The room was dark and cold, the shadows crawling over my hands as I look down upon a blood-ridden form.

I am perplexed.

What had happened?

There is nothing but pools of crimson blood trickling from one to the other on the floor of the room, the walls smeared with the liquid until there are rainbows glinting in the light. Temari is screaming so loud my ears ring, and the smell is horrible. Absolutely horrible.

The form beneath me is smiling, smiling, and she's whispering something, but I can't hear her. I feel desperation bubble up as I lean against her form, trying to hear her last words, aching to hear it but I can't, I can't, there's something clogging my ears, my nose, my heart--

"Gaara," Temari was still screaming as the form stops moving. I pay no attention, just let the thought scream through my mind: No words, last words, can't hear the last words, none, no, killed them all, those words, those--

I am scared. Why was the room covered in blood? Whomever had done it was still here. I scramble around, looking for a safe place to hide, but its hard to move since my clothes are caked in blood and soiled with something else, piss, maybe, but I try to move and hide but my body won't let me. My body is still. My body is calm. My body is totally relaxed as it stands there, staring at the woman who I had called 'Mother'. My body feels laughter bubbling up from inside it.

I look down, shakily.

My body is holding a butcher knife.

--

Breaking the Music

By FlightAngel

--

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto, but I do own this story: so you steal, I kill

--

I knew I was first 'in love' with Uzamaki Naruto when I was hanging by my foot, dangling upside down above the quarry right across from the school.

Now, how did I get up there?

During sophomore year of high school, Temari had finally pushed and prodded me into joining the School Aikido team in hope of me 'using my abilities to the best' and getting our team to win in the annual aikido-match-thing for the first time ever or something along those lines. Being that I dislike martial arts and I absolutely hated Sakura, who was also on the team, this was not a happy thing for me. Definitely not a happy thing.

"Yosh!" Maito-sensei, who was, unfortunately, the leader of the team, had cried out the first day the team adjourned, "First we will stretch! Stretch, young blossoms, stretch, and let your strength bubble up from within so you can then use it to prevail in the quest for youth!" I glared at him and looked around to see how everyone else was 'stretching'.

Sasuke, who had also been pushed to join, was all the way on the opposite side of the room trying very hard to ignore Sakura, who was 'stretching' her triceps by innocently lifting her arm upright and letting her breasts bounce around two inches away from his face.

Shikamaru, who was doing circles with his arms, forward and backward, forward and backward, was stretching besides my sister, who was enthusiastically doing jumping jacks. Thankfully, she was wearing a bra underneath her gi, unlike somebody we all know.

There were some more people I vaguely recognized, all doing various splits and other athletic names I've obviously forgotten, including Dog-boy and his Field-Studies Partner, Weird-dude-who-plays-with-bugs, Chouji (It's very hard to forget a name belonging to someone who is fat but don't tell him I said that) who was bouncing up and down, his fat a second behind him, and the Ice Cream Shoppe Waitress, Ten Squared. Of course, I don't know her real name, but that's what Neji calls her when he's in a good mood, so…

"Stretch harder!" Maito-sensei belted out, causing everybody to quickly increase their stretching pace, "Do not be afraid of pain! Pain is just a minor hurdle in the long path of everlasting peace! You are all so youthful it should not be hard to blossom into a well-grown lotus flower dancing in the night! Stretch! Stretch! Streeeeeetch!" I gritted my teeth and copied Temari, doing jumping jacks.

What the heck? How did Temari persuade me to come here again?

Oh, I remember. She threatened to steal Kiss Oil from me if I didn't come. Ha.

"SABAKU!"

"Yes!" Temari and I shouted at the same time in surprise, and then looked at each other blankly. Temari had actually graduated from Konoha High a year ago, but she still comes by every meeting without fail to 'encourage and help' her underclassmen. Of course, that meant she wasn't allowed to compete the in competitions, which then meant she just had to drag me over here to take her place. And she couldn't drag Kankuro to come, because he's too 'weak'. So that leaves me. Go me.

"MY!" Maito-sensei's bulging face appears an inch away from my own and I widen my eyes in mock-surprise, "So you are our dear Temari's younger brother? I am Maito Gai, your new aikido teacher! Did you know your beautiful flower of a sister was the team's best member? You don't look all that much alike but you both have such beautiful green gems as irises! And such a youthful face! And such lovely hair!" Temari was making frantic 'don't touch his hair' motions behind me as Maito-sensei reaches for my hair. My expression quickly darkened and all the other students took a step back from my impending doom.

