As if the gods knew we were trying to make some sort of progress in our lives, it rained the next day as Deidara and I tried to help the people from the furniture store get our stuff up the stairs and through a door far too small for it. After getting completely soaked, not only did we finally get it inside but it stopped raining immediately after.
With the people gone and the windows open, we sat on the floor trying to assemble a bed frame. It called for a hammer and a screw driver, but because neither of us felt like going to get either of those things, we settled for a rock from outside and our fingers. The bed might be the only thing inside our apartment that was actually ours, and it might have squeeked horribly, but it was the first thing we owned as a couple and it was a foot set in the right direction.
Our next purchase was art supplies. My husband insisted he simply couldn't go any longer without sculpting something and I took the incentive to get some paper and a pack of cheep colored pencils. As I arrived back at the apartment, back.. home, and threw him the bag, he brought up sketching by description again. I didn't want to try, but I did anyway, just because he's him.
"Alright," he started and paused, I assumed trying to remember.
"I draw face shape first," I told him, holding a yellow colored pencil at the ready.
"I guess he had sort of a, um, round face shape, he was a small guy, smaller than me, but like not too much smaller height, smaller framed," he began looking a bit more bothered as he continued, stressed maybe. I tried to bare with him, he was horrible and surprisingly awkward at this. I did my best, started with a circle, bisected though the middle, and moved to making a chin.
"He was a skinny guy?" I asked, not able to picture a fat ninja. Dei nodded, slowly kneading white clay with his fingers.
"Eyes?" I asked again. And it when on like that until I was looking at what would eventually be a red headed, brown eyed teenager. I was trying to remember who this was, I knew I'd never meet him but still I knew him.
"Not exactly, can we edit it?" That remark had me groaning.
"Yeah, in a little. Who is this guy?" Really it hadn't bothered as I was drawing, but the more I thought about this person the more I thought about the importance of him. Until I started on the shaggy red hair, I thought it was a younger version of Deidara's father.
"This is Sasori," he told me. Suddenly I remembered the poisons, a few of the stories and that time he'd completely flipped at the college claiming he'd seen his former partner.
"Why are we drawing him?" I huffed. This was mentally exhausting, trying to forum a picture in my head and draw it. One simple thing changed everything else.
"It's getting harder for me to remember. Once I started taking my medicine, I started having trouble, but now I've run out it's almost all gone," he admitted. Like he'd been carrying around a weight on his chest.
"Why didn't you tell me you were out of medicine?" I was astonished that after everything he was off his meds and that it wasn't him that was returning to normal on his own accord. I instantly felt horrible, why hadn't I called my parents, called my dad, when he suggested it?
"I don't want it any more, It makes me feel horrible," he confessed, "I can't remember anything for shit, not even at work. I want to remember my mom, I want to remember our wedding, I don't want to loose everything," he looked quite pathetic, his eyes looked tired, more tired than I'd ever seen him and it'd happened in just moments.
"How long have you been off?" I asked, pulling him closer to me. I hugged him tightly and he did the same. This was probably his second moment of weakness I'd ever seen, the first his emotional break down after he lectured me about responsibility in Ohio. No matter the size, we trusted each other and we were there for each other.
"I took my last the day we left," he admitted, a bit muffled as he spoke into my shoulder. After almost a week with no medicine I assumed he would soon be going into withdrawal if he wasn't feeling it already.
"Let's go get some champagne or something, were still newly weds right?" I doubted alcohol would make this any better. In fact it'd probably make the situation worse, but maybe if I could get him trying to celebrate and feel better, instead of feeling... like this.
"I wanted to tell you something, I know I've never really... I thought about something today while you stood in the door way, swearing at those men," he laughed lightly, "when I was a kid, my dad, who got me started in the explosion core, was killed. That was okay with me and my mom because we hated him, and we celebrated by moving into that house we visited my mother at, and she looked the exact same way, it was so funny. She ripped the boss man a new one."
"Oh god, this isn't a mommy fantasy is it?" I tried to joke, and I could tell he didn't think it was funny, but he laughed anyway.
"This is so bizarre, my life has seriously turned into a mess," he leaned away from me as he spoke, brushing his hair out of his face as he pulled his hair tie out and proceeded to pull it all back. I wanted to ask him if he thought mine wasn't. Since I'd meet him last summer my life had been one bizarre event after the next, but this wasn't about me.
"I wish there was someplace I wasn't completely broke or a criminal," he muttered, flopping back on the bed. His patterns of thought was getting erratic, first medicine, then his childhood and now his entire life was up for evaluation. I chalked it up to the lack of medicine. I figured if he wasn't feeling it he wouldn't have told me about it. I joined him laying down.
