Chapter Text
Temari took a deep breath and slid the engagement ring, a hideous sparkly thing she loathed to wear on her finger during the day, into her pocket. She twisted the spare key Ino had given her months ago in the lock to the door and opened it. Immediately, she could hear her girlfriend softly crying in the living room and already knew what was waiting for her. In complete silence, she walked in, dropped her leather handbag on the floor, and unlaced her shoes.
She found Ino sitting on the chair by the telephone, hands buried in her hair. Temari moved closer to her, waiting until she knew Ino could tell she was right beside her heaving shoulders. Still, there was no reaction or acknowledgement from Ino.
"Hey," Temari finally softly murmured and kissed right behind Ino’s ear. "I'm sorry -"
"He is going to die," Ino mumbled. For a second, she tried to hold her breath, to seem composed in front of Temari, but in the end, she didn’t manage it. A sob so strong it made her shoulders heave tore through the silence, and Temari waited until she had collected herself. “They said he - he is throwing up everything he eats. His intestines are failing, and they can’t do anything about it. Everyone knows it; his time is up.”
Temari didn’t know what to say. One of Ino’s closest friends, Shikamaru, was dying after having carried the death sentence of AIDS for many months now. Who knew when he had been infected? Maybe when he, as a twenty-year-old, had moved hundreds of kilometres from a rural town in the middle of the forest to the bustling life of the capital, where he had found gay bars. In one of those spaces, he had met Ino many years ago, and they had bonded over cigarettes and being from small towns, escaping their past to the capital in search of a setting where they could find their own kin. That was six years ago. Maybe he had already then caught the - at the time unknown - virus. Who knew? It wasn’t relevant anymore.
“Did you speak with Choji?” Temari asked.
Ino nodded between her sobs.
“He is there with him now. He doesn’t leave his side,” she said. “They are trying not to think of what’s to come. They - they want to plan for Midsummer instead. Midsummer! When Shikamaru is dying! They want to have a dinner as if nothing is wrong - as if he isn’t…”
Temari waited patiently for Ino to calm down. She pulled another chair up beside the one Ino was sitting on, and let her bury her face against her collarbone. In silence, Temari trailed patterns against the back of her girlfriend’s head.
There was nothing else to do.
In the position Temari held Ino, she could glance at the time on the watch Ino had around her wrist, silently cursing that she wouldn’t have time for more than an hour at Ino’s before she would have to head home. It was a Sunday, and Daimaru, her fiancé, probably expected her to start doing some magic in the kitchen, as was tradition on Sundays. If she spent too much time here at Ino’s flat, suspicion might arise. She had overstayed so many times already before, so many that she was almost turning paranoid and twitchy that someone might find out her deepest secret.
For two years, she had secretly met with Ino behind his back. Even longer if one counted when Temari started going out and having sex with other women without him knowing it.
Temari had tried to deny herself, to shut away that part of her, for ten long, exhausting and hateful years, during many of which she was under the impression homosexuality was a sickness, before that fateful decision so long ago. The decision to just give in.
Now she never wanted to go back to a life without women, yet she cowardly hid herself behind a man who had found her beautiful. She had entered a relationship with him, grateful that she could accept his existence. She did enjoy his company as well, she truly did, but the enjoyment was the same intensity as meeting a friend once a month, and that was that.
She couldn’t bear thinking of the consequences if word got out, if her family and work got to know who she was. That’s what made her a coward. That’s why she hurt her fiancé without his knowledge every time she saw Ino, every time they kissed and had sex. She couldn’t bear to be outed. Not when her entire family lived close by, not when her prestigious job was so rare to come by. Her greatest joy and privilege was backstabbing her.
Ino was lucky in that sense. Unlike Temari, she had nothing binding her to her hometown aside from her parents. Unlike Temari, she wasn’t highly educated, with a position which would tie her to a specific place. A year spent at an adult education centre to study the art of floristry and asking for a job at a local flower shop later, Ino had a job in the capital, a flat she could pay rent for, and a life independent from her relatives and old friends at school. She could forge her life wherever she lived, because as long as she could get a job, she could live anywhere and be anything.
Her parents questioned why she wouldn’t want to move back when the old couple running her hometown flower shop decided to quit. You could own a business, they said. Wouldn’t it be nice to live here and run the shop instead of being an employee over there?
Ino had understood their sentiment, and it had almost pained her to decline. No. I live here now, and I like it here. What she had wanted to say was that she liked being able to find hook-ups if she needed and wanted to. What she had wanted to say more was that she had a girlfriend here, that she was in love. Such words were never mentioned, and she only had to endure the rather hurt voices of her parents. They didn’t understand. They could never understand, not with how naturally their lives had been pieced together while Ino had to elbow her way to make sure she could live the life she wanted.
This elbowing would probably never end.
“I will make some coffee,” Temari said and walked into the kitchen. Ino was still in the hallway with her forehead against the table, remaining there, still, while the coffee was making its sputtering noises. “Should we buy - “
“There is no point in buying Shikamaru anything. He’ll be dead in a week,” Ino snapped.
“For Choji,” Temari said softly when she came back to the hall. “For the dinner he wants to have with Shikamaru.”
