Love and the Time Travel Paradox

10:35AM

Several minutes later his trembling had stopped. But he still wasn't ready to release her from his hold, judging by the desperate and almost painful way his fingers dug into her skin.

All she could do was keep her own arms wrapped around him.

But she was beginning to get restless; her current position on the couch was awkward and not very comfortable at all.

And the sun was just about to reach its zenith. The sunlight was streaming down directly on her face. The steady source of prickling heat was beginning to bother her.

Her emerald gaze shifted, refocused, from the body that trapped her against the couch to the unruly, red hair in front of her face, nestled into the hollow of her left shoulder. She could not see his face from this angle but she could hear his deep, even breaths.

He didn't fall asleep on top of her, did he?

She poked his head.

The male grunted halfheartedly, his breath tickling her neck, but otherwise remained still.

It was sometimes hard to believe that he was seven whole years younger than her. Back when she still did not recognize him, she had believed him to at least be around her age, more or less. Years of fatigue had taken their toll on his appearance, and combined with his intricate knowledge and experience in various topics was it any wonder she'd guessed his age wrong?

She poked him again, and he did not even flinch this time.

Oh.

His hair was so soft. It was as fluffy as a baby's!

With big grin, she dug her fingers into the mess of loose red spikes and indulged herself in the feel of his fine hair.

Her nails lightly raked across the scalp, and he made another rumbling noise from deep in his throat. She stilled immediately, mid-scratch. She worried that she'd crossed the line with that one.

But then he raised his head off of her shoulder slightly to give her a miffed look.

"Why did you stop?"

"Eh? W-well, I thought..."

She resumed the scratching motions, and he lightly dropped his head back onto the hollow of her shoulder.

10:50AM

Not even his thick, heavenly hair could distract her from the annoying sunlight shining through the window for long.

"Um, can you get off of me please? I can't feel my legs anymore."

"Mmm."

"...Oi."

11:00AM

After failing to coax the surprisingly stubborn male to let go, she tried a different tactic.

"Back then, didn't we do something like this? Cuddling, I mean."

She sighed dramatically.

"You were so cute back then, like a teddy bear! You didn't even have a problem with sharing a bed and a blanket with a girl. And we talked all night long together about everything. We had to keep our voices down though, because my master had had a really bad hangover... whoa!"

Message received.

Without a word of explanation, the redhead had slipped off her body to his feet, swept her up into his arms, and was now carrying her to her bedroom.

All of that in the space of seven seconds.

As she gently rocked within his arms with each step, she gave him a suspicious stare.

"So you can move pretty fast if you want to, huh?"

"Hn."

"I'll be sure to remember this."

11:20AM

Almost instantly after settling down beneath the blanket next to her, his arms had clamped around her waist like a vice. She didn't put up a fight because at least the sun wasn't shining into her eyes anymore. And more importantly, she liked being in the circle of his embrace.

She couldn't remember the last time she was held like this, for no real reason other than the pleasure of holding her close.

In return, she also slid her own arm over his torso and hugged him to her.

Some time later, under the cover of the blanket they now shared, he'd finally found the strength to speak his mind.

"On that day, years ago... I noticed you because I was enthralled by your magic."

She couldn't help but reminiscence along with him.

"I remember that! I thought you were really cute when you came up to me and asked what I was doing."

"No one else in the village could do what you did."

"Oh, come on! Ninja in general have some pretty quick hands. Surely you'd seen others do similar things I did as you grew older."

"...Maybe so, but nobody did it for enjoyment like you. And nobody would dare allow me to be close to them as you have. To you, it was perhaps a common occurrence to be approached by curious children. But to me, it was much more than that."

But what about your other friends. Your family.

Under his solemn gaze, she felt her other protests die on her tongue.

When she'd first met him, she'd thought he was just a shy and timid little boy. Had he truly been so lonely at that time? ...So lonely that he would disregard her 'foreigner status' just to speak to her when no other citizen would?

