to be seen

Balancing her missions with trying to maintain a training schedule had proved to be impossible. She had given up on the third day. Doing D-ranked missions by herself took a lot of time; even when she got early to her mission location, she would not leave until the last rays of daylight, leaving her too worn out to do anything but go back home.

That’s how she was going home today. After a day of babysitting triplets of a father that had said to her that he had three little angels, but after a full day taking care of them, Tenten was sure that man had unleashed three devils on her to test her will to live.

She ended the day with baby vomit on her clothes, half of her hair lost by the little hands of a vicious baby, and pieces of poop under her nails. It was truly a new type of humiliation that she could not say she had ever felt before.

With a feeling of being a pure waste of space in life, she opened the door to a home that expected a cleanup that she did not feel like giving that day. After washing her hands five consecutive times, she turned off the tap and left the bathroom, choosing to sit down on the floor of her little space and try to gather her life back in her hands for a few minutes.

The room was a mess. She saw her pajamas on the ground next to her sweat-soaked training clothes, and last time she checked, she had run out of clean underwear. Her idea would have been to get to do her laundry first thing the next morning since there were no other clean clothes for her anymore, yet it would make her lose a lot of the time that she could be working instead.

And it was at this moment that her stomach decided to remind her that it needed food. Unfortunately, she had eaten the leftovers from Lee’s dinner that morning, and her pantry was cleaner than her clothes. Food would become tomorrow's problem.

She wanted to take her scrolls and find a training ground in time. It had been a week since her last training session, which had happened a day before her team went to hell. Tenten did not want to lose her edge; it would eventually happen if she did not find time to train. Her hands trembled in anticipation of being able to throw weapons at multiple targets for a couple of hours. It had been weeks since she had trained with her swords as well.

Taking her eyes back to her clothes that were making a home on her floor, she accepted that there would not be training that night.

“Tomorrow, for sure!“ She promised as she got up and started collecting the clothes on the ground.

The laundromat was a few blocks from her apartment; taking the roof traffic made it quick. Genins did not have permission to roof-walk, but she lived in one of the most isolated places in the village. The chance of a ranked senior catching her was low, especially when she barely knew shinobis who had an idea of who she was or her rank status.

As she jumped back to the ground, she secured all four bags, opened the store door, and went to the washing machine closest to the seats, throwing the first batch of her clothes in.

Once the machine started working, she threw herself on the bench close by. Taking a look at the clock on the wall, she sighed; to clean all of her clothes would take the whole evening.

It was a good thing that she was always prepared. Taking her right hand in her pants pocket, she removed one of her fuuinjutsu seal sealbooks and a couple of brushes. Opening the journal to the page of the seal she’s been working on the last months: her explosive tags.

Normally, you could buy explosive tags in weapons shops, but she would rather do it herself to save the money. This allowed her to create modifications, just like she had been doing in this new seal prototype for some months.

It would be a long night, but not a boring one.

“Maa, back in my day, genins would not walk on the roofs.“

For a second, Tenten could swear that her heart had jumped out of her mouth. God, she hated jounins.

She hated that she had taken having a teammate with Byakugan for granted, not having much interest in learning when Gai had taught them awareness. She had believed, like a fool, that she would always have Neji in her life to rely on, saving her from these stupid jounins.

As her soul returned to her body, she slowly looked up to face a silver-haired man with his hitai-ate covering his left eye.

He was leaning casually at the washing machine across from her. In another life, it would look like a scene from one of the comics that she used to read at the orphanage. Cool hero. Cool pose.

But she had known Hatake Kakashi for a few months now, and even knowing that he was supposed to be this big, dangerous ninja, the known Sharingan no Kakashi, after months of putting up with him and Maito Gai doing stupid competitions together, he was just a loser who was friends with her sensei.

He had lost all the edge to her when she had spent an hour seeing him and Gai competing on who caught more chickens that summer. Kakashi ended up naming all forty-two chickens.

“Good night, Hatake-san.” She said, hoping to sound casual. “Honestly, I did not think anyone would notice.”

