Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.
Pairing: Temari/Anko, Anko/Temari (wut?) Temari/...Sakura? (kill me if you please)
Summary :A bloody-haired vixen. (Temari ponders her insolence, and the woman that is Anko, while eating dango and staying for the Chuunin exams.)
- - - -
Or shall I bring you the sound of poisons?
This is rain now, this big hush.
And this is the fruit of it: tin-white, like arsenic. -Sylvia Plath, Elm
- - - -
.I must shriek
The town is bitter and burned with a dilapidated home-sense, something that tells her both that she does not belong and to never come back, and she steps right into it-, squat in the middle, and following the great tug the very earth seems to have on her to a tea shop across the street. It seats her down in one of the chairs.
Temari thinks for a moment that Konoha belongs to it's people, just opposite from how Suna owns it's own-, somehow this is what makes Konohagakure seem weak, weathered, like great clapping hands of thunder have beat it back down under the surface, trying to discover it's own roots, lost and gone and buried deep beneath the clouded muck flooring, which is different from the clean grains of sand. Sand will stick to your toes and crawl beneath your skin-, but that is only another part of the great control Suna has over it's citizens; there is little else to look forward to, and it fills their sandals with small, insignificant hindrances, which prevent them from the time it takes to doubt.
Konoha has too much doubt that it feels like it is grasping onto all of her fine cooked little hairs of scheduling and plans and carefully plotted maps and ripping them out.
There is a vulgar, tom-boyish woman with brittle hair and badly kept everything sitting a little ways away from her, and despite the descriptive words, Temari can see how they are alike. Later she will ask, and the woman's name is Anko-, Temari sits perfectly still like a cat hiding from its masters and watches her eat dango with a violent mouth, tearing through the plate (until it shatters-, fine little glass-porcelain-china pieces all in crumbles, like a broken ballerina jewelry box, the ones that sang you to sleep for six years).
- - - -
.and no one will hear you scream
The room Temari is staying at is clean but empty. It is reminiscent of its city-, bleak and efficient, and therefore she cannot complain. If Kankuro were here, he might have, and had it been Gaara, he would not have been in the hotel, and instead in something neat and complex, something that matched with the unchangeable interest of his character.
Temari is not the middle child, nor the youngest, but she is disappearing more than the other two.
It's not as if she was weaker, or the least favorite of her siblings, but as with sand, she has learned that it is sometimes better to disappear. After all, it is less likely to find a man in a crowd than it is to find him in a secluded area-, Temari lives her life like a ninja even outside of the times when it is needed, and that is what makes her want to fade.
The lights flicker out like candles with a gust of wind, and it takes a few moments for it to register that her fingers are on the light switch, and she is turning them off. Her hands are invisible on the wall, even not in the dark, and by the time it is just thick, palpable blackness, she can't feel herself.
- - - -
.I sighed...but you swooned
Konoha holds a delightedness at standing still and jumping out at you. Temari has jumped inside her skin, as suddenly there are things she did not notice, even as her eyes swam out over the mass of buildings and people, drinking it in like a thirsty man until she drowned.
It is when she gives a slightly visible tremble as an old woman limps out across the street that Shikamaru is quietly behind her, hand snatching her elbow and turning her around, and still managing to be lazy during it. "Oh, it's you," she says, even if they both know it's just because she's running out of words (indeed, like a man out of thirst, you have drank yourself dry-, every speck of blood, every mouthful of saliva, every finger drop of tears, has somehow been digested, and now you are just dyingly hungry elsewhere, in every spot you've gnawed to soothe).
"I'm your escort." Shikamaru responds, as if everything is solved simply by it (you are certain he would like to be-, he is three times as lazy as you, so how tired would that make him?).
"Ahh." Temari makes a noncommital sound with it in the back of her throat, a not-quite reply, a something that doesn't connect her to anything, and she is almost in love with all the hollowness she hated just a day before, all that empty expanse of space. Her air is clean-, it makes it easier to speak.
"Show me a teahouse. Then show me the academy. Then show me the hospital." she says in a demanding voice, gruff with something that states it is inarguable. Shikamaru mutters something about how yes, she probably should know where the hospital is, because troublesome women like her would do things that they'd need to know it's location for, and just like knowing where everything is because they're micro managing like that.
It's with a fond light he grumbles about it, but she frowns.
- - - -
.rain falls quickly wetting my hair
The next time she sees the woman from the tea shop, is when she is grocery shopping to a minimum that is almost pitiful-, in Konoha, she has to eat to sustain herself, but the unfamiliarity swarms in her belly and makes it uncomfortable.
