An idea that's been toying with my mental facilities for a while, begging to be written. Don't ask – Gaara is a twisted being.
Plot Explanation: This is an introspective exercise in description, more poetry than prose - although I chose to keep it prose, it worked out better this way - so I chose not to work a concrete plot it. Set post-Chuunin exams, but just barely; Temari and Kankuro have gotten to know their brother a little, to understand Gaara a bit more, just when he flips out and does this. To put it simply, Gaara escaped his siblings - who realized something was amiss as soon as Gaara started staring at things for long spaces of time and refused to answer them - kidnapped a guy, tied him up in the bathroom . . . and you can read from there. Rated for blood and gore. Warning – blood and gore!
Bleed For Me
It was bad.
Gaara didn't care.
He felt empty, fascinated. A vessel which the world flowed through, not touching him, not impacting him. Time was a waterfall, moments unbreakable and deathly calm as they flowed away. His emotions drowned in them.
What was left was the intense desire to look at things, to study every detail of this bright world, whose noises rose and died a world away from him. Empty – untouchable. To look upon your siblings' pain and concern and fear, and feel only blank rapture for their exquisitely expressive faces.
Passive.
As if the world fell through him.
And he feels their hands upon him, hears their voices; things that come to him from the sunlight and the darkness and the shades of fading, burning color. The smell of freshly washed hair, the smooth scent of mint still lingering on the strands as desperate arms wrap around him. The firm hand about his wrist, pulling him from here to there, moving to his shoulder, shaking him.
But these things fall through him, too. They do not touch, they do not make impact. They might as well not exist.
He never answers.
Time does not skip by here, but lingers slowly, drawing out a breath as one might smooth a cloth to its widest length.
Time is the warmth trailing down his hand, beading at the tips. Time is the tightness on his skin as it dries, the red paths bringing each etched imperfection of his skin into a focus sharp and fine. Time is the blood welling in the torn cliffs of opened skin, spilling over rough edges into the smoother regions of unmarked flesh.
One line, slow, slow, down the arm.
Cross-legged on the floor before his friend, Gaara pulls the blade down, carving into skin. There is no reaction from the man hanging, upside down and tightly tied, from the ceiling's central beam. His head and shoulders rest upon the floor, crumpled against it; in this heightened state, where every speck and line screams to Gaara's vision, the man's hair seems like a tumbled froth of black. His arms are tanned and well-defined, the skin clinging tightly to the muscles. His face is ruddy, the eyes bruised and dark.
He had passed out two hours ago.
Gaara does not miss the screams; raw and jagged sounds that had stabbed at him, passed through him, violence to air. They had sank into the background, weakening to hoarse and fragile sounds as the light dimmed slowly into dusk. Gaara had noticed, faintly and without interest, that they had died completely not long after he had flipped on the bathroom lights.
Now these lights glared down at the man, bleak and merciless.
The blood and the shorn clothing and the long wicked knife, and Gaara's stained small hand, all thrown into surreal and sharp relief. The lines of torn skin, precise and fine, tracing down arms and chest and abdomen, and up the arms again. Wrists tied to knees, red and bruised where the cords bit into the flesh. Blood seeping down the body as a soft gauze, as a crimson sheen.
The seductive scent of iron, borne on flat and windless air.
The whisper of parting skin.
The rise and fall of breath, a gentle, yet rough, sound; inhalation; exhalation; in tandem, prey and predator.
He withdrew the blade, and brought it to him, both he and it slick and wet. A thin sharp tip, dimmed by crimson, dripping. Gaara watched the blood bloom along the blade's edge, swelling til gravity claimed its own; and the droplets fell, smashed onto the floor to lie gleaming on the tile.
He leaned forward, raised the blade, sank the tip into the skin, a calculated inch from the previous line. Slowly, with methodical care, he drew the knife down, down, down, watching as the skin was sliced away from itself, two lovers parting, a bridge of blood pouring down to drown their tragedy.
Again, the knife pulls back, lilts up; and liquid, warm and thin, seeps down his fingers, thumb, and wrist, beading on his skin.
It is here, in this moment, that he exists. As the demon stirs and turns within the fragile structure of his body, the slow pink pink pink pink of falling blood sings a paean to reality.
I am. I am.
The beauty of death's creeping pallor, the beauty of bruises and of blood. Of spit upon the man's parted lips, of unconsciousness and oblivion. What existence is cradled in that skull that rests upon the floor, will wither and flee, severed by the blade. Light to drink the pain, black to shield it.
Morning and midnight of a mind.
A smile spreads across Gaara's lips as the wings of an angel. Wonder blossoms in lost blue eyes and dawns behind the contours of cheek and brow. In this moment, he has purpose, he has reason. It has fallen into his hands, and now, in the cradle of psychosis, in the embrace of nurtured enthrallment of blood and light and slow, slow motions, he exists.
He does.
Please, he thinks, touching the blade once more to flesh, bleed for me.
Thank you for reading - what do you think?