So sorry for the long wait, but unfortunately real life takes priority over FF for me…switching topics, because the Shukaku was sealed into Gaara when Karura was still pregnant with him, that would make her a jinchūriki as well (at least in my mind) and subject to certain changes. Again, the name Takeo taken from ncfan's stories. Please review!
Timeline: set shortly after Takeo died, approximately twelve years after The Only Thing.
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
When Takeo first saw Karura in the afterlife, she was sitting under a Joshua tree, singing the old songs of the desert. The melodies twisted and wove themselves around her, brought to life by the rough tones of her familiar voice. They tugged at his heart, even though he had sworn to himself after her death that his heart was his own, no-one else's (because even though he would never admit it, Karura's death at his hands, however indirectly, had crushed him). He had missed her, too much for his own good, too much for anyone's. The feeling of her hand in his own, the radiance of her smile, her simple beauty at the end of the day. He had recognized her from a distance, unmistakable appearance calling to him like a beacon. Her huge black iron war fan was lying next to her in the grass (though at this, something struck an odd chord in his mind, because he knew Temari carried that fan). Familiar golden hair fell just over her shoulders, bringing to his mind the days before the sealing, when she still went outside, was still allowed outside. Her skin was still tanned, unstained with blood. Her voice was just as lovely as it had always been when she was singing to their children, not the cursing, broken, scream he had last heard it as. Then, she turned to him, and her appearance changed.
As Karura looked up at him, he saw in her eyes the savage bright-gold and curved black diamonds of the mad desert spirit Shukaku's eyes. There was blood running from her mouth, fresh red blood that smelled of copper and death, staining red the space in between her pointed, feral teeth. Her fingers were tipped with long, jagged claws, torn and gory from a vicious fight. Her arms shifted, freeing themselves from the heavy, constraining robes, and he realized she was painfully thin, bones jutting out of her wrists and shoulders like spears, shifting under the skin, rolling in their sockets. Her skin was covered in the rough, dark, seal-pattern and patches of drying blood, black-red like the ground of an old battlefield. She moved on all fours across the ground in between them, still singing, but with a harsher voice now, the song shifting to something infinitely darker and more threatening.
Tendrils of sand wove up from the ground, caressing her broken skin like gentle hands. Her head swung his way, dripping blood in a foul arc on the ground, and the sand moved with it, rushing and folding over itself as it moved in waves over the browning grass, bringing death with it as it moved. He refused to move backwards (it was just sand, just sand, he had lived in the desert all his life, there was no way it could hurt him), even as his feet were caught up and it began to crawl up his ankles. As it coiled around his knees, tightening and painfully compressing the joints, he reached for a kunai-
Only to find that all his weapons were gone, snatched away by fingers of sand long before he'd ever thought of reaching for them. She tilted her head upward, lips twisted in a sick parody of the smile he'd loved as she stood, closer now, close enough for him to see the freckles spattered across her face. Reaching out for him, she brushed his face with clawed fingers even as he tried to recoil, held in place by the crushing sand. And as she hissed her song of betrayal, he heard words snarled in the melody.
Now truly knowing what you have wrought, O Takeo, son of the desert, you shall suffer as I suffered.