"Maito-sensei!" Temari finally flung herself on top of the elder man in desperation and he was propelled far, far, away from my reach (pity, I wanted to reach up and strangle him) with her momentum, "Why don't we get on with class, neh? Neh? Neh?" She giggled nervously, shooting me a look that said kill-someone-and-someone's-guitar-is-going-get-hurt and I returned her look with one that responded touch-my-guitar-and-you-die-no-exceptions. The tension broke and the class let out a sigh of relief.

"ALRIGHT!" Maito-sensei cried out, jumping up from his just-seconds-before butt-in-the-air sprawl without any shame at all, "Let's get started with rolls!"

I won't go into what kind of things we did in class except for getting hit in the groin twice but afterward I ended up back in the men's locker room, back covered with bruises.

"If you had tucked your arm in when you hit the ground," Shikamaru was saying, "then you wouldn't have gotten those bruises on your shoulders." I growled deep in my throat as I roughly untied the knot holding my gi together and threw the belt onto the ground.

"Whatever."

All the boys changed in the locker room all at once and I was half grossed-out at the overpowering smell of sweaty testosterone in the air. Sasuke, who was the first one in, quickly removed his gi, threw on his black tee and navy blazer and fled the room as quickly as he came. For me, though, it wasn't that easy.

"Whoa, Gaara," A random senior boy said to me, bent down looking at my back, "You really got beat up, eh? Ha, all the beginners are like that at first, you'll get better." I glared at him, but the critique didn't stop there.

"Maito-sensei is really weird, but if you listen to him you'll be an awesome aikido follower," Another boy said to me, this time probably a junior, "Lee-san actually took this course last year, but then dropped out in favor of judo, which is also lead by Maito-sensei…" I threw a look at Shikamaru, who gave me a sort of pitying glance and slipped away as quietly as Sasuke. Damn. Why was it always me that drew all the attention?

Of course, there was the huge fact that neither Sasuke nor Shikamaru suffered any color-distorting injuries and thus, looked perfectly fine, while I was just short of resembling a messed up blueberry. Ha.

"—but that's so weird, why is your hair perfectly fine? It's not sweaty or anything…" A boy reached out and, fatally, brushed one of many locks of crimson hair. My eyes flashed.

Before anyone knew it the boy was screaming on the floor, a sickening crack left of his forehead spilling blood onto the floor and bench. I looked at my hand in a sort of dim horror, as if some part of me was still horrified that I had spilt blood while the rest of me filtered him out. The other boys were shouting, and, eventually, split into two groups. One immediately scattered to take care of the injured boy, some going to fetch a teacher and the other trying to calm him down. The second group, then, went after me.

"What the frick' is your problem?" A particularly muscular senior takes me by the shirt and slams me against the locker wall. I can taste blood in my mouth, but I don't really care. My back is on fire, first from the bruises and now this damn senior connecting my bruises with a metal wall of locks and bars. It hurt.

"What should we do?" A skinny freshman whispered from behind a mass of upper classmen, "Should we take him to the principal?"

There were a few murmurings from behind until the senior who had me in his grip said, defiantly, "Nah, what would the principal to do him anyway? Suspend him? I say we take the matter in our own hands."

Which, in the end, meant hanging me on a tree branch by a foot tied down with super-heavy duct tape over fifteen feet of dark quarry water.

"Hope you regret what you've done, loser!"

"You think he'd die? If he falls…"

"He almost killed Shiro! He deserves it!"

"Well…"

The conversation fades as they walk away, leaving me sort of fluttering in the wind, blood rushing to my head as, like I said before, I was upside-down.

'Ok', I think to myself as I let the wind let me dangle, 'What should I do?' There are several things that popped into my head.

One, get my cell phone out and call Temari to save me. But then, not only would my manly pride be injured, she'd probably just leave me hanging for life. Plus, my cell phone was still in my locker room as I hadn't had a chance to get my stuff before they dragged me out here.

Two, scream as loud as I could and hope for someone to hear me. However, I'd be seen as a wuss. Sabaku no Gaara is not a wuss. Therefore, option two is out.

Three, do a movie-quality sort-of flip and manage to untie the duct tape around my leg. This would then lead me to fall into the quarry, however, and I couldn't do a movie-quality flip anyways, no matter how many people I killed. I mean, you really didn't have to be all that strong to kill someone. It's easier to snuff out a life then to lift twenty pounds (which I can do by the way. I didn't say I wasn't strong).

