Chapter Text
1.
Tenten is thirteen the first time she pulls a trigger, and in thirteen years nothing she's done has ever felt so right .
She’s panting and throwing fleeting looks back over her shoulder as she scrambles through the trash-laden alleys, secure in nothing right now but the fact that if she’s caught out here- That’s it. That’s the end. She’s an unregistered orphan barely scraping by in the seedy underbelly of the city, no one will miss her. No one will even know to look for her.
Thirteen years of living off picked pockets and pawning junk off the street, all for nothing.
She’ll never be seen again.
Because it’s not your common mugger she has to worry about tonight, she wouldn’t even have anything worth taking if it were. Just the too-large clothes on her back, half a switchblade, and a broken pistol she’s been working on for the past three weeks.
It's a pitiful defense against the duo of almost corpse-like men shambling unnaturally after her in the dark.
Sure they could just be junkies, or one of the dozen little cults that seem to spring up daily around here, but Tenten isn't willing to bet on it. Every urchin in the city has heard the rumors recently. Kids disappearing without a trace, always orphans and unregistered urchins, the ones that won't be missed. Sometimes entire gangs disappear in a single night. And the worst part is there's never a single clue about what's happened to them. No strangely fresh young organs flooding the black market, no unidentifiable corpses showing up in the river, nothing. It’s not like they’re being taken for ransom either, none of these kids are worth anything to anyone.
If Tenten ever does get caught by someone, she’d at least like to have the reassurance that she’ll be killed relatively quickly.
They'll have to catch her first though, and even panicked and half-starved Tenten is quick enough to give anyone a run for their money in this part of town. It's a maze of nooks, crannies, and twisting alleyways that she's spent her whole life learning like the back of her hand.
Three times she convinces herself that she's given her pursuers the slip. Once when she darts beneath a bridge, running full tilt through the vagrants packed together like sardines and stepping on as many fingers as she can in the hope that she’ll be lost in the mass of angry shouting. She almost gets grabbed by a scowling, toothless old hag with a nasty looking blade that’s more rust than metal. A better way to go than those things , admittedly, but Tenten kicks her in the gut and bolts away to the tune of her shrieking curses into the night.
Despite all her efforts though, the instant she leaves the makeshift lights there they are again, sprinting after her with a loping, unsteady stride that makes them look all the more inhuman.
And again, when she climbs into the abandoned warehouse to hide among the ancient machinery.
And again when, as a last resort, she lures them right to the edge of Inuzuka turf. Even the snarling fury of the territorial war-dogs fails to deter them from their single-minded pursuit.
It’s in a cramped alley behind the factory that they finally cut her off, surrounded by smooth walls and the factory’s fence. A fence she'd actually come here to try and climb over. There were plenty of alarms and such in the building proper she could set off without much effort, and at this point even being arrested was starting to sound more appealing than whatever her attackers had planned for her.
In her haste to get here she'd forgotten something important though. Namely that a recent string of vandalism had prompted the owners to swap out their old rusted fence for a new one. One that would send several thousand volts of electricity through her body if she so much as brushed against it.
She’s a little pleased to note, when her pursuers get close enough to examine, that one now has several bloody chunks torn out of it. It's probably the work of the Inuzuka judging by the damage, very little else in this city will tear into you with their teeth. It’s a tiny, visceral pleasure to know that she’s at least hurt the bastard.
She's less pleased to to have her back to a fifteen-foot tall electrified fence with no escape in sight while the two stumbling horrors steadily close the distance.
She's terrified, actually.
“Stay back!” The sound of her voice surprises her, high-strung and trembling with the swift onset of panic. Shouting won’t help her though, no one in their right minds would run towards shouting in this part of the city.
Where before they'd been staring only vaguely in her directions, now they lock their vacant eyes on her as her voice echoes out. They open their mouths in response, but when they do no words come out, just a tinny, mangled tune like a cheap ringtone.
The sound of it wrenches a choked sob from her, another step back bringing her so close to the fence she can feel it start to singe the end of her shoddily shorn hair.
No more running then, which means there’s only one thing left to do.
The gun is unnaturally heavy as she lifts it, like the weight of her fear is trying to force it back down again, telling her to just give up and hope she dies of fright before they get to her.
She keeps it steady, keeps a grip on the handle, a finger on the trigger, and a snarl on her lips. She hasn’t survived over a decade out here just so she can die to two zombie movie rejects.
The pistol is something she’d found in a junk pile weeks ago. The casing is cracked and the innards are such a mess that a single glance would tell anyone it was beyond saving. The old folks drinking on the corner had told her as much when she’d scampered past them clutching it to her chest, that it was just a useless piece of scrap now, and if she wanted a gun that badly they knew a few places that wouldn't ask too many questions.
She’d been stubborn about it, as usual, bringing it to her little makeshift hideout to work on at night in the dim light of a stolen lamp. She was no mechanic, just a little girl with a decent head on her shoulders and probably too tenacious for her own good, but bit by bit she managed to piece the thing back together. Not that she'd ever fired the thing, as tempting as it might have been.
She'd even managed to scrounge up a bullet, risking her life to dig it out of the mud at the riverbank after a firefight between two families. That night she took a rag to it, polishing it until it shone before sliding it almost reverently into the empty clip of the pistol.
At the time it had been an incredible find, easily the most valuable of her meagre possessions.
Now she just wishes she’d found two.
It's a start though, and already plans to escape her predicament are running through her mind one after another. Maybe if she shoots one, she can escape around the other? They seem pretty slow, and she’s as slippery as any kid can be. At least then if she gets caught she'll know she at least tried .
She raises the gun, pointing it squarely at the man on the right.
No .
She stops, face twisting in displeasure before she sets her sights on the one to the left.
Not yet .
Again- It’s not right. Something stops her before she can take the shot, something even deeper than the fear gripping her heart so tight she fears it might burst.
Wait.
Each second wasted brings them another step closer, their eerie, tinny songs getting louder in her ears.
Twenty feet. She sets her feet, mimicking the shooter’s stance she’s seen the policemen take up before they open fire.
Ten feet. Her grip on the gun tightens, knuckles going white with tension and her breath coming in swift, unsteady pants.
Five feet. She can see every last one of the pale scars criss-crossing their bodies, the aftermath of some sort of gruesome torture. Twisted bits of metal stick in and out of their skin at seemingly random intervals, serving some unknown purpose. It's a little unfair that they don’t seem to hinder their movement nearly as much as they ought to.
With a burst of speed far surpassing what they've shown her thus far the one on the right lunges for her, pulling ahead of his companion.
And suddenly, everything slows. The world grows sharp and clear, every distraction boiling away until she can see it.
Take the shot. Says the voice in her bones.
She pulls the trigger.
It's the sort of shot that you usually only see in movies, punching through the skull of the first man and straight through to the second. Both of them instantly crumple as the deafening crack of the gunshot echoes through the streets, thick blood oozing slowly from the fractured holes in their skulls. Perhaps it's just the light, but it almost looks like tar pooling beneath them.
Soon the only sound left is her sobbing breaths in the aftermath, the world around her returning to normal. She barely registers what she's done, death is all too common around here after all.
So she runs. She doesn’t even stop to dig through their pockets first, doesn’t stop for anything until she’s back in the safety of her shoddy little home, holding tight to her gun and to the brand new perspective swirling through her mind.
She’d thought, once upon a time, that she wasn’t meant for anything all that important. That she was just another unlucky kid destined to live and die without ever making any sort of mark on the world.
Now though, now she has something. Something special even.
And sometimes that’s how a legend begins: With two dead men and a shitty, broken gun.