Chapter 2
“Who was your last summoner?” Tenten asks.
Fang thinks about it, “Hmm… it’s been a long while. Maybe… no, he died years before that. Then perhaps it was – no.”
“You don’t remember?” Tenten asks, scrunching her nose up. It kind of seems like the sort of thing a summon would recall.
Fang waves his paw in a so-so gesture, curiously human-like, “My memory’s pretty fuzzy. Just like the rest of me. If you want someone with brains, you need Bai. Or Li. Just wait ‘til you meet all of us, we’re a very loyal bunch. We’ll protect you until your dying day, Tenten-chan!”
“Um… thanks,” Tenten says, coughing to hide her nervous laughter, “I’ll protect you too, Fang-kun.”
Fang chirps happily, running around in a circle. His tail is so… fluffy… Tenten has to sit on her hands to stop herself from reaching out to touch it.
“So, when will you start having cubs of your own?” Fang asks, eyes bright with curiosity.
Tenten splutters, shaking her head wildly, “N-no! I mean, not any time soon… I’m focusing on my studies. They’ll be plenty of time for… cubs later.”
“Smart, smart,” Fang nods sagely, “but, just so you know, I’m very good with cubs. I’d make a great babysitter.”
“I’m sure you would. So, if you had a summoner before, why was this blank?” Tenten asks, pointing at the scroll. She has a sneaking suspicion she’d like confirmed.
Fang hides his face behind his tail and mumbles, “If we lose our summoner… then their name will fade. Over time, it’ll become blank again. When we’re ready for a new name.”
“How long has it been blank?” Tenten asks, brow drawn in concern.
Fang shuffles, “Too long, Tenten-chan. We’ve been waiting for you, I guess!” He perks up, his ears twitching, “for you to get big enough to become one of the Kuma clan!”
Tenten smiles, then gives into her urge to pat him on the head, “Well then, it’s nice to meet you meet you at last, Fang-kun. Sorry to keep you waiting.”
Fang reaches up slowly, touching her hand with his paws. He chirps again, tail swishing.
“I found your scroll with a bunch of others in my attic,” Tenten tells him, “they all belong to my mother. She’s a collector.”
“Is she a shinobi?”
“No, she’s a smith. She makes weapons. She’s in very high demand. I’m not sure why she has so many scrolls, actually, since she can’t use any. She doesn’t sell them, either. She just keeps them up in the attic. I found a strange scroll in there. It pointed me towards your summoning scroll.” Tenten says, lowering her voice.
Fang twitches his nose, “Pointed you? How?”
Tenten pulls the scroll out of her belt and spreads it across the grass. Fang darts over, his big brown eyes fixed on the blank paper.
“This is odd,” He says, head tilting, “look at you! Weird little thing. It’s got chakra in it that’s not yours, though I can feel that, too. Bits and pieces. But there’s a big bit of energy that’s old, very old, sitting in the centre. Hmm…”
He taps his paw in the middle of the scroll, blue sparks dancing across his claws.
The scroll stays blank.
“Weird!” Fang declares.
Tenten reaches out, grazing her hand across the spot Fang had touched, and sends chakra through her fingertips.
Instantly –
She’s sat in a room filled with ANBU, painted, blank faces staring back at her. Her own mask fits tightly over her face, covering eyes still red from her insomnia. She’d been dreaming of him again, and when she woke up in the early pink hours of dawn, her tears chased all chance of sleep away. Neko flashes discreet hand-signals from across the room.
‘Are you okay?’
She doesn’t know anymore.
Tenten gasps. Knowledge has been crammed into her head, full to bursting. She knows the sign language Konoha ANBU use, and how it differs from the general version they use outside the village. She knows the codes from past, present and future, and how they were written and broken. She knows that to focus on a target’s extremities during torture, their limbs and digits, before moving on to the larger areas.
She knows torture is rarely effective on its own, and that the target will typically either scream anything to make the pain cease, or clam up and refuse to say anything at all. She knows a combination of violent action and soft dialogue can be used to break someone. She remembers trading places with Neko after a hard session, leaving her target weeping blood, and Neko talking sweetly to them as if they were a dear friend. She remembers how often that tactic worked.
Fang is sitting on her head, his tail curled around her neck.
He swings upside down, making eye contact with her, “Awake? Good! You were in some kind of trance. I nibbled your fingers, but you didn’t react.”