“What an awful way to celebrate Midsummer,” Ino said, rubbing tears from her face. “In that sterile place. And that hill and that backdoor and - ”
“We can help them,” Temari suggested. “That’s the least we can do.” She grabbed Ino’s hand and caressed it, kissing the knuckles. Ino had to chuckle a bit, desperate noises that broke through her grief.
“How can you be like that?” she asked.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know - rational, I guess,” Ino said. “You just come up with ways of helping and organising, and I’m just a pathetic puddle. You’re spearheading these new ideas.”
Temari smiled.
“I don’t know; it’s just how I work,” she said. “And it’s your best friend after all, not mine, so I understand you’re stunned.”
“But he became a good friend to you, too,” Ino burst out, thinking of the countless times all four of them had sat here in her tiny living room, eating and drinking and watching TV or movies. She also thought back to the times all four spent a week out in the archipelago and slept in tents. So many memories consisted of Shikamaru and his boyfriend Choji, and Ino and Temari.
“Yes, he did,” Temari said. “And so did Choji. Come on, the coffee is done. Let’s enjoy something about life for a while.”
“Ah, coffee. The centre of joy,” Ino joked, and even if she felt like a hollow shell, she accepted the cup and tried to enjoy it as the world crashed around them.
And to say that the world was crashing around them was not an overstatement in the slightest. It felt like yesterday and an eternity ago that the first whispers of the gay plague had reached their ears. First, it had mostly been about this mysterious disease in faraway cities on the other side of the Atlantic: first it was GRID, then HTLV-3, then the virus was renamed to HIV, which turned into AIDS when it had progressed far enough. But that disease happened only in the USA. It had been easy to put on blindfolds at the beginning of the nightmare and pretend that what was happening would never reach their own shores.
Ino remembered when a notice - a simple A4 sheet with a handwritten message on it - appeared in the gay café she hung out in, in the café where Shikamaru and Choji had met each other. Be careful of AIDS, it had said on the piece of paper. The first person had died of AIDS in their country over a year ago by that point. The disease had come.
A lot had happened since Ino had first read that message. She had been so young and naive then. Now she felt like she had aged a lifetime.
The message, which had just been to be careful, had later turned into “Safer sex, better sex”, when the truth about the virus had been recognised and internalised. It had been weird, seeing that message with the stamp of the one registered organisation for homosexual rights pressed into the bottom of the page. Do not donate blood, was another gentle warning.
Despite those warnings, men became sick, and they died.
And despite those warnings, few took the chance to visit a doctor. Visiting a doctor meant a confession. It meant showing one’s rectum, mouth and penis to a judgemental doctor; it meant confessing that you were one of the guilty ones, one of the murderers spreading AIDS.
To live in denial was, for many, the only way. It had been so for Shikamaru, even when the blood test results arrived.
And now he would join the statistics. Any week now.
They tried to actively not think of him during this moment. There was enough hatred circling them, and the deaths of their friends didn’t make it easier to live. But they lived. And they wanted to make their lives worth living, too.
After the coffee was finished, Ino slid into Temari’s lap, like she often did. Her fingers trailed Temari’s jawbone before she leaned in and kissed her tenderly. Her teeth nibbled on Temari’s lower lip, earning a smile.
“Oh, don’t do that,” Temari said to her before snatching Ino closer to herself in order to kiss her again.
The curtains were drawn, so no curious or evil eyes could see them. No one would know two women were irresistibly drawn to each other in this flat. No, they were only friends.
Friends who had sex with each other, held hands, kissed and called each other girlfriend.
But still friends to everyone who didn’t know.
After hanging out and distracting themselves from the world outside Ino’s flat, Temari had to get up.
“Daimaru is probably waiting for me,” she said. “I better get back.”
Ino squeezed her hand, kissed her knuckles, before leaning forward and connecting their lips in a needy, wet kiss.
When they kissed, neither of them had to bend their necks. They were almost the exact same height - perfectly symmetrical - and that was something that made Temari tingle every time they kissed. She despised the feeling of craning her neck to kiss her fiancé, of standing on her toes, of pulling his head towards hers. It was disgusting to her.
With most women she had been with before settling with Ino - she had, after all, been escaping to the gay bars ever since she was twenty-five and couldn’t bear the idea of never being true to herself - she hadn’t had to crane her neck. She hadn’t had to stand on her toes. She had only needed to lean forward, and that made her inexplicably happy every time she kissed.
And with Ino, every feeling was heightened.
“I don’t know if I can see you before Midsummer,” Temari continued against Ino’s lips. “We are going to my father’s for dinner, and then Daimaru’s sister is coming to us. I don’t know if I can call you tomorrow without it being suspicious, at least not from home, but on Tuesday it should be fine. “
“It’s fine,” Ino said. “I think I’ll stay with Shikamaru as much as possible and help Choji with the dinner he wants to host.”
Temari forced a smile. So, Ino had managed to pull herself together and had begun problem-solving of her own. She brushed a loose strand of hair out of Ino’s eye.
“I will miss you,” she said, feeling oddly sentimental. Ever since she and Ino had first pursued their unspoken union over two years ago, they had become used to sneaking and having longer breaks from seeing each other to keep up the facade of being friends.
At times, Temari didn’t even have it in her to feel guilty about her infidelity. More often, she felt frustrated that her reality was what it was; that she had chosen to shield herself with that man, that she couldn’t live freely, that what she was and what she did was wrong.
Being unfaithful? Yes, morally wrong.
