Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

I left soon after the incident. I buried it in my mind, buried it with all the other things I maybe shouldn’t have done. It didn’t sit right with me, though it had felt right at the time. It didn’t feel right to give in to the insistent desire to bathe in the memory. Another thing to forget. Forget.

So I moved on, spent some time in the Country of Rain and the Country of Earth. Passing these borders was easy enough. It was only large cities and the Hidden Villages that require anything more than a glance at a passport. It was time to wander again, no ties, no intimacy, no thought. Reset everything. Put my mind and body back together as human-shaped as I can make it, for whatever good that does me.
As always, I kept my ears open, listening for any sign of the Witch: Disaster, discord, bloodshed. Her favorite games. But no luck. It was a pause, it seemed; a lull between storms. Never did I think it would stop. Just….wait. And so I waited, too.
I let the seasons pass as many times as I needed to in this manner. I went from small village to small village, feeling stagnant and restless. Despite my efforts, I could feel—I CAN feel the witch burning somewhere in my guts, longing for something more than the menial labor and meditation that filled these days. Digging ditches. Farm work. Anything I happen across. Forcing my body into these roles blankets everything in a bearable buzz. No bloodlust, no memory, no impatience. Besides, to be strictly practical, jobs mean income. I can only stand subsisting on sweetgrass for so long, and being starved is absolutely not any fun. It’s nice to have money, as fleeting as it is, and be able to afford the odd cup of tea, or dumpling, or if I’m lucky, cigarettes and lodging. I’m rarely lucky. Or maybe I just don’t try.

Gaara was on my mind more often than I like to admit. Especially when everything was still, when night fell and there was no one awake to make noise but the animals in the forests where I slept and my own mind. We’d made some sort of connection, that was sure; no matter how uneasy and wrong it felt banging around in my memory. Another stone of guilt in a mountain.
But I remembered. And I remembered remembering. Until they were blurry, burnt impressions. Worn out like a tape played too many times.

Teeth, lips, blood, teeth, lips, blood, sand…

It made my hands shake. It makes me want to take apart my own rib cage and remove the cursed source of it all. I’ve tried that, by the way. Doesn’t help, but it’s cathartic, I’ll give it that.

…cutting off the blood and air to my head, filling my vision with white and red.
Him on top of me, grinding down. Pressing my own kunai into my heart as he…

My own breath felt like fire as I tried to push back the memory, mouth feeling wet and tasting of blood.

I had to take to bandaging my hands those days. One drawback of isolation: the curse tends to get the better of my physical form when I’m by myself. It’s hard to notice, because it happens so slowly, but eventually I just… stretch out. Skin turns ashy and hard, fingers and toes become claws. A part of me thinks this ugliness disguising me is my only way out. If I can’t die. If I can’t die, maybe the only way out is to become something that doesn’t have to live.
See? It’s hard to focus on being human when your mind just wants to take humanity from others.

Thoe feelings brought me back to Jichyumura and Ichikotsu. The feeling that I had on those nights…they were frighteningly similar to what I experienced with Gaara, without the softer edges he gave it. Both were about bloodshed. But he…
No. no, we aren’t thinking about it. It’s not worth thinking about. Forget it. Forget.
…The nights in those towns were nothing like that. They were only blood, only killing. I didn’t know any of them, I still don’t know a single name, and I’d like to keep it that way. Their blood is as hard to wash off as the memory of lips and teeth on mine, but not as pleasant.
So I wrapped my knife-sharp hands in bandages, and kept my mouth shut.

I was staying at a tiny rice-paddy town in the Land of Rain when I finally head anything promising.
It was in the middle of a rainstorm, and the potter’s field I used as my bed was nothing but a bog now. Mud, soaking its way down to the bodies below, and through me, as well. The buried dead needn’t move. But I’ve learned that even the deathless need to preserve themselves. So, I made my way to town to escape the worst of it.
I ended up outside of a tiny inn, crouching under its leaking eaves to avoid the downpour and sighing at my thoroughly muddied sandals. I was pretty well soaked. I had a few En on me, and the place didn’t give the feeling of being fully booked; but I was pretty sure that the proprietors of the establishment I was squatting outside wouldn’t appreciate the patronage of a sopping vagrant.

