bequeath
by tovanell
Karura and Shukaku, as they wait for her to die and Gaara to be born.
.
She feels dirty, unclean, and no matter how much she washes and bathes and scrubs until her skin is raw, she still feels like there's something disgusting clinging to her. She can feel grains of hard, gritty sand everywhere on her, inside of her, but there's never anything there when she looks and it drives her mad.
She wants to tear at her stomach with her hands; wants to grab a sword, a kunai and carve out that thing from inside of her, then bury it, burn it, anything to destroy it so she won't ever see it, feel it again.
It's impossible, though, because there are ANBU watching over her every second of the day, making sure she doesn't get hurt, making sure she doesn't hurt herself, and, in turn, the thing she carries inside of her.
The thing.
In another time and place, another life, it would have been her son. It would have been her third child, Temari and Kankurou's little brother, and she would have been able to watch him grow up, become a strong shinobi like his father, or maybe a medic-nin like his mother and his uncle? She would ask Temari to take care of him, scold Kankurou for teasing him, and tell both of them to protect him.
But not this life.
Karura can't call it her son, because she can't love it. It hurts too much, to know the little boy she carries won't be human, but monster, demon, weapon for her husband and Sunagakure and nothing more. She has seen the previous host, a filthy, skinny girl with wild eyes and an insane, bloodthirsty grin, coated in blood and transformed into a grotesque mix of human and Shukaku.
A monster.
That is what this child is going to be.
She can't call it her son, because she couldn't protect it, couldn't prevent its fate and how could she call herself a mother when she let her child be damned like this?
.
.
When she falls asleep, there is darkness at first. Then the feeling of falling, of something dragging her down and down, deeper into the dark and she feels like she's been consumed by something.
The blackness gives away to gold and she would find herself on an endless stretch of desert, with the sky a black, lightless void but still everything is clear as if it is board daylight. It's always cold like the desert night and sand whips and flies all around her, even though there's no wind.
It is here Karura meets Shukaku, because she carries its jinchuuriki inside of her and she is the chakra that powers the seal separating boy and demon. The three of them are connected, though strangely there is only her with an un-bloated, un-pregnant abdomen, the demon and the glass panel between them that represents the seal. The boy is no where in sight and never shows up.
But it's a good thing he doesn't show up, because Karura isn't sure what she would do if she ever saw him.
The demon is surprisingly talkative and cheerful, yet there's something sadistic and twisted and insane underneath it all. His smile is too wide and full of fangs, and his laugh is shrill and harsh and sends chills up her spine. Sometimes he taps on the glass panel. With each tap, it feels like her head is being pried open with a kunai and she would scream in pain, collapsing onto the sand and clutching her aching head, while he watches with cruel amusement in his yellow-speckled eyes.
The meetings with the demon are nerve-wreaking. They scare her and disgust her and sometimes when she has the energy, she's filled with hated and loathing at the demon, at his vessel, at herself and the world. But she welcomes these feelings, because it's a relief to feel something – she's been numb and empty for months after she had cried the last of her tears and felt the last of her grief.
.
.
It was the Kazekage that named Temari and Kankurou. Temari was named after his long dead mother; Kankurou after the puppeteer uncle that took him in when both his parents died.
Karura gets the honor of naming their third child.
There's less than two months left, and she still hasn't decided on a name. This is mostly because she doesn't care. The boy has been just 'the boy', 'him', and when she's feeling more resentful than usual, 'it' or 'that thing'. She can't imagine him as a real, human child, one that will run and play and laugh with his siblings.
Instead, all she sees is the image of the previous host, the girl that became a monster. This is what her son is going to be, a monster, inhuman, and whenever Karura thinks about that fact, her already shattered heart somehow shatters into a million more tiny pieces.
She simply can't think of him as a boy, as her son. She reduces him to nothing, and there is no sense naming nothing.
"Then name him Nothing, name him Worthless," Shukaku says, a vicious smirk on his face. "Kaimu. Kainashi. Kudaranai. Fugainai. The list goes on."
Demons are born into the world knowing their names, their titles, their purpose. The Ichibi, Demon of the Sands. Shukaku is just a name humans gave him, one that amused him and he kept. No human will ever know his real name.
It doesn't matter to him if his latest host gets a name or not. His last host went insane and forgot her own name, believing herself to be Shukaku or an extension of the demon, and Shukaku went along with it. The other humans don't care either – what are important are Shukaku and his powers, not the container.
'Nothing' and 'Worthless', Shukaku thinks, are very fitting names.
.
.
"You are so weak and useless it's disgusting," the demon tanuki sneers at her one day. "I hope your brat won't inherit that from you."
"Wouldn't he be easier to control if he were?" She replies after a while, processing what he had told her.
"It would, but where's the fun in that?" Shukaku shrugs. "I want him to put up a fight, so I can break him down, little by little. I'll tear up his mind and his heart; all the while he suffers from you humans and comes to realize the world has nothing to offer him. He'll break, and he'll come crawling to me, giving in and giving me is heart and soul and I will get to watch it all happen. There will be nothing more satisfying."