And that was true. Tenten lived very close to the outskirts of the village, which was a mostly rural area; a majority of the people were civilians who lived on farms. It took almost a whole hour to walk from her apartment to the center of the village at a civilian pace.

Shinobi patrols in this region were normally made by genin teams or chunins. To see a jounin over there was truly a surprise. This made her question what Hatake Kakashi was doing in this specific laundromat.

“Most wouldn’t,” he replied. “But when you see a little genin running in the middle of the night with a bunch of bags, it does make you curious.”

Holding back a groan, she got her focus back on her seals. “Will you report me?”

Getting reported would give her an earful at the slightest or a week off duty as a punishment at the worst. She knew her luck and did not want to test it.

“Report you for running to wash your clothes?” The man asked, tilting his head. From her point of view, she could see his eye crinkling slightly, giving away the amusement he was having at her expense. “It’s perhaps the most innocent use of the roofs that I have seen.”

If she had let a growl leave her throat, no one worthy would have been there to witness it. Stupid jounins who love to get off on making genins look like idiots.

“And I doubt that a genin on the roof is the biggest problem that the Hokage would have to hear this week,” Kakashi said with a shrug, pulling the usual orange book from his vest.

“Lucky me,” Tenten muttered, deciding to go back to her seals; her scribbles and ink were much better company.

The silence did not stay much longer. Hatake was in a good mood for small talk, to her resentment. “I heard that you have not been seen in the training grounds lately.”

Well, that made sense. She did not need to think about who had told Kakashi this information. Gai-sensei was worried about her and sent his best friend to check on her. She would prefer Genma; from all of her former sensei friends, he was her favorite. He would not show up without a snack. Tenten wanted a snack.

She took a minute to respond, choosing to finish painting a trigger line inside her seal. Her idea was not to make a seal meant to go off seconds after being put; she already had pouches full of these. This one would be activated by a pulse of her chakra signature, even from very far distances. “I’ve been busy working.”

“Working on D-ranked missions,” he observed. A second later came the sound of a page turning. “It does not leave much time for training, especially if you are solo.”

She hummed, not interested in entertaining his observations.

“That’s an interesting adaptation that you are creating.” She heard him saying. Sneaking a glance at him, it seemed to her that he was more interested in examining her seals than reading his book. “A chakra signature trigger?” He let out a low whistle. “That’s not something you see every day.”

Tenten blushed; he was not telling lies. Once she entered the academy at seven years old, she spent a lot of time reading fuuinjutsu books, and a few of them had talked about the concept of triggers, but she never found one that taught how to actively write one in a seal. But what did she expect when the Academy barely taught them the concept of what fuuinjutsu truly was?

It made sense, of course, from the perspective of the chunin teacher; there should not be any academy student messing with advanced concepts of seals at such a young age. From Tenten’s perspective, it was annoying.

Only after some years of experience at trying her hand at seals did she have the courage to create her concept of a trigger. It was research that took more than five months of pure trial and error to get to a stabilized seal, and throughout these months, there were a lot of explosions and burns and a few close calls where a panicked Lee rushed her to the hospital.

But it was thanks to these moments that she created the trigger that was now present at her own summon scrolls, not only for her weapons but for any necessity that she needed.

“I know. It took me a while to understand the concept while I was creating this one.” She admitted with pride in her eyes. To Tenten, it was one of her more impressive moments in her short life.

The jounin hummed. He still was reading through her seals. She didn’t know if he truly could make sense of everything there. Tenten's fuuinjutsu style was not as easy to read to someone used to the Konoha design.

“It’s not a Konoha-style one.” He observed.

Tenten smiled at his observation. “Well, technically, it is my version of it.”

The Konoha style was created by Senju Tobirama throughout his time as Hokage. According to the research that she made, in that time, there were too many fuuinjutsu styles circulating, each clan bringing into active duty their seals, which caused a lot of problems of incompatibility and accidents on the field. To solve the problem, he created the Konoha Standard Style, which Tenten theorized came from his style.

