dedication: to Rhea.
disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.
.
"'Mythology' is what we call someone else's religion." - Joseph Campbell
.
The Gardener crumples with the budding of frost and blooms with the newly sloshing mud. Sasuke doesn't know her name, but he knows she lives and dies young again and again.
For time immemorial, she has kept to the far side of Sasuke's family's island, never venturing beyond the pond where she gets her water. It is a ten mile trek over semi-paved roads and every year he decides it's too much work, but every year, he finds himself biking over to her holding.
His brother and cousins don't understand his fascination, how he can give up their wanderings and wars in the forest around the clan buildings, but his elders and parents do. His uncle and his father - even his stern great-uncle - have told him stories of their own visits as boys, sighing over the Gardener's beauty and charm just as much as the magic. They remember running north along the coastline, cutting across a field with a severe nettle infestation, and around the furthest copse of trees to find her blushing garden.
It is a dream. Wild yellow daisies crop up in bunches among all sun hues, dismissive of the color scheme the gardener had cultivated with care, but he never sees the Gardener pluck them.
"They have a will to live," she told him after he didn't ask for the fourth year in a row. It was so early in the spring that there was more mud than dirt and she was younger than him. Too small to carry the aluminum watering pail, she toted around a small can and step ladder to reach the hanging plants. "Who am I to dictate its fate? I cultivate what spring brings - though," she looked around, "I obviously have some preferences."
It is mid-summer now when Sasuke props his chin on the end of a shovel and watches a young woman his age haul a can over to his area. He can feel a smudge of dirt on his cheek and see it a little peripherally, but his gardening gloves aren't particularly clean either. His lazy gaze flick toward the flowers on the far curve of the garden. They run the entire gamut of pink, from a deep primrose to soft summer coral, but none match her hair.
"Something is bothering you," the Gardener says. She doesn't look at him, too busy inspecting the pattern on a tulip. Most of her face is hidden by her wide-brimmed hat, anyway. "Spit it out before the flowers lose a year of growth."
Wiping the back of the glove against his forehead, Sasuke climbs into the flowerbed to pat down the dirt around the orchids he'd just planted under a young pine. "Shisui says you're not real, just a figment of my imagination. A dream."
"To be a god, Sasuke-kun, is to be someone else's mythology," she says, moving to water the corner crocuses.
Sasuke rests on one knee and looks at her. "Doesn't it bother you?"
Breaths coming in huffs, she clutches the large can to her chest and stumbles over to him. Plopping down on the wooden border, she pushes back the brim over her face and pokes his shoulder. "Well, for one, I've never met your Shisui. Whether his opinion is worthy or not - eh. I don't know. I do know that I am who I am whether he believes in me or not. I do not require his hands or his favors or fealty. I am the dream of humans that believe the world needs my care to grow, to renew."
After a few minutes, she looks at him over her shoulder, sighing loud when the straw brim falls in her face and holds it up with her forearm. Her eyes are brighter in the shade, two points of growing green. "Do you see me and speak to me and find what I touch, Sasuke-kun?"
He nods, eyes fixed on her work-streaked face.
She beams slow; her joy, like everything else about her, blooms. "Then I am real."
The Gardener tips her head back with a little hum, toes wiggling and digging into the dirt on the next bed over. Sasuke almost swears her pale skin is aglow as she soaks up the day's heat and light.
He, in turn, yawns and rests back on his elbows, his cap tipped over his eyes. "If you are the product of human dreams, what do you dream?"
She doesn't answer. Slowly and potently sun-drunk, she relaxes and slumps until her head rests against his knee, hat squeezed between them.
"I would ask you to forgive me for seeming a poor creation god for dying and dying, but you know, I live and live, too," she says sleepily instead. "To me, death only means more life. I do not need forgiveness for that."
Looking up, she sighs to see Sasuke is already in dreams, fingers curled around her hair as soft as petals. She closes her eyes before she can know, concrete and for certain, he grows only older and older. How many loves has she seen grow older only to grow away? Grow only to find a woman that would only ever grow forward? Grow taller and taller until they begin to stoop?
Every one.
She never sees them die, just grow away from her.
What do gods dream of?
She dreams of a world where time stops.
In this way, in between rows of orchids and beneath an evergreen youth, a goddess and her consort doze.