Authors Note:
Hey! Sorry for not uploading in a while but I just want to say I'm really proud of this chapter and I really think it's one of the best in the fic. I really hope you enjoy it.
Also, in the interest of communication, I just want to lay out what's going to happen with the fic over the next few weeks. There's still some "backstory" chapters I need to go through but these chapters will be significantly more important to the lore and story of the fic than this Gaara one has been (Which is saying a lot because this chapter specifically is one of main thematic showcases of the Chunin Exams as well as the whole fic).
To map out a quick timeline, the next few chapters will look like this:
Gaara Epilogue chapter Interlude Chapter (Both of these will be short, almost bonus-like chapters so don't worry, I'm not gonna put another 10,000 words into the lore of Suna. One of these will most likely be uploaded by the end of the week) Two Parter focusing on Hiruzen Final Round starts
Thanks for reading!
Gaara of the Desert sat calmly cross-legged on the seemingly endless sand dune that made up his mindscape. The sun hung high in the air, weaving threads of heat between his messy red locks. A white scarf hung from his neck while a crimson coat wrapped around his body. This was the one and only set of clothes he'd taken a liking to after that fateful night.
Realistically, the sweltering heat should have at least phased Gaara but the boy hardly noticed it. His attention was better focused on bigger things. Those bigger things were sat right in front of him and conveniently enough, went by a name.
Shukaku, the One-Tailed Tanuki.
It looked like something out of an expressionist painting, the two sitting across from each other with a complete disregard for the size-disparity of a young boy and a giant monster. Gaara's posture was rigid and cold, the boy crossing his legs and folding his fingers into each other. Shukaku, in stark contrast, lounged about himself like one would when bored at home. His massive frame rolled and bounced as he shifted once more into a lazy sprawl, resting his head on his paw as he watched over the space in front of him.
What was the space in front of him exactly? It was a shogi board, pieces and board not made out of wood but sand. Gaara took one of the grainy pieces, noting the darker, hardened grains that had inked the character of the bishop. After a few seconds of contemplation (which, if you judged by how fast Shukaku started impatiently thumping his foot, may have seemed like a few hours), Gaara gently slid the granular chip across the board and took Shukaku's knight piece. Due to the nature of the board, the knight exploded into sand before quickly reforming at Gaara's side (in his "taken" pile, of course, where it was only one of many pieces).
"Aggressive. That's unlike you." The beast noted, with a sense of humor in his voice.
Gaara looked back up at him, a disinterested frown gracing his lips. The dark patches around his eyes existed for as long as he'd been alive, but, under the magnifying lens of the sunlight, there was no mistake that it was beginning to worsen. Thin, inky black rings had started to transform into a splotchy gradient of gradually worsening greys.
Suddenly, the sand in front of them began to shift. Whereas the board had previously been the exact same size as a regular shogi board would be to Gaara, it had ballooned into a large-scale replica with pieces that towered over the boy himself. The ground beneath him began to retract backward in order to accommodate this enlarged board, taking Gaara out of the way for the moment.
Shukaku's beady eyes danced over the different pieces, hand floating over them in deep thought. There was no sign of his usual informality in the way he moved his hand, fingers stilted in cerebral contemplation. After a few seconds worth of thinking and humming, Shukaku grabbed his rook and slid it to two spaces to the side. Before he knew it, Gaara was once again looking over a regular-sized shogi board. He slid a lance forward, offering protection to his king piece.
"You forget how to speak or something kid, what's up with you today?" Shukaku asked, as the board enlarged itself once more.
Gaara gritted his teeth. Had the beast gave in and let him sleep, perhaps he would be a little bit chattier but, considering he could most likely count the words he'd said in the last week on one hand, maybe that was a lie.
"I find our conversations tiresome. I do not want to be here." Gaara said, masking any emotion in his voice with a resonant dullness.
There was still a certain amount of levity that clung to his voice, but it was residual, echoes of happier times and happier memories.
"Turning into a blunt little fucker, aren't ya'? Not like your pa. That's a guy with a silver tongue." Shukaku rambled, as the board shrunk itself once more. "Been a while since I've seen him."
This Gaara could relate to. Unfortunately for him, Shukaku did not seem particularly interested in anything more than having a wall to prattle off to.
"Been a while since I've seen anything actually. Do people still use the monité, or is it all ryo now? Seems like it would be, even the language is fucking dead, so I don't even want to think about the coins- "
In the months that had passed since they began interacting, his tolerance for Shukaku's neurotic rambling had steadily declined. The only reason these interactions were even vaguely consistent was due to the potential for the beast to let slip any, even the slightest information about their current situation. Unfortunately for Gaara, Shukaku seemed more intent to brainlessly reminisce about an old Suna that had been dead for decades then actually tell him anything useful. Without a word, Gaara stood up and began to walk away from the board
Watching the young boy trudge away from him, Shukaku let out a loud snort and began to giggle to himself.
"Man, you're such a sore loser. You knew I was gonna check you, I'd been setting you up the whole game!" He yelled.
Considering how few pieces he'd actually managed to take, Gaara would have disputed this if he actually cared. He marched a good distance away from Shukaku, grains clinging to the soles of his shoes, before slouching into a cross-legged position against the hot sand.
"Oh, does baby need his nap-time?" Shukaku jeered, his sandy features contorting into a beast-like grin. "One day, I swear, one day, whatever janitor-ass deity is protecting you is gonna slip up and I am going to pick you up by your scrawny chicken legs and toss you around this place like a fucking football, ya hear me?!"
Gaara felt little worry at the threats as his body decomposed into grains. Shukaku had made it incredibly apparent over the last few months that, due to the apparent sentience of Gaara's sand, he could do little to actually harm his host. At least, directly.
Shukaku's anger dissipated to laughter, a shrill, shrieking laughter that echoed through the never-ending desert as if it were a small cube of metal. No matter how secure his seal, Shukaku's voice still found a way to leak into his mind, hushed and frantic in its whispers. Sleep was now a maximizer for his situation as opposed to a refuge, every second of slumber being melded with the feeling of Shukaku's subconscious trickling into his own. On some level, Gaara realized that he'd snap awake at the last moment, that his protection, whatever it was, would pin Shukaku down before he could take control. However, just the thought of being trapped within his own body again made Gaara's nerves tingle in a way very little managed to do nowadays. A wave of weakness rippled through his eyelids, but he shrugged it off.
He had not slept in two months, though Shukaku was hardly the only reason.
Smash!
Case in point.
Wood splattered across the floor as the body of a ninja was thrown through a door. He was wrapped in heavy navy robes that matched the cold darkness of night time Suna. In the shadow, he looked almost invisible, as if his robes had been crafted from the silk of the shade itself. Now, sprawled in the soft blue light of a glass-reflected night sky, he stuck out like a sore thumb. This ninja's name was Saisho Gisei.