Tenten doesn’t feel any pain. He must have been too gentle with her. Her mind still feels overburdened, pain lancing her temples.
“Hold on a tick!” He says, holding a leaf up to her mouth. “Open up, please. This will help the pain.”
Tenten allows him to pour the liquid into her mouth, blinking in surprise at the sweetness of the tonic. Her head lightens, the pain easing, and her thoughts become less muddled.
Her breath catches, “Did anyone come by?”
“Nope! I can feel chakra within a small radius, and nobody came close. There’s some birds in that tree, though. I’m keeping an eye on them.”
“I saw… I think I saw the future.” Tenten says, dazed. She was ANBU.
Fang leaps off her head, landing neatly on the other side of the scroll.
“Hmm, time-space ninjutsu mixed with fuuinjutsu, or is it simply genjutsu? Or maybe it’s a toy, meant to show you your daydreams? Whatever it is, it can’t be totally effective, otherwise there would be many copies in the world, like summoning contracts. Once something extraordinary is discovered and understood, it becomes ordinary.”
“I saw someone I love die.” Tenten says, her voice coming out flat and dull. She can still feel the ache in her chest from the vision, and it’s making her cross. She doesn’t have the time or energy to waste on feelings that aren’t even hers.
“Daydreams aren’t always nice,” Fang says, a touch of melancholy in his high-pitched voice, “touch the scroll again, so we can be sure. If you see something that surprises you, it might be the real deal. Though it’s probably a fake. Or a trick! If it attacks you, I will leap in the way! But keep in mind that I’m not a fighter. I’m very good at giving hugs and writing poetry, but I can’t fight anything bigger than a housecat, and maybe not even that.”
“Well, can I hear a poem before I try this again?” Tenten asks, needing the time to calm down a little. She didn’t just receive a memory that time.
It feels as if endless knowledge has been crammed inside her head, ANBU tactics, shinobi hand-signs, code, methods of torture and how to withstand them all…
Fang chitters, clapping his front paws together, “Really? Okay, here it goes! Silver eyes flash warning signs, a gaze too costly to meet. She pays endless fines, for a heart not built to heat. But she’s flesh and blood all the same, her shiny metal heart too cold. It can only manage loss and shame, spite-torn tin painted gold. It’s dented and rusted, her poor little heart, broken and busted, so she pushes restart.”
Tenten blinks owlishly. “O-oh. Wow. It’s very… dark.”
Fang wriggles happily, “Thank you! Xia-sama says I’m the best at poetry.”
“Xia-sama?”
“The Queen of Bears.” Fang explains, tail swishing behind him.
Tenten blows out a short breath, pushing her sweat-soaked bangs away from her face. The Queen of Bears. Of course. At this rate, she’d be unsurprised if a whole troop of bears showed up, juggling kunai.
Where did her mother get the scrolls? The summoning scroll alone had to be valuable, especially as there was no summoner attached. If the scrying scroll works like she thinks it does, it must be invaluable.
Tenten shakes her head, then firmly presses her hand down on the scroll, not allowing herself time to doubt.
The chakra has barely left her fingertips before she is besieged with images.
Hokage-sama, she thinks, looking at a boy a year younger than her in robes of flames, his smile as bright as the sun. I’ll follow this boy to the end of the world, she muses, because I know he can save it.
Tenten comes back to herself, eyes adjusting to the dim light of the shaded undergrowth after gazing at the brilliance of the boy Hokage for too long.
She recognised him in two difference ways.
First, he was almost certainly the blond who had been holding Tenten’s loved one as they died. Even while wreathed in ethereal flame, his yellow-spiked head was unmistakable.
Second, he looked a great deal like the loud-mouthed prankster she saw getting chased through the streets, laughing his head off as he went.
That was the future Hokage?
Well. Either the scroll had an absurd sense of humour, or what she had seen was true. There was no way her mind could come up some troublemaker kid ending up as Hokage, which meant this was no illusion, reflecting her own desires or thoughts. The specificity of each vision was too great for it to be some vague quirk of a bog-standard fortune scroll.
“What did you see?” Fang asks.
“The future,” Tenten replies, certainty hardening her voice, “and that means I have work to do.”
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Before she’s due to graduate, Tenten’s mother insists on going to their favourite restaurant to celebrate, even though Tenten doesn’t even know if she’ll pass yet.
Kanon says warmly, “I already know you’ll pass. But even if you didn’t somehow, you’d still deserve a treat for working so hard.”
