The academy was a sad and sorry sight. Even in the brightly annoying light of the sun it stuck out of the ground like a rejection of concrete, jutting out for all to see. This place was avoided like the plague when one could help it, and apparently nature had decided to follow that rule as well, with trees that surrounded the building but all seemed to grow at a slant and a twist, as if trying to run away from their own roots. The grass spoke of care and fresh seed, even a hefty watering that had been put on in preparation for the first day. In a month it would be brown and dead, begging for replanting or burning from feet that trampled with no care for a sidewalk and a budget that was only big enough to really care once a year. There was even an occasional flower that was planted at the front of the building. Those never even lasted a single passing time.
Gaara wondered why they even tried.
The mass of students emptied the school, filling said lawn and already starting the ritual killing of the grass. Feet trampled, voices yelled and laughed and the occasional book and backpack being dropped and forgotten until class was called back into session. There was no regard for the trees they leaned against, nor the flowers they walked over. It had all been for show anyway, no one cared as soon as the parents were gone from the first day's orientation. Now the yard was just full of students. A normal group of students varying in age, height, appearance and scars. Especially here, the scars were plentiful.
These weren't the scars like the ones on Gaara's leg, which he was now covering with a loose pair of pitch black jeans, but rather the scars of life that were more visible in the eyes then anywhere else. This wasn't your normal school, but a school for the children who protruded from normality much like the school did from the ground. This school held the rejects who wouldn't be welcome at the fancy and expensive academy next door. Not even money and cleanly pressed clothes could hide something as important to the world as one's mental record.
Gaara, for himself, was the only one in the school who seemed to dress the part. Long ago he'd taken up the habit of wearing black, and the occasionally dark color that could easily be mistaken for black or something darker. His wardrobe consisted of dead clothing, but the type that was killed on purpose in the name of a 'gothic' sense of fashion as they now were in favor of calling it. A pair of black jeans and a loose button down black shirt that resembled silk easily changed their view when placed alongside fishnet and a handful of belts, on a body of pale skin and strikingly red hair. Even those who never considered themselves normal stayed away from Gaara. His wardrobe accomplished exactly what he'd intended it to in the first place. It kept people away.
Lunch hour was the hardest time to keep people away, because that was when even the shyest person in school seemed to grow a small excuse for a backbone, anything to make an attempt at being friends with those closest by. The mind was a scary thing when it felt the need for companionship and Gaara made quite sure he wasn't anywhere near anyone else when such urges always seemed to arise. You got in trouble for being antisocial here thanks to the teachers and doctors who watched the students like hawks. It was easier to slip away unnoticed to solitude and return silently when needed.
With that thought in mind, the line of bushes at the far side of the schoolyard quickly became a doorway to that solitude and quiet. He made his way nonchalantly to the line of foliage and easily slipped between the branches, knowing from years of practice how to keep the small branches from catching the fishnet which rested against his chest. A handful of steps and he was free, the sounds of the yard muffled by the leaves, leaving him to do as he pleased.
Gaara picked his way down a small path, wandering aimlessly with his hands in his pockets to the large chain link fence that separated both of the campuses. In complete disregard for the other school he turned his back to it and leaned against the fence, closing his eyes and enjoying the rare moment of quiet which he only seemed to find at school.
Footsteps moved off in the distance, light and soft, moving toward him. Gaara's mind dismissed them and he didn't stir, knowing they were too soft to belong to anything human. They were also coming from the wrong direction to be from the school. He wasn't the only one who knew about this retreat, but he was the only one who made use of it on a regular basis. The other students and teachers knew he liked this area, but also that he liked to be alone. Unspoken rules from the teachers on not bothering certain students occasionally made their ways to the students, and Gaara was one of the lucky ones. His style of dress wasn't the only thing about him that kept others away.
"Oh."
A frown crossed Gaara's face and he opened his eyes, correcting himself. There was someone else here.
