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FtGoG Character Focus: Gaara

Let's talk about Gaara

In the past week, since I posted the 3 part Gaara snippet, I have received messages asking me if I hate Gaara or if I enjoy abusing him emotionally. Well, none of those messages were serious, since you know me, and they know me, but I did promise to talk about Gaara in the AN of that snippet, didn't I?

So, let us talk about him, about how I feel regarding the canon Gaara, as well as what I have in plan for him in FtGoG.

First of all, I like Gaara. I adore him. He's not my top favorite Naruto character because that spot is already occupied by Tobirama (and the second spot by our titular blond main char of the show), but he's pretty up there. His design is unique. His story is compelling without being over the top. His character is one of the better ones of the series. Still, my feelings regarding the canon Gaara is that … he was shafted. His character arc was cut before it could really take off because he needed to fill the role of being Naruto's reversed mirror image. As a fellow Jinchuriki and the first Jinchuriki we saw aside from Naruto, he was the designated foil for Naruto. He was an example of how bad it could have been for Naruto, how bad it was for a lot of the ninja children in Konoha and in other countries. He was then used as something for Naruto to aspire to. The beast child that broke past his circumstances and became the leader of his people. Once everyone in his village feared and hated him. Now they love and respect him as their Kage. People who once shunned him now held him up as something to admire. He made peace with himself and with his own Biju. He made peace even with the father that created him and forced him into a life he never wanted. By the time Shippuden rolled around, Gaara's life was basically what Naruto dreamed he had. And all of that is great, but at the same time, it also feels incredibly forced.

Think about it for a second. Back in 2002-2005 when Naruto was published up to only around the Chuunin exam time and the immediate aftermath, Gaara was the poster boy for psychotic children in the fandom. He was hardcore fucked-up, a killer, a sadist, and incredibly messed up in the head. He was the dark child of the series. Sasuke ain't got shit on him. This is how fandom portrayed him back then (those of us that are old enough to already be in the fandom and fanfiction game that is). And for good reasons too because remember back then, Gaara had absolutely no compunction against killing people. He crushed that genin team from Rain like a child stomping on ants. He literally smeared the wall with the blood and flesh of those two Konoha chunin who got on his way when he was about to step into the arena in the last part of the Chunin exam. He was unhinged most of the time and not all of that was due to Shukaku's prodding either. This is the boy who stated by words and actions that violence was the only way he could prove his existence and only the thrill of killing those whom he felt was a threat to him that made him feel alive. And yet even seeing him at his worst, a significant part of the fandom still adored him in his blood child form back then, because his backstory was compelling and it made sense. He was severely traumatized as a child. He was raised more as a weapon than as a human being. And so the way he was when he was 12 years old, violent and psychotic, makes sense. Who would expect a child raised in such a way to grow up into a normal, well-adjusted person? He's very much a product of his upbringing.

A lot of people also liked this blood child Gaara because they saw him as a strike back to the violent culture of the ninja world. Unlike Naruto who was unrepentantly fanboyish towards his culture and community despite all their faults. Pre-Shippuden Gaara called them out for the messed-up society that they were. What sort of culture groomed their pre-teens to become soldiers? What kind of parents designed their children to become weapons of the state in the womb? This is not something only Rasa and Karura did. In a way, Minato and Kushina arguably did the same thing, only their actions and reasoning were dressed up in a more sympathetic way than Rasa and Karura. And not only Minato and Kushina either, but also Fugaku and Mikoto (both of whom were perfectly ok with using their teenage son as a double agent and soldier for a military coup they were planning. Like fuck?! What sort of fucked up parenting is that?), and the Hyuuga clan, and so many other clan parents too. People lambast Rasa for doing what he did to Gaara, but when you think about it, this is very much a wide-scale cultural thing. Rasa is in no way an outlier in this society. For every Rasa and Karura, and Minato and Kushina, or Fugaku and Mikoto, there is an entire society behind them that validates their actions and their rationality, that tells them that it is ok to do that to their own flesh and blood. Children like Gaara, like pre-Shippuden Neiji, are the products of this society. And out of all the characters in the series, Gaara alone is the one who called them out on this. And that made him unique and compelling.

Now, fast forward 3 years, and suddenly this violently volatile 12 years old boy has become… a 30 years old man in the skin of 15 years old boy. Shippuden Gaara was everything Chunin Exam Gaara was not. He was calm and wise beyond his years. He was stable. He knew himself, knew what he wanted out of life. He had the trust of many people. He was Kazekage (which also beggars belief by the way, because really why him? Certainly, he is a powerful shinobi, but pre-Shippuden exhibited absolutely zero leadership potential or experience whatsoever and the Kage post is, you know, all about leadership), literally the most powerful and influential person of his community. He had made peace with himself, and even with the man who made him into the monster child that he was. Now instead of talking about murder and mayhem, he talked about love, about friendship, about wanting to make something better for the future. The people around him, who we were told he used to terrorize back in his murder baby days (remember he was the murder baby of Suna back then, first because he was bad at controlling his own sand and later on because he just plainly didn't care for anybody besides himself), all just… forgot about all that and be kosher with Shippuden Gaara. It's like almost the entire village of Sunagakure (with the exception of the anti-Gaara crowd who are, of course, the antagonists in every Naruto materials be it manga, anime fillers, or light novel of dubious canonicity) suffered memory loss and woke up one day to adore the new Gaara who was no longer murder baby…

In just 3 years, this hardcore blood child who killed and maimed at the slightest provocation basically became… a unicorn. Seriously one of these days I expect a rainbow to appear out of nowhere around Gaara (and that's totally not because I ship Gaanaru).

Isn't that so amazing that it makes you sort of want to check either your head or your eyes? A lifetime of trauma, abuse, cultural brainwashing, and mental conditioning… wiped clean (or nearly clean) in less than 3 years… Does that sound realistic to you? Like seriously, think about it for a second. Gaara has issues, lots of them. He has this thing with his daddy and mommy. He has this thing with not being able to meaningfully connect and bond with people around him. He has abandonment issues. His mother abandoned him since birth (via dying). His father abandoned him through neglect. His uncle betrayed his trust and then abandoned him. His brother and sister shunned him out of fear. Certainly, it's not that simple, but from the eyes of the child Gaara, every person that he trusted walked out on him and left him to fend for himself. When you think about this, it makes perfect sense for pre-Shippuden Gaara to proclaim that he lived only for himself because he could not trust anybody else to stay, could not trust anybody else to not abandon him the way his mother, his father, his uncle.

When you apply this knowledge to his relationship with Naruto, suddenly you see extra dimensions to the way their friendship played out. I remember back years ago, a lot of people remarked on how devoted to Naruto Gaara suddenly became. Certainly, Naruto played a pivotal part in Gaara's life, being the one catalyst that made him want to turn his life around and be a different person. But the fact is that these 2 boys met about a handful of times before Shippuden and outside of 2 battles (Konoha crush and arguably the chase after Sasuke one), they didn't really have any sort of bonding experience to speak of. That level of devotion while not completely impossible is highly unusual. But when you factor in Gaara's abandonment issue, it suddenly becomes a little clearer why he behaves like that, why he suddenly becomes Naruto's biggest fanboy. People who are emotionally lonely, who fear abandonment have the tendency to try that much harder, to devalue themselves and overvalue other people in a bid to find acceptance and validation. That's how I see the relationship between Naruto and Gaara. It doesn't change the fact that their friendship is a beautiful thing, but it certainly adds dimension to how that friendship came to be.

My point is… Gaara has many issues, none of which is the type to be easily resolved in just under three years. In our real world, this kind of baggage during a child's formation years leaves life-long scars. Realistically speaking, any of these issues should take decades to be truly and completely resolved. Children from abusive households need decades to make peace with themselves, and even then not all of them succeed, because dealing with emotional scars is hard. You don't just shake off a violent and abusive upbringing since your birth in just under three years. It's not realistic. It feels forced. It feels cheap. It feels incomplete and cheaty. It feels like reading a book about a cancer patient and for 90% of the book you are hammered by the fact that this patient has an infinitesimal chance of survival and recovery, and then in the last 10% of the book, woala, suddenly he is cured and healthy and happy and everything is right in the world with next to no explanation what so ever. Do you get my point?

Now, I have to clarify. It's not that I don't want for Gaara to recover from his pre-Shippuden stage and make progress. I think it's a beautiful thing for someone who was put through so much like him to eventually find self-healing. But the way it was done was just… not good at all. The way it was done, the implied ease of it all just cheapens what Gaara went through, the enormity of his pain and the mistakes of his past. Remember, this kid murdered perfectly innocent people in the past. He got away with it back then because he was the son of the Kazekage and the Jinchuriki. But for a Shippuden Gaara, don't you think that he wouldn't think about it, wouldn't think about the people he hurt in the past, the mistake that he made, that he wouldn't want to atone?

Gaara's characterization in canon, when you think about it, was cut before it could even start. He was not allowed the time to actually resolve his issues and find atonement and self-healing. He just one day miraculously appeared new and whole and all shiny, the 15 years old wise man who led his people and lectured the other Kage on not being pompous old geezers. He skipped through the entirety of his puberty as well. Shippuden Gaara was supposedly 15 years old at the start and 17 years old at the end. But did he feel like a teenager who was learning about his identity and who he was in all of Shippuden? He couldn't have any of that, any actual character arc or maturation (both mental and sexual), because narrative-wise, he is locked into his role as Naruto's foil. Naruto is emotional and rash. So Gaara must be calm and rational. Naruto is a teenager struggling to find himself amidst this tumultuous world, struggling with his future, his identity. So Gaara must be wise and sure of himself. Naruto is a genin and is only now learning the ropes of leadership, who is struggling to find respect and acknowledgment from people outside of his circles. So Gaara must already be the leader of his people and the voice of command even to ninja of other villages. Naruto is still a child in many ways. And so Gaara is not allowed actual childhood or adolescence at all. Instead, he must be the adult to Naruto's child, the grown man in the skin of a 15 years old boy. In Shippuden, he appears almost sexless as a result (I'm also pointing out the many, many fans who view Gaara as asexual because of his apparent lack of any puberty or adolescent signs whatsoever)

The truth of the matter is that in canon, Gaara's characterization arc was shafted so that he could function as the foil for Naruto and enrich Naruto's own character arc.

In a way, I understand the necessity. After all, despite his popularity, Gaara is still only a tertiary to secondary character of a story with hundreds of named characters. He can't have too much screen time devoted to him. But on the other hand, it doesn't make me feel any better about it. Gaara's character arc in canon is… not bad, but it's not what it can be, nor what it should be. And for a Gaara fan who cares a lot about good characterization, it's kind of a bummer thing to have to accept.