"Arrgh." Saisho groaned, pain shooting through his back from the heavy landing.
The long cloth mask he wore fluttered as he sat up, eyes squinting through the night to try and find his target. Luckily, it wasn't that hard. Tiny, lithe footsteps hummed through the hall, echoing Gaara's arrival. He stopped at the doorway, gazing down upon the man with eyes free of anything that resembled emotion. He was used to this, albeit only slightly.
"This is your one chance to escape before he kills you. Take it or don't, it makes no difference to me." He said, with an amount of apathy that should have been far beyond his years.
When Saisho had initially received an offer to assassinate the Kazekage's sun, he'd laughed it off. Not for any moral obligations, but simply because he imagined the job would be nigh-impossible considering the compounds defenses. He'd been swayed by the offer of four million ryo and an explicit promise that there would be no guards on the boy that night, but feeling his back stiffen by the second, he wished he hadn't been.
This is what I get for taking an anonymous job, huh? He thought inwardly.
Suddenly, he reached into his pockets and retrieved two exploding tags. Ink dripped from his hands as he slammed them into the ground, and flattened the tags into flat two-dimension characters on the floorboard. These symbols darted forwards, swerving from the ground to the floor to the roof with little acknowledgment of anything other than the flat surfaces of the room. Their constant movement and flattened characteristics seemingly confused Gaara, who's once stable gaze began darting around the room in an attempt to spot them.
If he had any luck in this task, it was minimal as the tags scurried to his side and burst free from their two-dimensional prison. Streams of ink and smoke flew from their sides as they shot towards Gaara, hoping to graft onto his flesh and blow him to smithereens. Unfortunately, the material they latched upon was not skin but sand with the boy's impenetrable shield circled around him. There was now a sudden urgency in the room, a subliminal ticking running through both Gaara and Saisho's heads as flames began to foretell the tag's detonation.
With an almost audible motion, Gaara's eyes snapped towards Saisho's own. The man, who was already struggling to get up, felt a sudden jolt of fear run through his throat. He knew he shouldn't have been scared of a seven-year-old, but something about the way the darkness swirled around Gaara's gaze sent shivers down his spine.
They were more than justified.
Gaara raised his hand out to the man. The sand around him shot forward, almost like an animal. It wrapped around his body, coating him in a shifting armor of shingle and silt. The tags that rested on the sand continued to burn as the sand absorbed them inward, pressing them up rightupagainst Saisho's struggling form. Gaara cared little for watching this display and walked back into the halls.
Boom!
The sound of the explosion, along with the even more visceral one of flesh and bone breaking under the weight of the blast, resonated through every room in the compound. Gaara did not even spare it his attention, let alone his glance.
A sashaying sound rustled against the floorboards as his sand returned to him. Something about how it looked managed to catch his interest. Veins of blood ran through its beige coloring, puddling up and unclogging themselves as they splattered through the sand. Its exceptional coordination allowed it to flush the blood from its grains, spilling it to the floor. Gaara felt his eyes widen. The sight of this captured him in a way very few things had since he'd learnt of Shukaku. Blood spilling against the ground.
Blood, the substance which keeps one alive, free from the human body. Blood, the matter from which we are birthed, marking a man's death. Blood, the blood of a shinobi, taking by his own hand. For what felt like a minute, Gaara stood looking at the puddles of blood that his sand had flushed. On one level, he was disgusted, more disgusted than he ever had been before. On the other, he felt… excited.
The imposing doors of Rasa's quarters stood silently in the night. They were large and daunting, dark, black wood covered in delicate carvings that puddled up any moonlight sneaking through the windows. Most importantly, however, they were locked. Gaara's knuckles whitened as he raised his knocked against the door frame for what felt like the fiftieth time. He had not seen his father since the night of his mother's death, an absence which was surely intentional by this point. Nevertheless, Gaara continued to knock and knock, each respondent echo and subsequent silence spurning whatever lust for parent love still remained in the boy.
"Gaara?"
A voice called out through the darkness. At first, Gaara's heart bounced thinking it may have been his father. It may as well have flatlined upon seeing that it was only Baki. As his sister's primary teacher, he certainly held Baki in higher regard than most of the nameless ninja that wandered through the compound halls but this did not mean he was particularly pleased to see him.
"What on earth are you doing up at this hour?" Baki asked, marching towards him strictly.
Considering this question was something Gaara had asked himself numerous times over the past few months, he was not particularly enthusiastic about answering it. He simply looked at Baki with a frown.
"I want to see my father."
One of Baki's eyes briefly flickered with what Gaara immediately recognized as pity, but it had already faded away before he could properly react to it.
"He's not here." Baki replied.
Gaara was not satisfied with this answer.
"When will he be back?"
"I don't know. Even if I did, I wouldn't be allowed to tell you."
An eerie blankness came over Gaara's face as he paused. His father wasn't here, that much was probably true. The only question was whether he could hope to get more information out of Baki. The man was held in high regard by his father but he doubted Baki was told much more than your average jonin. Feeling the echoes of fatigue tugging on his back, Gaara decided to end the conversation here.
"I'm tired. I'm going to go to bed." He lied, earning a curt nod from Baki as he walked away.
That was one of the last time's Gaara would ever admit to wanting to see his father though it was far from the last time he knocked on the door.
It was not the earliest glimmers of daylight that trickled through his bedroom window, but the silence of the sandstorms that alerted Gaara to the coming of day. He sat up from his covers and stifled a yawn as he peered down at the village below. His room was on the front half of the compounds top floor, giving him a perfect view of town. The cold of the night still drifted through the air, fogging up his window enough that he had to wipe a finger across it to get a proper view. Small pockets of light bubbled through the waking Village, adding a warm hue to the mess of grey and beige that lay below.
Sand scuttled across the floor, weaving through the gaps in his doorframe and escaping to the hallway. He was becoming more and more proficient with his sand by the day, to the point that it was becoming less and less of a ninja tool and more and more of an extension of his self. It crawled up onto the shadowy depths of the hall's ceiling, transforming into an eye shaped orb. A third eye.
"Aah!" Gaara squeaked, the sudden burst of vision exploding through his left pupil.
He'd practiced the technique enough to know you needed to keep one eye shut, but he had been so focused on controlling the sand without a line of sight that it had slipped his mind. With the stinging sensation still echoing through it, Gaara's left eye fell shut. Its vision was replaced by the sight of the hallway, empty and desolate for the moment. If any of the house-keepers were up, they were occupied, and his siblings were both certainly still asleep (he could literally hear Kankuro's snores and Temari was typically a deep sleeper).
Flushing the chakra connection between him and the eye, Gaara returned to the sight of his bedroom. A mental order sent more sand scurrying into his room, though its arrival was noticeably delayed.
