AN: Yes, a Kon update... Sorry that I didn't read my lovely reviews sooner, dearies- I was just so busy applying to schools and GETTING ACCEPTED TO MY SECOND CHOICE, EEK.
I've let all of these fics stagnate...but I shall reward your patience with two chapters, for both Con and Changes. Forgive me?
"Where Do I Go From Here?" (c) Pocahontas 2, Disney
"The birds move on, so they survive…
They do what they must for now and trust in their plan
If I trust in mine, somehow I just might find
Who I am-
But where do I go from here?..."
I couldn't look at Lee for the first few days. Never mind that he didn't wake up- couldn't, even if he wanted to. His brain was bruised, mulching itself against the inside of his skull as it struggled to find somewhere to relieve the intense concussions he'd received. Gaara had knocked him silly- which gave me a few precious days to try and anticipate what he would say, if he remembered what had happened.
He woke up one Thursday; Gai was there, and I wasn't. I had been discharged, and was standing there in a daze, trying to remember how to function. (They couldn't fix the phantom pains or the fear in my stomach) I was a girl with one defunct nipple and only one hand; half Latina and half lost. Mostly lost.
Lee remembered nothing. I made Gai promise not to say anything about it. We told him that I'd been in an accident while out training; we told him not to worry about it, that he still had two arms and even if one was broken, pish- there were all kinds of ways to fight without one hand.
I hoped for my sake that there were. Lee's recovery was promised; mine was as fictional and meaningless as I was in this place.
… Losing my arm was hard.
They gave us a month to prepare, to train up a new strength to replace the ones we'd lost in the Preliminaries.
I couldn't have beaten Shikamaru if I'd had eight limbs; beating (if that was the word for it) Kabuto was nothing short of… I didn't know. I didn't know much of anything, especially how to proceed.
How was I supposed to protect anyone with one gimpy arm?
Gaara's drama would soon begin to unfold; I'd had sympathy for him in my old life (who wouldn't?), but it might be understatement to say that I was considerably depressed at this point. Gai had enough to do, encouraging Lee; I wanted nothing to do with either of them in my despair. Even el ciello had deserted me, it seemed; the days were dark, cloudy, grim. I didn't regret what I'd done… but it sure sucked to be me. That's what I was thinking on the night I climbed up to the roof of the Chinese restaurant.
You've probably seen the place as a backdrop in the anime. It's a beautiful building, all lacquered up and made to look like something beautiful and ancient. The tiles are authentic, but the wood is not; it's cheap, glazed, a specter of real ebony. Something in that just bled symbolism to me.
I had no choice but to learn to function with my missing arm. It was how it dragged behind me, like a useless half-wing, that made me not even want to get up in the mornings. I felt goofy and vulnerable; and so I climbed up onto the roof of the building to prove to myself that I could. Tomorrow, I would drop out of the Chuunin Exam. Tomorrow was another day.
Tomorrow was not promised to me.
I covered my face with my arm, blocking the moonlight for a sliver of a moment; when I withdrew it, he was there.
You could only possess that kind of silence if you were possessed as well. Gaara owned the sands, the riddles of the desert wind; he spoke the tongue of demons and despair, the language of the sleepless night. He could compress his existence to a whisper, or crunch his heart into the singularity at the center of a black hole, so small as to be unbreathing, undetectable. He could sneak up and kill anybody.
But he wasn't; he simply stood, with the distance kept by an animal examining a new object, looking down at me. I must have been a sight: unbrushed spray of hair, dirty sweatpants, the stub of my arm shining with clean, obnoxious-white bandage.
"Get out of here," the sands suddenly growled.
"Too bad. I was here first."
Again, a bravery born of absolute terror. This kid had ripped my arm off, but I couldn't summon the anger required to avenge Lee's injuries or my own trauma. I couldn't even get angry, lying there on the roof; I felt dead, my limbs all wooden but one that ached so much that my mouth was dry.
I got the feeling that Gaara didn't hear the word 'no' very often; he continued to look down on me, but with a faint glaze of stun.
"… Don't make me kill you-" he began.
"Oh, bite my ass!" I shouted, hauling my amputated upper body up so quickly that my visitor could only squinch back as a reflex. "Go ahead and kill me, you masquera-wearing cabrone! It'd be downright charitable of you!"
