Chapter 4
Sunlight blurred his vision as eyes blinked, taking in the blank yellowing wall in front of him. He focused on the wall, picking out the small cracks from repainting without bothering to scrape and small spots where the level was uneven and there were small air bubbles in the dried paint. The floor was cold under his body, slowly sucking the warmth away as it had been doing all night. The sunlight was an unwelcome neighbor, painful in its brightness and downright sadistic in the cheer and promise that was supposed to accompany it and a new day. Empty promises that continued to reshow their ugly faces to taunt him each and every morning.
His body ached, still moaning in pain that filled his mind and his ears, causing him to be momentarily deaf and unable to think. The fog of pain was choking and it was all Gaara could do to force himself to turn his head and slowly sit up. As he moved he could feel the cuts on his back and the dried blood flaking off. To say he hurt was an understatement. Sadly, he could say he'd had worse.
The house around him was quiet, not giving a single sound. Somewhere in the course of the night his father had apparently decided to go to work and was now gone, even taking the time to turn off the TV in his normal routine. This meant Gaara had the day to himself to do what he wanted, at least until his father decided to come home. It was almost a sense of balance, like the world was actually trying to apologize. Any time he was beaten bad enough to go unconscious he was usually treated to a day in the house alone, but it wasn't worth it to him. He would have rather been at school.
The walk to the bathroom seemed to take an eternity and Gaara just barely managed to limp there and sit down in the tub. He lay against the chilling cold tub and let it fill with warm water, just staring up at the ceiling.
He could hear the words of the news report from the other room the night before echo in his mind. A boy had been discovered in the street, raped and killed by a stabbing. Haku was dead. The muffled voice of the news announcer had repeated the words with a hint of appropriate sorrow over and over in his mind, hammering the fact slowly and permanently into his brain. His dream had been real.
Gaara suddenly felt sick, and seeing his own blood soak off his body and turn the water around him pink wasn't helping. Crawling out of the tub he managed to make it to the toilet, only to lean over it for the next hour while his body tried to throw up food he hadn't eaten. He felt sick. The sick feeling that started in the back of your brain, just in the back corner, and continued to grow so much that it affected your stomach and throat. It was the need to throw up every speck of food in his body, or attempt to, until he was completely empty. His entire world was spinning again, just like it had been after the beating, but faster now, spiraling into darkness. Gaara curled up on the floor and hugged himself tightly as he found his body shaking again to the effect of almost seeming to have a seizure. He coughed dryly, the feeling scratching his throat raw. He felt the need to throw up again but couldn't move enough to try and act on it. Black filled his vision again and the world dropped out beneath him into silence.
A couple hours must have passed before he awoke again. This time it was the sound of dripping water that awoke him, the pings ringing through his brain as it reverberated through the pink filled tub. Gaara couldn't stop the moan that escaped his throat as he sat up and looked around the room. He froze for a moment, waiting for the sick feeling to return, but it never came. Instead it seemed to now be replaced with a numb and empty feeling, as if he'd tried everything and the life had just been sucked out of him because of it.
Silently Gaara pulled himself to his feet and unplugged the tub, watching the now cold pink water swirl down the drain loudly. He stood there, transfixed by the motion, until the water was gone, then he set about cleaning up the rest of the bathroom and the small pinkish ring that now surrounded the tub.
His mind slowly began to work, processing things at a more palatable rate now that he'd had his moment of complete and total breakdown. He remember the sick feeling well enough that he was able to chalk it up to a momentary complete and total panic about having to deal with yet another unwelcome factor in his life. He'd had his moment of breakdown, and now he was well into the stage of acceptance and adaptation.
The sheer idea of having yet another thing to deal with in his life was not attractive in the least, in fact the mere thought boardered on making him sick again. A life at an academy that wouldn't get him anywhere but an annoyance of an escape was the least of his worries, followed by dealing with the society around him that put his sad excuse for a free life in jeopardy the moment he left the system. Then there was his father, and little more needed to be said about that. And the spirits he saw at the least convenient times. And now this? These dreams?
It was too much to handle at once.
Prophetic dreams weren't supposed to exist. It was a plot device to send movies along, to make people wonder and to cop out of explanations in fantasy novels. They weren't real. And even the ones he had heard about from various sources weren't like the one he'd had. They were supposed to be visions, images of things to come. Prophetic dreams were not supposed to be out of body experiences where he watched a boy he barely knew get thrown back and forth, raped and killed as if he were some sick bystander who'd stopped to enjoy the show. He shouldn't have seen that happen and he certainly shouldn't have seen it when it happened, at the same moment – which was about the right time as far as he could figure.