Anko walks into the restaurant just as Tenten is enjoying her second plate of sesame dumplings. Her eyes go wide, and her dumpling slips out of her chopsticks’ grasp. Her mother stabs it in mid-air with her own chopstick, raising her golden eyebrows at her inattention.
Anko strolls further in, arms stretched above her head as she yawns. Even with her carefree posture, she seems to expand, filling the space with her presence.
Tenten shrinks in her seat as Anko’s eyes fall on her booth, a smirk immediately spreading across her face.
“Punk!” Anko says delightedly, loud voice resonating through the restaurant.
Tenten slides a little closer to her mother.
“Fancy seeing you here – ” She begins, crossing the room to get to their table, then cuts off abruptly.
Tenten follows her gazes and sees her mother’s face, the scarred side clearly visible. Tenten stiffens. She’s heard all sorts from well-meaning strangers, things about how pretty her mother is despite her ‘problem,’ how she could get them healed if she was willing to pay a small fee, what a shame it was to see a former beauty so disfigured…
She hasn’t heard it all, because she knows her mother must have heard more throughout her life. Nastier things whispered in her presence. Neighbours speculating on what kind of rough woman she must be, to bear such marks without shame.
One of the reasons she had wanted to become a shinobi when she was little was because she’d seen countless kunoichi and shinobi glance at her mother without much interest, not caring about the three gouges running down her cheek, or the long slice that cuts through her left eye, leaving it milky white and blind. When shinobi looked at her mother, they saw her.
Or at least, they had until Anko. The woman’s gaze flickers across Kanon’s cheek and eye, her expression fascinated.
Kanon’s mouth tightens, and she slowly and deliberately turns her face to show off the full extent of her scars, the raw lines painted down her throat.
“Have you had your eyeful yet?” She asks tartly. “Or do you need more time to stare?”
Anko blinks, then an eerie grin flashes across her face.
“Spar with me.” She breathes.
Kanon frowns, her scarlet-painted mouth forming a moue of confusion. She taps her gold, gilded nailguards, shaped like claws. “You mistake me for a shinobi. I do not spar.”
“Anyone can spar!” Anko insists. Tenten is beginning to feel rather forgotten. “And if you win, I’ll show you some of my scars. If I win, well…”
“I have no interest in you or your scars,” Kanon says crisply, “but mine are not pieces to barter. If you would sell yourself so cheaply, well, you must do as you see fit.”
If anything, such a blunt rejection only increases the manic glee in Anko’s grin, “You got a name?”
“Most people do.” Kanon busies herself with cleaning the edge of her plate with a napkin, patently uninterested in the conversation.
One of the issues in their lack of a family name was that it tended to force casual intimacy with strangers. Tenten has introduced herself by her first name only many times, receiving bewildered looks.
No doubt, Kanon doesn’t want to give her first name to Anko, in case she takes it as a sign of interest.
“She’s mostly known as the Lady of Iron.” Tenten interjects, leaning into view.
Anko’s eyes practically sparkle, a highly disturbing sight.
“The smith, right? You made my favourite kunai. I always touch the carved kanji on it for good luck before a mission.”
“A pity it worked until this point,” Kanon replies, “now, you began this ‘conversation’ by shouting at my daughter. Was there a purpose to that, or is it your customary way to enter a restaurant?”
Anko’s eyes slide back to Tenten, “This is your kid?”
“Clearly.”
“You know she’s the betting kind?”
Kanon rests her head on her hand, eyes hooded in boredom.
Anko slides onto the other side of the booth, resting her dirt-encrusted hands on the table. Kanon flicks them a look of distaste.
“She bet me she could surpass me in a year,” Anko grins, leaning across the table, “ain’t that adorable? Not even graduated yet, already challenging jounin.”
Kanon looks unruffled by the revelation, “How enterprising.”
“You’re not worried for her?”
“I have every faith in my daughter’s abilities.”
“How sweet,” Anko coos, reaching to pat Tenten on the cheek, “aren’t you a lucky punk – ”
Kanon intercepts Anko’s hand, lightning-fast, pinning it against the table with her chopsticks.
“Do not put your hands on my child.” She says, icily calm.
Anko gives her a dazed smile, clearly in awe.
Her eyes glint, and she rips her hand free. She stands up, “You’re gonna spar with me one day, hime-sama. Might even mess up your pretty hair.”
Kanon twirls her chopsticks, eyes back on her plate, already dismissing Anko.