This is what I have always felt since years ago. So I made a resolution that if I ever write Gaara in any prominent position in my stories, that I will take the time and effort to give him the character arc he should have. And… well… that's what I want to do. I want to portray him as a child growing up into a teenager, struggling and finding himself in the process. I want to emphasize the pain of his past experiences, his struggles, but also want him to slowly and eventually find self-healing, find peace with himself the way it should have been in canon. I want to see him as an actual child behaving like a child, and as an actual teenager behaving like a teenager (getting into troubles, stumbling into his budding sexuality, finding his sense of self, his identity, stuff that we all go through in our teenage years) and not a sexless grown man in the skin of a teenager.

Chapter Text

Disclaimer: I don't own anything.

From the Garden of Gods Snippet: That Other One

From the moment the boy was born, he was cursed by love.

When he was six years old, in an act of rebellion, he carved the letter of adoration onto his forehead. He needed no love, he wanted to say, for love had forsaken him. He was a child. What did he know?

Red lipstick, rose petals, heartbreak.

When they meet in the morning of the last day, she asks him what's the matter. He says, oh, it's nothing at all. But his heart is racing, out of control. He slinks away, unable to face the full brunt of the sun. It's the last day before she goes. He may never see her again, and yet he has not the courage to tell her… to tell her that he…

It is hard to think he has lived like this for the last three years. He has lived every day with this sickness, sipping on this sweet poison every night. It is harder to think that he has once meant to continue on like this, for forever, safe in the illusion that she will stay, that nothing will change, that they will stay like this… always. But today is the last day, and tomorrow she won't be here. And… if tragedy strikes, as it is so wont to do in this cruel, merciless world they have built for themselves, perhaps she will never be here again… and if that happens… if it happens and he has kept this poisonous silence… if she goes and leaves him behind in this desolate world where he has remained quiet out of cowardice...

The thought of it is enough to send him running again.

He needs his courage. He needs it so much now. But she who is his fear and his adoration is also his courage, and now he must find some way to face her—alone.

He goes to the Kazekage building to find work, to find something with which to distract him from the clamoring in his head. There is always plenty of work there, plenty of problems to deal with. There are even more now with the journey scheduled for tomorrow. Supply routes to maintain, security measures to check up on, foreign correspondences to keep up, requests from far-flung mining towns and frontier outposts to answer. He's learning the role very well, some councilman or another tells him, helping to share the burden with his sire in a thousand untold ways. He will make a fine Kazekage one day, they say.

In the afternoon, when there is a mandated break and he can't quite harass the assistants into keeping up with him, he leaves and goes to Kalahari, the abandoned floodplain in which she grew a garden just for him. He sits under the shade of the apple tree where she used to sit, his back to the grizzled trunk, his hands in the overgrown grass. He's absolutely alone now. A handful of other people know of this place, none of whom venture here with any frequency, if they do at all. This is their garden, their place filled with childhood promises.

Closing his eyes, he thinks of the days of a halcyon past, a time when he was younger and she was younger; and by dint of his existence, he commanded the entirety of her attention, the apple of her eye—that which she fought to protect.

It is here that he finds peace. He sleeps. He dreams… of that time years ago, when he was small, and young, and yet to know heartbreak.

The met for the second time here in this garden, but back then it was just a dusty basin, barren of all life. Kalahari, where the water used to go, but there was no more water here—just dust and dirt and things long dead. She sat, right here. And he sat, hissing and spitting at her in fear and hatred, right over there. But her power took the pain from him, silenced the voice of the Shukaku. It lulled the child to sleep, to peace.

For the first several days, they said not a word to each other but then one day, she sang. She was a horrible singer but he couldn't remember anyone outside from the maternal uncle he had murdered in cold blood ever willingly sing to him. Then the day after that, perhaps because of his scathing critics of her voice ('Are you trying to kill me with your squawking?'), she had taken to telling stories. Myths and tall tales from some faraway land he had never heard of.

Time passed. Seasons changed. Spring became summer became fall became… well, in the desert the winter was eternal. Still, she planted trees in this dusty basin, made flowers bloom, ensorceled fruits to swell from wooden branches. She sat in the shades and beckoned for him to come, to seek refuge from the harsh, glaring sun. He spat at her in reply, saw the sadness in her furrowed brows and felt a petty glee in his heart. She gifted him an apple, fresh from the harvest, its skin glistening red. He turned her down, yelling at her until he was raw in the throat. I don't need your pity, witch! I will not be fooled by you! But she forced it into his hands anyway.

"Keep it," she said. "For when you need it."

He has it still. He kept it, and one day when it finally grew rotten, put it in a pot where he grew himself his own apple tree amidst the many cacti he kept. See, witch! I can do your cheap trick too!

One day, she told him the tale of a demon fox who was also a boy. A fox boy. A demon fox boy, whose name was Tails. The little fox was all alone, just like him, and for a while he was reviled and distrusted by people he met, just like him. But then one day, he found friends. One day, he was suddenly no longer alone. The fox boy went on grand adventures then, when his friendship held fast, and he went to many places and saw many wondrous things… and found love… and was loved in return… and grew up in the happiness of having found it.

The tale… it enkindled feelings the boy never wanted. Like looking into a warped mirror. Like walking into a funhouse where one knew not what was real and what was fantasy. Envy, sadness, resentment, sorrow, confusion… hope. It was this hope that was the hardest to deal with.

"What is the use?" he said one day when she was in the midst of recounting the fox boy's many misadventures with the thunder girl who loved him. "What is the use? It will not last. He's a demon. A monster... at the end of the day, no one can love a monster." He looked at her then, and, without noticing he had started to cry, spat out. "This is just stupid nonsense you made up to mock me. Stop it, witch!"

She fell quiet. She looked at him. Standing up, she crossed the distance between them in steps. The basin at the time was in full bloom, so her bare feet waded through green grass and blossoming flowers to come by his side. Strangely, he felt no desire to push her away. She touched him in the face, wiped his tears from his cheeks. She said…

"My tales are not made up. They are real stories I have seen with my own eyes. A demon is not necessarily a monster. And even if you are…" she paused here for a second. "... even if you are, your mother will still love you anyway. Even if you are... I will still love you anyway."

He said nothing in reply. He didn't know what to say. So he just looked at her, disbelief and… something… something he couldn't put a name to… warring in his chest.

"Don't cry, Gaara," she said. "Don't cry. Look, the lilies and daisies are blooming. Aren't they pretty? Come with me, Gaara. We will sit under the shade. I will make you a flower wreath and we will eat peaches and apples together."

The boy broke under her gentleness. The beast scattered into non-existence, killed by something it could not comprehend. From that day on, he followed her.

This was how she taught him love, but it would take a while yet for him to realize it.

He wakes up in the garden when someone calls his name. Above him, the sun is dying, spilling rivulets of gold and crimson blood all across a vista of sloping, rusted colored hogbacks and wide-open skies. His sister hovers somewhere to the side, looking down at him with concern in her eyes.

"So this is where you were all this afternoon. I've been looking for you. Come on. It's time. They're back."

He sits still for a second, the last of his memory of a simpler time—a sweeter time—lingering. But then he shakes himself awake, stands up, and follows his sister back to the village.

It doesn't take long. Soon, he sees a small crowd gathering at the gate of the Kazekage complex and another crowd—no, a procession—coming in from the main village gate. She is standing with the people in front of the Kazekage building, and when she sees him, she calls his name with something like relief in her voice.

He stills at the sight of her, at the sound of his name coming from her lips. He wonders if she thinks about him as much as he does her, if she notices his absence, brief as it is. Fear roils in his chest.

Tell her, it says. You are out of time. Tell her. Or be silent for the rest of your life.

His heart tumbles at the thought. They are standing in a crowd of people, familiar faces and strangers both. This is no place, but he's out of time. He thinks then of the past, and of the future. He sees in his eyes the memory of her being dragged away by a puppet of Akasuna no Sasori as he stood helpless on the other side of the village, wounded and broken, sees her taken, stolen from her home, sees her disappeared into the night, into the vast open-world outside these walls where he has a ghost of a chance of finding her by himself, of bringing her home, sees his own illusion of safety being shattered into a million pieces, sees himself abandoned, orphaned by love, again.

Tomorrow she won't be here, and if tragedy strikes, as it is so wont to do in this cruel, merciless world they have built for themselves, perhaps she will never be here again, perhaps they will never meet again, perhaps she will be lost for forever, perhaps…

The fear crystallizes into panic, and it is this panic that galvanizes him. He takes a step forward, the sound of her name on his lips. But then the crowd around them roars. There are movements from the other side, and then a procession pours into the plaza before the Kazekage building. His father walks at the front. He looks worn, weary, the edges of his clothing torn and singed in combat, but also triumphant. At once, his presence takes hold of her. She turns away then, and if the boy manages to make any sound at all, any words at all, then she does not hear it, cannot hear it as her heart sings for someone else and the sound of its joy drowns out all other noises.

They meet in the middle, his father and her, and… surprise… they embrace. Neither of them are often open with their affection. Her because of her age and shyness, his father because it is the kind of man he is, the kind of position he is in. That their relationship manages to stay an uncommon knowledge among the populace despite all odds is testament to this. And yet here they are, entwined like vines that grew from the same pod, brazen in the face of a public audience.

She withdraws a little, looks up to his father with open adoration, and says… I missed you. His father says something then in return, turns to his entourage and makes a short gesture, exchanges a few other words with his teacher and his sister, nods at him, before drawing her away.

And just like that, the boy is cast aside, made irrelevant, forgotten.

"You can't choose who you love," he says finally to the stunned fox, his friend, his brother of circumstance. "There is no choice. You just do, and if you are lucky, maybe you will love the right one. But if you are not…" He gestures towards himself. The ache has long become a background noise. He's long accepted the fact that he's trapped, perhaps for forever. He hasn't quite made peace with it yet, but he has accepted it. After all, acceptance is the first step to a solution, to something that will free him from this limbo. "... then you'll be like me."

He did not know when it started. Perhaps that first day, when he relented and allowed her to lead him under the shade of the garden. Perhaps later, when his violent encounter with the Kyuubi host made him realize that he too, had something he wanted to protect. Perhaps even later than that. He was 12, a child. He knew nothing of love except that he had suffered plenty at its hand. It took until he was 14, when one day his brother jokingly told him—"It would have been creepy or inappropriate if you didn't look like a little squirt. As it is though, you just look like a particularly clingy five year old." he laughed at the boy's stunned face. "You follow her everywhere! Somebody should pay that poor woman for babysitting you almost every day."—for him to realize something was up.

