:Prologue:
Those eyes.
Ice blue. Like glaciers of a cold, alien planet. They were so pale his victims saw a reflection of themselves in them, of what they had done—or not done—to create the monstrosity before them.
They were cold, heartless, the eyes of a psychopath. Inside burned the scorching intensity of brutality and hatred. A fervent passion lay restrained underneath the ocean of blood. A passion to spread the suffering wrought upon him.
The abomination who soaks the sands with blood, the atrocity who harnesses the monster lost in the eons of chaos…
Gaara of the Desert.
It had not always been like this. There was a time when the sands shielded him with maternal protectiveness, the days when a light shone through the pain, the light of an uncle's smile. There was a time when his small hands carried the attempt to make amends to an unexplainably harsh world.
Shattered were those brief days. Where a dim light first appeared at the end of the tunnel, it turned out to be the unforgiving, unsurpassable scorch of the sun, a nova that consumed every particle of his soul.
Scattered in those ashes, a soul was reborn. There came the understanding of true loneliness, and how that intangible blessing kept slipping through his cursed fingers, that blessing called love.
A/N: Bleh, this is going to have to do. I haven't published anything here in freaking forever, so I decided that maybe it's about time. I had originally planned to upload this story when I had finished it, but I realized I'm going to need some extrinsic motivation. I started this story for NaNoWriMo in November, so you could say I've been working on it for a while. I'd say that ninety percent of it is complete, so I'm going to update about once a week (probably on a Friday or Saturday).
Thank you so much to Friglit, my beta reader for this story, for her innumerable patience and hard work consider she's a uni student and all. She has a GaaraxOC story as well, and I am very much indebted to her.