Being hideously in love with Ino? No, that can’t be wrong. Don’t let it be wrong.
Temari was far from the only one. She knew many patrons of the café Choji was working in, men who had sex with men, homosexual or bisexual ones, with wives and children. Their sexual life was their deepest secret.
So many carried the same burden as Temari.
Yet, she couldn’t tell her secret to anyone. She couldn’t break up with her fiancé, only for her surroundings to start hounding her, wondering why and when she’d find a new one, and why she would insist on staying single forever.
She was already twenty-nine and childless. The questions rained already, even if most of Temari’s family understood that surely their talented Temari was more career-oriented than most women they knew. Having fought tooth and nail to gain a place as a stationary cellist in the philharmonic orchestra of their capital, she was at the top of the career ladder in her profession. Without moving abroad, there was no more prestigious job for her to have. Surely their talented Temari had waited to have children until she had secured her place as one of the orchestra’s cellists. Surely she was waiting to have children until after the wedding, whenever that might be. Surely their talented Temari would birth talented children.
To have a layer of suspicion for where her true feelings lay was more than she could bear in this world, with AIDS harvesting young lives and causing society to believe this was God’s way of punishing gays. She couldn’t lose her job. There were no other philharmonic orchestras around, not on this level, in her city. It was either this, climb down the career ladder, or move abroad. She couldn’t afford to lose her dream job.
Unlike Ino, her entire social network lived in the capital. She hadn’t escaped a past and left every bully, every relative behind. She had them all around the corner, and to come out would mean to expose herself to the city with nowhere to run. She would have to leave, and with that, the gay world - the café, the bars, all her friends she had found and loved.
Temari sighed deeply as she stood up, heart clenching.
“See you after Midsummer,” she said and gave Ino yet another kiss.
How freeing it must be to be able to have shed all past connections and not hide behind a fiancé. Temari knew she was overglorifying Ino’s situation - neither her parents nor colleagues knew. She was also trapped.
Outside Ino’s door, Temari slid the engagement ring on her finger.
She walked past headlines of newspapers in shop windows with horrifying messages and past graffiti walls with even worse messages sprayed along them. She still remembered when AIDS killing people was fine for the majority of the population as long as only the gays, the heroin addicts, the prostitutes and the immigrants died. As long as the traditional middle-class citizens with their nuclear family, Volvo and golden retriever weren’t affected, the other of their society could die.
Now, the traditional middle class had become affected, and the hatred they showed was unlimited.
Temari braved the path cutting across one of the parks that was rumoured to host a number of homeless addicts. People avoided said park, and there was a reason the ugly graffiti was on the buildings closest to this park, as if to yell to the drug addicts that they deserve AIDS, that they had chosen this life and therefore should be punished.
Temari wasn’t afraid of the heroin addicts as she walked past a group of them, trying to spot strikingly red hair among the huddled bunch. She didn’t spot it, nor did she spot the tired eyes she yearned to find. Her brother was not in this park.
How could she be afraid of homeless people? She couldn’t. She knew what lovely people they could be.
There was so much fear surrounding the drug addicts. They were rumoured to clean their syringes in oranges in supermarkets, and then no one wanted to buy oranges anymore in fear of catching the virus from there.
Gaara, her brother, did not walk around supermarkets shoving used syringes in citrus fruits.
Temari took a left down the street and left the park behind her, and with it, she tried to shake off all worried thoughts about her brother. If only they could receive clean syringes, then the death toll would be cut in half, as they wouldn’t infect each other. But of course, no one saw it that way. Everyone saw this as a war against the infected, against the HIV-positive, not a war against the virus itself.
Can women who only have sex with women become infected? was a question that had been asked around at the café. There had been arguments of all kinds until they had to settle with the truth - yes.
Temari wanted to live in ignorance. She was already missing Ino.
Ino assisted Choji in hosting his planned Midsummer dinner for Shikamaru. Despite the fact that Shikamaru threw up everything he ate, and had inhumane pain in his stomach, he had wanted to have a normal enough Midsummer - his last one. She grilled sausage and corn and mushrooms together with Choji; she whipped cream and chopped strawberries.
She spent the actual day out in a park with some friends, while Temari was at her father’s for a Midsummer dinner, and Choji and Shikamaru spent it together, the two of them.
“How was your Midsummer?” Ino asked when she visited them the following day.
The hospital wing that had been transformed into the wing for the dying AIDS patients was truly the most horrendous one. It was a separate building from the main hospital area, up on the top of a hill. Most taxis refused to drive up to the doors of said building, as if the corridors and the residents were cursed and spread the disease by air, which meant one always had to walk up the final leg up the hill.
For an AIDS sufferer, that walk up the hill was murder. Even Ino, healthy and young, found herself out of breath every time she walked to the hospital.
Inside, one could imagine being in a sci-fi book. All the nurses wore protective clothing, which made them almost look like astronauts. It was a relief for Shikamaru to be visited by people who looked like people, and more specifically, people who treated him like a human rather than a diseased subhuman.
The blazing pain in his stomach occasionally made him cry, but for the most part, he managed to keep his emotions beneath the surface.
“I couldn’t eat anything,” Shikamaru sighed, his voice low and shallow, as if he didn’t get to take enough deep breaths. He hadn’t managed to get out of bed for a while now, weak and slowly fading away. “But I tasted everything. It was delicious. Thank you, guys.”
