The dunes roll across the landscape like a sea, all motion with the water and bright telling sunlight without the sickness.
Sango had followed all the way to the water hole, standing at the edge of it as the waves from his passing rippled and rolled across the small pond. No more a puddle than a source of liquid in this parched landscape and, somehow he knew.
He knew what she wanted.
Though her voice was sharp and high pitched like the birds nesting in the underbrush, pecking through the leaves just for their food and the language wasn't familiar to him at all anymore, it's been too long, all he could hear now were bird calls.
But someone doesn't walk that far through burning heat and the darkness of the undead gripping at their feet and trying to drag them down, lost confused and disoriented. No weapon to their name beyond a tiny knife tucked in the sash at their back-
Don't you think I didn't notice that, Naruto grumbles, all guttural and throat rumbling tones that make Sango stop and look at him with wary eyes.
Cautious, but confused.
She doesn't understand a word he says, but she is determined to see this through, and kneels down at the water's edge to draw figures in the wet sand.
A crude drawing of a human-like creature, him, surrounded by what must be light. She chirps at him as she draws and he knows and doesn't know and leans closer to watch with mild curiosity.
What must be the tiniest fox he'd ever seen is scribbled before him and if these proportions are accurate, he'd be damned.
You want me to eat him? He rumbles with amusement, a smile slowly cracking through his features and Sango looks up, startled.
He hasn't spoken before the water hole. Until now she had followed with grim hope but if this demon is so old he's forgotten human language, or maybe never learned so far isolated between the dunes and the rising sun..
She chirps with frustration back at him. (He needs to learn!)
The drawings make no sense to Naruto, nothing of this girl makes any sense and she's beginning to give him a headache; her voice, her words, her too thick and heavy clothes that would have no practical purpose on a battlefield..
Behind him, almost out of vision, the ghosts whisper to him and he nods vaguely in their direction before turning, and walking away.
Someone will find her.
Or they won't.
Whatever her fate, it's up to her now.
.
The sand grumbles beneath his feet as he walks slowly, wishing again and again for his old shinobi clothes. The things he's stolen to wear, when he feels like wearing things, is too stiff and too thick and he hates all of it.
The world moves so slowly now he could walk for hours and never get tired. He could wander for days and never get anywhere.
You should go home, Naruto whispers to the ghosts. The spirits in the sand.
They won't though. Some are have moved further up to Gaara's temple, and many stay with him, but there are those.. Those that move and linger just behind him, just beyond the last dune where he can't see but he knows.
He knows he's being followed.
The sand tells him.
.
"Vengeful spirits," the Medicine-seller told Miroku over a cup of shared tea in the inn. "They always turn into demons."
.
"Should we burn them?" Sakura asks her teacher, (thousands and thousands of years ago) staring at the field of corpses, of Suna nins.
"They need a proper burial to pass on," he says. "Or they will become spiteful and malevolent."
Sakura steps to the mound of blood, but it is already too late. The sand beneath her feet swirls, restless, and with tendrils wraps around the mangled bodies, holds them tight, then consumes them. Dragging the flesh and the blood and the bone deep deep down to where the sun will never reach, crushing them until they turn to dust, turn to sand.
.
"He can't be brought back," the small woman with loud voice and strong ideals tells him, Sakura watching him from this tiny woman's shadow, holding of all things a fish. "There is no such thing. A body is a body."
But still Gaara is dead.
.
Gaara the bloody. Gaara, the impossible soul who was born a killer, from the moment he sought air, ripping through his own mother's womb like tissue paper. The sand instantly clinging to his tiny form, still within the shell of what was once a mother.
Suna, the village who hides in sand. Who housed a blood-thirsty murder, a demon in human flesh with the will and power to control it's very foundation, to destroy. Gaara did not live here so much as he allowed it to live around him, twisting and commanding the sands as he pleased.
Gaara is the demon of the desert, the true creature of sand who belongs here, in this space between the dying and the dead.
