Chapter 3 - Woman of None
Temari was thirty-six when she and her husband decided it was time to stop pretending. Their son had passed his chuunin exams only a little while before, and was going off on longer and longer missions, so his needs were diminishing. They had found that they just weren't remembering to love each other anymore. Sex was almost nonexistent, and sometimes they didn't even talk for days at a time - not out of spite or malice, just an absentminded silence that encompassed both their worlds when they were at home together.
They signed the divorce papers in the registry offices and then walked home together slowly and quietly, both of them musing on the question of how to explain it to their boy.
When he got back from a week long mission to Wave Country, they all sat together on the deck under the starlight, drinking tea. They talked long into the night. He argued and whined and shouted and pleaded and cried, and they understood it all, but things were what they were. His father tried to explain about how sometimes, if you don't pay enough attention, you can fall out of love by accident. Temari ruffled her son's hair and said, wryly but softly, that maybe he should take that as a lesson: The laziness of both his parents was probably the cause. They stopped working hard at their relationship, and so it quietly died.
He was angry with her, but his father laughed and said she was probably right. Then they made more tea.
Kankurou came to see her again as soon as he heard. He stayed with his lady's family, but he spent most of his days with Temari, helping her to pack up her things and think about what she wanted to do. It was hard to come to any conclusions, but all she could think of was going back to Suna. She wanted to feel sand on her skin again, and stand out in the emptiness under the moon, feeling the grandeur of being so small. She missed the smells of the dry streets of her city, the burning heat of the sun that turned everything to dust, and the cold nights that covered even the dust in frost. She'd taken her son and husband there several times since she had moved to Konoha, but it felt different now - she would no longer be just a visitor. She was finally going home.
All the arrangements made, the only thing left was to sit with her son and talk about goodbyes.
They did so one evening when her husband was away for the night, and so the two of them had dinner together and then lit a small fire in the back garden. Sitting beside it, her son produced a bottle of sake, which surprised her rather; but he was thirteen now, legally adult by shinobi law, and it wasn't a very big bottle. They shared it, restrainedly, and talked quietly well into the night.
He was angry with her, of course. She understood that. If anyone was to blame for not making their marriage work, she had to admit that it would be her. She tried to explain a little that after a certain point, love wasn't something you could just fix. It was either there or it wasn't. And although she still loved her husband, it wasn't in the same way she had when she had married him. She had changed, and so had he - although she didn't say so, she couldn't help thinking that he had outpaced her. He had grown up, while she had just persisted.
Her son asked how often he would get to see her, and she promised that she would come back to Konoha as often as he could stand her company. He was more than welcome to visit her, too, although she wouldn't have anywhere for him to stay for a while, having no home of her own to go back to. She said she would set herself up and then send a formal invitation, and he could come and inspect, to make sure the place suited him. Besides, she would email him every day, until he was heartily sick of her - and if he was feeling really talkative, he could email her back once in a while.
They said goodbye on a sunny morning a few days after that. He wasn't the most emotionally vocal boy, but he shared in her tears a little bit, and they hugged very tight for a long time. Then she waved back at him and her husband - ex-husband, now - before she and Kankurou set off up the road, carrying her single bag of clothes and possessions on her back.
Temari was thirty-six when she found herself without a single plan for what was to come. The emptiness of the future swallowed her whole.
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