I stared out at the rain, having washed the mud off my sandals and feet, and thought of nothing.

After a time, a sliding door a sliding door a little down the wall from me opened. I startled, expecting to be shooed away, but it seems I wasn’t yet noticed. A young girl leaned out. She was casual, content in her erroneous sense of solitude. That act of unseen watching… it made her simple act of shaking out a dustcloth into the likeness of an ink painting. Her actions, framed in the context of not being observed, became precious.
She wore a blue kimono, and her sleek hair tied behind her head loosely. All the pieces of her in motion. A servant of time. She would live and die like this, it occurred to me. She already was.
I envied that.

She stopped suddenly when she saw me, mouth open in innocent surprise, not fear. The sense of artistic voyeurism was broken, replaced with the normal flow of occurrence and reaction. I was again part of the painting.
The rain fell around us, now somehow more real than the second before. Awareness returned, bringing the rustling of forest leaves and the smell of petrichor, all senses coalescing into the drawn-out experience of awareness. The moment continued along with the rain, seeming longer than could fit into the seconds it was given to exist. A rare departure from what could be described as an indefinite period of solipsism.
She looked me up and down, and nodded to herself, ending the moment. “You’re a travelling monk, aren’t you?” She asked.

Well, I’m not. Definitely not. It’s not the first time I’ve been accused of asceticism, but it’s uniquely humorous every time it happens. I guess that my barely-grown-back short cropped hair, the mark on my temple, and my penchant for “meditation” can give the impression of monkhood.
I’m not much of a fan of lying, but simple morals like that seem a little more elastic after a century or so of purposeless existence. Besides, the allure of a warm, dry place to stay was a little too enticing.

I pushed the words out of my mouth to answer her.
“--Yeah, something like that. I didn’t mean to take advantage of your ryokan, but this rainfall kind of chased me under the nearest overhang…”

People like her liked it when you were polite and apologetic. It’s a lot of subtext and guessing, but communication is just a game, after all. And there are no wins and losses, since I never stop playing.

She waved her hands, dismissing my apparent apology. “No, no, no, it’s fine! Lots of people get caught up in the weather this type of year. You should come in until it quiets down.” She slid the door the rest of the way open, welcoming me. “I’ll get you a towel…”

“Are you sure it’s all right…? I can pay—“
Not full price, I can’t.

“Don’t worry about it! The innkeeper is my father. I don’t think he’ll object to sheltering a man of the cloth for a day.”

And so I was lead inside. I dried myself off, listening to the now-muffled staccato of the rainfall. There was some fuss with the innkeeper, but time was back to its old hollow habit, and I was back inside myself. Things spun on: rapid gears of life, passing as inconsistently as always. When it happens, I wonder, is it time, or memory itself which is at fault?
Why did I remember the inkeeper’s daughter and the rain, but not the time I spent there? Spotted fragments, scattered across senses. Once they are old enough I’ll wonder if they ever were memories to begin with, or just dreams.
I suppose this story will be hard to follow because of that. This has never been a traditional tale, though.

Chapter Text

The only other thing I found at that inn—and kept—was the rumor that sent me to the Village Hidden in the Leaves.
I tend to avoid hidden villages. Too much security, too many ninja, too much power trading hands and being sought. I know enough to realize what they’d see me as if I wasn’t careful to hide. At best, a pawn, and at worst, a monster. I really don’t want the hassle.
But a customer at the inn was trading stories, and one of them sounded just like the handiwork of the witch. Destruction, chaos, murder… her favorite fare. There were no details, just rumor and speculation. I’d have to make my way there myself if I wanted a facet of the truth.

