Title: Shifting Sands
By: Alysilita
Summary: Sand flows down, and down and down. It's a thread, a rope, a river. Gaara sleeps, and dreams of the shifting sand.
A/N: This is a redux of an old piece, I re-did it because I decided that writing it in 2nd person was a stupid idea. So I swapped it to 3rd which is easier to write in. Anyway, I'm 100% up to date with with manga as of today, I read 682 chapters in a week and 2 days. And out of the whole thing, Gaara's background and Infinite Tsukuyomi dream broke my heart. Seriously.
Gaara couldn't sleep
He sat down on the bed before spending some time selecting a comfortable (or at the very least a semi-comfortable) position to lie in. However, one of the ones that he had tried to far seemed natural to have and, over all, he was pretty sure the he'd exhausted all the possibilities, even when including pillows into the equation. He picked one position at random and then closed his eyes. Waiting. Waiting for something, anything, to happen. He tried switching positions whenever he felt particularly uncomfortable. He tried staying completely still. He tried light covers, heavy covers, and even no covers at all.
But nothing seemed to work. At some point late at night, or early in the morning, Gaara managed to doze of for a short while. This short sleep was only broken by him being jolted awake, body rigid, heart pounding unnaturally, eyes circling wildly with a certain idea that something terrible was about to happeb. It took several seconds before he remember that he wasn't in the middle of a battle, that Shukaku isn't loose, that Shukaku isn't devouring his personality. That Shukaku isn't a part of him any longer.
He looks over, checking the hourglass by his bedside and is bothered by how little time he spent sleeping and, often, by how much time there is before morning. Closing his eyes again, he waits for the next shock of awakening whenever it might hit him.
If it were up to him, he wouldn't bother. He just wouldn't sleep at all. Like he had live beforehand. However, without Shukaku to constantly enhance his chakra, sleep is once again a biological necessity. Without Shukaku, the effects of sleep deprivation— exhaustion, irritability, headaches, body aches, slowed reactions, lapses in concentration, hallucinations— are no longer physiological background noise. Unimportant to his being and easy to ignore. Now they interfere with his ability to perform as Kazekage.
At first he tries experimenting with fake sleep jutsu, but then all his aids suddenly aquire urgent missions that all begin at the same time. The crack of dawn. He asks Kankuro to come in and slap him awake in the morning. And while his brother seemed rather happy to oblige, Gaara finds that the synthetic sleep he'd been assulting himself with not only drained his chakra but also made him more tired than he had been the previous night before. So he abbandons that idea.
Deciding to go to Sakura to request sleeping pills, the redhead was dismayed to find himself denied.
"Anything that is strong enough to know you out will more than likely affect his efficiency if Suna was attacked in the middle of the night," Sakura points out.
Gaara reluctantly agrees but doesn't go away empty handed. Sakura advises applying lavender oil to his pillow, hoping that would work. It doesn't. Gaara, as it turns out, is allergic to lavender.
After disposing of the pillowcase and everything it touched, Gaara goes to the person he thinks he should have asked first: Naruto. It wasn't because he thinks Naruto has ever had insomnia, or anything along those lines. But, mainly, because Naruto is his touchstone.
Considering Gaara's question, Naruto scratches at his whisker-marks tumbling over answered in his head.
"Maybe you're not tired enough. Why don't you train with Gai and Lee in the evenings? I'll go too. And then we can get ramen afterward!"
Gaara thinks that this is, typically, a rather excellent idea of Naruto's. As Kazekage, and especially with Shukaku gone, he felt the need to get stronger anyway. Supposedly invulnerable defense or not, it was a quite the terrible oversight that he was never once taught taijutsu beforehand. It was an oversighed he's been meaning to correct for a while now.
It doesn't work. Gaara gets stronger and in the brief time they have together before Naruto leaves with the rest of the Konoha group, he even develops a taste for ramen. But he still can't sleep. Even after the rigorous he subjected to with Gai and Lee.
After a particularly lengthy night of sleeplessness, he eventually descends upon his brother at the crack of dawn. Somewhat to Gaara's regret, he isn't early enough to wake Kankuro up, but he does catch him putting on his 'makeup'.
"Fake sleep jutsu didn't work then?" Kankuro asked even though he knew the answer.
Gaara shakes his head.