Choji was mostly silent. He couldn’t speak without choking up, knowing these were the final weeks or even days with his boyfriend.
“My mother called this morning to wish me a belated happy Midsummer,” Shikamaru suddenly said. “Choji answered. Couldn’t hide it from them anymore.”
Ino looked up. She knew Shikamaru had wanted to keep his life secret from his parents, and when the symptoms he had had hadn’t gone away, and he had been forced by Choji to see the doctors, that hadn’t changed. Even when he received the death sentence, he had still been firm in his decision.
They would already be disappointed in me, to have a faggot as a son, and now this? Shikamaru had defended his decision. They’d spit on my grave. No, I won’t tell them. I don’t want to live my final months knowing they’ve erased my memory from their house.
He still didn’t regret the times he had had with different men. He had, just like so many homosexuals - men and women - dismissed the idea of a relationship when he had freed himself of the shackles of home. A relationship with a person of the same sex wouldn’t be taken seriously in any capacity, not by his parents, or by public services, and least of all in the eyes of the law, so that was an option a good few people took. The way to feel the bliss of their sexuality was through sex, and not through domesticity. It wasn’t until Choji had asked him to be his partner that Shikamaru stayed loyal to him. He hadn’t seen it himself as an option, and neither had countless other men.
Over the months since Shikamaru got his diagnosis, Ino had begged him to tell his parents, especially as he got sicker and sicker, but Shikamaru had refused.
“What did she say?”
“They should probably be here in a short while,” Shikamaru said. “They hopped in the car as soon as they heard.”
“Was she angry?”
“I don’t know,” Shikamaru said. “Couldn’t make sense out of what she was saying. She just started crying.”
Ino and Choji stayed by Shikamaru’s side until his parents arrived. When they did, they didn’t have enough time to even comprehend who was there with Shikamaru and what roles they had in their son’s life; they only stared at them with pale faces. Shikamaru’s dad didn’t even get a greeting out of him, but his mum said a stiff hello to them.
“Do you want us to stay?” Choji asked. Shikamaru shook his head. “Are you sure you want to be alone?” He glanced nervously at Shikamaru’s parents, at their bewildered faces.
“Well, if they kill me, my suffering is cut short,” Shikamaru managed to joke. His parents scoffed in shock to hear dark humour at a time like this.
“Well, if I can have an opinion in this, I’d like to talk with my son in peace and not with…” Shikamaru’s mother began, tense, gaze wandering over Choji from top to bottom, and even if she might not think to come across as judging, she did. Then she stared at Ino. “And who are you? How do you know my son?”
“We’ll excuse ourselves,” Ino said and pulled Choji with her to let Shikamaru be alone with his parents.
“Why didn’t you tell us?” were the final words Ino and Choji heard through the door, before Shikamaru’s mother broke down in tears.
Ino glanced up at Choji, at the red whites of his eyes. He had no more tears to cry today, and eavesdropping on Shikamaru’s parents’ five stages of grief in that room would just be torture at this point.
“Do you think they’ll try to… I don’t know, take him home?” Choji whispered.
“I don’t know,” Ino said. She hoped they wouldn’t try to take him. The AIDS patients weren’t locked in like they were before thick-headed politicians accepted that the virus didn’t spread through touch. “I hope not.”
They waited in the lounge in silence.
“I want to help,” Ino suddenly said.
“Help what?” Choji asked.
“When you called me last week, I was paralysed by… shock, I guess,” Ino said. “Even if we all knew, the finality of it came like a punch to the gut. I was pathetic, while Temari pulled me together.” She looked up towards the ceiling. “I admire her so much, and I want to be just as able as her. I want to do something and not just sit and cry.”
She looked at Choji, her eyes wide with sudden inspiration.
“I want to help you,” she said. “The gays and… everyone who is… dying and suffering in vain. The world around us: they hate us! All of us. They refuse to help the sick, and… and, well, it’s like no one understands. I don’t know. I just want this nightmare to end.”
Shikamaru wasn’t Ino’s only sick friend, but he was the closest one, and the first one to descend into the hell of having his symptoms gain enough speed and severity to eventually kill him. Others still lived with impending doom above their heads, but they weren’t sick yet.
Ino wondered if Choji had tested himself. She hadn’t dared to ask.
“I get you,” Choji said, and then he said nothing more, too tired to think of anything else but the fact that once Shikamaru died, his body would be wrapped in a plastic bag like human waste.
The following day, Ino heard that another patron of the café where she often hung out had taken his own life upon finding out he was HIV-positive. He had marked every single item he hadn’t thrown away with names of friends, family members, exes - people he had wanted to have what he left behind.
After work, she called the gay organisation she knew had once given out pamphlets about HIV and AIDS and asked what she could do to help.
She was referred to another organisation, a completely new one specifically for the HIV-positive, and received their contact information. No one answered when she tried to call that number, so she groaned and slammed the receiver back onto the phone. She stared at it, tempted to call Temari to ask her to come over and snuggle - or even better, have sex - but Temari would already be at her work in fancy clothing playing music for rich, cultured people with champagne in their glasses.
Instead, she grabbed her jeans jacket and spent too many seconds tying her Converses, before heading out to the shop to buy something. She felt fiddly and distressed, looking over the available food. She wasn’t hungry.
Maybe she should just go for a run. Or punch something.