“I believe that the Konoha Standard is way too rigid for how I perceive and work with seals.” She answered the question that must have been on his mind. “And I never had access to more than the introduction of it. People don't trust kids of my age with the more advanced stuff. I think it’s the fear of being responsible for the reasons we have blown ourselves up.”

“I wouldn't say that they are wrong.” Her eyes snapped back to him, ready to say something. “Seals are unpredictable. Even my sensei had a sensei to supervise his seals when he was your age.”

Tenten rolled her eyes. Gai had told her —and the boys— about who Hatake Kakashi sensei had been. The Yondaime Hokage. And then that the Yondaime had been a student of the sealmaster, Jiraiya of the Sannin. And, of course, everybody knew that the Sannin had been instructed by the Sandaime. And then, the Sandaime had been a student of both the Shodai and the Nidaime —two of the greatest shinobi to ever exist.

A tale of greatness passed down to hands chosen to become gold.

All these men had become legendary. Every corner of this country knew every single one of them. Tenten would not deny that they had worked hard for it, but it was easier to be successful if you had the proper access to a good education from the beginning.

No one remembered the kids who had to train with borrowed scrolls and weapons stolen from forgotten training grounds. These kids never became worth mentioning.

Tenten feared that she would be one of these kids.

If she had sat and waited for an adult to guide her in anything in her life, she would have been living in a monastery by now. “Well, there are not a bunch of seal masters out there? There isn't?”

After the massacre of the Uzushio almost thirty years ago, sealing had become a dying art. Tenten could understand why the sealcraft did not appeal to the masses: Fuuinjutsu was complex; you need to take care of the structure of the seal and its arrangements to be used without messing with the chakra flow. It was an art that took years to understand. And most shinobis wanted something fast, like ninjutsu, where you could learn jutsus from a scroll with some weeks of training.

At Konoha, only a few knew the art, even at that time, and now, the only master known in the village is Jiraiya—someone who spent most of his time outside the village, wandering and writing questionable books, instead of taking apprentices and sharing his knowledge, to her indignation.

“You have a point,” Kakashi complied. He leaned closer, passing his right hand lightly to the engravings that she held. “But your trigger will destabilize the matrix of the seal if the pathway isn't reinforced. It will not be able to support your chakra once you try to activate it.”

Tenten frowned. She had not thought about this; it had never been a problem with her summoning scrolls.

Pausing to think, she tried to understand the motive. Any summoning scroll would use a spiral pathway that would be putting the chakra inward constantly, feeding it to the dimensional pocket. Every time Tenten summoned an item, the chakra that she spent had a clean way inside to hit the matrix, creating a tear in space-time, so it could go inside the pocket to pull out whatever she wanted.

While in this explosion tag, part of her chakra would already be stored inside, to be able to recognize her once she pulsed her signature to activate. But having her chakra already stored would mean that the pathways of her seal are already congested.

“Oh, I see,” she said slowly, still examining her work. “It would be clogged.”

In a way, once the seal tried to flow the excess chakra to the matrix, it would eventually collapse, causing an explosion still, however, in a way smaller proportion than she had written it for.

“I will need to redo my flow lines before I reinforce the pathways.” Her hands twitched, and she went for her abandoned brush, then stopped. “Thank you, Hatake-san.”

“Maa, it’s nothing,” he said, waving his hands in front of him dismissively. “Just doing my job at preventing children from getting blown to bits in Konoha.”

Before Tenten could return with a remark —because no, it was not funny— the jounin pointed his fingers casually to the qipao that she was wearing. “But maybe seals are less risky than whatever happened here.”

For a second, she didn’t get it.

Until she looked down at her clothes and realized that she hadn’t changed before leaving for the laundromat.

She was still in the same clothes that had baby vomit in them. That’s why she had been smelling something bad. It was her.

“I had a babysitting mission today. Triplets.” With her face as red as a beet, she answered before he thought the vomit came from her. She would die of embarrassment.

“Yes, the glamorous life of a genin,” he nodded sensibly, faking an empathy that she knew was just amusement at her expense. “Don’t miss a minute of it.”

