The sand stretches. The sand stretches. The sand stretches and stretches and stretches and stretches until the sweeping ribcage of the desert is cracked open and sultry flesh is turning inside out. From within the gaping fissures heart and lungs swell and hemorrhage between the jagged teeth of the world he feeds on.
Gaara peels his lips back, feral impulse sliding down the points of his canines. His lids are shut and squeezed until the eyeless black becomes the facsimile of sand-blood. The air is hot and thick with the tang of viscera. Lumps of raw flesh and tissue, odors of bodily fluids and copper. Death is fresh-wrought, sticking heavy and slick on his skin, living. Shukaku strokes the bars of his cage and rubs his face against his seal and croons to him. His voice is soft and natural like psithurism and yes, yeeees, yesss.
It is as if he wants to pet and be petted, as if Gaara isn't his Jinchūriki but his master.
Jinchūriki is the sin of power-lust; Jinchūriki is the stigma of demon-love. Jinchūriki is being aware; Jinchūriki is the darkest kind of symbiosis, the merging of soul and hatred and bloodlust, human and beast bound as one and bound to never be one.
Gaara opens his eyes and everything shatters – the chimera of submission, the sibilance of satisfaction, the monstrosity of affection. Shukaku rampages in his cage and rattles his chains. His voice is a shrill cacophony and an effusion of kill, kiiiill, kkkkill.
No more. Gaara tells him no more and runs blood-fingers through the tanuki's sand-hide and that shackles tighter than the seal-chains.
Chapter Six
Two years have passed. It's only two years but feels nothing like only. Each hour has been a day, each day a month, each month a year. Time moves with hypersonic speed for someone who has once been suspended in limbo.
Gaara is too young and too old, has seen too little and too much, has felt too empty and too full.
When the sun begins to rise on the first day of the third year, he stands at the edge of the Kazekage's balcony with his back to the East. Sunrays stream hotly over the angles of his body, and behind him, his family grins and urges and nods. Kankurō. Temari. Baki. A waft of zephyrs rustles softly through his hair, and below him, his village waits and whispers and stares up at him. Many tongues, many eyes. Much suspense, much unease. They regard him with one quarter of fear, one quarter of suspicion, and two quarters of hope. War has made them more weary than wary, he knows. Weary enough to be willing to accept him not as something but other.
Shinobi.
Kazekage.
Someone needed.
Gaara doesn't wear the Kage's headpiece because he wants them to see his face, see him. They need the shinobi who wears it, but Gaara wants them to need him. Perhaps it's selfish, or perhaps it's selfless – all of Suna's Kage have been that way, selflessly giving their lives for the village, when in reality, it is done selfishly. They die when they are most needed. Gaara can't distinguish what decides their time of death. How much is mercurial fate and how much is personal choice?
He shifts precipitately, one down-slant of eyes and neck. Time moves motionlessly, one flat line that starts in his vocal cords and ends in their ear canals.
"Suna has suffered many losses through senseless war. I can't promise another war won't come, but I can promise you this." Gaara spreads his arms wide and shadow overstretches and swallows all beneath him. "Here and now, I will stand before you and nothing will harm those who stand behind me. For as long as I stand – there will be no more death, no more blood."
His voice rides on the zephyrs and passes through the hollows of the desert and comes back as drawn-out echoes of no more. Time moves limitlessly, one resonant vibration that pulses with need and burrows deep into hearts and bursts out of throats. They don't holler his name but Kazekage-sama and that is enough for now. If he stands longer than those who die too soon, one day they will.
Baki's nod is the first thing Gaara sees when he turns around even as the celebration still holds strong below.
"Well done."
Gaara returns it with one of his own. Kankurō's grin then.
"I can't believe you're better than me at speeches when you barely talk."
That grin…he can't return. It's just another thing that will come one day. Temari returns it for him, with one thwack at the back of Kankurō's skull.
"Ouch. What the hell, Temari?"
"Show some respect. He's the Kazekage now."