Face Paint
Hey-Diddle-Diddle

Temari's curled up on the couch, polishing her fan with brisk strokes. Kankurou watches her, watches the way her fingers grip the cloth, the way the muscles in her arm bunch and pull and push beneath her pale skin. He doesn't understand how she's pale, when she's always out beneath the sun, but somehow she is. He looks down at his purple face paint, tapping a fingernail against the jar's lid, and he feels like a freak.

He wants these things, these things that make him sweat and moan, that keep him awake at night because when he dreams, he dreams of her, and then he wakes up to sticky sheets and the smell of sex clinging to his skin. He wants to touch her pale skin, run his purple face paint down the hollow beneath her throat, follow down between her breasts, all the way to her bellybutton, and beyond. He wants to kiss her, more than the brotherly peck on the cheek he gives her once a week, on Sundays. He wants to kiss her mouth, lick her tongue, taste her skin.

Kankurou's not stupid, he knows that all of this is wrong. He knows it's wrong to be panting after his sister, because she's just that, his sister, but somehow, she's become more. She's more than other girls, more than a pretty face and soft skin. She's angry and bitter and broken, like a piece of glass, and when she cuts him, with her words and her fists and her fan, it feels so good, because she's like heaven on earth.

So as he feels guilty and dirty, he tries to tell himself it's fate. Too bad that he doesn't believe in fate.

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