He was 14, not quite a child in the eyes of his people, but not yet a man either. He was a creature locked in between, stuck in a metamorphosis that would take years to complete, twisting and squirming in the skin he that was trying to shed. He looked at her. She was 21 that year, a woman grown, lovely, resplendent, like the sun wrapped up in a shell of flesh, and all of the sudden, the creature stirred somewhere in the pit of his stomach, clawed its way up, wrapped itself around his heart, squeezed. A visceral something bloomed in his chest.

He tumbled, dazed and confused. He wanted… He didn't know what he wanted. Just that he wanted it very, very badly.

Adolescence. A bewildering, mortifying, and sometimes painful thing to go through. Not even the ninja-born were spared this humiliation. But most ninja his age had help, had support, had structure and discipline to fall back on, had been primed for the budding of their adulthood, for their sexuality. The boy, on the other hand, knew of no such things. His murderous child self had barred him from a proper education on the topic. And so when the onset of his own adolescence came, he flailed and floundered, ill at ease in his own body, at a loss at what to do, how to deal with it all. It was as if overnight, he had grown bigger than his skin and his bones could accommodate, and now the seams were coming apart, the gangly limbs tangling over each other, and always it happened when she was around to set off weird sparks in his stomach.

One day, he realized that he wanted more of her, more of her presence, more of her voice, more of her attention, and her time. He did not know why he wanted this, just that he wanted it, and the wanting would not go away, would become an incessant niggling that only grew and grew over time if he attempted to ignore it. He had never been denied the things he wanted before, by dint of his strength and what he meant to the village, so even now, after all that had happened and how much he had changed, he saw no reasons to deny himself what he wanted.

His first few attempts were crude and clumsy. Brazenly and without asking for permission, he inserted himself into her days, into her work, into her routine. He went to her house in the morning, ate breakfast with her, walked with her to the plantations, stayed there by her side. He accompanied her to meetings with civilian and ninja representatives alike. He followed her to the schools and to scheduled gatherings with the children of Sand. If she felt any sort of irritation, she did not say it. Instead, despite the abruptness of his intrusions, she welcomed his presence with an easy smile, as she always did. Eventually, the frequency of his presence by her side garnered notice, until his sister took him aside for a quick chat.

"You know, Gaara," she said, tone apologetic. "Your following Kagome around was cute when you were a little thing, but you're a big boy now. You know how it looks right? It doesn't look good. I mean… even Kankurou notices and you know he's a dolt about things like these."

He stared at her mulishly. Temari sighed, rubbed the back of her neck.

"You know you're giving her trouble right?"

… What?

"You are. You keep following her around and usually that's not a bad thing so long as you don't neglect your own work. Added security and all, but part of her job requires meeting with civilians and such and… well… your reputation precedes you. The elder folk, they remember how you were like… before."

… Oh…

"They are scared Gaara… of you. And when they are busy being scared of the Jinchuriki in the room, they are not paying attention to her or the proposals she needs to push through. And worse, word is getting around. People tend to be nervous when they know they are going to have to share an enclosed space with a Jinchuriki with… a history. She hasn't said a thing yet, but Oren told me two satellite town representatives who dropped out of a scheduled meeting without a reason last week… and… well... she needed them there in the room with her."

He stared at his sister in shock and mortification and not a small amount of irritation. He hadn't realized, one part of him thought. So what if a few busybody civilians didn't have the guts to stand in his presence? If they couldn't deal with a mere ninja child, why then did they apply for citizenship in a ninja village in the first place? Thought the other part. But the thought of him making troubles for her, even unwittingly, was strangely uncomfortable, more so than the fact that apparently his mere presence was enough to send some paper pusher civilians running. Finally, he muttered under his breath, "I'll stop…"

His sister pat him on the back. "You're a good boy, Gaara. One day, everybody will realize that, even those old codgers. But for now, if it's friendly company you want, I know a couple chuunin who really want to talk to you. Said they owe their life to you. How about…"

He put the rest of her ramblings out of his ears. It wasn't them he wanted. He wanted… the only one he wanted… The creature stirred, restless.

Nevertheless, he kept his word and kept his visits to a minimum. For a while he tried to bear the incessant niggling, tried to wait it out, see if it would stop, see if he could stop it. It didn't. He couldn't. It grew. It was a constant white noise in his head, an itch that slowly overtook him, gradually getting so bad he felt like grinding his teeth in frustration at times. He found himself thinking of her in the morning when he woke up, and in the night before he went to sleep. They still met, of course, but it wasn't nearly enough. And once in awhile, he'd catch the derisive laughter of Shukaku at the back of his head, the sound of it suggesting the raccoon knew some secret that the boy himself wasn't privy to. It was, in one word, maddening!

He lasted for two whole weeks before his frustration and his impotent anger started giving birth to errant thoughts. He was a ninja, born and bred. Rules were meant to be broken or bent completely out of shape by people like him—whichever way was more convenient. What sort of ninja would he be if he didn't even attempt to exploit the obvious loopholes in Temari's words? If he couldn't be seen with her openly, then he just had to make sure that nobody saw him.

Subterfuge and illusions were not his forte, but that was not to say that he had no skill in the art. He was a more direct kind of shinobi, and didn't usually bother with the roundabout ways to deal with problems, but he did know a little something. His ninjutsu were taught to him by his father, and among the many, many ways to kill and maim someone with sand and chakra, he was also taught a way to spy on someone from afar. A technique requiring both a genetic affinity for certain elements and precise control of chakra to create a third eye made of either gold dust or sand. The eye, when properly connected to the optic nerves, granted vision from a great distance. It would be like he was right by her side, even if his physical body sat on the other side of the village.

Obviously, the original technique itself was unfit for the task. Too obvious. The moment the eyeball appeared anywhere near her, he'd be busted, if not by the kunoichi around her, then by either his siblings or, if he was unlucky enough, his own father, the one who taught him the technique to begin with. But the underlying ninjutsu principle was exactly what he needed. It would require just a little bit of tweaking to be up to the task.

He spent a week modifying the Daisan no Me. He broke the shape of the eyeball, forcing it back into clumps of condensed sand. He didn't need the enhanced 360 degree vision that came with that form. Then he made the sand disperse a little. Desert village or not, floating clumps of condensed sand would still send warning signals to any ninja with some skill to their name, let alone the kunoichi around her who had all been trained for the task. He experimented with the nerve connections. Taking her strangely potent sensory ability into mind, he dropped the chakra amount put into the technique until it became a thin thread barely held together by his will.

The result was a technique that would be no good for any sort of reconnaissance requirements. It retained the massive range, but it could only focus on a single close proximity target at a time and if he didn't concentrate, then the visual quality transmitted through the link would be all but useless. Prolonged use also put a greater mental strain on him due to the focus required. In return however, it became an extension of himself. He could see and hear through it, and manipulate it to a greater extent. Its form had become a mist of dust particles, which was all but invisible unless the right light was put on it. And to top it off, the amount of chakra powering the entire thing was so faint it got lost in the ambient energy of the earth. It was a work of combined precision and his own inborn affinity for the desert element. Even his father, the creator of the original technique, would have trouble replicating something like this. Certainly his control of gold dust was impeccable, but the boy was born from the desert element itself. From the moment he exited his mother's womb, he had been cradled in sand. The difference in affinity between father and son was significant.

He felt strangely pleased as he contemplated this. Rare were the times the son could claim he surpassed the father in about anything.

After a few tests, he deemed the technique ready. Then, selecting a day, he set about field-testing it for the first time. In a training session when she came by to check up on him, he tagged her with the locator end of the technique, and later on that day, when he was ensconced in the safety of his own room, activated the seals. It blinked to life with a thought, the vision, the sound, the scene.

It worked. It worked perfectly. Sitting on his bed with one hand on his eye and the other on his ear, the boy watched her in the company of her kunoichi bodyguards as they made way from work to home. Not a one of them noticed anything was out of place, not her, and not the sensor specialist assigned to her protection. Happiness, born not from battle sparked through him. Excitement, from having successfully circumvented the sister's order. Pride, at having created a technique that bested even the most adept of sensors, even if it was built on top of what his father gave him and was probably good for nothing else. He sat up a bit straighter, allowed himself a smile as his specter followed her in his place.

For the next several weeks, the boy knew contentment. He still prefered to physically be in her company, to claim her attention for himself, to have her speak to him, smile at him. But following her as a specter as she went about her day had its perks. He learned little things about her, things that he hadn't noticed before or she simply hadn't done in his presence. He learned that she apparently had a love for Oden of all things, and that during lunch time she would occasionally steal away to the nearest garden or plantation where she sat alone in silent contemplation. He often wondered what she thought about during those moments. Old memories perhaps, of that faraway homeland she would never see again, of friends and comrades she would never reunite with? Could she have left her own family behind? Left someone important behind? Could she be thinking of them, even now? The thought rankled him deeply, for reasons he couldn't quite grasp. The idea that someone, somewhere, inhabiting a part of her mind even now…

But then he would immediately dispel such thoughts by sitting beside her in specter form. It didn't matter if she used to have a home somewhere else. Suna was her home now. She was happy here, he was sure of it. And perhaps it was not memories of the past that occupied her mind, but plans for the future. He wondered if he were in those plans, in her thoughts, the same way she was in his. Like that, he whiled the days away at her side. Gentle mornings, lazy afternoons, breezy sundays under the shade of the orchards, where she read him a new story from the big book she had been working on. The god of happiness, a monk once told him, is in the little things. If that was true, then perhaps the boy was the happiest boy in Suna at that moment, for he had not one, not two, but a thousand little things with which to entrap said god—a thousand such moments when he could feel nothing but a quiet, sated sort of contentment, when everything was right in the world, and he was exactly where he needed to be.

But of course, like all good things, it had to end.

.

.

.

