A/N: Well. For all those who, with hope in their hearts, added this to their alerts, rejoice. :)
I'm not going to be working on it consistently, alas. I would like to, but I don't have a ton of ideas. In fact, this chapter here was written almost entirely by my good and amazingly talented friend, Emi. Unfortunately, she has apparently taken herself from the fanfiction world, claiming she will not write it anymore, removing a huge amount of talent from our lives and throwing me into despair. Thus, where this story was going to be a collaboration between us, I'll be continuing on my own. :(
Still. Since reading to-love-is-to-lie's amazing fanfic SecondGuess, I've rather been in the mood to write one of my own. And since the next chapter of Obsession is in-transit, you might say…
Well. We can hope.
Also, I'm going to do something which, if you know my writing, is incredibly amazing for me. I'm going to break canon, and with no good explanation, either. That's right, ladies and gents. (Do any gents ever read this?) Gaara is fifteen and heading off to the Chûnin Exams to be murderous. Did the earlier exam never take place? Did it just not include Orochimaru's famous plot? Who knows. At this point, not me. XD
So without further ado, enjoy this beautiful chapter barely written by me. (I proofread it, and added my own parts here and there. XD) Don't look too eagerly for the next one, because I don't know when it's coming. (Although I have started it!)
(Holy smokes, it's possible that author's note is longer than the chapter… XDDD Btw, DISCLAIMER! I don't own Naruto, Gaara, etc. Psh. I sort of have a claim to Sunako… and the rest of them? THEY'RE MINE NOW. MWAHAHAHAHAH. *bricked*)
-/-
The rage set the chakra roiling, like tendrils of flame, hither-thither through my keirakukei. Had I grown any better what he'd taught me, I might have set the doorknob aglow with energy.
But I'd stopped trying to bring my father back long, long ago. I was so badly out of practice in the techniques he'd patiently sought to teach me that they weren't even worth mentioning. Just another way I've shamed him, I guess.
And a further one was the anger I felt towards my mother at any given time—ever.
But it was hard not to be infuriated by her high, wheedling voice that was more of a controlled screech than anything at all. I was coming into an age where my vista sharpened as the blur of innocence fell away, and nothing was harder than accepting the precarious world I lived in. Perhaps because I was being taught to kill, the desire to kill everything around me was never far from the surface of my conscious. In the pressure cooker of my still-developing mind, only the bare bones of lessons could be understood, and there's one thing that stood out in every single one I was gradually beginning to retain: Killing and death, killing and death, train yourself to be the only one left…
Nobody will hold my hand: I have to walk on my own feet, even if somebody slits the tendons of my ankles. This was a time of great confusion, not just in my body but in my mental realm as well—and because anger is the only thing that not eroded by tribulation, I was brimming over with it.
They took my parents from me.
That would have been so easy to use as an outlet for my fury. They took my parents. That left revenge. But who was they? A sandstorm. A natural disaster that killed one parent and took the other almost as thoroughly.
So at that moment, my anger was directed less at the unfairness of my situation and more towards the overweight woman oozing across a mismatched pile of moth-eaten cushions. In fact, it was more the exhaustive smile on her face that I hated so. (I didn't have to turn around to know that it was there; it always was.)
With idiot inanity, the woman gazed lovingly at the back of her daughter's head, as though nothing outside the walls of the house went wrong—as though I were still a child, and love had replaced the entire existence of hatred.
"Where are you going, swee-tie?"
I flexed the muscles in my hands, which were already aching crazily from clenching the doorknob. She always said it that way, with a near glottal stop after 'swee.' It nearly drove me crazy, but I never said as much.
Because my mother had already taken that drive.
"I'm going to training with the rest of my team," I stated, not turning around. "Just like I do every day."
"Ah, my little girl's already so big! Tell me it hasn't been so long since you graduated the Academy…"
"It's been three years, Mom."
I remember exactly how many years, months, and days it had been since that very ceremony. It had been the last time my mother had left the house, and some memories were worth savoring.
Sometimes, they were all you had left.
That accursed smile grew even wider; if I hadn't known any better, and hadn't loved that woman for some strange reason, I'd probably have taken it upon myself to wipe it right off that decrepit hag's mug.
I may have called her 'Mom,' but that lump of collective chain-smoking and chocolate-bingeing was no mother of mine. I had lost her a long time ago—lost her in the desert sands between Suna and Konoha, shortly after a platoon of Sand-nin had disappeared into the funnel of a sandstorm.
