pigment

iv. because some loves are slow burning, others all-consuming. still others are like fires that blaze one moment and die quietly in the next.

###

Temari doesn't ask to stay over at Neji's place for more than one night, and he doesn't offer.

Sometime after she and Neji had gotten together, she makes peace with Kankuro, who asks her to move back home. "Gaara wouldn't talk to me, he was so mad," he admits. "You're the only one he listens to."

Tenten had refused to accept payment at first. But three months' rent is no small sum, and Temari had a thing about debts — she didn't like having them.

"Don't be ridiculous," Temari snaps, taking the other girl by surprise. She clears her throat. Tenten narrows her eyes, parts her mouth to speak. "Is everything—"

Temari liked Tenten, that much is clear. She's never had a close female friend before. But some information was just too much information, close friend or not.

"Sorry. Moving back home has been rough." A lie.

Since she moved back home, her brothers have been behaving rather well — Kankuro being friendlier than usual, Gaara showing up less, but that had always been a good sign. She nearly cried though, when on her first day back Gaara visited her room. He squeezed her hand very briefly and said, almost a whisper, "Welcome home." Gaara did not like to be touched, much less touch people, even his siblings, so that tiny show of affection had taken Temari aback, about 500 km back if she were being honest, and she was almost suspicious someone had kidnapped her little brother and placed a dummy in his stead.

"Go on, sis, you can cry. I won't judge," Kankuro teased, and teasing, with Kankuro was always a good sign. "May never happen again so seize the moment, I guess."

So, a lie —

"I see," Tenten says, eyes still narrowed. She had a nasty habit of seeing right through Temari, sometimes without knowing it. Or maybe she does, and it's Temari who is late to realize she's been found out.

"Say, what's up with Hyuuga Bossypants anyway? He seems more on edge lately. You two doing alright?"

It's been less than a month since they started seeing each other...No, that's not quite the right term, Temari muses. She has never asked to stay at his place for more than one night in a row, and he has never offered. In the mornings after they talk with cadenced silences; not so much through words as the spaces between them.

She finds out his secrets and habits (in a way, habits were secrets too, when left unexplained) mostly by observation, on rare instances by slips of the tongue. They were similar in that they didn't find it necessary to disclose too much about themselves.

She does, at least, manage to learn the names of the people figuring in most of the photos on his shelf. The blonde artist, Yamanaka Ino, Temari already met. But there was another person who was often in the photos with Ino.

She looked like Neji, the same dark hair and pale eyes. Neji never did talk about his family, and she never talked about hers. She wouldn't have been surprised if he had a sister.

"Cousin," Neji corrects, when she does find the nerve to ask. By the furrow of his brows she could tell he was contemplating telling her more. He really didn't have to, if that made him so uncomfortable. "Hinata. She's two years younger than I am."

Looking at the picture on his desk — moon-faced Hinata, flanked on either side by Ino, all smiles like sunshine, and Neji, wearing his usual scowl — there's a story in there somewhere, Temari decides, perhaps.

###

Ino doesn't question her newly found closeness with her neighbor, doesn't question when he graduates from calling her "princess" to Yamanaka, and on the rarest of days, Ino.

She doesn't question when he joins her, often wordlessly, during her rooftop retreats. He doesn't talk much, especially about his private life. His work he mentions from time to time. He smokes, sometimes, but she knows self-control when she sees it.

To make the silence more comfortable (not that it was heavy to begin with) she has taken to bringing her drawing book with her during these meetings. Few words pass between them, she sketching with crayon-stained hands, he sometimes watching her, sometimes looking at something in the distance. Yet these meetings were always oddly intimate, with them speaking not through words but through silences.

For his part, Sasuke doesn't question why she gets herself crazy drunk sometimes, and who that person was with the ink-stained clothes he saw leaving her apartment one morning. She talks a lot, but not about her work — something tells him there's a story there, somewhere, but he doesn't ask. She tells stories, snippets she knows about the other tenants of the apartment, often about Guy's bizarre antics, but never about herself.