Things like this didn't happen, weren't supposed to, but apparently the world had just decided that Gaara had gotten too used to his current hellish situation and had decided to throw in another piece. Gaara made a point of deciding that if he ever met the person in charge of throwing this horrid excuse of a life together for him he'd tear them to pieces with his bare hands.
That said and decided, he finally left the bathroom and moved to his closet in an attempt to find clothes. Gaara had discovered early on that fish net, in spite of its strange look and general un-acceptance by the masses outside of 'gothic' teenage style, was actually the ideal type of shirt when your back was a patchwork of cuts and scrapes. The fabric barely touched one's skin and usually was light enough to not even be felt, and it kept other fabric from irritating the cuts as they attempted to heal. As a result his wardrobe served a double purpose. It hid the cuts, and it did so in the most comfortable way he could without drawing attention to himself and inviting more such treatment.
The fish net went on automatically first, followed by baggy black jeans that allowed the cuts on his legs to get as much air as possible and hopefully heal faster. A thin black over shirt hid the cuts that were visible through the fishnet and Gaara looked like his normal self, which he confirmed by glaring in the mirror. He allowed himself a moment of complete hate and disgust, directing the look at himself but aiming it more at his current situation – if you could really glare at a situation and an inanimate thing – then he wandered to the kitchen in search of some sort of food.
His father, in spite of his horrible attempt at being that – actually wasn't bad at much else. Like any other single guy with no real interest to have a social life, he went to work and then came home and watched television, electing to wander to his bed at some point during the night and repeat the process again. Food was kept in the kitchen, and it was all relatively simple. Gaara had money for clothes and other things when he could manage to steal it from his father's room or whenever there was some comment made by a social worker that he should have something a little newer. Other then those simple things, his father really didn't care. They lived in a smaller house which could have been about the size of an apartment, but was left over from the days when his mother had been alive. So simple things like finding food and attempting to look normal for those who become just a little too nosey were easy enough. No one bothered them in this house. And as much of a hell as it was, it was a familiar hell and therefore one that Gaara was able to deal with.
It was the unfamiliar hells that caused the problems.
The kitchen didn't yield much this time, and Gaara settled for a bottle of water and a half finished bag of salt crackers to fill his stomach. He munched on one of the crackers slowly, making sure it didn't upset his stomach again, then set about cleaning off the chair next to the kitchen table so he had a place to sit down and attempt to relax.
In the process of tossing a pair of his father's dirty jeans, which had seen the floor more times then they'd seen the washer, he heard a click out in the living room. Gaara immediately froze from years of trained reactions and went completely still. That familiar sound was the distinct click of the TV turning on and he could hear the sound of electricity humming from the old appliance still hanging on the edge of life from constant use for almost eighteen years. He hadn't tripped over the remote.
Was his father home?
Gaara winced at the thought of his father finding him in the kitchen and losing his temper again just because Gaara had basically presented himself as a target. He didn't like to be found outside of his room, it usually lead to more beatings then he could deal with. On instinct his panicked mind started plotting ways to get back to his bedroom uncaught.
But his father was at work.
That thought implanted itself in Gaara's mind and he slowly straightened up. His father may be abusive, but he didn't skip work. So he had to be gone. But then how had the television turned on? He distinctly remembered it being off when he'd passed it a moment ago. Unable to contain his curiosity and wonder at the situation, Gaara abandoned his pathetic excuse for a meal and stepped out of the kitchen to look around the living room for the culprit.
The living room wasn't that exciting of a place and generally looked like the rest of the house in its general disorder. The required decent sized TV was situated against the wall, with a worn and well used easy reclining chair sitting in front of it that had long ago lost its ability to recline and now just slouched much like the person who usually filled it. A small table which was probably an antique sat next to the chair, overflowing with empty and half full cans and bottles and a few crumpled bags of snack food. No one bothered to clean so the junk seemed to be breeding on its own, slowly moving to take over the entire room until some form of motivation over swept his father to clean.
The television was on, the sound turned down low and nothing else strange about it. Gaara could even see the remote sitting on the reclining chair; no one had touched it.
But his mind concentrated more on the scene on the television as he stepped forward, following the urge to turn up the volume and listen in. The channel was turned to a random news show, showing the scene of a murder with bodies being pulled away on stretchers in black bags. Gaara's feet moved him slowly toward the television until the screen flashed, showing the faces of four boys. Then it turned to another picture, of Haku.