There is some fruit she does not know (the city is so vastly different from Suna-, in the wind, the fire, the smoldering ashes from jutsus swimming freely through the air, and even the foods are unexplainably odd; they look very nearly inedible) in her hand, so ripe that if she squeezed it, the skin would burst and the juices would come out over her fingers like a volcano erupting-, something slicker, wetter than that, though, and filled with a piteous demise and anti-climactic sense; ocean waves washing over her toes, or something similar.
Ninjas don't find a need in talking to strangers, or even associates-, Temari feels for a moment that she will be left there alone in the corner of the stall, too-ripe fruit sitting small and unimportant on her palm, feeling like a tiny fetus, all dead-weight and petrified lack of experience or sophistication. Instead, Anko, ever disregarding of the rules (whether unspoken or hanging in the air like their loose strands of hair falling out from where they are similarly pulled back-, there is a certain fineness in it), comes over with a walk that is almost a strut, mingled between stride and lanky, loose transport.
Her shoes come up almost to tips of Temari's own, and it seems as though Anko will continue walking, right straight through Temari's body, unaware of the limits of solidity, disregarding them and bending them back for her. She stops and her eyes are judging before she asks who she is, and why she has a rotten fruit in her hand.
- - - -
.and clothes
Anko asks her to go for tea and dango not a few days later, and Temari nods, liking the feel of Anko's breath on her face (it swirls down to her bones-, forbidden and lost and undescribable, like stirring flavoring into a glass of milk; down, down, down, and though it's direction is to the bottom, it merely mixes itself in to the liquid, thrives in it's conflictions, and its downwards spirals to the very most), and the woman being near her. Temari thinks Anko probably eats dango every day-, but it is almost a relieving thought, because if she ever needed her (what is the difference between want and need? If she truly wants Anko's company, it will no longer be a want, but a need), that is where she could find her.
Temari ponders her insolence, and how much of this woman is fake-, frankly, it doesn't matter. For those small moments, she is caught in the eye of the storm-, not content, never content, but willful to pause.
In silence, it is easier to digest the frames of her fault. The wrong steps of her past are merely swallowed, floating towards the pit of her stomach, and though they will one day wash up in bile through the back of her throat, for now they are at rest, the ever chattery graves (that is why it is a relief to hear them silenced-, the sounds of it, which are more like ear plugs, shine everything else in a brighter, easier light).
"You're persistent for your dango," Temari comments, watching the older woman shove her way through the streets, like a hungry dog (that is, also, what she reminds you of-, her summons, her skills of jutsu, those are all merely the programmed results that someone has taught her-, similarly, ironically, Anko is the human sharingan, and is typed up in a neat little package, because she is a possession, and that's all she will be, like most of you).
Anko grins back at her, a wry, toothy form of a smile, whereas nothing else would any longer be suiting. The hidden message is there, the unspoken words, which admit that, moreover, she is persistent in her habits. The moment she proclaimed that dango was her favorite food, or the first few days after beginning to continually just eat the same meal, were the times she was caught into the never ending cycle of tediousness and scheduling. It is what they call persistency, all the same.
Temari is the woman who wears the same clothes and ties her drawstrings in the same level of tightness as they had been for years and years, but she does not cling to habit as much as she clings to sternness. The same frown is on the same stern man, because he is solid, and not because he is unsure-, the lines are blurred and the edges sanded down until the point, like Anko, was worn into rounded, blunt corners that held no bite or no hurt.
(Anko barks but does not bite, and you are the one who is sound is your convictions. Your mother, and then your uncle, and then the people who came after them all told you that it is better to be comfortable than glamorous or edgy or genius. In that way, you win, but Anko is, in the same way her mood is wishy-washy, also a donkey, and in that she is stubborn, and can not be put down with the firm hand of your body.)
"Dumplings before flowers, uh?" Anko asks rhetorically, winking with a childishness that is mistaken for what frightens people about her-, she is a child in a woman's shapely body, and as her breasts cannot be ignored neither can her immaturity, so she covers herself with heavy jackets and vulgar speech. She is, if anything, confusing-, but not frightening, at least not to the people who understand her.
Temari nods thickly, and watches Anko take a rabid bite out of her dango with a deep noise in the back of her throat that is almost a snarl (it's fascinating, watching animals eat).
She gets the feeling that they both are only eating for the sake of not letting the other take off their own plate. They lost their appetites days and days before.
- - - -
.slowly exploring the room where you sleep
Soon after, Temari finds herself comforted by waking late in the morning and dawdling until she can go meet Anko in the little tea shop that they each find themselves in. It is not, she convinces herself, because she is like the woman and has to have persistency and scheduling. She is a solid woman and needs solidity, and is not melting around the edges and grasping onto the last strands of straw left on the mucky floor.
