Speaking of the death was taboo in our household.
Speaking of my stay at the therapedic hospital and what I had done there was something that wasn't even hinted at.
For the longest time, I believed, truly, that all my memories were mine and mine only. However, I now realize, they are my family's as well, no matter how I try to clutch them to my chest. Sometimes even more so.
They remember more things than I do.
Some things I might've forgotten, long ago.
--
Breaking the Music
By FlightAngel
--
Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto, but I do own this story: so you steal, I kill
--
Old habits die hard.
Especially habits… urges… that have haunted my entire being for the greater part of my life. Even if I have long since given them up or tried to ignore them, change them, they are still there. Hiding.
Because, the body seems to be like a soft foam pad—absorbing the shape of one action and leaving an imprint of it in its skin, even if it is not there anymore.
Sometimes, I close my eyes in the midst of the moon and dream of sweet, sweet blood.
Dripping down my hands, dancing at the tip of my tongue, covering my every being in a shower of crimson, my covering and comfort. I dream of slowly drawing a knife at a woman's neck, licking the spurts of liquid guttering out, I dream of taking a hammer and, ever so delicately, start to carefully and slowly tap it against a man's head until it splits open, a gaping hole, and, most of all, I dream of standing up in a room of blackness. A room of blackness, where all there is in there is a mirror, reflecting my wholesome dirtiness, stains, undignified and I see my reflection grin and reach into his pocket—taking out a gun and putting it to his head.
"Fire." He whispers and there is gunshot.
Splatter.
That is always the moment I wake up, immediately after feeling the sharp pain stab my mind, eyes wide and green and according to Temari, glowing, in the shuddering darkness. The dreams have wormed their way into my head the past couple of weeks, each becoming louder and clearer, more frightening real by the minute, the underlying meaning—you can go back to the way you were. It's so easy. All you have to do is shed the blood and the rest is history. And, no, no, no, no, I'm better now, I'm ok, I don't want to go back to—but you want to, don't you? You like the smell and the taste of blood, admit you, you'd be happy to shed it again—no, no, no, no…
I would sit there, still, eyes still wide open, staring at my ceiling as I softly hum a song—any song—blocking out the voices whispering to me in my head. Because I know if I listen to the voices I will fall into there again, no matter what the case is. Eventually my voice runs out and I shut my eyes, waiting, waiting for them to quiet.
So I can sleep again.
--
"Porn-obsessed weirdo!"
"Out-of-character freak!"
"B.O. DUDE!"
"Eyebrowless FREAK SHOW!"
"Big Nose!"
"Girly boy!"
"What?"
Back up. How did this start again? Oh yes, I remember.
Gaara goes into Kankuro's room. Gaara asks question. Kankuro gets mad. Gaara gets mad because Kankuro starts raising his voice. Starts asking annoying questions. Kankuro is watching a porn video and moaning noises make Gaara even madder. Two brothers start fighting. At first a little, mostly Kankuro. Then, sparks something.
Yelling match ensues.
"Gaara! Brat!" Kankuro somehow manages to grab a hold of a chunk of my red hair, pulling it up so we were face-to-face, "What the hell do you mean when you call me a whore?"
"You are one." I hiss and hook my arm around his neck, successfully grabbing him in a headlock. We struggle a bit, rage swirling around me in a dense cloud because… well, I was still angry at all the other things Kankuro is responsible for and I guess I just cracked. I mean, really.
"What's wrong with you?" Kankuro is booming out in his low bass voice, "Reduced to wrestling with your brother? What happened to, look at me and you die and don't give me a knife because I'll cut your throat and all that, huh? Face it, Gaara! You're not scary anymore!"
Of course, I am only semi-listening to him and instead retort by kicking him, very forcefully, in the abdomen. He coughs and rams my thin form into the wall, first my back and then my head. We wrestle some more until, finally, Big Sister decides intervene.
"Kankuro!" She screams as she very easily kicks the door open with a slam, "What in God's name are you—" She stops mid-sentence as she finally gets a good view on what we were doing. I wait in anticipation for her next words. Her mouth opens and closes a little before, suddenly, her eyes catch in a malicious green fire that radiated murder.