It happened like this. He came home after a mission that took the better part of a month, winded and road-weary and, of course, thinking of her. His first thought was to go to her place immediately, to say: Hi, how are you doing? I'm fine. I did fine. I'm home now. What did you do when I was gone? The whole shebang, not because it was something he usually did, but because he knew it would put a smile on her face. It always did when he came back from missions that sent him away from the village, and the first thing he did was check in with her. Perhaps it reminded her of something, or someone. But by the time he reached the gate of the village, it was already half-past eight. Not that late, but when he actually got to her house, it would have been toeing the line between inconsiderate and outright improper. She worked hard. Her schedule started early in the day. She needed her rest and he should know better. So he discarded the thought, went home with his siblings, ate a late dinner. He would see her tomorrow, first thing in the morning. It was then that it came out. His mission was a two-person one, him and his brother, with their sister remaining home. She updated them on things happening in the village while they were gone, and that was when it came out that she had gotten sick. A rare virga that somehow became a surprise downpour. They had had several of those recently as more and more, the new biome around the village effected changes on the weather conditions, as well as what happened during the vote for war or peace two years ago. The Holy Rain, some people called it, the Bloody Rain, the rain that she called upon to flood the old streets of the village when she wanted to make a point to his father and the warmongers in the council. It was the start of a series of subtle but large scale changes to the entire meteorologic makeup of the region. So, they had rain in Suna now, occasionally. When it did come down, it always came down hard and always it was a surprise to a people so used to a country parched dry as… well… as a desert year-round.

"She was caught outside when it came down and came home wet. Got herself a mild case of the cold, so her voice has been a bit funny these last few days. You should bring her some cough candies the next time you see her," Temari informed him over her bowl of creamy potato soup before smoothly segueing to another topic.

She was sick? The thought niggled. He swallowed his dinner, steak with the mashed potatoes and asparagus, took a drink from his cup. It wasn't like she had never gotten sick before. She was attended to at all times by her own caretakers. One of the kunoichi who stayed by her side at all times was a medic. It wasn't like he could do anything even if he were to go there now. That would just be plain silly. And yet…

He finished up his meals, went to wash a day's worth of road dust off of him, then scampered off to his room where he locked the door in case Kankurou got in his head that they needed another session of brotherly bonding, whatever he meant by that. He climbed onto his bed, thought hard about what he was about to do.

By this time, he'd gotten used to the altered seals of his dust specter state. It had gotten easy, almost second nature. He'd never been suspected, never had sensors turning their heads around trying to look for that blink and you miss it tell-tale flash of a ninjutsu in use. His work on the daisan no me was good—thorough. Nevertheless, even with the possibility of being discovered hovering near zero and with him already following her unseen almost every day for the last few months, he'd never actually followed her home, never violated the sanctity of her house where she had openly welcomed him so many times before.

The boy knew he was bad at the social stuff. A childhood of being the unofficial murder baby of the village would do that to anyone, and that was on top of the child-of-the-reigning-Kazekage thing that got even Temari and Kankurou in a bind sometimes. People were afraid of him. Much less now than it was years ago, but still, his name elicited some reactions, his presence evoked emotions that were not entirely positive. Hard to learn how to talk to people—how to interact in a non-violent and non-threatening way—when a sizable number of the people he met couldn't wait to get away from him. But bad as he was, even he knew it wasn't kosher to just barge into another person's house unseen and uninvited, especially if that other person had done so much for him. If it weren't for her, he would still be that beastly child who thought thoughtless violence and senseless killing were the only way to prove that he was alive, that he existed.

And yet… something restless stirred in his stomach, nervous energy that made him want to pace and fidget. I'll just check on her for a bit, he told himself as he pushed back his reservation. Just to see if she's alright. He hadn't seen her in nearly a month, and it would just be a quick look, to make sure she was okay. It wasn't right, he knew, but he couldn't stop himself. So he flashed through the seals, placed one hand on his eyes and the other on his ear. With the slightest twinge of his chakra, the technique activated, and then… he saw her.

She was sitting, naked, in a marble tub big enough for two.

The boy's first thought was. I shouldn't have. His second thought was. Stop now. But he didn't. He was frozen where he sat, overwhelmed.

There were the sounds of music, of water sloshing in the tub, of faint murmurs, and the scents of vetiver and cedarwood in the steam, and something else crackled in the fireplace of the next room over. And she… she looked good, her skin wet and glistening under the diffused glow of bathroom light, a flush on her cheeks that either came from that cold Temari mentioned or the open bottle of peach sake by her side. Probably the sake, because her lips were stained red. She had put something in the water, something that painted a map of vibrant vortexes and glittering constellations on the surface. She sat half-submerged in there. That shimmering water framed her body, gilded her body like an artwork piece out of some museum, one depicting stars and galaxies being born from the body of a woman as tides of light and shoals of dust surrounded her.

But she wasn't alone. His father sat on the rim, watching her as she soaked her feet, sitting so close to her that even the specter form's narrow field of vision had no trouble picking him up.

Something twisted deep in the boy's stomach, pulled taut. A strange heat crawled behind his eyes while thoughts churned furiously in his head. His father? Here? His father? With her? These thoughts were strange, and inexplicably uncomfortable. It wasn't like he hadn't heard the occasional rumors surrounding the two of them. It wasn't like he never noticed how close they seemed to be at times. He wasn't stupid, nor was he blind. But, there was a disconnect. What seemed obvious to other more well-adjusted people simply didn't occur to him at all. He knew little of human bonding, and even less of attachment. He simply wasn't one to think much of idle gossip. But here, and now, with what he was seeing, with how close his father was sitting next to her, how relaxed he seemed, how unlike his usual self.

What were they to each other? Officially, Kage and subject, guardian and ward, even if she had long since come of age. Unofficially, master and student, and perhaps friends, because of all the things they had gone through together. The revival of the great motherland, the revolt, the purge, and the healing after. But there was nothing even vaguely like guardian and ward or master and student going on here. That wasn't how normal guardians looked at their wards. And students didn't smile at their masters in such a way, did they?

She was wearing a strange smile. He had never ever seen her smile like that to anyone before. Teasing and… inviting… somehow.

They were talking quietly between themselves, about something going on at work today. His father said something. It must have been nothing good because it put a frown on her face. She kicked up her leg, splashed the water. He dodged it with the slightest twist. He said something again, one eyebrow raised. It was a challenge, because immediately, she reached out, grabbed him by his shirt, and pulled him into the tub with her. Her hold was soft, flimsy. He should have been able to dodge it or break free of it, even if he was asleep or drugged to his gills. But he didn't. Instead, he let her pull him in, let himself fall into the water, full Kazekage regalia and all, minus the hat. He made a great big splash. He sent torrents of water over the rim and down to the floor. She laughed at him. Her laughter was rich and warm and it made the boy's stomach twist in strange pleasant, not pleasant ways.

She said—"My bathtub Kage"—as he wiped the water from his face. There was glitter on his temple, on his hands, on his drenched Kazekage robe. He looked ridiculous.

"I don't mind being Kage of this tub," he replied.

"There's exactly one resident in tub-land, TubKage-sama. I'm not sure how it measures up to one of the great five. You don't mind the demotion, do you?" she said again. She picked the suds out of his hair, shifted so as to allow him more space.

He sat up straight, cupped her chin with one hand.

"Just one is fine." He kissed her, long and deep, as his son gave a strangled cry, unseen and unheard in the background.

After a minute, she pulled back, gave him a look filled with deep need, and want, and adoration. A look the boy knew all too well. He'd worn it before, carried it before, deep in his heart. He just hadn't recognized what it was until now.

She drew him into her, their bodies intertwined, like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. And then when it was done, when they lay in the water, spent and basking in the afterglow, she held him tight, and whispered…

… Never let me go…

He kissed her on her temple, on her eyelids, on her wine-stained lips. With tenderness he reserved for no one else, he said...

… Not until the day I die…

It was then, and only then, that the boy disconnected the specter form. The vision faded away. The sound dimmed. The scents of the bathroom and of sex receded. He sat alone in his bed, trembling. A hot broth of realization, shock, humiliation, pain, jealousy, disgust, and the creeping tendrils of despair simmered in the pit of his stomach. He put his hands on his face. His skin felt like glass that was breaking with every tiny move he made. His heart whumped endlessly in his ribcage, and with every beat, it put yet another fracture on his breaking glass skin. And there, on his forehead, the scarlet letter he had carved into himself in remembrance, in defiance, in rebellion. It felt raw, as if he had not put it there years ago but only just now, hot and painful and bleeding.

The boy's uncle once said love was medicine, and perhaps that was true. But what was also true was the fact that some medicines were poisons, and though they might cure you, they could also kill you.

…...

Irony, that the one who taught him of love and self-forgiveness also taught him jealousy and how deep despair could run—that the one who picked up the pieces of him and glued him back together was also the one who broke him again, that the one whom he loved the most also hurt him the most.

…. …...

The thing about truth was, once he found it, learned of it, he could not put it back into the box and lock it away, could not pretend he had never known it. He tried to. He really did. For a short few days, he pretended as if nothing happened, that he went home from that long mission and went to sleep without ever thinking of her or checking up on her. But then morning came and he got up and cleaned himself and clothed himself and like a moth to a flame, pulled by the force of habit, he went to her. They ate breakfast together in her kitchen, talked to her kunoichi bodyguards, discussed what they would do for the day. And all that time all he could think was…

… Is my father in your bed right now? Or did he leave through the window of your bedroom before I came here? Did you wash and iron his clothes for him and dress him in the morning? Or did he leave spares in your closet, in between your skirts and your shirts?

Some of it must have shown on his face, because she looked concerned, asked him what was wrong. In his head, he screamed.

You kissed my father with wine in your mouth. You let him into you, let him ensconce himself in you.

But outside he said he was just tired from the long trip and here, have some cough drops he brought. She smiled at him, said thank you, told him what a thoughtful boy he was. And again in his mind he shouted.

Don't call me boy. Don't give me that smile like you give to little children. Give me the one that you gave my father. Call my name like you call my father.

But somewhere, deeper in his heart, a tiny part of him cried. Stop putting cracks in my make-believe world. It's a lie I know, but it's a pretty lie. So please let me have this if I can't have the real thing.

She looked worried at his silence, said perhaps they could take an easy day today, let him have some down time. They could go somewhere quiet and just enjoy each other's company. He had half a mind to reject her, to walk away, to break free, to tear into her heart and do to her what she did to him, but in his eyes, she shone, beautiful and terrible, not like the sun—no more—but like white lightning. She ran through him and left him charred, and spent, and ruined before he could even lay claim to adulthood.

I love you, he thought in his head, and felt the slightest bit of pressure let loose. Finally, he could put a name to the strange feeling he had carried in his heart all this time. But it doesn't matter anymore, does it?

At the back of the room, the chief of kunoichi looked at him. Oren, her name was. She wore a look of faint recognition and pity. He looked back at her for a brief moment, let loose his boiling anger and his resentment for a brief moment. You knew, didn't you? You knew and you didn't warn me. You let me fall. You let her poison me. I should kill you. I should kill you right now. Crush you until what was left of you would be lost in my sand.

