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In the red tent. Low heat swimming around the floor from a gas lamp. And he isn’t alone - your stomach leaps in jealousy. When your eyes find the two bags on the floor - of course they aren’t sleeping together, it was crazy to assume - it almost makes you feel worse to know she must occupy the same wanting space as you. Setting her arm outside the bag at night just in case he were to turn and see it cold and want to warm it.
She had bleed-red hair gathered in a rat-nest at her neck, thin silver frames at the end of her nose with sweat beading around them. You can see all the places where she is busting at the seams, grown since the time you’d seen her before. When he had nearly killed her. Longer face and deeper eyes, jaw set just a little stronger. And yet she was still here beside him. Sleeping still, open, vulnerable in this dark place beside him. And you don’t know that you would be able to do the same thing - though you’ve come all this way to try. She must have a hell of a lot of faith in her.
She had glass beads braided into the strike of hair hanging over her left eye. And a wrap of bright violet silk around her neck. Across the tent, sitting low in a mess of fabric, was Sasuke. More of a collection of linens than a man at all anymore. More of an implication in space, of something ashamed and hidden. One scarf wraps his head and his wiry coal-black hair peeks out, wet with sweat.
•••
"Do you know,” she asked me with her hair loose and low over her face. "What they say about the boiling of frogs?" I did not know then, and when she told me I was distinctly aware of a slow heat building for me as well. But her idea - genius in scope and scheme - could almost work. And her horrible charm - her awful way of things was intoxicatingly convincing. Isn't this what he wants? Though he won't ask for it. Floor falling out, degree by degree until everyone was in the pot about to spill right over and flood the place. And we went out in the bush seeking blindly for root vegetables with our filthy hands. We were plucking the thinnest runts of fruit. But our meager harvest would be enough because the soup didn't have to be good, it just had to be drunk. It just had to get his mouth on a dish. She told me all she needed was a little bit of saliva. But the arms-reach he kept us at made it hard to conceive of how we could get any piece of him into our possession. Believing the old adage I thought it might be a good way - through the stomach.
Suddenly I felt hurt for my mother. Then remembered her thoughts on my choices - - wondered what she might have to say about me using her tender acts - sweetly made for comfort- to trick the only man she'd never wanted to see me standing beside. It doesn't, didn't, matter. I was not home - stuck in the desert with baubles on my head - sleeping blanket-less on the floor of a tent - hungry in all the ways with everything only getting hotter. When the going gets tough you have to get tougher. When the heat turns up you have to get cold - snap the hot lines of doubt, guilt, duty…
This is not the same world we had lived in as children.
Everything is different now. The night of the feast. She was wearing pearls and finery with her glasses off. I went into the village and bought a new dress with blowing silk. I wanted to lose myself to the place, I didn't want my mother's child serving deceit on these dishes. He came home to the tent and stood in the opening and picked an end of his head scarf and started to unravel it, until his face was finally bare and open, peering at the two of us in shock at our obvious expectance as well as unusual attire. It seemed to immediately give him pause - seemed to alarm him to the temperature - we presented the pot to him and he didn't seem impressed. As usual - an unusual man. He wanted none of our soup . We offered it to him again and again - so much so that it almost completely blew our cover. But immediately he wanted nothing of it - wasn’t hungry and wanted to accept nothing from anybody during such a time in his life. I guess he was fasting - spiritually - but what we offered was unsafe in a spiritual respect. He understood that.
After we had gone that night to drink our failure away - we returned to a small tin of fish left for us at the tent with a note - THANK YOU BOTH. We opened another bottle - pure gin - and both lay down on her sleeping bag and tried to lay our next plan. But we should have known that faith goes a long way and rewards always come for those who put in the grueling work.
Nobody had felt anything different about the world. We couldn't receive letters from here. We were isolated in our private island of madness. So the news didn't come until rather much later than we had hoped - after the child had already been born. It came from the Kazekage when he came to see if the rumors were true that an old friend of his was within his domain and had so rudely neglected to come say hello. He arrived to the encampment with a wicker basket of lunch in his long fingers. When he came into my line of sight, I immediately realized that l had forgotten him entirely. And also I was embarrassed and felt cruel and insensitive remembering with a start his feelings for me. But when, nearly an hour into the lunch, I brought an apology forth, he just laughed. He had really grown. He had filled out - just a bit- his arms were thicker and his shoulders were almost broad. His skin was clearly thicker and had tanned from the sun. He was more burnished and golden now than he was burnt salmon - pink - like he was all those years ago. His white robes brought him now a grandeur he felt deserving of. The sleeves no longer covered his hands - so you could see all the healed up scars and his tidy round nails. He wore no ring on his finger. He looked kind of old and sad when he pulled the photo from his pouch. "I suppose,” he said. "You’ll have not gotten a chance to see the little baby yet,” and presented it smoothly into my hands, and as soon as I’d seen it, the soft and light curls, the point of his nose - it was pointless to wonder or pretend it was any mystery whose child this was. But the realization nearly wrecks me and I have to chase him out without a good excuse.
