Wake Up
By gelfling
gelfling8604@yahoo.com
***
LSD melts your mind, not in your hand.
Does this have to do with the dragon in your pants?
I'm going to be a lobster when I grow up.
***
There's the smell of sand. It's an awful comforting smell, and he could never get away from it even if he drowned his head in the icy ocean and stopped breathing. It's always there in his ears, in the corner of his eyes, matted through his hair like flies.
It won't go away and he can't run fast enough; there's nowhere that will safeguard him from the things that he carries in his head. He understands that with a grudging rejection; he doesn't deny it, but he doesn't accept it. He's not the kind to accept anything he doesn't want. Despite everything he appears to be and everything he really is, he is at heart a fighter. Not a ninja, not a demon, barely human, but surely a fighter.
His family fears him; that's fine. His siblings aren't stupid enough to try and kill him, and have risked their lives to protect him. This doesn't guarantee their safety from the darkness in his head, because not even he can control it, can make it stop hurting himself, but he won't allow anything else to hurt them. They belong to him; he's possessive about things like that, yet aloof. He won't touch them, and they won't touch him. But nothing hurts them. They stay away from him. Fine. Whatever. It's…complicated.
He thought he was alone.
And…he's right, but he's also wrong. He's right and wrong all the time, more often than he wants to think about. He's wrong to kill, but right to follow his nature at the same time. He's wrong to be alive, but right to defy the greed that created him in a lab like a three-headed snake. He's wrong to dream, but right to try for something better. He doesn't know. It's so damn confusing, and he just doesn't know.
He tried to stop caring about what was wrong and what was right to do, tried to rely on bare instinct, and that was good but it wasn't enough. He was complete, but he was in Hell. He was complete in Hell, and that wasn't a place he wanted to be complete in. Complete in and incomplete. It wasn't what he wanted. It was what he was. He wasn't what he wanted to be. He isn't what he wants.
He doesn't know.
He is alone. He is alone, but Nature always makes two.
It's like phoenixes; legend wrote only one egg per nest, and so the creature was reborn from the ashes of its corpse. But birds always had more than one egg because Nature was far too cruel to take chances. Nature always made two, because though the phoenix was the symbol of hope and death and rebirth, first and foremost it was a bird, and birds needed to survive. So the phoenix had two eggs, regardless of what legend wrote…or, at least, that's what the gray guy said when he caught him outside the apartment bedroom.
He is alone. But he is alone with another. He is still alone.
He doesn't understand. He doesn't understand so much.
Fox and badger are supposed to fight, supposed to be locked in eternal rivalry, but someone beat him there first. He isn't the fox's rival; someone else beat him to it, and absolutely nothing he did now could possibly change that. Not even if he killed Sasuke; not even that.
So he just watches. It's okay, only it isn't.
They fight and yell, and then they get tired. It's a sort of ritual. Sometimes they stomp on toes a little too hard, and one of them gets banished to the couch for the night, no hanky panky for him that night. Generally, it's Naruto. This confuses him, because Naruto's stronger than Sasuke, but he's still not in control of what the other does. He doesn't have to do anything Sasuke says, because Sasuke doesn't have the power to make him do anything. But Naruto does anyway. Why? Gaara doesn't understand.
Maybe that's the price demons paid for living with humans: agreeing to whatever they said. Gaara had done that--they had always asked that he kill someone or something, and that had never been a problem for him. That hadn't bothered him; he enjoyed it. As the Hokage's son, possible heir to the Hidden Sand legacy with the power of a demon backing him, he followed orders because they had always asked him to kill. Seemed all he was good for. That had been fun.
It bored him now. He tired of it.
They never asked that of Naruto; make a point not to give him assassination missions. The blonde was capable of it; they don't do it on purpose. Strange. Or, it was strange to him. Strange that they'd be treated so differently even though they were too much alike to be normal.
Toes haven't been stepped on tonight. Sasuke cradled Naruto from behind, talking into his ear so closely that his lips brushed the skin. The blonde grinned enticingly, leaning back and murmuring something down low that made the darker smirk and nuzzle his neck. Naruto closed his eyes.
Gaara had stopped trying to listen to their conversations a while back; he heard the words perfectly, but didn't understand what they meant. They insulted each other, but there was no hatred in their voices. There was no malice in the retorts, no demands in the demands. He didn't understand what they meant; it was like they were talking in code that meant something to only them and to no one else. Still, he watched.
He's been watching a while now, trying to figure out what it all meant, because it meant something, obviously, because Naruto's skin has finally managed to scar.
He wears the same small bite mark Sasuke wears on his shoulder, and it scars him. Intellectually Gaara knows it should have freed the fox or tainted the human soul. It should've done something.
Naruto's worn the mark for five months now--he continues with the missions, death matches, the village's distrust, and constant bickering of Sasuke. In all that time, from the moment it was placed on him, the bite-mark has never activated. Gaara would know it if it had; the fox's and blonde's combined energy signature would have been different. But it isn't. It isn't on. It doesn't work.
Naruto got the damn thing saving Sasuke's life; Gaara's hazy on the details. They're not important. What's important is why he got it. That's the part Gaara doesn't understand; that's the thing he wants to know.