And then he was tugging his book back to his vest. Decided that his time there was coming to a close. “Well, I should get going. Places to be, missions to do.” He said, strolling back to the door.

“Hatake-san.”

“Eh?”

“When you report this back to Gai-sensei, tell him I’m expecting him to pay for my lunch someday soon.”

There was a silence in which both looked at each other. Tenten knew that Kakashi would not be in a laundromat this far off the center of Konoha without a reason. She may not know where exactly he lived, but jounins had a tendency to live in the middle of the village for security reasons in case of an invasion.

“I’ll tell him.” He said, finally opening the door while raising his hand in a farewell before disappearing in a bunshin.

With the sound of the door closing, she got back to her seal, knowing that she had a few modifications to do that night.

-

At the first lights of the sun, she walked inside the mission desk. Holding back a yawn, she got herself in the line of the genin teams waiting to receive their mission. Tenten did not get almost any sleep that night.

After the chat with Kakashi at the laundromat, she spent hours sketching and remaking her seal. The flow lines are a tricky part to redo after the core is already done, so she had to remove all the anchors inside the seal, redo the flow lines, reinforce the pathways of her seal, and then put the anchors back again. It took a few hours until she got a version of the seal that was well stabilized.

Now, it was just to find a place to test it. If all went well, which she was sure it would, it was just to make a hundred copies of the seal.

She would make sure to find a time that day to train, regardless of whether it was midnight and she was practically sleepwalking. A week without training was absurd, even for Tenten, who had been the least enthusiastic about the training schedule of Team 3. Gai-sensei would be sad when he found out how much she had been slipping.

Time dragged on; during the wait, she had a few minutes to analyze what was happening in the room. She was the only genin doing solo missions, as usual. Tenten cursed Tobirama Senju, who decided on the tradition of the three-unit team. It made her lonely self stand out like a sore thumb in the room.

She stayed put on her own, with her arms crossed while pretending not to hear the murmurs or see the glances that came in her direction. And to be frank, after months of being the center of attention since the first time the Hyuuga had tried to put out a request to disband her team, she has gotten used to it.

The problem is that she used to share the attention with her team. Being alone made the weight of their stares way heavier on her shoulders.

Then, it became humiliating being all there alone when she saw one of her classmate’s teams. Truthfully, she didn’t know much of them personally; she had not been a social type when she was in the academy. Shiho was the only member of the team that she knew —both girls used to share a table in kunoichi class. The girl was a lanky one who wore glasses bigger than her face and could talk her day out when the topic was puzzles or codes.

Shiho waved once she realized her stare. Tenten waved back, flustered at being caught. A few minutes later, the team passed next to her, leaving with a C-ranked mission, if the low, excited voices of Shiho’s teammates told the truth.

Lucky bastards.

She approached the desk once her turn came. The chunin, she recognized as one of the academy instructors that she would see around the building. Mizuki, if she was not wrong. At the academy, he was always chill and polite, way opposed to the energy he was bringing to the table here.

“Tenten, isn't it?” The desk officer said, his voice carrying a lightness that sounded forced.

“That's me,” she answered, as neutral as possible. “I’m looking for a D-ranked mission.”

Mizuki grinned, and something about his smile made an uneasiness grow in Tenten. She hoped it was because the last time she had eaten something had been yesterday's breakfast. “I heard about your team’s… situation.”

She kept her expression neutral. It was not a surprise; at this rate, all the village knew about the disbanding of the genin team of Maito Gai. Konoha tended to gossip. “Could I just get a mission?”
Mizuki hummed, passing his fingers lazily through the scroll’s missions. To Tenten’s misfortune, he didn’t look ready to shut his mouth and give her a mission. “It made people curious about what had to happen to a team to disband. Normally, only death can take a genin team apart.”

The kunoichi kept herself from scowling. Today looked like it would be one of those days when she should have stayed at home.

“Sir, I didn’t come here to discuss my team situation. I am only here for work. If you could give me a mission, please.”