.
"He is dead," they had said to him. "What shall be done?"
Standing around the cold corpse of Gaara, who doesn't move, doesn't breathe. His best and only friend. The one he tried, feebly, to save.
The one he failed.
"Burn him," Naruto commands.
It's a fitting burial.
Gaara's body is laid on a funeral pyre of stone and sticks at the entrance to what is left of the Suna Village. They light the sticks at the base and the fire quickly builds.
The base burns, the wood burns, Gaara's clothes are even set aflame. But it isn't until an hour passes that they realize Gaara isn't burning.
Gaara's body, laid out bare before them, flames licking and surrounding him, but he won't burn.
Fire isn't enough.
Chakra rises in Naruto and immediately Sakura and Kakashi step back, give him wide berth because the red is rising, the deepest darkest parts of him are screaming their way to the surface and all of a sudden he is surrounded by the brightest strongest light, the purest source of fire there is the world.
The essence of the Kyuubi.
Naruto burns, and on the pyre, Gaara begins to burn too.
The fire consumes Gaara's body, engulfs and ignites it until there is nothing but burning. The skin, the flesh wastes away, is turned to sand, to dust. The bones and body crumble. There is nothing left but dust, but sand.
The sand consumes everything.
.
Naruto stands there for hours, for days, burning.
At first his team refuses to leave him, standing as close to his side as they can dare, but he is too bright. He burns too fiercely to stay long.
Kakashi walks away first. He believes Naruto will come home, will come back.
Sakura is reluctant to part. She will never be used to seeing him consumed from within like this and she just doesn't like it but her words can't reach him now, he's fallen too deep inside him and all that he can hear comes from within.
Eventually, she leaves too.
Turns around, and walks away. Goes home.
Naruto burns. Gaara burns. And the damning fire inside rises and rises until all that's left of the city itself is burning, consumed from beneath. Light is cast for miles and miles and the resonating oppression of demon casts out any who would linger near.
.
You are a borrowed god, the sands would say.
There is truth in this. Naruto does not belong here, but the desert seems to understand him all the same. He does not command of it, nor ask of it. It is not his place to. He does not belong.
.
The sand, the desert thrives, a living wave, immense, and swallows a country whole.
It grows, on it's own. Leaving far behind the forgotten ruins of Suna. Deep in the furthest corners of the desert, where no one will ever find. Isolated, forever.
The world ages around this living wasteland, timid roots that sweep up and entwine themselves into colossal forests. Mountains of weed and seed.
The sands are alive. But no one knows why.
No one remembers.
No one but Naruto.
.
And they are staring at a strange formation of rock that almost looks man-made but it's too worn by the sand and sun and wind to be sure, standing atop the closet crest of a dune, waiting.
Sango and Miroku and time itself.
Time has caught up to him. Reluctantly, somehow, he knew it could catch him eventually.
And there, that tiny shadow between them with the barest traces of a small fluffy animal on it's shoulder must be the tiny demon Sango drew for Naruto in the sand and, yes, he really is that tiny.
Naruto glances at them, just once, over his shoulder out the corner of his eye.
He is sitting on the strange formation of rock.
He is sitting on the funeral pyre.
He is sitting on Gaara's tomb.
He is sitting atop Gaara's temple and dedication where he rests, always and forever, waiting for something he can't name and can't figure out, but still, trying.
His back is to them, and they walk slowly down the crest, feet slipping in the sand as the spirits charge and relent. Bite, attack, and flee.
They want to eat.
But Naruto isn't burning.
His heart beats, the flame is still inside him should he want it to rise, and the sand moves eager beneath him, ready.
But he doesn't.
.
And Miroku is chirping away in that high-pitched language that Naruto absolutely hates, asking for something and demanding-
How dare you think, Naruto grumbles over his shoulder, teeth sharp and bared in the laziest form of a threat he can muster, but he's tired. He's just so tired of walking, and waiting, and burning and..