She is a jounin now, and has therefore melded into all the other jounins. At least when she was a genin, there was mockery to her, and weakness, and things like rank that would draw attention to her-, her unnerving need to get better, that was also there, but now she is as good as she can be and she allows herself to fall back into a steady rhythm, like waves in the ocean (she is not a fish, or a mermaid. She is the little shark that couldthatcould, and she will. She is the whale that breaches the water, and sprays the surrounding water with it, all that she has taken in. She is the dolphin who does tricks for food and out of only pure necessity, because she won't allow herself to sink so low.).
There is no reason, at all, that Anko should find her something different from the other women, or the other men. In a way, the villages separate people into four categories: Genin, Chuunin, Jounin, and above. Everyone else is nothing, and even inside their categories they are nothing. It is only the vast expanse of the city, and it's workers who are, in the end, counted as one, which thrive only to let it thrive, and to be trained to clear away the things that distract it from doing so with a hand that brushes them away like spider webs in the corner of a room.
Temari imagines that Anko merely picked her out out of pure chance, and that is comforting too, as much as it is disettling. There is nothing to say that men who stand out are killed straight off.
(That is why Sasuke is lost in the pits of Orochimaru, and that Naruto-boy is in a place far away from his hometown, and Sakura is inside the hospital, in another white gown, and another white face, with her differences being painted away with the big, ugly streaks of insanity. It is why Kiba is not to be seen, in a house that is not seen, and Shino is unheard of, and Hinata has shrank back into herself (or more likely been pushed). They are all like hernias, with the intestines oozing out, and they are plopped back in and sewn straight up in neat, even little lines. Soon the scar fades and the remnants of any of them at all are lost behind mounds of tissue, and what they fought for. Madness is always there, a possibility, creeping in the dark, like a bug-, it is the needle and the gentle hand that guides them back into their places, digs them a grave. Soon, they will stop writing the names on the memorials, and there will only be nothing, which takes up a surprising amount of space. If you are nothing, there is never any room for anything else.)
She would like to know, anyway, that there is more between them than dango. That there is flowers, even if things are always put before them.
- - - -
.am I the reason you breathe?
Temari buys a bouquet of freshly cut flowers and places them in a vase on her bedside table. They stand there until they wilt, and then they slump, and she keeps them there until they crumble beneath her fingers into brown, brittle pieces on the wood surface.
- - - -
.tell me what will I find?
People who have a liquid grace have no solidity-, that is what Temari thinks, as she watches Anko walk meaningfully across the carpet in the room, with a purpose. There are also people like her who are simply hard built stone, and solidity is everything and all they know.
Temari's eyes are wet and big like a puppy's, and she imagines that if water is what she is looking through, Anko can become a little bit more like a softer person, a graceful thing, made of lace and rivers and the creatures of the ocean. Instead, Anko continues traveling steadily (like a bug-, inch by inch, creeping into Temari's shoe, until she is smushed beneath her toes, like sand; except there is no hindrance, because Anko is too hard a person to be one. Hindrances are for the weak-, that is why Suna is underrated and pushed aside, like yesterday's garbage at a restaurant no one likes) across the floor, and presses her lips to Temari's, no room for disagreeance.
And then Anko would claim 'it's not rape, it's sex you didn't know you wanted', and laugh all the way home, and then back again, for another round. Instead Temari agrees without speaking, and pushes back.
There are places Anko explores on her body that her watery eyes could never see-, so she cranes her neck and watches the scruffy ponytail go back and forth and side to side, something that expresses exactly the moment and the woman Anko is.
- - - -
.I'll dress like your niece
Yamanka Ino is like a bird plucked from the stem of one of the twigs of it's nest. She has quick eyes and small hands and shallow moods that flap here and there like wings, hitting them in the face.
Her family's flower shop has one too many of every kind of flower, and Temari thinks that the whole space will simply erupt and then fall over onto it's side, bringing all of them down to the ground-, but it's neatly designed, and everything has a designated place in their household. It's extremely different from Temari's own house, and that is the first thing she notices.
"Temari-san? You're here for the Chuunin exam, aren't you?" Ino asks, fingering a chainlink bracelet on one of her thin, unnatural wrists. Temari nods curtly, briskly, and asks about flowers.
- - - -
.and wash your swollen feet
Temari cannot see an injustice in solitude. Most times, she likes to be alone. In depth, there is peacefulness and a beauty to loneliness, and deeper still, people like her youngest brother or Uzumaki Naruto who cannot stand being lonely have covered their inability to adjust with strength in power and control, even lacking the power and control to make themselves stop what they have been doing. That is why, for most of her life, she hated Gaara, and that is why, until now, she hates Naruto.
Even with her brother's (who she is just coming to love, like a flower becoming adjusted to bloom-, one does not merely stretch out it's petals and bask in the sun, without risking sunburn) appraised speeches about Naruto, Temari never cared for him at all. And here she learns that he has left a little over a year ago with only one companion, who supposedly drinks and enjoys his own appreciation of solitude, and would therefore leave Naruto alone-, it is the greatest fear for someone like him, and Temari supposes that the small sprig of that selfish dependancy has fainted and ran unconscious under the cold water of misery like limbs being numb under ice.
