Warnings for: Angst!!! A good deal of artistic licence. A lack of chronological structure.

Vanishing Act

Chapter 6

Gare de Lyon

(melancholia)

Neji dislikes sentimentality, but if there is one thing he pulls out (in a morose, weak-willed moment) it is his photo album. A present from his cousins, upon making chunin, it features a grand sum total of 8 photographs on its black pages. His mother and father, on their wedding day, staring at each other as though they are the only two in the world. A tiny him, on his father's back, asleep. And then there are Team Gai's 5 annual team photographs. A series, like time-stop photography, in which their faces lose their baby softness, their bodies harden and tighten in on themselves, and their eyes lose their innocence until they are poles apart from their 12 year old selves, and facing a world without their sensei. They are strange to look at, and so he flicks to the final photograph quickly this time. The one that no one else knows about.

The accident, when Tenten tried to snatch the camera from whoever was aiming it at her. The shot is unfocused, framed by dark fingers, and her edges are blurred in it, a little, because she moved when it was taken, or Lee or Gai did, but, curiously, her face is perfectly focused. Caught in the crosshairs, her mouth is a halfway twirl of a nearly smile, dimples only just forming on her cheeks (like parenthesis, holding back some latent, unfulfilled emotion. Joy? Happiness? Euphoria?) and her eyes shine with a dazzling sort of straightforwardness, one she usually lacks. Even in their team photos there's a strange look in her eyes. A wariness underlying her smiles, as though she's been caught off-guard, and her instinctive reaction is to be polite.

"Orphanage courtesy," she once called it. "You try to play nice with anyone, to make yourself a little bit more secure in the world."

"Oh?"

"Not you, Neji. Not even I can pull the wool over those eyes." And she'd turned to him, flicked a reassuring honey coloured gaze his way.

But it had only made him doubt.

Those eyes… sometimes he wondered about that. He is an orphan, but, in some ways, Tenten is even more so. He is a Hyuga, and this means that he has history in his very blood, and the omnipresent awareness of just how deep his roots are in this land. His bloodline limit and fighting style (and even his skin and hair and bones) are the physical embodiment of this, but it is at his core that the difference between them is strongest. He fights like a Hyuga and thinks like a Hyuga and reacts like one, and he has just enough of his mother in him (Midori, the woman from beyond the pale) to be aware of it.

It is always there. That his people had lived here before the time of the Bijuu, before the village hidden in the leaves, and, because Tenten was an oh so conscientious student at the academy, he knows she knows this too, and more besides. Tenten is perceptive, is easy to talk to, is amazingly astute. Is an unknown quantity.

If Tenten resembles her people, he's never seen them. If she behaves like them, then they're probably more than a little insane. She is a person with no people, and sometimes the freedom makes him horribly jealous of her, but sometimes he thinks that continuing to breath in and out (when she does) is the bravest thing he's ever seen anyone do.

Not that he ever tells her so. While she sometimes knows what he is going to say before he says it, or understands the things he cannot put into words, there are some things which he'd rather die than for her to know.

That when they were 12, and he had sealed himself up, tight as a seashell, he fell in love with her anyway. That he has spent a good number of years trying to deny it, diminish his feelings for her to a stupid, hormone-driven crush. But it isn't. Neji has never been so sure in his entire life that anything is as not as that. It isn't just that he wants to be with her... in that way... or that she is beautiful, or the only girl he has ever enjoyed sparring with, and the only person who has ever got him,

But that she has managed to change the way he breathes.

And being so tied to someone like that is something he vowed to never happen. So when he pulls out her photograph, it isn't because he has studied her face longer than he has to, or to makes his heart ache in his chest, or to try and see where that clarity disappears to, when she stands still. That would be preposterous.

He'd rather stare and recollect exactly why he doesn't tell her.

(esoteric)

She likes to think that, one day, she will be normal. In her head, always, is an idealised person she wants to become – someone real, someone strong, someone not beholden to anyone or anything, someone powerful and in control and everything that she is not – but sometimes, when she's trained herself to the point where she can no longer see the sky because her vision has begun to warp, she feels the emptiness clawing at her edges.

But today is different.

She is nearly 17. She knows, if not who she is, when she was brought into this world.

Ninety percent certain, anyway.