I think my thought-process started to wander after ten minutes of dangling. It may have to do with boredom; maybe to the fact my face was turning an unsettling shade of red. I wonder how long I had to be hanging for me to die of too much blood in the brain? If I was still truly murderous I would have considered this a new killing technique. But then, I wasn't, so I let my thoughts ponder over other more trivial things.

Did Kankuro remember to do the laundry this week? If he hadn't I'd be forced to wear my tanks to school, then. And no one wanted to look at a skinny almost muscle-less sophomore's sticks for arms.

What about Sasuke? He'd left before the whole let's-hang-Gaara-in-a-tree thing came to being. Will he hear of it? 'Probably not,' I think dryly as another gust of wind blows me like a feather, 'Probably sitting in his room-sized sofa drinking hot cocoa and talking to Naruto on the phone.'

Sometimes I envied the two's relationship. Sasuke, his cold demeanor and aloof attitude really pissed me off sometimes, especially how he glared at me when I so much as touch Naruto. Naruto, happy and cheerful smile lighting up the whole room, laughter as pure as the color white. Bad metaphor, I know, but I can't think straight with all this blood in my brain.

Suddenly I was hit with a longing for Naruto to be here. I have no idea where the idea had sprouted from, and I usually didn't long for company, so I was utterly confused at myself. The feeling wouldn't dissipate, whoever, causing me to split into two people again. I had a habit of giving different sides of me personalities and figures.

There was prideful-Gaara, who couldn't stand having anything ruin his reputation for his lack of emotion. Nice-Gaara, who felt sympathy for those people bullied out in the halls or had their hair pulled every day, and urged my body to go help them. Realism-Gaara, who believed that you couldn't help anything that went along— it was all pointless. The world moved on and you were just a speck, and little dust mite that really didn't matter. Shukaku-Gaara, who had been put to sleep temporarily but still threatened to resurface at times. And, finally, feeling-Gaara, the part of me that felt everything I should feel—anger, sadness, hatred, happiness, longing, love…

Love?

My eyes widened in horror at what I had just thought. After a few years of denial and hatred towards my siblings, I admitted, grudgingly, that I didn't really want to kill either of them. That was, as Baki insisted, 'love'. And, according to Temari's bouts of explaining how her newest romance novel was worthy enough to be read, love was pure, kind, and was defined as 'the feeling to sacrifice anything and everything for that one special person'. Of course, I felt nothing of that sort towards neither Kankuro nor Temari, but then, Baki said that was a different kind of love.

There are different kinds of love?

As I hung helplessly, I checked off several things on my mental list of Naruto. What was it I exactly felt about him? Wanting him to be near me at all times? Listening to his laugh in the hallways and feeling enlightened by his smile? Feeling the sense of understanding as Naruto listens to what's happening in my life? Willing to give up even my motorbike for his company? What was it? This feeling?

Love?

My expression froze.

Then, at that exact moment, the duct tape holding my foot onto the branch snapped, and I was plunged into a basin of chilly autumn water.

Damn, I thought as I floundered, Temari'll kill me for soiling another pair of pants!

--

When I see Neji again, he smiles at me. I stare. He smiles wider. I stare harder. His eyebrow starts to twitch and his smile turns scary.

"What are you staring at?"

I don't know if I've said it before, but I will say it again. Neji. Almost. Never. Yells. Never. Being raised as one of the descendants of the original founders of Hyuuga Jewelers, he is an extremely magnanimous young man who seemed to accept everything presented to him and reject anything presented to him as well. While talking to him you make a slip of tongue, he'd tilt his head sideways and glare you down so hard until you feel like you were going to set on fire and turn to ash or something. He's done it to me, except I glared back and turned him to ash.

Ha.

So it was typical for him to turn his pleasant face to one of annoyed anger in a matter of milliseconds, of course. "You…" I say, flatly, "…are smiling."

His elegantly curved brow furrows in a sort of irritated confusion, "Is that a crime?"

I stare at him again. We are at the beautiful park situated between Temari's Aikido class and Papa Gino's, the best pizza restaurant ever (in my opinion, anyways), me squatting down between two roughened tree trunks and him, crossing his arms and towering above me in an extremely superior way. Not like I cared about 'superiority' and 'inferiority' and all that crap: in my opinion, whoever could beat the heck out of anyone either physically or mentally is superior, and whoever ran away at everything and never fought back was inferior. Everyone else was just somewhere in-between.