That is just the way life goes-, Sakura's sad eyes disguised by the blaring white of her nurse uniform show a bleary, weary acceptance, a carriage rattling down the rocky trails of a mountainside.
Out of all of Team Seven, Sakura, the girl, knows suffering the most. She has watched others suffer and not been able to suffer with them, and she has watched the misery that had evaded her go into unacceptance which turned into outright denial and lead to insanity, and then she took the leftovers of that suffering and dipped it on her fingers and smeared it over her cheeks in war paint.
This is not an uncommon process, but Sakura makes it look beautiful. The girl is spring tulips in a southern wind, soft but not fragile-, Temari listens to her ask mindless questions that still retain meaning, and speak about memories almost forgotten but dug up with her long fingers curled around a doctor's stethoscope and all that knowledge, and wants to pluck her from her stem and mail her to herself.
There are flowers in other places, just ones with stronger roots than she can pull.
- - - -
.just don't leave, don't leave
Before the day is up, Temari purchases a bundle of tulips and follows Sakura home.
- - - -
Feedback is mucho appreciated.
- - - -
Listening to my dad play the History Channel upstairs, watching the bags under my eyes get deeper, a constant thing. Finally finished this-, some spots were easier to write than others, some came out like water and some were forced from the keyboard like pulling chunks of wood from my fingers. It was not an easy thing. You can probably see which places are which, but that's okay too. I'm just glad to see this thing over, and extra glad (and pleasantly surprised) to see a feeling of satisfaction with this one-, a rare feat. In fact, it's almost never there. God prevent satisfaction from a thing that isn't crack.
Inspirational habba jabba includes but is not limited to: Tip Taps Tip by HALICALI, Days by FLOW, Aozora no Namida by Hitomi Takahashi, What I've Done by Linkin Park, an assortment of Radiohead and Rufus Wainwright, and Saliva and also Shine by Collective Soul. But mostly 'Sweet Tangerine', 'Wine Red' (by The Hush Sound), and 'Home' (by Great Northern).
You're a god if you can figure out what those things in italics are. Many are from the songs listed above, some from Radiohead (most prominently, 'True Love Waits', ironically enough, because I never imagine Temari and Anko to have love at all, or even profound attraction-, this story was simply sex to me, and therefore the lacking of clear 'seme' 'uke' roles-, they're both semes, and they just happened to get tangled into my wild schemes. Temari'd even seme Shikamaru. The only person who'd seme their asses is Ibiki, and I cannot be convinced otherwise, unless you're freakishly manipulative.), and the first (.I must shriek, accordingly) from Sylvia Plath's 'Elm', which is also, as said, the stanza of the start. 'Tis all.
I was writing the ending sentence, 'lalala tulips, Sakura, so clever', and originally thought that Temari would leave the flowers on Anko's doorstep. You know, as a meaningful sign. I even THOUGHT I wrote it down in there. But then I turned back to reread it, and what a wonderful sentence I had made, except to find that no, indeed Anko was missing. But I liked the sentence and so therefore kept it, and Temari is now chasing after Sakura. Wasn't THAT a plot twist. It certainly was for me. Picture a twelve year old girl that I am, still alive, getting her brains wrenched out through her nose, ancient Egyptian style. But hypothetically of course. Of course.
Was the Temari/Sakura planned? Not at all. Was it oddly choppy because it was so unexpected? Of course. The leaving Anko flowers on her doorstep was actually being planned since almost the beginning. Leave it to me to leave out the plot devices-, but then again, it works out in the end, because in a way the 'meaningful flowers' business is still there: Temari found a new person who appreciates flowers (you know, I should've put Ino in there ;D), and by god she PUTS those flowers that she's wanted for so long in front of them. Sakura doesn't just appreciate flowers-, she's named after them.
It's clear I know nothing about Japanese flower meanings/decorating/piecing together in those pretty little displays you see. I'm sadly chock full of Western Culture-, but that doesn't mean I can't use 'Hana Yori Dango' basis, right:D I researched Japanese flower arranging and arts for many nights, on numerous websites, and found flower meanings, but have yet to memorize but a few, and probably never will. -, Besides the fact, I couldn't put together flowers that didn't look good together, right? ...That's my Western Culture kicking in. So I didn't try and said 'I'll put in my own WRITING STYLE/comparison meanings'...and THAT'S where you get Sakura being a tulip. You know, Sasuke's a cupcake, Naruto's a crazy, pie-shaped mud art, and Sakura's a tulip.
The author's note honestly was not meant to be this long.