He's grinning again, eyes gleaming with sadism at the thought, and a suffocating, bone-chilling evil chakra spreads through the air. It's hard to breathe and Karura gasps for air as she hugs herself, trying to stop herself from shivering.
"Wouldn't you want to see your son like that? Wouldn't you want to see him suffer like he made you suffer?" Shukaku asks, lowering his head to watch her closely.
"I don't care. He isn't my son," Karura says, still hugging herself. She's staring at the ground in from of her, refusing to look up at the demon. "You can do whatever you what to him."
"So cold! He would be devastated to know what an ice-cold bitch his mother was." Shukaku says, chuckling.
"But you're lying," he continues. "You do care. You still love the little whelp." He sneers the word 'love' like it's something repulsive.
Shukaku is a demon, and he knows nothing but malice and hatred and bloodlust and sometimes maybe even fear. But he has lived thousands of years and in two previous human host and knows exactly how humans works; how they grow, how they live, how they feel, how they break, how they die.
He watches the woman and her lies and many conflicting emotions, and how she attempts to protect herself and her child by distancing herself, and thinks humans are pathetic.
.
.
In Suna, love meant duty and pride, and Suna shinobi should only ever feel it for their village. Love and protect Suna; there was nothing better, nothing more important than that.
Karura, like the good little kunoichi she was raised to be, had loved and swore to do anything for the village.
She had let Suna take her father - who was a council member and cared everything for the village and nothing for his family - and pretended not to care when he forgot her name. She had Suna take her mother – who was often off on missions and the rare times she was home, she was usually drunk – and pretended to be proud when her mother died a hero for her village.
She had cared for four years younger Yashamaru, acting like a mother instead of a sister, because their parents were nonexistent and didn't care. She had taught him everything she knew, and gave Suna another medic-nin to help in the war.
She had studied hard and tried to be a good ninja and medic-nin, and gave the village her abilities, time and effort to save her fellow comrades, only for them to be sent out to their deaths soon afterwards. She had tried not to feel upset when she stitch up body parts of nine-year-old genin for their funerals, or prepare rape kits for kunoichi younger than her; and told herself that all of it was for the good of Suna.
She had married her husband, because he is a good shinobi, strong and powerful, loyal to his village and reliable, and supported him when he became Kazekage. She had given up her career to have children, a strong little girl and a healthy little boy, and gave them up to be ninja for Sunagakure because what else could they be?
And now, she is giving her last gifts to Suna: her third child and life, to give her husband and the village a monster and weapon.
But Karura's tired of always giving, of sacrificing herself and everything she has for a village that takes and takes and takes, until she has nothing else left to give. Locked inside a cell and having less than a month left to live, she's tired and resentful and spends her days waiting to die.
.
.
It's when she sees Temari and Kankurou for the last time, when her children cry goodbye to her without quite understanding that they will never see their mother again, when the guards tear them away from her and leaves her sobbing tears – tears she didn't know she had left – on the floor of her prison, that something inside her breaks, then burns like the desert sun.
(It was for Temari and Kankurou that she sacrificed her body, her life, so they won't have to be turned into a jinchuuriki. They can't take them away from her, because they are the only things she has left.)
All she sees is red and she can taste the bitterness of something like blood at the back of her throat. It's then that Karura gives up her delusions of loving Suna, of caring for anything, and gives in to the rage and hatred and hopelessness.
She doesn't have much love for anything anymore, because love was meaningless and nonexistence to her now.
Somewhere inside of her, Shukaku laughs.
.
.
For the first time in months, Karura feels alive.
Even since the day she found out Suna was going to create a jinchuuriki, ever since the day she gave her third child in exchange for Temari's and Kankurou protection from becoming hosts and seal her own fate, life had taken on a surreal nature. Nothing felt real anymore, certainly not her or her life. She drifted through the days, feeling like she was in a dream, dead-like and no energy at all. There were brief fits and episodes, moments when she suddenly felt inexplicably angry and destroyed anything she could get her hands on, or when she felt overwhelming disgust and scrub herself raw in the bath, but they vanish as fast as they came and she fell back into resignation.
But now, here's the anger again – once fleeting and inexplicable, dismissed as hysteria; now it's undying and a constant inferno in her veins, and she knows without a doubt it's directed at Sunagakure no Sato.
Anger…hate… Something to feel, something to think and wish for, and this lets her keep on living, if only for a short while. She feels restless, feels like a bomb about to explode; she's itching to move and do something, something destructive, and this is the best she has felt in a long time.
She hates Suna, for what they have done to her, for what they have took from her, and she wants nothing more than revenge, to see the Kazekage's efforts in saving Suna to be in vain, to see Suna be destroyed.