"After meeting you, I focused all of my energy on becoming a shinobi. I believed that I would find happiness on the outside, far away from the ones who'd shunned me. It was my entire reason for living."

It went unsaid that he had been feared and ignored by everyone in Suna. Within her mind, she suddenly began drawing parallels between the redhead's childhood and her ex-student's childhood.

"In the eyes of the Yondaime Kazekage and the Suna shinobi, I was a crucial, powerful weapon for military purposes. I would not be allowed to wander freely outside of my own volition, especially with Iwa at our borders."

11:26AM

"But you succeeded in the end. You got to travel to all kinds of places, just like you wanted."

"Yes."

"How?"

"I became a diplomat representing the interests of Suna."

You ended up throwing away your original aspiration to be an author, just to get away from your village, was what she meant to say, but didn't. Instead, she took a different tack.

"And all those stories you told me over the past couple of weeks... were from your diplomatic missions in other places?"

As a jounin kunoichi of Konoha she had been sent out to exotic locales herself on courier missions. But she was never immersed in these diverse cultures as deeply as he had. Infiltration was not her forte, and she was mostly focused on maintaining the health of her teammates.

"It was very hard. Ambassadors have a history of dying at the hands of the foreign powers they had been attempting to contact."

She recalled that gentle, precious little boy who stared in open mouthed wonder at her little magic tricks. She compared him to the man lying in bed next to her, a man who had seen so much, experienced so much, that even with anecdotes from those adventures she couldn't begin to imagine how it was like.

Had meeting her... really changed him that much?

11:28AM

"When we met again, five weeks ago, I was confused. It had been years since I last saw you... and, you did not seem to recognize me. I thought that maybe you were someone else... or maybe, meeting you in Suna had been just a dream."

His arms tightened around her once again.

"I would have lost my sanity if it had really been just a dream."

She sighed and pillowed her face onto his shoulder. Her response was completely sincere.

"I'm glad that meeting you wasn't a dream, either."

At the back of her mind, something didn't feel right about what he said.

As a medic and the apprentice to the Godaime Hokage she was well-known in Konoha, and by extension, the Land of Fire. He was an important diplomat from Suna who was coveted as a weapon at one point. Their villages had been in an alliance for nearly three decades.

Surely they would have crossed paths at least once during those sixteen years apart, even by sheer coincidence, no matter how busy they were? Or even during the Fourth Secret War against the Akatsuki?

11:37AM

A giggle escaped her lips and disturbed the comfortable quiet in the bedroom.

"I just remembered! You stole my first kiss that one time in Tenshu! You were pretty smooth for a six year old. A little casanova!"

His cheeks flushed.

"I was seven. And that did not count as a first kiss. I merely... touched the corner of your mouth."

"Gee. Sorry for getting the details of the not kiss wrong."

And then her traitorous mind began to go off a tangent.

What would she do if he tried to kiss her, right now? If he, say, moved his hand from her clutching her waist to cradling her face?

As if aware of her musings, his eyes flickered to hers.

And then-

His face began inching closer.

Emerald eyes widened.

She held her breath.

...But then he just bent his head and rested it in the crook of her neck, and she felt just a bit foolish and juvenile for getting excited over this little thing. She wasn't fifteen, she was thirty! She should be able to handle kissing just fine!

12:05PM

They had to get up from the bed to retrieve his clothing from the dryer, which had been beeping incessantly for the past twenty or so minutes.

Now that he was fully dressed once again, she suddenly didn't feel like lying down anymore. The sun was at the highest point in the sky by now, and the village looked very active and alive from what little she could see from the window.

"Hey. Let's go out and get something to eat!"

His jade eyes blinked slowly at the suggestion, hesitant.

"You... won't be ashamed to be seen with me?"

That was a loaded question, if she ever heard one. There was their obvious age difference to take into account. They were public figures. And there was the matter of the aftermath of her divorce...

She stepped closer to him and firmly wrapped her arm around his in lieu of a response.

Things were just getting real.

TBC...