I didn't care, at that moment, if Gaara dashed me to pieces, combusted me with sand, or flung me into the courtyard below. There's no way that Lee would look twice at a girl who couldn't hold her own in battle, and I wouldn't be Gai's student anymore. After all of my promises to the Hokage, the potential benefit I had held was zilch: I could be thrown out of the village, evicted and disowned. All of this sounded much worse than death.
"If it keeps you from eating babies, go right-on-fucking-ahead!" I couldn't stop; months of rage and fear were finally boiling over, in front of probably the worst person in the world; and knowing that just made me cry harder. "Maybe I'll go back to being an Honors student who can barely run a ten-minute mile, instead of the biggest fuck-up of a Shinobi known to mankind! I have the collective skill and societal worth of a cheeseball quishe, all of my teenaged fantasies about bearing Rock Lee's children are shot to hell because now I don't even have an arm to hold them with- or a nipple! He almost cut my tit off! Do you have any idea what that feels like! Oh, sure, Rock Lee'll wanna hit that!"
Gasping laughter, tinged with saltwater; my face stung. "Like he would have hit it even before," came this gravelly, sardonic being that had been nursed to fruition. "- because I was still a failure then, and now I have a gimpy stub to remind me of it every day! AND NOW YOU WANT TO KICK ME OFF A ROOF. Well fine! FUCKING FIIIINEEEEE! KILL MY SORRY ASS AND END THIS, I DON'T CAAAAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRREEEE!"
There is a way that girls can scream, only when they're at the end of their mind; I had never heard a voice like mine, and even as my shrill hell-howl screeched over the rooftops of Konohagakure, bounding like some unleashed beast of caged hatred, I could barely believe it. It must have been like seeing a nine-tailed demon fox.
Silent night, unholy night; dogs barked from the Inuzuka compound at the echo-specter of my cry. I screamed again, dashing my lungs bloody-murder against the chill again- and when that was spent I crumpled back onto the rooftop, spread-eagle beneath an apathetic sky; I tried to smash my head on the tilework as hard as I could, even as tears chapped my cheeks and stung me with my own life. Why couldn't I just die!
"I'd rather die… I'd rather just fucking die…" I whimpered, hands clawing at my face.
Gaara had been at point-blank range to my rant the entire time; I'd leaned toward him, crazed with my own useless fury as I begged him to kill me the first time. God, I belonged in the looney bin even more than he did- the poor kid couldn't understand one iota of emotion, and yet here I was shouting at him like he was some sort of homicidal psychiatrist. I didn't blame him for just standing there, dumbstruck; but no matter how I clawed at my tears, he still remained.
"You gonna kill me, or what?" I finally snarled at him.
The sand roiled up my body in a thick, salt torrent; I could taste it's chauvinistic, bragging power, the dark, soiled secrets that Gaara carried on his back. I wasn't afraid; I could barely see, and that was how I wanted it. I couldn't stop crying, even as my feet left the rooftop.
"It seems I'm not the only one who believes in thinning the herd," sounded the skanking voice of Dosu.
Gaara whirled around to face the Quasimodo-shape of the Sound Shinobi; I dipped in the sky, the victim of the Jinchuuriki's manic attention span. Of course, Dosu had come to be massacred, just like in the manga. I hadn't imagined that this could be the night-
"Be a good Tanuki-demon and keep quiet while I finish you off- and the girl too, since she seems to want it so badly."
"And you- you are the biggest idiot known to man!" I called; Gaara's head whipped back as if he were watching a pingpong match. Dosu's single eye read confusion. "He turned my teammate into tomato soup, and you really think you're gonna defeat Gaara? Jesus Christ, you aren't worth your animator's salary. Gaara, kill that numb-nuts first so I can at least die in the company of another loser... Better yet, let me get him. Even I could take him."
Gaara's gaze bounded back to Dosu, who was already frothing with a reply.
"Y-you stupid bitch! Who the hell do you think you are!"
"YO MAMA," I snapped, beyond lucidity. "I'm a woman at the end of my rope- I've got a bipolar schitzo levitating me in midair, my nipple fell off, and I can walk on ceilings. I'm done. DONE."
"Why you-"
"I'm not schitzo," Gaara calmly, suddenly remarked. Dosu dropped his stance.
