I really hope you've liked it so far. Thank you to all who reviewed, I really appreciate it! I don't own neither these characters nor places, they belong to Kishimoto-san in his awesome manga Naruto which I do not own. Please reveiw!
On to the story...
After Temari had come home from her mission to Konoha—a simple C-rank—she had become more distant than she had been ever before. Kankurou had told Gaara that she might be more attached to Suna if she had paid a visit to her sweetheart's homeland.
And heck was Kankurou wrong. What had led him to believe anything that his older brother said? In fact, Kankurou might have been squished into billions of pieces by crushing sand, but Gaara thought better of it. Maybe Gaara had trusted him because he was hoping for some miracle that the wound to Temari's heart might patch up maybe a little if some solution were found. They were both just beginning to realize that this was way beyond the norm. They still wanted to believe that there was something that could be done about it.
Temari spent most of her time shut up in her quarters, seclusion not helping the situation, yet it was better than being with other people. She never did anything; 'something' seemed quite pointless. There was no meaning for her existence, so why should she try and give her life a meaning? Shikamaru had been her life before, yet, he was gone. What was left?
Gaara couldn't take it anymore; he was running a shinobi village and trying to find a cure for grief. Neither of which were very easy. While the direction of a shinobi village was manageable, the resolution for grief would be impossible.
Temari just lay on her bed, watching the sunrise and fall—painfully slowly—each day. She hardly left the room anymore, keeping to herself and wondering if the next day would get any better…any less painful.
But each day Temari's condition worsened and everyone realized what a big mistake it was to hope for miracles. Because, here in Suna, there weren't any.