"You know kids contradict my entire opinion on art," he started, "kids are beautiful little things but they live longer than their creators most times."
Honestly I had no idea what he was going on about. He sounded drunk but we hadn't drank today. I vaguely remembered him telling me that he'd lost his muse once, when he broke our window, but he'd found it again and probably restored his pervious feelings on art. We'd never spoken about it in depth but I knew he saw poetry in things short lived.
"Are you telling me this because of what I said the other night? I was just kidding, the chances of getting pregnant first try are like..." I stopped talking after I realized he wasn't listening. He'd fallen asleep and I realized that was probably best. I watched him for a moment before I got up, deciding I was going to run myself up to the store and buy a pregnancy test. I had car keys and thirty dollars in my pocket, I found the nearest Walgreens and shelled out for a test and a bottle of coke before driving home. Dei was still asleep when I returned, so it didn't take me long to use the test. I sat in the low light of our bathroom with my head in my hands, waiting, for possibly the longest three minutes of my life, for a little red plus or a small blue minus. I times myself, hitting my finger on the counter as I counted numbers in Mississippies. Finally when I reached ninety I got up, picking up the stick as fast as I could. I shook it a few times before I looked down.
"God damn," I swore, I'd never been so happy to see the color blue. A negative meant no baby. I needed this for me I reasoned, because I'd genuinely been afraid that I'd bring a child into this fucking mess. Because I was vaguely afraid he'd kill it.
I didn't wanna say that to myself, but my husband probably wasn't a safe person to be around anymore. I went back to Walgreens and bought a tiny, cheep bottle of pepper spray. I wasn't sure of the integrity of this stuff, probably nothing strong, but maybe it'd buy me some time to call 911 if I really needed it. I made up my mind at three am that we needed to go back home to Ohio. I beat the shit out of my steering wheel until the car alarm went off. I couldn't believe this.
I wanted to die, I wanted to kill myself and let this all be over. I'd thrown everything away and now I had nothing else to throw, no one else to turn to. I was more stuck than I'd ever been and now I was stuck alone. I had a car and two thousand dollars, and that was it. What has happened to the freedom I'd felt watching wild horses, the freedom that helped me find the courage to get married, which I now felt was the wrong thing to have done. Why didn't I just leave him behind as the portal closed? Why did I have to fall in love with this asshole just before I left the other world?
His mom would have known what to do right now. My mom would have. My poor parents, all I'd done was cause them grief. They didn't even know where I went to, I just up and left with a note that didn't even tell them I loved them. I loved Dei too. I loved him and I regretted every moment of this.
A knock on the passenger side window pulled me out of my thoughts and scared me half to death. I couldn't see anyone, just a pair of red orbs in the distance. I should have locked the car doors, I knew who it was, the source of my every nightmare, he'd chased me this far. I tore out of the car, I needed to go after him. I needed to find a way back. I blanked for a second, only focused on those red eyes and revenge for sending me back here, but when I realized what was happening, I was standing in the middle of the road, dodging an on coming car. They hadn't been eyes, they'd been tail lights. I was simply desperate.
"What are you doing?"
My head whipped around, and there stood the root of all of my problems. He had a jacket on and his long hair laying across his shoulders, his hands held a jacket for me. The car alarm must have woke him.
"Nothing," I muttered, coming to meet him next to our car and taking the coat, "nothing I just needed some fresh air. God you scared me," I sighed, looking at his chest rather than his eyes. It was easier if I didn't look at him. I knew he knew what I was talking about.
"I didn't mean it," he responded and that was all he said.
"I know," I said, not even believing myself. He was about to open his mouth when I spoke over him again.
"I've watched you kill someone in cold blood before, and you scared me, and I was afraid of you for a long time, and I thought it was different now we were here and I wasn't scared for a long time, but after all that in there, I'm scared again."
"That was one time, I'm not," he jumped to his own defense but I wasn't having that.
"You tried to rape me! But I bet you don't remember that, you were drunk! The next morning you held a knife to my neck and threatened to kill me!" I shouted.
"Stop bringing that up! Your acting like I'm the same person I used to be, I'm not!"
"How can you tell me not to bring that up!" I was near tears. I never got upset when we fought, not since...
Why was everything so different?
"I'm safe," he said, and that was all he said. He stood there, just stood there, because he didn't know what else to do or what to say. I heard him suck in a breath of air to say something, but then he slowly exhaled.
