There are bones in the dust. There is blood in the sand.
Naruto can feel it, he can taste these things in the back of his mind like lucid illusions. Vivid sensations of lies, a mirage. But they are there.
Surrendered to the dunes, the tattered cloth of failed travelers waves in the torrent of gust and sand. The bones are markers for the dead, testaments to those who would perish by seeing this warning. White, marred white fragmented with dusty grains, it reflects even for miles, these bones.
They are often enough in the curving dunes, but not this far out.
Naruto sleeps at Gaara's temple, and gathers the bones of his enemies around him like a fortress. The living sand swallows it whole before this door. And sometimes, in the middle of the night when he is not quite awake and not quite asleep, he can hear it whispering to him.
Naruto loves the sun.
It exhausts him, he would admit, to be in it all the time, letting such intense frustration of heat filter through him like a screen. But he does not mind.
The sun is large and immense in the sky. It hangs like a swollen wound so close he could reach up and touch it, grasp at the core and center. And he dearly wants to, has and holds this constant desire firmly to himself, barely resisting.
It too, calls to him. But in larger motions, and though the language is as wordless as the sand's it is far harsher. And yet, feels more like home.
Kyuubi is in the sun. His memories, too, are in the sun.
He laces them to himself with silent ambition, standing all day staring at it from atop the dunes.
He steals things, in the middle of the night.
Naruto knows where the humans live. He follows the whispering echoes of civilization crying over the desert. The light of a single fire he can see for miles off. These things carry unerringly well over the flat carved by the wind.
He finds where the last human settlement is, sneaks through it as easily as if it were just yesterday. Yesterday that he and .. there was something about missions, were there not? He had a duty to accomplish. He had a defined purpose.
But he can no longer remember. It eludes and escapes him, and though he tries grasping firmly they slip steadily through his grasp.
Naruto steals what pleases him, in the quiet cover of darkness and ingrained, learned, instincts. His footsteps tread so silently that they leave no imprint in the sand.
Trinkets, things that reflect the light.. he pulls a blanket off a crib that is so soft it is like touching water. It is an almost-memory he loves to hold close in the fury of sandstorms. A belt, now worn half-away, with a tarnished silver clasp and engraved carvings. He knows not the worth of these things.
He carries them back over the mountains of desert sand. Stopping so often again, and again, to examine what he has found. Sometimes dropping and loosing pieces in the moving sand by neglect and carelessness. Sometimes just dropping what he grows bored with.
He stores these things where he sleeps. Beneath the monument of his old friend, is a storage celler, full of dark things. Living things, that hide in the shadows and eat flesh.
It is a tunnel to nowhere, that the sand has mostly eatten. But this is where he keeps his treasure.
Naruto may not remember Gaara, exactly, but he knows how close the sand was to this person. The temple, though falling, is precious to him and he tries to ask the sands of this once friend, but the grains reply in no words he knows any meaning for.