Arashi: I was working on a couple of chapters for this story. ^^ Hope you guys will enjoy the next chapter of this story. Last chapter from Boom then it will be my own version from here on out.

Gaara ducked down behind a trashcan.

Fuck.

Why were people that knew him everywhere?

If he had been in a better mood, he would have been humming the James Bond theme. But that was not the case. He was in a shitty mood. Things had escalated last night to a degree that had made it impossible for the family to sleep. Sasori had apparently broken down in front of Deidara, spilling out multiple apologies and how he was wrong about whatever it was they were arguing about and how Deidara deserved not to get hit. Having a hysterical Sasori noisily apologizing for an hour straight did nothing to improve Gaara's already sour mood. It only got worse. Not only did Deidara forgive Sasori so easily, but they had very loud, very kinky sex right after their little heart-to-heart. Gaara wasn't sure what he was madder about, the loud sex, or Deidara giving into Sasori so easily. The guy had hit him for god's sake! Sure, Sasori was so sickened by his action that he threw up almost immediately after, but still.

He slowly peaked out from behind his hiding place. Looking around he noticed the group of people had ran past where he was stationed, he sighed. He really didn't want to go to school, but he knew he had to if he wanted to make it seem like life was normal for him to his family. He knew they would try and 'help' him, but that would only hinder them. He didn't want to cause any unnecessary trouble for his family, they did enough for him as it was.

He continued.

Shooting out from behind the trashcan, he sprinted towards the school. Outside the school, people could hurt him badly. However when he was inside the school, they held a certain amount of caution. So as long as Gaara was out in the open with teachers in the general vicinity, people wouldn't try anything extreme. While the enclosed spaces were safe in the outside world, it was the opposite in school.

His gourd was banging softly against his leg as he ran towards the front gates of his school.

30 feet.

20 feet.

10 feet.

Almost there…

"Hey you!" Shit, somebody recognized him. He told himself to just keep running.

5 feet.

Pain. He raised his hand up to touch the back of his head, and when he looked at it there was some red liquid coating his fingers. They had thrown something, and whoever it was had good aim. Scrambling up to his feet, he made it into the school. He allowed himself a small reprieve before starting towards the building out in the open, where he was safe.

He pressed his hand against the bloody spot on the back of his head, applying pressure to stop the bleeding. He knew head wounds bled a lot, even if they weren't serious, so he wasn't particularly concerned. He caught sight of his very orange friend, who was talking to someone. This person was wearing a black leather jacket with fishnet, had two triangular red tattoos on his cheeks, he was also holding a leash to very large white dog.

Figuring this new figure was safe, he approached the two.

"Hello." Gaara said softly to Naruto.

"Oh hiyas Gaara! This is Kiba! He's new here!" Naruto said, waving his arms around enthusiastically.

"Why does he have a dog? Animals aren't allowed on campus." Gaara asked, looking at the monstrous furry thing.

"Its my seeing eye dog." The new kid replied, petting the head of his dog softly. Gaara narrowed his eyes and zeroed-in on Kiba's eyes. True enough, they were slightly misted over, causing the brown in his eyes to become distorted, his eyes reminded Gaara of smog on a cold day.

"Oh. Didn't notice." Gaara said shortly, turning to raise a non-existent eyebrow at Naruto. This kid made friends with the weirdest kids, didn't he?

"And look at this!" Naruto practically yelled, grabbing a book for Kiba's hand, "Its in Braille! He has all of our textbooks in Braille! How cool is that?" Naruto opened a book to reveal bumpy dots all over the page, in neat, nice rows.

"That's… nice?" Gaara said, closing the book and holding it out to Kiba, nudging his hand so he would take it. Kiba took the book with a small smile, stuffing it into his messenger bag, which had "Kiba" written on it in red graffiti graphics.

"So, your name's Gaara?" Kiba asked politely, reaching out to touch Gaara's face, "Hmm, you're kinda short… But you have nice facial features- pretty, even." Kiba said, simply running his hand over Gaara's face, trying to get a feel for what his new acquaintance looked like.

