Chapter 2 - Mother of Leaf
Temari was twenty-three when she became a mother.
She couldn't really remember what it was like to have a mother herself, so she'd had to make it up when it came to her turn. Some things were obvious - you figured out how to breastfeed fairly naturally, if you listened to the demands of the child - but some took more thought and intention. Her husband took as much leave as he could, changed over to a desk job while they were learning and so they shared the sleepless nights, but he was a valuable jounin, and sometimes he was called away all the same. On nights like that, Temari would bring her son to sleep beside her, and tell him stories until he drifted off. Then she would lie in the dark, listening to his quiet, easy breathing, and wonder what would happen when, one day, her husband failed to come back at all.
Of course it didn't happen, but each time she found herself thinking, 'What will I feel when my son goes off to do the same job? Why do we all live like this? Why is it that, even though the war is over, we are all going to die as soldiers?'
When her son was five and school finally claimed him, she found her days strangely empty. She'd forgotten what it was like, not having to take a little person with you everywhere, or clean up a dozen different messes a day, or find ways of entertaining them every minute of every hour even when all you wanted was to tear your hair out and cry. She found she had freedom again, and she had no idea what to do with it.
She had passed thirty when she realised that her solution, unintentional though it was, had been to acquire a drinking problem.
It had grown on her slowly. She'd always enjoyed a drop of good sake when the occasion suited it, and after living in Konoha, knowing so few people, she found that a little liquid fortification made all the difference between a painful evening with acquaintances and a perfectly tolerable one. Once their son was born they spent fewer evenings out with friends, mutually too tired to handle such frivolities. But Temari had found that, even after the child had begun to sleep through the night, she could no longer do so.
Often she would waken after only a few hours of rest and be stuck like that, lying in the dark with nothing to do. So she took to getting up in the middle of the night, and when she did, she would take a bottle from the sideboard and go and sit on the back step. There she would listen to the night birds and sip at the warming liquor, hoping that it would make her sleepy enough to go back to bed, but it rarely did. Sometimes she would find herself still sitting there by dawn, and so she would put the bottle away, make breakfast for her boys and get on with the morning as though nothing was wrong. Then, once they had gone off to work and school, she would go back to bed and sleep through the afternoon. It seemed easier that way, because at least when she was sleeping off the liquor she didn't have to go out and talk to people.
The realisation came when she was standing in the kitchen in the dark, searching through the cupboard for a bottle, cursing herself for forgetting to buy more. She recalled that her husband had gone shopping with her that week, and so she hadn't picked up the extra bottles that she usually did on her own. As she stared at the counter top, polished wood gleaming dimly in the starlight, she had to admit that she was trying to hide the habit from him - and if that was the case, then it meant that even she knew that there was a problem.
She didn't talk to anyone about it. To her it seemed like there was no point; if she couldn't sort it out herself, nobody else could do it for her. She made an effort to avoid the excess she had been consuming, and it mostly worked. She stopped buying the extra bottles and recycling them at night when nobody was around to see; instead she would only buy enough to keep something in the cabinet, and would ignore it, even when her insomnia was driving her crazy.
Still, occasionally her will would bend and she would go out late, after her husband was deeply asleep, and take a crate from the back room of the corner shop, leaving enough money in the till. She would carry her acquisition to a high place and sit there, drinking her way through the contents until she couldn't stomach any more, and then vomit most of it up again before heading home. She never got caught doing it, and somehow that made her feel satisfied, because retired though she was, she hadn't entirely lost her touch just yet.
Temari was thirty-two when she began to wonder if she was the only one keeping secrets.
Her son was growing up, and he was kind and strong and clever and she'd never imagined she could be so proud of anything she'd helped create. He was so like his father in so many ways. He had her eyes, though, and her temper, and that always made her laugh. She hoped, silently, that he would do without her gloomy temperament. But he was startlingly good at lying to her, and even though she grew to know his tells and signs, it made her wonder whether that particular skill had come from her or someone else.
Her husband was a good man, no one could argue with that. He was one of the smartest shinobi in Konoha, and for all his attitude he worked hard. She'd watched him go from strength to strength, complaining all the way, and she'd pushed him when she felt he needed it - no longer having anything to work towards herself, but conscious of the goals he pretended he didn't have. She loved him, of course, it would have been silly not to. And yet... He didn't like inconvenience, didn't go out of his way for anything he didn't have to, so it was strange, out of character, when he sometimes got home so late from work.
Once or twice she slipped out in the afternoons and sat in a tree by herself where she could see him at his desk through a window. She never saw anything out of the ordinary, but inevitably on those occasions he would leave work and head home at the time you'd expect. She never managed to see him staying late or going anywhere else.
