A/N: Entry for Naruto100's 'Song Titles' challenge. Song used was 'Drought' by Vienna Teng.
Drought:
Sunagakure was a dry, desert city trying to subsist beneath the sun that beat down upon them and heated the ground beneath their feet. Summer never moved forward. The days were always hot. The nights were always cold. It was a landscape of a sort of merry and desperate drought.
Shinobi in Suna were hard and brittle. They were raised in such a place that they began to become like. The heat was anchored in the dust and the only thing they breathed was the taste of dried-up hopes that had shriveled in the baking sun.
The Wind Country shinobi wrapped their lives in the brilliance of death. The craved the darkness, craved to put their backs against the wall, and craved to be broken by ice, a coolness they could never comprehend. They drowned, they carried, they buried, and they fought.
Looking over the balcony at the city sprawled before him, Gaara mused that he was the only one among his siblings who truly belonged in this desolate landscape.
Temari was secretly a flower, trying to bloom in a place where most wilted. She seemed to belong in Konoha, with that man she spoke of, in a place full of green and jubilance.
Kankuro couldn't taste those dried-up hopes, because he dreamed and built with his own hands and saw within the cold unfeeling joints of his puppets a way to move beyond, to rise. He belonged somewhere away from the oppressive, from this unrelenting pounding heat that drove you down instead of up.
But Gaara knew of this desolation. He tasted the dried-up hopes every time he donned the robes of Kazekage, every time he felt the demon stir restlessly inside his mind. He sometimes thought that maybe if he knew himself, if he had faith in himself, then maybe he could love himself.
Looking over the horizon, Gaara spotted a large bird, out of place within the desolate, heated skies. And as he rallied the sand he thought maybe he could make it so that he wouldn't quite belong in this landscape either.