Anko meets Tenten’s gaze, frustration evident on her face.
Tenten only shrugs, unable to hold back her grin. Anko had been scary when she encountered her out in the wild, up to no good, but here she’s just another person who’s unable to overcome the sheer force of Kanon’s indifference.
Anko backpedals out of the restaurant, not seeming to notice she never ordered anything.
Tenten looks at her mother warily, waiting for the explosion that was sure to follow the revelation that she had challenged a jounin.
Instead, Kanon plucked a dumpling from her plate and demurely popped it into her mouth. “You’re trying to fly before you can even crawl, my dear,” is all she says, then they continue their family meal without any further discussion on the subject.
Tenten feels warm. Her mother might appear cold and stern, but she knows her daughter and has plenty of faith in her. She trusts that she knows what she’s doing.
Tenten isn’t quite so sure of herself, but takes comfort in her mother’s belief.
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Later that day, Tenten spreads the scrying scroll across her bed.
She touches the new choker around her neck, feeling it warm up beneath her fingers. It unfurls, then spins in the air, turning into Fang. He lands on her bed with a flourish, paws up as if expecting applause.
“It worked!” Tenten says. She’d witnessed him turning into the choker shortly after her last vision, but had feared he’d never turn back and she’d be stuck with a cutesy red panda necklace and no summons.
“Of course it did!” Fang says proudly. “I’m the best at transformation jutsu! I can turn into a hat, too. And a little dagger. But please don’t lose me. I don’t want to end up in somebody’s pocket.”
“I won’t. I’ll take care of you, Fang-kun.” Tenten promises, gripping his round paw in her hand. He shakes it decisively.
“So, you said this thing can answer questions?” He says, looking down at the blank paper before him.
“Yep. It told me I could save the person I saw in my vision, and that to do that, I had to get stronger.”
“Hmm… Weird! Okay, I’ll try asking it something,” Fang leans over, sniffing the paper, “scrying-san, did Bai take my fish, or was it Li?”
The scroll remains blank.
Fang flails on the bed, scrunching his nose up.
“Did Bai take Fang’s fish, or Li?” Tenten asks hastily, sensing a tantrum coming on.
Words appear, written in thick, black ink. Neither. The fish swam away while Fang slept.
Fang claps his paws over his mouth, “Really? And I put bugs in their beds for weeks after…”
“Why did you think they took it in the first place? Are they greedy?”
“What? No! I wasn’t going to eat the fish. It was my new pet!”
Tenten hides her smile, “Summons can have pets?”
“Well, I certainly tried. Oh, fishy friend, you had scales of pearlescent sheen, a sparkle without end. I loved your eyes, so bright and keen – ”
“Could we get back to testing out the scroll, if you don’t mind?” Tenten asks politely.
Fang chirrups in agreement, miming zipping his mouth shut.
“Where can I get allies?” Tenten asks.
The scroll shimmers, then brushstrokes begin to form a map. A red circle is drawn over a tiny area, and a large number of days is written in the top left-hand corner.
“So, in that many days, I can find allies here?” Tenten asks, pointing at the circle.
Yes. The word floats over the map, then melts into nothingness.
“Are there any allies closer to home?”
Yes.
“Uh – can you show me them?”
Sacrifice a small amount of energy.
“A terrifying way to say, ‘use some chakra.’” Tenten grumbles
She touches the edge of the scroll and feeds it some of her quicksilver chakra.
“You know, we’re not here to hurt you.” Neko says earnestly, in her saccharine voice. The prisoner lets out a wet-sounding laugh, incredulous. “No, really! It’s always a last resort. You think we like doing this? It’s awful. I hate seeing people like this. But we have to do it. We don’t have a choice. All we can do is wait and hope that you’ll see reason, that all this unpleasantness can end…”
Neko spends another hour coaxing him into complacency, making him believe she truly cares. Ten minutes after he cracks his first smile, he breaks. He spills everything, and Neko makes him feel good for doing it.
She leaves the room and pulls her mask off instantly, heaving a big sigh.
“Ahh! It’s always so hot and stuffy in those rooms,” Ino complains, smoothing down her frizzy ponytail, “You have it easy. All you have to do is knock them about a bit, and then you can leave. I have to spend hours talking nonsense to them just to get some results!”
“It’s almost like you chose a career in interrogation, or something.” Tenten replies dryly.
Ino bodily-checks her into the wall, hissing like her ANBU namesake, “I can’t help being so talented in such a valuable area!”