"Kankuro," She hisses in her better-than-thou voice, trembling with rage, "What. Are. You. Doing. To. Your. Brother?"
Kankuro blinks, mind still caught in the midst of the fight, unaware of what we must look like right now. Me, pushed against the wall, face absolutely blank (which meant that I am acting innocent) with Kankuro straddling my waist, both hands on my shoulder with nothing but his night clothes on growling. Wearing nothing but his boxers and a tang-top. Tank top. Tang top. Tank. Whatever. (When Neji first described to me what this sleeveless shirt was, he pronounced it like "tang top" and so, there on forth, I always called it that. It is just recently Sasuke had kindly informed me that it is "tank" and not "tang". Meh…it's not like it's life threatening…)both our faces are slightly flushed from exertion (wrestling takes a lot of energy).
"Uh…" his brain is trying to come up with something logical, "…fighting?"
Big Sister snaps.
"SABAKU NO KANKURO! What has that porn done to your brain? Your brother? While you're watching that disgusting thing? HOW DARE YOU TAKE ADVANTAGE OF GAARA!" And before I know it Temari has Kankuro in a headlock of her own and his boxers slid down, spanking him with a fan.
I stare.
It has been a very long time since I've seen Kankuro being spanked. With a fan, no less.
I also have to correct myself: Kankuro does not have a hairy butt. I am just "making fun" of him. Whatever "making fun" is (Naruto says it means to joke, Neji says it means to tease and Sasuke just says "Yeah, whatever"). I know because I see it, slightly red because Temari spanks hard. Kankuro is manly enough not to scream or shout or anything like that, just looks pissed off that he, a twenty-year old grown man is being spanked like a five-year old.
He doesn't even try to protest, being that Temari had spanked up ever since they were little, even if she was only a year older. His spirit had already been broken, long, long ago (sounds like he's some kind of slave boy or whatever those porn books call those people wrapped up in chains. I know because he's shown me before. And anyways, it's not that bad. Temari always uses a fan, never a stick or a belt or anything, because she's a girl. Or at least, that's my conclusion). When she is finished, she drags the shamed man onto his bed and huffily takes the remote control, stops the porn video, and flips to a channel of her choice.
"You two just sit there and stay there until you two make up and get along, got that? Both of you are almost grown men! Stop fighting with one another like you're still whimpering, sniveling children! Understood? Good!" Take note that most of the shouting is directed at Kankuro because Temari would never ever, in her right mind, call me a whimpering, sniveling child if she feared for her life.
We both sit still as she forcibly slams the door so hard my ears ring and the thousand necklaces hanging on Kankuro's neck cling in a jarred cacophony of noises. Big Sister is finished with her mission. Two Brothers are forced to sit in Older Brother's room and watch… Pokemon.
There is absolute silence from us as we watch the show intently, Kankuro sometimes making snorting noises and scratching his butt, wincing because it seemed as if it still hurt. I just sit, fascinated, because I do not often watch these kind of shows—mostly I watch what Temari watches because she was the one I always tagged along to watch with in the first place, like Judge Alex or Full House or something like that. These… are these cartoons?
There is just the buzz of the TV as I lean forward, intently looking at how plain the colors were on their faces, how big their eyes were, how high their voices were as Kankuro just shuffles around like he wanted to go but didn't dare to because he feared the wrath of Temari.
"…James is definitely gay."
I glare at him from the corner of my eyes, all green-fire and malice. "Do you have anything against gay people?"
He looks mortified that he had just said that out loud. "N-no, no, no, of course not, I'm just saying…er…" He scratches the back of his head, looking sheepish and frightened at the same time. "I…I like gay people!" I just give him a look that says, oh, really?
I squint harder at the screen.
"…what is that?"
"What's what?"
"That yellow thing."
"…Pikachu?"
"…"
"…uh," he asks even though he knows he might be stepping over invisible boundaries his small mind cannot comprehend, "why?"
"…it's humping Ash."
Silent pause.
"…you're right."
Who knew one can have a brotherly bonding session while watching one of the most cheesiest, cutest, fluffiest cartoon show ever created on the face of the earth?