But right at that moment, she took his hand and pulled him away, out the door to a new day, and like always, he could never resist her. The last of his childhood died this way, whimpering and alone, unmourned by none saved perhaps for the boy himself.

The first year was the toughest. He struggled with this new reality, with emotions he now could put a name to but could not declare out loud. Fourteen years old but he knew the hunger of a man grown. He tumbled, lost and alone. He fell. He hurt himself. No one ever taught him that love hurt like so. He was paralyzed, by fear, and pain, and humiliation and a shameful hunger he kept to himself.

He dreamt of her.

She walked before him in a green field, bare feet in the grass. She turned around as the sun crested the hills in the distance and smiled at him. He looked at her, at the sun caught in her raven hair. She gave him a smile like the one she gave to his father.

Come with me, Gaara, she said. The sound of his name coming from her mouth was enough to undo him, to make him throw away everything and follow her. Let's go watch the lilies and daisies bloom. We will sit under the shade of the orchards and I will give you a kiss like I gave your father.

But the moment he took her hand, she became a thousand dandelion blooms and disappeared in a tide of light. The sun greyed. The flowers rotted. The greenfield around them withered and died, and he was left all alone in the dead land, in the land that his father deemed too far, too useless, and too dangerous to allow her to go. The boy, the beast, shunned, forgotten.

.

.

.

He knew all the longing and the wanting but none of the taste itself. He dreamt of taking his place not behind but beside her. He dreamt of walking side by side, of holding her hands, of trading secrets in whispers. In his dreams, he built a world where he needed not shy away, where he did not fear, and longed for discovery, for this secrecy to disappear. He thought of drawing her into this secret world, of making a home there where he was not a boy but a man, in love, and beloved; where she was not she, but his woman, his one.

.

.

.

They were in the greenfield again, but this time around it was nighttime and he was walking before her. He turned and took her hand and drew her to him. He kissed her on the lips. It was as sweet as he imagined it to be. Venoms dripped from her mouth but he didn't mind. He would rather die young than live alone without her. He looked to the skies and said.

Kagome, Kagome, come with me to the stars where we can be with each other. We will grow flowers and build our lives there. I'll be the fox boy in your tales and you be my thunder girl. We will be playmates and lovers and share our secret worlds. You can kiss me and kill me slowly, but that's ok. Because everything I have, I have already given to you. And if you throw me away, that's fine too, because ever since I took your hand and let you lead me into your orchards I had already forfeited myself to you.

.

.

.

Sometimes, the hardest part was dealing with the anger. It simmered beneath everything else, beneath the resentment, the bitter jealousy, the pain, sometimes roiling and threatening to overcome him. The urge to slide back into the beastly child was strong. Sometimes all he wanted was to go back to a time when everything was simpler, when the anchors of his existence were violence and bloodshed. It would be easy, he thought, so easy, to end everything in an all-consuming blaze, to…

… sink a kunai deep into her heart, catch her as she fell, watch the life ebb in her eyes, see him become her entire world in the last few seconds of her life…

It would be easy, to end it all. He could do it, he knew. Her power was great, but her body was frail. And above all else, she trusted him implicitly.

And if he did it, once he did it, what was next? What came next after she fell silent and quiet in his arms?

The boy swam in a sea of dark fantasies, a shadow paradise he made for himself. The refuge of his terrible, monstrous self, away from the pain, away from the boiling anger, away from the disgust and self-loathing.

If he survived the wrath of his father and of all those who loved her, he would take her and go. He would go into the deep desert, into the heart of the deadland where not even father could go. He could go there on a passage made with his sand. They would go to a place as isolated as the stars in the skies of his dreams. And there, in the place where all was dead and gone and every cry in his tell-tale heart was quieted, at last, he would build her a castle made of sand, a tomb as large and deep as the great desert itself. He would make her a bed of crystal, where she would sleep undisturbed. He would gather the dew of of desert night and make her a crown of ice. Then he would lie down next to her, close his eyes, hold her hands, and slowly, ever so slowly, drift off to sleep, and never wake up again. They would be interred in the heart of the great desert, and be together forever.

Now and then, he would think of this plan, this dark dream. He loved the closure it offered, the promise of an end, the ease of it all. Once, he stood by her side as she slept under the trees in their garden, a kunai heavy in his hand and this dark dream in his heart.

Do it, something whispered in his ears. Do it, and set yourself free. Do it!

She wore a blue dress that day, with little yellow swirls sewn into the helm, and her long hair in a braid. He touched her hair with one hand, felt its cool, silky texture between his fingers. He thought, I could lose myself in you. I could lose myself in you forever, if only you'll just let me. With his other hand, he brought up the kunai, six inches of cold steel, and heavy as a mountain.

She opened her eyes then, saw him, and closed them just as soon. She slept unperturbed. He let the kunai go, let it fall from his hand like so much dead weight. He would rather kill himself first before he hurt her.

….

The day after his fifteenth birthday, his sister found him alone in the deadland three hours from the village. Without saying a word, she sat down next to him. She was always the shrewd one in their family, the one who understood things without being told the full story.

"Temari…" he said after half an hour of silence passed between them. "How… do you make someone love you?" He looked at her, and his desperation must have shown because she flinched from him. "You were taught… those classes, right? Back when we were kids. You know how, don't you? Won't you teach me, please?"

She fell silent for a minute, before finally said.

"That's not love, Gaara." She pat him on the back. "That's just a pretty lie. You can't make people love you. It's not that easy. If she doesn't love you, then she doesn't love you. You can't force it. I should know."

"Then… what do I do?"

"Let it go," she said. "Move on. This too shall pass."

He looked at her long and hard, then finally he said. "Okay…"

He didn't know if he could. But he could try.

He's sixteen. His best friend found out that he loved the woman who belonged to his father. Akatsuki came and took her while he nearly bled out on the other side of the village. They fought, nearly invaded another country, and kicked up a hornet's nest in almost every nation that cared, but they got her back. And now he's standing here, at the head of the crowd that is seeing his father off to the Kage Summit that will attempt to straighten out the knots that Akatsuki threw at them.

He is nearly as tall as his father now, and there they stand, man and son. Reining Kazekage and his heir apparent.

"You'll be fine," the father says, patting the son on his shoulder. "Look after the village for me."

It is more trust and more faith than he has ever shown to his youngest son. It is the fruit of a long, and difficult healing process between father and son. They have not gone through every wound between them yet, but they are getting there. This too is something that was started because of her.

He nods solemnly. He doesn't trust himself to say anything else. His father the titan, his father who she loves.

The Kazekage turns and with a gesture, they are off towards the road. The crowd roars. Some of them break off to follow. She lingers behind for a moment, her hand clutching the rein of a desert eagle the size of a horse. One of his father's summons, tasked with carrying her with him to the Summit.

"Hey," she says. "Did you want to tell me something? Sorry. Yesterday was… hectic."

"It's nothing," he replies, keeping a lid on everything that threatens to boil to the surface. "Just… look after father for me." It's the last thing he wants to tell her, but it is also the proper thing.

She brightens up. "I will," she says, and then smiles at him. "You take care of yourself too, Gaara. I'll be back soon, okay?"

There's something in her smile, something that twists and pierces, that kicks up all the hurt and all the anger in him. And he wonders, for a split second, if she smiles at him because it is him, or if she smiles at him because she sees the father in the son.

Don't look at me like that. I'm not your child.

It takes until he sees the flash of hurt and shock in her face for him to realize he has said that out loud, with all the venom and the bitter resentment that come with it.

"I… I'm sorry. I didn't mean to." She recoils as if stung. "I'll just… I'll just go." She gets on the eagle and they fly away.

He makes to follow her, to right the wrong he inflicted, to tell her that he never meant to hurt her. But his sister holds him back with one hand.

"Don't," says Temari. A frown mars her face. "It will pass. Let it pass."

It takes everything he has to stay. It takes everything he has to stand there and watch her figure fades into the distance, until eventually, even the crowd around them starts to disperse. His sister holds him by the hand, and slowly she starts to pull him back into the village.

"Let it go, Gaara. There's much to do."

"... Okay…" he mutters under his breath and let her pull him away. He throws one last look over his shoulder, in the direction where she flies away. If one day this passes and he truly lets her go, what will be left of him then? If one day this passes and he ceases to love her so, what will be left of them then?

He sends his wonders to the skies and buries his dreams in the earth. He burns the poetry he never writes for her in the dark of the night and swears to himself he will try to forget.

What is love without tragedy?

End Snippet

Chapter Text

This snippet is something I wrote a few years ago and was only briefly posted on ffnet before I took it down. 

The chronology of this snippet is in the planned Arc 2 of From the Garden of Gods, which takes place after the Konoha invasion incident and the resulting social fallout (March of the Dead, led by our dear Miko who is lost in a strange world). Arc 2 covers the complex social issues of Sand village in the aftermath now that people are aware the Miko's power is not just growing plants and stuff, the fallout of Kazekage Rasa and Hokage Sarutobi's failed assassination (yep, Sarutobi survives, but is maimed), the bridging and secret deal between Sand and Leaf, the emergence of the Bloody Maiden, Kagome's more active role in changing the village, as well as the start of the relationship between Kagome and Rasa being more or less official. 

This specific snippet takes place right after an anti-Miko faction tries and fails to assassinate Kagome... using a child assassin. It contains a very big reveal regarding what happened to Kagome and how she ended up in Naruto verse. Please consider carefully before you read, because it will absolutely spoil you. It is written from the perspective of a "bodyguard."  

Also, this chapter hasn't been beta-ed or proofread, so there are probably typos and small mistakes here and there.

Mouse sees the Wind fall

The walk back is quiet. Their Kazekage doesn’t speak, and the Miko too, is silent. Mouse and Eagle shadow them, with Diamondback hanging a ways away. There is a tension between them, something big and thorny and too complicated for either to broach the topic right now. Mouse sees Eagle sign with his hand from the corner of his eyes.

Calm before the storm?

Mouse has no idea. Despite all the ill omens he has been spewing regarding the unlikely and in poor taste relationship between their Kazekage and a girl half his age, the Miko is anything but predictable. And even in the worst case… well… despite that he doesn’t think their relationship will last, he doesn’t exactly wish for it to end in such… spectacular fashion either. Despite what he thinks about the Miko and her influence not only on their Kage but the village as a whole, there is no denying what she means to the village’s future and no denying the fact that a Kage in a happy relationship is far easier to work under than one that is not.