Paranoia was an ugly thing, and she knew it was stupid, but after his old teammate, the ex-girlfriend, had split up with her husband, Temari couldn't help noticing that the instances of tardiness fractionally increased. There was never any tangible sign, nothing concrete, only a slow fade as time went on of their mutual interest in the bedroom. They had started out with a kind of fire, casual and comfortable though it was, so seeing that wane into absentminded lukewarm apathy was unnerving.
It was probably her fault, she realised too late. Not that she had any control over what her husband felt or wanted, any more than anyone, but maybe she'd driven him to stop caring so much. She had lost her spark with time, maybe once the blood stopped running so freshly in her mind. Did she have to be full of hate and bile and murder to keep feeling that fire for him? She was getting tired. Bored, even. Her son was growing older, didn't need all her attention anymore, and she couldn't spend all her time drinking, so perhaps she needed something new to do, to keep the spark inside her from dying completely.
In her search she joined the academy as a teacher. At least that was a job they didn't need to talk politics to trust her with. She liked being around kids, with all their vigour and energy overflowing all the time. She taught ranged weapon use, showed them how to hit targets at hundreds of metres with pinpoint accuracy. A few bright kids who asked the right questions got showed some of her old moves, and when they asked, she agreed to teach them how to use tessunjutsu.
After a few months of her tutoring, her handful of students were growing increasingly skilled. She found herself feeling the warmth of pride, and for the first time in quite a while it was not just for someone else but for herself as well - she had given these kids something good, something great even, that would help them in their lives. It felt powerful. After dinner one evening, she lay with her head on her husband's shoulder and told him about that feeling, and he ran his fingers through her hair and said how glad he was that she was doing something that made her happy.
A week later, Kankurou came to visit with a couple of other envoys from Suna. He stayed with them for a couple of days, and when they were alone he told her how he was planning on retiring soon. After they had talked about his plans and his dreams, he grew sober again and asked her if the other envoys had spoken to her yet. When she said no, he shook his head and said it seemed bloody stupid to him, but he told her the news anyway. They had found out about her extra classes. Suna had sent an ultimatum to Konoha: Temari was to be removed from teaching at the academy and banned from sharing any more of Suna's hidden techniques, or she would be treated as a political enemy and removed from Konoha altogether.
Within a day, the message had come down from the Hokage's office. Everyone involved seemed to regret it, but Temari found herself without a job anymore, and with a warning not to involve herself in training with any of the Konoha youth ever again. Not even her son was deemed permissible.
Her brother stayed another few days. When her husband wasn't there to offer what comfort he could, Kankurou did his best, sitting with her quietly, sharing tea and talking softly about the past. Temari couldn't help thinking that in the old days she would have fought this, gone back to Suna herself and stood with Gaara and Kankurou and shouted the cowardly council into submission - but somehow she didn't feel like it was worth it anymore. After all, maybe she was wrong. It seemed ridiculous to her to try and hide their old techniques from their allies, but then again, Konoha almost certainly did the same. Such things were jealously guarded. She had trained from the age of five to become proficient with her great fans, and like Kankurou's puppetry, it was a sacred technique of the Sand, a symbol of their country. Maybe it didn't belong in soft, sunny Konoha. Maybe it was foolish of her.
Kankurou went home, where she knew he was going to set his affairs in order and then go quietly into civilian life himself. He'd found a woman, he said, and Temari had been surprised to learn that she was from Konoha. She hoped that the woman would have better luck assimilating than she had managed herself. Kankurou seemed to think she would, but then, Temari supposed her husband would have thought the same. There was no logical reason why not.
Her husband found her another job eventually, helping out around his old girlfriend's flower shop. The woman ran it with her mother when she wasn't away on missions, but her mother was ready to retire, so she needed another pair of hands. Temari agreed, and was taught the basics of how to tend the till, how to handle the flowers, how to check the books for plants that went well together. It wasn't the kind of work she'd ever cared for, but the smells were alright. Luckily her boss wasn't around too much, so Temari didn't have to stare at her pretty face and her svelte figure and her perfect hair all day long. It grated on her nerves, but she appreciated having something to do.
Putting together posies and arranging flowers in their displays, she found a sort of catharsis in plucking out the imperfections. Cutting the dead blooms from the flock, pinching off the ones with crumpled petals or strange, off-kilter growths, it felt somehow clean and straight forward. There were rules to such tasks. You knew what was right and what was wrong. The business of putting together special bouquets was much less to her tastes - you had to be creative there, to see what was aesthetic and try to please peoples' senses. She'd never been so good at that.
Temari was thirty-three when she realised she had no idea what she was living for anymore. She pulled the silky head off a perfect anemone, just because she could, and crushed it under her heel.