Part two of five. Reviews are appreciated.
xx
"I hate you!" Gaara screams, fists shaking, face twisted something ugly. He grabs the sides of the chair and throws it into the fridge; it bounces off and crashes to the floor, where one of the legs splinters. The heel of his boot comes down on it hard before he stalks into the living room. The crispy brown plant he hasn't watered in a week meets the wall with an unsatisfying shatter.
Lee had been the one who decided to hang up all of the pictures.
There are plenty of them – Lee smiling with his thumb raised to the camera, Gaara staring as if he'd rather sit through a three-hour traffic jam than pose pleasantly for the click of the shutter. The outside of their apartment complex covered with snow, Lee whooping and cheering after he won the sledding race with Naruto, who stands to the side grinning good-naturedly and holding an old wooden toboggan. Gaara actually smiling for once, a wry, thin-lipped gesture as he sits on a beach blanket just a few yards up from the summer waves with a towel around his shoulders.
It's another universe.
Breathing heavily, the redhead feels pumped with adrenaline, as if he's just consumed a gallon of coffee, or as if he's just stumbled over the edge of a cliff. He winds back an arm and punches the first picture adorning the wall. Ignoring the pain, he bombards the opposite wall with the other two, and they shatter to the floor.
Shards of the glass frame embed themselves in his skin and later, the doctor would say he's lucky none of the lacerations became infected.
Instead of screaming again he snarls, the low raw noise of a predatory animal stalking to kill. His throat is unused to the strain and quickly feels scratched and irritated. Murder plagues his mind; he doesn't care what, or whom, but he needs a way to transfer this torture onto someone else, onto anything else.
He breaks three plates and rips the phone from the wall and tears out the hairs from his head. A neighbour complains about the noise.
The pain doesn't even begin to fade.
x
Gaara bursts through the front doors of the hospital, trembling. Papers around the welcome desk go flying as he knocks them off, shoving people aside.
"Why couldn't you save him?!" he seethes at the frightened secretary in little more than a whisper, the low volume of his voice detracting naught from its hostility. The secretary takes one look at the fire in his eyes before her chair rolls back, and her fingers move to press something on the underside of the desk. He imagines her head crushed to bits, crimson blood spurting through the severed jugular, blood and brains flying in streamers and cascading like party confetti down the walls, on the empty chairs, splattering heads of the panicking orderlies. It wouldn't be a fit enough punishment.
"It's all your fault!" He is shaking too much to stand.
A pink-haired nurse escorts him to a private room until he calms down, and Naruto arrives to take him home, mentioning only once they're on the road that he's lucky nobody glimpsed the sharpened kitchen knife Gaara'd hidden in his coat.
x
Fury is easy to feel. The hatred blinds him, consumes him, swallows him whole, and he relishes in being able to feel something.
His fingernails leave deep red welts on his shoulders, the backs of his arms, over the organ clenching and twisting in his chest.
With a choked cough and a hiccough Gaara kneels to the floor among the shattered glass and the torn pictures, not even noticing the wetness drying on his cheeks.