She picked a bottle of Coke, looked up from her hand, and saw Choji. Her face remained neutral, and she looked down again. Choji didn’t live too far away from her, but he didn’t use this particular shop that often, so it wasn’t a weekly occurrence to run into each other while picking potatoes.
She did what she always did; looked down, walked past Choji without acknowledging him and paid for her Coke.
It stung in her chest. To avoid suspicion, everyone pretended not to know one another if they ran into each other unexpectedly.
When she got home again, she just lay in bed and stared at nothing.
Shikamaru died six days later. He was twenty-six years old. During his final days, he no longer received nutrition and survived on liquid pumped into his veins along with morphine until, at last, his body, which looked like it belonged to an old man, gave up the battle. His body had been covered with pressure sores and bruises. The inside was probably in even worse condition, with his intestines failing, but now the body didn’t have to fight anymore.
His parents had been surprisingly accepting of Choji’s request to be there for the burial. He almost hadn’t dared requesting to be present since they hadn’t wished his name to be on the obituary, and to be allowed to be there had made him cry out of relief. Even Ino and Temari were allowed to partake as anonymous friends.
“Whose funeral are you going to visit again?” Daimaru asked when Temari had asked him to help her with the zipper on her black dress. He did it gently and stroked her back, full of care and well-wishing. She stared at him through the mirror they were standing in front of. He isn’t unattractive, she thought, looking at his concentrated face. Maybe someone would genuinely love him. She stared down again when he was done, unable to meet his eyes. Someone who isn’t me.
“An old school friend,” she easily lied. “You’ve never met him.”
“Huh,” Daimaru mumbled. “How did he die?”
“Cancer,” Temari said.
The default lie for the cause of death. Sometimes tumours were the final cause, but they weren’t cancer in themselves. Shikamaru’s parents had explicitly said to them - even Choji - that their son had died of a rare and tragic cancer in the stomach, which was found too late, and the news spread all over Shikamaru’s family’s network.
“Poor fella,” Daimaru said. “When are you coming back?”
“Tomorrow,” Temari said. “I will stay the night at a friend’s house. The funeral is… um, it is not here. It is up north. It takes three hours to drive there. My friend moved up there a few years ago.”
“You could have told me, you know,” Daimaru said. There was hurt in his voice. “I didn’t know you were going to stay the night.”
A sting of guilt ran through Temari. She had been so occupied by her grief that she hadn’t shed many thoughts on her so-called lover. Maybe he was upset he would not be served his Sunday dinner.
“I’m sorry,” she mumbled.
Daimaru only shrugged, clearly disinterested in hearing more of the story, which Temari was relieved by. Let him live in his own world, wrapped in cotton, clearly detached from her reality.
Immediately outside their door, she removed the engagement ring. While doing that, she caught a glance of her newly trimmed and filed clear nails. The sight of them made her involuntarily grin. Daimaru asked sometimes why she wouldn’t ever let her nails grow long like many other women did, or why she didn’t even use nail polish. He clearly would find it attractive if her nails were more feminine. Luckily for Temari, she always had the cello to use as a scapegoat. It was hard to play at her level with longer nails, she always said, and Daimaru accepted her reason for it.
She had planned to stay the entire day with Ino and Choji. Already driving to the church was a journey in itself, as Shikamaru’s parents had decided to lay him to rest in the local graveyard in their hometown. Choji was sure Shikamaru would hate the idea, since he had lived all his adult life in the capital, but being present was a gift in itself from the family. It wasn’t unusual that boyfriends and friends were shunned and ignored.
They were allowed to be present at the burial, but not the memorial. It would raise so many questions, Shikamaru’s mother had painfully tried to explain, and they just had to accept, even if Choji did argue he could be there as a friend. The reply then was that it would raise suspicion.
Ino promised Choji that they would have their own memorial to honour Shikamaru’s memory. She promised they would sing their hearts out and live like Shikamaru would want them to live.
They had been a quartet, but now only three remained.
The burial was painful to attend. They were sitting at the back of the church, but even from the back, they could see the coffin. They could also see Shikamaru’s father carry his son’s backpack - a black Fjällräven Kånken backpack - with knuckles almost white from the pressure with which he held the straps.
“I wanted to keep that,” Choji whispered through a choked sob, “but he took it with him before I could ask. It was in the hospital room, and when I wasn’t watching, he took it. I gave it to Shikamaru as a gift last year.”
None of the guests seemed to know the actual cause of death, not even the priest, who talked about the forgiveness of all sins and spewed beautiful words about the afterlife. If the priest knew, he’d probably never use such kind and empathic words. Maybe he’d even refuse to conduct the funeral altogether, even though Shikamaru’s body was cremated and there wasn’t any risk of infection anymore.
All this while, Shikamaru’s parents held up the facade about who their son was. They didn’t look one single time towards Choji, Ino and Temari during the entire funeral.
That night, they drove straight down to the capital again, changed into the sluttiest outfits they owned, hit the dancefloor, and made out with anyone with a tongue and will.
If AIDS got them all, then AIDS would get them while they were dancing and loving life.