He's tired.
It's been so long. He's waited what feels like forever. (But Gaara hasn't come back. Gaara will never come back.)
(Naruto will never go home.)
He grumbles at them, and watches the horizon. Refuses to look at Sango lingering just outside his field of vision, arms crossed and weary. Miroku who kneels before him, and hands outstretched, reaches for him, palms up, a peaceful gesture.
More fucking chirping.
Naruto isn't even sure what he's waiting for anymore, what he wants.
(Sakura will never come back.)
The sun is bright and strong, as it always is, and it burns through Naruto's eyes as he stares past it.
(Kakashi will never come back.)
.
The fox-child waits behind him, afraid of him.
Naruto hasn't that much, he's pretty sure. Though his hair stopped growing, his body stopped aging, he's still Naruto.
There are no thorns on him for the child to be wary off, no thrashing visual cues of demon beyond too-sharp teeth (that he's always had, even from the smallest toddling year wandering through the orphanage and gnawing on the table legs just to teeth because pacifiers weren't enough).
But still the child is afraid.
And it sends something rippling down his back and he tenses and sits up straighter, trying to ignore them all and it's not fucking working.
Naruto grumbles. He growls and the words sound like the forced beginnings of a bark to the language of birds and they have no idea what he's saying, he still won't actually look at any of them, but..
Naruto lifts one hand, palm up.
The humans around him tense, fearful deep down inside, they were never truly not, they've walked through too many nests of danger to not be wary of the threat in waiting.
The barest trace of light flickers between his fingers, source cast brighter by the setting sun, shadows lacing through him, his palm, and he lights up the darkness with blue.
Orbs and orbs of blue surround them.
Tiny at first.
Gentle.
Until there is a circle of them surrounding Naruto, Gaara's temple, the outsiders, and the fox-child.
Dancing tiny lights that weave and move carefully all around so eager for attention, for care, that Shippo carefully reaches out to touch one and,
Poof!
It's gone.
But there's another to his left, and two more to his right, and the fox-child is soon running back and forth through the stretch of desert surrounding the temple, giddy with excitement and eager for something he knows not.
Sango and Miroku step back, chirping quietly to themselves as the lights dance.
And Naruto's heart slowly fills with something he thought he had long forgotten, but it rises in him still the same and he feels a foreign sense of contentment.
A light darts close to Shippo, too close.
It moves through him, quickly, and Shippo flinches away.
But it didn't hurt at all. It was a warm, pleasant feeling, and soon Shippo is back running across the unresponsive sand.
The ghosts are quiet.
A second light touches Shippo's skin and, this time, he hold still.
The light moves slowly, carefully through him, lighting up his veins, his skin from underneath, and he touches the areas it passes with tiny fingers.
A foreign, and yet not so strange feeling. Something rising up inside him from beneath as he focuses on those areas, and Shippo is too young to know what those spots mean, Naruto is too old not to remember, and bit by bit he teaches.
Chakra.
Demon chakra, buried deep inside Shippo where he has yet to fully reach, and Naruto coxes it out. Guides it and guards it with the tiny, twinkling lights that cast a soft and soothing glow over the small patch of desert they linger at.
.
They take Naruto with them.
Reluctantly, he follows.
Or rather, the truth is to say. Naruto follows the fox-child, because he was a fox-child once too, and that's something he can never forget. He ignores the chirping from Sango and Miroku, and won't even spare a glance to Kilala, he refuses to even acknowledge their presence.
But, he follows Shippo.
Out over the desert and past the softly murmuring ghosts in the sand who let them leave. Through the tiny village build in shacks on the edge of the sand where they drop to their knees and worship him as he passes, but all Naruto sees is the fox.
The child.
This, he will protect.
.
.
THE END.
.
((Don't expect me to finish all my stories. The ghosts in the sand were just haunting me, wanting me to finish this one. If my computer hadn't died, I'd have done this long long ago..))