Work Text:
Tenten sits behind the counter in her weapons emporium and enjoys the peace. Sure, an occasional customer is acceptable, and in many ways a requirement for the room around her to be a shop rather than a personal armoury, but she prefers the long and quiet periods between visitors. The shop, too, is something she likes: it’s a place that’s hers, and one where she can be pleasant and helpful and honest rather than cold and calculating and deadly.
She sets down the kunai that she was unthinkingly flipping from hand to hand. When her mind wanders, her default is to reach for a blade.
That’s something Tenten doesn’t like so much.
The room is comfortable; there are racks of swords of all kinds, of course, but also the soft glow of many lamps scattered around, and thick carpets along with heavy curtains that lend a certain fluffiness to the space. The paintings on the walls are incongruous with the spears and shuriken they sit beside. Most depict bucolic scenes of shepherds or farmers, with a few grand artworks showing towering mountains or dynamic waterfalls.
By Tenten’s side are two stacks of scrolls. The smaller is all bare paper, the larger is a stockpile of weapons of all sorts, sealed away with great care. Tenten has always been praised for her handwriting, her calligraphy, her precision and her detail. She sets down another kunai–when had she picked that up?–and unfurls the next scroll.
Creating a seal capable of holding a single metal item isn’t easy, exactly, but Tenten has done it enough times that it’s second nature. She begins by taking the dry brush and drawing a wide circle, laying down a trickle of chakra but no ink. That’s going to become the container. To fortify it, she takes the inked brush and paints over a small section of the circle, keeping the brush on the paper afterwards. From there, the seal master can add any word, phrase, sentence, or even an entire essay that gives structural and conceptual support to the container and imparts additional properties based on what’s written.
This is going to become a simple piece of storage, so Tenten avoids anything elaborate, and writes what she’s always written: Hold.
From there, the process repeats, and she adds more arcs, distributed evenly around the circle. She uses four in total, as it’s a nice stable number, and there aren’t many properties the scroll needs to have. Protect. Hide. Compress. Lastly, she presses an oversized shuriken against the paper, and with a little sideways twist of will it’s absorbed by the chakra container. In its place, the kanji for shuriken now fills out the center of the seal.
Tenten rolls the paper up and adds it to the pile of finished scrolls. They won’t be used for a long time, if ever, but it gives her something to do. She notices there’s a kunai in her hand again, now that it’s been empty for a few seconds.
It goes back into one of the sheaths below the counter. As always, the act is temporary, and she knows another blade will find its way into her hand again soon.
She takes a new scroll, but this time, Tenten doesn’t form a seal. Instead, she gives in to temptation and begins to draw.
The first few brushstrokes are bold, setting out the heart of the painting. A rugged mountain takes shape in the center of the page. Tenten adds a few trees, but the sizes are all wrong, and with a frown she tries to draw over the worst offenders. Quickly, she’s left with a mess of black blotches that look like nothing much at all. She’s trained for years to handle every weapon under the sun, and to use a brush for seals, but none of the muscle memory lets her put the images from her head onto the paper.
With a snarl she crumples the scroll up and tosses it into the bin under the counter.
There’s another item in the shop, though it’s only visible from a very specific angle. Tucked away between one of the curtains and the corner of the room, a faded photo rests. From where Tenten usually sits at her desk, she can see it clearly.
It shows a genin team, back from their first real mission, tired and dirty and bickering with each other. But the teacher has a wide grin on his face, and smaller smiles are lurking on the lips of the kids. They would all go on to fight great and terrible battles, and keep each other alive in the face of the worst hardships.
Whenever Tenten has doubts about the path her life has taken, that photo is there to reassure her. Her eyes find it the way her hands find a knife.
She sighs. One hand sets down yet another knife, while the other reaches for a fresh scroll.