We spent the latter part of our evening commenting on how Ash is too stupid, Misty is too fat, Brock is definitely gay for James and vice versa, Jesse's boobs are too big for a frickin' twelve year old, Pikachu should really go get a life and stop humping Ash when that poor Raichu is obviously heads over heels in love with it, Todd should shove that camera up his behind and Gary should just go and jump off a cliff.
Kankuro actually relaxed enough so that he slapped me across the black as we both doubled over in laughter when Pikachu was jumping on top of its other mini-clones in this not-so-innocent fashion. Temari kicks the door open once more to see what we were doing because it is not very often you heard loud noises that were not violence-related coming from Kankuro's room when the Sabaku brothers were grouped together.
"Kankuro, what are you—" She stops to see us all over each other in a fit of giggles as she, with her pure, female mind, watches the innocent little Pokemon playing with its partner in the wild by pouncing on it, and wonders what we males are thinking. Narrowing her eyes, she gives Kankuro the warning glare and shuts the door behind her.
"You know." I say, after I recover myself enough to see that the Pokemon marathon has ended. "I rather like that show." My brother just stares at me as if I had gone even more insane then I already was.
"Really?"
"Yes. James is pretty hot."
Kankuro looks blanker.
"Uh…"
The credits start to roll and I fall back on his bed, looking at the painted, nonsensical ceiling as my brother turns off the television. Kankuro gets up and starts rummaging around one of the piles in his room (I have mentioned the condition of his room… I can barely walk through it without stepping on something remotely piled up). Temari opens the door again, as she magically knows when the huge Pokemon marathon thing is over due to her awesome sister skills.
"I have come up with the perfect punishment!"
Kankuro and I exchange glances.
"…wasn't that our punishment?"
"No!" Temari holds up a little round, mechanical buzzer-like object, grinning in the traditional Sabaku way (all of us share this trait too… along with liking tea, having natural eyeliner, closing one eye when we get annoyed or pissed off and having a slight, Suna-like accent), "That was just an intermission so I can come up with a truly evil punishment! And yes! Gaara, you are being punished too!" I raise my brow from my slightly-not-looking-at-her position on the bed.
Kankuro's face has the pale look of utter dread. "And… what is our punishment?"
Temari responds by very loudly slamming the buzzer thing onto the door of Kankuro's room. She flips a switch on and suddenly large red letters flash onto the screen, numbers, a five and two zeros. "Both of you… will have to stay in this room for an entire day!" Kankuro squeaks.
"Together?"
"Together."
"B-but—"
"And I'm taking away the television too. Why'd you move it from the living room to here, anyways?"
"Because Gaara says he doesn't like porn and the living room is really public so I had to move it here so no one can see it and please, please, please, not this punishment, I don't think I can survive being stuck with Gaara for an entire day, no offence, Gaara, but I might get him mad and then what? I'm gonna get killed and Temari, you can't, you just can't, I-I'll do anything, I'll do the laundry, I'll do the dishes, I'll wash the sheets, I don't care just—"
"Just shut up." I say and my brother's mouth snaps closed, eyes darting back in forth in a nervous manner. Temari just frowns.
"Kankuro, stop acting so childish. The big problem between you and him and the reason you two don't really get along is that both of you don't take in consideration that both of you have changed. Kankuro, Gaara isn't maniacally insane anymore, he won't kill you if you just pushed him or something. Gaara, Kankuro isn't that obsessed and the last time he had a BO problem was when he was a sophomore in high school, before I introduced him to the wonders of deodorant bars. I want you two to spend time with each other for twenty-four hours so you can start getting along and understand one another better. And this buzzer thing."
She taps the screen with a perfectly manicured fingernail.
"It has a five minute time limit. It'll only let people go through it ten times, so don't you dare think you can just walk back and forth through this room without once talking to each other. If you go over ten times, or if you don't come back before five minutes, it'll not only let out an ear-piercing shriek but it'll ring my cell phone so I know you broke the rules. And when I know you broke the rules of punishment…" Temari looks dangerous.
"There is more punishment." We look at her, Kankuro in horror and me, blank. She smiles sweetly.
"I'll bring you dinner so you won't starve. I'll call in to school to say you're sick. And the ten-times-going-out thing is just for bathroom breaks, not for other things. I'm giving you the laptop, too. So you won't die of boredom. Ok?" Before either of us can say a word she disappears and reappears with the Sabaku family laptop, places it on Kankuro's tightly disheveled desk, and pops back out of sight. "Good luck!"