Temari woke up the following morning in Ino’s bed. She hadn’t drunk too much last night, and the headache she was feeling was only moderate. She was so thirsty, but didn’t care to get up from the bed just yet. Ino was snuggling beside her, also awake. This was a good gift for her 30th birthday, Temari thought, even if it was clouded by the funeral. Her real birthday was in a few days, but it didn't matter. She couldn’t celebrate with Ino on her real day, anyway. Right now, Ino was here beside her, alive, and that was enough.
“Good morning,” Ino said and reached forward to kiss Temari.
The bed was narrow - only 80cm wide - which meant the rare times they slept the night together, it was crammed. Snuggled in tight spoons, they shared the bed, and that meant the space between their lips was never big.
The kiss felt loveless.
“I am empty,” Ino said. “Is it meant to feel this way?”
Temari looked at her lips, then up at her face.
“Grief is the worst,” she just said and kissed Ino’s hand. She knew a thing or two about grief, but decided to keep quiet. Ino knew everything she needed to know about it.
“I did look into ways of being anything but pathetic,” Ino said, still letting Temari kiss her hand. “I found an organisation. I had an interview and everything already. They hired me.”
Temari looked up from the hand, staring at her girlfriend.
“They did?” Her headache suddenly seemed to wash away. “Wow.”
Ino nodded.
“I don’t know yet what exactly I’ll do and what it entails, but… I’ll help people with AIDS,” she said. “I will not be pathetic anymore.”
“You never were pathetic; you were grieving,” Temari said. Ino leaned back against the pillow, staring up at the ceiling.
Ino took a big, deep breath and looked the flower shop owner straight in her eyes. She twisted the apron in her hands.
“Unfortunately, I have to quit,” she announced. The owner looked up over her big, round glasses.
“Excuse me?” she said.
“I’ve received an offer to work elsewhere for the foreseeable future,” Ino said. “I have to take this chance.”
“Is it the Jansson’s shop?” the owner asked, expression sour. “Have they snatched you for themselves? I always thought they were despicable, those folks.”
“Ah, no, it’s not another flower shop,” Ino said. “It’s a completely different field. I, um, I don’t know the details yet, but I’ve decided to take on the challenge.”
“You’re accepting a job without knowing the details, girl?”
“Yes,” Ino said and squeezed the apron even harder before returning it onto the counter. “I’m thankful for the chance to work here at yours, but this was my final day.”
The owner muttered something about what a good employee Ino had been and asked her to steer clear of Jansson in case that family would ask her to work there instead. Ino promised never to set foot in that shop, received her final paycheck, and walked regally out of the shop. She hopped on the bus into the city centre. The street name she had written on a piece of paper in her pocket was awkwardly central, almost as if the location she was about to visit was situated at too good a building, too fancy a block.
She threw one extra glance behind her shoulder when she entered the lounge. It was modest in every way, and in the middle of the lounge, two butches were in full motion of assembling what seemed to be a bed. One of them looked up at Ino and stretched out her back. She was unfairly muscular, and Ino felt a hot, embarrassing flush cover her face. How embarrassing to check out who she assumed was her new boss.
“Ino, I presume,” the butch said and smiled blindingly at her. She shook Ino’s hand. She had kind brown eyes and her hair tied in two buns on her head. “Welcome. I’m the host of The Guesthouse. Or am trying to be, at least. You can call me Tenten. Come, I’ll show you what your position will be.”
Ino learned that her position would be to answer the telephone. The numbers connected to the telephones had been advertised as a counselling phone line for everything connected to AIDS. If anyone had any questions, they could call, and Ino, it turned out, would be there to answer.
“Here’s a bunch of magazines about AIDS,” Tenten said and patted the stack. “For reading and looking for answers. It’s all we could find, and some of them are in English - can you read English?”
Ino nodded. “At least with the help of a dictionary.”
“Good,” Tenten said. “We’ll sort it out. How’s your German? We received these issues from Berlin yesterday, and they seem to have good information.” She showed Ino a few magazines.
“Uh, I wasn’t really the best student at school,” Ino said, looking down. She felt ashamed of not being as useful as she had wanted. “I don’t remember any German anymore, sorry.”
“Hm,” Tenten muttered. “Well, there’s no problem too big for us to handle.” She threw the magazines back onto the table by the telephone.
“The beds you were assembling,” Ino said. “People are going to live here, right?”
“Yes, when we are done with the preparations,” Tenten said. “So far, we only host the phone lines, but we hope to get funds to upkeep the guest house very soon. It is in progress.” She looked at Ino for a while. “The thing with this place is that, uh, we are not only for the gays. We are for everyone affected by AIDS. Addicts, prostitutes, people infected through blood transfusion, everyone. Even their parents and other family.”
She stared out through the window.
“The government is shutting the Sauna club now,” she said and looked at Ino. “The one place where many gay men gather and have sex. Or gathered. It would have been so easy to just have pamphlets there, to share condoms, anything. But they shut it down. To keep us animals contained and stop us from having sex. Ha, as if. That will just drive people into shame and hiding. We had this chance to use the Sauna club. And now it will be gone. Fuck them. Fuck the government.”
Suddenly, she dug around in her pocket and fished a cigarette out of it. She put it to her mouth, and Ino was painfully reminded of Shikamaru. He used to smoke, too, before he became sick.
“Do you want one?” Tenten asked, and Ino accepted, mostly out of pressure. They needed something to keep the anger from boiling, as they smoked inside. When Tenten was done, she spat in a tissue she kept in her jeans pocket. “They just think it’s them,” she said. “Gays.”