Think the missus is going to dump him? Eagle signs again. Hey, talk to me, Mousey. Aren’t you the guy who’s been saying this is going to end in tears? Now, it’s playing as you said it would, and I’m getting real anxious here. She’s so quiet. She’s rarely this quiet.    

Mouse thinks hard about it, about the implication of that relationship going up in a plume of fire, the fallout of that. An angry Kazekage is already hard enough, but an angry Miko? The last time she lost her temper–for a definition of lost anyhow–she incited a revolt. He thinks of all the people that depend on her now, the hundred thousands of them… no, the millions of them. Suddenly he doesn’t feel very good about having his forecasts be proven right anymore.

They reach the Kage building without incident and without a single word being exchanged between them. She comes into his office for next week’s schedule while her bodyguards stand outside, probably heedful of the coming ‘storm’ between their charges. The lucky bitches, thinks Mouse as he and Eagle slinks in the rafters and into the office itself. They get to flee in the face of the greatest peril of long-term bodyguarding missions–awkwardly witnessing their charge’s domestic troubles while desperately pretending that they were invisible. Mouse, Eagle, and Diamondback have no such luck however.

This is going to end in tears, Mouse says with his fingers. Nobody is going to walk out of this looking pretty, least of all us three stooges. He says again. I fucking told you so!

We heard you the first time, Mouse-san. Diamondback signals back as it settles into a shadowed alcove opposite of him. Repetition of the same claim does not make it factual.

Just as it says this line with a crooked pinky and thumb, the showdown begins. Their Kage wordlessly hands the paper schedule to his Miko. She turns to leave. But he stops her with a one-word question.

“Why?”

She turns around, looks at him.

“Why what?”

“Why did you come with me to see the widow? Why did you apologize?”

“You mean aside from the fact that her only son died because of me?” Her voice raises a little, and she spears him with a look. In the background, Mouse mourns his last hope of getting out of this without having to bear witness to a lover’s quarrel that promises to be spectacular in all the wrong ways.  

“I am the one who killed that child,” replies lord Kazekage. “You just sat there and watched.”

“So, you admit it. He’s a child.” There is a vicious triumph in her voice.

“He’s a soldier of the state.”

“A child soldier you mean.” she parries right back. “He was thirteen years old.”

Which means a whole lot less to ninja than to her, Mouse thinks. But it’s not like they haven’t seen this problem coming a mile away. The Miko is a consummate pacifist, despite living in a hidden village. While she understands the need to accept the law of her new home, she also has never had to confront the fact in such fashion.

Lord Kazekage pauses for a second, regards her with an intense look as if a stern teacher looking at a belligerent student.  

“We talked about this,” he says finally. Mouse hears the weight in his voice, an answer to her accusation. “But if you insist, yes, the boy is a child soldier. In fact, there are over thirty thousand child soldiers like him in this village, including my children.”

She flinches, as if just now remembering something distasteful. He’s not done however.

“That’s not all. Every single adult soldier in this village starts out as one of them, including I, and everyone else who came before me, and everyone else who will come after me. This is not unique to our village. This is true with every other hidden village out there. But you know what else is true?” He leans a little bit closer, as if making a point. “Not a one of them is forced into service. It is their choice to serve, just as it is your choice to stay and make a life here. You don’t get to make light of their choice just because it doesn’t agree with your world view.”

She looks down, as if chagrined. Perhaps it is different from her perspective, but from the perspective of a ninja, this whole thing didn’t have to happen. The Kazekage’s expression softens somewhat at the sight of her.

“You cannot ask an entire society to change the way they live just because it doesn’t fit your view on how the world should operate, Kagome. Perhaps it is different in your old home, but you chose us. You chose this village. Now, you must accept us, and make the best with what you have.”    

He’s handling this very well, Mouse thinks. In all of his service, he hasn’t ever heard lord Kazekage sounding like this, like he’s almost… gentle. But then again, the opponent is his woman. Anyhow, this uncharacteristic gentleness is proving effective. She has gone quiet now and seems to be contemplating something. Mouse holds out hope that this night isn’t going to become the domestic shit show he has feared. Just as he thinks this however, the Miko lets out a question that blows his hope to kingdom come.  

“How many people have you killed?”

She doesn’t even look up, just lances the air in the room with this chillingly delivered question. Eagle makes a sign beside Mouse. Mayday! Mayday! On his part, Mouse wonders if he should start sending out discreet distress signals to warn the outside team that shit is likely to go down soon. Lover’s quarrels among ninja have a way of blowing out of proportion. In this case, when one side is the literal strongest warrior of the village and the other side is a woman whose powers can casually bitchslap Bijus, little guys like Mouse best take precautions.  

Down below, lord Kazekage is momentarily frozen. But then it passes. He stands up straight. He’s not an especially tall man, but the Miko is petite, and so he towers over her. He spreads his hands in one motion, face dark with fury.

“Do you really want to hear the answer, my dear?” he says. Whatever warmth was in his voice has long since gone. “I will tell you what you don’t want to hear. You have been sharing your bed with a killer.”

She lets out a quiet gasp. Her right hand goes up to grip her left arm as if she is trying to steady herself.

“But you already know this. That day, I told you no, that this wouldn’t work, but you barged your way into my bed and into my life. You knew who I was then. You knew what I did. But you still asked for it, for this…”

He cups her chin with one hand, forces her to look at him.

“Do you regret this now? Do you condemn me now?”

There is a moment of breathless silence, the air choked with tension. Then, she puts her hands on his and pulls it away. Holding his eyes, she says.

“Seventeen million souls died by my hands.”

At that moment, the office is so quiet one could hear a pin drop. Mouse picks his jaws off the ground, turns to Eagle and signs.

What?

Because he needs to check whether he has heard that correctly or if by some freak chances he has been put under a genjutsu without even noticing it. Eagle looks back at him, just as askance. Across from them, Diamondback is still as a statue. Down below, an impossible conversation is playing out.

“…Probably” The Miko adds as an afterthought.

“Probably?” Lord Kazekage doesn’t even bother to hide the surprise from his voice… or his face.

“There were around seventeen million people… humans… on the island nation where I came from. When I was done, there was not a single person left alive. That island nation was separated from other countries by great seas that my power couldn’t reach through without some time so… probably.”

She looks out the window at the skies outside. It has turned dark then, with distant stars dotting the great black expanse. She turns back to him. There is a sadness in her eyes, a weariness that seems at odd with the youth of her face.   

“If there is a killer in the bed we share, then it isn’t you. So, no, I don’t condemn you. With what I did, I have no right to judge anyone, least of all the people who took me in when I had nothing.”

...

Lord Kazekage sits down in the chair of his office, momentarily stunned into speechlessness. He looks at her long and hard, a young woman in her early twenties who clearly does not have much experience with true war battlefields and who is a consummate pacifist by both words and actions. For someone so used to seeing fierce warrior men and women, she looks soft, frail. Mouse can see the questions clear as day churning in his head.

Why? How?

Seventeen million is a lot. Not even the casualty of all three great world wars combined even compare to that number. Seventeen million is…

…The total population of Kaze no Kuni and Hi no Kuni combined, says Diamondback with a few curt signs.  

It seems the Miko guesses the same for she smiles a sad smile, sits down in a chair next to him and tells him her story for the first time.

“You once guessed that my power was a force of nature. It is more than that. It is something that grows the more it is fed, the more I use it. But I didn’t know this back then. You have to understand. I had lived most of my life in peace. I never had to fight for anything, until suddenly I had to fight for everything.”

She pauses for a moment then, gathering her thoughts.

“There was an old woman, an old Miko who taught me the ropes in the beginning. She had good eyes and she saw what I had. She told me the same thing you did, that I needed to get a grip on this power, that it would be key to ending the conflict. But I didn’t really listen to her. I had been a normal girl for most of my life then. I didn’t have any reason to believe I was that special, or that I had the power to decide anything like that. I was not alone in that fight, nor the leader of that group. I had friends that fought with me, that stood before me in the battlefield. Besides which, I wanted a normal life. I wanted to go to college, to marry and settle down, and live happily… as an ordinary woman. Learning the Miko arts, learning how to fight demons, doing it every day for life… it all seemed so… out there. And if I did it, if I committed to being a Miko, it would be like I have given up on my dream of living a normal, happy life. So… I… didn’t really give it my all. I learned a bit, and then I mostly stayed in the sidelines. I did my part but…”

She fell quiet for a second, lost in thoughts.

“Then it got bad. My friends fell, one by one. Until it was just me… and the enemy.” Mouse has never heard such hatred and dread from the Miko before. “… I panicked. For the first time in my life I called upon the full breadth of my power. Perhaps if I had been in a better state of mind I might have been able to control it, but I wasn’t. I was terrified, and in despair. All the people I loved, gone. The man I loved and trusted with all my heart, gone. All of my faith and my hope, gone. I was all alone in a hellish realm, trapped in the illusions my enemy wove for me.”

Her hand comes up to her chest where her heart was. She closes her eyes.

“… In an instant, I ripped out the souls of every single living being on that island, humans and demons. My power has no true counter you see, not when it is at its strongest. But that war I was in had been five hundred years in the making. My enemy, he knew this power well. The old Miko told me that he feared it above all else, but because he feared it so, he understood it better than anyone else. Since the day I was born, he had been preparing himself. In that very same instant, as I was lost amidst the screams of a thousand innocent souls I hadn’t meant to hurt, he descended upon me. He trapped me in my own mind, wove a dream for me so sweet that I couldn’t immediately break free. Then he took control of my body, and rode it on a bloody rampage across the lands.”

She falls quiet once more. The room is so silent they can hear the sound of her trembling breath. When she finally opens her eyes, Mouse has to remind himself that he’s looking at a young woman who has just recently passed her 20th years. In that moment, she seems as old as the great desert itself, old and worn and brittle as glass.

“… I didn’t wake up until months after, when someone risked death to break the enemy’s grip on me. I came to in a dead world, everything burnt to the ground, every souls ripped apart and eaten alive by the enemy, and I… I was drenched in the blood of my own people, and wearing armors made from their bones.”

She looks down at her hands, for a moment looking like she’s seeing something else in their place.

“We fought,” she continues. Her voice has gone quiet, as if it has taken everything she has to tell that first part. “Neck and neck, for seven days and seven nights. With the help of the man who broke me free, I won over the enemy. I ripped apart his heart, shattered his soul into a million pieces, and then I devoured every last bit of him to prevent him from ever rising again. And just like that… it was over. A war five hundred years in the making and involving more powerful demons and priests than you will ever see in a single lifetime. A war that had taken everything I had and destroyed a nation. Over, in a matter of days… but though I won, there was nothing left for me.”

