A New Ally

Tenten moved quickly. She was pretty sure no one had followed her. If so, Neji would probably have detected them and made sure they followed him instead of her. So, the documents made it to Tsunade safely and swiftly.

Without knocking, Tenten slipped into a side door to Tsunade's home. Tsunade's home was in the middle of the city but it was large, especially considering it did not harbor a family but just one woman. Tsunade was waiting for Tenten in the living room, sipping tea with her legs underneath her. She was clearly ready to go to sleep soon because she already wore her nemaki of lined gauze with a floral pattern. Tenten slipped off the soft cloth coverings she wore as shoes, and stepped up the engawa to enter the living space. She lowered herself opposite Tsunade at the chabudai and unstrapped the satchel, laying it on the table.

"You brought something useful?" Tsunade wondered.

"Not sure."

"Beg your pardon?"

"They were waiting for us. We encountered a stray guard in an unexpected place, but I decided to push ahead anyway. Neji did not detect anything else out of order. But once we were in the bedroom, Hinata showed up. She definitely knew we were coming. It is unclear whether she told her father."

"Well, this is a mess," Tsunade sighed.

"Time travel and intrigue do seem potent ingredients for a mess."

"So, what happened with Hinata?"

"I took her out, we grabbed all documents we did not have time to inspect. On our way out, we split up. Neji is in charge of Naruto and Sakura; they're travelling home while we speak. I ensured the safety of the bounty."

"I guess you did the best you could in a- … wait, did you say you took out Hinata?"

Tenten nodded. Tsunade frowned.

"How…?" the Hokage was not quite sure how to phrase her question. The Tenten she knew was not capable of taking out a member of the Hyūga clan.

"I blocked her chakra systematically. I started with the limbs, then moved towards her center. The result left her unconscious, but, I believe, unharmed."

The two women stared at each other for a moment in the dark room, only illuminated by the silvery light of the moon.

"That's not something I can do, is it?" Tenten clarified.

"No," Tsunade confirmed. "It isn't."

Tenten didn't respond.

"Can you… I mean, can you see ...?" Tsunade began, leaning across the table, intrigued.

Tenten shook her head.

"No, of course not. My eyes are completely normal - that I'm sure of. I can't see a damn thing beyond your clothes."

"Then how…?"

"I just knew they were there," Tenten explained. Then she remembered something else.

"I also knew that Hinata leaves her left shoulder vulnerable whenever she tries to advance. Somehow, I knew a lot of her weaknesses."

Tsunade leaned back again.

"Interesting," the Hokage murmured, rubbing her finger across her chin.

"Well, I'm not gonna be sleeping anytime soon now," Tsunade announced then and gestured to the satchel.

"Open it then, tell me whether anything useful is in there."

Tenten hesitated a heartbeat, then did as she'd been told. The scrolls came tumbling down onto the table and Tenten grabbed a random one, opened it, stared at it.

"Interesting?" Tsunade asked. Tenten hesitated before answering.

"I can hardly make any of this out."

"Excuse me?"
"I can't read Hiashi's writing."

"Really? I would think he had outstanding hand-writing. He had a very good education."

"Yeah, but I didn't. He uses a lot of old characters and phrases. He also writes a lot more elaborately than I'm used to. There are so many small extras I can't make out what character it's supposed to be referring to." Tenten gave the scroll to Tsunade.

"Sorry," she declared.

"You can't help that," Tsunade held against that and took a look at the scroll.

"This is regular clan-business. Defense expenses - whow, that's a lot of money on guards." Tsunade had raised her eyebrows as she went on. "He really has increased the amount of guards he has."

This made Tenten listen up.

"I think Neji would have mentioned if there were more guards around than usual."

"So?" Tsunade asked, already grabbing for the next scroll.

"So, where are the extra guards?" Tenten wanted to know. The question made both of them pause. In their pregnant silence, a sound inserted itself. It was the sound of rushed steps and someone's panting. Shoes came flying off and Hinata stumbled into their little soiree.

