It was really good! but where was the knuckle cracking?

crying screaming throwing up. This is absolutely excellent. The feelings are described so well and characterization just wow. I wish there was the last chapter oh god. Itachi deserves a happy ending pleaseplsasepleasseee

EXCUSE ME WHAT, THIS IS IT?

Omg that was so wholesome and amazing! Ngl I rly wanted them to get together or go between villages and stuff, but it’s still a great, great fic! Tysm author!

10 years of the last update and I'm reading this fic again, is unfinished I know, but this master piece will be always my fav fic forever, hope you are okay and happy and thank you so much for this fic

This was truly beautiful, I can only dream that in the end Itachi gets his happy ending.

So!

It’s been nine years and about eleven months since the last time I left a review here, and wherever this finds you I hope you’re well. Whether you’ll ever see this or not, I wanted to start off on that note. I'd forgotten only let you leave one review per chapter and I hope you can forgive that I'm technically posting this as a guest.

During the intervening and approximate decade, I’ve churned out maybe 441k words of fan fiction under a different username and, as of now, two (unpublished; how embarrassing!) complete original novels, but I’d never realized until re-visiting this story twice over the last several days — once very quickly, to remind myself of the plot points, and then once much more slowly to savor it — how much influence it’s had over the types of romance I love to read and the romances I try to write.

First, I was astonished at how many little details I remembered. The fireball demonstration at the academy and the fused piece of glass; Itachi cutting through Temari’s hair elastics instead of yanking them out, because needless pain is needless pain unless he’s inflicting it on himself; the two of them together scouting out scammers at the village festival; the fragile yet perfect genjutsu of the ocean and the waves, from which Itachi disappears first to leave Temari there in wonderment alone; the jewelweed explosion incident; the fact that our boy is so repressed and reticent that the prognosis of being in love almost puts him into a coma; the scene of them together, watching the sandstorm, whose sensory details and descriptors appear to have been grafted into my hindbrain somehow; the fact that he is a dork.

(Things I’d partially forgotten and therefore was delighted to rediscover included the ghost pepper challenge, the little girl’s “ARE YOU MARRIED IN REAL LIFE?” question, the roughshod affection between Sasuke and Kankuro, the fact that Temari learns something important from reexamining — long after the fact —the class photograph of them together, and the particulars of the plant she gave him as her parting gift, which is a frank and yet beautifully understated expression of her friendship and respect interpenetrated by a deep desire for his bodily and spiritual goodwill that is in fact the mark of true love in any form.)

There’s such a depth of feeling here, and it’s all explored with such intricacy and familiarity as the relationship develops between these two characters who are able to recognize the wounds in one another. I adore, especially, that there is no romance, in the conventional sense (the kind I think Temari, beloved girl, seems to have been expecting, all the flash and fireworks), because it would paradoxically distract from the love. There is familiarity, which fosters the way they’re able to move easily between banter and honest baring of their hearts because they both feel sheltered and safe, while doing so. They are both engaged in this continual act of Noticing the Other Person, perhaps unsurprising for two older siblings with challenging yet endlessly-adored younger brothers. Itachi is rendered in such a human way as he wrestles with the demons or maybe the angels of his own emergent desires, which become reminders of the fact that he is indeed still a person; Temari, too, although she undergoes less of a radical internal transformation simply because she is practical and therefore slightly oblivious (he helped you with plant taxonomies for TWO HOURS), is given the splendidly novel chance to be a mostly ordinary young woman, although the ironic humor is of course that it’s in the company of a man who would not say there was anything remotely ordinary about her.

I knew you had a gift when I first read this, along with all your other stories, and everything in my return to this as an adult at age [redacted] confirms it.

Above all, though, I’m obsessed with the way your author’s notes indicate that this started out as a much shorter work and grew slowly, wonderfully, to the size it needed for itself, as many stories about relationships tend to. Like I said, I hadn’t wholly remembered where this left off, and although I admit I would probably scream and cry and soil myself (apologies) if the final chapter ever did appear, I think this is a lovely conclusion. The openness lends itself to all kinds of rich possibilities, and potentialities, and that's a mature, perfect finishing touch wherever a romance between two people like this is involved.

For my own money, though, personally, I like to believe that in maybe four to six weeks — by which time that little plant should be blooming; time is important — Konoha will receive an unexpected visit from a Suna delegate: more trade agreements, I imagine. Maybe she will pay a visit and find her botany pupil hard at work trying to make whatever is deadened, parched, and neglected in his family garden grow again. Maybe they will have a lot to say to one another, or maybe they will not need to say much, since they both understand that there is a time to speak and a time to be silent, a time to tear apart and a time to mend.

Maybe, just maybe, Temari will even run her fingers through Itachi’s hair again, and this time she won’t even be searching for a jewelweed seed when she does it, and then that beleaguered, scarred, tuckered-out, broken and broken and broken but never, ever beaten heart of his will be singing.

Thank you so much again for this; I wish you a happy life.

This is a great fic, I really hope that add that final chapter one day

Incredible, you are really really good.

I guess we’ll never read the part 2 but I hope you are well!

Sorry but you deserve that stomach ache temari. Poor Itachi.
I want him to do some training btw. He's retired but not dull. And I'm sure Sasuke would beg every day for a spar.
Yay for older wise kind women with good advice!
Yay for gardening!

Heart
My. Heart.
There was even something I need to tell you about the previous chapter but I've completely forgotten it not. Ouch!
Itachi... Rebuffed. Rebuked?
REJECTED.
Temari... Damn girl, you harsh. Respect.

Itachi's literally mental breakdown as he tried to hold and successfully held himself back from his own happiness and conversion was palpable.
Ridiculously good writing

The way you wrote him falling in l...the emotions.
Raw.
Amazing.
I was completely HOOKED.
Love it

Whew! Ok now I have to remember what I wanted to say at the beginning of the fic
You wrote Itachi well. He's just aimless and just, like, alive, but not really living.
I'm not a temari fan but since you are I am here for the ride. She is likeable!
Now he's rubbing her scarf all over his face and his heart is all light and fluffy. And he was a substitute teacher for a class of loud brats and liked it. Amazing

It has been ten years since you post this story, and maybe 7 since i read it for the first time, and i just wanted to leave a review to tell you that to this day i still think about it. Time passed and i lived normally but sometimes i remember a scene or a dialogue or a little something that remind me of this fic and i cant help but go back to reread it, even when i have done the same countless of times before and i probably have memorized the story by heart now. This fic has a very special place in my heart and i will never forget about it. I still have hope that maybe the next that i decide to read it again you will have uploaded the next chapter and it hurts a bit seeing that nothing has changed since 2014. But who knows, maybe in another ten years things will be different. Or maybe i will have to invent the end of this fic in my head for the rest of my days. Anyway, thank you for the memories. I hope you are living a great life.