The door slams.
Silence.
"…um." Watching television together wasn't so bad. We didn't really have to truly, really talk to each other, just watch and laugh at the funny parts. But this? Kankuro is cowering in a nest of old homework assignments he has yet to throw away. I cross my eyes.
"So… are you going to clean up your mess and have me sleep on the floor or will I sleep with you on the bed?"
"W-what? There's no way I'm sleeping with you!"
Kankuro hugs himself and rocks back and forth, looking at the wall, the papers, the books, worriedly as if he wanted to pretend that Sabaku no Gaara was not, right now, lying on his bed debating if they should sleep together or not. Said Gaara wonders what "lie to sleep not dream but be awake" means because he is reading what Kankuro has written on the ceiling. Who knew the brown-haired man was poetic?
"So what? We're brothers."
"Barely!" Kankuro growls and gets up, attempting to pace but failing because of the mess on his floor, "Gaara! W-we have to get out of this somehow!"
I don't say anything. Why? Because I really don't care. Stay with Kankuro and talk to him a bit? I really might not like him but I wasn't some idiot that was stubborn enough to not take other people's advice; I knew Temari was right in what she said. Thus, if I solved this whole brothers-from-hell thing, I'll have one more thing off my list of "Things to Worry Over".
"Don't try. You want to be spanked again?"
From the silence my comment met, I conclude that he doesn't.
"What do we do?" He whimpers. I know Temari had trapped us together just so that I can be proven that Kankuro is not as bad as he seems, but can he just be a man and not fall down into heaps of tears whenever something goes wrong? Of course, there is the fact that the only time he seems to fall down into heaps of tears is whenever I get involved, but that's really besides the point.
I sit up from my spot on the bed and, giving the room a scrutinizing glare, say, "Clean this up."
"What?"
"Clean. This. Mess. Up."
Kankuro stares at me for a moment before, very suddenly, latching on to the nearest item closest to him in absolute possessiveness, "No! You can't! It's not a mess, it's my life!" I set my feet on a stack of files that could've been about anything from medical records to lists of erotica, and slowly work my way towards the shivering man, who is now being eccentrically crazy, grabbing onto everything and piling it onto his lap, not wanting his insane little brother to destroy them all.
"It is junk, Kankuro. Get rid of it."
"Never!" He screams, gets up, and starts running away from me. Because we are trapped inside the same room, we end up going in circles, him running and me walking, until all I had to do was turn around and grab him.
"AH!" Taking the crumpled heaps of paper in his arms, I calmly take my new hoard onto his bed and, with utter precision directly in front of him, I pick up one piece of paper, shred it, take another, shred it, another, shred it… Kankuro is grappling with my feet to no avail, pleading with me with actual tears rolling down his cheeks, "Stop it! Please! I'll do anything! S-stop tearing up my babies!"
I stare at him.
"Kankuro."
Sniff. Sniff. Whimper. "What?"
I dangle a piece of magazine cover in front of him, featuring a hot guy with two girls dangling off each of his arms with the large words: "Be Sexy Fast" imprinted onto their hips, "What is this to you?"
"That," he declares as he attempts to snatch it and I pull back, "is my treasured piece of artillery!"
"Artillery?"
"I use it to hit Temari with."
"…" I stare at him with narrowed, suspicious eyes. "…why?"
He looks the other way, anywhere where this big red blob is not sitting on his bed, "uh… um… er…" Concluding that it is the other way around and that Kankuro is a big black blob, I take another sheet of paper and tear it. My older brother immediately collapses and starts begging again.
Rip.
"Nooooo!"
Rip, rip, rip. Tear.
"Please! Please! What did they do to deserve this?"
Teeeeeear.
Sob. "My babies! My babies!"
I look at an old, foul-smelling plastic potato-chip bag from centuries ago with distaste. "You still want this?"
"Yes!" He reaches up to grab up to no avail as I just raise it higher and look at it, wrinkling my nose. "It is part of my Kankuro Two Doll! How dare you rip up my Kankuro Two Doll?" I just blankly stare at him.