"No… but why were you smiling like that?" I don't wait for him to answer before adding, "You smile a lot, but you never smiled like that before… like you just came back from a moment of pure bliss."

"My," My best friend says mockingly, "I didn't even know you knew the word 'bliss'." I narrow my eyes and chuck my water bottle at his head. Swiftly catching the plastic thing without breaking eye contact, he slowly removes the cap, lifts his head up, and drinks all my water.

"Neji…" If looks can kill, all trees in a twenty mile radius would be wilting because of my enormous dark fury, which is unbound. Ok, unbound except for when Naruto is concerned, which is a lot. "That was… my water…"

"Too bad," He replies coolly, pocketing the empty bottle into his giant tote-bag-thing (it's like a tote bag attached to his waist… a huge tote bag…) and folding his arms, "Punishment for ruining my good mood."

"What exactly were you so happy about anyways?"

He shrugs casually, leaning down and sitting down next to me. "Well, nothing… except for the fact I won't be free on Saturday night."

I look at him incredulously. "…and?"

He gives me a quick smile and I stare at him again. He notices my stare and raises a hand for me to stop looking at him that way. "'Cause I'm going to the movies!"

I stare at him.

He stops smiling, turns around, and rummages through his tote bag. Finally remerging with a large club-like thing in tow, he growls, "If you stare at me like that again I'll blow you away to kingdom come, alright? Good? Nod your head. Good boy."

I don't usually let myself be played around my fellow band members, but I was still trying to get my mind to comprehend 'going to the movies'.

"…" I open my mouth, "…date?"

His eyebrow twitches, "Yes, Gaara, I am going on a date. Are you in such shock that I, Hyuuga Neji, am lowering myself to your standard and going on a date?" I don't say anything, but I tilt my head to get a better look at him. Why the heck was I born short?

"No, it's fine… congratulations." He stares at me.

"Why are we acting like it's a funeral or something? Whatever! We're going to the Ice Cream Shoppe to eat ice cream, got that?" Before I can widen my eyes in shock at Neji yelling for once, he grabs my hand and pulls me uphill. As I struggle to get out of the senior's insanely sharp grip (his fingernails are digging into my skin…) I dimly wonder what Temari would say if she came home from the Nara's today and saw grass stains all over my white pants. Probably burst out crying and run over to the Nara's again.

"My, Neji!" The same two-bun girl who has served us every week smiles at me charmingly then turns back to her so-called boyfriend, "What are you doing here on a Monday? Don't you usually only come Wednesdays?" Neji, who is still in bliss from being invited to go on a date, allows a small, cheerful grin to cross his face.

"Well, I felt like eating ice cream today and where better then to come to then here? This shop does sell the best ice cream, after all." Two-bun girl just laughs behind her hand, then takes out her clipboard.

"Ok, boys, what would you like to eat?"

"Caramel Turtle Sundae," Pops out of my mouth before my brain catches up.

"Vanilla Malt." Neji answers her curtly and she nods, tucking away her clipboard into her breast pocket and skipping behind the counter to inform the ever-so-generous cook that we had arrived and we wanted ice cream right now.

We stare out the window in a comfortable silence for a while, Neji with his chin resting in the palm of his hand, hair completely pulled back in the traditional Japanese style he always wore at his house. I tried to guess what I looked like from his point of view. A too-skinny boy dressed in a sweatshirt two sizes too big for him, arms crossed with his sleeves pulled up to his elbows. Pale complexion making him look like a shallow ghost, burning red hair uncombed and altogether hard to look at. A bored, rather angry expression sketched across his face as he glares holes into the nearby birds, which stop singing immediately and drop dead onto the grass.

Temari once said I looked constipated when I wasn't glaring, and ended up running for her life when I finally grabbed the butcher knife from Kankuro and chased her. Did I look constipated to Neji? If I did, he better not tell me or I'll chase him with a butcher knife too.

"Hey," Neji breaks the silence, letting his hand fall to the table as he lifts his chin and turns to face me, "How'd your date go?" I stare at him with a murderous glint in my eye and he raises a slender eyebrow. "Let me guess—you didn't get a kiss?"

My eyes flicker back to the birds out the window, totally avoiding Neji's glance. I mumble, "I didn't say that."

"You didn't! That's why you were so morose this morning!"