Said someone was a boy, about the same age as Gaara, but easily a world apart. Unlike Gaara he actually wore a school uniform of light blue with an intricate flower insignia embroidered over the left pocket. Perfectly ironed pants and even polished black shoes added to the ensemble while only his long black hair seemed to throw it off. Boys from that school weren't allowed to wear their hair down if it was long, not to mention that it made this boy in particular look like a girl.
"Sorry, I hope I'm not disturbing you."
Gaara gave a soft snort. "Wrong side of the fence kid. Your school's over there, and I'm already disturbed. You should know that."
"Oh. I know." His cheeks flushed with a bit of red, the sure sign of shyness, no matter how normal a person was. Gaara watched as the boy fidgeted a bit and his eyes wandered, as if they couldn't decide if it was safe for them to stay fixed on Gaara, no matter how much Gaara knew the boy wanted to stare. "I know… that my school's on that side. But I wanted to see it from this side, just for a change."
"Still the same school." Gaara countered with a shrug of disinterest. Normally he wouldn't have talked to such a kid, but today it seemed worth the effort. If he could make him not as interested there was more of a chance that he would be left alone in the future. Of course he could scare the kid away, but that usually took too much effort and could easily backfire. Disinterest seemed to be the best route available.
"Same school yes, but different view. And the view is the interesting part."
Gaara just shrugged and crossed his arms, his eyes looking back toward his own school. He could see the top edge of the clock and that the arm hadn't come into sight yet. It wasn't even near the end of lunch.
"Want some?"
Gaara blinked and looked down to see the boy had taken a seat leaning up against the fence, much to Gaara's distaste, and was now eating his small excuse of a lunch which came from a brown paper bag. At the moment he was holding out half of his sandwich toward Gaara.
"Not hungry."
"Oh."
Silence returned to them, broken only by the quiet sound of the boy's paper bag whenever he grabbed another part of his lunch. The fact that he wasn't leaving soon became very apparent to Gaara and he only found himself frowning more. People like this boy were the reason he isolated himself at lunch. There were always people who tried to attach to you and be social no matter how clear you made it that you weren't interested. For people like this, scaring and disinterest didn't work and often neither did leaving. They always attached themselves like leeches until the victim finally got so fed up he was forced to either detach his own limb or squash the annoyance.
"Do you have a name?"
"Everyone does." He responded, now avoiding looking at the boy completely.
"Mine's Haku."
Gaara shivered, hearing those words and for a moment the world around him seemed to pause. He blinked and looked up, surprised to find the same apparition from the night before, nestled in the shadows of a willow tree whose branches moved back and forth, almost hiding her from view. Darkness surrounded her like a shroud as she faced them, her eyes hidden from sight and yet her stance leaving no doubt that she was watching them.
That was strange. She didn't usually leave his room.
Gaara glanced down at the boy beside him and was surprised for a moment to see him sitting there, his uniform torn and blood soaking the light blue, turning the color wet and brown. The grass surrounding him was wet, dripping in the liquid as it stained the ground. Two of his limbs were bent in odd angles, showing exactly how many times they'd been broken and snapped.
And before he could react, the vision was gone, melting back into the poor excuse for reality which made of the world of others. One moment he was surrounded by cold and hollow silence, and the next it faded with a sigh of breath originating from the willow tree. Gaara took an involuntary step back, causing the boy next to him to move and break the vision, returning to his appearance from a moment before.
"Are you… all right?"
"Fine," Gaara bit out. Pushing off the fence he quickened his pace and didn't look back. Images like this didn't bother him as much anymore, but that didn't mean that he liked seeing them. He avoided turning his face back and quickly moved back to the school, all but running as he ducked between the bushes and retreated back into an empty classroom, seriously considering finding a new silent place to claim as his own.
(The next day)
His feet carried him, on instinct and years of voluntarily built habit, back to the same spot. Ducking through the bushes and following the path, he made his way down to the fence the next day. He'd thought about it for a long time last night and had finally come to the conclusion that there simply were no other places to seek solitude on the campus that could be found. This was the last one that was accessible to him, and he wasn't going to let one solitary boy force him into being social with the rest of his school during lunchtime. And it certainly wasn't as if the fence was only along a small area. He could easily sit far away from the boy and find his own peace and quiet.
