Disclaimer: don't own anything.
Soulless
1. Red
Red is the colour of both love and blood. Unfortunately, Gaara is much more familiar with the latter.
(Shukaku hears the word blood and cackles like a maniac. Mention love, and he scrunches his nose up in distaste and shrivels away like a flower without water.)
2. Group
He watches the Kyuubi's vessel prance around his teammates like a brainless moron. "What's the point of working in a group when you're just as powerful on your own?" – asks Shukaku, the tailed beast's eyes a mask of careful confusion.
To this, Gaara has no answer.
3. Power
Shukaku sets his standards high, high enough to make Gaara want to bash the tanuki over the head.
"It's always about power with you, isn't it?" – pants Gaara as the beast struggles for the hundredth time to wrestle his conscience away from him.
Shukaku hears his silent complaints and grins the blood-thirsty grin that reduces lesser men to piles of cowering limbs.
4. Cruel
He thinks the village cruel because they shun him like he's the plague. Later on, he sees cruelty in its true light when Yashamaru whispers, his tone cold and vengeful.
"This is it. Please die."
5. Sand
The assassin creeps low against the walls, shadows rising tall to cover him in their gloom. The kunai shifts lightly in his hand. He hears a noise, but thinks nothing of it, until pillars of sand erupt beside him and bury him like a corpse in a coffin.
"I thought father would know better than this."
The last thought that ghosts through his mind before he takes his last breath and sinks to the bottom of nowhere, is that the Jinchuriki of the One-Tailed Beast is just a mere child.
6. Beauty
Gaara thinks beautiful is a terrible compliment, because what good is beauty when the enemy is breaking through the front lines and your village is manic in its chaos?
7. Castle
Children play with sand. Make castles out of it. Entertain fairy-tale fantasies in their little, pin-sized heads about how they will be the world's best ninjas and live in eternal luxury like tiny kings and queens.
Gaara watches them, fists clenched around palmfuls of children's dreams and his very own, very lethal weapon.
8. Heart
"You're the heartless monster of Suna!"
Gaara picks at his fingers, unperturbed. Shukaku bares his fangs ferally inside his head.
"Contrary to popular belief, I do have a heart."
He sounds bored, as if the insult is mere dust on his back. The man in front of him gulps audibly. Gaara fixes him with a hard stare.
"It's too bad that I don't use it too often."
9. Eyes
Gaara's eyes are blank and dead, with absolutely no hint of life within. "If what they say is true, and that the eyes are really the windows to the soul," the towns people say, "then Gaara's soul must be even blanker and deader than his eyes."
10. Leaf
The genin of the Hidden Leaf are weak, he thinks, as the Uchiha boy gets his ass handed to him by the idiot in the green spandex. "They are weak because they are dependent," rumbles Shukaku, and Gaara can only nod in response.
11. Shuriken
He doesn't practice throwing shuriken, and doesn't bother learning how to dodge them, either, because what use are weapons when Shukaku's sand is twice as fast and twice as deadly as any kunai out there?
12. Puppet
Kankuro says puppets come alive under the right masters. Gaara supposes it's true, since he feels nothing more than a plastic puppet himself.
13. Demon
They call him a demon. He knows better than to argue.
He doesn't want to prove them right.
Written as a gift for a friend. Reviews are appreciated and welcomed.