He does feel like he should question the soundness of his judgment when it comes to her. On the night he learned how well acquainted she was with his boss, he had contemplated leaving her right then and there on the rooftop, never talking to her again.

"And yet here we are," Ino says, interrupting his thoughts. A few seconds pass before he realizes she's been talking all along.

Ino narrows her eyes. "Have you been listening?"

He shrugs in response. They were past the point of pretending to care what the other thought now. Strange, he thinks, he wasn't the pretending type. But with other people at least there was a part of him that wanted to be seen as smart, as reliable, highly capable of dealing with whatever's thrown at him. And yet, with Ino — well, to put it bluntly with her he didn't really care. She was too wrapped up in her own world anyway to care if he appeared dependable or not.

Frankly, he preferred that. And if he was being more honest he'd say he saw himself in her, even if they moved in somewhat different worlds. Hers was a world of clay, and hands dirty with paint and chalk, a world of canvas suffering under the weight of its subjects, and days that bleed into one another making a face, a landscape, a shape, rise to the surface. His was a world of concrete, of formulae, measurements, buildings and their skeletons, a singular shade of blue on fine paper. Her world celebrated flaws; his relied on precision, the closest man could ever get to perfection.

And yet here we are.

He doesn't ask to be taken to that other world, and he has a feeling her own world is all she's ever known.

(Sasuke came from a little town, and city dwellers to him had always seemed to have come from another planet. The way they talked past each other, chin raised, eyes staring but not seeing. City life was much less intimidating up close, Sasuke soon found out when he moved there, and it didn't take long for him to adjust, and eventually adapt.

Happiness, or any semblance of it, was much easier to fake in the city, that paradise — or Dali-like wasteland — of shiny glass and polished metal that reflected your own face, multiplied a hundred, thousand times, the same dull expression on everyone.

Even hers, when the fading daylight's shining on it like this, her eyes two mirrors holding twin images of his face that was worn, weary, lonesome, alone.

In the city, where the high-rises look like giant coffins from afar, the spaces between people who sleep next to each other are much wider than the spaces between the skyscrapers.)

###

Sai paints over the canvas, white over black, and blue, and gold. Since seeing Ino again he's begun to use gold in everything — gold to depict sunlight, gold as glint in the eye, gold as ghost, as soul, as memory.

The galleries of the Sand siblings were, frankly, not much to his liking. The halls too far apart, the crowds too large, the walls too white they hurt his eyes. Ino had always been better at this, mingling with crowds, blending in without giving too much of herself away. She was a master at keeping people at arm's length, without pushing them away completely. She's magnetic, but only just so. People used come to warm themselves around her, like she was some fire burning low, steady and slow.

(Sai, he was no fire. On most days, he was just like the sea: quiet, calm, constant. But inspiration came like waves, his moods like storms. On days when he was a tempest, he consumed everything around him, and that was when he hated himself the most.)

What was it that really drew him to her?

It was Shin, unsurprisingly, who had brought them together.

Sai was a freshman in college, doing the art majors' first exhibition. He had asked Shin to come because he hated going to these things alone. Also he had won first prize in the painting division, and wanted to show Shin.

A few minutes in, Sai got cornered by his professors into a lengthy discussion about his next work. During this time Shin had wandered into the opposite wing of the gallery. He stopped in front of a sculpture, a clay and wire figurine of a person reclined, one hand over the heart. A ribbon for first prize was attached to the pedestal.

"Psyche," Shin reads from the title card. "It means soul, right?"

The person standing beside him turns to look at him. A girl with gleaming hair and startling blue eyes.

"Love stories involving the gods do not always end happily. Take Zeus and his many, many women. Apollo and Daphne. Orpheus, who is at least half-god himself, and his wife Eurydice. Cupid and Psyche are the exception, I think."

"What do you think the story means?" the girl asks. "The story of Cupid and Psyche?"

Shin mulls over the question for a moment, placing a hand over his chin. "I think it means — finding each other in the darkness, and coming out into the light. Love need not be afraid of illumination...or something?"

The girl says nothing to that, only looks back at the sculpture. "Well, I think the artist is sloppy," she says finally, frowning.