And for the first time in a long time, she fights it back. Beats back the feeling threatening to swallow her whole, holding onto the threads of existence that bind her to this world (the sweet evening air filling up her aching lungs, the sweat that stings and sears in the various cuts and grazes she's sustained this training session, the sound of her breathing and the trees that wave in trance-like slow motion, as if they're underwater, not overland encapsulating her in a bubble of cool green light), if only in this moment. And when she feels more solid, more tangibly there (if only marginally) she puts one foot in front of the other, and leaves behind that nothingness.

And then somehow, she is at Lee's, and she doesn't know how she got here or how long she has been there, but he is cooking her "power food" and she is lying on his couch, drifting in and out of sleep, and he is letting her and acting as Lee-like as usual (which is Gai-esque, really…) at the same time and she wonders if this sort of a break from reality is what it's like to have people. For a second, she can't remember being anyone else but Tenten, the kunoichi without a last name, who fights for Konoha.

And for once, being that person isn't as scary a prospect as she has always thought.

(spectre)

It's the morning after, except we haven't – hadn't – didn't… go all the way.

Sucky terminology aside, I can't look at her, and I'm glad that it's mutual.

Anger is radiating from her as palpably as the vaccuum she so readily turns into, and she is resolutely avoiding me.

As much as she can when the three of us are seated in front of the Hokage, who tries to deal with us and finds the task more difficult than it probably should be, anyway. She has had her most beloved people die on her, as has Hatake Kakashi, and a thousand other souls who live in our village. Konoha is a hidden village, after all. People will always fall in the line of duty; there were will always be orphans, and every family in the village has a name carved upon the memorial stone.

But with us… it's like they're afraid to talk about it. As if our tragedy is contagious and Gai dying – the man who even the Akatsuki were wary of – has made us not invincible (far, far from it) but as a consolation prize, untouchable. Unreachable.

I remember, once, my father told me of the way that sailors who died at sea were buried by having millstones tied around their necks. We buried our sensei and hooked some part of ourselves to him, and lost that in the process...

It's meant to be our first mission briefing back together after… after what happened last time, and while we have all succumbed to psychological analysis for the things that went wrong, I know that I, at least, lied through gritted teeth about what happened, and they didn't pick up on it. I suppose the fact that we're seated here at all attests to the fact that the others did, too.

We have stopped speaking about it. Stopped doing anything together, and what Tenten and I did or didn't do last night (have sex? Make love? Sleep together?) seems like some surreal upside down dream, belonging to a world where the leaves fall upwards to the trees and girls whiten their skin in the moonlight.

I look at her, at her white, white shirt – not of the same degree of whiteness as the soft skin it covers; at her hair pinned up into strictly ridiculous panda ears to stop it from cascading down her back in smoky curls; at her calloused and scarred, honey coloured hands which traced my body and... and...

Don't, Neji. Don't think about her ever again.

But she has haunted me through the night.

So I look at Lee instead, but I barely recognise him these days. His hair is unkempt and falling down around his face in ragged waves, and his eyes seem to burn and unfocus all at once, and there is a sort of feralness about him, as if Tenten has rubbed off on him. As if he is, for the first time, the beast that he has always proclaimed to be.

Tsunade clears her throat.

"I'm not going to pretend that this is the way I wanted you to come back into the field," she tells us, her sake glass held in one hand, skating across the broad expanse of smooth mahogany desk that separates us from her. "But times are hard."

The other two don't respond, and she watches me, as if to say "Well?" and I realise that, as the jonin among us, I'm in charge now.

"What are the details of the mission?"

She slides a manila folder across the table to me, and the relief in her eyes makes me uncomfortable, so I open it, to see myself staring at a girl with deep brown hair and hazel eyes, her skin the same creamy gold as the froth on top of a cup of coffee. I don't need to read the rest of the information to know where we're headed.

"Earth country?" I ask, and superstitiously I snatch a glimpse at Tenten as she pulls herself back into our world, catching my words, ceasing to ignore me, and I marvel briefly at the power two words can have over her.

And when I look at Tsunade, I see the way her eyes flicker away from my teammate (almost lover? Ex-best friend?) as well, before she nods.

"Earth country."

(innate)

When Gai finds her in the moonlight, she doesn't have time to wonder at what he is doing out at that hour himself, too caught in the shock of being pulled out of her trance as he grips her in a choke hold, his hand catching the blade of the knife, forcing it away from its line of travel, directed at her bare arms.