"Uhmm, thank you?" Gaara said, but it came out as more of a question. He wasn't particularly thrilled at being called 'pretty', but he supposed he should take it as a compliment.

"Ahhh, don't listen to him, he said I had 'childish features'." Naruto said, patting Gaara on the back roughly.

"Touch me again and I'll smack your 'childish features' so hard you'll be red for three days." Gaara said, taking Naruto's hand off of him.

"Why do you have to be such a destructive ass?" Was Naruto's oh-so-clever rebuttal.

Gaara just shrugged off-handedly.

"Hey! Sand freak!" Someone yelled from across the grounds. The sound of thumping feet started.

"Oh shit. Imma cut this meeting a little short! Bye!" Gaara said quickly, attempting to run in the other direction. However, this feat was impossible due to the fact that Kiba had grabbed his shirt collar.

"Let me talk to them." He said simply.

"You don't understand. They're going to fucking kill me."

"I doubt that…" Kiba said, strengthening his hold on Gaara's shirt collar. The group of people that had halted in front of Naruto, Gaara, Kiba, and the dog suddenly asked:

"Hey, let go of him. He's ours." The tallest one of the group spoke.

"I think not." Kiba said simply, staring at the general area where the voice came from.

"Why you-!" a boy yelled, throwing a punch at Kiba, who, miraculously, caught the hand.

"Hitting a blind boy? Have you no morals?" Kiba spoke up, tightening his grip on the boys fist, making him gasp. Kiba let a smirk bleed into his normally rambunctious face.

The group of four looked up at Kiba's eyes and found the evidence clear. The smoggy eyes made them all instantly feel guilty.

"Hey! Let go!" He yelled, wide-eyed, trying to yank his fist away.

"Should I let him go?" Kiba asked, turning to where he was still holding Gaara hostage.

"Ahh! Let him go! We don't want any trouble!" One of the fatter guys said, shaking his hands back and fourth.

"By the rate Gaara's heart is beating, I'd say you have terrorized him before… I think I'll let you off with a warning." And with that, Kiba tightened his grip, causing a very loud cracking sound to emit from the attackers hand and a scream to be ripped from the boys throat. Kiba just dropped the bys hand and turned to where he last remembered Naruto to be standing. Naruto winced, cradling his own broken hand. He knew how painful that was and he was almost feeling pity for the kid.

"You… you broke my hand…"

"Correction… I dislocated it. You should probably go see a doctor." And with that, the group of kids sprinted away, one cradling a bum hand.

"That… THAT WAS SO COOL!" Naruto yelled out, practically ecstatic about how cool Kiba was, but still a little wary of his new friend.

"How did you know he was going to hit you?" Gaara asked, taking Kiba's hand off his shirt collar.

"Well, first what he said, then there was a rush of air hitting my face, and I could smell the sweat on his hand. It was kind of obvious." Kiba said off-handedly, stroking his pets head. His pet seemed to like the owners attention and nuzzled his hand. "Atta boy

Akamaru…" Kiba said affectionately.

"Isn't Akamaru amazing?" Kiba said, squatting down to come face to face with his seeing eye dog, who licked his face and barked.

"Why is his name 'Akamaru'? Isn't he white?" Naruto asked, reaching out to pet

Akamaru, who just was delighted by the prospect of even more attention being lather on him.

"Oh, I didn't know he was white. I named him Akamaru because his personality is fiery. My mom told me that fire was red." Kiba said, letting a small shocked expression grace his features.

"You didn't even know what color he was?" Gaara asked condescendingly.

"I don't even know what color is." Kiba said, letting a small, sad tone enter his voice.

Gaara immediately felt guilty. How stupid could he be? Of course a kid that was born blind wouldn't understand the concept of colors. Gaara wanted to smack himself. However, instead of moping about his insensitivity to others, he decided just to drop it.