"Hokage! Careful!" she yelled, then stopped abruptly. Obviously she was taken aback by what she saw. "There was a break in at the Hyūga mansion and..." The rest of the sentence trailed off as Hinata's gaze became more and more disturbed, jumping back and forth between the two women sitting at the table.

"Hokage?" Hinata breathed, unsteadily. Then her eyes focused on the scrolls at the table and Tenten, acting preemptively, jumped to her feet and positioned herself between Hinata and the table.

Tsunade realized some firm interference was necessary to smooth over this situation.

"Down, both of you," she commanded. Hinata was stunned but fell to her knees immediately. Tenten was a little slower in her retreat.

"What is happening?" Hinata asked in a meek voice. "Hokage, this is the intruder. You need to know, - she may look like Tenten but she's not." Hinata was very insistent about this fact. "She has my cousin and some other ninjas convinced but I can assure you this woman is an imposter."

Tsunade rolled her eyes as if to say 'not this again'.

"I understand why you would think that but I have it on good authority that she's the real deal," Tsunade tried to skirt around the issue and defuse the situation as quickly as possible.

"No, you don't understand. This woman has intimate knowledge of chakra. Tenten simply does not have that ability," Hinata explained, almost desperately.

"Correct. She doesn't," Tenten confirmed.

"See!" Hinata exclaimed. "Yet she was able to beat me at my own technique. I think you're in grave danger and I advise us to retreat-"

"I can't see your chakra," Tenten broke out again, this time addressing Hinata directly. "I beat you instinctively. I didn't use any ability to see chakra. I just happen to know where your chakra points are."

Hinata's eyes were wide and empty as she stared at whom she considered a dangerous intruder. Tsunade took a sip of tea, wondering how this would play out.

"But you don't know me that well," Hinata held against that.

Tenten sighed, then looked to Tsunade for advice.

"Might as well tell her," Tsunade advised with a shrug. "It's not like anything else will make any more sense in this situation."

Tenten sighed again, looked at Hinata and said:

"I was secretly trained for a mission that included you so I learned all your chakra points by heart but the next time you see me I'll have forgotten all of this."

Tsunade burst out in laughter and Hinata looked horrified.

"Are you kidding me?" Hinata wanted to know, her anger turning her cheeks pink. Tsunade laughed for a moment, before abruptly stopping and asking:
"You are kidding, Tenten, right? Or did you remember anything more?"

"Remember?" Hinata was flabbergasted about what was happening.

"No, yeah, I was kidding," Tenten admitted with a crooked smile. "But I do think that I learned the position of the chakra points by heart. I just got a feeling."

"Ok," Tsunade mused. "Another one of those feelings you're pretty sure about?"

"Yup."

"What is going on?" Hinata demanded to know.

"I'm from the future," Tenten admitted.

"Don't-" Hinata began.

"It's true," Tsunade interjected. "This Tenten is from the future. Pretty neat, huh?"

Hinata's cogwheels were definitely turning. The heiress had a look on her face as though… well, as though someone had just told her something impossible. She pointed at the Tenten in front of her and then over her shoulder in the direction the Hyūga household lay. Then her second hand pointed into the direction Tenten's house could be found. The general impression was that of a profoundly confused, mute Hinata.

"Does Neji ever become head of the clan in the future?" Hinata finally croaked out.

"I can't tell you that," Tenten replied. Then she asked Tsunade "Why do people keep asking me about their future?"

Tsunade shrugged. "People love answers to a good mystery. And there's no mystery greater than the future."

"How would that even work?" Hinata wondered, completely ignoring any conversation that was going on.

"We're not sure," Tsunade explained. "It's a jutsu that alters time and place. So far I haven't found anything like it during my research."

"So, this is… real." Hinata said it as though she were testing out the sound of it ion her tongue. It seemed to taste bitter.

"Then why was she in my home, stealing, nonetheless!?"

"Your father has something that might endanger the whole village."

"What? Really?" Hinata seemed disturbed by this news. "What is it?"

"No idea," Tsunade admitted.

Now Hinata was lost again.

"How do you know it's dangerous then?"