"…Mmmm," Anego said, her ever-sagging mouth jerking further up at the corners. "Well, you go off then, honey. Your father would be so proud of the kunoichi you're becoming…"
The hope in her eyes was something I couldn't bring myself to crush—no matter how angry I got at her. There was so much knowing in them, and yet she managed to know nothing at all about the world outside these (relatively) safe four walls.
That was easy, I suppose, if you never set foot outside of them.
"Pick me up some cigarettes on your way home. And, Sunako?"
I perked slightly. She didn't use my name too much, just her irritating endearments.
"I love you, Sunako. I love you more than life, my precious girl. Do you know that?"
I think I blinked a few times at the bare wooden door in front of me before closing my eyes tightly.
"Yes, Mom," I said, and gave the sweaty knob in my hand a turn. The mellow warmth of summer encompassed me suddenly, so different against my skin than the iced-over insanity that permeated our home.
I used to know.
-/-
The fronds gave a whisper, a mere whisper, and she knew. Not a half an instant and the charcoal-haired girl's hands were recoiling to her sides, fingers splayed and receiving the ends of kunai. They spun madly once, twice, in her hands, and then zoomed towards the disturbance. I didn't feel the tip of the knife slit my sleeve and draw a thin, bleeding line across my arm—that's how fast they flew, like quicksilver bullets into the all-encompassing forest.
That forest seems perpetually trying to swallow me.
Konan Eiji is everything I can never hope to be. She's also my best friend, even when we're on the training field. I was lucky to have her on my team, since, of course, the standard squad was two boys and one girl, but she got nervous when the guys outnumbered the girls. A disadvantage in battle, but the Academy had taken pity on her… for now.
"Daaaaamn…" came her husky voice as she rearranged herself, fisting a hand against her hip and flipping the thick hair into her eyes. (She liked it covering one side of her face, and in the back it fell past her shoulder blades in a night-colored curtain. Eiji has beautiful hair, and even though she never takes care of it, it's always beautiful.)
"I thought for sure you were Raiyo-kun, trying to sneak up on me again. That boy just never learns, I swear…"
"Eating kunai knives is a lesson most people usually retain," I said, grinning. "Raiyo's just stupid."
No, it wasn't just small talk: Raiyo was an idiot, any way you looked at it. If he made it to Chûnin, it'd be a miracle. No—that he'd made it to Genin was a miracle. It wasn't that Raiyo lacked that crucial ability to age twenty years on a mission and can his boyishness; frankly, he was a no-talent. I guess he'd learned it from the best, though. He'd die early, and making fun of it eased the pain we knew we'd feel when he did.
Let me explain quickly: We are Cell 14, made up of me, Izari Sunako, as well as Konan Eiji and Shueshi Raiyo. Eiji is a tried-and-true kunoichi with a talent for using a wooden bouken (and kunai, as you've seen). Raiyo… Well, you also read about that. We just keep him around for comic relief. And me… I'm trailing along somewhere behind Eiji in the skills area, still moving my sand and still craving the desert.
Still harboring latent fury.
Our Sensei is another story, and that's what we speak of next.
"So, what's the plan for today?"
"Aruno-sensei says he's taking us on another mission."
"Let me guess…"
"Yep. Your favorite rank."
"URRGH!" I shrieked, shutting my eyes and tilting my head backwards. "HOW are we supposed to become decent Shinobi when all we do is shovel dog crap or pull somebody's weeds!"
"It gets better," Eiji said, her knife-blade smile stretching. "He's got an announcement to make, which I already found out about. What event's coming up that everyone's all in a tizzy about?"
I love that about her: She never discloses information or tells me anything straight. She's subtle and so in every way a ninja that I can hardly stand it. She hardly ever expresses anything besides her usual, cool attitude or condescension, and she doesn't worry about anything relating to her physical appearance. I'd give my left arm to be able to swallow emotions the way she does.
"Chûnin exams?"
"Yep."
"No," I said, shaking my head slowly.
"Yep," she just answered back.
"…Hold my hair back while I throw up. Is he NUTS?"
"I mean, really… Keeping us on D-ranked missions isn't teaching us anything, especially if he's going to ship us off to the Chûnin Exams in two weeks. It's just poor strategy," Eiji noted calmly, sliding her thumb nail between her front teeth. It's her only bad habit, and she does it when she's thinking. "We've hardly seen a C-rank, and it's been almost three years."
