Sundance

13. Body (Izuna)

I woke up in a cold sweat.

It was as if I resurfaced from the bottom of the ocean after swimming for the surface for thousands of years. My body was hot, yet cold as the sweat used up the heat on my skin to evaporate. I was panting.

I looked next to me in the white layers of my bed, soft as snow. My bed was empty. A lot of things were empty. Like my heart. Tobirama had been avoiding me since Madara's announcement, and I hadn't pressured him.

I hid my face in my hands. Always the same bad dream. Always that I had so much pain in my joints that I couldn't do my act. Stiff. Unable to move.

But the worst part was waking up, because the relief of realising it was just a nightmare was soon replaced by the realisation that that nightmare was actually not that far from reality.

My joints hurt. They hurt a lot. I knew the recognition I'd gotten was mostly due to my new usage of fire archery, but the flexibility gain that had happened since I'd started stretching and stopped doing strength had turned out to be addictive.

I just couldn't stop.

Nowadays, I walked very slowly, and the pain in my knees almost never went away, even if the moments that were excruciating were short flashes of unbearableness. At least for now. Sometimes, I had moments of no pain where I could pretend there was no problem. Those moments had, however, become fewer and further in between.

I took a deep, ragged breath. On top of all of this, it was the absence of Tobirama. I knew about the dangers of believing this time was different, or believing this particular partner was special. But I couldn't hide from the fact that Tobirama was the best man I'd ever met. The conversations we'd had. The way he had seemed to like me, and not what I could provide him. How he had been genuinely interested. "It's the bare minimum, Izuna, so stop praising me for it", he would say. I had started to realise it was. What he had said to me to express his love, however, wasn't. It was far, far above the bare minimum. 

I checked the time on my phone; six thirty, later than I thought. I got up, put on my chunky vanilla cardigan that went down to my thighs, put my shoes on and went out. It was dead silent in the trailer park except one person who was out taking down laundry hung on a line suspended between their home and a tree. I walked the other way, not craving interaction from anyone but one man. His trailer was parked next to mine, as it always was now. Even since he started avoiding me, he kept parking it right beside me, which I thought was his way of showing he wasn't mad at me, but had been put in a situation he wasn't quite able to handle.

I tried the door. It was open, but his trailer was empty of him. I saw a book on his dinner table and went to it to have a look. It was a thick book called "Advanced calculus". Next to it was a notepad filled with numbers and symbols I didn't even understand; he'd been practicing. Suddenly, I was desperate to meet him.

I walked out, went to the little lake a way away from our park. And there he was, in a strong butterfly, swimming away from me. Even if he wore a cap for swimming, I recognised him by his body, weirdly elongated with strong shoulders. I sat down on the shore, waited until he turned and swum back. His mouth opened up in a gasp as he surfaced every third butterfly stroke. I had no idea if he saw me or not, and if that was the reason he stopped, or if he was just finished, but he still stopped a way away from the shore where the water was too shallow to keep swimming, and removed his goggles and cap.

"You're really good", I said.

I realised it was the first thing I had said to him since Madara announced we were moving to the states.

He looked at me for a while. Then, he walked up and sat next to me. I shuffled closer, craving him to put his arm around me. He did. The weight of his arm around my shoulder was pleasant. I didn't even care about his cold wetsuit.