I need somewhere to store it all. Gaara thought, as he watched the sand scuttle across the floor.
As he became more and more reliant on the sand for even basic movements, Gaara had become conscious of leaving it around. Obviously, he couldn't just keep a big pile of sand in his room but on the other, it was becoming more and more irritating to retrieve it from whatever corner of the compound he'd left in. Perhaps he could ask one of the housekeepers for help, or even use those solidification techniques he'd been hearing about.
Speaking of which, the sand darted under his bed and reached up into the discrete hole he'd torn in the bottom of his mattress. Peeking back up, it handed Gaara a large, leather-bound book.
The Contradiction of The Modern-Day Shinobi, by Shamon of the Sand.
It was a book he'd stolen from the compound libraries restricted section a few days ago. He'd been looking for some of The Third Kazekage's works on sand manipulation and stumbled upon this. Considering he was already reading the works of one Kazekage, studying those of one who may have had more of an ideological impact on Suna than anyone else wouldn't hurt. As it turned out, this had been correct.
Gaara's relationship with the position of Kazekage had always been strange. His father was the fourth and his grandfather had been the third. However, these Kazekage were unlike the two who had come before them. Suna's was initially Sabbiah, the capitol of the Land of Wind. Prior to this, Iwa had had complete control over that side of the continent but, with the rise of Jashnisim and religion in general, their powerful "rule of man" ideology was weakened. Sabbiah was the first to split. In the decades after, Iwa's trade policies would segment the land into a number of different sects. Some were concerned with the "weakness" of Orthodox Jashnisim and some thought the Tsuchikage's laws were oppressive against those who didn't identify with Iwa's culture.
This bloody conflict led to the Sabbiah's transformation into Suna. Reto of the Sand, the first Kazekage, began to envision the village as a liberal paradise, where social and economic status was only determined by ones will to work for it. This meant open borders, multiculturalism and little government interference outside of international affairs. Shamon, the second Kazekage, shared this intention, but his view more grounded in reality. He viewed Suna not as a libertarian paradise but a primordial battleground. Those who could adapt to the world were those worthy of surviving whereas those who couldn't perished. This, he said was the true nature of the ninja world.
This "Shamonism" soon became ingrained in every facet of Suna life. Throughout his reign as Kazekage, his iron-willed rule and sharp political instincts ensured that its popularity was never in question but as his cognitive ability began to decline in his old years, so did Shamonism's stability. Suna was far and away the most diverse country on the planet in terms of religion and culture, and now each of those religions and cultures were now split up into tribal sects, all at odds with each other. Something had to give.
Ferro of the Sand was the Third Kazekage, though that name lasted not long at all. With the establishment of the Suna monarchy, Ferro brought an iron-fisted stability to the country's politics and a new regal suffix to naming conventions. "of the sand" became "of the Desert" and Suna's religious diversity was forcibly purged along with it. Despite him claiming to be the true heir to Shamon's empire, a significant number of loyalists decried his self-described "pragmatic Shamonism" as an authoritarian ideology that was only propped up by his silver-tongue. At least, they did until Ferro made it clear that the newfound monarchy had no problem purging unwanted groups from the country.
Most adults struggled to wrap their heads around this history, yet seven-year-old Gaara had begun consuming it much like other children did with infantile entertainment. He'd always been a smart boy, perhaps a little bit too smart. Add full twenty-four-hour days as well as Shukaku's intermittent ramblings onto that and you got a child who was operating years above their expected level of cognitive ability. He'd become smitten with the writings of the Second Kazekage, that he was certain about, but what he was struggling to figure out was why?
This question continued to bounce around Gaara's mind as he turned to his neatly folded page, eyes hungrily running over the words.
"-and it is love, that so many leaders before me have become smitten with. The thesis is not completely alien to me, but just because it is understandable does not make its contradictions any less blatant. The shinobi system is followed by every capitol village on the planet. Every year, new swarms of children are appointed as soldiers and peace-keepers controlled by the state but that is not what surprises me. It is the childish infantilization of comradery that continues to baffle. Other nations are beginning to see the shinobi system as a career path running in conjunction with academia and the arts, instead of the militarized arm of the state it truly is. Once again, it is not the morality of the action I am in question of. It is the contradiction that surrounds that morality.
The ninja world I grew up with was harsh and unforgiving. Shinobi who embraced love were considered weak, not just by their constituents but by the world itself. The ninja world was, and make no mistake, very much still is a jungle. Love is a complex emotion, so complex in fact that it simply cannot exist in the psyche of such a jungle. There are only two laws that matter in the ninja world and those are adaption and survival. To sacrifice those solidified concepts for fragile and frigid bonds is to mock the path of the shinobi and debase one's own instinct.
Snake-oil salesmen like Hashirama Senju may desperately try to cover this reality up, but there is no changing that it is indeed reality, a reality that no safety measure or age requirement can chasten. There is no love in the shinobi world. Love is a weak emotion carried by weak ninja who think their sentiments are so great that they need to be shared with others. Those who love in the ninja world either realize the fruitlessness of their journey or die in a stark misery to the emotion that forsakes them. Once again, shinobi exist in a jungle and they must adapt to their surroundings.
Rely on only the power of yourself and your own will, for a shinobi will forever be shackled to the bidding of the world around them. There simply isn't enough room for anyone else."
The words sent a chill running down Gaara's spine but he'd been cold for far too long to feel it.
Pain, in the context of the ninja world, is no less of a currency than ryo or kono. At the heart of a shinobi is a soldier and at the heart of a soldier is battle. One battles as to avoid many kinds of pain, therefore to feel it is to fail as a shinobi. As stated in a previous chapter, bonds and love are incompatible with the shinobi system precisely because it amplifies the potential for pain so very much. However, to fully solidify this thesis, I will need to properly explain the different models of what we in a contemporary context consider "pain"-
Gaara gripped the edge of the page and folded it neatly before closing the book.
It was time for an experiment.
Closing his fist, Gaara willed his sand to the center of the bedroom. There, it squashed itself into a dense, and most importantly, still sphere. His eyes lingered on it for a few seconds, almost nervous in their gaze, before the boy slammed his arm towards the wall.
Fwoosh!
Before he could even hope to hurt himself, the sand latched onto his arm, its once spherical shape splitting into several strands. Each one had glued itself to the surrounding area, leaving Gaara's arm without even the slightest chance of a successful struggle. Sighing somewhat, he relaxed his arm and sent the sand scuttling back to its original position. For a moment, everything was still…
Then Gaara thrust his arm forth at the wall once more, but yet again the sand was too quick. Luckily, he was able to pull back from the movement quickly enough to render it docile again, but the problem was clear. Gaara wanted to feel physical pain but his sand did not. The rest of the morning was saddled with his gradually escalating experiments of self-harm, Gaara attempting everything in his power to even do as much as stub his toe. By the time noon rolled around, he'd not experienced any pain except the mental frustration entailed by the endeavor.