Today, as the fence came into view, he turned his steps to the willow tree. There were more clouds in the sky today and the sun wasn't readily visible, making the world just that much darker around him. It wasn't much, but it was enough to make the space under the willow tree seem a misplaced patch of night. Parting the long hanging branches Gaara peered into the darkness.
The old and gnarled trunk of the tree stretched out under the canopy, hidden from sight and standing like a large bouncer to protect whatever misty or half visible figures decided to take refuge in his shade. Gaara couldn't make any out with any clarity, but willow trees always had thicker air then the rest of the world, hinting toward the possibility of other things solid. He'd rationalized it to the dead tending to gather around a tree that was forever weeping.
A soft breeze blew behind him, rustling the leaves at his feet and the air seemed to shift. Gaara stood still as a hollow static filled his ears and the empty space in front of him began to take form. He blinked once and she was standing there, her head tilted at an unnatural angle as she smiled gruesomely at him, this time both of her hands raising as if to pull him into a hug.
Gaara stepped back from the tree and let the branches fall between them, turning away from her. He stopped and took in a soft surprised breath when he saw that the boy from yesterday was standing a few feet away.
Had she appeared when Haku did?
"Good afternoon." The boy smiled in greeting, looking the same as the day before, save that today his hair was halfheartedly pulled back into a braid. It may have been perfect this morning, but his hair was obviously so smooth and straight that it could easily slip out of braids and hair ties. The back braid was falling apart, but in a way that it almost looked intended. He still looked like a girl.
"You ran away yesterday, I didn't know if you'd come back. Was something wrong?" The boy actually looked concerned. Gaara wondered if he would have wandered up to the school to find out about him if he hadn't showed up. Haku seemed like one of those types.
"Fine." Gaara shoved his hands in his pocket and took another glance out of the side of his eye toward the willow tree, before walking back over toward the fence. He couldn't decide if it was strange that she was staying under the tree, or if it was just odd that she seemed to be watching both him and Haku. It was the first time he'd ever seen her turn her attention to something else besides him. She didn't even seem to acknowledge his father when he entered the room occasionally at night. So why was now different? Was there something about this boy?
Haku followed Gaara back to the fence and stood there for a moment, as if deciding, before he sat down, leaning against the chain link. Once again he opened his lunch and just silently ate it, sitting next to Gaara. Gaara, meanwhile, laid back on the ground, his eyes closed as he pondered the fact that she was still under the tree, watching.
"So what did you do?"
Gaara ignored the question, feigning that he'd dozed off. He didn't feel like participating in a conversation at the moment, especially not with a random stranger who was nothing like him at all. Conversations with random strangers never really wandered beyond the weather and sports and stupid subjects like that. Anything beyond the dreaded small talk and it was too much information. You never gave out that information until you knew what kind of person you were talking to, and Gaara preferred to not give out that kind of information at all.
Silence grew between them, occasionally broken by the boy eating his lunch. After a moment he closed the bag and set it down. "I'm sorry, it's not really my business I guess. I was just curious."
"You don't really want to know." Gaara responded, shifting a bit. "No one who asks that question really wants to know."
"I'm just curious, that's all."
Gaara opened his eyes and glanced at the boy, half expecting for a second to see the same image he'd seen yesterday, with the blood and the dead body laying shattered beside him. But instead he just found Haku watching him nervously, the curiosity obvious in his eyes. Gaara frowned slightly and resorted to earlier tactics.
"I killed someone."
This time the silence was thick, palatable. Gaara could feel the stress that rose in the air, along with the fear. That's how everyone reacted. If you were going to reveal your past, or even a part of it, to a total stranger, why not start out with the most interesting part? That's how he'd always answered before and as long as the person he was speaking to wasn't a cop then the reaction was usually pretty gratifying. After a response like that, people left him alone.