Mizuki smiled and grew wider, while his fingers stopped around a scroll. “Of course.” He stops for a second, not getting any closer to give her the damn scroll, for her frustration. “It's just, when the Hyuuga clan made so many attempts to remove a member of their clan from a team, it makes people wonder.”

Her stomach dropped. She had a feeling of where this was going. “Well, I don’t know anything about politics.” Her hand stretched to the scroll in his hand. “Mission?”

Mizuki chuckled. “Well, not that I blamed them. I would not want any kids of mine to be close to someone with your people's blood.”

Tenten did not react.

It was not the first time that she heard the accusation. Once she got in Team 3, it did not take long for rumors to spread around the shinobi society about her origins. Something that very few people know. Or was supposed to.

It didn’t matter when a noble clan like the Hyuugas was the one who leaked.

“I am Konoha-born. You can read my file at the hospital records —they are public,” she replied, her voice dry and curt. “Now, my mission.” Impulsing her body to go forward, she snatched the scroll from his hands.

Making her way back to the door, halfway there, Mizuki decided that more people should witness their conversation. “The mission is in the sewage.” He said, with his voice raised, taking the attention of the people in the room. “I’m sure that will feel like home for a mudbred like you.”

Mudbred.

The world landed like a slap in her face.

Tenten froze. Her body went rigid as her right hand hovered around her closest summon scrolls. For a few seconds, she could have sworn that she had not breathed.

(Mudbred.)

In these months, when people started questioning her heritage, no one had ever been this bold. They would never have had this courage when she walked in the shadow of a shield mountain named Maito Gai.

(Mudbred.)

But seeing her alone, people become confident to jump at someone who did not have another to protect them.

(Mudbred.)

For a second, she considered turning back around and making herself clear that no one could insult her this way. Even alone, she was not someone they could speak of like she was a piece of trash. If she wished, she could pulse her chakra, and this whole room would become an arsenal of weapons pointed directly at him.

(Mudbred.)

Yet, looking around, the room locked its eyes on her. Chunin, genin, and even jounin teachers are watching her. Some with pity, another curious, and others with something hard in their eyes. Some had heard the rumors and agreed with Mizuki's point of view.

(Mudbred.)

It would not be wise to lash out; it would just make him the owner of the reason. Of course, the girl with mud on her veins would act out; she could almost hear the whispers.

(Mudbred.)

Letting her hands leave her scrolls, she straightened her stance. With her head held high, she walked forward.

And walked.

And walked.

And walked.

Until she reached the door and left.

(Mudbred.)

(Mudbred. Mudbred. Mudbred. Mudbred. Mudbred. Mudbred. Mudbred.)

The word haunted her as she made her way to the village. The sun was going strong even in the early hours of the morning. The sunlight felt too bright on her eyes, and the village too loud. She felt black spots at the edges of her vision.

(Mudbred.)

She could not lose her shit now.

(Mudbred.)

She walked.

(Mudbred.)

She walked.

(Mudbred.)

She walked.

She kept walking, her hands clenched into fists so hard that she could feel the blood accumulating in her nails. The pain helped her focus at the moment.

(Mudbred.)

She left the Hokage building fast, not giving anyone time to see how much her hands were trembling. Quickly, she took the less busy route back to her apartment. She would need to change to a really old set of clothes; no way in hell would she work in sewage with the clothes that she just got cleaned. And leave her seals at home; she would not let her summon scroll close to the sewage.

Once she left the busy streets of the village, she took a fast run. Her home was far away if you went on a civilian walk, but running at a shinobi pace wouldn’t take more than fifteen minutes.

Mudbred.

A child of mud. A child with dirt in her blood.

She had read once about this term in the history books that the academy almost tried to vanish with. It was a cuss word created before the villages were standing. A time before the Warring States, before Uchiha and Senju would come to live at each other's throats.

It was a cuss word that came from conquest.

A slur that was born from inside the Fire Daimyo palace, and it took the form of war when Fire invaded the Earth’s Country. When the Fire took Earth’s culture, names, and history. Let them be stripped bare and seen as lesser.

As mudbred.