I watched him for a minute and he watched me, next to a busy road with head lights illuminating our faces. I wanted to believe he was safe, I didn't want to have to be reassured.
"I know you think I'm dangerous, hell, I think I'm dangerous sometimes, I mean what are we even doing here? But I want to protect you, and I'm going to protect you just like all those times in the past," the words he spoke didn't sound like his words, the cry that came out of my mouth as I crushed myself into his chest didn't sound like my voice. The tears came, and they burned, but I remembered that I never wanted to be anywhere else but with him.
"Please don't over think things, put the past in the past," he tried to soothe, his strong arms wrapped around me.
Over the next few days he would pass though moods of normality that quickly flowed into alien absurdity. It was mostly verbal, he'd mouth off about trivial things for a while, get very quiet, and then walk away like nothing happened. I dealt with it the best I could, it was my job to, I felt, as his wife.
We'd just sat down on some folding camping chairs (ones I'd picked up cheep) to eat when he mentioned going back home, and I knew what he meant by home.
"What about my parents?" I asked between bites.
"What about them? You haven't so much as called them in two weeks," he noted, not looking up from his meal. I didn't say anything else, just put my food down and left the room with the cell phone. I called home and waited as it rung.
"Hello?" Came my mothers voice, a new calm had settled in with her.
"Hi mom," I muttered, a bit upset now I'd heard her voice.
"Oh May," she said, apprehension seized her as she sucked in a breathe of air, "oh I was worried, where are you?"
I was throughly surprised that she wasn't screaming, I could place her emotion best as concerned, but not outraged like she had been in the past.
"Vegas, uh, we got married," I blurted, I hadn't even wanted to tell her that right away, but it happened anyway.
"We sort of figured...after what you said in South Carolina anyway. Where are you staying?" I heard the door shut in the background, my dad had just arrived home.
"Uh, no, we got an apartment, uh," I sighed and thought for a second. I'd been feeling so horrible about all of this, and who cared if I spilled my guts now?
"I'm not even sure what were doing here, and he's off his meds, I don't know what to do," I confessed, "I might as well be alone here," I sniffed, but I decided in a snap I wasn't going to let this break me.
"Do you want your dad to call in a prescription?" She asked, I could hear the tell tale click that switched the phone to speaker.
"No, he won't take he, he says it's making him forget things he doesn't want to forget. Besides he's acting erratic, I don't think I can reason with him," I explained, seating myself on the steps. I heard my dad sigh.
"You two should come back home, May, I thought we had a talk about this," my dad didn't sound scolding, I was an adult now, but he might as well have been and I knew it.
"There's nothing there for us, that's why we keep leaving, but every time we leave we have to run back," I put my head in my free hand, it was my turn to sigh now as I tried to explain. My parents were both quiet for a while.
"We can't wire you money," my mother finally said after the long silence.
"I don't expect you to," I said raking my hand though my bangs, "i just needed some advice."
That had been why I called, right?
"You've got to work it out together. Talk to him about his medication, work it out, don't cry May," my mom tried to soothe, without my voice so much as shaking she knew.
"I won't. I'll call you later okay? I love you guys," I shut the phone as they said their good byes too. Hauling my sorry ass back inside, I walked right past my husband and flopped down on our bed.
"Well?" He asked, I couldn't see him but I figured he was watching me.
"You can have my food," I knew that wasn't what he was asking, but I hoped he'd settle.
"Nice try," he sneered.
"Their okay. Us, not so much," I noted, still refusing to look at him, "we need jobs. Income at least. We need furniture, food, stability," I just let myself talk without a filter, "this is ridiculous if we think we can just keep going like this forever, I feel stupid, I feel ashamed, I'm fucking laying here, and we look pretty doomed from my point of view."
I heard him get up and then I felt his weight shift the bed as he sat down next to me, and proceeded to pull me unwillingly onto his lap.
"I've got some stuff I made out of clay I was planning on selling, I wanna try the lake, the one you fell though, to go back. After the rent is up, let's sell the bed and go there, try to get back though the lake," he held onto me tightly as he spoke, very meticulously and exact in his words even though he repeated himself.
"Whatever," I said, sitting still in arms.
He kissed me, softly and it was welcome, no matter how he acted. He let me know that we were still a team, that we were still doing this together, and with that kiss, that small sentiment, he made me feel so much better.
"When we get back, I promise I'll make it up to you," he whispered.
"Make what up to me?" I asked.
"This problem," he said as he pressed me closer to his chest. I wasn't sure which problem he was talking about. It didn't matter. We were headed home and I was happy.