Thinking back, it was about then that things started to feel substantial. Or maybe that’s not the proper word… relevant? It’s the part of a long, boring book where you finally encounter something memorable. There had been bits and pieces before, of course, but when I remember my life now, the chapters after Konoha are the ones that really feel like part of a story. And what is life of not an inelegant story?

Of course, that story didn’t pick up the moments I passed through the gates of the village. Like reality so often is, my journey there was slow, and more filled with time passed staring at my own feet as I walked than anything truly exciting. Stories in books never show you those pieces of being. No bathroom breaks, no quiet hours of trying to fall asleep, no mention of those little repeating thoughts that meander unceasingly through your mind when you are alone.

Well, I’m a boring person, not a book. So I’m not going to leave all of those parts out.

I don’t walk quickly. I have stamina, not strength. The journey to Konoha was days of stepping around puddles and letting carts pass. You have to consider the distance—everything’s so much bigger than I can describe in words. There’s so much you take for granted in lived experience that can’t be conveyed through text without excessive verbosity. It is true that I can’t remember the trip in detail, of course. Time like that passes almost meaninglessly and leaves your memory with an impressionistic smudge of the whole, embellished by the way you know things must have been and the way you know them to be.
For instance. I know that it looked like it was going to rain, almost the whole way, until I reached the border of the Land of Fire. I can’t remember the shapes of the clouds. I can’t remember the smell of the mud. But I can guess at it.
What I do remember, thoroughly, is my hand running over my satchel every time I took a step. The texture of the mesh pockets is still familiar to me, even though I don’t have the bag anymore. It was brown, with a strap that went over my shoulder and one wide central pocket, already well-worn. The mesh was torn on the bottom, and the strap had broken on my way out of the Wind, forcing me to tie it. The knot still had sand embedded in it. If I scraped the bottom of the main pocket, I’d come away with sand under my nails, too.
I wondered over and over again on that walk whether it was HIS sand or not. I couldn’t help but think of it as his. It felt like it. I felt his presence in it, imagination or no. Each grain was an eye, a hand, it was him, watching me. I felt like if I touched it he would know. Sentimental bullshit.
I tried not to think about it, of course. I’d left that all behind of my own will. I didn’t. I didn’t understand my own motives, maybe, or just the feeling behind them. As soon as I left him I was blind to him. Left a nagging itch where there shouldn’t be one: Where was he now? Did he resent me? Did I make him cry?

The thoughts never really left me.

I suppose it would make more sense if you knew me. Writing it like this I can see how it would be perceived: Oh, Gen is pining, how sweet; he misses Gaara! It must be affection. No, sorry, that’s not it.
Things are always much more complicated than that. Just—see. When I met him, I was not the Gen whose mind makes rational decisions, or even decisions that are fully my own. I had been wandering—not like I was on the path to Konoha, but really, truly wandering; no destination and nothing inside. I don’t even have blurry memory of the paths I took then. I know what I did, but the memory is black and white text: “I did this.” “I went here.” Even before I died, this would happen, I think. I hesitate to say that it’s something that’s wrong with me. It’s just how I am. But… the witch. She makes it worse.

When I met Gaara I was on the edge of rationality. But instead of staying black and white like the before-and-after, my memory of him was in full color. I remember textures, details, I can walk around in the sense-memory like a ballroom. It was both him and me that made it so strange. I was so very nearly happy. I remember that… oceans of nothing, of dry, coughing depression, and then a period of feeling alive and the sense of being truly seen by someone else.
Gaara had seen me and he did not blink or look away. He made me real. He made the world real for me. And I?
I kept the memory.

So you see, this wasn’t affection that drew me to thoughts of him, not yet. I was still stone cold. Love is repugnant, and I don’t think I believe in it. What we had was certainly not love. But it WAS something I didn’t fully understand, and curiosity can be the strongest of lures.