Disclaimer: Kishimoto Masashi owns Naruto. I'm just playing. :3
Note: With all my drabbles, it really is up to you whether or not the word and definition have any value within the drabble itself.I don't actually start with either.
Word Count: 480
Benign: Gentle disposition; harmless.
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For as long as he can clearly recall, there has always been this other presence within him. It is constant in his life: a parasitic entity feeding off his psyche and murmuring horrible things to his ears from within.
At first it was, he thinks, not quite quiet per se, but not so overpoweringly tempting. As a child, during the brief moments of his life that he could call himself such, grey didn't exist. Black and white defined morality in the sharpest sense. Hurting others was wrong – Yashamaru had taught him so.
In those days it was easy to ignore shukaku's whispering demands. For example: suffocating to death children that feared him wasn't right. His five year old self knew that and could easily laugh off the psychotic suggestions.
However, after that day, something changed. It wasn't so much that the black and white bled together, but rather, they disappeared, only to be replaced with foreign colours, shapes, and patterns. To discover that the only living person in his world that professed to love him in actuality hated him was more than just a catalyst; it was the destruction. It happened instantaneously that night, like waking up one morning and suddenly finding the sky beneath your feet and the earth rising high above your head, with your eyes on you back and your limbs sprouted from you face.
No longer could he believe what he had always thought. If Yashamaru lied about loving him – what else had he lied about? Nothing learned from his uncle could be trusted, and so Gaara had fallen back on the only other thing he could: the demon inside himself and the mother that would always be with him. He etched love into his skin that night. If he couldn't receive it from someone else, he could give it to himself. He could wear it where everyone else could see, and perhaps that would be enough…
Unfortunately that night he had also lost his centre. He didn't have a grounding point anymore, and he didn't have a basis for anything. Without question, almost, he believed everything shukaku told him, and shukaku became his centre; his sun as it were.
Shukaku taught him many things over the years – and still does occasionally. Although mostly, shukaku taught him what his existence meant. Death. He was born through it, his love saw only it, and it was what he needed.
Shukaku also taught him his only duty: serve mother.
It was through these teachings that Gaara was able to understand the world that existed outside his own. "That place" was created just for him to test himself. It was only in that place that he could come alive. It was only there that he could kill, that he could rip from the delicate, sinuous human vessels and organs the blood that mother demanded. Love.
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