Becoming Tenten

Summary: It took six years to become a kunoichi. Stealth!Tenten.

This is a bit of an experimental piece for me- a character study instead of a longer, adventur-ish story. It's meant to be canon compliant. It's a Tenten headcanon that doesn't fit with the Tenten headcanon I described for Vapors/Clarity on my blog, if you've read that. It's actually sort of an inversion of that... *handwaves*

"Look, I'm just not certain-"

"Tenten," the child interrupted stubbornly, for the eighth time.

"Tenten-chan," the academy recruiter conceded, rubbing at his tension headache. "Aren't you a little young to be making this decision?" If Tenten wasn't determined to make this work, he'd be the one inconvenienced. The liaison between the academy and Konoha's legal system for trainees without legal guardians ended up tied to the recruits they picked until the children either graduated or dropped out of the program.

Tenten's little bangs flopped wildly when she shook her head, short hair fluttering about. "I'm going to grow up to be a great kunoichi like Tsunade-sama," Tenten insisted.

'A great kunoichi like Tsunade-sama? Kami, that's terrifying.'

He grouched a little, but actually approved. 'Terrifying' was a good career goal for a little kunoichi-to-be. Hiro silently gave up on dissuading Tenten. Maybe this was just a phase and the child would regret all the paperwork she was about to be put through in a few years. Then again, maybe it wasn't, and this was an excellent time to set Tenten on her chosen path. "All right," he finally conceded, making a checkmark on his clipboard. "I have two more interviews. After that, I'll take you to the hospital and get this all sorted out, alright, Tenten-chan? If you hold out on this for six years- the academy length- then the village will pay for your medical care."

For a brilliant instant, Tenten's face lit up with a million-watt smile, made all the more charming by her missing front tooth. "Hai!" she chirped, darting over to hug his leg before she went to go wait in the hall.

He tried not to smile, he really did. "Don't thank me yet," he called before the door closed. Rueful, Hiro shook his head.

'A great kunoichi, huh? Well, she knows what she wants. That's the first step.' Hiro readied himself for the remainder of the six-year olds in the orphanage's care that had expressed interest in the shinobi lifestyle. He almost hoped that the others would be as interesting, despite the administrative headache it was going to be to get Tenten registered as a female entrant.

Stealth: When a trans person chooses not to disclose their trans status to others. This can be done for numerous reasons including safety, or simply because the trans person doesn't feel other people have the right to know. (definition taken from " you know youre trans do blur do slash definitions " , remove spaces and add dots as appropriate).

"I said, do you want your teachers to know?" the elderly doctor repeated. Tenten screwed up her face in confusion. She didn't see why they needed to know, and said so.

Mito-sensei hemmed and hawed, exchanging glances with Hiro-san. He eventually took pity on her. "She means that if you change your mind later, it will be easier to fulfill the boys' curriculum if they've been keeping that in mind," Hiro sighed, looking mildly embarrassed by the admission.

She wrinkled her nose. "I'm not going to change my mind." Tenten hopped off the hospital bed, smoothing down the front of her skirt with her palms. "That's a silly thing to tell them. It's not anyone else's business, is it?"

Hiro offered her a fond look, holding the door open. "It's not," he agreed. She waved goodbye enthusiastically when he dropped her off at the orphanage, excited that her life was finally beginning.

As far back as she could remember, Tenten had known that she was destined for greatness. It didn't matter that every other orphan with scuffed knees claimed the same thing but that half of them dropped out before making genin: she knew that she was going to make it happen. She wanted it so, so badly that it hurt sometimes when she was laying on her futon at night.

'I'm going to be somebody,' Tenten promised herself the night before her first day at the academy, trying not to glance too often at the serviceably plain equipment that had been provided for her from village stocks.

The academy was her way out of being just one more face in a crowd. She wasn't just going to be a kunoichi, she was going to be the kind of kunoichi that everyone wanted to work with and who people could recognize on the street. One with a cool name and teammates who always had her back. The Sannin thing was already taken, but that was fine.

She'd find her own niche.

In her first year in the academy, Tenten learned about inequality. Overall, the academy was alright. It was hard, but she'd expected that. Heroes have uphill journeys to make. So, really, it was good that the clan kids had already begun practicing taijutsu and that the students with moms or dads at home had nice bentos and shiny equipment and books that hadn't already been drawn in. She didn't mind at all. She didn't.

Two of the other orphanage recruits in her class dropped out after a month and went back to playing with the younger kids. Tenten ducked her head and learned how to adjust for the slight weight difference that nicked kunai had when throwing and polished her slightly crusty shuriken until they flew as true as anyone else's.