He asked Temari what it meant when people went inside the other. She paled, blushed, and finally said it was called making love. Kankuro said it was called having sex. Love or sex…he wasn't sure if they were the same thing or not.
Watching the two shinobi undress, he supposed it could be both. Perhaps. It was a stretch, but it was a stretch that could happen. Maybe it was—he's pretty sure one of them is happening. He doesn't know enough to argue yet. He's watched them put one inside the other before, nothing like animals but not playing either. They fall asleep next to each other, curled up and holding tight.
He can smell their fear. He can see their smile and smirk. He can recognize desire and carnal urges, the obscene need to devour a living breathing heart-beating creature. But…
They don't hurt one another, only sometimes they do. Only they don't mean to, except when they do. Except they don't actually eat each other, but they bite and suck and drink down what they can. But they don't try to bleed the other, only sometimes they do.
He doesn't understand it, not the act or the reasoning behind it. He's hunted and eaten human and animal flesh when the moon was full and high, demon blood running through his veins and calling for the fluid and flesh of something alive. He's crunched jackal bones with his teeth, and later vomited up jewelry carelessly swallowed.
What Naruto and Sasuke do in bed is different from what Gaara does under the full moon with his victim.
He doesn't understand it. There's so much he doesn't understand.
It's just… why???
Was this what love was? Was that what he was looking for, a body to put himself in?? Was that It?!
What the hell was it all about!?!
…he didn't know. It was so damn confusing; he didn't understand it at all.
His body reacts though…when he watches them, watches Naruto's bronze neck arch and mouth beg brokenly in groans and sobs helpless as a beached fish, hands combing through Sasuke's dark hair and pushing his head down just a little bit more. Their hands stray everywhere, touching in between their legs and inside their bodies, into their mouths and through their hair, over their backs and just everywhere. They do things to each other with the lights on that Gaara wouldn't dream of doing to himself in a very secure dark private room. He hasn't even thought of having someone else do those things to him.
It was…different. It was very different from what he expected. It was very different from what he does when the moon is high and full. It excited him, made him feel when he watched them do things to each other, and confused him.
None of that stopped him from coming to watch them. Not even the painful 'left out' feeling that hits him afterwards, always. When his isolation is contrasted and epitomized right before his unwilling eyes. When his loneliness is ever greater. When he knows how very different he is from everyone else.
It hurts. It hurts a lot. But that doesn't stop him from coming to haunt them.
He needs to know. They knew, but that wasn't enough. He needed to know too. They knew, so if he watched and learned long enough, eventually he would understand it all. Eventually. It was possible; he hadn't given up hope on that yet. He'd do it. He'd figure it all out.
Naruto laughed in his throat and kissed the top of Sasuke's nose. They curled together like wolves, tangled up and comfortable warm still making noises deep in their chests and murmuring to each other.
He had watched carefully, ignoring the flush and crawling on his skin and rhythmic throbbing between his own legs. Every shift the fabric made against his skin felt like a small bomb has gone off inside his flesh, the slight twitch of the breeze against his forehead felt like a splash of ice-cold water. Small jolts of sensation prick the inside of his hands like acupuncture needles, demanding his attention right then! He had watched every movement, noted the slight reaction and twitch to every movement, read the motive behind the body language in each and the reaction in the other.
It had started out innocently enough. He needed to know and they knew so if he watched then he figured he would know. He still needed to know. He needed to know. But…he's already figured out that if he hadn't figured it out yet, he probably wasn't going to figure it out for a while. There were two souls in his heart, two minds in his head, and he never slept so he could keep control of the soul and mind. This only confuses him more.
It's very warm, and his eyes are wide.
…Gaara doesn't get it at all.
"Cold showers work wonders on those problems. Bathhouses should still be open."
"Shut up."
Sing song voice. "Someone's gotta a boner, someone's gotta a boner—"
"Shut up!"
"They're gonna hear you."
Gaara glared at the individual adjacent him. He had already explained that he had no intention of maiming anything, and if did then he'd do it but some guardians didn't know how to take no for an answer. He wasn't going to hurt them; there was no reason for him to do that. He wanted his privacy, but he couldn't control when he did and didn't come, because it was Naruto and Sasuke who decided when they were going to do anything. It was…irritating. It was severely irritating. He turned his head away, and tried to figure out the reasoning behind what he had just seen.
He didn't really want to kill everyone in the world anymore, because of what Naruto had said and done 3 years ago and the things he had learned in that time since, but sometimes it was really tempting. So tempting just to grab that mocking smile he can't see but can hear word-perfect and just tear it off, throw it on the ground and just forget the whole fucking thing because it confused the hell out of him more than anything else. It would be so easy just to turn his back on all of it, to say, "The hell with it," to all and everything and everyone because none of it made sense to him at all. It was a waste of time; it was a waste of his time.
"It's kinda sick watching them, don't you think? Wonder what they'd do if they knew they had an audience…"
"Fuck off," Gaara got up and left.
He hated people. He hated all people. It was barely worth his trouble.
Except when it wasn't, of course.
***
A/N: This is an experimental piece, meant to continue on in TWO more chapters, no more, no less, because I need to learn to control my big mouth! I have a big mouth! I emphasize experimental; I'm trying to get a grip on Kakashi's character, it's so very elusive.