A/N: I'm back. Woo.
Disclaimer: Not mine…but I do own a rather nice pair of Emily Strange socks…
Warning: Yaoi and swearing. Progression in the anime and manga have made some of the events in my story inaccurate.
"..." normal speech
'...' thoughts
Italics – emphasized thoughts or words (can also be flashbacks)
Chapter 19 – Rock Bottom in Sight
There was a great rushing in his ears. He loved its scary scratchy tone, the way it pummelled his heart dully, the way it sent his body into mild convulsions. It had been a long time since he was able to hear himself breathe, to take breaths this deep and savour it wholly and indubitably.
It was like, for the first time after many a bated breath, he was alive.
His eyeballs, they were swivelling so quickly, so haphazardly in their sockets. Left, right, left again, up at the night's complexion where the stars had receded in their twilight, and finally, down at his feet, down ahead of him, down where there lay the Uchiha.
Sasuke was in a lasting stage of pure, unadulterated mutilation. His hair was gone. His arms, poking out of the tatters of his shirt, were covered with open running sores. His face was a cratered red soup from which one desert-faded black eye peered with a terrible, pitiful intelligence. His teeth were gone. His eyelids were frayed flaps. He looked like a man who had been regurgitated out of the dark and burning subterranean mouth of Hell itself. What a beautiful sight to behold. What a true masterpiece he had created.
Chapped, bleeding lips twitched upwards ever more slighter, and a horrible laugh of triumph beat against Gaara's chest on the inside, fighting to get out. He was a clot looking for a place to happen, a splinter of bone hunting a soft organ to puncture, a lonely lunatic cell looking for a mate – they would set up housekeeping and raise themselves a cozy malignant tumour.
Then there was Uzumaki. The shape assailed his vision like dead fate. He lay there, twitching in a way that told of a bird being beaten to death by pointed sticks in the hands of twisted, smiling children.
Gaara watched him, frozen. His smile was gone. His high, rich colour was gone. His face was suddenly a window pane of pale clear glass.
Those musical, tantalizing breaths had ceased.
There were people above.
"Gaara!"
Temari. He now felt the sting in his chest, as if his breaths had been slapped out of him.
Upon further speculation, the Uchiha's demise was not so beautiful after all. He had been sloppy. Remnants of his body were still visible, although it would cost the nins of Konoha many months to piece him back together again. If they found all the pieces.
Sloppy. Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy. Sloppysloppysloppysloppy"What are you waiting for, Gaara? We have to go now!"
But it was not all waste. Blood had soaked the sand, and his mother had imbibed enough of Sasuke's blood to send her into a happy, drunken delirium. It was also deliciously fulfilling to insult the foolish Uchiha clan and their worthless family pride.
Temari leapt from the trees and placed a firm grasp on Gaara's shoulder, not caring that her arm could end up in a similar condition as the Uchiha's. She gave a soft tug towards the branches where Baki and Kankuro knelt quietly, waiting. "We have to go," she implored, albeit meekly.
He looked back, half-quizzical, half-smiling, one imaginary eyebrow – the left – cocked. Yet the overall impression she took from him was one of great gravity.
"G-Gaara! You're hurt!" Temari exclaimed, her eyes wide. Gaara felt a hot pinpricks along the length of his thigh where one of Sasuke's kunais had deeply embedded itself.
He looked down at the knife, then up at her again. The savagery, for now at least, was gone. He was only a lost little boy who wanted his teddy, or the scratchy blanket which had graduated with him from the crib.
Then he screamed. Screamed and screamed, huge, inarticulate sounds of terror and rage. Like a lion, Gaara could not (or would not) speak; he could only roar in his lost little boy's voice.
Suddenly Temari yanked harshly on his shoulder, and soon, they were riding the ebbing shadows together with Baki ahead and Kankuro flanking his left. Temari glanced at her little brother's face, and saw that the little boy was still with her. In his insomnia he had drawn away from her a little, that was all. He would curl up like a fetus, his thumb in his mouth, his hand wrapped around the shaft of a knife.