My brother is, as most people know, a puppet-drama fanatic. When he was little he'd make a little puppet stand out of four boards of wood against a scrubby old tree and perform puppet shows for me behind the little lean-to. He hand-made all his puppets and drove Temari up the wall with the expenses of all the materials (wood, chain-saw, workshop, fabrics, metal, and a whole lot of other things) and his obsessive habit of spontaneously locking himself into his room for hours on end without coming out even once to pee. When he couldn't afford to make new puppets (because I had a just as spontaneous habit of smashing them into pieces) he performed the shows himself and sometimes dragged me into helping him act out some parts. Of course, this was all before our huge brotherly rift gaped open.
I stare at the small bundle of glued-together trash I had picked the potato bag out of. Taking a rather violent hold of its head, I lift it up so that I can get a good picture of what it might be like. A basketball for a head, condoms for its eyes and a smile drawn on with a Sharpie, torso made of masses of newspapers and magazines glued together, arms and legs, dangling beer cans with strings, random potato chip packages and cigarette boxes glued onto them. Strings, everywhere, a web of tangles and knots linking back to an old-fashioned wooden spoke-thing. I stare at it.
"…what is it?"
Kankuro abandons begging me as I, unfortunately afterwards, notice his obsessive sparkle twinkling in his eye. Clasping the thing to his chest, he drags me over to his bed, sits me down, and then passionately decides to spew the true meaning behind being a puppeteer and how it chases people's lives and blah, blah, blah… "This is my representation of American's corrupt boy…" blah, blah, blah, "…all the things I made this out of are things that lead to the path of destruction. Though it may not seem like it, beer can cause long time addiction…" blah, blah, blah, "…and because of this I actually modeled it after myself to play it in my new play, Broken Feathers…" blah, blah… wait, what?
"After yourself?"
"I'm not that stupid, Gaara…" Kankuro puts his head in his hand and looks at his other hand, forlorn, "I know I try too hard to be normal… watch porn. Talk on the phone. Walk around the home in boxers. It's just a way to 'express' myself because I—we—never had a normal childhood when we were little." He makes little quotation marks with his fingers, "'I crave normal' is what your psychiatrist would say. It's true. I do a bunch of things I wish I'd never done just because I wanted to 'fit in' and be just an average guy…" I look at him. He looks at me.
He takes out a cigarette from his pocket.
"Cigar?"
He backs away as I reach to snatch it.
"Don't smoke."
"Why?"
"Because we're stuck in the same room together, idiot." A pause. "You'll also set off the fire alarm." Kankuro's window had long been nailed shut because of his aggravating habit of throwing bricks at the paper boy in the morning. Once it actually hit the poor boy on the forehead and had immediately cracked his skull, ending with eleven stitches and a huge lawsuit that Temari still hisses over once and a while. Because the foot tall floor of trash very snugly buried the crack underneath the door, there was literally almost no ventilation in the room.
How did he breathe in here?
"I don't care." He fumbles with a lighter he'd taken out of his pocket and I, seeing my chance, suddenly snatch the thing from his fingers. He yelps. "Hey, give that back! Great, first you destroy my babies and now you're going to steal my stick-of-pleasure?"
"Stick-of-cancer," I answer him as I examine the said cancer-stick in my hands, "and shouldn't your stick-of-pleasure supposed to be your dick?"
Kankuro's eyes bulge out of their sockets as he stares at me, goggle-eyed, "Y-y-you—you—you—"
"I—I—I," I mimic him in monotone, "What?"
"You said dick!"
"You want me to say it again?"
"W-w-w-w-what? B-but you're not s-supposed to know—"
"Anything about sexual intercourse?" I aim a glare at the laptop, as if Kankuro's beloved Porn TV would suddenly drift out into existence, "With that erotica going about? We also have something called Health in school, you know." Kankuro snaps his mouth closed.
"You're not supposed to talk either!"
I narrow my eyes and, ruthlessly, smash the cigarette into a dozen pieces with Kankuro's century-old dictionary. "So?"
"So, what? Stop talking! Start sitting down and glaring!"
"You like it when I do that?"
"No! Yes! No—well, yes, I guess, no! It's better then you suddenly getting up and acting normal!"
