(written for b. march 2004.)
hissing, but stingless
.
.
Everything Gaara hates about the desert, he can also find in Kabuto. After a few weeks, the differences blur into triviality: he wonders whether Kabuto is simply the product of dust and mirage. But it's not that easy, of course. No matter how hard Gaara blinks -- the insides of his eyelids sparking sharp noncolors against his vision -- Kabuto is still there, hovering at the edges of peripheral sight.
When Kabuto speaks, there is nothing insubstantial about his words; they define him more than the dimensions of his physical self. (Not that this is an indicator of anything in itself. In this village, one realizes too well the limits of flesh and blood, but Sand takes it one step further, reduces you to less than that, bleached bones and powdered ochre streaming through your veins.) It's not so much Kabuto's face that Gaara recalls but the way he speaks, the quicksand pull of his words. Habituation at its finest -- Gaara knows better than to listen for too long, and most of Kabuto's words slide cleanly through the hourglass of his consciousness, but others, the ones he suspects Kabuto really wants him to hear, have a way of stinging his senses like thin shards of lightning-fused glass.
In his own way, Gaara practices patience, if only because he has long since learnt the futility of attempting to avoid the inevitable. So he doesn't ask until he finds Kabuto in his room, examining the little-used collection of scrolls in the shelves about the bedstead.
What do you want, he says, and Kabuto, who doesn't even look at him, replies, We always ask others the questions we want to ask ourselves.
Gaara has very little interest in verbal byplay. What do I want, then, he snaps. He expects Kabuto to make something up, something slightly off from true, the way you can't quite judge distance from dune to dune.
To sleep, perchance to dream, Kabuto quips. He still hasn't looked up from the parchment he's holding, but the smile is visible anyway, some tiny movement of his mouth that comes and goes like the shimmer of invisible heat off sunbaked asphalt.
The worst thing you can do when you're trapped in a sandstorm is to try and make your way home; it's too easy to lose your way when there are no visible landmarks, when you can't even see your own feet in front of you. Gaara, who has lived his entire life in Sand, knows this. He says nothing in response.