It started with a kiss.
Another day of his name constantly dripping, seeping, oozing from their mouths and I'm just about ready to go insane.
Another day of his holier-than-thou personality, stupid smirk, and antagonizing eyes.
Another day of insults and being told I'm inferior.
And maybe, just maybe, I'm already insane because I'm closer to him than I'm sure anybody has gotten, but I still can't see it. I can't see what makes him so attractive, so special, so amazing.
As far as I can see, there's nothing.
And suddenly, I'm closer to him than I know anyone has gotten—lips touching and eyes wide and now I also know I'm definitely insane, because as we both dart away from each other spouting curses and spitting, I think I'm beginning to understand what his appeal is.
It ended with a kiss.
Things are going wrong. So, so wrong, so, so fast. I never knew anything could go so wrong so fast.
It's inexorable. I feel like I'm trying to stop a raging fire that's already destroyed too much to merely be a simple fire. This blaze, this inferno. I can't stop it, no matter how hard I try.
And that scares me. It scares me more than anything I've ever feared, more than bloodthirsty jonin and s-ranked nukenin.
It's speeding up, gaining momentum, careening out of control and consuming more and more with every second and still—
I can't stop it. He's adding fuel to this fire, and I can't understand why. He's embracing this fire, and I can't understand why he won't come back. Why won't he listen? Why won't he understand? Why won't he stay?—and I'm shouting at him, reaching for him—
But now he's gone.
It was us.
If I had to say it in simple cliché terms, I would say he was—is—darkness, and I'm light. But maybe I'm biased, although I'm sure he knows what he's getting himself into. I'm sure he knows he's diving headfirst into darkness.
But if I'm going to say what I truly think of it, it'd have to be that neither of us was light, and neither of us was darkness. It's all a grayscale, a gray blur and I don't know what to do with this new medium to my previous black and white world.
Because before him it was always black or always white. Everything had its own category where it stayed and never strayed.
It was all so simple, and all the questions I could ever think of always had an easy solution. But then he came in, and I can't fit him into either side. I knew from the first moment I saw him that he could never be placed squarely in light. It was so easy then to just pretend that he was the purest form of darkness.
But over time I learned, albeit stubbornly that some things just aren't that simple, least of all him. We're not all black and white; we're mixed shades of gray—
And that's just the beginning.