No matter how far away he left his sand, no matter how little motion he wasted throwing himself at a wall, a convenient receptacle of the stuff always seemed to have wormed its way into his pocket or his hair or even the soles of his shoes. At first, he thought it was Shukaku messing with him but he quickly realized that if Shukaku had somehow managed to claw back control of the sand, the last thing he'd do is stop Gaara from hurting himself. Whatever part of the sand was "protecting him" seemed to have far more consciousness than he'd given it credit for.
The efforts stopped at around twelve, firstly because Gaara realized that the sand was becoming more and more reluctant to leave his side when he ordered it to and secondly because his attempt at locking all of it in one of his father's expensive cabinets lead to a mountain of shredded wood and hysterics from the housekeepers. So, Gaara deduced, he would need to find a different way of experiencing pain than simply experiencing pain.
Now, he'd obviously experienced significant mental trauma over the past few months but his own efforts had yielded mostly physical damage and not much else. He wanted to make someone mad. Really mad.
The compound library was quiet that day. It's carpeted, spacious halls lay empty while billions of words worth of knowledge sat dusty on the shelves. There were only two people in the whole room. One, Kankuro, sat at a rounded table, a stack of books and a stray puppet lying at his side. The other, Gaara, sat at the far end of the room, watching Kankuro with a blank, glossed-over gaze more befitting of a corpse. On the outside, his eyes held nothing but a complete indifference to his sibling, but a peek beneath the outer emerald iris revealed the steady workings of the boy's mind.
Kankuro had been a figure of interest from Gaara in the last few months. As he'd begun to study more and more political philosophy, so had he started to dig into the past of his own family. While he'd always been confused by Kankuro's place in the family, his young, unawakened mind had dismissed it as a lesser concern. How foolish he had been…
Of all the religions in Suna, by far the most persecuted was the Fantocia. While acclaimed in scientific circles for their development and mastery of chakra puppetry, they fared much worse on cultural fronts. Not only were they racially distant from your typical Sunanese (usually containing a differing mix of Sunanese and Iwaian blood), but their large families, unique vernacular and cultural habits such as wild and colorful face paint did little to endear them to the Suna populous. Even in the early days of Suna under the First Kazekage, they were considered savages and low-life crooks. To sum it up, aggression between Sunanese and Fantocia-Sunanese was always present but it was only the Third Kazekage who acted on it.
They were the primary targets for his religious purges and were sent scampering into the outskirts of Suna, constantly on the move for threat of persecuted further. The Fantociapersisted however, right up until one, known as Sasori of the Red Sand, successfully assassinated the Third Hokage. Tensions between Fantocia and Suna boiled over to degrees once thought impossible, and the young Third Kazekage took the reins with a lust for vengeance. Perhaps, Gaara thought, this may have been projection more than anything.
Teenagers liked to break the rules and his father had been no exception. However, breaking the rules for some lower-class teenager usually manifested in the form of graffiti or shoplifting. Breaking the rules for the crown prince to the Suna monarchy came in the form of associating with the most persecuted minority under his father's rule. In fact, "hanging out" may have been too light of a word. Kankuro of the Desert was born to the Third Kazekage and a Fantocia mother in an affair that's length and time frame Gaara had been unable to gauge from the information he'd retrieved (judging by Kankuro's age, Gaara assumed it had probably been later in his father's life). Kankuro was a year older than Temari and three years older than himself. Rasa had taken him in after the Fantocia group he'd been living with was found and destroyed by Secu-nin, though by that point his mother had already passed away.
Now, most of the information here had been taken from tabloid read and sells and restricted books he'd stolen, so Gaara supposed it could stand to question how much of it was real. However, Kankuro was treated as Rasa's son while also being explicitly out of the royal family's chain of succession (Laws from the Third Kazekage's time made it so that non-secular Sunanese could not take office unless in the time of an utter emergency), Kankuro had not been present in Gaara's life until he was three and, most importantly of all these factors, Kankuro dressed, spoke and acted exactly like a Fantocia. Even if one assumed that all of this was indeed shaky evidence, what Gaara was about to do would certainly clear the air once and for all.
With a cold, calculating gaze in his eye, Gaara wandered over to the table. Recollections of the Second's writing weaved their way into the front of his mind, leapfrogging his typical moral functions at the head of his psyche.
The ninja world has quickly become a modernized jungle-
Back hunched over and posture lazy, Kankuro could not have looked any more like prey.
The sound of Gaara's footsteps, though light, brought his attention away from the book. His gaze lazily settled back onto his brother, a subtle frown gracing his lips as he rubbed a hand over his left eye.
"What do you want Gaara?" He asked, hints of a yawn lingering in his voice.
Any hesitation his mind could even hope to muster shoot to his throat. However, there simply wasn't enough left to silence him for more than half a second. Readjusting his gaze somewhat, any hint of emotion or sentiment was drained from his face. Kankuro was annoying and he wanted to see how he'd react to pain.
"Fuck you, mudface." Gaara said blankly.
Mudface was of course a derogatory term for the Fantocia. For a second, it looked as if Kankuro thought he'd misheard him but as the seconds ticked on, he soon realized that there was nothing else his brother could have said. His face puckered, teeth slamming against his tongue in anger. A clear attempt at suppression, Gaara noticed. He'd need to press harder.
"What did you just call me?" Kankuro growled, fists clenching.
Perfect set-up.
"Mudface." Gaara repeated.
For a second, he thought Kankuro was about to lunge at him. Sand rustled against his skin as it brushed against the negative energy in the room. It was as if the large, docile library had become very, very loud all of sudden. However, this noise was only a spike, not a wave. Whereas Gaara had fully expected his brother to attempt to beat his lights out, Kankuro simply took a deep breath and reaffixed his gaze back on his book.
"Everyone in class knew I was Fantocia. I've heard better." He said boredly.
The notes of aggression in his voice made it clear that this boredom was merely a curtain to the anger he truly felt, but this mattered little to Gaara. A second worth of teeth clenching was not the reaction he had wanted when attempting to test the hypothesis of the Second. His normally cool and collected brain began to warm up as its depths were plunged in recollection of all the books he'd read. See, Gaara had long stopped interacting with normal human behavior. Weeks could fly by without him interacting with so much as a housekeeper and while it made him mentally more resilient, it had greatly damaged his understanding of those around him. Now, instead of identifying the problem, he needed philosophical literature to fill in the gaps. He was attacking Kankuros self, and the self was in fact the strongest part of the shinobi's psyche. Love was the weakness and what did Kankuro love? This answer was quickly found by looking only centimeters to the side. A tiny puppet lying on a bed of screws and wood.