She's weak, though. She haven't been in a battle, haven't on a mission in years. She's stuck, barefoot and pregnant in a cell, ANBU watching her every move. Her chakra's being drained out and she's dying. She can't do anything to Suna, not when she's so pathetically weak and useless right now.
But it doesn't have to be her.
It doesn't have to be her, for she has unimaginable power right here in her womb. How fitting it would be to have her revenge be carried out by the child, how fitting it would be to have Suna's own jinchuuriki crush Sunagakure to the ground.
The Kazekage wanted a demon and a demon she will give.
.
.
Two weeks before the predicted date. She's moved to a hospital room, and she lies in bed all day, too weak to do anything.
Yashamaru stays with her day and night. They don't talk, because there is nothing to say. All Yashamaru does is hold her hand, and they both sit in silence.
A week before, her brother breaks the silence and asks if she has come up with a name. The Kazekage's growing impatient, and he's ready to name the boy himself.
It is Karura's right, though, the Kazekage gave it to her himself, and until she dies and still doesn't give a name, the he can't do anything.
Unfortunately for the Kazekage, she has a name. No; curse would be more fitting. And if the boy lives up to it, then there much, much more misfortune in store for the Kazekage and Suna.
She whispers it to Yashamaru.
.
.
When she goes into labor, Karura slips into a coma. She had expected it. Right now, she's only hours away from death.
Sand thrashes and whips around across the desert of her mind. Yet where she and Shukaku is standing, there is only calm space.
"Here to say goodbye, woman?" Shukaku asks, in a twisted cheerful way. He's excited – there's death and chaos up ahead. Already he can smell the blood that will be there, when the jinchuuriki is ripped out.
Karura doesn't answer him.
"They will use him," Karura says instead. "They will use him like they have used me; use him until he's nothing more than an empty shell."
And once they finish using him, once they decide he's useless. They'll toss him aside. Monster, after all.
The boy isn't her son. She tried to convince herself over and over again, yet the thought of him being treated like trash, after all she had gone through to have him, after all he will go through in his own life…
Somehow, it hurts. Hurts like when she saw Temari and Kankurou leave the cell and she knew she will never hold Kankurou in her arms again, or kiss Temari's little forehead.
You still love the little whelp
She doesn't. She can't.
"Of course," Shukaku snorts. "Can't believe you only see it now."
"You will use him too." She says.
The demon shrugs. "I won't deny that."
But the demon is inside of him for life. He has a vested interest in keeping him alive.
Ironically, Shukaku will be more trustworthy than any human the boy will know.
"I want him to live," Karura says. "They will try to kill him one day. I know it. I can't let that happen, not after what they did to us."
Her fists clench.
There is bitterness and rage, and the storm around them intensifies.
Karura closes her eyes.
"I've named him." She says. "Gaara. A self loving carnage."
Love (even if it was the Suna brand of love, and that was the only type of love she knew) had ruined her, betrayed her. The same will be taught to Gaara, but she won't let what happened to her happen to him.
A demon that loves only himself. Loves only himself, fight only for himself. He is all he can depend on, and then, surely, he can survive.
"I want him to live." Karura says, voice harsh and sharp. "I want his existence to continue, even after Suna doesn't want him. I want him to be able to let out his anger and hatred at Suna, do what I wasn't able to do. I want him to be a reminder of my grief and grudge towards this village, and I want the Kazekage and his people to never forget."
Shukaku savors her raw, intense emotions, loving the sudden burst of power and energy that comes with it, loving the bloodlust that's underlying everything.
He grins.
"And you want me to help him with that." He says. His eyes glint with something cruel and feral.
The price of making a deal with a demon is you and everything you are.
Karura doesn't care. She herself had died long ago. She had already given her chakra, her life. Whatever was left, Shukaku could take.
"Yes." Karura says.
"Protect Gaara." She requests. "Protect him from Suna, from himself, from anything that could harm him. At the least…make sure he lives."
She can't bring herself to love him. It's dangerous and it hurts already too much.
The only thing she can offer is to protect him.
Shukaku's high pitched laughter fills the air and sand invades their calm space, thrashing against Karura, blinding her.
"I'll protect him," the beast promises, and he laughs again.
end
A/N:
I wanted to write a story concerning Gaara's mom. Something about her life, what she was like - mostly just to explore the reasons on why she would leave her son with a gruesome name and purpose. If she had decided Gaara would survive and be better off loving no one and depending only on himself, then she must have believe that herself.
Shukaku being present was not planned, but I had thought, why not? It would be an interesting twist, having her be able to interact with the demon that is sealed into her son. Naruto had both his mom and dad inside of him, and it was implied they interacted with the kyuubi, so I decided Karura should too. He was definitely fun to write.
I also worked in the reason why the sand would always automatically protect Gaara. It was hinted in the series that Gaara was unique for having this trait, as the other jinchuuriki before him didn't. Yashamaru said it was his mother's will; general opinion is that Shukaku wants to protect its vessel. Why not both?