WARNING: Some bad language and implication of really bad stuff. Should show and not tell but I'm trying to wrap this thing up. One or two more chappies should do it. Was trying to make Gaara's life modern and hoo boy did it stink.
How do you explain yourself to another person? Gaara hadn't faced the idea of explaining his actions in roughly half a decade. Being mentally ill had been so convenient, being dangerous had been so satisfying, being ignored had been exactly all he had wanted it to be… and then her pretty face had walked through the door and just her being there had posed a question.
What if he could have more?
He wanted something he couldn't have, and it burned him inside out. The dangerous voice, the one that drove his dark moods and created chaos in his life, didn't have anything to say about this one. Gaara had been used to silence outside of himself, wandering hallways with nothing but bad radio stations or the faint sounds of television in the background, but the inner silence was so hungry. There was no way to fill the maw except when she was there and somehow he looped those memories like bad syndication until he knew all the lines.
This kind of thinking was pitiful; it was weak. When people relied on one another then terrible things happened. His mother and his siblings had relied on his father, and a bottle of pills later he and his siblings had relied on his father. Weak bitch, he had liked to say, taking the coward's way out instead of divorce. He hated her for leaving him alone, vulnerable.
Then Yashamaru…
He could forgive his mother but some things were too despicable even for him to revisit. His childhood had been no childhood at all, and the damage had left him ready to take his rage out on the world in every way imaginable. The best defense was a good offense, or so their father had said. His favorite offense was the buckle side of the belt when Gaara had been suspended for fighting yet again. It hadn't fazed him, he had a body like weathered stone by the time he was fourteen.
By sixteen he had gotten his GED and was quietly slipping in and out of college lectures illicitly during the day and sleeping on the streets at night. He'd dream of the desert, of a spirit quest, of some kind of mission to exorcise the inner demon that drove him to fight. He was picked up by the cops not too much later, and with a bit of playacting he had found himself in good 'ol happy acres or whatever they insisted this place was called.
He wasn't crazy, it was the world that was. Only a crazy world would be full of the kind of cruelty he had endured at the hands of his father once Kankuro and Tamari had left. They were a family only in the sense that they shared a blood type, because he didn't need their sideways glances and hushed suspicion.
Gaara the psycho. Gaara their twisted little brother. Gaara the genius. Gaara the murderer.
Yashamaru had deserved what he got, calling what he did love. Even young Gaara knew it was twisted and depraved, and that night when his uncle had gotten a little too near the window it had only taken a push to end the suffering that love had caused. No one would ever touch him again without his consent, he swore, and a decade and a half later he was starting to wonder if maybe he wouldn't despise the touch of one person in specific.
He had been dreaming of the desert again, but instead of being gloriously alone she had been there holding his hand. It was sappy.
It scared him shitless.