"You… killed someone." Haku's voice shook a little, but otherwise seemed pretty steady. Gaara had to give him credit for that. Most would have left, most wouldn't have touched the subject again. In fact, most would have pulled the same excuse he had yesterday after seeing that image. He was almost tempted to mockingly hold his breath, to see how long it would take Haku to do the same.
"What happened?"
Gaara blinked and looked at the boy. "What?"
Haku tilted his head a bit curiously, eerily reminding Gaara of the way she always did. "What happened? Why did you… kill someone?"
Why don't you look scared? Gaara's mind quietly asked. He'd meant to say the words out loud, but they just wouldn't come. For the moment all he could do was watch Haku quietly, wondering as his mind was caught up in the tilt of his head. His eyes flickered back to the willow tree and he barely suppressed a shudder to see her tilting her head in the same fashion. The two resembled each other too much, it was uncanny and unnerving. It was as if she was trying to persuade him to tell, or asking why exactly he thought it was all his fault.
Gaara quickly looked away from both of them, leaning back against the fence to try and hide his sudden lack of comfort in the situation. "I killed my mother, during birth." His eyes slid to the tree and he watched her straighten a bit, her head returning to its normal angle--as if anything about her could really be called that--then she stepped back, becoming merely a shade under the tree. She was still watching, she always was, but she'd gotten her answer it seemed. So she stepped back to leave them alone.
Gaara wondered when he started attributing such a personality to the thing which haunted his bedroom.
"That's not your fault. They wouldn't have sent you to a… well, mental institution just because your mother died in childbirth. It can't have been that."
Gaara resisted the urge to laugh. The boy next to him struck him as comical in his innocence. Of course it wasn't the fact that he'd killed his mother in childbirth, but most wouldn't have ventured off past that statement because it was taboo territory. Death itself wasn't something you talked about, that's what landed you in mental institutions and convents and possibly even in the hospital. And yet here this boy was, asking with the curiosity of the little kids Gaara ran into when he wasted time at the mall. The kind of person who would ask what you ran into, when someone older knew it was obvious that your father had beaten you black and blue with a belt.
"I… I'm sorry. I'll stop pushing." The boy brought up his knees, hugging them lightly against his chest as he looked out over the small amount of plant life surrounding them. Apparently the situation was uncomfortable, but not uncomfortable for him to leave.
Did he crave the presence of another person that much, that he didn't care if the person was quiet, just that they were next to him?
Gaara sat up straighter, moving off the fence and leaned forward, picking a stick off the ground, lightly twirling it between his fingers for simple lack of nothing else to do. "No. It isn't enough. It is when you spend your life as a child insisting that she's standing in the corner of your room, staring at you."
The boy lifted his head in a jerky motion and turned to look at Gaara, an unreadable look on his face. A moment later the shock seemed to wear off and Gaara saw him blink a bit. "You… see ghosts?"
"I hate that word." Gaara tossed the branch and laid down on the ground, closing his eyes again. Mentally he was hitting himself, what in the world had possessed him to start up a conversation with this boy? What was the real point in it, and where would it lead? It was just a waste. Another venture into the realm of his life that people always asked about but never really wanted to know the answer to. There wasn't a nice way to say any of this and there really wasn't any point in saying it at all.
And yet.
And yet there was something else about this boy. It went beyond his eerie resemblance to her and even beyond the odd conflicting image of his older body and yet younger questions. The boy was a walking contradiction and perhaps, bore too much of a resemblance to the Gaara hidden under the black clothing and mis-cut hair then Gaara himself wanted to admit. One glance at the boy and a person would say that he and Gaara were nothing alike. And yet the longer the boy sat next to him, the more Gaara found himself peering at the boy, as if looking down into a lake at a blurred reflection.
"Then what do you call them?"
"I don't call her anything. She's just there. The others are just there. They come and go." Gaara shrugged.
