A/N: Comments, even if they're just a simple "You're awesome!" or something are very much appreciated.
A History of Grief
by Pridefall
Demons knew the price of power; were instilled with a small amount of it at birth and given a desperate, psychotic need to acquire more and more of it throughout their lives until there was nothing left for them to hoard to themselves except the ashes of the fallen and the brief, fleeting moments in time that allowed them to stand tall, and proud, and beautiful.
Shukaku remembers when he was beautiful. Remembers in the darkness of the night, when the black-shelled insects and lizards tip-toe across the earth and the moon hung over the world like a great, luminescent tear in the universe, and burrows further and further down into the cooling earth to think long and hard about they who thought otherwise.
---
And this one smiled like the sun, wandering the desert like a lowely sirocco across the sands while innocently searching for something he was missing; and this one cried like a wolf without her cub at the moon that did not care, finding something she would never want to find again in the darkness and vanishing into the jaws of unforgiving desert like a drop of water cast into the sun.
And this one had a laugh like a warm breeze, soft and easy and pure, while this one had a fury like a dark tempest, deep and black and foreboding, his words harsh like grinding stones and his eyes shining with so much hatred that he--
"Give her back!"
Was taken, just like the rest.
--
Power was a disgusting, twisted thing. It corrupted everything it touched without qualm or compromise, and demons craved it like the sweetest of all ambrosias -- treating those who had it with equal amounts respect and envy while treating those who did not have if as if they were toothless misers clutching forlornly at the first and last piece of gold they ever unearthed from a vein that dried up too soon, too late, for them.
These demons were consumed first, allowed to swell up with as much power as they could handle before they were split open and devoured like ripened fruit, their dreams and their desires for greatness spilling out into the world like the innards of a carcass left out too long in the sun.
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And this one never saw it coming, and this one stood, dumb-founded, as his hands broke and his chest caved in seemingly of its own accord.
And this one laughed like a mad child, and this one wept like a scorned lover, and this one stood tall in defiance while the sands slithered up his legs and this one ran for his life, screaming into the jaws of the inevitable. Each one sought to live their life as they saw fit, and each one died, as they all did, eventually, because everything was committed back to the earth, in time.
Shukaku is the earth.
---
Hierarchies amongst the demons are enforced through millennia of murder. Crude, wholly tyrannical empires are carved out from the land and built on the backs of the fallen, and though humans were much the same -- screaming, dying, and bleeding that same beautiful dark and thick hue -- they each tasted different from one other as if, somehow, even though they looked the same on the outside they were all different on the inside, and this…This bothered Shukaku.
Demons had no set form; no gender or species that unified them under one banner. They were each unique in their different interpretations of chaos and anarchy, so what made humans, so rigid and static in the grand scheme of things, so special?
If you cut them both, did they not bleed the same blood?
---
And this one weathered the storm but faltered at the last moment, and this one had a solid plan but poorer form, and this one tried to trick him into weakness and failed.
And this one thought suave words and mortal tricks would prevail, and this one was hungry; so very hungry as to think to challenge him, and when he won, she smiled a soft, sad smile and said "Devour me, my love", and he did, from her feet to her skull, he did, just as she would have wanted him to.
Yes, just as she would have wanted to.
Everything comes back to Earth, in time
--
Shukaku memories are like an ever-flowing river. He can pick them apart easily, swimming through the morass of the ages and moving from moment to moment like a silverfish cutting through a stream, and this, he believes, gives him a certain amount of humanity his brethern demons do not have.
Shukaku remembers things.
Shukaku memorizes things.
He knows that which other demons will never want to know; knows that which other demons will never come to know, and he keeps these relics of remembrance sacred, because as demon he knows the future better than he knows the past, and realized earlier than most that all that has come to be was decided long, long ago.
---
And this one tasted of fire, of sacrifices and sweat and ash and the things that separated men from children and warriors from killers. He knew when to scream, knew when to fight and when to run, and rallied his people against the monster that threatened their homeland like any good hero would have in his place. They fought for years, pushing each other back and forth across the desert until it came down to the man, the demon, and the final stroke to end it all.
"For all of those who have died by your hand, you die now, you monster!"
And Shukaku took the man's head off at the jaw, because where heroes stupidly went for monster's heart, monsters went for hero's neck and let history sort out the glorious details.
There was no room for anything else.
---
He is older than the earth and the sun and stars, and all of the upstart demons who think they are more powerful than he, but he is also tired. He has watched the ages come and go like slowly tumbling rocks down a cliff-face; has seen the changing fetishes of his kin and partaken in their politics; in their scheming and their ever-changing whimsies. He has rhymed with them, he has danced with them, he has butchered and eaten and proclaimed bloody, immortal fealty to them during war while making love with them during peace, and now...
Now, he is old.
---
Everything back to the earth, in time. Break down, and blossom.
---
Now, nothing makes sense, and he digs down deeper into the earth, his muscles groaning and aching like severed limbs, and Shukaku sleeps, and Shukaku forgets.
---
And this one, yes, this one who once that looked at him with wide, innocent eyes before the ground opened up beneath him and swallowed him whole, who now looked at him and expected him to cower, this one he needed, but now something was different.
Now, now this one was important, but he was not his and would never be his.
---
Gaara dreams, sometimes, of things he does not understand. Of formless, dark things that whisper to him in his sleep and claw at him when he is awake; of a hunger for…something more than sand and death and blood, but when he wakes…When he sits up in his bed, screaming out Naruto's name as the heat of his orgasm causes Shukaku's sand to crystallize around him, he forgets of these things, and slowly falls back to sleep again.
---
No, he would never be his.
- Fin