Bones in the Beach - Chapter 1: Blood-Soaked Rooftops - Author: PenSmoke
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto, nor make any profit from writing this.
Sunagakure
Wednesday, January 18th, Year 68
The wind howled through the open desert, the sound drowning out all other noises. Grains of sand that had been caught up by the sandstorm darkened the night sky to the point where no moon or stars were visible any longer. His red hair ruffled in the strong breeze, the follicles dancing angrily about his head. The loose parts of the clothes that he had on were flapping behind him, already being damaged from the weather. Gaara closed his eyes and settled down into a sitting position on the rooftop of the Kazekage Tower.
If not for the fact that he was already encased within the sand, the particles that were flying through the air would have ripped his skin raw within minutes. The storm made for the perfect place to escape. Nobody else would dare step foot outside in the blizzard of sediment for fear of the pain it would cause. He only wished that he could feel something aside from pain.
It was the only thing that he could ever remember feeling. Occasionally his brother and sister would attempt to interact with him in a neutral manner, but every other person he had ever met treated him with fear, contempt and hatred. He loathed every single person on the face of the planet. It was the reason that he was on the rooftop right now. Whenever a large sandstorm hit Sunagakure, many people took cover in the Tower, meaning it was extra crowded.
The large crowds both infuriated him and made his desire to rip apart their bodies into a red sandy pulp skyrocket. But, with his father in the same building, he would be restrained and denied his kill. So, he sought solace on the rooftop. His heart was one with the storm as it raged throughout the city, his own conscious raging within.
The voice in his head, his mother's voice, had often told him to kill everything and everyone in sight. For some time, he had tried to fight it. That was back before he had been betrayed by his own family. Before they had tried to assassinate him. Since that day, when his mother asked for blood, she received it, except for a select few times when Rasa had been close enough to prevent it.
While he was brooding on the tile-covered roof, staring inside the tower at his victims that would be denied him, a figure slowly walked past the window behind him that he had used to escape the madness within the building. He watched as the man noticed his form, stopped and approached the window. When the thick glass pane opened enough to let in the blast of sand from outside, Gaara expected it to immediately shut.
When it didn't shut, but opened wider to accommodate the man exiting the viewing portal, his blood began to get excited. Perhaps some unfortunate caring soul had noticed him outside and thought he needed rescue. He lips twisted upwards in a vicious smile, pointed teeth revealing themselves. His sand began to pour out from the large gourd shape on his back, and he began to push his chakra into the sand surrounding him.
As the figure shut the window and turned around, he pounced. The sand formed into a viscous blob under the victim's feet, quickly cementing the human figure in place. His own personal sand shot out like a lance, aiming directly for the neck, targeting the jugular vein. Mother was always so much happier when there was an excess of blood.
The sand shot true, a red misty spray erupted from the target as a hole was sandblasted into the neck. The victim's hands futilely shot to his damaged area, trying desperately to cover the blood flow. The hands smeared the crimson liquid all around, getting it on his ear, his shoulder and even some into his mouth, which was probably screaming. Not that Gaara could hear it over the sandstorm. And even if he could, he wouldn't particularly care.
The river of life-giving fluid drained from the neck into his sand, which greedily lapped it up, making his sand turn a deeper brown than normal. The ruddy pools of darker sand returned to his gourd, and he could feel the satisfaction boiling up from his mother within as the man collapsed onto the roof, gurgling.
Taking a step towards the fatally injured man, he looked at the face. He vaguely recognized it, and he tried to think of where he had seen it. After a few moments, it clicked.
His father had been meeting with some religious sect recently in an effort to do some strange political maneuvering. He only knew because there had been a formal dinner to entertain the members of the visiting party, and he had been ordered to attend. He listened to their ramblings, and dismissed what they had to say as some ignorant cultists spouting off nonsense. If he remembered correctly, this one had been one of the head priests. Oh well, the man was soon-to-be-dead and nothing would stop that now. He didn't have to deal with the political fallout anyway, so why would he care?
He approached the man closer and used his sand to cover every inch of the body but the eyes and the mouth. Gaara enjoyed watching the eyes as they realized they were going to die. When they suffered the last pain they ever felt, it was the only time that he felt like he could connect with another human at all. The mouth, he left open because he wanted to hear them beg. Just like that man. That man had begged for not to be killed after he had been caught by Gaara during the assassination attempt.
He commanded the sand to lift the body, and it responded as usual, bring the eyes up to his eye level, so that he could stare into them as the life left his body. He made his sand squeeze little by little.
The eyes focused on him. They were so deep brown that they looked black, the irises blending into the pupil so much that it was hard to see a difference between them. They stared at him, and the different stages that were normally witnessed progressed. Confusion, Fear, Desperation followed each other in rapid succession. After reaching the last of the three, the mouth opened. Gaara waiting for the begging to start.
He waited. And waited some more. Then he realized that no words were forthcoming. Emerald green met black as the gazes matched, when Gaara realized that something was wrong. Very wrong.
The man was laughing. Slowly being crushed to death, blood soaking into his sand from numerous places and dripping out of his mouth, the man was full-out laughing.
