Cities of the Dead
Part II: Sunagakure
By Insomniac Owl
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In a place like Sunagakure, they have to be especially careful with their dead. Each windstorm would uncover hundreds of bodies if they didn't take precautions, but the nets and weights keep them underground in all but the worst weather. Even so, more and more people are choosing to be cremated. This doesn't bother Gaara. He knows it should - centuries of tradition and all that – but it's getting crowded underground. They've started burying people on top of one another, because no one wants to travel to a graveyard miles away in the desert, and it's getting crowded. He can tell. At night, when he lets his mind wander, he can feel the bodies stacked on top of one another, feel their dissatisfaction.
Even the dead need space. They have their own lives down there, with the sand packed in around them, and they can't fit many more bodies. The limits of their city only stretch as far as Sunagakure's, but there are more and more dead people every year, and the number of living stays relatively constant. But they've been dissatisfied for a long time. Gaara knows this. It's getting too crowded down there, and the situation won't get any better.
Too many people are dying.
Eventually, something will break.
This is just a silly, romantic vision of his, but he has the idea they're waiting for a sandstorm, one that will blow and blow and leave them exposed for the first time in years. The desert is an excellent preserver of corpses; once exposed they'll will look much as they had in life, except their skin will have vacuum-sealed itself across their bones, stretched paper-thin over joints and the places where muscles used to be.
When that happens they'll open dry, perfectly preserved eyelids to reveal perfectly empty sockets, and breathe sighs of relief. Then, and only then, will Gaara feel that all of his people are satisfied.
end.