It was the kind of morning where any reasonable person would have looked at the grey light seeping between the curtains, rolled back over, and claimed another hour. Tenten had attempted this. She had attempted it twice, in fact. The second attempt had lasted approximately three minutes before the knowledge that her teammates were already awake defeated her entirely, and she had dragged herself upright and into her training clothes with the grim reluctance of someone going somewhere they did not want to go.
The clearing on the village's outskirts was still wet from the night. Dew clung to every blade of grass and soaked through the soles of their sandals within minutes. The large trees around the perimeter were completely indifferent to any of this.
Lee was already shadow-boxing.
He had been here before any of them, Tenten was fairly sure. She had stopped asking when he woke up because the answer was never satisfying. He danced in the half-light, his weight wraps catching the first grey rays of morning, his breath coming out in small clouds. He looked, as he always did at this hour, like he had never encountered the concept of tiredness.
Tenten came to stand beside Neji with a yawn so thorough it cracked her jaw.
Neji didn't look too happy about it either, but when did Neji ever look happy about anything?
Guy-sensei arrived last, but exactly on time. He stepped into the clearing with his smile already at full capacity.
"Today, my youthful students, we shall undertake a training session that will test the very limits of our physical prowess and mental fortitude!"
"Like we do almost every day?" Tenten said flatly.
"You betcha, Tenten!" Thumbs-up. Gleaming teeth.
"I hate waking up early..." she groaned, drawing both arms across her chest against the chill.
"You'll surpass Lady Tsunade in no time, Tenten!" Lee flipped over to her, full of genuine enthusiasm for Tenten's ambitions at an hour she considered unreasonable. "You can do it!"
"EUGH!" The sound came from somewhere deep in her core. She threw her hands up. "Maybe it was a mistake to say I would surpass Lady Tsunade."
"Haha." Guy began stretching, dropping smoothly into a low lunge and rotating his ankle. "That's the beauty of youth, Tenten. Regret hits harder when you're older."
Tenten stared at the sky and thought about what she had done to deserve this.
...
The warm-ups began.
Six months in, none of them needed to be told what that meant. It meant the clearing filling with a collection of cracks and pops as four people convinced their cold joints to cooperate. Guy ran them through everything. Handstand walking came first, as it usually did on days that started with Guy looking especially pleased with himself.
"Core tight, fingers spread, and breathe!" he called out from his upside-down vantage. "The moment you stop breathing is the moment you fall!"
Lee inverted himself immediately and followed. Neji went next. Tenten wobbled on her first attempt. Her second attempt held. She began moving forward on her hands, her shoulders burning immediately, the blood rushing to her face, her arms shaking slightly with the effort of supporting weight she was not quite built for. But she moved. One hand, then the other, slowly and without anything resembling grace, but definitely moving.
They ran a thousand circuits of the clearing like that, upside down, the world a blurred green-and-brown that smeared past her inverted eyes as Tenten tried to breathe and not fall over and move forward all at the same time. By the five hundredth circuit she had stopped thinking about form and was simply surviving. By the eighth hundredth she had found something on the other side of exhaustion that felt almost steady.
She crossed the finish mark of the thousandth circuit still on her hands, which she counted as a personal victory.
Pull-ups on the worn-smooth bar between the trees. Push-ups with their faces inches from the dew-soaked earth. Sit-ups with Lee talking encouragingly about the springtime of youth that helped distract her from the agony her abdomen was in and caused Neji to tell him to shut up once or twice.
The race went through the forest, as it always did. It was never against each other, technically, though it was absolutely against each other because that was just how things worked. Lee and Neji raced each other as usual. Tenten did not bother and simply ran at her own pace trying to keep them in sight at the very least.
The trees blurred. Her lungs burned. Her legs felt like they were made of wet clay.
She crossed the finish back at the clearing and immediately sat down on the grass, because sitting down was the only sensible choice.
"Great job, everybody!" Guy smiled brightly at them. "You have completed morning training! Enjoy the rest of your day."
...
The river was three hours from the village, at the eastern edge of a broad stretch of forest where the land began to slope down toward the flats bordering the Land of Rivers. The mission briefing had been straightforward: a waterway running along a disputed trading route had been used as a dump by merchants and travellers for years, and the communities downstream were dealing with the consequences. Team 3 was tasked with clearing the debris.
Not ninja-like in the slightest but Tenten had noticed, since the Sugi mission, that she had started approaching even the straightforward assignments with the understanding that they still paid good money.
The trees here were older and taller than the ones around Konoha's training grounds, their roots running deep enough that they had outlasted several generations of shinobi. The air smelled of mineral water and rich soil and the kind of deep green that never quite dried out. Sunlight came down in long angled shafts between the branches, illuminating columns of floating dust and drifting insects.
The river came into view around a bend in the trail: wide and clear, running over rounded stones. It would have been beautiful without the mess that humans had made of its edges. Bottles. Cans. Waterlogged rope and cloth. A broken cart wheel half-buried in the mud. Pieces of pottery and rusted metal that had been sitting long enough to become part of the bank rather than additions to it.
"At least it's a good day for it." Lee said.
Tenten and Neji looked at the stretch of contaminated riverbank and said nothing.
They spread out along the water, working down the bank. Neji used his Byakugan to spot material that had been buried in the mud or obscured by overhanging vegetation, grabbing the trash himself. Tenten sealed each item away as it was found, her scroll filling steadily.
Lee, after watching the work for approximately two minutes, came to a decision.
"I'll handle the underwater trash." He announced.