Some things, however, she really didn't want to adjust to.

"I don't want to learn about flowers," Tenten burst out, dismayed. It was an extra two hour commitment after class three whole days a week! Training fields were only open for pre-genin supervised training for three hours after class. That wasn't fair. She needed to practice real shinobi things. The sprints in class were only the bare minimum fitness requirement. Without practice time, she'd never catch up.

Ami-chan giggled nastily. "She's such a boy," the other girl hissed in an undertone that wasn't an undertone at all.

That hurt.

Her outburst had her put in the corner to fume silently while the red on her cheeks faded. That gave her time to refine her understanding of what exactly what had made her so indignant. The frustrating thing wasn't that the curriculum afforded time for students to learn about communicating with flowers as a code and arranging them prettily. That was a valuable skill for certain types of shinobi, like spies and infiltrators. It was important to be able to covertly pass information.

What she didn't like was that the after-school seminars cutting into her training time were mandatory for all age groups but excluded half the class. It didn't make sense to her. If it was important for the girls to learn, then shouldn't the boys learn too? Either it was valuable or it wasn't.

But detention cut into even more of that time. So Tenten learned to smile when she wanted to frown and produced technical perfection on every bouquet. When classes covering the traditional clothing of other regions came along, she didn't argue.

She hadn't thought that being a ninja meant compromising.

In her second year, Tenten learned about disappointment. "Hey, what's with the long face?" Hiro prompted, nudging his pet project. "I thought you were enjoying classes."

Tenten kicked sullenly at the legs of her chair, not making eye contact.

He sighed. "I can't fix what's wrong if you don't tell me, Tenten-chan," he coaxed, without thinking too much about the fact that he was offering to go to bat for her outside of the context of his job.

Her lower lip wobbled. Tenten looked up, face screwed in a childish pout of Severe Unhappiness. "Kata-sensei says that I'll never be like Tsunade-sama."

Statistically speaking, that was true. That didn't stop him from frowning. "What? Why would he say that?"

Tenten shrugged, rubbing at her face with a palm. She seemed to be talking to that hand more than she was talking to him. "They pulled the students with the best chakra control out and put them in introductory med-nin classes this week," she explained with a sniff. "They're- they're doing chakra control exercises, and learning about specialties- and- and-"

"And you weren't one of them," Hiro concluded slowly, frowning.

She nodded, miserable.

"Well, I don't see the problem." Tenten's face shot up in a rictus of shock that would have been amusing at another time. He gave her a smile to soften the blow. "You've never told me that you want to be a great medical ninja like Tsunade-sama. You've always said that you want to be a great kunoichi," he stressed, raising an eyebrow and hoping that she understood the difference.

The seven-year old in front of him gave a skeptical frown, clearly not sold on his argument. "All the kunoichi we talk about in class are med-nin," she protested.

Oh, jeeze. He'd never noticed that. But when kunoichi tended to be directed towards infiltration or the medical field- well, one career choice lent itself better to visibility and even a little bit of glamour.

"Is Tsunade-sama just a med-nin?" Hiro prompted, feigning disinterest. "Would she be famous if she didn't have her strength of a hundred men?" When Tenten shook her head wildly, he spread his hands out as if to say, 'see?'. "There you go, then. Tsunade-sama is famous because she's part of a great team, and she practically invented her own specialty. An offensive medical ninja was unheard of, Tenten-chan. If you want to be a great kunoichi, figure out what you want to do and own it." He hesitated before adding, "And if you really want to be a medic, you can join the program in directly your second to last year. Not everyone is recruited, after all."

Tenten didn't exactly give up on emulating Tsunade-sama directly. Part of her idol's appeal was that she was elite at both the traditional male specialty of heavy combat and the traditional female specialty of combat assistance. How cool was that? Tsunade-sama was beautiful and brave and clever and no one told her that she wasn't enough of a girl for any of it. No one had ever told Tsunade-sama to calm down and do what she was told.

She did stop trying to sneak into the Academy med-prep classes, though. All great ninja faced trials, right? So what if the teachers thought she lacked potential. She could go to the civilian library and learn all about human biology and healthy living and homeopathic medicine without anyone else's help.

In her third year of the academy, Tenten learned about what her body could do.

Yamada-obaasan wrinkled her brow, delicate skin folding easily. "Tenten-chan," she wavered delicately, struggling to lean down to the nine-year old's eye level. "The after school apprenticeships are for children who aren't going to be shinobi. You don't need to work," she explained kindly. "The Hokage is kind enough to let you pay back your education after you have graduated."

