I DO have to warn you though that I'm revising for exams and these are VERY important exams so updates will be very, very slow. Don't beat me, I try so hard!
Enjoy...
My eyes are growing more like yours every day. The intimate haunting demons that are personal to ourselves aside, the hardness I can see in your eyes, I can see in mine. The dark circles that show your sleeplessness to anyone that would dare to look close enough. I share them with you now, because I share your demons. I abandon sleep so you might take it back once again. I take upon myself, my hardships and yours. And now you know of mine. Are we coming together? Are we melding ourselves into each others histories in a way you never comprehended before? Are we melding ourselves into each others futures?
I cannot imagine this world for me without you.
We are coming together. We are creating something more than our village would have two monsters capable of being.
If you are a monster, then so am I.
I cannot imagine this world for me without you.
Hogo finished wiping the dirt and blood from her face with the rag Lee had found for her, giving her reflection a final penetrating stare. Her attention shifted as she saw Gaara stepping into the mirror's gaze behind her. His words confirmed for her that which had been trembling inside her stomach, doing nothing to break through the cool perfect power that she felt inside her.
"They are coming."
Her smile had nothing to do with happiness and everything to do with the hard lines of battle. And the smile he gave in return was the same.
"Are you feeling energetic Gaara?"
"Meirou-sama, could you get this baka off me?"
Kankurou's muffled growl would have rendered a man of lesser control into fits of laughter, but Meirou simply smirked. "I think you'll find that whatever grapple you have the man in front of you in is unnecessary Naruto."
Naruto squinted down in confusion at the back of the head he currently had wrammed in to the sand before realisation slowly kicked in. After all, in the pitch black night, a dark shadow bulleting towards them had to be treated with caution, and the figures HAD come out of nowhere just as they were approaching Suna. "Kankurou! Oh I'm so-" Considering in the torturous amount of time it had taken Naruto to realise he was attacking his own teammate he had still not released him, and that even as he apologised he had not removed his grip, Kankurou's patience swiftly wore out. Naruto let out a garbled yelp before leaping backwards as Karasu's head pivoted on Kankurou's back and clattered his teeth aggressively. Meirou was finally unable to suppress a chuckle as he heard the irritated mutterings of Kankurou scrambling to his feet, dusting sand out of his clothing. Meirou lifted his head and nodded in the direction he knew Hinata and Neji to be "I see the Hyuuga male is feeling the ravages of our desert." The partially reunited group surveyed each other with exhausted relief, panting slightly, soaked in sweat and sand and blood. That they were all alive was too much a blessing for them to even address it. Hinata gently touched Neji's arm as he slowly sank to the sand floor, despite his fatigue his eyes sluggishly taking in who was there. Kankurou, Meirou-sama, Kiba, Hinata, himself, and Naruto.
Kiba blinked in surprise from his vantage point, propped under Meirou's arm. That Meirou could claim to see anything amazed him, when for him the world was a spiralling mire sucking him into a darkness even deeper than the nighttime allowed. He took a tiny rasping breath and felt the rushing flood of pain collide with his insides as the poison took even this amount of aid to carry on with its work. Meirou's grip tightened around him and became the only thing solid for him as his senses began to melt into that cold mire.
"Kiba! Kiba! Focus on my voice. Kiba! I will tell you something interesting, will you listen to me?"
A hard solid slice of reality came down hard across Kiba's face, Meirou's calloused hand striking him into a split-second of sensibility. His eyes rolled in a struggle to see Meirou clearly even as his attempt to speak came out as a murmur.
"Kiba! You want to know how I could tell where Neji and Hinata were don't you? Don't you?!"
Kiba did want to know. But even his bones were suporific, so he did not know how Meirou expected him to master his tongue. He could not feel where he ended and Meirou's arm began, icy numbness was pervading him.
"You gave me the idea Inuzuka. Do you hear me Kiba?? I have gathered chakra to my nose so that I might smell in place of eyes. I have good reason to thank your clan, don't I Kiba? KIBA. It is a poor way to thank your people if I let you die. Focus!"
The words were a whitewash as all vision faded into forgiving sleep.