As savages that lived inside rocks and holes in the ground. People who needed help to dress properly, cook, and work.

It was not the Fire Country’s best moment, for sure.

Once the Earth took control of their country back, the slur ended up in disuse, being muttered on occasion only by the old, the ones that had seen too much at their age and knew that peace had a fragile meaning.
And fragile the peace was, it never had a chance to survive once the hidden villages were formed and the power balance disrupted.

Tenten had heard from adults that war made the worst of the people come out. And reading a few of the things that had happened through the three wars, she could believe it.

Mudbred was reborn once again in the war stations of commanders, growing at the emergency wards hidden throughout the fields, said by parents who send their children to die.

The resentment and hatred grew as much as the number of the war crimes of the villages did.

Iwa’s policy of taking civilian women who lived at the borders of the Fire Country has one of them. It was a form to break the enemy spirit, to demoralize them. And when the few who survived come back, normally they would bring back the reminders of their captivity inside their belly.

Babies.

Mudbred babies, like Tenten.

A few hours after Tenten was born, her mother left her at the closest orphanage in Konoha, taking her belongings and returning to her home village. The orphanage matrons had been the ones to explain to her why, once she grew a little, in whispers of “Tenten-chan, it’s better if you never talk of this to anyone else, alright?”

And she had kept her mouth shut. Not a single word came from her about her parentage, not even to Lee, who had been her friend since the first day of class. Not to Neji, who became her buddy in suffering from the embarrassment of being the only two sane people on their team. Not even to Gai-sensei, who had lived to fight Iwa-nin at the Third Shinobi War.

But in the end, it did not matter, because the Hyuugas, with their all-seeing eyes, had found out anyway. The news slowly spread throughout the shinobi ranking, just as water seeped through the ground.

Reaching her apartment, she felt her eyes sting from tears that her pride would not let fall. She had too much to do that day, and crying was not one of them.

She changed to one of her older sets of clothes that she used to wear back when she lived at the orphanage. It was one of the clothes that she had been promising to tear down to rugs a long time ago but never did.

After today, she would burn it all down. It could be the first thing that she would stick her seal on. That was it. She would train that day and explode a few things.

Once, she hid her summon scrolls and seals inside her apartment. She took the door and left, running at once to the east district, a civilian one that was not that far from where she lived, thankfully.

The supervisor, a middle-aged civilian with a look of perpetual boredom in his eyes, didn't blink an eye before shoving the protective gear at her—rubber boots, a face mask, and gloves—and pointed her down to the entrance of the sewage.

Putting on her clothes and taking the tools needed at hand, she walked down the way with the enthusiasm of a condemned man walking to his death. The stench hit her nose hard, and she knew that she didn’t throw up only because she had nothing in her stomach to take off. The perks of starvation.

The smell was worse than she had feared, a mixture of rotting water with things that she did not wish to think about. The sting in her eyes returned, and her body didn’t remember how to breathe for a good minute. The light was low, making Tenten blend in with the water and shadows as if the grime absorbed her civilized traces. She felt the wetness seeping through her boots and a chill walking down her spine.

Breathing in and out, she walked, putting her right foot inside. Once her feet made contact with something semi-solid, she removed them as fast as she could. Disgust flowed through her veins as much as the mud that she was born from.

(Mudbred.)

For the first hour, the work had been slow and without much progress. Knees deep in the filth, clearing the debris and clearing the blockade. After an hour of not advancing and realizing that the supervisor was not doing his job of supervising, she decided to use a few clones. In the end, this was a job supposed to go for a team, wasn’t it?

To her shame, after a week of barely using her chakra, it took much more than she would remember using at the academy to conjure five basic clones. She didn’t remember using much of the Academy Three since her graduation. That’s what she got for not training her ninjutsu.

In five, it took way less time to work all that stink. It was a blessing that basic Bunshins couldn’t say anything because she would have been losing her mind to hear her grumbles all morning.

The group worked methodically, going through all four sewage passages way faster than expected. Surprising the supervisor when she called to show her work done just a little past lunchtime.

