The sun sets. The sun sets. The sun sets and sets and sets and sets and fire-tongues lash across the gold skin of the desert until it bleeds with dark ichor. From within the gashes glow pours out in brilliant points of star-blue and white-hot phosphorescence. Far-spreading, wide-reaching, it swallows the sun and seeps into the sand until there is nothing but blood clotting inside the swollen veins of the world he sinks his teeth in.
Gaara knows this taste, the only nourishment he has ever been fed. Blood-thirst. Blood-heat. It is rather ironic, vestige of some twisted protection, that he has never known the taste of his own blood. When he does know – he burns with such mad impulsion to never have its taste again that it becomes an inferno.
Blood is the voice of the beast; blood is the love of his mother. Blood is being alive; blood is the chain that binds Shukaku, the slick-tailed whip for the tanuki's taming, spilt for the need of spilling. An apotheosis, that spilling.
Shukaku may never sleep but he purrs after he has gorged himself on bloodlust and human hatred. It is silk-soft and glutted with odious docility. The beast's lullaby. Urges lurk at the edge of his purr but merely that. Satiety. Silence. It is the silence that Gaara craves, not the spilling that perpetuates the satiety.
Chapter Two
It is deep night and chill when Gaara slips past the guards and inside Jōseki's office. The elder sits behind his desk, skin folded with age and malice, waiting. Gaara takes one step forward, and another.
"You're here." Jōseki's voice is full of gravel and mild surprise, as if he hasn't expected him to come, but it soon turns into ravishment. "Good."
How Jōseki accents that word, like he holds the leash and at its end Gaara is the pet who needs to be rewarded for good behavior, rouses swirls of aggression. Gaara has not heeded the summons out of obedience or hierarchy. It is necessity that makes him heel and the infant want of an excuse, some kind of reason to kill, no matter how flimsy, how fallible. Shinobi mete out death for the sake of their village. His father has taught Gaara that lesson six times in the past. In the end, it's as good a reason as any, and the only one he can now accept. Perhaps if he accepts that simple truth then he can forgive what should be unforgiven.
Sand rises and hisses and writhes with rows of myriad grains, a snake dance of killing instinct, and Jōseki flinches. Apprehension contorts his features in a mask of wan skin and friable bones.
Good, Gaara thinks. Fear is good.
Despite that there isn't the merest blink of eyes, the merest twitch of lips, the thought must have manifested on his face because Jōseki's mouth peels back, more baring of teeth, less human expression. Gaara appraises it slowly. One glance of detached curiosity, and mockery. Who is the beast now?
Jōseki is raising his arm in the next moment with one picture gripped between his fingers. The man depicted there appears to be in his midlife, lavishly dressed in brown silk and purple garb, dark-skinned, dark-haired.
"This man is the current Wind Daimyō. Everything you need to know about him is written inside the scroll."
Gaara's gaze darts to the scroll on the far end of the desk, made of plain paper and inconspicuous but its contents far from that, then back to Jōseki's face.
"You know what to do and what not to." Kill him. Quickly, quietly. Leave no trace; tell no one.
Gaara reads the unspoken words in the bright gleam of Jōseki's eyes, so bright that it evanesces all shadow and cunning until only void remains. Bottomless. Sinister. An abyss of self-righteousness and delusion. For the sake of the village. His father may have wielded the same ideals as justification for every word and action, but Gaara cannot bring himself to believe the Kazekage has been the same as this person before him. Because if he has been…Gaara cannot hope to ever forgive him.
An impatient sound crawls out of Jōseki's throat when Gaara stays silent for too long as it seems.
"So what will it be?"
Gaara takes the scroll, and Jōseki smiles. It is too vicious for a smile, warped with sordid pleasure and things Gaara loathes to see. He has seen too much of them in reflections of blood-mirrors for the past eight years.
For a man of the Kazekage status, incongruously few people attend the obsequies. There is no body to lather in the seven sacred oils and wrap with strips of fine linen, only sand-scoured bones inhumed deep into the earth and sarcous hunks long since digested in the vultures' stomach.
Kankurō stares at the tombstone which marks the grave of the man he has most often called Kazekage-sama, and far less often…father. But it hasn't always been so. When did I stop calling him father? The obfuscous membrane that coats his memory enshrouds the when but not the why. Kankurō can never forget that. After I stopped calling Gaara monster. Shame saturates the flesh of his tongue, sizzles and suppurates, old-festered wounds and septic shock. Children are so facilely, so pathetically impressionable, and that is why he despises them – despises the child he has once been. No matter how long he stares at this grave, Kankurō can never speak the word father, cannot forgive the man for robbing him of that joy, just as he can't forgive himself for being that child he so despises.
Temari's fingers stroke the curve of his shoulder, and though she doesn't speak either, her smile is laden with words. She motions for him to leave with her after the ceremony is done, but he shakes his head. Temari understands, he can tell, even if she doesn't approve. Her smile sharpens on her lips, and she draws him close for a brush of skin and heat, then walks away.
Gaara will not come. He won't come. Won't come. Still, Kankurō waits.
The last dark of the morning is fading when Gaara comes. But he comes. Blood-drenched, deathly calm, maniacally quiet, the afterimage of murder.
Kankurō wants to murder Jōseki. Teeth bite the inside of his lip until it bleeds and iron glides down his throat mixed with purple grape dye.
"Gaara." Nothing but a whisper, and hoarseness. "I didn't think you'd come." Three large steps, and he stands beside Gaara. "But I waited anyway."
No reply, no motion. Kankurō tilts his head, stares down at the mess of blood-red his brother has been reduced to. Gaara only lives; he only suspires. The pad of a bloodied finger then – Gaara drags his fingertip over the arc of the gravestone in one languorous graze.
"Kankurō." Necks slanting, gazes boring. "Did you love father?"
There is something in Gaara's eyes – breath of blue-green fire, so alive – that he can only speak the truth.
"No…and yes."