I'm getting pissed off. "What's wrong with acting normal? And if you haven't noticed I started getting more social when I was thirteen! It's not sudden! You just don't notice these kinds of things!"
"Stop shouting at me!" He grabs my shoulders, "You're not supposed to shout!"
Now, I am not a boy who likes to have people tell him what he should or should not do. Having his sibling, an older sibling, no less, yelling at him that being normal was weird that being an oddball murderer mute schizophrenic freak is good is not a very good thing to do. Thus, what happens?
I sock him. Hard. Right in the face.
Expression frozen in one of stiff surprise, he flings into the wall with a good smashing noise, gently ooze off and lie, limply, onto his bed. I flex my fingers as I look at him.
Good. No blood.
Ha, I'm getting better at this.
"Gaara!" Temari voices filters through Kankuro's rather sturdy door that prevented Temari from hearing us fight, "I heard something! Is everything ok?"
"Fine," I answer in a loud yet muttering tone, "The lamp just fell over." This seemed to be a rather acceptable answer because Temari bothered us no more. After a few minutes of ripping up more useless junk from Kankuro's pile of trash and placing it outside the door (we can put stuff out as long as we ourselves do not leave), I start to, admittedly, get worried. Why hasn't Kankuro moved yet? He wasn't that weak to be shot down by one measly punch like that (usually he can last three… or four. But then, this was one of the first times I hit in the face, so…)
Cautiously approaching his still limp body, I stare at his dark brown locks, mussed everywhere because he had a just as bad habit of not combing his hair as I do, tank top rolling up so I can see some of his stomach, boxers, thankfully, still on his hips. People who first meet us Sabaku siblings are fascinated when they see us together. We have, though we do not like to admit it, very many similarities.
Temari has Mom's blonde hair and the Sabaku green eyes that we all have, of varying shades, terrible cooking skills, an interest in painting and photography, a loud and demanding voice, a cruel sense of humor, a thirst for cream, a nicely refined nose that arched downwards, a stocky yet curved body shape, and perfect cheekbones.
Kankuro has Father's mussed brown hair, dark, dark green eyes that only seemed to dilate enough to see the color when he was trying to be sad, equally if not worse cooking skills as my sister, a sweet tooth, a bellowing voice that whined more often then not, an acute interest in acting and puppets, a thirst for cream, an unique sense of humor when there really isn't anything to be laughing about, a large, prominent nose, muscular and full-grown form resulting from hours at the local gym, and has two left feet on the dance floor.
Me, red hair that comes from Lord-knows-where (Temari once suggested that it may be because Mom had a trickle of Irish blood in her, but even the Irish's hair don't go as red as this), pale, cyan-green eyes that change color in the light, good cooking skills, a horrible hand in social circles, a thirst for cream, a cynical if not odd sense of humor, quiet, hoarse voice that can very suddenly explode into one of loud, clear shouting, a very large sweet tooth which I hide as much as I can, an interest in music, the same noble nose as Temari, lithe, slightly muscular form and such bad feet when it comes to dancing I plop myself onto a chair and refuse to get up.
Even if Naruto begs me with a cookie.
Which he has done before. I have not given in.
Well… I did give in after Naruto offers his hand towards me to dance. He had such a heart-torn expression resting on his features; how could I have said no? Of course, Kankuro would probably be saying that Gaara "should not" be gushing over his best friend and should be plotting the annihilation of mankind. He has such a frozen view on people, sometimes.
I reach over and poke him. He doesn't budge. I reach to poke him again when suddenly his hand lashes out in lightening speed, latches onto my arm, and suddenly flings me over him and onto the bed, hard. Needless to say, I am surprised.
"Eh—"
Before I can properly say something, I find myself pinned down by… lots of weight (I have long since given up keeping track of Kankuro's weight… he gains it, he loses it, he gains it back again, it's just not stable enough to remember). Nose-to-nose, I decide that if he doesn't get off me soon I will be flatter then paper. Before I can act on this conclusion, however, Kankuro attacks me first.
"Rawr!"
"Eek!" Ok. I did not just squeal like a girl. Of course, I'm not scrambling to get Kankuro's hands off my sides or neck either, and neither am I giggling like I am high off of Sharpies. Merciless, my brother manages to get a brush at all my spots—neck, side, armpit, under-the-knee, stomach—without any trouble, as my body has yet to change much from when we were younger.