I give him the dirty look and lean forward, putting my weight on the table. "It's really something I'm probably going to have to deal with myself, so can you please back off?" He holds up his hands with a quirky smirk on his face, then sets them down again as his expression quickly morphs into one of quiet concern.

"But… why didn't he kiss you? Or," he quickly corrects himself, "Why didn't you kiss him?" I inwardly squirm at Neji's thoughtful, intellectual gaze. My outward appearance still had its mask of cold demeanor, however, which was relieving as I had a lot of things to worry about currently without the loss of reputation as well.

"Um…" I ran a hand through my hair as I continued to avoid his gaze, "Well… we were about to kiss… and…" I struggled to find the correct words. Silence may be cool, but it definitely didn't increase one's vocabulary, "…we were… interrupted… so we pulled away and… ended in silence."

He stares at me for a second as I try to recover my composure without making it obvious that I was doing so. He holds up a finger and, slowly, says, "You were about to go smooch?"

I nod, feeling my brow tick at the word 'smooch'. Neji was sophisticated. Why was he using such an… unsophisticated word? Ok, so my vocabulary really sucked, but that really doesn't matter.

"And who made the first move?"

I point to myself and he continues.

"Did he back away when you leaned towards him?"

My expression is blank as I shake head no.

"So he wasn't backing away and he was accepting the kiss when you two were interrupted?"

My slow-pace brain finally catches up to Neji's reasoning and I can feel a light blush creep over my face as fast as the plague. "S-so you're saying he l-likes…?"

Neji smirks crookedly again and his expression has now almost completely lightened up. "Maybe… I'm just saying you're not completely hopeless. If you persuade him to drop Sasuke…" We stare at each other for a while, then turn, in unison to look outside, back at the stocks of trees poking out from beneath the shaft-thing the store had set up to give shade to its dine-out customers.

"Ice cream!" Ten Squared shouts out as she slams a bowl of Caramel Turtle Sundae and a cup full of vanilla malt, causing both Neji and I to flinch. "Okey-dokey, if there's anything else you boys want just ring me ok?" She winks at Neji, who gives her a tight-lipped smile back, then turns her back on us and skips over to another customer all the way on the other side of the store. Neji sips quietly at his malt while I take a generous spoonful of gooey, still hot caramel sauce and rich vanilla ice cream crammed with little turtle-shaped chocolates (if Neji cared for real ice creams instead of malts he'd probably love eating this just because of the turtles) and place it delicately into my mouth.

Before I had come to Konoha, I never had an interest in anything besides blood. Toys? Maybe a little, but then I never used them anyways so they don't count. Going to the carnival? Nice place to kill people, don't you think? Eating cotton candy? Stuff it down a guy's throat until he bubbles up and dies is better. Ice cream? What the heck was that? I already explained to you my first encounter with ice cream, when I was fourteen. And I've never gone a week since without eating ice cream in one way, shape or form. Never.

Amazing for a skinny guy like me (skinny until I go berserk and think I'm fat like Chouji).

I stare at Neji hard as I eat my ice cream, and a question that had been sprouting at the edge of my mind comes into being. I put down my spoon and lean over, looking at him questionably. "Neji…"

"Mm?" He's concentrating on trying to slurp up a huge wad of vanilla-goo but looking cool at the same time. "What?"

"When do you know you want to have sex?"

He literally spits vanilla malt all over my face. Coughing, he stutters something incomprehensible before grabbing the nearest napkin holder, yanking out as many little paper-things as you could get and trying to clean his and my face at the same time. "S-sorry, you j-just surprised me—hold still!"

After Ten Squared went crazy with the whole get-some-soap-and-scrub-Gaara's-face-so-hard-his-eye-bags-fall-off, the table and our faces are completely clean and Neji has finally regained his composure. "Well… I'm not even going to ask why you want to know… well…" His face turns a dark shade of pink as he looks away from me in a curt noble fashion that makes me want to smack him. How can he look so embarrassed and so stiff at the same time?

"Ok, for a man there are several ways to know. You can't help thinking about the other person naked and… doing stuff. Get my drift? And also when you think about such things you get…" He coughs here again and he turns away from me, "An… erection. There? Happy?"

Sort of. Neji is the only person I know who says 'erection' instead of 'hard-on'. One of the other quirks from his intellectual side.

I stare at him blankly. "So… how do you know whose top or bottom?"