I didn't know what to say; I was still stunned that Aruno-sensei would do something so… so non-clingy. It's not that he values or appreciates us, or that he's enough of a shinobi to even handle himself let alone three Genin, but his stupidity surprised me this time. It's not like we're too inexperienced for those kinds of missions—hell, we could take a B-rank if we were offered one—but Aruno-sensei is holding us back. It just further stifles my unpracticed abilities, and remembering it just irritated the less-than-optimistic disposition I'd left the house with.
"Oh, and speak of the devil—"
I was wishing Eiji would pull out her kunai again, because here he came in all his glory just then, flouncing through the shrubbery and grinning, as usual, like a madman. A rather disenchanted-looking Raiyo was being dragged along by the elbow behind him. Yes, here he was: Naoto Aruno, my squad's 'captain.'
"Gooood morning, girls!" he piped, and I felt some of that rage that I'd been letting simmer since the morning's conversation with my mother bubble back up. Yuck, I remember thinking.
"Shalom," Eiji greeted, gazing dispassionately at the pair.
Of course, Raiyo perked up the minute he saw Eiji. He's been madly in love with her since antiquity, and although he has sense enough not to openly show it, we girls have a way of knowing these things. Eiji's never said anything substantial about the subject, or given any indication that she even cares about the whole thing. So Raiyo's love remains unrequited, and something to laugh at when I'm about to lose my mind.
Aruno-sensei was still smiling (like always) as he shoved forward a stack of forms, stapled together and labeled at the tops in faded blue mimeograph, "KONAN EIJI" and "IZARI SUNAKO."
"These are your permission slips for the Chûnin Exams coming up. Aren't you excited? I know I am!"
Sheesh. What kind of Jōnin shows outward emotions? I averted my gaze to the lovestruck Raiyo and took my papers wordlessly. Eiji reverently folded them in her hands and gave them a once-over, having not even looked over at our male teammate.
"Risking our lives and dragging Raiyo along for a five-day cut-throat vacation… Yeah, sounds like a regular carnival," my friend murmured, still browsing the first few indistinct lines of print.
"Now, now—cheer up, you! I have every confidence that you're going to mop the floor with this test as one cell! You can become everything you want to be, Eiji, only if you try!"
If at first you don't succeed…
And that was the first time I looked into my sensei's ever-grinning face and saw something that looked just the same as when I looked into my mother's. Something profoundly missing, and something in those teal eyes that made them seem a thin curtain, hardly disguising the mass of shattered sanity behind it. I saw that voice as faintly masking the caws of inner demons, and his façade of cheerfulness for what it really was—a façade.
It was the first time I ever wondered if, instead of him guiding us, we were his students so that we could guide him to something,
But I was blind as to what it was—and so was Raiyo. That left Eiji, and she probably had figured this all out ages ago. If I had to grasp a hand in any darkness, it would be hers.
And nobody would want me to guide them through their blindness.
-/-
"Otouto-chan…"
The breezes screaming over the balcony were whispering of hell, and although Temari wasn't scared of much, this nighttime stinking of Halloween really gave her the spooks. How he stood it, she wouldn't ever know—
Oh, wait. She did.
He was so still she wondered if the gusts had carried her voice away, and she called again, louder this time, but still soft and fearful, like a kitten's mew.
"Otouto-chan… You should come in. It's getting cold out."
Gripping the opening edges of her yukata, Temari narrowed her eyes. Only further silence greeted her, until at last he stood and moved past her—so slowly it was almost arcane, and yet so quickly that she nearly gasped aloud. It was all she could do most of the time to not sense the bloodlust, even if she could control her reactions when others were watching.
At their hermitage of a home, she was just Gaara's sister—and he was just a lonely shell of something waiting to be, making eyes with his personal demons and the conflicting information everyone he'd ever cared about had dealt him.
Down the hall he slumped, not to sleep or to watch the dunes any longer. Temari shut the sliding door and stalked down the hall in padded socks back to her own room. Gaara listened to her go, until the rustlings of her futon ceased and only easy breaths filled the sandstone home.
It was a light sandstorm outside, but inside of Gaara's head, it was a full-on desert hurricane. And something had lead him to watch the swirls of silt outside, to lie in wait for something he could feel desperately wanted to return to his desolate land.
He was thinking of, long ago, a little girl who had been able to move sand like him—or almost like him, not as well. And how many people would die by his hand at the approaching Chûnin Exams.
-/-
A/N: Also! Contest. :) http:/ameko-shadowsong(dot)deviantart(dot)com/journal/22063061/