Tenten shook her head, the tight weight of twin buns still an oddity on her scalp. "I want to work," she stressed politely, fingers folded together at her front. "If I get an apprenticeship, I'll have money for better equipment and I'll be helping out." Konoha ninja worked in teams, they worked for the good of the whole. She should be doing what she could to repay her benefactors by working as hard as possible. In Academy, she was becoming known for the fact she that she could hit the target nine out of ten times while upside down. But that wasn't enough. She could do better. She could do more if she worked harder, and she needed resources to do that.

Pale lips pressed together, the old woman gave Tenten a searching look. "Very well," she conceded, still sounding concerned. "No one's volunteered to work with the blacksmith yet because it's a hard job. You're a sturdy little girl, so I think you can handle it. But if it's too much, you just tell me. Do you understand?"

She nodded politely, and tried not to be too obviously enthusiastic with the reserved orphanage matron.

So Tenten went to work for a man with red skin, burns up his arms from molten metal, and a brusque manner. She went to bed at eight every night, woke up at four am and practiced her kunoichi skills until class at nine. Then she went to Kenta-shishou's workshop and hauled materials, ran errands, polished weapons, and learned how to make various chemicals for coloring and waterproofing.

The work was hard- her arms and legs grew strong enough to carry her through all the Academy tests even faster and more accurately. She loved them. Her palms turned reddish from the chemicals she was using and she gained calluses. They were beautiful. Her body was wonderful.

Tenten was barely nine when she first had to deal with the thing that lived in her pants. It wasn't fair. The other girls didn't wake up with an uncomfortable stiffness calling attention to itself and refusing to go away. She put her face into her pillow and waited until it went away. She didn't know why hot tears of shame were making her pillow wet.

She learned to tuck it away and compensate with pink. Pink everywhere. A pink headband to keep her bangs back, a pink tank top, and pink skirts with just enough fluff in them that there was no chance anything she didn't want showing to be visible.

Tenten learned to covet in her fourth year in training to become a shinobi. That lesson wasn't intentional, and it wasn't for the pretty things that the other girls wore like little peacocks. It was just that no matter how hard she worked and how much money she saved, there was always one more perfect, gleaming weapon she hadn't tried out yet.

Kenta-shishou definitely noticed her longing glances.

"Sit down."

She blinked around her armful of steel ingots, but obediently made her way to the man she was apprenticed to and settled herself by the workbench.

"Are you going to get around to asking me how to make a kusarigama?" His wide mouth twitched in what couldn't be a smile. Kenta-shishou was far too stern for that. "I hope you weren't planning on buying one. A real weapons master should know her tools inside out. The only way to know your blades is to make them yourself and then work with them."

Tenten shook her head slowly, cheeks burning at the implication that he'd noticed her staring at a piece that had been sold yesterday. "I can't afford that," she protested, glancing down. He knew that. He was the one who paid her. Why did he make her say that?

He snorted. "Of course you get to keep the first one you make decently. How else would you have a proper model for what you make when I'm not watching?" Her shishou shook his head seriously. "You've been running my errands for long enough, I think. I'm getting another little brat for that. You're going to have to step it up and actually learn the trade."

That was a very weak excuse disguising his charity. She nodded solemnly and tried not to fidget, internally running a tally of all the wonderful creations she had in mind.

Three months later, Tenten spun her kusarigama and let the chain slide through her fingers, slicing through thrown targets with 80% accuracy. That wasn't good enough. She wanted to master it.

Over the next two years, she learned to make six different kinds of weapons and begged personal instruction from Academy chuunin so that she could learn to use them properly. It would be disrespectful otherwise- why make something beautiful only to leave it sitting around? No, things should be useful, and Tenten wanted to use them all.

This time, when she failed the first session of the 'intro to the medical program' by accidental fish murder, Tenten had a fallback plan. Okay. She'd never be Tsunade-sama, and she'd mostly accepted that. She'd just have to settle for being the world's best weapons user, master of any and all projectile and short-range weapons.

The uniquely kunoichi art of a carefully constructed presentation of self finally made sense to Tenten in her last year at the academy. Pink stopped working for Tenten when she was eleven, less than a year away from being a real kunoichi. Tenten woke up one day and saw that her classmates didn't look like she did. That precocious Yamanaka girl a year below had curves. She looked down at her thin-strapped tanktop and knew that she had to go shopping. Tenten found tiny bras that fit her waistband, high-collared shirts so that nothing could ever (not) show, and a clever little insert that she could use for padding. Not at the same store, of course.