I swear, the senior looks absolutely horrified at the hidden meaning behind my words. "Well… when you start thinking this stuff, it all depends on how you think it. If you're thinking the… other person… is underneath you, then you know you want to top, w-while if you imagine the other person… dominating you, then you know you want bottom. But the real decision comes when the two of you…" Neji is so flustered he keeps pulling at his charm necklace and glaring at the innocent wallpaper, "Try stuff… out…" He coughs and I decide to stop torturing him.

"Well I guess that sort of answers my question…" I look down at the polished table and stare at my reflection glaring back at me, "but what does it mean when you want all this stuff? Love?"

"Not necessarily. Look at Sasuke and Naruto for example. It's called lust. Love encompasses lust inside it, while lust doesn't need love to exist."

I look even blanker. "Math?"

He sighs, "Yes, Gaara, like in math. A square is a rectangle but a rectangle is not always a square. Moving on. Do you feel like that towards Naruto? Is that why you're asking me this?"

"No…" I sit back and nibble on several turtles I picked up from my ice cream rampage, "It's my lack of desire that's odd…"

"Odd?"

"Never mind, now how's it going with Lee?"

Neji eyes widen and he stammers with a completely straight face, "W-what about Lee…?"

--

At school a couple of boys corner me at the turn of the hallway, right where there's a mountain of lockers strewn everywhere, so they corner me along with a bunch of other people who just really want to get their stuff and leave.

"Hey, faggot," One growls, swaggering towards me with a sneer half-curved onto his face, "Where do you think you're going?" People start whispering and hurrying away, obviously not wanting to get caught in the upcoming doom rising from over the horizon.

I wanted to stay low profile, so I look down and mumble, "Trigonometry."

They exchange crude glances, lean over, and pluck my books from my tight hold, me glowering as I feel the tallest boy take a tight grip on my arm. One roughly pushed me against the locker wall as the others laughed as they started throwing the seventy dollar textbook against the wall and floor, crumpling up the paper and dirtying the cover.

"This is our hall, gay wad," They spit in my face, laughing, poking, prodding me, "so don't you dare set a foot in our hall aga—"

A fist comes from seemingly nowhere and a boy is propelled a good ten feet away while people scream in fright and escape into their classes. I look up into a very familiar pair of blue eyes, now cloudy with anger.

"Get the hell away from my friend you frickin' asshole!"

The other guys took a step back, obviously not used to being confronted by a five-foot six-inch blonde who looked like he was going to take the trig book in his hand and smash them all into tiny little bloody pieces. "W-who are you? His boyfriend?"

I cringe at the comment.

To others, it was basically the standard bully-comeback. To me, Naruto's answer was rather very, very important. Would he deny it? Or will he say 'That's disgusting, go away'? Would he (in my wildest dreams that weren't that wild due to my lack of imagination) accept it?

"That," Naruto says very flatly as he roughly picks up my poor trashed textbook from the ground, "Is none of your business." And in one smooth move that I may be able to accomplish if I put all my effort in it, he takes me by the arm and leads me off to class with the boys gaping at us from behind.

--

"I hate you."

"I hate you too."

"Get your frickin' girlfriend out of my room."

"She still has to recover you know. We just had some mind-blowing sex."

I can feel my short-fused temper at its end already. Kankuro is sitting cross-legged in a kitchen chair totally naked drinking a cup of tea. Just for the record, no one in the Sabaku family drinks coffee. We are all very addicted to tea, including me, much to my embarrassment.

His face-paint had smeared off in his 'mind-blowing sex' and he was obviously very satisfied. I, however, was more like horrified.

"I don't care if you had so much sex you flew to the moon in your ecstasy. Get her out of my room." He shrugs as if it's no big deal and lumbers off into my room to get up his girlfriend. The minute I came home and saw Kankuro at the kitchen table drinking tea with no clothes on and snores coming out of my room I knew something was up.

If he had done something like this five years ago he'd be hanging over the porch with his man-parts cut out and stapled to his face for good measure. But then, that would be pretty sick, even for me. I never went as far as to sexually harass someone before and I wasn't planning to now.

I scan the room with scrutiny, making sure there weren't any fluids or liquids or any unidentifiable substances lying around the flat. It wasn't that I was afraid of getting in trouble or anything, I just felt sick whenever I thought of where those things came from. I mean, blood and water I can deal with (I've had a lot of that in my experience as an ex-serial killer) but stuff like semen? No way.

