TenSquared Community: April Challenge ("fool me once..."). "Three years. The dream lasted for three blissful years. 'I can live without him.' She's lying to the world. She doesn't fool anybody but herself."


Only Sun and Rain


Could she call, there were never a rose to reply.
Over the meadows that blossom and wither
Rings but the note of a sea-bird's song;
Only the sun and the rain come hither
All year long.
--Algernon Charles Swinburne, "A Forsaken Garden"


o.

Ansatsu Senjutsu Tokushu Butai.

ANBU.

The mask is cold white porcelain in her hands. She can only feel the cold because she hasn't put on her gloves yet.

She's not sure she'll put on her gloves at all, today. Or the mask.

She doesn't want to.

It just isn't the same without him in her squad.


i.

Their old training ground is nothing more than a hill, a stream, and grass. The grass is dry with August heat. Not a single footprint or training trail remains. Even the paths that Lee stomped into the training grounds have vanished.

Green has invaded.

Everywhere Tenten looks, she sees reminders of just how empty the damn place is. There should be a muddy bare patch in that valley between the hill and the stream. But it's gone. Now it's a bunch of tall, dry stream-side grass and wild onions.

She knows exactly where it used to be, of course. Knows exactly what shape it was (it was an oval), exactly how big it was, exactly how wide it was. She traces its former boundaries with her footsteps.

It seems so small, now that she's walking the place where that hard-beaten patch used to be.

Did they really train here?

It's not a question she wants to answer because it hurts too much. They were children and now they're grown (well, she's grown and he's--) and the old training grounds are just useless now. Not that they weren't when they both first entered ANBU.

Wind blows. The grass sways, whispering as it goes. Dry reeds along the stream bank rustle.

She does not turn around. She keeps her gaze grim on the picture of dry, dying summer that surrounds her.

"You don't have to be here, captain." She does not even look at her team leader as she speaks to him.

Behind her, his voice is dry, husky, almost hoarse. "Neither do you."

(He is probably hoarse from all the smoking; for the thousandth time, she considers advising him to quit, but she knows exactly what he would say to that.)

"I'm here because I want to be," she says, and her voice comes out wrong, harsh. The cawing of a crow: But I like eating carrion!

"So am I."

For all his sharpness and all his angles, his smoke and his lean, hard body, for all the bright, brittle coldness of his nature, he is the soft one this time.

He says it again: "So am I."

She watches the wind blow through the murmuring grass and says nothing.


ii.

Sometimes she wakes up and wonders if it was all some sort of cruel cosmic joke.

She thought, once, that ninja could love.

She knows now that she was nothing more than a girl. An idiot. Maybe she came late to the girl-child fantasy of romance, of love, of a happy life...

But she came to it all the same.

Three years. The dream lasted for three blissful years. Like late spring, maybe. When the pollen has been chased away by the rains but the flowers are still blooming and fruit is heavy and round and ripe.

But now it's summer. The fruit has been plucked from the trees and eaten, or harvested and sold, and the flowers are wilting from their stems. The only respite from the heat is total submersion in cold water.

She can't find water cold enough anymore. Everywhere inside her, even in her dreams, there is nothing but harsh, dry gusts of heat and dusty air.

And all she has to look forward to are autumn and winter.

She was fooling herself.


iii.

There are six dead men in the room. Each of them died by her hand. She doesn't have a scratch on her.

Her captain closes and locks the door the room they just left. Their assigned victim is dead. It looks like suicide.

Now they just need to make sure that these six deaths look like oibara: ritual suicide committed at the death of one's lord.

"He's an idiot," Hawk-Four murmurs to her.

"I know," she says.

They are silent during their work, forcing chakra into their hands and along their blades so their victims will bleed. In the end, they behead five of the men. The last man, they bisect again. This time vertically, so that his torso is a mass of cross-shaped wound. Juumonji-giri. A form of seppuku that requires no second, and does not involve decapitation.

They survey the bloody results of their work. Tenten idly rubs a small chunk of something that is red-brown on her thigh. Red and brown smear along her glove. Good thing it's black.

Hawk-Four says nothing for a long time. They just stand there and stare at what they've done. At last, he says, "Don't let it end like this."

She shakes her head. "He wanted to leave. Probably had wanted it for a long time. There was no way I could have made him stay."

His innate sharpness comes back. "Don't be an idiot."

She goes still. "I can live without him."

She's lying to the world.

She doesn't fool anybody but herself.


iv.

A safehouse. Not a well-known safehouse, either. And actually a barn, not a house. They hadn't expected to find anybody in it, but his team is there. So is he.

Hawk-Eight. Hyuuga Neji.

They spend most of the night ignoring each other. She has duties to fulfill as a second in command. He has a job to do as captain of his own team.

Hawk-Four leans in a corner and chain smokes. The glinting red tips of his cigarettes look almost like iced dango in the darkness.

It isn't until late at night, when all Hawk-Four's cigarettes have long burnt out and they are the only ones awake that she permits herself to look at him.

He is still silent, still pale-eyed, still immobile as mountain and colder than ice in deep winter.

Still beautiful.

"Why did you leave?"

He doesn't say anything. Outside, there is only the sound of rain. Inside, she can barely hear the breaths of their teammates.

"Tell me."

Outside, the rain slows. She looks up and wishes to hell it wasn't late summer. Be winter, please, please, she almost begs. Snow, ice, cold, anything but arid heat that turns muggy and impossible. Anything but what she's feeling now.

When he opens his mouth to speak, the rain speeds back up. Harsh winds begin to blow.

Rain drowns out his answer at first.

Finally, he says, "I left because I kept wondering, 'And what happens when one of us dies?'"

She doesn't punch him. She does worse.

She turns away and goes to sleep.


v.

She kept his letter. It's still in her quarters. She reads it every morning and every night.

It is better this way.

--Neji

And just what is better this way? She wonders about that every time she looks at the letter. She never reaches an answer.

Her floormate and over-friendly neighbour, Haigatake Takaha, comes by again. She knows it's him because nobody else knocks on her door in that pattern. It's a silly little tune, done purely to annoy her because he can.

She knows that Hawk-Four is Haigatake Takaha. It's obvious from his voice, his mannerisms, the shape and colour of his lips. (She knows those lips well. It's an odd feature to memorise, but then again, only his lips are ever visible.)

"Called him yet?"

"No," she says.

"You should."

"You should stay out of my personal life, captain."

A bitter quirk of those thin cupid's bow lips. "Think of it as neighbourly advice."


vi.

Late September. The world is dry and crunchy and crumbles to dust if you pick it up. Everything is red and gold and brown.

Somehow, dying has become beautiful and romantic. Everything smells of apples and hot wine. Children demand hot, sweet drinks of their parents.

"You aren't leaving me again, are you?"

He looks up from where he has perched in the dead grass, resolutely digging up the remains of all the wild onions. One eyebrow lifts, but otherwise, he makes no reply.

She returns to her work flattening the grass between the hill and the stream. It will be an oval again. This time, though, it will be larger. And they don't plan on leaving it behind.

After she gets about a meter completely flattened, she looks back at him.

"Don't leave me again."

His only reply is wordless: he holds up a patch of dead onions from where he pulled them out of their hill.


EL FIN.