Silence again, for a full five minutes this time. Lord Kazekage reaches over and holds her hand in a rare gesture of empathy. She looks at their conjoined hands, looks at him, smiles. It is a weary, exhausted smile, but it does not lack for a certain sense of sweetness. Sweetness that is reserved for lord Kazekage alone it seems.  

“And then you came here?” he asks. She shakes her head.

“I begged for death,” she says. “I had nothing left to live for. My family were still alive in a different country, but I knew then that I could never go home again, not after what I did. So, I begged for death. The man who broke me free was there still, dying, but he had the strength to end me. The elder half brother of the man I loved. A powerful great demon. He had a sword that could tear open doorways into other worlds. He used it to open rifts straight into the heart of hell where he sent his enemies. He could also use it to resurrect the dead, but he didn’t do it nearly as often as he could. The bastard.”

She laughs. It’s a tired, jaded laugh filled with nostalgia and old regrets. It is a laugh that sounds too old to have come from one as young as her. “Had circumstances been different, I think I would have called him brother in law. He would have hated it too, for a mere human to call him so.”

She drew in a long breath.

“So I got on my knees in front of him and begged for death. I told him this power I bore was a terrible burden no mortal should bear. I told him that it would be a mercy and if we ever met in some other life, that I would be forever indebted to him.” She pauses for a second. “But he refused me. He called me a liar and fraud. He accused me of having forsaken the oath I made to the Miko that came before me, to Midoriko, and to Kikyo.”

Mouse glances at Diamondback. The representative of the research branch is scribbling away furiously on its notepad. Rare are the times the Miko shares anything on her power, on her old home, on the people of her past. And here she is, spilling as if a dam has been broken. The name Midoriko is something he has read once before from her dossier. Supposedly she was the most powerful Miko and likely to be mother to the one Miko they have in their village. The other name he knows nothing of, but for it to be mentioned in the same breath as Midoriko, it must be of equal importance. Down below the conversation continues.

“Pillars hold things up, and salt keeps things clean,” she speaks as if reciting an old oath. “But it’s a poor exchange for losing yourself. People go back, but they don’t survive, because two realities are claiming them at the same time.” She looks at lord Kazekage. Her gaze is as deep and unfathomable as the great abyss. It is not the look of a young woman barely past her twenty-one year, but one belonging to some other unknown creature from a shadowed world. “In the endless shadow of that nightmare, before Sesshomaru came to break me from the enemy’s hold, two hands reached for me. Midoriko and Kikyo. They made me promise to them that regardless of how things turn out, that I would carry on living, would carry on their legacy as the Miko of the Shikon no Tama. I begged him for death but he called me a liar and told me he had no need to humor the likes of me. With his last strength, he opened a rift between worlds and threw me inside. When I woke up, I was in the desert.”

Her voice breaks a little near the end, just before she stops completely. Something wells from her eyes. Not tears, but a silent, dark despair that no words can describe. And beneath that despair—Mouse breaks out in cold sweat—is madness. Black and lurking like oil at the bottom of a dry well. He sees then that though her body is whole and largely unscarred, she has nevertheless been horrifically brutalized by this ordeal; sees then that she has been kept quiet by shame, by guilt, by pain; that though three years have passed, little has truly healed. And now, the wound opens to show the rotted blood and fetid flesh, opens to show that something else—something more dreadful and abominable than even the enemy that was devoured by her, has grown in its place.

For a single feverish moment, Mouse fears that this madness would subsume her, that from her flesh a monster would grow and feast upon the souls of all those who walk this earth. But then it passes. She leans back in the chair and suddenly she seems shrunken: a slender young woman, clad in simple white, with tired blue eyes that are steeped in sorrow.

“I said it.” The words gush from her mouth like blood from a wound. “Finally… I said it. I have… I have never ever said this to anyone before… not even out loud to myself. I never thought I…never thought I would…” She brings one hand to her lips. Though her eyes are dry, a single sob wracked her slender frame and breaks free from her mouth.

She looks at the Lord Kazekage. She is waiting for his response, waiting for his judgement. He is her lover and her protector. He is also the avowed leader of his people and sworn upholder of the law. And she has just confessed to possibly the most horrific crime in recorded ninja history. It might not have been committed in Sunagakure, but that does not change the possibility of a repeat in the future. Beyond even the Biju, she is without a doubt the single greatest threat to Sunagakure’s existence. If she were to lose control again…  

She waits with bated breath, the tension coiled tight and hot in her ribcage. Half of her is fear and sadness, and the other half a self-flagellating eagerness. Would he cut her from him? Would he throw her out? She is the beacon of hope for a lot of people in Sunagakure, but in truth she may be the single greatest existential threat their village has ever faced. It is the duty of the reigning Kazekage to deal with such threats as quickly and decisively as possible.

He sits there in his big chair beside a desk filled with papers and unsigned documents, still like a statue. It is only Mouse’s many years of service as a shadow that allow him to parse the minutiae of lord Kazekage’s reactions. Beyond that stillness is the tightness of his shoulders, how his left hand is balled into a fist and his right hand strains to hold back the nervous tic he has whenever he is agitated. If he had a kunai in his hand right now, Mouse is more than sure he would have started twirling it round and round without even realizing it. He is trying to make it seem like it doesn’t affect him that much but in truth it does. Beyond the carefully blank look of his eyes flit recognition and pity, but curiously no fear, and no anger.

Eventually, the stillness breaks. He turns to stare at the ceiling above him, draws in one big breath, turns back to her. Mouse sees the tension bleeding out from him, some weighty choice having been made. He seems almost sad in that moment. It makes for a strange expression on the face of the usually fierce Fourth Kazekage.

“Well…” he says as if he’s discussing the weather. “We are going to have to adjust your training. Less exercise, more meditation. And we need to bring in a genjutsu specialist and probably someone similar to the Yamanaka to see if you still have that vulnerability to mental assaults. If no, good. If yes, there are measures we can take.”

Now it is Mouse’s turn to still with shock on the rafters. Measures? We?… She just admitted to murdering seventeen million people because she could not control her own power! He turns to the side to see if he’s alone in his shock. He isn’t. Diamondback crouches rigid in the corner, fingers and pen frozen, while Eagle merely looks back at Mouse, his head shaking imperceptibly. And yet the Miko below does not look surprised in the slightest. On the contrary, she looks as if she has been expecting this.  

“…Are you sure?” There’s an odd timbre to her voice. She says the words slowly, as if by lingering she might offer him the time to rethink and retract what he has just said. But he does no such thing.  

“Why wouldn’t I be?”

She stares at him. “Even by your laws, I am a mass murderer.”

“And by your laws, I am a war criminal,” he replies with a shrug. “Are we going to compare our mistakes and see which one of us is worse? Because I am sure I can match your quality with my quantity.”

She doesn’t answer him, merely looks away. He sighs, loud and audible, as if he has expected this.

“Or would you rather I tear you apart with words?” he asks. “Tell you what a monster you are? Would that be more to your liking? To be flogged for crimes none but you remember? But what point would that make? That subjectively, we are both monsters? That objectively we are humans, and are bound to mistakes like all humans do? But because we were born with the burden of extraordinary powers, that our mistakes are so much more extraordinary compared to those of others?”  

She turns around at that and stares at him. Her eyes are dry like drift glass, and they seem to see into him, and then through him altogether. She wears a strange expression on her face, a rictus of intermingled gratitude and some vague, aimless anger. Eventually, it fades into a sad smile.  

“This is so like you,” she says faintly. A hint of wistfulness clings to her voice. “I tell you I murdered seventeen million people, and you say we should adjust my training. I tell you that I am burdened by a world-rending power that has no true counter, that I’m a ticking time bomb waiting to go off and you say there are measures we can take. As if there are measures to deal with what I can… what I did. Do you know how weird you sound to me?” Despite the wording of her question, her words are undeniably infused with an exasperated fondness.  

He blinks, cocks one eyebrow. “I’m the weird one?” He parries right back. “Shouldn’t I be the one to say that? For as long as I have known you, you would cry for the pain of complete strangers, for people you have never known, for sinners and innocents both, but for yourself, you would not even shed a tear. I would say you are a glutton for punishment. And you tell me I’m the weird one? You cried for me…” He pauses. There is a look of faint surprise, as if he himself is caught off guard by the secret he has just confessed. But then it passes, as if it does not merit more than a single thought. He looks down for a second this time. “…Knowing what I did.” Then backed up. “But not for you. Do you truly think so little of yourself? Put so little value in yourself?” Another pause, and slower this time, with quiet words pregnant with a sincerity that seems ill-fitting in their usually ruthless Kazekage, he says. “Do you not know that you are precious to me?”

Now it is she who is stunned into near speechlessness, her eyes wide and mouth parted. Mouse doesn’t blame her for that reaction. For someone like lord Kazekage, that is probably as close to a declaration of love as it’s ever going to get. In front of Mouse, Eagle makes a warped hand signal that roughly translates to either ‘awww…’ or ‘aewwhhh…’

She sits like that for a full minute, silent. She looks down and for the first time, Mouse sees wetness in her red-rimmed eyes.

“Rasa…” she says, and somehow imbues that single word with so much weight. He wipes the wetness from her eyes with one hand.

“This is no longer about that boy, isn’t it? It couldn’t have been easy telling me the things that happened to you, the things that you did. But that’s not even the main point, isn’t it? What are you trying to tell me, my dear? What brought this on?” An almost imperceptible shiver runs through her. Lord Kazekage must have picked up on it, because immediately he states as if to reassure her.

“I promise you, whatever deep, dark secrets you have left, chances are I have seen or heard of worse, and I am not walking out on this, not until we lay to rest every bone of your past.”

She stills as she hears this. The expression on her face grows hard and cold and sad for a split second, before it thaws, softens as she studies him and sees nothing but honesty. She draws back a little and starts with a simple statement.

“My power…. It’s growing.”

A power that can wipe out a continental population in its infancy, is now still growing. Mouse thinks to himself. It says something about her that he is more concerned about the way she speaks of her power as if it is an entity separated from herself rather than the actual content of her declaration.

She allows the Lord Kazekage a moment to think about this statement before forging on.

“My enemy…I have no words to describe him to you. His nature or… what he could do. Remember that one guy, that soul eater, who tried to kill you and failed? And you tried to kill him in retaliation and you did kill him but somehow he never stayed dead? Somehow he just keeps jumping from one body to another, like… a snake… shedding its skin, but the things he sheds is not skin but bodies?”

