Truth Well Hidden

Connections of the Weapons-Mistress

A child with naturally flushed cheeks and a bun on each side of her head sat in the bushes and peered out, watching the other children play.

This was Tenten, the daughter of the infamous Higurashi Natsume, who was the best weapons-maker and shinobi tool-supplier in all of Konoha.

The other children often made fun of her twin buns, perpetual blush and slanted eyes that caused her Chinese ancestry to shine through, but she did not mind. These were all the small little features that she drank in when she looked in the mirror, knowing that they had come from her mother. Though her father was a civilian who just had a knack for forging, her mother was a whole different story. Higurashi Izumi had once been a famed kunoichi of Kumo before she had fallen for Natsume's charms and decided to resign as a shinobi. She had then followed the man around during his travels, only to finally settle down in Konoha.

They had been happy, but that was not to last.

On a short supply trip to a neighbouring civilian town as a family of three for a short break from their bustling life in Konoha, they had been ambushed by a group of missing-nin seeking Izumi's head for their collection.

There had been no weapons within reach, so the former kunoichi had no choice but to take them down bare-handed with a few non-flashy jutsu to avoid being spotted by more missing-nin. Unfortunately, in one of the men's death throes, he had gotten in a lucky hit and stabbed Izumi in the gut. Natsume, not knowing any medical ninjutsu or even with the ability to use chakra, had no choice but to watch his wife bleed out. Tenten had barely understood what was going on, but she knew that her mother was leaving them for good.

Never to return.

That saddened her, so she cried. She sobbed in the arms of her father, whose expression remained tight as he fought off his grief to console the child he had shared with the woman whose head he had brought gently into his lap. Her corpse was already cooling in the chill of the early winter breeze, making it all too real that the woman he had loved, his Izumi, had died. Natsume embraced his daughter just as tightly as she hugged him, father and daughter practically clinging to each other for support.

"I'm sorry, my angel," Natsume had whispered into her ear as he carded his fingers through her loose brown locks.

Tenten did not know how she had managed to grasp the severity of the situation, seeing as she had not yet known about the existence of the sad end to all life called death. She just understood innately that she was not going to see her mother's twinkling hazel eyes again, or the familiar warm smile that always seemed to light up the room. She just knew that her mother was gone, that the cold body lying before them was but an empty shell, a mere husk that no longer was the vessel of the kind soul that had once animated it.

She was five then.

It was only two years later -- when she had finally started attending the shinobi academy, that she understood that her mother had been killed.

That was when she realised that what she had witnessed was the death of her mother, seeing as she had no name to refer to it as before.

It was sad, yes, but it did not shake her as much as she knew she should have been. Her mother was dead, but she accepted it as just the end of another life. She learned that people died every day, from old age, sickness or otherwise. It was the end of the life of one very important to her, but it had been the end of one life nonetheless. It did not hit her hard or anything like that. She had long accepted upon seeing her mother's eyes slide shut and breath still that she was not going to come back.

Tenten knew that her mother did not want her to grieve, so she did not.

What she did not know and would not find out for quite a while, was that it was her unexplainable connection to an otherworldly being that made her so different.