“I know,” Ino sighed.
“So, our mission is to spread the fact that anyone can be infected and help everyone,” Tenten continued. “But most of all, we’re a shoulder for anyone to lean on. The dream is that The Guesthouse will be for the HIV-positives who are too sick to live at home, but have no one there for them. That’s when they can come and live here.”
“That sounds like a life preserver for them,” Ino said.
“That’s the point,” Tenten said. “Come on, I’ll show you around.”
The hours rushed by as Ino spent the entire afternoon making herself more familiar with the project. She ate lunch with Tenten and the other lady, J. She was one of the three employees of this organisation, besides Tenten and J, so they worked like ants to create the space as they wanted to. Late afternoon, right before Temari’s work was about to begin, a knock could be heard at the door.
“Oh, that’s probably my girlfriend,” Ino said. “I told her to come by before her work. She works evenings, mostly. I just… wanted to show her what I was up to.”
When she opened the door, Temari slid in as fast as lightning.
“Quite a daring location,” she said after the door shut behind her. “To have this place right in the middle of the city.”
“There’s not even a sign on the door yet,” Ino said. “No one would know why you walked in here - “
“Fear not, there is a backdoor too, which we will utilise,” Tenten said as she walked into the lounge. There was a smirk on her face, and she crossed her arms cheekily across her chest. “Well, well, well, look who we have here.”
Temari snorted out of nervousness. Ino looked from Temari to Tenten.
“Do you know each other?”
“Of course we do,” Tenten laughed. “I was your first lesbian shag, wasn’t I? You were pretty nervous, remember? All green, yet so persistent to have that perfect experience - ”
Temari’s cheeks turned dark red.
“Your point has been made, thank you,” she said, trying to fight her blush away. “And, um, besides, you had all my fantasies to fulfil,” she added. “And that was a long time ago.”
Tenten laughed from the bottom of her throat
“Sounds like I did a good job,” she said.
“Well, here I am,” Temari snorted back, still a bit awkward at the memory of first taking the plunge and seeking the sexual bliss she had needed, even if she’d had a boyfriend.
Ino looked amusingly at Temari, clearly finding this information funny. She tried to imagine Temari, who could present herself as such a proper woman, standing there in the corner of a bar, awkwardly, trying to dare herself to venture into the unknown. It was an entertaining image.
“Ooh, I didn’t know this,” Ino said and brought her arms around Temari’s waist. “I can share you, for old time’s sake.”
“No, thank you, I am good,” Temari said dryly, but she didn’t let go of Ino and only squeezed her a bit harder with one arm.
“Alright, I won’t bother you anymore, cuddle bugs,” Tenten said. “I’m just happy to see you around again.”
“I’m not out in the bars that often at the moment,” Temari said. “I managed to get a position at the National Music Hall. I’m a cellist. Evening job, mostly. So, that’s why I’m not around as much as I used to be.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Tenten said. “I almost thought that beard boyfriend of yours had knocked you up.”
Temari immediately stiffened up at the poor joke Tenten had unleashed. She didn’t seem to have realised the sensitive nature of her joke as she laughed to herself. Then her eyes fell to the ring on Temari’s finger, and she stopped herself.
“When we’re properly open, you’ll be welcome to hang out here too,” she quickly said. “Have a good evening. I’ll head up and… fix things.”
Tenten rushed away, and Temari sighed deeply against the side of Ino’s head. She pressed her eyes closed as a sudden sting hurt in her chest. She had come here only for a quick hello and a kiss on her way to work. She didn’t have time to stay for longer than a few minutes at most. Less if she wanted to buy a quick snack from the corner shop before showtime.
“See you later, sweetheart,” she whispered after wallowing in mental discomfort for long enough, and pressed a kiss to Ino’s skin. She still held her eyes shut, worry swarming around in her head. Would questions arise about the nature of their relationship if Ino were often seen walking in through these central doors, only a few bus stations from the National Music Hall? “I’ll call you tomorrow.”
This time, she walked out the back door.
Out in the streets, Temari was, to her big regret and frustration, deep in the closet. The only people in her family who could ever find it out would be the ones searching through a smaller trunk she had beneath her bed, where they might find a novel with enough homosexual undertones, underlines and annotations to be glaringly obvious what this teenage-find was, as if its pages had become her diary or a chronicle of her first realisations. Later, the book and all her notes had become the only comfort she knew at the time, when she still denied herself.
And of course, the ones who would find out the true nature of hers and Ino’s relationship. That was a special kind of nightmare. The constant fear of being found out and the consequences of her infidelity were often burdening her mind, as well as the tiring guilt she felt about it. The book, she could deny, but not lovebites on her breasts.
But when her hands traced Ino’s skin behind closed curtains, she let herself get lost in this world she felt like belonging to. Tracing Ino’s skin in bed was like becoming lost in that novel again, reading those lines where Temari could clearly see homosexual yearning disguised as obsession over a friend. It was comfort as much as it gave her a sense of belonging.
It made her feel emotions she couldn’t even name. It made her feel lost while still being anchored in the now. It tethered her to herself after staying away from Ino for days, cooking dinner for her fiancé, who didn’t even know how to boil water, sleeping next to him, and even sleeping with him. Not even her time at work, with her beloved cello, could she truly get lost. She was bound to play whatever was written on the sheets, following the black musical notes with no say in the matter.