Without so much as a thought, Gaara raised his hand up and willed his sand to his side.
"Hey- "Kankuro growled, as a tentacle of sand snatched the puppet into it's grasp.
He dove out to grab it, but the sand was too quick. It snapped itself sideways and slammed the wooden doll into one of the pillars that reinforced the upstairs area. Soft, smoothed wood met harsh stone and the puppet exploded from the impact. Its little blank head shot forward, colliding with Kankuro's stack of books before finally landing and meekly rolling off the table. Upon seeing the anger surge through his brothers' eyes, Gaara couldn't help but let a tiny little smile. Mission accomplished.
Kankuro's gaze snapped to his, a pure fuming anger pulsating through it. If looks could kill than Gaara's sand would have done well to cover his eyes.
"Oy tido zolow tecca! I swear to god-"
The chair let out a wailing squeak as Kankuro pushed off from it. In this moment, he did not care that Gaara was the host of the one-tail, nor that he was his brother. All he cared about was punishing the person who'd just broken his puppet. So palpable, was this anger, that not even the sight of sand surrounding Gaara was enough to dissuade him from charging forth.
Thin shivers of moonlight trickled through the glass of Gaara's window. His eyes darted towards the clock. It was midnight. Just as quickly as they had turned, they snapped back to the page where the writings of the Second lay. As punishment for breaking Kankuro's arm, Gaara had been "grounded" for at least the next week. He did not particularly care about having to stay in his room but the fact that housekeepers were now constantly knocking on his door to see if he wanted food or water, which meant he now ran the risk of being caught with restricted literature more often. Maybe one of the Third's text books had information about sand concealment…
Speaking of which, the excuse of "my sand broke his arm not me" might have actually managed to sway Baki at least a little. For some reason it hadn't even occurred to Gaara until after the punishment had already been enacted. Anyway, he didn't really get why everyone was so mad. It wasn't like he killed him. A broken arm would heal itself in a couple of weeks, even without medical ninjutsu, so Gaara could not see why he had been so thoroughly torn into by the jonin.
An uncomplex aggression leaked into his movements as he turned the page, creasing it slightly. His room was engulfed in the darkness of night but a sand tentacle to his side stayed fixed with a candle in hand, dribbling light onto the pages of the book.
Fwoomfwoomfwoom.
Footsteps, dainty and light, echoed through the doorway. Gaara's hand immediately clenched, willing the sand to snuff the candle out. With the whistle of flame sizzling against sand, the room was engulfed in a blanket of darkness far colder than the one he already lay upon. He thrust the book into the hands of the sand, which quickly drove the book into the hole at the bottom of his mattress. A second's worth of listening identified the footsteps as Temari's but left him unable to feign sleep before the door squeaked open.
Beams of moonlight leaked through the opening as Temari stepped into the room. There was a look of concern on her face, though Gaara did not share it. In the moment, his intentions were purely focused on removing her from the room.
"What do you want, sister?" He asked quickly.
Too quickly. The room was so dark that Temari, in her black robe, looked like a flat silhouette rippling through the darkness. Both her and Gaara's expressions were muddied by the dark, the shifting crevasses of moonlight being the only illumination for their features.
"Baki told me you and Kankuro got into a fight today." She said, attempting to hide the emotion in her voice.
Gaara simply nodded. When you were holed up inside your room for as long as he had been, unnecessary words became just that, completely unnecessary.
"You broke his arm?" Temari asked.
"My sand did." Gaara responded, though it felt like he was lying
"He said you called him a mudface."
She was walking closer to Gaara now and the boy could make out her features clearly.
"He's lying." He replied bluntly.
This lie however rolled off his tongue without even the slightest hesitation (mentally or physically.) However, Temari didn't seem to buy it even if she did not say anything back. Instead, she sat down next to him, eyes full of concern for her brother. A visceral twinge of disgust bubble through Gaara's gut but he didn't know why.
"Look Gaara, I know there's no way I can even imagine going through what you've been going through in the last few months but I'm really starting to get worry about you." She said.
Her voice was as quiet as the night but the faint trembling that permeated through it rung loudly. Gaara had not ever seen his sister as vulnerable as she was right now and to tell the truth, he didn't really care.
"I mean, you're in your room all day, you don't even come out for food! I hear you mumbling in your sleep all the time now and- "
Before Temari could continue, Gaara held a finger up to her face.
"You are not my mother so pretending to be will achieve nothing. Please go away."
There was no emotion in his voice as he peered up at his sister. Only the dull drum beat of his voice against the silence of the night. In an incredibly short time period, he had completely given up any attempt to sugarcoat his words and had instead ordered his sister out. She did not comply. Her eyes were locked onto his own, a look of horror spiraling through them as she gazed upon the dark bags surrounding them.
"Gaara, your eyes- "
She reached a hand up to touch him, but her palm soon found itself in the grainy grip of his sand. A hushed gasp escaped her lips as Gaara's eyes shot back to her. Through the murky dark of the night, a slight furrow could be seen on his brow while a small spark of anger bounced through his eyes.
"I asked you to go away." He said, the sand clenching around her hand just that much harder.
The threat was silent yet also deafening. Temari looked over her brother one last time, expression unsure of whether to be fearful or saddened. It was a look lacking in familiarity or recognition, a look that was so very far away from one sibling's should share. In a strange way, this made Gaara happier then if she had looked at him fondly.
Breaking the silence of the night, Temari whispered an unsteady "okay" and walked herself out of the room looking as if she'd just seen a ghost. Gaara hardly even acknowledged she'd been there in the first place.
As the children of the Kazekage, the Suna siblings were not placed in public school (Kankuro had been for a while, but had unenrolled fairly quickly). Instead, they were taught within the walls of the compound. Gaara, as he did with most things now, considered most of the subjects they were taught pointless but sitting upon that trivial throne had to be art class. Now, he understood why they learnt art. Suna's "melting pot" culture had birthed one of the most unique and refined art scenes on the planet but Gaara, as a shinobi, did not particularly care for the arts at all. Unfortunately, he was the only one in the room.
"You are so bad at mixing it's not even funny." Kankuro bluntly groaned a Temari lazily circled her brush around his palette.
The boy's arm twitched, almost begging to do it himself but alas, the bright yellow cast that encased it kept him still for the moment. His other arm was too busy painting anyway.
"Well, how do you do it then?!" Temari snapped.
Kankuro let out a small sight and circled around his chair, pushing his sister away from the palette for the minute.