"What are you doing, Tenten?" And the clipped icy words wash away more of her than anything else ever could. She takes a gulping breath of air, feeling the pressure on her throat which is his arm, feeling her heart beating, suddenly jolted back into the world by six feet and one hundred and fifty pounds of angry jonin.

"It's a martial art," she begins. "It's called – "

"I know what it is," he interjects, and his voice is so low and hard and angry, burning through her back from his own body, that she shivers. "I asked what you were doing."

But something in the last word (and she doesn't have the time to pick it apart in that instant, no. But later, when she is bandaged and shamefully grounded for 2 days by her goddamned teacher, she isolates the repulsion and fear in his voice) makes her angry.

"Training," she says, and the defiance in her voice is more evident than she meant for it to be.

"Training," he repeats, but the way he says it makes her look at herself – and the training ground itself – in a new light. Through Gai's eyes, she sees the pools of blood turned black by the silvery nightlight, and she feels the cooling blood running down her body, the blood his own hands are getting slick in, and the euphoria of her training – the feeling of invincibility – is replaced by acres of shame. She relaxes against him, and he lets her go. She crosses her arms defensively and he looks at her, so hard and harsh and furious that she barely recognises him.

"There is a reason this is not an art practiced by Konoha shinobi. You stupid girl." He – there is no other word for it – snarls, and just to reinforce the hideousness of the situation, she feels hot tears begin to roll their way down her cheeks. She hates him in that instant, more than she has hated anyone in her whole 10 years (because the time beforehand, when she wasn't in this village, when she was 4 – the time before life began – are something she doesn't – can't count).

But he, even in his anger, is merciful (loving, although she doesn't think about him as such until it is too late) to a fault, and so he relents. Pockets the claw-shaped knife, grimly pulling out a roll of bandage as he pretends not to notice her tears.

"Where did you…" he begins.

"I'll do it," she snaps, and flings out a hand (that would, in the light, be stained rosy coloured by drying blood) to take the white white fabric from him, wrapping it up around her arms quickly and deftly. She will see to the rest of her (her hips and thighs and ribs and stomach and tongue) when she is back home. And on that thought, she finds herself saying (bitterly) "It's not like I don't take care of things afterwards. I bet you haven't noticed anything untoward in training. No one has." No one notices anything. She nearly adds, but catches her tongue just in time.

"I'm noticing now," he returns, flatly, arms folded, drawing himself up to his full six feet and a few inches and staring at her with… betrayal(?) in his eyes. "And I'll even go one better. I forbid you to touch karambit, Tenten. Ever again."

But it is how she makes her history...

"If I do..."

"I will see to it that you are suspended from active duty for the next twelve years..." And he stares at the outrage staring back at him through her eyes. "We are shinobi, Tenten! Do you really think anyone wants to be protected by a self-destructive ninja?What are you playing at?"

It is the first time she has ever heard him yell and for a moment she tries to slip away, closing her eyes, willing herself to cease to be Tenten - My name is Kayo and I was found in the forest - but when she opens her eyes she is still facing one of the most dangerous men in the world who is still looking at her with jet black eyes that snap with anger, and all she wants to do is run away from here, and only the knowledge that he will track her to the end of the world keeps her standing there.

After a moment that stretches out like an eternity, Gai sighs. "I'm going to set you to training with Kakashi a while, alright?" he says, and she wonders why, for a few days, until she realises that the reticent man with the silver hair never wears short sleeves.

She lasts 3 weeks before she visits Noboru-san – the metalworker – again. When she begins to feel transparent, inconsistent, invisible. And although she watches over her shoulder for Gai, from then on, it is out of a kind of duty. It is for his peace of mind that he forbade her, and she reasons that, what he doesn't know, won't hurt him.

It never occurs to her that someone other than Gai could be watching her.

/Chapter

Disclaimer: Uh uh. Yeah right. Like Tenten is ever going to get screentime and have a deep dark past ;p Escapism baby. Pure and simple ;)

Right. Two things:

a)Emo, no? :p It is what it is, dude. I'm having great fun making this drip with angst :p. At the same time, I promise it won't always be this way. Just for a while.

b)Anyone got any idea how to better define – chronologically – when the events in this story take place? Because I don't know, aye. And it's rather important, I suppose. Influenced by the Jefferson Airplanes and Led Zeppelin and M.I.A and To Kill a Mockingbird.

Cheers for reading. Tell me what you think! Oh and a big thank you to those of you who've recently put this on story alert too 3