Shin looks at the title card again. Artist: Yamanaka Ino

"I think the artist did a pretty good job bringing Soul to life...bringing life to Soul...hmm." He smiles a little. "I'd like to meet this Yamanaka-san."

Behind them there's a shuffling. Someone clears his throat. Shin and his companion turn to look.

"Shin," Sai says, "how could you leave me with those old men again." Shin laughs. "Sorry 'bout that! You know how I feel about shoptalk."

Sai's gaze falls on the girl, who was looking at him intently. "Yamanaka-san, hello."

Ino's frown deepens. "Shimura-san," she answers, bowing slightly.

"I see you won in your department," he deadpans. "Congratulations. Seems like my brother is a fan."

Shin's face brightens. "You guys know each other? That's great, Sai."

Not really, we don't really know each other, Sai's expression seems to say. But to Shin he only says, "Let's go."

Shin bids Ino an enthusiastic farewell. Ino offers him a soft smile. Walking away, Sai sees her from the corner of his eye. She turns back to the sculpture, and is soon joined by a boy and a girl, both with pale eyes, who take her by the elbows to disappear into a crowd.

For some reason beyond him at the time, he commits the gold of her hair to memory. Beside him, Shin chuckles to himself.

"What's funny?" Sai asks.

"Oh, nothing —" though by his grin, something clearly is, "— it's just that Yamanaka-san's sculpture is Psyche. Your painting is called Memory. Soul and Memory. How interesting."

"Coincidence," Sai replies. Shin shrugs. "Perhaps. There's a story in there somewhere. I know it."

The story of soul and memory. Memory and soul. Sai paints over the canvas, white over black, and blue, and gold. Whatever happened to happy endings?

###

Sai leaves behind an empty packet of cigarettes in her living room, tucked in between the cushions of her sofa. Ino picks it up, brings it to the light. She reads the label: he's never smoked this brand before. So many things have changed, but —

What was it that really drew her to him?

His immense talent? And yet, she had always known that he was more than the sum of the images on his canvas. Or was it because he, more than anyone, knew the agony it took to make pictures come alive? Perhaps she saw something of herself in him, that part of her that hid in the shadows, a ghost, a memory, or perhaps, her soul.

(Ino had submitted a painting for the second exhibition of their freshman year. The blue ribbon tacked to the frame told her she had failed.

"Shimura again?" Sakura sighs, "Well, he's really talented, but it would be nice to see someone else win first prize for a change." She shoves into Ino's hands a flask that contained strong-smelling liquor. "Hey, you know, he's been asking about you. What do you think of that?"

Ino shrugs. "I don't know. He's kind of a prick. His brother's much nicer."

Sakura hums. "Huh, you've met his brother. I mean, I've nothing against Shimura, but you know, to me he just seems so...empty.")

Empty.

Neji had said the exact same thing. Like Sai was more drawn to Ino's art than herself, he said. A blank slate, in the worst possible way. But was it empty, really, the way Sai looked at her that night like he'd crumble if she left him completely? It seems to her that someone who was empty wouldn't be able to cry like he did, holding her so close it hurt.

They have already lost Shin, and Sai had told her she's one of the few things keeping him from following his brother to the grave. But most days it feels like she's already lost him too.

Ino almost throws away the packet but she stops herself. She puts it back on the sofa where she found it. She runs to her bedroom, grabs a canvas and some half-opened cans of paint. She runs her brush over the picture already there, white over the reds, and the purples, and the gold.

(There's time, she thinks, to rewrite endings and forge beginnings. That's the artist's job. Carve a new path when everything's a muddled mess of shadows. Art is illumination, and infinite possibilities.)

When she finishes, a different picture shows on the canvas, and the midnight moon is shining brightly above Tokyo's starless skyline. She dials Neji's number. Had it been another person, she might have thought it cruel to call at this hour. But this was Neji, and he probably just got back from the office and is getting ready to pull yet another all-nighter.

"What?" came the irritated voice from the other end of the line. But his anger had no real bite, and Ino knew better.

"Hey, can you give me Temari's number? There's something I need to talk to her about."