Luvs2smooch: Hello all, this is I. For the amount of time it took me to get off my lazy ass and write this, it may be a bit lackluster. I hope you enjoy this. This chapter goes out to Caddy4839, who inspired me to continue this.
Ex's and O's
I kept walking. It always hurt so much, just remembering all we had done, all that we had been to each other. That's why I've been trying to forget it all for so long. That's why I kept walking….also why it hurt as much as it did when the memories of her crossed my thoughts.
We really were meant for each other…a perfect match. She always said that depression followed our wake, for whenever we met, it always began to rain, always. I loved that about her…her dark sense of humor. Always cajoling danger, poking susceptibilities, and leaving pandemonium behind her. She never hesitated to point out problems, but somehow continually confounded me with her harrowing accuracy and radical solutions. Lacking an answer on no account, she solved many a crisis, even if she usually left most everyone feeling pissed off.
I sighed. A necessary evil...hated and needed.
She still puzzles me, even as I look back at our shared past. All I can really do at this point is go home, I suppose, and dread tomorrow, when I must share a day with her.
And so I continued along my path. The rain beat lightly on my shoulders. The stars were out, piercing the thinning clouds with their celestial beams. On a whim ressurected from stale memories, I halted and stole a gaze upwards. Raised my eyebrows at the surprise I beheld…I was not the only one who took a chance look into the heavens that rainy night.
"Temari?... Is that you?" I selected my words-and tone- cautiously. She sat up on the crumbling tiles of an old building, likely abandoned or housing the unfortunate. Water ran off of the old roof in splaying gushes, and the old red paint looked rather like caked blood.
She seemed to mentally jump into the air, obviously surprised but too calm, too distant to respond bodily. She slowly turned her head down to me, as the rain fell from her dampened hair and supple complexion in light droplets. When her soft eyes finally met mine, I could see so much within-longing, hatred, nostalgia- but most of all, sadness. Depression, grief, misery. I felt it in a wave, felt it's strength, knew instantly what it was. I was filled with a wretchedness, the sort that comes from the deepest form of self-alienation. I knew…because it was the precise thing that I myself had enacted soon after we had gone our separate ways.
Her nonchalance listlessly evolved into a faintly ironic smile.
"Hello, Shikamaru…" The words tumbled from her lips in broken syllables, only emphasizing her zoned-out detachment. Several things shot through my head. Was she... high? Drunk? Just feeling slothful? Why was she still here? But I had time to say none of these, for she was so quickly gone from her rooftop perch that I scarcely noticed the air she had occupied moments ago was now vacant. And yet, all of a sudden, the air all around me seemed full of her voice. I heard her slight call from all angles, echoing from every nook. Each voice, though slightly differing in tone, uttered the same phrase:
"It's a shame, isn't it, Shikamaru?"
Just as abruptly as it appeared, her voice vanished, an undetectable wraith fleeing through the pitter-patter of the rain and into the darkness of night. I glanced left first, and then right, unsure whether or not what I had witnessed actually occurred. I puzzled over it for a moment more, ten just comcluded, quite simply, that Temari always has been a strange one. I stole a gaze about again, and the allowed a few tears to fall from my eyes. They mixed with the rain and dissapeared. Sighing sadly at the unavoidable nostalgia of things, I once more marched into the breaking dawn.
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