“Good job,” he grunted after signing off on her mission scroll. “And right on time. If I had to stand one more hour with that stupid man, I would throw myself at the sewage.”

She looked at him, confused. “Stupid man?”

Then she heard him before seeing him.

Well, she did not know many stupid men.

“TENTEN-SAN, MY STUDENT!”

And then, a lot of green.

“Oh,” she said simply, turning her back to greet the man who was running at full speed toward her. “Hello, Gai-sensei.”

Lee had said that Gai would look for her for lunch someday, did he not?

Maito Gai slid to a halt in front of her, his smile gleaming even through the dim light of the facility. He was in his trademark pose of a thumbs-up, and she could almost swear that she saw a rainbow up on his head.

“My youthful student! I have been looking for you!” She winced a little at the volume; the sewage made the favor of reverberating the sound of his already loud voice.

She heard the supervisor returning to his office, with a muttering of “freaks” on his breath. She did feel like one, wearing all that filth on her skin at that moment.

“I wasn’t expecting to see you here, sensei,” she said, while both of them made their way back to the surface.

“My eternal rival had reminded me about the lunch that I had owed you.”

Tenten blinked. Surprised that Kakashi had passed on her message.
She didn’t know what to make of this situation. For the last few days, since Lee mentioned it, Tenten had been anticipating lunch with her former sensei. She missed him, Neji and their team like a limb.

But after her morning at the mission desk. (Mudbred.) And after spending the rest of her time on literal shit, she didn’t know if she had any social energy left to put up with her sensei. “I think we should agree to arrange for another day, sensei. I’m not exactly in a presentable state to enter a restaurant.”

Gai’s expression softened, his confident smile giving place to a slightly more sincere one. Tenten felt exposed to his stare, the same one he gave to them before the presentations on the first day of the team. It made her feel even more self-conscious of her state because there was no way that we could not smell the sewage and grime exhaling on her.

“None of that! A shinobi who completes a mission deserves a proper meal! He declared, his voice echoing even louder. “But perhaps we could stop at the Genin Corps first, so you could have a refresh.”

She thought for a second. The Genin Corps were close by; it would take only five minutes walking, and she would take a shower, which would probably have hot water, unlike hers. But she would probably find genins who had been inside the mission desk or who had already heard what had happened there. And she was not in the mood for more whispers about her.

It's a cold shower for her then.

“Sensei, I would prefer to take a bath at home if this is not a problem,” she answered truthfully. She stopped to wince for a second when the full light of the sun beat at her face. “And I still need to report this mission back. We could meet at the restaurant in an hour.”

Tenten hoped that he would agree. She wanted to get home, not only for a shower but also to get her weapons and her seal. Since she had finished this mission early, there was the whole afternoon to train, and she needed to take advantage of this.

Gai seemed to think for a minute, his expression hardening about something that she said. “Do you need to report in?” For a second, something strange passed through his eyes, but the next, he smiled brightly, and suddenly, the sky seemed even clearer. “Then go home first and refresh yourself, Tenten! We shall meet at the mission desk for your most youthful report, and then together, we will celebrate with a proper meal!”

Tenten looked at her sensei.

Her sensei looked back at her, still smiling like an idiot.

She was not dumb; Gai would not meet her at the mission desk in normal circumstances. He may have been considerate, but he was a busy jounin, he did not have time to babysit her.

That meant that he had heard about what had happened this morning.

(Mudbred)

For a second, she almost said something. She didn’t want his pity or to be seen as someone fragile who would fall apart because one bad thing had happened to her.

But Gai-sensei had been genuine in everything that he had done his whole life. Every time that he had been concerned for her, it was because he genuinely cared for her. And even if she had only known him for six months, he had been the only adult that had ever wanted to protect her in her twelve years of existence.

Then she looked at his eyes and smiled. This was the first smile that felt honest in a week. Because she was grateful that she still had the only adult who mattered in her life. “Gai-sensei.”

The jounin, who was walking ahead, stopped in his tracks, turning back to listen to her better.

“Thank you, sensei.”

And if her eyes were a little misty, neither would bring it on.