Six years later.

Tobirama:

The dead autumn leaves crunched underneath my feet. It was a beautiful day for it really; the sky was an icy blue and the leaves were in that stage where they were yellow enough to paint the world a bright, hot canvas, but not dead enough to have fallen off completely.

I'd always had this thing when walking in graveyards that I looked at the dates on the tombstones, thinking 'Wow, that gentleman died before I was even BORN' or 'That girl never even reached the age which I am now', and other silly things like that. I wondered if I was the only one.

I huddled inside my thick, black coat, pushed my gloved hands deeper inside my pockets, careful not to crush the bouquet I held under my arm. My messy hair tickled my nose, and I tried to blow it away. The temperature outside was barely above zero.

I loved it.

Whenever I saw the silhouette of his gravestone, I always seemed to increase my pace. It was as if I couldn't wait until I was in front of it.

And in front of it, I finally was.

I stood there for a while, just looking at the stone. I had donated a large sum of money to his parents so that they could get a beautiful burial for their son. They didn't want to accept the money, but I had convinced them. As thanks, they had asked me to design the gravestone to my heart's desire. I'd gladly done so, chosen a completely black, polished stone with no hints of any other colours, with only his surname carved on it in gold in italics. I'd taken their willingness to let me design it in a way that felt good for me at heart and excluded his date of birth and death dates because I knew I couldn't bear seeing those. I knew it was selfish of me, but I allowed me this one thing. The only thing decorating the stone except his golden name was a beautifully carved bird, in the same black stone, that sat on top of the stone, watching over him when I wasn't there.

I put the sunflower bouquet down on the gravel. Wow, so many heavy layers on top of his coffin... Is it really necessary? I had gotten to give him flowers every now and then when he was alive, something I'd never done with anyone before him, but his giddiness and excitement every time he got some made me do it over and over. Seeing that reaction was almost addictive. I never asked, but I figured sunflowers were his favourites, seeing he always squealed a little extra over them, and the sunflowers were the only ones he put into the super-expensive glass vase we had.

I looked at his grave and contemplated.

It was more than six years ago a police officer had phoned me, ten days after his death.

"We know who drove the red sports car. He turned himself in. We will need you in the courtroom to testify."

I had agreed to this. The police officer had continued:

"Mr Senju, I'm so sorry... It wasn't an accident. The suspect has admitted he did it on purpose."

The thought hadn't even struck me and it shocked the living daylights out of me. Why would you do such a thing? I'd hung up with a shaking hand, slid down along the wall, held my knees and just stared onto the opposite wall, unable to cry, unable to scream, unable to process this new piece of information in any comprehensible way because I was already so emptied of emotion.

It wasn't until I sat in the courtroom with a lawyer, thirteen days after his death, watching the suspect being led in, that the pieces clicked together. He looked awful. He was unshaven, his hair was unwashed, he had circles under his eyes. He looked like someone who'd lost someone he loved, and he had.

Not only that; he had purposefully killed that person.

It was Adrian.

And I lost it.

I completely fucking lost it.

I don't remember anything, but I got to see the video footage from the courtroom afterwards, and it was mad.

I had suddenly lunged at him, luckily not reaching him before two police officers grabbed hold of me, I had screamed and sputtered in gibberish, drool running down my chin, my eyes bulging. I looked absolutely fucking horrifying. In the end, it had taken four police officers to hold me back, and half an hour for me to calm down enough to be able to give my testimony.

Adrian had cried and cried as he said it was an act of jealousy, of madness, that he didn't want anyone to have Izuna if he couldn't have him.

He was condoned to prison. And he was still in there. 

I sighed where I stood at his grave.

"Happy thirtieth birthday, little bird."

I walked about two minutes in the enormous graveyard to an area that held smaller urn graves. On a stone that said "Cindy Crow", I stopped, hands in my pockets. I had no flowers for her; she'd had me promise no flowers for her grave, ever, because she was allergic so she didn't see the point in receiving some when she was dead, either.