After talking for a bit, the threesome broke up, Kiba going with Akamaru to their first class, Naruto going to gym, and Gaara running to Art class. Gaara liked art class. It was the only class he paid attention to, he sat in the front (apocalypse) and listen to his teacher. The words flowed from her mouth so seamlessly, she made art seem alive. Gaara really like her as a teacher. Don't get him wrong, he wasn't some sicko that had a crush on their teacher, but that didn't mean he couldn't appreciate her knowledge of art and the way she taught it. She was the only teacher that he said their name with an honorific.

"Hello Haku-sensei." Gaara said softly, shuffling into the class, sitting down in the front. He wasn't sure she would like him anymore after the sand incident, but he was proven wrong when she treated him like it was any other day.

"Why hello Gaara-kun. You're early as usual. Care to help me set up?" She said sweetly, smiling as she collected tins of charcoal from a storage closet. Gaara gave a soft nod, happy that this teacher needed his help. God he sounded like such a teacher's pet, but he really did like this teacher a lot. He helped her set up the room with excitement. They were doing charcoal drawings today. He couldn't wait to get started on his. After they had finished setting up the classroom for the inevitable mess it was going to be submitted to, they both sat down at their respective desks, waiting for the students to come filing in through the open door.

"I heard about your little gift Gaara-kun. How come you never told me about it. I'm sure you could have some artistic use for it." Haku-sensei said softly, looking briefly at Gaara's gourd of sand.

"S-sorry. I, I knew it wasn't normal, so I tried to keep it a secret." Gaara said, speaking to his desk. He was slightly ashamed of himself for being so timid around his teacher, but he really didn't want his only teacher that actually liked him to hate him.

"Do you mind showing me some of your prowess?" Haku-sensei said good naturedly, genuinely wanting to see what her student could do. Gaara looked up, surprised. Deciding that he couldn't manage to hurt his reputation any more, he unstrapped the gourd from his hips and set it on the desk with a soft thud. Uncorking the small reservoir of sand, he manipulated his fingers as a puppet master would and let the sand trickle out of the gourd fluidly win a skinny stream. He let a small smile melt onto his face as he manipulated the sand into a sort of ribbon dance, before molding it into that of a skinny, faceless dancer letting it dance across his desk. After a few moments he grew bored of just a dancer and turned it into a gymnast, manipulating the sand to do flips and cartwheels through the air, finally ending his little sand routine into the splits.

"You are very talented, Gaara-kun." Haku-sensei spoke from her desk, starling Gaara, reminding him that there was another person in the room. The sand shot up into the air from Gaara's twitch at being startled. Haku-sensei yelped and fell back, out of her chair.

Sorry!" Gaara said hurriedly, running around Haku-sensei's desk to help her, "it's a good thing you don't wear skirts, huh?" Gaara said good naturedly, helping his sensei up from the ground.

"What?" Haku-sensei said, stopping in the middle of dusting herself off.

"I… uh… said that it was a good thing that you never wear skirts…" Gaara said with a faint blush. Haku-sensei cocked her head to the side, looking at her student curiously.

"…Just what gender do you think I am of?" Haku-sensei said with an informal air.

"Uhh… a girl?" Gaara asked, unsure where this was going. But before he could figure out where this conversation was going, Haku-sensei started to laugh.

"A girl? A girl ? Gaara-kun, I'm a boy."

"No you're not." Gaara replied reflexively, before clamping a hand over his mouth.

"I'm not going to prove something like that to you, I might get fired. But yes Gaara-kun, I am a boy." Haku-sensei said, giggling madly at Gaara's flabbergasted face. However, before Gaara could say anything more on the matter, the bell rung and students started to file in. Gaara went and sat numbly in his seat. He couldn't believe that Haku was a boy. That just didn't add up in Gaara's book. However, Gaara didn't linger very much on this new piece of information. He needed to be alert, lest he be hazed by some bored classmate. He managed to make it to lunch before he was attacked seriously. He had made the mistake of staying in his history class a little longer than he should've. Empty hallways were not safe for him, because he knew the hallway wasn't really empty.

Out of nowhere, he was slammed into a set of lockers quite hard, causing them not only to rattle, but to dent slightly inwards too. Gaara let out a small gasp of pain.

