Chapter Text
At the end of the three day funeral—the feast that is part mourning for Honored Grandmother Chiyo, part celebration of his resurrection—Gaara feels … tired. Not exhausted, not drained of chakra, but as if he could lie down and genuinely go to sleep.
The feeling is novel. The dragging behind his eyelids, the way his shoulders slump. His body is being pulled down into the table he sits at—legs still too shaky to stand for long—as he reaches the end of the procession of anonymous well-wishers, bowing his head emotionlessly in thanks.
His heart should feel warm, he thinks. Did, at one point. Now it beats sluggishly in his chest, struggling from one pump to the next.
He’s cold when Kankuro claps him on the shoulder. The sand barely stirs, and Gaara feels the now all-too-familiar pang of fear.
Could it be … that Mother was Shukaku all along? His Ultimate Defense a combination of hypervigilant self-preservation and the constant watchful eye of the beast?
His face must look something awful when he turns around, because Kankuro’s cheeks—paint smeared from something he’s almost certainly too young to be drinking—stretch to form a grimace.
“Konoha delegation is leaving,” he says. “Thought you might wanna see them off.”
Gaara nods, and he feels mere scraps of gratitude mixed with shame when his brother has to help him to stand.
At one of the hidden entrances to the great maze of walls that surround Suna, Gaara stands in the burning midday sun, siblings flanking him.
Kankuro nods his thanks to Haruno Sakura. Behind her stands Team Gai, Rock Lee at their forefront, his eyes rimmed dark. Further back are their two jounin sensei, Kakashi slumped over and looking almost as drained as Gaara feels.
“I know we’re supposed to tear up and shake hands,” Naruto says, “but …”
It occurs to Gaara then that he’s missed yet another social cue. Something important. He holds out his hand, trembling with fatigue, and waits.
For a long while, nothing happens.
It takes an extraordinary effort of will to bring the sand from its gourd, to wend it around Naruto’s wrist and force it upward. Gaara wonders if he’s resisting. Or is it that Gaara himself is simply that weak?
When their hands clasp, it feels like an ending. A tidy bow tying off this chapter of Gaara’s life. Like he’s become fully human: admired and despised, important and inconsequential, tired and overwhelmed and full of so much feeling that it hurts.
He does not grab for his chest, though he wants to.
It’s only after Naruto’s calloused hand drops back to his side that Gaara hears it. A choking sound, someone gasping for breath like the air’s been punched out of their chest.
He looks up to find Rock Lee blubbering, eyes streaming. His nose runs with snot. His irises wobble behind the glass of his tears like a fish’s in a river.
“Gaara-kun!” he blurts, and then he throws himself forward.
Before Gaara can react he’s wrapped in a hug so crushingly tight that the cartilage between his ribs crackles.
Just as quickly, the sand rears up into the scant space left between them and shoves Rock Lee back out into the desert. He lands some meters away, sprawled on his backside, tears still dripping off his chin.
Gaara heaves a sigh of relief—at the knowledge that his mother’s spirit remains in his sand or at the simple joy of oxygen back in his lungs, he can’t be sure—before his blood runs cold.
“I’m sorry,” he stutters. The words are weak, his tongue clumsy. These little mandatory niceties are not yet instinctive.
“No, no,” says Rock Lee, rubbing the back of his head. “I deserved that. I shouldn’t have surprised you!”
“I—” Gaara’s throat tightens around his words as Lee’s teammates help him back to his feet, shooting him twin glares. “I did not intend to ever use my sand against you again.”
“Don’t say that!” Lee shouts, even as the knee Gaara once crushed turns inward, knock-kneed, once he’s gained his footing. “I’m not afraid of it—or of you—any longer.”
Some shouted nonsense between Lee and his teacher deadens the conversation there, but as the Konohans’ backs vanish into a mere mirage on the desert’s horizon, Gaara is left thinking:
How could he not be?
He is not surprised to see a hawk waiting for him when he returns home a week later, a familiar scroll tied to its leg.
What does surprise him, however, is the condition the letter is in when he unrolls it. It’s in terrible shape, and not just because of the marked-out lines he’s become accustomed to (though there are many). The parchment is spotted with dried teardrops, the ink running in rivulets across the page. The words are distorted into illegibility where wet ink was rolled against wet ink, the characters doubling and overlapping, evidence of the scroll being sealed up before the ink had even dried. Gaara finds himself squinting, moving it closer to the flickering oil lamp on his desk to make it out.