"I don't. Tenten has a feeling."

Hinata's mouth was left slightly ajar until she finally said:

"A Tenten from the future told you my father has something, though she doesn't know what it is, but she feels as though it might be dangerous to the entire village?"

"Exactly! Now you got it. Want some tea?" Tsunade offered.

But things did not go as planned. Hinata was at her Hokage's side in no time, trying to slap her in the face. Tsunade was not pleased with this development.

"I'm not in a trance," the Hokage complained, impatiently, deflecting Hinata's attack.

"I don't know what kind of power you wield but I can't let you-"

"My gosh, sometimes I miss the timid girl," Tsunade murmured, rubbing her wrist where she'd deflected Hinata's attack. Tenten tried to get through to the heiress:

"Hinata, your father had something imported! He does secret things behind your back all the time." After this warning, Tenten very carefully and slowly slid her hand into her bosom and pulled out a crumpled sheet of paper. She handed it to Hinata across the table. Hinata took it, hesitantly. She looked at it.

"No," the heiress breathed.

"Yeah," Tenten confirmed.

"What's this paper?" Tsunade, who wasn't used to being out of the loop, wanted to know. Hinata gave her superior the paper.

"Engagements? To be married?" Tsunade wondered as her eyes scanned the document.

"Yeah, my father's been promising us off to clan leaders in other villages as political alliances," Hinata answered as if in trance. She didn't even have to look at the paper to point at a specific passage of it.

"Look, here are mine and Neji's names."

"You're engaged then?" Tsunade surmised.

"Apparently," the heiress breathed. "He didn't even tell me."

Things started to dawn on Tsunade. She figured Tenten had found this tidbit of information in the archives but she wondered why Tenten had kept this piece of paper on her. In any case, the paper seemed to have served its purpose as Hinata was a lot less likely to view Tenten as the enemy. In fact, Hinata humbly retreated from her Hokage and fell to the floor at the side of the chabudai. Once she had seated herself, Hinata stared blankly out into the garden through which both Tenten and Hinata had approached Tsunade's living room. It was a beautiful garden in the middle of the house, lots of lush green.

Something rustled in the gardens.

"It's just Neji," Hinata mumbled downtrodden and absent-mindedly when the other two women at the table perked up in alarm. Indeed, the figure that emerged had Neji's build.

"Permission to approach," he said. Tsunade waved him over.

"The more the merrier, I guess," the Hokage mused.

"I'm here to report-"

"Yeah, yeah," Tsunade said impatiently. "Did Sakura and Naruto make it home alright?"

Neji blinked, then nodded.

"I brought Sakura home and treated her. I expect her to be fine by next morning. Naruto split off from me. Hokage, unexpected incidents-"

"Yes, Neji-" Tsunade interrupted him, holding back her eyes from rolling up into her head. "Obviously you must've noticed your cousin here, so let's just assume that I'm all caught up on everything unexpected, ok? That reminds me, Hinata, why don't you tell me why you seem to have launched a counter-mission?"

Hinata shook off her gloominess and said "Neji had visited me earlier yesterday and his questions were strange enough to make me alert, especially since I had this weird feeling that someone had been in our house the night before. I chalked it up to a dream at first, but then I became wary."

So Hinata had noticed that they'd already snuck into her home before. Tsunade decided to gloss over this invasion of privacy.

"So, basically you followed a hunch - Neji, you can come and sit down, you know? - Anyway, Hinata, I hope you understand that the privacy of your clan cannot be placed above the safety of the whole village. So, now, I have an important question to ask you."

"Yes?" Hinata said as Neji made his way around Tenten to sit at the last remaining side of the square table.

"Can you read your father's writing?"

It took Hinata only seconds to decide that she was going to help her Hokage figure out her father's secret plans.

"Great, can you figure out where these guards went?"

"I don't think I need to read anything for that. I'm pretty sure they are meant for the other side of the property, where we keep a tea house and pavilions."

"What's over there?" Tenten needed to know. But all Hinata could do was shrug.

That only made the tea house more interesting to Tenten.