For a moment the world hung, unloving, with this red-haired boy at it's center. "I'm an unloved sack of sand drained completely of emotion by Daddy issues.. . Everyone I've even remotely liked has tried to kill me. I've got guilt coming out of my ears, my brain is held together with tape because I haven't slept in fourteen years, and I fantasize about my sister because she's the only girl who hasn't thrown rocks at me! Don't call me a schitzo!" he snarled at me. "You don't know the beginning of wanting to die! And you- get the hell off my roof!"
"I don't know what you two are doing here, but I came here to get ahead!" the Sound-nin roared in reply; with that, he charged blindly at Gaara, that wonky amplifier sewn by dark charka to his very bones leading the way.
I managed to catch myself as Gaara's sand abandoned me, in midair. If the sand had been light, Dosu would have been carbonized, a dark shadow on that wandering field of glass; nothing remained of him, the claws of sand having swallowed all of his meager existence but a few paltry drops of blood, which Gaara's demonic familiar hovered over, alien, to slurp up in the new wake of Dosu's complete absence.
We the living stood ten feet apart on that indigo eve, each of us struggling with demons of our own. I will never forget Gaara's soulless eyes, the equal help and homicide battling eternally in them.
"My mother says you're annoying," he deadpanned. "She says killing you would be a waste of effort. One day… I will kill you, all of you… You will sate my purpose and disappear forever…"
"You're gonna come out of this." was my only reply. "I'm not. Now who doesn't know the beginning of pain and uncertainty?" Suddenly exhausted, I whirled on my heel and walked away from his imposing, black form.
"… Come back," he called plaintively.
Someone hit pause on the universe: did Gaara just… ask for my presence? Oh, god- every fangirl wants to save him from misery, but what would that do to the plot? How could I refuse him, if he-
"… My father the Kazekage wants to speak with you about what you told us. There's no record of your alliance to the Sound village anywhere. "
Well, so much for that…
This was precisely what I hadn't wanted to happen. My secret was out, and there was no telling who knew, now. Orochimaru certainly; I wouldn't put it past him to do some research after my abysmal "defeat" of his favorite sidekick, but in the madness of the recent weeks…I'd kind of hoped that he'd forgotten.
Big mistake. Huge.
Nothing seemed to spark on Baki's face when I approached his tall, curtained form at the location which Gaara proceeded to lead me to. "Does he know?-" I whispered shrilly, trying to look like I wasn't sweating my brains out of my skin with fear.
"He's my father's most trusted aid," the redhead replied, in his usual monotone. Oh, joy.
The traditional gloom that swallows a hollow, traditional home during the night was cloying as we came up a treacherously-steep set of stairs. Why were there no lights on or candles? Just to scare me? It was working!
We entered a plain sitting room, vivisectioned in the center by a green mesh curtain; behind the mosquito netting I could make out the forms of a few steadfast viziers, and the straight-backed curve of a brawny shoulder silhouetted by moonlight. It had to be close to two in the morning, by now, and yet the Kazekage received me with a lazy gesture that suggested he had all the time in the world.
Baki plunked me down; I dropped dumbly, and was then kicked into a bow by the crumugeonous old Jounin. I was too freaked out to even remember formalities. That feeling only magnified when the broad, seated form dismissed all observers and guards from the room. Gaara, Baki, and the rest of the aids scampered away into the clamshell-dark. The room was still entirely dark. A fear tactic, of course.
"My dear," came a scaly voice, it's coldness stark and detached. "You cannot be so foolish as to believe that you have pulled anything over us. Your best option is to be completely honest. We know everything."
"Which everything would that happen to be?" I asked blankly. I'd read Death Note enough times to know that evasion was a vital skill, and Orwell's 1984: confessions made in the throes of pain aren't what interrogators are looking for. There was no way I could stop Orochimaru from draining my memories to discover all that I knew, but I removed the thought from my mind; it was an awfully big leap to assume the weight of my knowledge of the future from this one incidence. They would probably just kill me for knowing about the Suna-Oto alliance, and never suspect otherwise if I didn't give any indication.
Now I just had to manage to get killed... Sounded easy.
Welcome, Possible Pairing 2 of 3: Gaara/Kon!- if she lives long enough. Stay tuned!