He had pulled off his gi and was jogging toward the water's edge. The river swallowed him smoothly. He cut through the water easily. Within seconds he was below the surface, visible only as a blurred shape against the pale riverbed.
Then objects began appearing on the bank. A bottle arced through the air and landed neatly by Tenten's feet. A length of rusted chain followed. A wooden bucket that had been down there long enough to sprout algae. They came at regular intervals, each one emerging from the river and landing on the bank with the accuracy of someone who had a very clear idea of where the bank was even from below.
Tenten sealed each one and said nothing.
Beneath the surface, Lee was in a different world.
The river had its own population, entirely unconcerned with the trash cleanup happening in its shallower stretches. Fish moved in slow-turning formations through the mid-water, their scales catching the light that filtered down in broken columns. A turtle was parked on the riverbed beside a flat stone staring at Lee. Frogs kicked through the water in the reed-heavy shallows. Small crabs picked through the gravel of the bottom. A water snake wound between the rocks near the far bank.
It reminded him, in some small way, of Kagerou.
His snake had taken to the apartment like a fish in water. It had found the warm patch near the south-facing window within the first day and claimed it as its own. Lee had arranged some branches and a water dish, and Kagerou had accepted these additions without visible opinion. In the mornings, before training, he would find the snake awake and watching him with small dark eyes that communicated nothing he could understand.
He gathered a rusted pot from the riverbed and tossed it skyward, then continued along the bottom toward a cluster of broken pottery he had spotted in the deeper water near the far bank.
Tenten was watching the river surface when Guy-sensei appeared at her elbow. She had been watching it for a while, she realized. The pile of salvaged debris on the bank had grown significantly. Lee had been down there long enough that she had lost count.
"How long can a normal person hold their breath underwater, sensei?" She asked.
Guy's eyes went to the river immediately.
"Lee!" His voice carried across the water without straining. "Are you okay down there?"
A beat.
Then the surface broke, and Lee came up.
He emerged facing them with a frog sitting on top of his head. The frog was large and greenish-brown and wore the expression of an animal that had not made any of the decisions that had led to its current situation. It sat on Lee's wet hair unhappily.
Tenten laughed at the sight. "Lee," she managed. "I think you found another friend." She pointed at the top of her own head.
"Huh?" Lee reached up slowly, touched something damp and living, and understood. He cupped his hands carefully around the frog as he lifted it off his head, bringing it to eye level gently.
The frog looked at him.
Lee looked at the frog.
Then the frog launched itself from his palms with a powerful kick of its back legs, arced through the air, and hit the water. It was gone beneath the surface in a second, swimming away at impressive speed toward the reed beds.
"Sorry, little buddy!" Lee called after it, waving.
Tenten was still laughing.
Neji, working farther down the bank, did not acknowledge any of this. His Byakugan had found a pocket of debris buried deep in the riverbed mud, and he was directing his attention there. Not indulging in Lee's foolishness.
...
They worked through the morning and into early afternoon, the pile on the bank growing and the river steadily improving. It was not exciting work.
Lee had surfaced a few more times, usually to deposit a load of debris too large to throw from underwater, and once to check on the situation after apparently dislodging a section of the bank while moving something heavy. Tenten had gone along the bank to check on him. He had been fine, still smiling, with mud in his hair.
Neji had not commented.
The afternoon birds had started up in the trees above the bank. Somewhere in the reed beds, frogs were calling to each other in their ribbits and croaks. The river itself moved calmly over the stones, carrying its debris toward the flats.
Tenten was sealing the last of a batch of trash when she noticed Neji stop moving.
He had been working steadily down the bank, using his Byakugan to find buried material. Then he simply stopped. His body froze before getting into a fighting stance.
Neji's hand went up with two fingers extended, a gesture she had seen him use during training when he identified something.
"Enemy shinobi." He announced. "Four of them. We are surrounded."
"What?!" The scroll Tenten had been working with hit the ground. Her hand went to her weapons pouch and then to the scroll at her back, the one with her combat tools, and her fingers fumbled for a half-second before finding the right grip. Her heart was going fast. She had known, in the abstract way that all genin know things before they know them in the way that matters, that this could happen on a mission. Knowing and having it happen were not the same thing at all.
Lee's head appeared above the surface of the river, just his eyes and the top of his hair. He scanned the bank without moving.
"Get behind me!" Guy-sensei covered the distance between himself and his students with the kind of speed that still occasionally surprised Tenten despite everything she had seen in six months of training with him. He had already placed himself between the team and the most likely direction of approach before she had finished processing his words.
"Reveal yourselves to the Blue Noble Beast of Konoha!"
His voice rang through the trees and over the river and presumably quite a long way beyond. The birds in the reed beds went quiet.
They revealed themselves.
The adult that came out of the trees wore dark red. She did not answer Guy's declaration. She simply came at him with her fist raised, and her fist was covered in stone.
The blow connected with enough force to push him back that his footwear carved two lines in the muddy bank before he found his footing.
He held her gaze for one moment.
An Iwagakure jonin. He turned the information over quickly: the Land of Rivers lay between the Land of Fire and the Land of Wind. Iwagakure was in the Land of Earth, which was not in either of those directions. Whatever these shinobi were doing here, they were a long way from where they were supposed to be.
Three of the enemy were genin. He could see them through the trees, moving toward his genin. Each of them his students' age, maybe a year older.
Guy settled into his stance and looked at the woman who had hit him.
"Team Guy, do not forget your training!" He shouted.
Behind him, the river churned.