[Fic] "Seasons of Cloud and Shadow (In a Dry and Thirsty Land) -- Naruto, remix

I am editing ch. 12 of "Secrets" and attempting to structure my Yuletide story, both of which are delayed-gratification projects, so I won't have anything to post for a while. :-( Also, I was organizing my files and stumbled across this fragment.

This spring, I remixed everysecondtues's brilliant Shikamaru/Temari story, Seasons of Cloud and Shadow. The remix I posted was not actually the first one I tried to write. What I ended up writing, in Seasons of Cloud and Shadow (Like the Deserts Miss the Rain), is kind of a nonlinear fairy-tale mashup with extra symbolism and biblical quotes. What I started writing in my first attempt was a straightforward third-person Temari POV... still with extra symbolism, but much more linear and somewhat less pretentious.

This early draft is a fragment, but it's different enough from the final version that I want to post it individually, if only for the sake of completeness. So.

( Seasons of Cloud and Shadow (In a Dry and Thirsty Land) )

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And that's as far as I got.

I'm not quite sure where I was going with this version. It might have worked out; it might not have. But I got stuck at this point, and when I spent a couple days tossing story structure around in my head like a metaphorical game of pick-up sticks, the elements of everysecondtuesday's story hit some of my own preoccupations, came down into a notably different configuration, and held my imagination hostage. So I let "In a Dry and Thirsty Land" lie fallow and wrote "Like the Deserts Miss the Rain" instead.