"Here, let me show you. Now, index finger on the brush like this- "
Gaara almost regretted breaking his arm as it had transformed most classes from little quiet bout of nothing into non-stop bickering between Temari and Kankuro. To make it worse, Gaara's strategy of simply not attending class had been found out by Baki, who had seemingly made it his personal mission to yell the boy out of bed every day. On one hand, Gaara could almost appreciate one of the adults treating him as a human instead of a weapon. On the other, it had been Baki who had punished him with his stupid "no leaving your room" rule in the first place. At this point, Gaara had begun flirting with the idea of simply ignoring Baki to the fullest of his ability. It was not as if the older man could really harm him considering how valuable he was to the village.
"G-gaara, dear?"
A shaky voice from his front directed his eyes upward where he found Ms. Artigiano staring at him. She was a short woman, not much taller than Kankuro was now. A mousey cluster of grey hair ran over her head, while her eyes were covered with glasses that Gaara couldn't recall ever not being fogged up.
"Are y-you going to be participating i-in this class?" She asked, as hesitant as one could be when asking the capable destroyer of the village if he wanted to finger paint.
Gaara briefly gazed over the table in front of him before nodding (which led to a sigh of relief from Ms. Artigiano) and walking over to the arts tray. He grabbed a palette and paper before lazily tossing them down onto his table. There, he dabbed his fingers in a puddle of maroon and began to drag his fingers across the page. Streaks of red, beige and blue molded together in the minutes that followed as Gaara crudely sculpted his piece. He only just managed to apply the finishing touches on it by the time Ms. Artigiano called for the end of the class. Before they were allowed to leave however, she went around as she always did and called upon them to explain their pieces. Considering Temari and Kankuro had been forced to share one due to the latter's injury, Gaara found himself called upon quite quickly.
"And your artwork Gaara, what is- "
For the first time since she had spoken to him earlier, Ms. Artigiano looked over his artwork. Maybe it would have been better if she hadn't.
On Gaara's paper sat a childish depiction of a profusely bleeding Rasa, torn in two by tendrils of sand while Gaara himself sat contently at the top of the page. The boys gaze was blank as he held it up, a complete one-fifty from Ms. Artigiano's anxious eye-darting. As his siblings got a better look at the piece, Temari let out a gasp while Kankuro felt his face contort into a disturbed scowl. There was something very unsettling about how the brutality of the image had been filtered through such a crude lens, with the fat splotches of paint for blood and the big streaky smile that Gaara had given himself.
"A-a-and what is this s-s-supposed to be G-Gaara?" The older woman asked, feigning ignorance.
"This is me killing my father." He said bluntly.
A small, mouse-like squeak involuntarily escaped Ms. Artigiano's mouth.
"O-oh. A-and the red- "
"It's blood. His blood." Gaara explained quickly.
His eyes were now locked on the drawing, almost transfixed by the art he himself had made,
"Blood is what fuels the human body. A newborn baby emerges covered in blood whereas an old shinobi passes on with it pouring from his wounds. Blood is the language of life but it is also the language of death. To have one's blood spilled is the ultimate discretion of the self and the shinobi as the language that constitutes your existence is gifted to the soil and absorbed like fertilizer."
The other people in the room may as well have not been in Gaara's mind. His eyes stayed oddly locked onto his paper, the smell of freshly applied paint stinging his nostrils as he did. Before any could muster the courage to say anything, Gaara's eyes snapped upward at a speed that made Ms. Artigiano jump in fright. For the first time in nearly a year, a smile crawled up Gaara's face. It was proud.
"Can you give this to my father?" He asked, excitedly jutting the picture out.
It was later in the week that he felt the sudden urge to check up on the status of his father. Slinking out from bed, Gaara tip-toed through the halls of the compound. Eyes looking up through the moonlight, he yet again found himself standing in front of the imposing doors to Rasa's chambers. This time, he did not knock. His sand weaved through the keyhole, twisting and bending around it's innerworkings before, with a triumphant click, the doors were unlocked.
Gaara gently pushed the doors open and walked inside. His mind was blurry, the only coherent thought he was able to extract being "find father." Any emotional connotations that had were forcibly blocked out by his brain but deep down, Gaara was excited. A chance at an explanation, at chance at seeing the bigger picture or even just why they'd had to seal Shukaku in him. He wanted it so badly, he could kill for it.
Unfortunately, all that awaited him in the quarters of the Kazekage was an empty room. No Rasa, no explanation, no nothing. Just Gaara and the faint sound of the nighttime wind. It was strange, he thought, how little emotion surged through him in that moment. A chance at an explanation he'd waited on for months dashed and Gaara didn't care. Maybe at this point he just found it too hard.
Just as he was preparing to leave though, he spotted something out of the corner of his eye. A small envelope sitting on Rasa's table. He didn't hesitate in moving towards it, thinking that if he was here, he may as well try and get some more information. Surprisingly though, taking this information didn't seem to be much of a transgression considering what was written on the front of it. In neat, cursive handwriting read the words:
Hello Gaara
Before his mind even realized what was going on, he'd already ripped the letter open and dumped the contents onto the table. Out fell a little postcard which he quickly snatched up and began to read. However, after a second's worth of looking, Gaara soon found that there were no words to read in the first place. Its paper housed a crude, crayon drawing that depicted a confused Gaara walking into the room while a sneaky Rasa slunk out the side window. Gaara flipped the paper over, finding a neatly written scrawl.
Ms. Artigiano gave me you're drawing from the other day. You got my nose wrong.
I'll be seeing you shortly.
It may have been a few mere sentences but those mere sentences were the most interaction Gaara had had with his father since the night of Shukaku's rampage. He was hungry for more. Heavy echoes reverberated through the house as Gaara dashed toward the side-window, thrusting it open. There were no traces of his father out there. Just the dying lights of a sleeping Suna and the sting of the cold air.
He would spend the hours that followed this incident cursing himself for feeling that brief flicker of emotion.
Despite the letter's wording, weeks passed and Gaara was not treated to even a glimpse of his father.
"I'll be seeing you shortly."
The words continued to echo through Gaara's head as he stared out the window. The moon was bright tonight, acting as a sort of pool who's rippling water refracted beams of moonlight through the village. The sand lay desolate against the ground, it's day-tone of burnt beige transforming into a shallow-blue under the lunar gaze. A distinct chill ruminated through the night, cold enough to fog up Gaara's window. His irritation at this was clear from the dampness on his hands.
In those damp hands sat a big leather-bound book. "War and Sovereignty: The Benefits and Cons of Militarism" by the Second Hokage in particular. It was denser and less structured than his previous works, with a significant amount of the first half being anecdotes and stories that Shamon had from the war. As such, Gaara found it somewhat useful but significantly less interesting than his other literature. His attention constantly found itself being torn away onto the hands of a nearby clock.
It was only two minutes now. Two minutes until Gaara turned eight.
