Somehow, their whispers never reached him…
He heard them all. Pity. Despair. Encouragement. Support. Tears.
Yet he saw them as well, and he forgot their words and stared at their eyes which were all curiously not the eyes he wished to be looking in to.
Side-long glances. 'I don't think he's going to get better…'
Closed eyes and a sighing mouth. 'I don't know what else to do.'
Eyes filled with tears and the mouth wobbling. 'I miss him too!'
Blank, dim eyes and a slack face. 'I can't believe he's gone…'
Tightly squeezed eyes and a painfully strained smile. 'Everything's going to be okay… Soon! Everything will return to normal…'
Pointless. No one said what their expressions showed like a mirror would show a reflection.
He stared blankly at all of them. All of their mouths moving and spouting pointless things, yet none of them had the gull to meet his eyes.
None of them had his lips either. All of them; from full to thin lipped. Each their own shade of pink. None of them his.
He felt cheated.
Hands reached out to him. Tan hands; pale hands; dirty hands; clean hands; short fingers; long fingers; awkward fingers; graceful fingers. Decorated with rings; decorated with leather; decorated with nothing. None of them with the attributes he was unknowingly looking for.
Now he knew he was being cheated.
None of them touched him. He would no let them touch him. It was nonsensical to let them touch him when touch had led him to this downfall. When words and the lips that had spoken those words and the eyes that had expressed each word spoken by those lips had led to here and now.
He wasn't going to let them touch him. He would not listen to them. He did not want to see them.
Hands tried to reach him anyway. Words were flung about as if they were important and faces more tried to catch his face and make it seem as if everything was alright.
He was beginning to hate them.
He was gone. His! His! His! His own was gone! His friend, his ally, his companion, his partner, his lover. Gone! His!
A finger just brushed the air close to his sleeve. He snarled and heard a scream of surprise and pain. He saw sand and blood. He heard pleas and threats, but their words were garbled and slurred in his ears. He heard the tone of them. He knew both well.
He took himself from them. He could see the mouth that had spoken clear words bent down into a disapproving frown and large black orbs flickering with displeasure.
He wanted those eyes and lips to smile at him again.
Alone. Completely. Irrevocably. No one would follow him here to his domain where he ruled supreme and they -no more than prey to him now- could not even enter without his knowledge.
He would be merciless upon them. They were intelligent to realize that.
His eyes closed -slowly, softly, for fear of what he would see when he would see nothing at all- and saw him behind his closed lids.
His smile was so bright, his eyes alight with excitement and adoration and love. "Gaara-kun!"
His eyes turned slightly away. There was a flush of red to his cheeks and yet his lips were turned so softly up. It revealed an entirely different person from the one he had come to know; this one shy and uncertain in contradiction of who he had been when loud and boisterous. "I think… No! I know that…"
His eyes, so fiercely determined and his lips so tightly pressed. His fist was held high to his chest over his heart and shook slightly with how he gripped his fingers so tightly to his palm. There was indeed red and orange flamed dancing in the backdrop of his onyx eyes. "I am deeply, madly, and unmistakably in love with you,…"
His head was thrown back against scarlet linen blankets, his throat marked with claret bruises and marred by teeth marks. His hands, even now wound with pristine white bandage wrappings, tear into those same scarlet linen blankets. His hips are arched up and his body -beautiful, deathly, His, His, His!- is pushing back onto him. "Gaara! Gaara! GaaraGaaraGaara!…"
Yes; he had made his lover call out his name because it sounded so right falling from those oddly shaped and fully plump lips.
He looked at his hand. Flawless, actually. Not even a callous on his fingertips despite the weapons he had come to handle and the pens and pencils he had come to hold. The sand smoothed away each rough patch of his skin.
His hands had been different. Scarred from fingertip to his entire body; his knuckles were clubbed and his fingers thick and nearly graceless with their knobby features. That had made them beautiful. How imperfect they had been had made him watch them constantly. Each time he were to suppose they would move jerkily or twitch indignantly- upon occasion, even drop or be careless-, they would be elegant in their movement and agile in their speed.
They had not been agile when they had needed to be. They had not been elegant when they should have been.
He was dead. Ashes to the wind and the wind to the four corners of the earth and the earth continued to move on it's orbit that continued to circulate in ovals around the sun which was only a small aspect of the universe entirely.
He was alone in this grief. Everyone else in the world continued as their birthday was celebrated; their weddings attended; their days ending, beginning; their life going, stopping, loved, hated.
No one else was such as he.
Abandoned. Again. This time, the matter had been completely out of his grasp; beyond his third eye and far beyond the sands of the desert. In that way, he was the most to blame.
He should have been there. There was no way to cleanse himself of this mistake as he had with other mistakes. This was a debt that could not be repaid; a deed undone. In return for harassing the people of Suna, he had ruled them with a firm, yet gently hand that had willed them to live lives they had never known in this generation and the last. For those of Konoha he had harmed, he had saved each in turn. For those he had killed unjustly, he killed another with a just cause in mind.
There was no way to save himself this time. There was no way to 'kiss and make up' as he had once said.
Who would he 'kiss and make up' with? None of them…
Broken… Abandoned… Forsaken… Deserted…. Desolate…
A wildness rose in the back of his mind, coloring his thoughts crimson.
Inane… Maddening… Cracked… Insane… Crazy… Demented… Manic…
He screamed… Maybe, perhaps; he was not entirely certain if the sound he thought he heard came from his own throat. What he knew was that it went on for hours -or maybe only minutes? Certainly not seconds…. When the howls of pain and rage and terror and heartbreak finally died, his throat was suspiciously sore and his eyes curiously watery.
It could explain many things.
Hands grabbed him again. They pulled at his shoulders and lifted his legs. He snarled -bucked, tore, bit, scratched- and they carried him still. It was a last thought as to why the sands of the desert did not kill them instantaneously.
Honestly, he did not care. He wanted their blood beneath his own nails; staining his own teeth and flowing down his throat. He wanted their red life caked on his bare skin!
How dare they take him away! How dare they take him away! These filthy bastards and their god complexes!
He saw blonde hair and blue eyes and his hand clawed at them. They were not black with a glossy life shining in them. They had no tight looking at him.
They strapped him to a bed with seals on the chain-like ropes; they left him in a sterile white room where he could not even detect a door much less see it.
He shat and pissed into bags and threw their food back at them.
They should all die. Not his own, not his lover, ally, companion, partner, friend, companion.
He snarled and spittle ran down his chin. He glared and the edge of madness in his eyes warded them away. He only stared and he could smell their fear cloaking the air.
He simply did not care.
They took away the only part of him that cared. Onto them, the hell they had driven out of him.
I was listening to an AMV by AikiMaiAkaneSu, 'GaaLee- (no longer)Quiet mind'. So I wrote this! After the first day, however, the creative juices dwindled… I am still proud, though.
Do I own Naruto or its characters? Has Gaara and Lee smooched each other off? If the second is no, so is the first. (Thus far…)