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After the war, everyone is scattered with little to nothing in their hands, so you haven’t made your trip to Konoha as soon as you would like. The streets are now feverish with legible signs, built from the mighty, calloused touches of people you could consider in silence, your friends.
A smile.
Naruto doesn’t greet you at the first sight of dawn. His tanned figure is still in the in-between stages of chasing a bloom and realising another one may just be right behind his back. Flowers are more complex to care about, Yamanaka has told you once behind the counter, your fingers trailing the veined and fragile leaf of a tulip’s bud. She looks at you like you have no clue how to care for the graceful blush of a red blossom turning ochre.
You are a tourist here. Pliant and quiet.
To be serviceable to her, however, you don’t say you do.
The young woman stretches her fingers, fairly jewelled with the sign of a soon-to-be commitment, and you think about your sister, the world and its colour becomes a second sight until your eyes can refocus. Her comment is languid, with white light over your shoulders when she continues.
I think you’re more fitting with herbs, don’t you think so, too?
Naruto smiles. You don’t really give a response, assuming your voice would have startled people more than you would like it. Haruno Sakura smiles and greets you kindly when she enters with antiseptic hands, but the grip of your nightmarish figure is something she still struggles with. Per usual, you don’t point out the silenced fear in her eyes.
Your fingertips are still touching the clean leaf when Naruto hovers to hide a birthday gift for the wrong girl. On his side, you blink, watching him navigate what you may never have.
The children are becoming adults now, it seems.
“Gaara.”
“Yes?”
When Temari gets married, she gives you a plant.
She guffaws. You think about the word more than the action, the way that there are no other possible words to describe it. Your sister guffaws in her ceremonial kimono and her eyes crinkle, like she knows a secret to life that you haven’t, and you won’t. You don’t ask her for more things; your relationship has never been a transaction of knowledge. Instead, as the youngest, you look around, fidgeting with a tablecloth. She moves into Konoha by the end of summer, and you can feel your breath condensing on window panels.
“Here,” she says. You should think of her as Nara Temari rather than her maiden name, the sun’s lazy reflection encasing her hair to a light shade. In your head, she’s still a sister who creaks the floorboard with her echoing steps. You think about your parents in the empty seats. You wonder if your mother would have cried.
“He’s not taking your trash, old hag,” Kankurō states when your hands are still halfway through accepting the potted plant. His hair sticks out everywhere, still half-asleep. Shikamaru watches from the driver’s seat and truth be told, you like the idea of having another family member more than you’d think.
“It’s not trash, you brat!”
Temari sharpens her gaze, the sea glass of her eyes reminding you of days when she would unbraid her hair, carefully watching you circle around the garden that has been left barren for twenty years without fault.
“It’s a parting gift for Gaara, of course.”
This is a new beginning, she doesn’t tell you.
You look the plant up in the Suna botanical database, a finger brushing against its leaf.
Jack-in-the-pulpit, the webpage replies. The way it’s named is simple, a preacher hanging over his students, a shade of green that can be the world if it wants to, and it does in your eyes.
By the hue alone, you feel as if there has been a metaphor nobody else clued you in on.
It feels uneasy to acknowledge but when you were younger, the colour would have been everything, a myriad of emerald shades that could only be seen in dreams, in the back of your anger and pain and in the eyes of a young girl who would fight God to protect her beloveds.
There’s nothing more revealing than this knowledge.
“I’m not used to such things,” you tell Kankurō over dinner, and the thought lingers in the rearview of his mind.
A blink. Your brother chews his way through a particularly dried piece of fish, and the colour green to him is just a shade, no poison to his heart.
Kankurō’s answers are rarely clipped but,
“Just, give it a try.”
The plant is named after the only intimacy you know, a good life away from your eyes and this depleted world. You don’t say its name out loud. To everyone, this is merely a table decoration with no further meaning, no guesswork beckoning a reply.
Even without the instruction from ten thousand sources, you know to give it water. The sun. A dot of fertiliser. Fresh air from the office.
It doesn’t injure you in ways a flower can fight back a tending hand.
You stare and it grows, and all your intrusive thoughts seem to die down.
Still.
A small crisis.
Your hands pause when the handwritten guide from decades’ worth of voices says to give it love.
The sentence is a refined edge that cuts through the fogginess of your ponderings.
You don’t know if you have that inside you.
“Did it hurt?”
“What?”
“Redemption,” you say, because it seems like he would know, even if no one else did. “Did redeeming oneself hurt?”
In the blurring of daylight, Uchiha Sasuke only stares back at you.
It’s intrusive, you guess. Everyone processes things differently, and to pose a question so nonchalantly could be crossing boundaries between an informant and another eye for his aid.
You feel like a joke, but the words are already spoken when the files in his hands are clenched.
What’s gotten into you? Nobody says and the scowl on his face is marred as if he’s considering whether or not you are worthy of the answer, to hear something that can crack the sky open like a blazing blade of truth. Out of the three, Naruto has never faulted you, light beaming from his grin to tender patting on the pad of your shoulder blades.
In Konoha, the doors to Uzumaki’s office open and close in unison with your footsteps. You never quite stop to think about the kind of pain you’ve left behind when he tells you not to. The bench near his favourite stop is always cold. One of the snacks he consumes looks like nothing you would ever want to eat. The blond shares anyway, and you know he would, like how you know he slaps a hand down his thigh when he laughs and the crinkle on his left eye is barely there.
Naruto will always choose to forgive when it comes to pain. It’s wired inside of him, the kind of ridiculousness that he hasn’t quite figured out yet.
But with Sasuke, it’s—
There are scars that don’t quite heal.
He speaks but his words don’t convey. The kind of polite exchanges without anything else added into it. Like a thief against vulnerability, he doesn’t quite answer your gaze whenever you look. It’s the same kind of green flecks that die in Haruno’s eyes, too.
In the outlines, a gnat lingers on your plant. It dances lightly, ruminating on the idea of making a home inside the red blooming dots. It’s in their coding of survival to mistake a flower for the beginning of a life cycle, even when it’s not. Blinded by desires, the gnat doesn’t understand it has fallen too deep inside the hooded spat of a plant to come out alive, because no one has ever been a proxy to show it otherwise. But you are not a bug, for you were vulgar with the madness that bordered on religious. Your words slur on the back of your tongue at the depths of wanting to learn, wanting to understand uncharted lands from a perspective that ate the violence you gave.
At the core of survival, Jack-in-the-pulpit needs to be pollinated by fungus gnats.
You want to be better than a volatile being that consumes in the blank of memories.
Your eyes settle on the plant. Your voice feels like a placard. The silence is a mediocre place of comfort, and the base of your throat feels desperately dry, floating above your own mind. All that would unfold from the inside are dreadful, horrid things; and in his lack of response, you feel as if every word has been justified in its cruelty. Sasuke is still chewing on your confession, even when you have tried to pass it off as something else. This is worse than your fantasy of yearning. The ceiling is not high enough for you to stare at its lines.
“Never mind.”
Eventually, you wave him off. No need to look back into the vignettes of wondering when he’s trying hard to chase what is in front of his heart. He looks as if he has found an escape from your hooded spathe. You lift a finger to help the gnat fly away.
When his shoes echo and you try to understand the weight of your wants, the first time you have ever vocalised something so unthinkable to a being outside of the three blondes in your life, your heart feels trapped.
You think about what Yamanaka didn’t say that day,
I think you’re too ill-fitting for human relations, don’t you think so too?