"Hey freak." a low voice sounded in his ear. The person was very tall, and very close to Gaara, totally violating his bubble. Snickers erupted around Gaara. Ah. So his attacker was not alone. He would have just taken whatever they were going to say to him and left, but he found himself discovering a whole new level of rage when the person had licked his face and muttered '…sand whore…' into his ear. Gaara's eyes narrowed. He knew he looked like a whore, the kid didn't need to rub it in. It wasn't Gaara's fault that he had 'whore eyes', like his father used to say. Glowing green eyes. Bedroom eyes. Gaara hated them. It didn't help that he was painfully skinny either. He knew he looked like a common whore.

"Get the fuck off of me." Gaara growled, trying to push the unwanted visitor off of his frame.

"Aww, it looks like the Sand Whore doesn't want to play. Too fucking bad." The teen said, letting his friends draw in closer, raising a sense of urgency in Gaara. That's what Gaara's father had called him. Sand Whore. Gaara shivered. They were too close, and him, too tempting. He needed to get away. He didn't need to be used like when his father was around.

"Get away from me!" Gaara yelled, manipulating his sand to burst out of his small gourd and swirl around violently, "I swear to god if you don't let me go…" Gaara let his threat linger and he weaved his sand around the now nervous group.

"I said let go!" Gaara yelled, and in an explosion of sand and power, the group of four flew into the hallway. He slinked up to his attacker, sand whirling around him in anger, and grabbed the wide-eyed teen by the collar and spoke in a deadly calm voice.

"I may look like a whore, but that does not mean I am one." …at least not now I am… the thought lingered in his head after he had thrown the boy back onto the ground and stomped off, letting the sand slither back into his gourd. He was furious. Those bastards just had to say the one thing that he thought he had escaped from when his father had been thrown in jail for child abuse and molestation. Of course his father had never gone too far with Gaara, but he had lent his son out for money to his lecherous business partners. What a better way to make a business man agree to an unfavorable contract than by sweetening the deal with some carnal pleasures given in the form of a small boy?

Gaara still remembered his first time left alone with a business partner of his father. It was horrible. The man had to be at least 65, and Gaara clearly remembered he was eight at the time. He didn't even know what sex was at the time. All Gaara knew was that he was supposed to stay quiet and let the man do whatever he wanted. The man was sick. He liked blood just as much as sex, so Gaara got to experience both. Gaara felt sick just remembering. The touches. The pain. The knife slicing he virgin skin. He never wanted to be used ever again like that.

Gaara shook his head back and forth, trying to rid himself of the images flying through his head. That time when he was eight wasn't the only instance dealings like that had happened. By the time Gaara was 10, dealings like that had been a common matter. Who couldn't resist a boy in shorts and a small tee shirt, shyly peeking out from their fathers backside? Apparently the men that Gaara's father worked with.

Gaara was trained like a dog. Keep quiet and do what they want, and maybe you'll get fed this week. Was Gaara's internal mantra by then. By the age of 12, Gaara's internal mantra had changed, 'It'll be over soon… It'll be over soon… It'll be over soon…'had been what plagued his mind. But it was never over soon. Sometimes the sessions had dragged out longer than four hours at a time. It was torture. However, after a few months into his 12th year of life, Gaara's father had made the special deal to a business man that he shouldn't have. The man immediately called the cops and Gaara, along with his siblings, were sent to go live with their distant cousin.

That, coupled with his sandy problem, landed Gaara firmly in the 'freak' category. Of course, nobody knew Gaara was used as a 9-year-old whore for business deals, it just resided in the back of Gaara's mind every time someone referred to him as a freak or a whore.

Shaking his head clear, Gaara stumbled into the Cafeteria, looking for his orange friend in the crowd of teens. Spotting the rambunctious teen animatedly talking to his new blind friend, Gaara ambled over and took a seat next to Kiba.

"Hey."

"What took you so long?" Kiba asked playfully, eating a fry from his plate.

