A Thousand Mornings [Deidara Love Story]

III - Mystery Shrouding the Necklace

“You what?!” Ayumu coughed out his food as I told him what happened in Leader’s office. I gave him a giant pat on the back so he wouldn’t choke and die. He didn’t seem to appreciate the pat even if it was for a good cause. He threw down his fork and faced me with an annoyed gleam in his eye, “You faced the Leader!? Not only that, you asked if I could join you on your mission to tame the Nine Tailed Beast?”

“…And to unseal my Kekkai Genkai.” I added sheepishly. He groaned loudly and sat back down into his seat, rubbing his eyes with annoyance. I placed a hand on his back with a wry smile stretching across my face, “Aw, come on, don’t be that way; think about all the adventures we could have. It’ll be a time and a half!” He just gave me this look that seemed to say ‘Shut-up-and-leave-me-alone-right-now’. Shrugging, I did just that.

Wandering upstairs, I felt the necklace swinging around. Once again it tickled me, but that deja vu that I got every time I thought of the necklace was really beginning to get on my nerves. So I went into the bathroom to grab a wet cloth and began scrubbing the dirt, grime and age away from the necklace. When the outside was cleaned, it gleamed in the light, making the familiarity so much worse. It was almost like I always had this necklace with me. As if I never left it from whenever that time I had the surgery was. There was a floral decoration on the front etched into it - causing it to look like it was something shared between friends with the ‘Best Friends for Life’ cliche on it.

Then I opened the dirty inside and saw my younger self smiling in the picture. Man, I looked like a ham: I was showing my gums and everything. My hair and face was messed up like I had just been playing in the mud for some odd reason. My clothes got the worst of it, though. Momma probably got so upset with me when she saw me returning home covered in mud. I wondered - who took the picture if it wasn’t Momma or Papa?

Taking the cloth, I rubbed it first onto my picture, clearing it up. The picture inside was sepia, I noticed. At first I thought it was just the mud covering the glass part making it that brownish color. It must have been extremely old or packed away in a way that made it weathered worse than it would have been outside wherever it was stored. Anyway, I pointed the cloth over to the other side, but I found myself pausing. What was on the other side? One of my friends from way back then? Ayumu? For some reason, it seemed that my heart knew who it was while my head was just a jumbled up mess that couldn’t really process anything. After a brief pause, I poked at the glass and scrubbed furiously. Now it was like opening a present at Christmas. All of a sudden, I just couldn’t wait to see what or who it was.

My lips slightly parted when my eyes met with a boy no older than the me in the picture. My heart was thumping quickly as if it was a rabbit running from a predator. Since it was all in sepia, I couldn’t depict what the color of his eyes or his hair was. Though, he had really sharp eyes like he was determined or something. He was smirking - which set off a lot of ‘recognizing’ bells. This boy was almost as familiar as the necklace. When I looked away from the picture for a moment to reflect, I realized that my hand was shaking. Whoever that boy was - he was making me nervous for some reason. Did I have some bad chemistry with him or something? My heart was really making it seem so with its erratic beating.

Closing up the necklace, I let it drop down to the top of my middle again and looked into the mirror. My reflection just stared at me as always, but I couldn’t help but wonder if a part of me knew who that boy was. If that part of me knew, why wasn’t it telling me? Taking a deep breath, I looked away from the mirror. Maybe my memory of him would come back another day. Clearly, that day wasn’t today.

It was only when I was stepping into my room when a flash of something zapped through my mind like a lightning bolt. Sucking in a breath of surprise, I realized that it was a brief memory of the past. Just like the Iwagakure and the memory of the smile.