader.

Tenten of the Akatsuki. It rolls off the tongue nicely.