Gaara stumbled forward quickly and hit the sound up, holding the button until it was blaring loudly through the room as he stared.
"…found just days ago murdered. No concrete connections have been made between the boys yet, but all of their bodies were found killed and positioned in a similar way. It has not been confirmed if the three recently found were raped as well. Police are still investigating the scene…"
The reporter's voice faded out as Gaara flipped through the channels, trying desperately to find another news report on the events that wasn't just wrapping up and switching to more appetizing things. But the television seemed to be malfunctioning, because every time he thought he found a channel and let go of the button, it would suddenly flip back to the original channel it had been on.
Gaara stepped back as he watched the weather man move across the screen pointing out the weather for the next three days. Three feet from the TV, four… five… nowhere near the remote….
The channel flipped again and it was almost as if something had pressed rewind. Gaara watched in mute awe as the camera man showed a shaking image of the house surrounded by yellow police tape in the middle of a perfectly normal suburban neighborhood. Neighbors stood not too far away, watching as four bodies were wheeled from the house wrapped in black bags, followed by another medical worker carrying another bag holding what could have possibly been spare parts.
The same scene played over and over again. It showed the bodies and showed their faces in perfect looking school photographs, and then showed the photo of Haku which looked too posed to actually be real. As soon as that photo was flashed across the screen the picture would blur, like a tape rewinding itself, only to repeat again.
Gaara turned away from the television and took a few deep breaths to calm himself.
She was standing in the kitchen doorway, her head tilted as she looked at the television picture.
Gaara blinked. "Did you…?"
She of course didn't answer, she never did. But her body moved, slinking slowly back into the kitchen and out of sight as if she'd never been there. As she moved the sound on the television began to turn up again and Gaara could hear the news report, the volume slowly turning higher and higher.
"Shut up!" He turned to the television angrily. The last thing he wanted to see was the face of that dead boy flashed on the screen over and over again as if something were accusing him of the death. It wasn't his fault he wasn't there. Hell he barely even knew the boy, so why in the world was all of this going on? He had nothing to do with it. Haku was like any other student at his school who'd just suddenly decided to talk to him out of the blue. He wasn't important.
"You're dead!"
Gaara turned toward the television and opened his mouth to repeat those words but his voice caught in his throat and the room grew ice cold.
Staring back at him, from behind the television, emerging from the wall as if it were a part of it, was the thing he'd seen yesterday.
Hair tangled down around his head, looking wet and almost alive in its strange fluid movements. He could see the eyes and they stared right back at him, the mouth twisted open painfully in an eternal scream of pain. It slowly slunk out of the wall, pulling away like a drop of water slowly falling from a turned off faucet, escaping. Shoulders became visible and arms slid out of the wall as it moved through the television and slowly advanced on Gaara.
"You're dead." Gaara's voice shook as he just stared at the thing advancing on him. The words were small, trembling on their own as he watched. He couldn't move and he could barely breathe. It was as if those eyes were black holes, slowly sucking in everything around him. The warmth was gone from the room, as was any sound that Gaara could make out, and now those deep black pits were pulling away his voice and the air. Gaara himself felt that if he stayed there too long he'd fall in, caught in a world of darkness and falling forever.
Sound disappeared around him, the television fizzing to silence and a loud static sound filling his ears. It was the same sound she always made, but louder, almost violent in its volume. The sound felt like sandpaper, rubbing over his ears painfully and it grew louder and louder around him.
Then the mouth moved and a scream shattered the air, forcing Gaara to move and cover his ears. The thing in front of him moved in a flash, suddenly appearing right in front of him and Gaara felt a stabbing cold hit him in the chest as if the thing held a knife.
Panic took over. He stumbled backward, landing against the wall and sending an old dusty picture shattering to the floor. The sound of the glass cracking and wood snapping seemed to shatter across the room and shake his surroundings, but Gaara didn't care. As soon as he could get back to his feet he was bolting, slamming his shoulder into the doorframe in his hurry to get out of the room.
He stumbled out into the sun light outside and for a moment was completely blinded. The sun stunned his eyes and he stumbled across the grass, tumbling to the ground for a mere second, before he was up and running again, bolting from the house. He didn't care how stupid he looked or if anyone else even noticed him. All he cared about was getting away from that thing.
He just ran and never looked back.