He did not particularly care about his age or at least, that's what he told himself but there was something about his birthday that kept his attention somewhat piqued. If one were to ask Gaara before Shukaku what the happiest days of his life were, he would have almost certainly said his birthdays. However, those memories were tainted now. Tainted with emotions and feelings he'd had to let go off. Recollections that were once beautiful and vivid with color had been reduced to memories of black and white.
Perhaps that's why he took interest in this coming one. His first birthday without a celebration, his first birthday without his mother, his first birthday after discovering what being a Shinobi really meant (for the most part, at least). That was a nice way to put it. His first birthday.
The arms ticked along the clock, edging closer and closer to the top of the hour. A small chill of excitement ran down Gaara's nerves as he watched it. Closer, closer, closer…
Chick.
There it was. Gaara of the Desert was eight years old.
He didn't have much time to enjoy it before the floor began to shift underneath his feet. Yet another set of chills ran down his spine as an icy cold voice began to murmur into his ear, it's words as intelligible as his ever-shifting vision. Soon enough, he found himself sat squarely against the desert of his mindscape. The chilling, feminine voice he'd heard just before had been replaced with Shukaku's garish, screeching voice.
"Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you-" The beast squawked, voice far too shrill to be properly confined to the rhythm of a song. "Happy birthday dear Gaara, happy birthday to you!"
He let out a laugh that Gaara could only define as "disgusting" before slamming his large paws together in a clapping motion.
"Hey, don't forget to blow out your candles!"
Gaara looked down to see an array of sand candles sticking up at him, their tips flickering and moving with grainy speed. He was not particularly enthused, a fact which Shukaku picked up on quickly.
"Oh, come on! That's a funny bit, isn't it?"
The look of distain that made itself apparent on Gaara's face said "no". Shukaku briefly wilted under that look, ears and eyes drooping like an old unwatered flower. However, it was not long before he managed to perk himself back up.
"I've got some info for ya'."
Gaara shrugged and stood up, walking away from the tanuki. Yet again, Shukaku felt his features drop.
"I am not interested in anymore of your silly anecdotes. You bore me."
A bolt of anger surged through Shukaku's features though it was quickly smoothed over in place of a more cunning grin.
"It's about your mother."
Gaara whipped around with a force whose physical whiplash was only rivaled by the mental embarrassment he felt at showing such emotion.
"What is it?" He asked, trying to hide the interest in his voice.
"How've you been enjoying the seconds works?"
The sudden change of subject initially confused Gaara but the prodding look in Shukaku's eye told him that this was entirely intentional. On one hand, he doubted Shukaku had any actual information about his mother. On the other, he knew curiosity was eventually going to get the better of him and he was lucky that Shukaku's current demand for the information amounted to a homework summary.
"I find him very interesting and enlightening. His writings have helped me greatly over the past few months."
"Elaborate. What's your worldview looking like now?"
Gaara stayed silent for a few seconds, not enjoying being talked down to in such a way. This irritated Shukaku.
"What?! You're out there in your fucking art class going on little monologues about blood and shit. Can you not explain why you even exist?!" He growled.
"I exist as every other person on the path of a shinobi does. That is, as an isolated animal born into a world scented with death. The path of a shinobi is something one must walk alone. To indulge in bonds or love past the point deemed useful for survival is unnatural to the nature of a ninja. To put faith in other people is to make yourself vulnerable to the unpredictable brutality of the ninja world."
"Good. Some of that was straight-up quotes but still, good. Elaborate on love."
"Love is an animalistic emotion that we, as humans, have grown capable of curbing. To love is to be vulnerable and to be vulnerable in this world is to forsake yourself." Gaara explained.
There was a twinkle in Shukaku's eye now. It made him feel uneasy.
"See, that's funny Gaara, because, and here's the juicy part, you know that sand- "
Before he could speak, a gag of sand wrapped itself around his mouth. Shukaku's shrill droning became muffled into its grip, his hands shooting upward to try and claw at it. A few grasps of his claws yielded little results so it was up to Gaara to unbound him. A clench of his hand willed it to attention and, even if the sand seemed reluctant, it fell from Shukaku's mouth. He gasped, spitting spare grains of it out his mouth (odd considering he looked to be made of the stuff) before looking back at Gaara with a newfound fury.
"See?! That spirit that's always been protecting you, that's nestled itself into MY sand and kept me from taking your little head off! It's your mother's soul Gaara! It's your mothers love!"
Gaara's eyes slanted slightly.
"You're lying." He said.
No matter how hard he tried to mute the aggression in his voice, it still managed to seep through.
"To hell I am! Your mother was a dirty Madenoe and she stuffed a fat chunk of her soul into you when you were born! Those filthy Madenoe, always playing dirty tricks like that-"
Shukaku had most likely intended to gradually elevate his screaming but the intervention of the sand had sent him into such a rage that he was screeching like his life depended on it.
"A Madenoe?" Gaara asked.
The term had definitely been mentioned in some of the political books he'd read. From his understanding it was a religious group.
"Yes! That's what's kept me pinned down all the years she had you and what stopped me when I was finally able to break free! You're literally made of love you little idiot!"
It was a humorous contrast, Gaara's silent existential questioning and Shukaku's neurotic screeches. The beast thrashed about in a rage, hurling insults and vitriol about the place while Gaara sat still. He could not believe what he was hearing. A soul?! How could one seal a soul in someone else, it was impossible? At least, that's what he told himself but there was something about Shukaku's fury that made him think the beast was at least trying to tell the truth.
"Shukaku…" Gaara said quietly. "These Madenoe, are they- "
His sentence trailed off as he realized Shukaku no longer seemed to be listening to him. The Tanuki's rage had seemingly fizzled out as his eyes gazed into the distance, starkly blank to the fury he was proclaiming just seconds earlier. Then, with a quickness so sudden it almost made an audible snap, his beady little eyes locked onto Gaara's own.
"You're gonna want to wake up buddy."
If Gaara had not just been told his mother's soul was apparently gallivanting around his innards, he would have perhaps been quicker on the uptake. As it were now though, it took him a few seconds to snap back to reality. Before he could even adjust his eyes to the moonlight, the glass of his window shattered. As he drew breath, Gaara's eyes rested on the barrage of Kunai that were flying at his body.
Fwoosh!
His sand leapt over his body, shielding him from the barrage just in time to avoid him becoming a human dartboard. The blade of a kunai sat inches away from his face, Gaara's hot breath caressing its smooth metal as he turned to face the side of the room. A kunai sat imbedded in his floorboards, one of many that had failed to hit him. However, these kunai had not been entirely inaccurate. Scraps of paper had been secured neatly around their handles. Scraps of paper that was currently burning. In the tenth of a second before detonation, the sand desperately crawled forward in an attempt to mask his full body but it was already stretched too thin.
BOOM!
…
…
Wake up.
Wake up!
Wake up!