After I was totally confident that the whole house was properly clean and uncontaminated I closed the door to Kankuro's room because there was such a strange odor coming from the place that I was practically lying on the floor gagging before I slammed it shut. After sitting around wondering what I should do as Kankuro bid this week's girlfriend farewell, I finally decide to go clean up my bed-sheets, as that girl had probably leaked something nasty onto them.

"Hey," Kankuro pops his head out from the kitchen as I drag my white blankets to the laundry room, "What are you doing?"

"Cleaning up your mess," I say in a flat voice as I lean down to the washing machine's level, trying to decipher to the mass of buttons and switches jabbed right on the control panel.

From when I was little I've always watched people doing the laundry. I never did it myself. It was always either Temari or Mother, when she was still living, and then they would always keep to themselves. Of course, years of staring at Temari do the continuous routine of lifting the hefty basket, sorting them out into two piles—darks and whites—stuffing them into the machine, pressing a sequence of buttons I have memorized—bottom left button, second dial turn eighty degrees, third switch, top right button—and, altogether, starting the machine. Watching her do this has always given me this weird sense of going out there and playing around with buttons too, but then Shukaku had told me I'd blow myself up and I shouldn't try.

But since Kankuro is too busy pulling some boxers on and Temari was camping out at the Nara's for who-knows-how-long, I prepared myself for the worst.

Of course, it was only bed sheets, but then there was all that laundry that had piled up the week my sister has been gone, and I know I had the 'responsibility' to wash them as well. I gather them in my hands and blankly sorted them out. Black hoodie. Goes in the 'dark' pile. White socks. 'Light' pile. Black hood. 'Dark'. Beige Sweater. 'Light'. Since my family is basically just black and white minus Temari, who was gone anyways, it was pretty easy sorting them all out. Hauling the light pile into the tiny compartment called a 'washing machine' along with my soiled bed sheets, I coolly press the order of buttons Temari always does and look amazed when the thing actually starts.

I got it right?

I crawl back to the living room where Kankuro was brewing more tea, now dressed in his boxers and tang top. He obviously liked to wander around the house naked or half-naked all the time. I want to hit him, but then it'd be too much of a mess to clean up afterwards. I never really worried about things like blood and vomit and all those other good things that come with being a serial killer until Temari made me fully realize the enduring pain that goes along with cleaning up said fluids. Some people questioned me before—why did I care what Temari said I should do?

I don't know. Maybe I just got tired of taking care of myself. It was kind of nice knowing that there was 'dinner' at home (if you can call what she cooks dinner) and that you didn't really have to make your own bed or worry about money or care about the basic necessities of life. When Shukaku was still here he forced me to depend on myself and only myself, finding my own food, never asking help from anybody, doing all my moving and shoving myself excluding laundry because Temari obviously had that down, and all those other things that said, 'Independent. Leave me alone. I can take care of myself'.

But after he went away it became easy to start depending on others. It was human nature. And the prospect of not being able to depend on others (Temari threatens to stop doing blah for a week or something) was too hard to bear because once I got a taste of what it feels like to be truly pampered it was hard to go back to your old lifestyle. Really hard.

So I try my best to not piss Temari off too bad and she works hard to not piss me off real bad and we get along fine. Much better then Kankuro and me, who usually end up solving our conflicts by kicking each other under the kitchen table instead of nicely negotiating for better rights at a 'family meeting'.

"Gaara!" Kankuro's voice bellows out from the living room, the TV volume raised to its loudest, "Someone wants you at the door!"

I groan inwardly and beat myself over the head. Whoever was visiting me had just seen my brother in his boxers. I pity him. Or her. But I don't know any girls that well, so it must be a 'he'. Outwardly, I sweep through the flat with a set glare on my face, giving Kankuro a glint on my eye that meant 'I'm going to kill you!' and turned to face who it was at the door.

"Who is it?" I look up and I stare.

"Hey," Itachi chirps as he shrugs off a duffel bag onto the floor, "Mind if I stay over a few days?"

I can feel my brow twitch as a single thought drifts from my innermost chambers of my brain: holy crap where will he sleep?

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Author: ACK! This chapter took sooooooo long and is soooooooooo boring! ; sorry couldn't make it more interesting. Whoo-hoo! Nothing happens... Reviewers! (Hugs all) When finished with the whole fic I'll add an afterword listing all the names that helped and supported me as I wrote this . But I'm busy trying to get the next chapter up to stop and list the reviewers so... (runs and hides from rotten tomatoes and cups of water) Ah!