Chapter Text
It all started on a very strange Tuesday. Well, Tenten supposed it was a fairly normal Tuesday, actually. At first, anyway.
She’d been with her genin team for about three months. Rock Lee and Neji Hyuga. The best and worst of the graduating class. She’d known them both since they were all children, barely older than toddlers, really. Tenten hadn’t thought particularly highly of either of them. She hadn’t thought much about either of them, period. But she didn’t bemoan the assignment, like so many of her classmates. Any feelings Tenten might have had towards her new team mates were drowned out in the excitement and determination. She was officially a ninja. On her way to making something of herself. Tenten felt that if she only were to stretch out her fingers, she could touch the future…
And so Team Gai settled into each other’s company. Through extreme training sessions and mindless D-rank missions, Tenten came to enjoy their company. Lee and Gai—especially when combined—could be exhausting, but she was no longer quite so put off by their weirdness. Team Gai had a very… interesting dynamic.
And so it was that the Tuesday in question happened to be both very normal and very strange. It had begun like any other Tuesday. Tenten had finally learned to rise before Gai’s obscenely early wake-up call, a fact her sensei was ridiculously proud of. They got in an early training session before heading out to be assigned yet another D-rank.
Today they were sent to a music shop to help clean the instruments. It was a delicate job, work that really only Neji was suited for. An hour in, even Lee was forced into near-silence by his need to concentrate so as not to break anything by accident. And the day became strange. Never before could Tenten remember a quiet mission with her team.
Things were going well. It looked like they were going to get out at a reasonable time, and the post-mission training sessions were usually optional—only Lee ever took Gai sensei up on them. And then the woman walked into the store. And everything stopped.
Or perhaps it would only seem that way, after the fact. But for Tenten, everything stopped.
The woman was… unremarkable. Relatively young—twenty-nine, Tenten knew. But it wasn’t striking beauty that caught her eye. It was the exact shape and shade of her eyes. The way she held her hands at her sides. The way her voice hit unusually high notes when she laughed at something the shopkeeper said. It all seemed to happen in a split second. But then, time had stopped, after all.
Tenten recognized it all. These strangely specific details that she’d spent twelve years becoming acquainted with within herself. For a moment, she wondered if she could be mistaken. But only for a moment. Because then the woman turned to the corner where they were working, and Tenten saw the same immediate, almost inexplicable, recognition on the face that looked so much like her own.
The woman did not have Tenten’s composure, however. In the space of a second, her expression crumpled. She turned and fled the shop, her errand apparently forgotten.
Time returned to normal. The woman’s actions had not gone unnoticed. Tenten was distantly aware of the fact that her own hands had stilled. Her team mates were staring at her.
“Tenten,” Lee asked at last. “Is something wrong?”
She turned to him, but she could only stare, her eyes too wide, her mind too blank.