Then I'm just trying to catch my breath and understand why. He always wanted me. In a juvenile sense I guess. So there is the persistent nudge - if i wanted life to be easy, I could have conceded and just gone along with him. I am sure we could have had a good life. But I also always hoped we could keep a closed circle. In my own broken way I wanted our team to only know, only want anything to do with one another. It was meant to be a closed triumvirate. Now it feels like he has cast open the window and let all the mosquitoes inside.
•••
She is just fine. But she is not part of any blood pact. She will never be close as a second skin. Some part of you feels a forever possession towards the two boys, it should be threes all the way down. He has broken something sacred. But - really how long have you and Sasuke been gone to the desert now? Who broke the circle first? And then your panic and anger turn to guilt and then back again. And you look at the child - should've been yours - or a blight on history breaking the spines of record books open - and you know that whatever you're feeling, he will feel it harder - bat out of hell flying into the cave later on and then you know that is exactly how you will win and make him think it is all his own idea.
Selfishly - you want to tell her - breaking the circle again. This is a private indecency But it isn't like that. She and you are in your own new circle arced around the man with his back turned to you both. He stands between you. Both the glue that binds you and the impassable moat that keeps you from ever becoming anything more than right hand and left hand.
Two appendages have an awful lot to do with one another - even if they're virtually strangers. A faith healer and a disciplinarian. Practicum and all the usual trappings of an emergency visit. One steaming cup of herbal tea for the patient on the metal altar. This dark place, cobwebs and glass beakers pointing at the scaffolding. "All the things that try to eat me,” she says. “End up ahead in the end." With a wicked smile and bite marks all down her body. What is the point of such an ability? Was she made to be nothing but an appendage? Built in a lab by a shadow pushing buttons? Her practice is non-traditional at best. But it’s impossible to be surprised if you remember who her teacher is.
New sting in your heart when you realize again, she is another student of the three. There are so many reasons she lives at the periphery of your life. About as God-granted and fate-pulled as the two boys. Looking at the cold bed where the light bends and reflects and because of the angle you can't see yourself but you can see her. With long needles, like torture instruments, above the scene.
The unraveling hour putts across the room like a stone skipped across the lake. One scarf and then the next until he's sweated all his pain out and he is laid bare. Such a strange life to live with such a silence. A pair of cold eyes locked onto a sight only he can hope to see. Where is he? When is the time you can do this? You realize truly what you are doing now. How you will destroy his peace. You can notice - in his growing place in this real world - how he leaves space for Naruto. And you can see what he believes he can get back upon the completion of
his penance.
Don't think he really knows about Hinata at all. Don't know if he would know enough about his own heart to know what it really means. But he gathers these things, he reaches for rounded stones, he whittles shapes he keeps hidden in his hand, secret. He wants to come home with treasures to present. At first you thought it could be for you. But you know now it isn't. You go back and forth on this. How good it is going to feel to break his heart. At the beginning you felt immediately gleeful, finally the one on top after so many years of his little heartbreaks against you, always pushing the foot down further. But now you feel mostly afraid to see what will happen to him and what will happen to all three of you. They are sun and moon and you are star. You need them to make the system exist. To moor it down. Even worse, what if you only remind him of what he really wants and cannot have? And that makes him hate you even more? The last few weeks you have been warm with one another. You don't want to ruin this friendship that has gone so long in the dark.
Most of the time you don't even understand why you want this anymore. It's like an unconscious function of your body. When you aren't thinking of anything at all you find yourself drifting towards him. It's the oldest feeling that still lives in you. If amnesia ever swallowed you it would be the first memory to come gasping for air. Your love and the punishment for it, the way it's eroded you away until there wasn’t much, has defined you the way a surgeon's knife defines a body's new edges. No, not good. Not beautiful. You haven’t thought that for a very long time. But it is yours. The life you sunk into and so the life you get. Be careful what you beg for or you will end up getting it. Because God is always listening.