We had remained close until she died two years ago, at the age of ninety-six. I remembered our last conversation fondly, me at her hospital bed, not as her doctor but as a visitor.

"Have you met someone else, yet, dear?" She asked this every time.

"No, Cindy. And I don't want to or need to." That was my standard answer, and it was the truth. It wasn't an active decision I'd made; it was just the way it was.

"But tell me, Tobi-bias..." This part was new. She nudged me with her pointy elbow.

"Ouch!"

"Are you at least having some fun?" Her eyes glittered and she winked at me.

"Your elbows are not so young anymore, Cindy, dear. They're sharp, so keep them in place."

I decided to leave it at that.

I walked back to the little Toyota. I'd decided to take over his car. It looked extremely unflattering but it drove like a dream.

I had one last stop.

A prison guard led me through to the visiting room and then stood at the door, watching us. I sat down at the table, sipping some coffee with oat cream from a paper mug.

"Are you coping?" I asked.

He gave me a lopsided smile. "Not really. But it's strange, how you get used to it. I'm not happy, you know, but I'm not unhappy, either."

I smiled a little at that. "I guess that's a first step."

"When are you leaving?" he asked, a slight worry in his voice.

"I'm on my way to the airport. I stopped by his grave one last time, then I came here, and then I'm leaving."

He got that look into his eyes he got sometimes, and I knew what was coming.

"You know-"

"Don't!" I was quick this time. "Don't apologise. We've been through this."

He sighed. "I know," he said with a mild voice. "Thank you", he said instead, looking up at me. "For everything."

I looked at him for a long time. Then I put my hand on his arm and squeezed, and stood up to leave.

"Take care, Adrian."

And I drove to the airport.

Before everything happened, I had started my specialist training to become a psychiatrist. But after he died, I realised that just because I had a well-managed mental health diagnosis, it didn't mean I had any obligation to help others who were not so lucky with their mental condition. So I had taken a complete U-turn, and was now almost a specialist in plastic surgery, specialising in cleft palates in children. And once I got the opportunity to fly to Botswana to live there and perform cleft palate surgery on newborns and children who couldn't otherwise access healthcare, I'd taken it. It was a two-year contract, with the potential to extend. It would be good, I had thought, to be somewhere where the stars that shone upon me wouldn't be the same that shone upon his grave, because it would be on the other side of the Earth.

And so it was that I found myself, three weeks later, under the stars, sitting next to an open fire with a bunch of children with my light blue maple guitar under my arm, playing melodically, singing carefully, while the children clung to me. The elders of the village close to the provisional hospital where I operated had invited me for their dinner under the stars, and I had accepted. I really stood out with my lack of coloring, but the children loved it; they clung to my hair, to my face, to my neck, stroking my skin, marveling at the milky colour, laughing. One particularly cute and shy little girl of merely five, the only child in this village who'd had a cleft palate and whom I'd operated on only last week, came to hug me. I snuggled my cheek close to hers.

Then she pointed at my wrists and said something in her native language.

"She asks what those are", one of the village elders translated, a warm smile on his face.

"They're scars", I replied, and he translated to the girl. "They're eight and a half years old."

The girl said something.

"She says: 'That will need stitches.'"

I was taken aback. And I felt tears well up in my eyes, then falling one by one over my cheeks. She looked horrified for my sake and dried them away with her little hands. I leaned into them, closed my eyes and indulged in her gentle touch.

Indulged in a place where I couldn't think that the starts outside my window were the same as the ones that shone on his grave, but where the moon that shone on my face would take its turn to look upon it, and then come back and look upon me, shining its light on both of us, separately, weaving a pattern of light between us as the months and years passed and the moon took its turns around the Earth. And I played and sung to the moon so it would bring it back and give it to him, once it left me to be with him on the other side of the planet.

And as the night rolled over this place on Earth that was now mine, the temperature decreased, allowing the sun to rise in the place where he was and increasing the temperature there instead.

And I dove into the cold and indulged.

End.