Gaara immediately ordered his sand to crush the arms. How dare this man laugh at him! The sand coffin exploded around the arms with its' normal intensity, instantly turning the flesh and bone within into paste.
But no pain showed in the eyes. Instead, the look of amusement turned into crazed pleasure, as if the loss of his arms gave the man the greatest pleasure he had ever seen.
Confused, Gaara made the coffin around the legs explode as well, taking all four of the man's limbs and reducing them into a bloody pink jelly that seeped through the grains. The look on the face intensified and the laughter became audible over the howling wind.
Withdrawing both himself and his sand, he let the torso and head bounce down onto the tile rooftop, the remnants of the limbs splashing around him, no longer encased by the sand. What Gaara saw next was the most disturbing thing he had yet witnessed.
The skin of the man, formerly a normal flesh tone, was pitch black like a night sky with no moon or stars. Outline of brilliantly white bones sat in the places where bones would normally be, showing a ribcage and spine on the torso, and a white skull covering most of the face. The black eyes remained crazed as they lolled in their head to focus on Gaara from his new position.
A moment later the constant noise backdrop from the sandstorm died, an eerie calm surrounding the few feet on the rooftop where they occupied space. It was if some new presence had arrived, stronger than nature, pushing the sand away several feet around them.
The laughing could be heard as the man continued to lay on the progressively redder tiles, blood spurting out from his mangled joints where his limbs used to rest. And then, slowly, the sludge that had once been his appendages began to quiver and pulse, the areas that were next to the wounds instantly turning to black and reattaching itself.
The torso rolled in the sludge, still cackling wildly, as the young red-haired boy looked on in both wonder and disgust. With each pass, the man smeared himself in more and more of his own blood and gore. And each time, anything that touched an open wound immediately reformed back into the flesh that had been there. After just a few seconds, the man had regrown most of his limbs, to the point where a hand had re-appeared. Without missing a beat, the man picked up handfuls of what remained and put them on his still recovering body parts.
Within a minute the man had gone from being a bloody paste on the ground with just a torso and head, to being back to a whole human. Gaara had never once seen anything like it.
"Praise Jashin! This will be a wonderful feast!" The priest yelled jubilantly, as he rolled the last of his bloody tissue remnants into a long staff, which seemed to harden into a real weapon a moment later.
Gaara couldn't help but stare at the man as he charged in. Nothing like this had ever happened before. Even Mother was quiet in his head. It confused him and he just sat there as the staff of solidified blood descended towards his head.
But a moment later, the screams that he had been anticipating erupted. He had expected to hear the painful cries earlier, but hearing them now was unexpected.
"AAAAAGHHHH! No! Why Jashin? Why are you abandoning me?" The head priest had collapsed again to the ground. However, this time, his skin was losing the blackness. The disturbing black void that had encased his skin fell off in chunks, forming a pool under his fallen body.
As the last piece of blackened skin broke away from the man screaming on the rooftops, it suddenly moved together as one into the void between. The energy that had repulsed the sandstorm expanded even further, creating a huge blank bubble in the middle on the storm, big enough that the entire tower was visible around him.
The black puddle shot upwards into a shape. Black as the void, it created a form unlike any living thing he had ever seen. It was humanoid, thought just barely. Two massive wings on the back dwarfed all other features. As they flapped in place, they appeared as six-foot-long rips into space and time, slowly holding a human afloat. Four arms shot out from the shoulder area, two on each side. A large set of horns grew out of the skull, the right longer than the left, each at least a foot long.
A voice, every bit as demonic as Mother's entered into his head.
"Within you there is so much violence. So much hate. So much death. You will be perfect to spread my word. Jashin's word"
Quick as a blink, the blackness shot forward engulfing him into the inky nothingess that was his form. Gaara then struggled, as the blackness burned into him. While there was no physical pain, it felt like his soul was being ripped apart, the pieces set on fire and burning with the intensity of the scorching desert sun, and then the ashes glued back together where it used to exist.
The fire within his body burned out, he collapsed, the blackness that had surrounded him sinking through the sand armor and absorbing into every fiber of his being, each cell receiving a small seed of blackened aura within. The being, Jashin, suffused himself into every fiber of Gaara's body.
As the presence left the physical area, the sandstorm resuming winds kicking up even higher then before. As if the gods of the sand were displeased at having something disrupt their own chaos, the razor-sharp grains of the sand dug into everything with new intensity, ripping everything not protected against them into tiny shreds. The body of the head priest, now devoid of any blackness,
The redheaded son of the Kazekage fell over backwards, his body plummeting off of the roof of the tower. His sand armor in place, skin infused black as night, he was carried by the winds of the storm, outside the walls of Sunagakure, disappearing into the desert sands.
AN: This comes courtesy of an idea from Reddit user The-Knyght who wrote about Gaara being a disciple of Jashin. The idea has stuck in my head for a couple of days now, and I really wanted to put something out about it. Since it hasn't left me alone for more than 36 hours, I decided to sit down and write something on it. The above is about 2 hours' worth of writing and brainstorming.
I'm not abandoning Sealing Salientia, that will remain my primary work. So, don't expect consistent updates on this for now. After that story is complete, I may make this into a long-term story. We shall see.