The scuffing of Shimobe's feet echoed across the sand-strewn pathways of his estate in an otherwise crisp and total silence. The wind was the only accompaniment to his idle musings, his journey a wandering one as he attempted to make his mind unwind. The darkening shadows added a tranquility to his thoughts that wouldn't have existed for him otherwise, the night breeze similarly soothing. His wife would be eating alone. Unforgiveable rudeness! But nonetheless his steps continued their aimless path amidst the outskirts of their home. Yet another day of attempted diplomacy, the dissuading of villagers writhing with the need for resolute action. Fighters by nature, it was an impossibility to ask these people to stay still and wait for an attack that they all knew would come. And yet that was all that they could do while they waited for word from the Leaf shinobi. Was it too much to ask of their kind, expecting them to rely on outsiders? More than that, on outsiders that were the reason behind their predicament? It was not the first time Shimobe had considered the Elders decision to have been a hasty one. But he was Elder too, and the decision could not be passed on to anyone else's shoulders. He breathed through his nostrils and touched his fingertips to his temples, rubbing the ache away. The descent of a presence behind him was sudden enough that he would later think it an impossibility that an injured man could appear from nowhere. Nothing but dirt and sky surrounded them, and wounded men did not fall from the sky, any more than they travelled fast enough that you could not detect them. His whirling gaze confronted his wounds and concern flooded such suspicions as he rushed to catch him before he fell.
"Shiro-san! What happened to you?" he exclaimed, gripping the young Jiyuujin to his chest and easing him to the ground, too much an old man himself to take his full body weight. Though a ninja no longer he knew a gravely hurt man when he saw one. Wounds lacerated Shiro's torso, reducing his arms to ribbons of torn flesh saturated with sand. Yet more sand caked his eyelashes and cracked lips as his rasping breath showed its interference with his throat. He wheezed and clung to Shimobe's shirt front with a weak desperation, and his words were barely puffs of breath that had to be leant into to be heard. "... Gaara... He... the Konoha ninjas... They attacked us."
Shimobe's grip slackened and his face took on the strange stillness of a man on the brink of something about to shatter. He licked his lips, lips that suddenly felt as dry as Shiro's seemed to be.
"... If Gaara, is not with us. If he has betrayed us..."
Tears stained red from stinging sand crept from under Shiro's eyelids as he strained them open, meeting Shimobe's gaze. "We need... to act now... Gaara is..." Violent coughing interrupted his speech.
"Gaara is penned at the outpost... We must... We MUST take the Konoha ninjas NOW."
Sand met horizon at their destination as they flew across the desert, the speed of their motions emitting a dull thrum that conveyed their path even if they could not be seen. Battle motions, battle stances. Even in the flight towards their goal because they knew the strength of what they faced.
And yet when they arrived they did not arrive, because what they were expecting to be there, was not.
The group of forty stood for a moment in tense bunched patience, before straightening. Their gazes skimmed the sand dune that was the only alteration in the landscape.
"Disuruki, did you lead us in the wrong direction? This can't be where the outpost is."
"You know as well as I do that it is here and that we are tracking Gaara and Hogo's movements..."
"And you should know just as well as I do that outposts, and people, DON'T just disappear!"
Nothing but silence, silence and then more silence, until it made an individuated sound of its own, a swelling of absence in the eardrums. Alien fear gripped their hearts. And then the ground exploded in maelstrom of sand and disintegrating rock, chunks of debris flying yards away. From all this chaos rose a disc of sand that carried two figures with it, but only thirty seven of the forty perceived this because three had already been bludgeoned in to unconscious by the blurred figure that was dressed in green.
As the sand settled once more and they flailed backwards, outwards, away into defensive positions, only a few would see the smiles that graced the faces of Gaara and Hogo. Even less of them would notice that even now, at such an imminent moment of battle, they could not feel Gaara's chakra, normally so animalistic and deadly, at all. Hogo's trembling hands gave testament to her gift, locked in a final seal.
"Don't try and sneak up on a Jiyuujin, baka."
And then the technique was dispelled and sheer roaring power hit them full force, a shockwave of energy pelting them so that they were physically forced backwards, their skin shuddering in reaction. Turrets of sand flew upwards, wind howling round them in agitation as the only option became one of running until the sky could be seen again. Except this was not an option for some, because in the blinding flurry of sand, they found that they could not move. The six unfortunates, struggling with every muscle in an agony of exertion, had the opportunity to see Hogo walking towards them through the sandstorm, kunai in hand.