Tenten laughs, even though she dipped the prisoner’s fingernails in acid and he’s in the next room, red-raw and vulnerable, because together, she and Ino peeled back his layers and left him exposed.
She’s not sure if she’s a terrible person for laughing in such a situation, or if Ino’s just that good a friend.
Tenten comes back to herself slowly. The first thing she’s aware of is a high-pitched voice reciting words with some vague melody.
“ – and I did say to the lady, ‘I’ll take care of you,’ and she did say to me, ‘You’ll – ”
Tenten flaps a hand, squinting through the headache bursting behind her eyes.
Fang perks up, “You’re awake! And in pain again. Oh dear. I’ll get the leaf tonic.”
Tenten now knows the recipe for a particular kind of salt that can literally be used in wounds to spread the pain throughout the body, causing the victim to feel as though their veins are on fire. At that point, incapable of soothing the searing agony ripping through their body, most people would give up what they knew – whether it was useful or not. And if they did, Tenten also knows the salve that counteracts the salt’s effects, leaving the target babbling with gratitude.
Fang pours the tonic into her mouth again. It tastes a little like cold herbal tea.
“Thank you,” Tenten says, scrubbing a hand across her brow, “I saw the ally, by the way. Someone called Ino. She looked my age, but she’s not in my year in the Academy and she definitely is a shinobi, by the time that I know her. So she’s probably a year or two younger.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Well… find my interrogator, I guess,” Tenten says, “if I can get her on board, I’ll hopefully be able to find more info than just what the scroll can give me.”
As horrible as it is to suddenly have years’ worth of knowledge of torture dropped in her mind at once, memories of Ino/Neko’s friendship lighten the load.
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It doesn’t take long for Tenten to find Yamanaka Ino. Apparently, Ino is part of some legendary generational team involving three clans. Tenten can’t help but be a little intimidated by that.
She knocks on the door of the Yamanaka residence, admiring the immaculate flowerbeds that bracket the entrance.
Ino answers, a curious look on her too-young face.
Tenten gives her a gentle smile, unsure of just how much younger she is, “Hi, are you Yamanaka Ino?”
“…Yes.” The blonde replies, examining Tenten from head to toe without even trying to mask her interest.
“Can I have a private word with you, please? Maybe in the park?” Tenten asks.
For some reason, a light dusting of pink covers Ino’s cheeks, and she only nods, following Tenten down the path without another word.
She fidgets all the way to the park, looking immensely awkward. She’s a fair few shades off Neko’s confidence.
Tenten stops when they get to an empty patch of the park, beneath a large plum tree. She turns to start her recruitment speech about how much she needs someone like Ino to help her get stronger and muddle through the gift she’s been given, when Ino herself steps forward.
“Thank you very much for your interest, Tenten-san!” Ino blurts out. “But I’m already taken, sorry! I’m going to marry Uchiha Sasuke. I’m very flattered that an older girl would confess to me, but I’m not available. Goodbye!”
And just like that, the younger girl shoots off, her face tomato-red.
Tenten stares after her, dumbfounded.
That was Neko?
***
Hello, friends!
I am so glad that a lot of you are as hungry for a Tenten-centric fic as me! My goal is to get at least one more written as a result of this one, because I need more Tenten in my life!
Fang can turn into a necklace, a straw hat, and a jewelled dagger. He’s also an amateur poet, and he’ll never let you forget it.
So. Tenten has had a few more visions, some nice, some not-so-nice, and she’s tried to react to them all with the same level of calm and rationality. She’s seen herself as a badass ANBU, Naruto as Hokage, and Ino as an interrogator. It’s going to be difficult for her, seeing how vastly different the future is from the past.
Anko has a huge thing for scars, which frequently makes Ibiki uncomfortable. “I am not a sex object!” He complains. Anko doesn’t care.
But Anko has underestimated the level to which Kanon does not care. She’s apathetic by nature, unless you try to put your hands on her kid right in front of her. Then she’ll grab you with chopsticks and bodyslam you through a wall.
Ino has read one too many romance novels! Older student who’s never spoken to you before, suddenly arrives at your house, gives you a gentlemanly smile, and asks for a private word in a romantic, public location…
Poor Tenten. Rejected without even realising it.
Quick poll for fun: If you could live in a TV show/film, which would you choose?
I would want Kiki’s Delivery Service, because I missed my call as a witch and I love bakeries.