A/N: I'm back. For those of you who hung around because you still had hope in me to write again…thanks. You're insane, but thanks. I hope to see all my favorites again! You know who you are. Want to know where I've been? IB. Go to the poll on my profile so I can seek out you other stricken beings!
Internet praise for anyone who can tell me where my inspirations came from. One is over quite quickly, while the other one comes up throughout. And one is so dang obscure that you will not find it.
This is unbeta'd! I didn't want to bother Fallacy this late. So it's a present for her, which I'm sure she didn't expect if she's at all acquainted with my relative normalcy. Some improvising for you, dear!
Purists
Sakura and Hidan
She doesn't know why she tolerates him, honestly. When they go out to eat, it's never still and romantic. There are no clutched hands and whispered words, smirks across the table for one and one only. Only a hurried efficiency because he knows this is the only way to get her out of her clothes later. He pretends they are a normal couple on a date, and she pretends later that they are in love when he takes her selfishly against the bedroom door, leaving her unsatisfied and listless, again.
It's tedious, this game they act out. It began as a joke, an experiment, a mutual test of boundaries and lust, a taste of the forbidden, for the cliché. They couldn't help themselves; they were made irrevocably mad. Now it's old hat, but the tension is there still. Feeding on them both like parasites, choking them with wind-blown hair! But here there are no teacups in kitchens, no, no time for even a false normalcy. They're both waiting for the other to give way, to step back and say 'You know, this is crazy, but…what do we do?'
What, indeed? What are the lines, where is the exit? She feels like an amateur actress who remembers her part on the tip of her tongue, but when she opens her mouth, an encompassing silence stretches out, farther and further than she could ever reach with her mind alone. She has seen this play a million times, worn it like a skin for even longer, and yet each time she approaches the stage her legs give way and she falls into the arms of a much more accomplished actor, who knows the dance even less than she but improvises like the truest of thespians.
How many times has she spun a coin, telling herself that if it lands on tails she will end it? The cool, unforgiving metal betrays her every time. Heads, heads, heads, heads, heads. One right after the other.
Sometimes she shuts her windows at night and spins the coin so many times that all's left is a silver blur flashing up and down, flaunting the laws of natural probability to her tear-saturated eyes. It should not surprise her; there is an equal chance of it going both ways, and yet the tension kills her. She doesn't know what to say, what to do. And yet—!
She has now spun the coin eight hundred ninety-two times.
Her friends know their lines. Their stories have been written out and carefully memorized, muttered in a monotone while staring at the heavy stage curtain inches in front of their noses. Where are her scripts? She has misplaced them. He took them all away when she caught the first glint of silver hair and that dreadful, knowing smirk. He made her forget her entire future for his own pleasure, and she can never forgive him that.
Where will she go now? She has nowhere to go, nowhere to be, without him. He is a part of her act now, and she has no other choice but to watch him for her cue. She is back to the beginning, when she wrung her hands fearfully without a clue of what to do next, waiting for someone with blessed experience to fly out of the wings and save her. But he's not Ino, coming to rescue her social dignity with ribbons and sass, he's something much more dangerous. Unpredictable.
Eight hundred ninety-three. Heads.
A/N: So? How's that for a return?