She felt her hand drop from the back of Gaara's shoulder when they soared over the gates of Konoha again a few minutes after their entry. Even though Baki was sprinting, consuming all remaining reserves of energy for this final sprint towards freedom, and causing the group as a whole to travel faster, she could already feel sleep settling in the back of her eyes. She was not sure if she was awake in the night or only dreamed she had. Beside her, Gaara stared ahead, an expression of blissful ecstasy writ across his face.
To the desert, to the desert.
All he needed was the desert. It was true Naruto had taken him. Taken him with wide, bright-blue eyes. They took him the way they might take a girl with pale blank eyes, or a boy with hard, obsidian ones – and now that their spell was done they were cold, both so cold, it seemed impossible that they could ever be warm again, with him bleeding to death and he letting the cold wind brush his fleeing self.
Yes, the spell was over, and all that remained now, unchanged and forever unchangeable, was the desert. In the desert it was always ice or fire; there was no in-between. His madness, like a fine skillet dish, now wanted only for the desert sun to simmer it and complete it, to give it that final subtle touch of flavour. The nights, oh, the nights – overhead a trillion stars gleamed, seeming almost close enough to touch, bathing the desert in their cold witchlight. He was known there, and even the maddest of them could only gaze upon his dark and grinning face at an oblique angle as they scurried around corners and dove behind walls at the sight of him, like so many pathetic vermin.
Gaara stole one last glance at the shrinking sihouette of Konoha, where he imagined the changed Naruto would be bleeding to death. Or perhaps, he would be listening to his own breaths becoming bated as he felt the life being wrung out of him and his corpse left to bake in the sun like forgotten laundry. Maybe he was shivering now, his skin pallid, wanting ever so desperately to cry for help, as a simple expression of distress, or fear – because in his half-lidded eyes, the shadows were slowly starting to gather around the edges of his vision.
Gaara scoffed. It was the truth, the divine truth that Naruto was simply not – he was simply, succinctly, different. The one he had left behind clearly had no answers for him. The one with incarnadine shoots running through those golden locks had shown him that this thing called 'love' held no truth. If there was truth, then the impudent leaf-nin had forgotten it. The impetuous Uzumaki had nothing to tell or show like he had so arrogantly proclaimed back in the Chuunin exams. No, he had only demonstrated that he had grown weak and pitiful, with no chance of reverting back to his former self. In the end, he had even proven himself a waste of his time to kill.
Somewhere in the vestiges of the night, Temari's brow creased in puzzlement as she heard Gaara utter three words.
Two black shapes frayed at the edges were dancing across his line of vision, twisting and turning, growing bigger then smaller, and then were gone completely. Naruto uttered an amorphous scream, which was little more than a violent susurrus of air. Everything seemed far off and floating, except for the pain in his throat, which had returned in slow, thudding bursts.
Suddenly, Naruto's breath exploded out of him, and then large hands were groping at his face, and he thought the thumbs gouging at his eyes. Naruto saw hair the colour of quicksilver and his surprised mouth formed the word "Kakashi!" in the faint light of early morn. But the exclamation was never made, because someone was calling to Naruto in the world beyond, or was merely making a statement that referred to him – somewhere past the horizon of trees over which the sun's fiery face was rising, a dark stranger was there and speaking of him.
His soft voice, coming out of the growing darkness. Infinitely soft, the final enveloping terror that was like coming home. Somewhere the dark man was abroad in the night's close, and he spoke three words like an incantation to all the black spirits that had ever been – an incantation and invitation for all misfortunes to befall him:
"No great loss."
A/N: Yup, that pretty much sums it up for this story. I might write a prologue, since I believe there are lots of loose ends that need to be tied up, but I'd like to see the reaction to my attempt at a new style of writing. Anybody like it? It's been a while since I've written a chapter for this story :P Big e-kisses and thanks to readers, and especially those who actually remembered my story after my looong break.
Tsuki