It felt like hours passed before Gaara came to his senses once more. The dreary dusk of unconsciousness warded off by the smell of ash and smoke burning his nostrils and grime weaving itself into his clothes. The sound of footsteps echoing through the ground snapped his primal instincts into effect. He felt a wriggling in the distance, its movements resonating through the nerves of his arm.
A spare piece of sand, clinging to the wreckage of my room. Gaara identified.
Willing it into shape, the small patch of sand shifted to a third-eye. Now, with his eyes locked shut, Gaara got a full view of the situation. The eye gazed upon the grounds of the compound, Gaara's room having been completely obliterated into a pile of scorched floorboards (this meant the eye must be clung onto the last bit of turf still attached to the compound building). A man, skinny with shoulder-length blonde hair, was walking towards Gaara with a clear hesitation in his step. At this point, he'd learnt to search the perimeter each night in case an assassin lay waiting in the wings. Those who would attempt to assassinate a Suna royal family member (a royal family member who had become notoriously hard to kill in recent months, mind you) usually only had guts going for them and were easily disposed of. This one was clear different.
However, before Gaara could continue to analyze the situation, the numbness from his explosion-rocked body began to wear off. A surge of heat raced to the top of his head, stinging his skin and sending a wave of warmth running down his face. It was a sensation Gaara had never experienced before…
Schling!
A kunai came soaring forward, aimed directly at Gaara's head. An arm of sand leaping up to catch it.
"Shit." The assassin grunted.
Gaara did not care about his words nor did he care about the man himself. Any attention he had to spare in that moment was purely focused on the trickling sensation that ran down his forehead. The nectar of battle, dirtied and spoiled by grime and desecrated on the altar of it's spillage.
His own blood.
The red that graced his brow was only matched by the one that masked his vision. Eyes shooting up, Gaara's gaze locked onto the man with a fury that sparkled through the dark of the night. Then he screamed.
" Aaaaaaaaaaaah!" He cried, deep breaths racking his voice as a wall of sand formed ahead of him.
The man haplessly flung his weapons reserves forward, but they could do nothing but cling to the grips of the thick barricade. The sand wall charged forward, slamming into the man hard enough to send him sprawling across the ground. A distinct jolt of pain rushed through his body but it had not even numbed before the sand began to grip at his leg. Before he knew it, he was hoisted up by the appendage, headband falling to the ground with a resonating clink. At his head no longer sat an unconscious vulnerable boy. Savage grunts and yells fell from Gaara's mouth, moonlight weaving through the puddles of blood on his forehead. There was a distinct blankness in his eyes, a blankness that came as a stark contrast to the emotion flowing from his lips.
The ninja desperately reached into his pockets, retrieving a small handful of mini shuriken but before he could even hope to grip them properly, the sand crunched down against his leg.
"Argh!" He screamed, feeling his bones snap like they were made of glass.
Letting loose another violent yell, Gaara thrust his hand down. The sand reacted in turn, slamming the ninja to the ground with a visceral "crack". Just that alone would have been enough maim the ninja beyond physical repair, but in Gaara's mind it was not enough. The stench of blood burning through his nose was all that was driving him at this point, arm erratically thrusting upward and downward. Each twist, each lunge brough the ninja slamming back down against the ground once more, blood staining the stone with each hit. His arm movements were frenzied, yes, but there was a certain cerebral nature to them that made it that much more disturbing. As the man's head slammed against the ground yet again, Gaara's movements had started to resemble those of a conductor. A crazed, blood-lusted conductor but a conductor none the less.
By the time he'd worn himself out, the man's body looked like he'd just taken a bath in red dye. It would have been a good opportunity to play dead had he not been so mutilated that frequent, sharp gasps of air became a necessity. Similar pants came from Gaara's mouth but, as he watched the man writhe around on the ground, begging for air, they became lost to the night. The rage that had consumed his features still wore its effects but was beginning to dissipate against the cold night wind. Gaara simply watched the man for a few moments. Somehow, he lay there covered in the very essence of a human being while writhing and gasping like some disgusting animal. As the man cried out in pain at nothing more than the touch of the wind, Gaara gazed upon him in the same way a small child would to an ant.
Then, he began to walk forwards.
The man twisted his head, recoiling (at least, as much as he could) in fear as he heard Gaara's slight footsteps. A small burst of motion coursed through his body in an attempt to bring himself to his feet, but his body was in no state to even hold his weight should he do so.
"I swear, just let me go and you'll never fucking see me again. I promise, really, I promise, please-!" The man wailed, words falling from his gums in a mixture of spit and blood.
The pathetic display did make Gaara hesitate for a minute, a few words weaving themselves to the front of his mind:
This is your one chance to escape before he kills you. Take or don't, it makes no difference to me
They felt like a lie and not just because Gaara had no intention to let him escape. Instead, he silently held his hand up. Waves of sand waltzed forward, eager to serve as they surrounded the man's form. His screams faded softly into the sand as it surrounded him in a mass of itself.
"Sand coffin:" Gaara growled, raising his hand up to the sky. "Sand burial!"
With a clench of it, the sand compacted in on itself and the man was crushed to death.
In the waking moments of the kill, a strange sensation started to overtake Gaara's mind. It was a mixture of euphoria and intoxication, a feeling that slowed the senses but stimulated the nerves. For god knows how long, Gaara simply stood still, wrapped in a blanket of blood and glimmer. In that moment, he thought, it all made sense.
Love, his mothers love was imbued within every inch of his sand. This love was not a vulnerability though, in fact, it was the most beautiful love he had ever felt. A love that answered to him and him only. A love so pure that its very essence was ensuring his survival and protection. The Second's writings had lambasted love, claiming that it was unable to effectively exist in the jungle-like Ninja world but Gaara knew that if he had observed something like this, he may have revised his hypothesis. A shinobi lived for combat and conquest. For one's blood to be spilled was to prove uncommitted to one's purpose. His sand was an extension of himself, saving his body from the stains of combat scars and spilled blood. An all-seeing guardian devoted to his own survival. This was the love of a shinobi, a love perfectly suited to the brutal and unforgiving jungle of the ninja world.
Blood continued to trickle from his forehead. A mistake, Gaara admitted, but not one that would be repeated anytime soon. He clenched his left hand, calling his sand over to him. It crawled upon his head; its beige grains being bleached red as it absorbed the blood. Another clench of his hand. This time the sand hesitated for just a second.
And then it dug into his skin.
An intense stinging overtook his forehead but the boy paid it little mind. The blood from his wound had been wiped away, replaced with a bright red tattoo.
Sitting there in Sunanese characters read the word "love."
As the cold night air brushed against his back, Gaara took a seat on the grounds. His blood felt like ice and his skin like glaciers but soon enough, the bloodied sand swept over him like a blanket. There, once again draped in a cloak of sand and blood, sat Gaara born anew.