It suddenly occurs to me, I haven't done anything on Kankuro in a while. In fact, my archive of Kankuro oneshots is rather pathetic, to be honest; I don't think I've ever done something before that features just him. This will be the first.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
He was never quite one thing or the other. Just when people tacked one label onto him, that label flew off and another became applicable, shifting endlessly like the sands. But there was one name that never changed, no matter how much he changed and the sands shifted around him.
They called yokarasu, the night crow. Less commonly, they called him the Soulless One. It fit into all his roles, no matter how diverse or divergent.
Kankuro had committed his first murder before Temari or even Gaara. He had been nine years old, still pudgy with baby fat despite his hard, even brutal training.
The other boy had tracked him down into a dark alley way as Kankuro was hurrying home from training with Chiyo-sama. The shadows had begun to grow long in their daily cycle of lengthening and contracting, and the boy facing him was a thirteen-year-old genin holding a kunai and an insane gleam in his eyes.
His father had died on a mission Kankuro's father had sent him on, and the boy wanted to repay the Yondaime Kazekage in kind. Revenge was the only thing on his mind, making him so reckless, so stupid.
The genin flung a kunai, which Kankuro caught in his open hand. The boy didn't notice that Kankuro's hand wasn't bleeding.
Kankuro drew a puppet snake with five tenuous chakra strings that flickered in and out, the clear sign that his training hadn't progressed far enough to form chakra strings that were steady and reliable.
The genin laughed and didn't even flinch when the bamboo snake rocketed forward. It was a toy used to frighten people, a favorite amongst students of puppetry. What the genin didn't know was that Kankuro had recently added an addition to his toy: fangs. He somehow maintained the smile and the laugh on his face as he convulsed for the one hundred and eighty seconds it took for the poison on the fangs that struck his ankle to kill him.
By the time Kankuro was fourteen, he was the Sand's greatest assassin. An ANBU agent was a clumsy oaf in comparison to the teenage boy, who traipsed in plain view yet always remained out of sight. His catty smile and cool feline steps carried no weight in the sand, disappearing like all impermanent things that had no meaning.
A report of a strange death would come in, of a healthy man dying suddenly in his bed, or of a shinobi falling from his roof, and even though there would be no proof, no trace of poisons present in the bloodstream nor any bruises on the surface of the skin, whenever someone died without reason, there was no doubt in anyone's minds that yokarasu had struck again.
Only the stupid, the ignorant or the foreigners ever assumed that Kankuro, like most puppet masters, his soft, pliant skin beneath his enveloping clothes. Under shifting, rustling folds of black that grimaced and puckered like it had a mind of its own, there was hard muscle, scar-bitten skin. One ridge of flesh from a kunai strike that came just before he was able to cast the killing blow, a mark that looked like a red birthmark in fact the result of sand scouring, a hazard for any shinobi traveling in a sandstorm.
They had tried to label Kankuro, those people who couldn't accept that some things were as changeable as the surface of the desert landscape, as constantly waxing and waning as the desert moon.
They called him shinobi. What they didn't realize that calling Kankuro a shinobi was like calling a scorpion an insect. They both had natures so alien from what they were compared to that it simply did not fit. Kankuro was what a shinobi would never be, a haunting shadow.
They called him soft. Anyone who did that ended up dead, and Kankuro was often left to wonder why he was wasting his effort on someone who had gotten it so drastically wrong.
Even the title of puppet master didn't quite mesh with what Kankuro was. Kankuro's puppets were always at his side, but those who were killed by him got the sense, just at the moment when they were dying, that he hadn't needed those puppets to kill them, that he could have done it any other way, that he simply could have enveloped them into his shadows and they would become the skeleton with no name.
In the end, only yokarasu clung to him as his shadows did—an epithet, a title, a persona all its own. Where Kankuro walked, shadows followed him, shadows that writhed, shrieked, cursed, wailed and swirled around his feet like a path into the abyss, shadows that did as they were told.
He was more subtle than his sister, the Wind Mistress, who toppled mountains. He was more terrifying than his brother, the sand's only true child. Gaara they feared, Kankuro they dreamt of, saw in the shadows and ultimately dreaded in the waking hours as well. Kankuro inspired fear without ever having to be in the presence of those who feared him, something Gaara had never been able to do.
Yokarasu. The Sand's greatest assassin, the man whom many believed to be nothing but sand and dust beneath the folds of black and shrouds of shadow. Kankuro, the wielder of puppets, puppet master of the Murasaki sect whom no one had ever been able been able to pin down, label, or banish their fear of.
A shinobi looked up at night, and saw a black shape fly out of a window, gracefully as though gravity did not apply to it. It leapt the roofs, formless and shifting, a black deeper than the night around it in the darkness of the new moon.
Within a moment, it was gone, and all that was left was the shadows that the shinobi now realized weren't empty anymore.
Yokarasu had claimed another prisoner to its shadow, and the authorities would know what house to look in for the body when the morning came.