To the children sitting around a campfire, the world of ghosts and demons was a wondrous and scary place to visit on a creepy summer's night where the wind was just chilly enough that you could blame it for the shivers from the story. To a solitary child who grew up seeing them lurking in the dark corners of every day life and occasionally reaching out to him, they moved beyond something scary and creepy, to become things of normal life. To Gaara the shades and apparitions he saw had melted back into the woodwork of life, becoming no more interesting then an old lady out walking her dog, or even the dying oak tree which had long sense given up the attempt to produce leaves.
She occupied more of his thoughts then normal, because he now knew of her connection. She still looked the way she had when she died, completely with the blood from her screaming child covering her night gown. The smile was a ghastly exaggeration on her face and perhaps the only thing that made her stand out from a normal person, making her instantly recognizable to him. Still, after seeing that smile nearly every night of his life, it had become no more creepy to him, then the curious look which had settled onto Haku's face now.
"What did you do?" Gaara countered after a moment, disturbing the silence. He didn't really care what Haku did or didn't do, but he needed to say something to derail his current train of thoughts. "How did you end up there?"
A tilting of the head down and Haku tugged at his uniform a bit. "Father's a lawyer, mother's a doctor." He hesitated, his voice growing a little softer. "They're attempting to make something out of nothing."
"So quit."
The boy looked up at him and blinked in question. "What?"
"You don't like school, so quit. Find something else."
Haku frowned. "Like you can leave where you are."
Both of them fell silent, his words echoing just slightly in the air between them. Gaara's train of thought once again reverted back to the track of how alike they were. And he closed his eyes to try and shake that thought. As he lay there silently he heard the bells ring from across the fence, signaling that lunch was ending for the more prestigious students in the area. The grass crunched beside him, giving way as Haku stood up and gathered up his lunch bag.
"You haven't told me your name."
Gaara opened his eyes sitting up to answer and froze in mid motion. He hadn't even noticed the air around him, but in the second it took him to open his mouth, the static sound roared into his ears and the sun passed behind a cloud, eerie twilight filling the area.
A repeat of the image from the day before flashed before his eyes with difference and more details, as if the artist had taken the time to flesh out the nightmare, bringing it more into reality then from the day behind.
Haku was knelt by the side of the fence, looking like a tossed rag doll, abandoned for new and better things. Hair covered his face, shading it from view, while his clothes were torn and stained, the thick red and brown ironically making the crest from his uniform stand out that much more. A stench filled the air, thick with blood, pain and other things Gaara had thankfully never experienced, nor did he ever want to. A stained knife glimmered a few feet from the body, only the handle unstained.
Gaara coughed out his name, barely able to understand his own word and that seemed enough to break the image, shattering it before his eyes. He coughed again and drew in a short breath as he saw the image break away to reveal Haku kneeling by the fence, completely normal and just watching him with a tinge of concern in his eyes.
"Gaara," he responded again when he was sure his voice wouldn't betray him.
Haku favored him with a smile and stood up, apparently not having noticed, or not bothered by Gaara's strange reaction to the question. Holding the crushed paper bag in his hand he waved at Gaara and started down the line of the fence, heading for whatever opening he used every day.
"Haku!" Gaara was standing up and calling after him, before he even realized what he was doing.
The boy stopped and looked back in question.
For a moment Gaara stood there, unsure what he'd intended to really say, though a second later it slipped out without hesitation.
"Be careful."
The boy nodded and rushed off, now more late then before. Gaara wondered if it even occurred to him why he'd said such a strange thing at the last moment. Aside from the images, he didn't even know the reason himself.
Seeing spirits and shades of the dead was one thing, something that Gaara had seen all his life. But premonitions, if that's what this was, was something he'd never experienced before, and honestly didn't have the foggiest idea about now. He was venturing into unknown territory with this boy and it seemed to be creating a progressing pattern.
But if that was true, how much more detailed could such a vision get?
Somewhere behind him, perhaps buried back in the willow tree, a thing seemed to stir. And she tilted her head once more, before fading from sight.