Kankuro outlines his left eye, then his right. Gaara looks over his shoulder. Two pale, shock-haired, raccoon-eyed faces hover beside each other in the mirror.
"Well, personally," Kankuro says almost absentmindedly. "That is… well… it's sometimes relaxing to…"
"Yes?"
"Think about someone you like a lot. And."
"And?"
Kankuro's face is no longer pale, but as scarlet as the second-most poisonous type of desert scorpion. It's a striking effect. Gaara thinks that his brother has just found his next new look.
"Take a hot bath."
"Think about someone I like, and take a hot bath?" Gaara repeats, wondering if he's missing some sort of essential context.
Kankuro's suggestion seemed logical enough so Gaara kept it in mind but it still felt odd. Almost as odd as Naruto's parting suggestion of countring imaginery tadpoles. Either way, that night the young redhead tries his brothers idea. Contemplating over the 'someone I like' idea, his minds thinks about Kankuro, Temari, Naruto, and even Sand village as a whole. As a sleep aid, it works about as well as the tadpoles.
Eventually Gaara makes headway with Temari, who also, apprarently, was prone to insomnia.
She rattles off remedies like a set of holy scriptures:
"Drink a glass of warm milk. Train in the afternoon— not in the evening— then meditate for half an hour before you go to bed. Take a hot bath. Drink a cup of herbal tea with honey. Imagine something peaceful. Don't keep checking the hourglass, that'll only make you obsess about how long it's taking to fall asleep, and that's probably the worst thing you can do. Wrap yourself in a blanket and drink a mug of cocoa. Leave your windows open so you get a breeze. Or close them if the wind is too noisy."
"Temari. How can these all help you sleep?" Gaara asked, unknowingly perplexed. "What do they have in common?"
"They're relaxing, or comforting," she explains. "Of course, not everyone is comforted by the same thing. Say, you don't still have that old teddy-bear you used to carry around all the time, do you? Because maybe— uh, never mind, forget I said that."
"I don't still have the teddy-bear," the redhead replies.
"Right. I didn't think you would," Temari laces her fingers together and cracks her knuckles. "Look, Gaara, this might take a while. Just try one thing at a time, and sooner or later you'll figure out what works for you. Because like I said not everyone is comforted by the same thing."
Ignoring everybody's advice, that night Gaara heads to be with no advanced preperation and stretches out, watching the shifting sand pour through the hourglass on his bedside table.
Truthfully, he has no idea what "relaxing" or "comforting" mean to him. He knows what it means to other people. For Naruto it's a bowl of ramen. For Lee, it's five hundred push-ups (though he seriously doubt that could be considered relaxing).
The sand continues to trickle slowly through the glass, forming an ever-shifting hill at the bottom. It seems as if the top is as full as when he first turned it over, but by morning it will be empty again. Before, there was an unceasing emptiness inside of Gaara. He tried to fill it with blood. However, it was like pouring water into a sieve: it was only full as long as you kept pouring. And he couldn't keep it up forever and it was slowly breaking him. But then he met Naruto. After that he began devoting as much energy to keeping other people alive as he formerly had to killing them. He hadn't imagined that he would ever feel whole; it just seemed like the right thing to do. He wasn't quite whole again, maybe one day, but as of that moment he felt just that little less hollow. Now his life has meaning.
The sand keeps pouring down, and Gaara then realises that he doesn't feel hollow at all. Had that happened after he'd chosen to protect the village at the cost of his own life? When he'd been alone on the barren plain, and Naruto had called him back with a hand on his shoulder? When he'd opened his eyes on the grassy field, and seen everyone who'd come running to save him? Or had it been this last week, when he'd gone to the people he cared about to ask for their help, and they'd automatically given him their best, albeit useless, advice?
Sand grains bounce at the bottom of the glass. Gaara decides something. That at the end it really doesn't matter. He's whole now. No matter how long it took. If it took him that long to feel whole again and if it takes him years to learn how to sleep, then in time, he'll manage it. After all he'd already mastered more difficult lessons before. In time, he'll master this one.
Sand flows down, and down and down. It's a thread, a rope, a river.
Gaara sleeps, and dreams of the shifting sand.
A/N: So, I hope you liked it. Mistakes will be fixed at a later date. As of now, fave and review. Thanks for reading :D