What he can decipher is this:
—was the worst part, I think: not knowing. You were so still. Your chest wouldn’t move, no matter how much chakra they poured into you.
Naruto———so confident and determined, but all I felt was—
—helpless.
—not the first time I have seen a dead body, but———a comrade and not an enemy. It was the first time I have wished that I could somehow shake that person back to—
—kept thinking: What if this is the end? What if you were gone and I never—
Here the ink looks like it’s been caught in a derecho, smeared by some hand into a blurry mess that takes up nearly half the page. Lines down, though, the characters reconvene into something Gaara can just barely make out.
A shinobi’s life can be all too short. That is why I have resolved to tell you my true feelings.
I care deeply for you. Perhaps too——. I think of you too often for you to be a mere——or rival. I do not think you——my affections. And that is all right.
What is important is that you know. Even if I am not ever brave enough to——who I am, I needed you to———
You are loved.
Gaara swallows, and a boulder travels down his throat to lodge in his chest. The sand grates against itself in a whine, dances up across his desk and tugs at the edges of the scroll until he bats it away.
He stands in a rush, so quickly that he goes lightheaded and sways. He’s forgotten, again, to eat. That he no longer has an infinite reserve of chakra to sustain him.
His feet stumble like an amateur’s puppet on the stage down the stairs to Kankuro’s workshop. His brother is gone, the air stale with the smell of sawdust and grease. Screws roll under his bare feet and nearly trip him, but soon enough he finds what he’s after: a bottle of faintly yellow oil, a dropper capping it.
He must fly back up to his room because before he remembers another thing he’s back at his desk, his shaking fingers hovering over the page, over a stricken line.
But he pauses.
Does he really want to know? If the pain of this half-sensical letter strangling him is already too much to bear, might the rest of the writer’s words actually kill him? Will his tenuous grasp on sanity slip between his fingers? What if his madness was not Shukaku’s after all, but something innate to him?
The sand stirs with nowhere to go, because there is nothing to protect him from but himself.
The scar on his forehead prickles; his fingers itch to peel it away, to leave an indistinct, gaping wound where it once was.
But in the moment his fingers twitch with that restrained impulse, a single drop of oil shakes loose and falls to the page.
And Gaara knows he has made a mistake.
The oil spreads like fire on an exploding scroll, burning quick and efficient across the paper, leaving blackened embers in its wake. Gaara slaps his hand against the edges of its radius of destruction, tries to suffocate the flame with his sand, but it’s no use. In seconds, all that’s left on his desk is a pile of ash and a single, singed scrap of paper where the fluid worked as intended.
He tugs it to himself and reads it with greedy, watering eyes, terrified that it, too, will soon burn away.
At the feast, I watched you eat a pomegranate. You licked the juice off your lips and fingers like you’d been starving your entire life. Have you ever been hungry before? Or was it new? Because of it—him—Shukaku?
Gaara savors the words again, and again, and again. Because he remebers eating that fruit. The way the skin cracked under his fingers like ribs breaking. The flow of cool juice over his fingers, the color of blood. The resistance of each aril between his teeth like he was chewing through raw flesh.
He'd been ravenous for it.
Because the hunger is new. The thirst. The craving, the longing for anything other than destruction and death and the small, fragile flicker of want for a love that doesn’t hurt. It rages now like a bonfire in his chest. He wants everything. Every pain, every pleasure. All that being human entails.
In the back of his unconscious mind, one fact settles in: The person who wrote him this letter is not from Suna. No Sunan other than himself ever speaks—much less writes—the name of the Demon, for fear of attracting his eye.
But in the forefront of his thoughts, Gaara is focused on dusting the ash into a tidy pile, scraping it into an envelope and tucking it in his desk drawer as far away from the other letters as he can manage. Afraid of the chemical contaminating and destroying his other treasures but unwilling to let it go. That done, he smooths his hands over what little evidence remains of the confession like it, too, is funerary remains, a charred length of white bone too stubborn to be burnt.
For the first time since he died, tears prick at the corners of Gaara’s eyes.
And he swears to himself: he will never try to take more than is offered to him again.