Dammit I hate it when we—he, mostly—play the tickling game.
"The itsy bitsy spider, climbs up the water spout." Another bout of giggling. I try to turn around and kick him off but, unfortunately for me, his weight proves a definite advantage in the who's-on-top-and-who-gets-tickled factor and keeps me under him and harassed. "Down comes the rain and washed the spider out," I am going to kill him. After I stop not giggling. I am not giggling. I mean, I admit I've gotten more normal over the years, but Sabaku no Gaara does not do normal giggling. Insane giggling is ok. Normal giggling? No. "Up comes the sun and dries up all the rain and the itsy bitsy spider climbs up the spout again."
"Shut up," I finally manage to kick him so that his weight is finally off my back and my lungs can finally expand with air, as it was both crushed from the heaviness and sore from giggling—laughing—too hard. Kankuro falls onto his back and lays there.
Recomposing myself in a sitting position, I don't bother to redo my hair or put on a glare or anything like that. I mean, why would I want to save my reputation from my own brother? He's seen me naked on the beach, squash my man-parts, get chased by clowns, crying under a bridge, pee in a tree, poop in a bush, steal Temari's tampons, chase Itachi with a knife when he took a pair of my boxers during his stay here, wander around the house in my almost completely naked and indulge myself in cookie dough ice cream. I am not sure if there are any more things I can do to further lose my reputation with him.
Except for the murdering part. You can't forget the murdering part.
Kankuro takes out another cigarette. I turn my head enough to glare at him from an angle, the light from the window at the perfect shade, reflecting my whites and irises in what I know must be a terrifying manner because it burns holes through whatever is in my way. Kankuro shivers and tucks the cigarette back into his pocket.
Silence, and then a spurt of conversation.
"I didn't know you were into smoking."
"I am. Er, not addicted or anything. I just do it after school, so Ne-chan can't see me or anything."
"You'll get lung cancer and yellow teeth."
"I said I'm not addicted."
I stare at him. Noting the dimming light shining through the blinds, I grunt as I lift up one of Kankuro's legs off my lap and push it over his other one. I have enormous strength, but it only seems to shine through when I get psychologically insane. Don't ask me why.
I don't know.
"Kankuro."
"Eh?"
"What time is it?" Without getting up the brunette reaches a hand over to his crowded desk and effortlessly tosses a black, digital alarm clock in my general direction. Aikido skills give me good reflexes. Peering at the neon digits, I calculate the amount of hours left I have stuck with my brother. Including sleeping hours.
I'll probably get insomnia tonight.
"…twenty more hours." I give it back to the sprawled man, who looks at it with a What-The-Heck-Am-I-Do-To-With-This look. "What are we going to do?"
"Open up and talk about our inner secrets?"
"…" I prop myself up against the wall his bed leaned up against, covered in Kankuro's scrawl of poetry and artwork, glancing upwards again at the decorated ceiling. "That sounds like… a very good idea."
He looks like he has just swallowed a ball the size of the Earth.
"Um… I was being sarcastic?"
Too late.
I allow a slow, agonizing smirk to consume the lower half of my face.
The game has already started.
--
Author's Note: Slight reference to Pokemon in this chapter (avoids rotten tomato) I'm sorry for the almost crossover! Waaaaah! Um, anyways, are you people happy? Usually I have like three or four scenes in a chapter. Guess what? ONLY ONE BIG SCENE! The first one doesn't count--it's really more of a prologue. Trust me--big scenes are good because that means I'm focusing enough to make this story get somewhere. I KISS ALL MY REVIEWERS! Thank you for supporting me! And... whateverhis/hernameis... I guess I should thank you for getting me back on track with my work.
Lol this chapter could really be taken as Sandcest, but I intended it to be more of a brotherly bonding moment XD. For those who like sandcest, you think that. For other people who like GaaNaru, we stand here at the sidelines wondering what Kankuro has anything to do with this, lol...
Next Chapter: The meaning of the title of this fic, revealed! What in the world does "Breaking the Music" have ANYTHING to do with this story? Stay tuned!
(yes, the Naruto confession has yet to come XD)