Hmmmm...
I have a feeling that this will eventually end up as a three-shot, with the Sand Siblings going in chronological order. Which means Kankurou will be next. Now that I've watched Shippuuden again, I have a new fondness for Kankurou. And I really wanted to see Konohamaru's butt kicked (frankly). He was really rude about Sakura. -_-
iStat:
Chapter Title: N/A
Chapter Word Count: 994 (or thereabouts)
Chapter Rating: PG. Sort of. Maybe PG-13.
I was experimenting with style. And character. And stuffs.
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto. If I did, Konan would be the main character.
black cat
by shu of the wind
Because fairy tales aren't a part of us.
1. Blonde
When she is small, and Gaara hasn't yet been born, her hair is much lighter. Instead of golden-blonde, which was always the hair color of the heroine, it is shockingly white, enough to make her father ruffle it and tease her for being a ghost. He never frowns now, and there isn't the hardness in his eyes that she always remembers later. Or rather, it is there, but she is two and doesn't see it.
She only learns later that the heroine's hair is always a sheet of pure gold, because when she is small and Gaara hasn't yet been born, her mother changes it. Over and over again.
Long ago, Temari, long, long ago, there was a girl with hair the same color as bright sunlight, and she was the hero of her village.
But mama, she's always that way.
Do you want her to be different?
...No.
When she starts to get older and realizes that her mother has lied, she can't work up the strength to be angry with her. Because by then her mama is dead, and Kankurou is wetting the bed at night, and that thing is in the guest-house and it screams and it kills and it screams.
2. Alternatives
She decides to become a shinobi when she turns five and it's been a year since Karura's death (murder) by the monster (her brother).
Karura had been a jounin before she married the Kazekage and pulled Temari into her lap for fairy tales. It is never talked about.
In Suna, a kunoichi is an aberration. They are not supposed to exist. Women live for children. (She doesn't like them.) They do not slit the throats of their enemies in the dark after a seduction. (Only once, and she hated his hands and his mouth every second he was near her.) They do not fight boy-men who hide in the shadows and nearly win. (She would have if she hadn't been fighting fair.) They don't kill. (She does.) And they know how to cook. (Kankurou is her housewife. They laugh about it after he makes something they'll all like.)
Kunoichi are wrong because the desert leaves no breathing room for them.
It has no room for monsters either. But the red one lives anyway.
3. Traditions
On her mother's death day (January nineteenth, Gaara's birthday, the one they missed last year and the year before and the year before because it is always remembered as Karura's Deathday and never Gaara's Birthday) Temari goes up into the attic and unlocks the trunk that has been hidden in the corner for almost fifteen years. She is a jounin now, the first jounin kunoichi in Suna in almost nineteen years - because it's my fault Mom quit - and she finally feels she has the right to open it.
There isn't much left. Her father ruined or hid most of it. There is a photograph of an academy graduation, and she can pick out her mother's eyes in the crowd of grinning twelve-year-olds. Her father is there too. She sees him and her heart skips. Then she chastises herself because there is no reason to be scared, because he never touched her or Kankurou or even Gaara, at least not himself. And then she remembers Yashamaru and she feels sick to her stomach, and looks away from the photograph.
There is a small knife taped to the side of the trunk, emblazoned with her mother's crest, a hawk, and she sheathes it and slips it into her obi. She carries it with her down the stairs with a photo album, which she and Kankurou pour over and Gaara observes quietly from the other side of the table. No one comments on the fact that there is no redhead in this family album.
Over dinner she gives Gaara a new album, one of photographs she has taken secretly (maybe not so secretly, judging by the look on Kankurou's face) and her favorite is the last one, where her arms are around both of her boys in front of Gaara's old house where he had been confined. It is old and derelict now. She thinks it is a sign.
4. Old
In the fairy tales it's always the eldest who fails first. It's the eldest who's always in the way. On their first mission after the chuunin exams and she gets caught by a Oto nin who has his arm around her throat and a kunai slipping into the skin on the top of her spine, she remembers this and almost cries.
In the fairy tales it's the middle child who is the stupidest, who goes down the wrong path even after hearing about the fate of the eldest, and that's what scares her because Kankurou only decides to become a shinobi after hearing about her own plans at five years old, and she prays-hopes-begs that following her won't lead to his death.
In the fairy tales it's always the youngest who is the most cunning, the one who always succeeds, and in some ways that's right. But it's also Gaara who stumbles the most, Gaara who falls the most, Gaara who lost everything, Gaara who destroyed everything, Gaara who clings so hard to an idea that might ruin them all, Gaara who's lonely, and at night she curls around her pillow and tries not to see the shadow dappling the rooftop across from their house, because even after everything she doesn't really know how to talk to him and it hurts, because I am the eldest and I should take care of them.
But in the fairy tales, the heroine always has a sheet of golden hair, and now that she's older her hair almost fits that mold. Almost, but not quite.
She likes the almost-but-not-quite-ness of it, because it means that her mother could be wrong.
Because it means she has no more reason to believe in fairy tales.