Virtue (Temari, Hinata, Sakura, Ino, Tenten) SLOW UPDATES

Heaven - Heaven 2

PART ONE: TENTEN

HEAVEN - HEAVEN

CHAPTER TWO

Since the people she asked would not lend her traps either because she was a foreigner or because they was using it or even because she simply was a woman, Tenten chose to make her own bird traps to catch partridges and she stuck to fishes.

Within just one week of moving to Konoha, more than five men had made a pass on her and despite how much she rejected them, they still came. Men. They all believed that what widows needed was companionship to replace their lost husbands and boasted of their riches to lure unsuspecting widows in and use keep them as housewives.

Not that widows didn't need companionship, some even wanted to be housewives, but Tenten had never been a normal woman, not even in her adolescent age. She never played house with other girls, never tried to learn how to sew dresses, was never interested in boys until Lee won her over, and definitely not interested in being a living ornament.

Aside from meat and fish, Tenten and Anko needed wheat and other nutritional supplements but there was simply not enough money to buy anything yet. There was a very large farm on the way to her and Anko's cottage  that caught Tenten's attention. There was simply no end to the vast field of grains and fruit orchards, a perfect place for Tenten to work at– that is if she was hired.

"Ne Mirai," the woman called on to Kurenai's daughter one day. It seemed that Asuma and Kurenai had conception delay for years until Mirai finally came along because the girl was far younger than Tenten and her parents were Anko's age mates. Mirai looked nothing like her mother save for their similar garnet eyes, every feature she possessed was inherited from her father, even his unruly hair. Her and Tenten became fast friends despite the age gap between them; it was like having a younger sister from another mother.

The younger one was making delivery rounds of clothes for children for her mother when she met Tenten who was coming back from fishing on the way. They chose to walk together since neither had no other place to go. "Who do you think I can talk to if I want to work on that farm?" She gestured to the vast field with her head.

"Eeh?!" Mirai was genuinely surprised that Tenten would want to work manual labour but she comported herself enough to answer the question asked. "The chances that you would get hired are small for that field belongs to Hyuga-sama, the wealthiest merchant in the Kingdom."

Mirai added the last part of her sentence purely because she figured that Tenten was oblivious to the most obvious things (especially if she didn't know Hyuga-sama's landmark), and she was right. Tenten was quiet for most of the journey home until Mirai spoke again, breaking the tranquility of the moment.

"You are planning on going there either way, are you not?"

"You are in fact correct." Tenten laughed at Mirai's astounded face. "What? Do you suppose I can not handle a bit of manual labour?" She asked the young girl through fits of giggles.

"Well yes...and besides it is not something a woman would want to do...but coming from you, it is not unconventional." Mirai replied with a sheepish chuckle of her own. In truth, Tenten was the kind of woman Mirai looked up to. The young girl wanted to take over her father's carpentry business one day but she had faced many scornful sneers for even dreaming about it.

There was no way a girl's furniture would be as good as a man's, they would say, and even if Asuma, her father, encouraged her not to mind what others said about her aspirations by teaching her basic things about the occupation, the words still got to Mirai and she decided to learn dress making instead.