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Team Gai are always sent on the most dangerous missions.

They are not a team of hopeless shinobi, nor are they middle-of-the-line shinobi like Team Ten. They are instead a team of oddities.

Two are Dead-Last's, yet geniuses in their chosen field, taijutsu. One is the discarded nephew of a clan head, brilliant yet cold. One is a kunoichi with no past and no future, who fights only with weapons and never misses her target.

They are always sent on the most dangerous missions, not because they are the most skilled, but because no one will care if they don't come home.

Gai decides that his team is the best that there are. It is not a matter of question; he simply knows it to be true.

Lee and Tenten argue about what meal to get as they settle into the booth. It's their ritual; no meal would be complete without it. There is no fire in their words, no malice. They enjoy this argument as they do all their debates, and do not seem to care about all the stares they are attracting.

Neji sits beside Tenten, his chin propped on his hand, his elbow resting on the table, staring bemusedly at his two teammates. There are some nuances that Neji will simply never understand about the nature of his team's dynamics, and it shows.

Gai laughs generously and scoots in beside Lee, while surreptitiously checking to make sure that there is a definitive lack of sake in the vicinity. Lee on the drunken rampage would result in multiple fractures and exorbitant property damage, and Tsunade-sama has made it quite that she won't be paying for any of that.

They aren't the best because they are top-of-the-line shinobi. They aren't the best because of their 1-in-15 fail rate or because they have all made jonin before hitting eighteen, they're the best because they're his team.

They are his team. They were his genin so long ago, and they're still his team. If Gai had ever wanted children, he would have asked for three children like them. The four are a family, and like a family they have their ups-and-downs, their twists and turns, and like any family, they always stick together.

It is not that no one will be upset if they don't return. Because there will be people who mourn their deaths (Not many, but enough to matter).

It's that there is no one in power considers them to be anything but cannon fodder. Lee and Tenten are orphans with no family; Gai is not from a powerful clan, but just a lower-class civilian family; to Hiashi, Neji is just another caged bird—a servant to be sacrificed.

They are simply expendable.

Lee never gives up. Just as Naruto's motto is to never go back on a promise, Lee will never give up. Not even in the direst situation.

The kunai are coming closer now. He can't see them very well (the darkness obscures everything that's not within five feet, and there's blood dripping in his eyes from a thin scalp wound), but he can hear the musical whiz of the metal weapons as they com nearer and nearer, and the sound is strangely beautiful.

He doesn't know how many of the enemy there are. Again, the light is fading all around, and his view of sight grows smaller by the second.

Lee has no idea where the others were. The last time he had any sign of them was when he heard a shriek, high and furious and female, and he knows that was Tenten. He would know her battle cries anywhere.

Lee has lost a great deal of blood (though his body is too pumped with adrenaline to notice), and the trees and enemy shinobi look quite alike in the night. He blinks and shakes his head, and the trees stop moving.

Maybe the blood loss really is getting to him.

He peers in the inky black, and he discerns the bodies on the ground. Lee smiles through the sharp pain in his head and side, and staggers away, hand against the stab wound in his side, to look for his teammates and Gai-sensei.

Lee doesn't hear the faint musical sound coming up from behind.

They are humans, with beating hearts and thrumming souls. They have lives and hopes and dreams. They love and hate, bleed and cry.

But more than any other team in Konoha, they are shinobi, the tools of war.

Tenten grimaces; when she tries to move, the shuriken lodged in her stomach shift and climb further into the warm confines of her larger intestine. She wonders how it would look on the autopsy table if she was opened up and someone found a shuriken-shaped lump in her intestine.

Unlike Lee, Tenten knows when she's beat. She knows when to withdraw, when to run away, when to retreat and fight another day.

But the problem is, she's just as hotheaded as Lee. Maybe more so.

The kunai were whizzing closer and closer to her body, and she didn't care. She wasn't listening, wasn't paying attention, she didn't care, and she paid the price.

But she was just so angry.

Gai-sensei fell first. He was gasping and coughing up blood, and Tenten knew it was because of the dozen kunai dug into his back.

But Lee was the last straw. She had propped him up against a tree trunk, whispering "Don't you die on me, don't you die on me, don't you die on me," but he did, the bastard did die, with a smile on his face and a laugh in his voice, whispering, "How'd I do?"

After that, it was no use trying to pay attention to her surroundings, because the blood rushing in her ears burned away all the reason in Tenten's thin body. She fought and fought, and never realized how close the weapons were getting to her body, never noticed when they first grazed her flesh, then scoured it, then lodged in it.

She only notices when she falls to the ground because she's lost too much blood to walk.

And she knows. She knows the cold, hard truth. If we fall here, no one's going to come for us.

And like all tools, like all those who are simply unimportant in the grand scheme of things, they die.

Sometimes Neji hates having the Byakugan. It shows him things that he wishes he couldn't see, and he can't do a thing about it.

He watches as Gai-sensei falls, face down on the blood-slicked grass. He watches as Lee goes next, and Tenten tries to save him, Tenten who's strong, Tenten who's stubborn, Tenten who's perseverant. He watches as she pumps Lee's chest, makes him chew a blood-replenishing pill (and it does nothing for him, because blood-replenishing pills thin the blood, and with the wounds still opened, all it does is make the wounds gush more dark blood), performs CPR, and he watches as Lee died, and Tenten collapses to the ground, clutching her stomach and restraining half-mad howls.

Neji steps in front of her, and in a fatal moment, he meets her gaze. Neji has never hated himself quite as much as when he looks into Tenten's eyes and sees the hope shining there, because sure enough she thinks he can do something, when in all reality he can't do a thing.

But instead of trying to attack the enemy, all he does is stare at Tenten's face, because the light is going out of them and he has never seen something so mesmerizing as watching death overtake someone's face. Then reality kicks in. Tenten is dying. Tenten is dying, and he's just standing there. He's not doing a thing, he's only watching.

Through the Byakugan, he sees all the chakra flooding out of her body, and it is the most terrifying thing he's ever seen. Through the Byakugan, he sees what death looks like, sees the specter come up behind her, and take her breath away.

Neji sees what a corpse freshly hewn of life looks like with the Byakugan, and he wishes he was blind.

With the Byakugan, he sees the kunai speeding straight for him. With the Byakugan, he sees the eyes of the enemy as they stare in glee. And he doesn't move.

With the Byakugan, Neji sees death hover above him. He sees it pull it's lips back in a ghastly grin full of long, broken teeth, and he smiles back.

Team Gai don't come home one night. No one comes for them, and after a while, Konoha realizes that they aren't coming back, that they won't ever come back through those gates again, grinning and laughing. Their deaths are mourned, but they cause only a small ripple among those who know them, and within a few weeks it is as though they never existed.

Team Gai are sent on the missions that are sure to end in death, because they are expendable.

Because no one will care if they don't come back.