In the daylight, it worked. Tenten could look at her reflection in a blade and smile. Then she went home and looked at her face and wondered if she'd ever stop seeing an ugly dumb boy where she should have been.

She learned to work around it. At night, she showered quickly with a loofah and her eyes closed so she didn't have to confront what didn't fit. She slept in her padded bras and slightly loose shorts. Then she covered the bathroom mirror so she didn't have to wonder if her jaw was getting a little broader.

That was fine. It was working. When she went to the doctor for her next bi-monthly appointment, she asked about her options.

"Well, we could start you on hormones," Mito-sensei said dubiously, pursing her red lips. "I'm afraid that surgery is off the table for now, however. It would never be perfectly functional," she stressed hurriedly, misinterpreting the look on Tenten's face. "Sex change operations have a thirty percent failure rate in the long term."

"Failure?" Tenten asked uncertainly, kicking her heels against the hospital bed.

"Mmm," Mito-sensei hummed, bending over to examine the reading on the blood pressure cuff. "After ten or more years, a constructed vagina ends up what is defined as nonfunctional. Intercourse will be difficult, and orgasm may be impossible." At the horrified face Tenten was making, the older woman winced, remembering just how young the shinobi trainee was. "You don't have to make any decisions about that for years," she soothed. "Let's just look at your options for the hormones, hmm?"

Tenten went home and uncovered the mirror to just stare at her face and torso for a while. She didn't even want a full length mirror because she hated looking at It. It didn't fit and it wasn't part of her. But the idea of lopping off The Thing was a little scary too.

She sighed. 'I can decide when I'm a little older. I can be a kunoichi with or without it.'

In some strange act of compliance she didn't entirely understand, Tenten found another pink shirt and learned how to apply lip gloss and eyeliner. She started spending time with the other girls after classes at the movies and using some of her earnings on pretty notebooks and animal-shaped charms for her pens. That's what girls did.

Kunoichi

'My team isn't that impressive.' Tenten tried to hide her dubiousness behind a polite, closed-mouth smile. The sannin probably hadn't been obviously great as twelve-year old graduates either. It might take a few months to figure out how they were going to fit together. That was okay.

"You two losers should give up now." The pretty one of her teammates looked away dismissively, his long hair swaying. Tenten took a moment to covet his beautiful hair before his cruelty registered. Her smile froze and her jaw stiffened.

"D-don't say that!" Lee pressed his palms flat against his legs in nervousness, but his chin was steady. "I work every day to improve my ninja skills. I am not a loser."

"And I'm not either," Tenten chimed in, fingering the thigh pouch she'd painstakingly packed and repacked a half-dozen times last night in an attempt to optimally arrange as many projectiles as possible.

She wasn't. She was a kunoichi now.

Tenten didn't bother trying to make the grin that crossed her face into a palatable, polite smile.

Kunoichi.

This was an exploration into body dysphoria in combination with female socialization and policing- how growing up involves both positive growth and negotiation. I hope it reads well and doesn't offend (and by that I mean offend anyone other than queer body-shaming weasels, because I don't care what those people think and they probably didn't make it this far anyway). Anyway, if I've portrayed something improperly or insensitively, I apologize.

The following resources discuss 'stealth' persons. Just remove spaces and add 'dots' where noted.

The first article is an opinion piece advocating the opinion that transpersons should be 'out' in order to benefit the trans community. I don't know that I agree, on the grounds that it seems pretty reasonable if a person doesn't want to make their genitals and medical history (in other words, their private life) public, they shouldn't have to. The author makes an argument about how transpersons need representation- a premise I agree with- using the argument that therefore transpersons have a responsibility to represent. Form your own opinion, I suppose.

spot 2013 / 07 / stealth - doesnt - help -trans - community.

(man I hope that works, I have such a hard time arguing with ff over links. If you're really interested and can't get this to work, the links definitely work over in the same story on archive of our own. There should be a link to that in my profile, I think. The penname is the same for sure).

This article is part of a series that goes into what it actually means to be stealth. That link probably should have been first, huh? Mm. Regardless, it's part of a fairly comprehensive series of articles that show a fair few viewpoints. This author is examining the unfortunate relationship between power and private presentation- a person can only be labeled with their correct moniker once the people / groups in power allow it, and the way that various groups and philosophies interfere with a person's right and ability to be stealth. In other words, the power to choose not to be publicly seen as a transperson can be taken away by other people if you don't 'pass' or if they think you have an obligation to be out.

transadvocate youre - only - as transitioned - and - stealth - as - the -next - person - says - you - aren 9827.h t m