"I got held up." Gaara said offhandedly, waving away the look of worry on both of his… erm… he supposed friends… faces. "It's nothing important." except for the fact that I was reminded that I was once a whore. Gaara let out a soft smile, turning to look at the rest of the lunch room.

"You're lying." Kiba said, feeding a fry to his doggie.

"What? How could you tell if I'm lying or not?" Gaara said defensively.

"Your heart rate went up, and I can smell the slight scent of sweat on you. That along with irregular breathing. The human body has reactions to lying Gaara, some of them are really obvious."

"Uhhh… new topic!" Gaara said hurriedly, pulling out a bin of Tupperware from his backpack that resided on the floor. "Who wants an oatmeal cookie!?" Gaara asked, popping off the top of his 'lunchbox'.

"Do they have raisins?" Naruto asked warily, peeking into the bin.

"Pfft. No. They have chocolate chips instead." Gaara said in a manner that would make even the idea of raisins in a cookie preposterous. Taking out three cookies, Gaara handed one to Kiba (who commented that they smelled very good) and one to Naruto, who ate his in under three point four seconds. Gaara ate his cookies slowly, he had at leat two more cases of them in his backpack. What can he say? He likes to bake. Gaara made twelve batches of oatmeal cookies last night from scratch because he couldn't fucking sleep (coughDeidaraandSasoriwerefuckingtooloudcough). And he planned to eat them all.

"Is that all you're going to eat?" Kiba asked, now eating a hamburger.

"Yea. What of it?" Gaara replied, defensive of his cookie-lunch.

"That can't be healthy." Kiba said offhandedly, taking another bite of his food.

"Whoever claimed it was healthy?" Gaara questioned back, eating yet another cookie.

"You're going to get sick…" Kiba taunted.

"Better sick than without the wonderfulness of oatmeal-chocolate-chip cookies." Gaara said, enunciating each word with a chew of his cookie. "Mmm… cookie."

"Whatever. I'm not your mother."

"That would be weird if you were, because then you would be part of the living dead."

Gaara retorted, eating yet another cookie.

"What?" Naruto asked, jumping into the conversation once he sensed healthy eating wasn't the topic anymore. It not like he could have a say in that type of argument, all he ate was ramen.

"My mom's dead. It was a joke." Gaara said slowly to Naruto.

"You shouldn't joke about things like that, man." Kiba said, stopping in his process of demolishing his hamburger to 'look' up at Gaara, but not quite hitting the mark. Those empty eyes made Gaara feel slightly guilty about what he said. The murky eyes weren't looking at him, they were looking through him. It was unnerving.

"I can joke about whatever the fuck I want. It's not like she loved me or anything." Gaara spat back, eating two cookies at a time (which caused him nearly to choke, but that wasn't the issue at hand). He was slightly bitter about the situation, but still, it was the truth.

"Whatever man." Kiba said, turning back to his food.

"Hey…" Gaara attempted to change the subject yet again, "Did you know Haku-sensei is a boy?" Soda suddenly erupted from Naruto's nose and mouth as he started choking and gasping for air. After he could breathe properly, Naruto flailed his arms about before slamming them on the rickety school lunch table.

"What?!"

"It's true. Haku-sensei's a boy." Gaara confirmed.

"No she's not! Where the hell did you hear that from?" Naruto exclaimed, peering intensely at Gaara.

"Haku-sensei told me himself that he was a boy." Gaara said with a superior tone.

"No fucking way." Naruto said in awe.

"Hahaha, it's true. You can ask him if you want." Gaara said nonchalantly.

"I'm not asking our teacher about their gender!" Naruto sputtered back.

"It's a 'he' Naruto." Gaara said back, getting annoyed that his friend didn't believe him, ignoring the fact that he didn't half believe it himself. And that's about all they argued about for the rest of school. Yes, they argued over the gender of their art teacher. It was a long day, and Gaara didn't know how he could last reiterating that his teacher was a boy for the entire day, but that how the cookie crumbles, ne?

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Arashi: Please read and review. ^^