She hadn’t improvised on the cello in months. She hadn’t allowed herself to have fun with it, without the expectations from an audience that had paid for expensive tickets, without the pressure from the working culture in the orchestra.
Sometimes it felt as if she worked without thinking at all. Her brain read the sheets, and her hands moved, and there was no emotion behind it, only work. That was life at home as well. She existed without living.
“Hey,” Ino said and touched Temari’s cheek. “You’re spacing out.”
Temari looked down at her. She was on all fours above Ino and should have had all her attention on her, yet her mind was trying to escape the now, the now she had worked so hard for. Days had passed since she had managed to snatch a moment for Ino. It shouldn’t have been this hard to relax.
“No, I didn’t,” she said and grinned at her girlfriend.
Ino snorted and grabbed her hand, pulling it up on her naked breast with a devilish smile. She had big teeth, especially her two front ones, and Temari almost always fondly looked at them when Ino’s smile was at its biggest, like now.
Ino hadn’t smiled a lot these past months since Shikamaru’s death. It wasn’t easy to smile when the world outside the curtains was what it was, which was why Temari treasured the rarer moments they had, when they could just be. This was where she wanted to be.
She followed Ino’s lead and squeezed her boob, feeling a rush of excitement through her body, before she leaned over her to hungrily kiss her. A tongue slipped in when Ino grabbed her hair and let her fingers get lost in the thick, wild locks.
“Ah fuck,” Temari mumbled against the sloppy, wet kisses. She almost wished she had worn lipstick today, thinking of the sexy view of messy lipstick marks over Ino’s entire face, one of her favourite sights of her. “Stay here, please, stay here.”
“I am here,” Ino said and leaned her head back to expose her neck, where Temari’s lips found themselves. Her eyes rolled back at the sensation of Temari hungrily nibbling at her skin, and she gently clawed Temari’s back - carefully enough so it wouldn’t make marks that could be visible after a minute or two. She wanted to make such marks that would make her grin for days on end when she would see them. She wished she could.
Her hands followed the curves of Temari’s sides, over her hip bones and arse, until her index finger reached her labia. Temari snorted against Ino’s neck when she sensed her touch ghost over the sensitive skin. It was a tease just as much as it was an invitation.
“I’m staying,” Ino whispered. Temari wished more than anything in this moment that her face would be red and pink with various lipsticks.
Temari straightened her back and leaned her elbows against the wall above Ino’s head. Her pelvis lined up over Ino’s chest, giving Ino perfect reach to her core.
It wasn’t like her to beg for reassurance, but hostility outside had made her anxiety grate on her. Not only were so many of her friends in danger of the virus, her brother was too. One desperate need for an injection with whatever he could get his hands on could doom him forever, and the world outside wanted both him and her erased from society.
This was her escape.
“Stay,” she whispered once more as the touch against her vulva turned real and Ino stroked her fingers against it.
“I am,” Ino replied and let her fingers find their way in between Temari’s lower lips.
Ino spent the next few days slowly reading through all the material on AIDS that Tenten and J had managed to scout for her. With the help of dictionaries, she read through everything, and besides the scary information about HIV, also got a fascinating view of the lives of gays in other big cities abroad. She became jealous when hearing of the broader networks that existed elsewhere, and bitter because they had more than one single magazine aimed at them. Here, the only gay magazine survived solely on advertisements for condoms and a few bigger organisations for gays that could be counted on one hand.
Tenten was proud of the fact that their organisation would have a big advert in the next issue. She claimed the funds had now been approved, and they could get to work for real. A team, in which Ino was included, had formed. Ino couldn’t wait for their advert to be published, to spread the word to everyone who needed it. Now they only needed a way to get their info over to the heroin users and the prostitutes, and everyone else in need. They needed to print pamphlets to send to schools in order to raise awareness of what it was among the younger generations. They needed to organise protests.
Maybe this was her way of not being paralysed by helplessness. She had the rare ability to help on a grander scale.
In her wait for the hotline to open, she leafed through another new magazine from abroad and read an article - complete with photographs and everything - about the first public showcase of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in Washington, D.C.. She didn’t understand all the words, but she didn’t need to. She could stare at the black and white photos, showing people of the American counterpart of her community carrying a giant quilt which consisted of memories of the dead sewn into fabric, like soft personal tombstones stitched together.
It was a wonderful sentiment, a true cathartic way to be remembered as one had been while alive. Ino looked at the photos, read what she could understand from the text.
A little seed began growing inside her when she saw examples of how people had chosen to be remembered.
Soon, time for leisure was up, and Ino sat by the phone, staring at it. She didn’t have an estimation of how many would want to call, but the phone rang almost immediately. She spasmed in her chair with surprise and lifted the mouthpiece to her face.
“Ino from the AIDS hotline, how can I help you?” she said in a way she had practised before.
Someone breathed loudly at the other end of the line. Whoever it was sounded exhausted, as if he had run up a hill. Ino immediately thought of the hill leading up to the AIDS wing.
“How can I help you?” she repeated. No reply. She licked her lips and took a deep breath, just about to ask again when the voice on the other side spoke.
“I have HIV,” the voice said. “I just had to say that to someone before I kill myself. Thank you for listening.”
The person ended the call.
“Wait!” Ino yelled into the phone, but it was too late. The line was dead.