“Orochimaru.” There is frustration in the Lord Kazekage’s voice… and not a small amount of grudging respect. In their world, strength begets respect, regardless of the atrocities committed. That the disgraced Sanin of Konoha has committed an act of war against Sunagakure does not change the fact that he is one among the strongest warriors of their world.

A tiny smile appears briefly on her face as she savors his frustration, the parts of him that aren’t the unfeeling, implacable leader of a village of trained soldiers. But it disappears in the blink of an eye, chased away by thoughts of her once enemy. She presses on.

“Magatsuhi…” There is something in her voice as finally, she puts a name to this great enemy. Some dark emotion too complex and contrary for Mouse to nail down. Not entirely fear, perhaps some hate, a pinch of revulsion, a hint of sadness, and something more, something else. An unnamed something that lies at the crux of it all, in between hate, revulsion, sadness, fear. “… is similar… I suppose. The way a shark is to a goldfish.”

Lord Kazekage raises an eyebrow at that comparison. There are not that many individuals in their world who can stand on the same level as Orochimaru. When one takes into account the disgraced Sannin’s vast knowledge and genius as a Ninjutsu researcher and inventor, there are even fewer such individuals. To have him be the little fish in her comparison. She must know Lord Kazekage’s silent question. She knows him too well to not have seen it, but she doesn’t even pause, doesn’t second guess herself, doesn’t backtrack and rephrase her statement. Instead, she forges on.

“He was born… partly from humans, from our darkest parts, from our malice and our hatred and our thirst for violence, but he never was one of us. He was… an entity far beyond your tailed beasts, powerful beyond compare, cunning, ruthlessly determined, and possessing a patience that comes with a lifespan measured in centuries. He was all but unkillable even to Midoriko, the most powerful of us.”

“Even when it appeared that he was crippled and sealed away for good, he found ways to slip through the bars of his prison, even if it took him hundreds of years, even if he had to borrow the hands of creatures so much lesser than him. He rose, again and again, in different forms and under different names to visit maladies on the humans he despised. He was a disease, a mockery of humans. In some places, people revered him as a dark god, a devourer of the sun. As eternal as he was dreadful, immovable, unchangeable, a shadow that awaited the absence of light. I have battled divine spirits less powerful than him. I… the only reason I could even stand against him is because of a quirk in our power’s interactions. Because from the day I was born, he held a part of me, and I held a part of him, and so it was I alone that could truly hurt him.”

Well, that didn’t sound ominous at all, signs Eagle. For once, Mouse finds himself agreeing. Mouse’s imagination, a pool of combined thoughts and subconsciousness from the seven hosts that make up his gestalt sapience, draws an ugly picture from this description. Something more powerful than a tailed beast, equipped with the mind of the snake Sannin and the spite and malice of the most craven members of their shadowed world. A worrisome enemy indeed, if what she says is true. Mouse has no reason to doubt the Miko, but bias gets the better of even the most logical humans.

She pauses, draws a long breath. The act of speaking of things held in secret for so long tires her more than she thought.

“How did you kill him?” asks Lord Kazekage.

She smiles in response. It is not a nice smile, but one filled with bitterness.

“I didn’t,” she says, then goes on to explain. “In the aftermath of our battle, I broke his heart and shattered his soul into a million pieces. But even then, I had doubts. How do you kill a shadow? How do you wipe out the malice in the hearts of men? You may spend your entire life trying to pursue a futile cause. He was something that we weren’t entirely sure could truly die. He was a child of humans, born from the dredges of our hearts. Our violence and malice nurtured him. If there was even a shard of his soul left in a world filled with filth and darkness to nurture it, then, there was a chance, a microscopic chance that he would one day rise again. I knew this. I thought of it, even as I fought him in those seven days and seven nights. What is death to a creature like him? I could harm him, hurt him, but he needed no air to breath, no light to see, no grounds to stand on. He did not even need a physical body. He could feel pain, but that would only feed his hatred of humans. To truly end him, I… I did something unthinkable.”

Uh oh… thinks Mouse, already seeing where this is going and not liking it one bit. At once he recalls what she has said she did earlier. He thought it a figure of speech, but it seems it is not.

“Once the dust settled and I made sure that nothing remained of Magatsuhi’s physical shell, I scooped up his broken soul, and devoured every last piece of him.”

She pauses once more, leans back into her chair, turns her eyes skyward—“How do you kill an unkillable entity?” she repeats the question to the silent chamber. “It’s simple. You infect him. You corrupt him from within. He drew strength from the purity of his purpose. So… I… infected him… with myself.”—and then back at Lord Kazekage.

“Us humans are inherently flawed. Though we seek purity of heart and of purpose, in truth, we are tainted with life. We know love and loss, sorrow and joy. We are easily swayed by doubts, regrets, distractions, temptations. Magatsuhi didn’t know any of this. He was like a child in that regard. I wielded my humanity against him. I cut him with my human joy and sorrow. I crushed him with my human doubt and regrets. I corrupted him. My humanity became his death.”

She stops there, looking out the window behind the Lord Kazekage. The sun has set over the horizon of the village. She watches the last light stretch in a single fiery line across the open vista. In the distance, the sounds of great bells ringing, reverberating through walls and stones, white smoke rising from red brick chimneys. In the air are the scents of spices and bread fresh from the ovens. A symphony of life arises from the village ground. It is autumn, the third autumn Sunagakure has ever witnessed. She sees red leaves floating in the wind. A gentle breeze ruffles the papers on his desk.  

In the rafters, Mouse fidgets with nervous anxiety. He doesn’t know what to think about all this. Souls, demons, the human heart wielded like a weapon against an entity beyond even the tailed beasts. They all sound like nonsense to him, but the Miko’s power is something very palpable. He doesn’t know what to think. It is almost like the Miko’s old world does not function by the same metaphysical rules as their world. He cannot even begin to imagine what that world is like, where souls are weapons unto themselves and young women like the Miko can send monsters like the Biju packing with the barest efforts.

She’s a Jinchuriki! Eagle signs, which then prompts Diamondback to look over to its comrade in what is likely annoyance.

Oversimplification. It states with a single, curt gesture. The Miko is entity far more complex. Different metaphysic system. Different methodology. Different starting parameters and outcomes.

Tomato tomahto, replies Eagle. She has got a thing in her and it’s a dangerous thing. She’s a Jinchuriki, same as Lord Gaara. No wonder she has a soft spot for him.

Mouse ignores his bickering comrades in favor of carefully observing the happening going on below him. Despite the disturbing connotations of the Miko’s statement, Lord Kazekage appears remarkably calm. Unlike previously when she told him of her seventeen million people body count, this time, he doesn’t even bat an eyelash. In contrast, he looks as though he’s expected this and appears deep in thoughts.  

After about a minute or so, the Miko makes to say something, but he holds out a hand in a stopping gesture. He stands up, and walks to the side of his large desk, takes out a hip flask and two brass cups in a drawer, pours himself a cup, pours her a cup. He hands one to her. The liquid inside is a glossy rose gold color and carries a faintly sweet scent. Something to calm her frayed nerves. Something with which to soothe her parched throat. She has been doing a lot of the talking and it is obvious that she will be doing more momentarily. He sits down, drinks from his own cup, and gives her a look as if to say ‘go on’.  

She frowns at him, but eventually brings the cup up for a sip. The sip turns into a long gulp, and then before long, her cup is empty. She looks at it, then back at him. The mar on her brows goes away. A wan smile blooms on her face. It is pregnant with a tenderness that makes Mouse want to sneak out of the room and leave them be.

“Koshue?”

He nods. ”Six years old. That wine’s been in my drawer longer than you have been around here. You shouldn’t drink so fast. Good wine is to be savored. Besides which, I don’t normally share.”

She puts the empty cup on his desk. “When I first came here, I wasn’t even at drinking age yet.” Her voice turns a little accusatory. “You taught me all the vices of adulthood.”

“Would you rather learn them from someone else?” he parries right back. Setting the flask aside, he makes a vague gesture pointing at her.

“So… this Magatsuhi… you talk of him in past tense, but you don’t act like he’s already behind you. Is he in there?” There is the barest stress on the last word of this question. Pointed intention.

“A piece of him. A vestige,” she says simply.

“Should I worry?”

She takes a moment to think things through. “No,” she says finally. Laying a hand on her heart, she explains. “We are bound, he and I, in ways that you can’t comprehend. This is not a seal like the one you used on Gaara… nor anything anyone in this world can hope to replicate. He’s no Biju waiting for my lapse of control to escape and wreak havoc upon our village. He’s a part of me now, and we… we are never to be separated.”

She takes another moment before continuing on, addressing concerns yet unvoiced.

“He’s a shadow of himself, a speck, a shard. It’s not even coherent… or sentient for that matter. Even when he was whole and at the peak of his strength and I was younger, I was still his equal in power. I suppose… if it had a few millennia, it might grow into something that could actually threaten me, but… “

She looks down at her hand, at her unmarred palm, an expression on her face like she’s seeing something that used to be there.

“… But I’m not an eternal thing like him. I’m only human you see. I don’t live that long. When I die, I will take the last shard of Magatsuhi with me to the grave.”

Immediately, an image came forth from the shared well that serves as Mouse’s repository of memories—an event not that was long ago witnessed by a host of Mouse’s consciousness. The Miko, looking slightly younger than she is now and holding onto an unconscious Jinchuuriki, stood beside the Lord Kazekage in the council chamber. She extended a hand and told him to cut her open. Blood welled from the wound in her palm, ran down her bare, pale arm, dropped down onto the floor. It made a sound like breaking glass. In that memory, Mouse hears her voice crisp and clear.

I am made of flesh. If you cut me, I will bleed like everyone else.

Back then, this was said to reassure the anxious council members in the wake of her swift defeat of the Shukaku—something not even Lord Kazekage could do, at least not with such contemptuous ease—but Mouse sees now that the meaning of this statement runs far deeper than any sitting in that room could ever imagine.  

There’s a brief spell of silence, one broken when Lord Kazekage speaks next.

“And this thing about your power growing?”

She doesn’t answer. Not with mere words anyhow. Instead, she turns to the window behind him. She doesn’t do anything, doesn’t gesture with her hands nor frown in concentration. She gives no sign that she’s doing anything at all, anything beyond sitting quiet and motionless in her chair and looking at the skies above the village. Nevertheless, something happens. Something twists in the empty space between her and the skies. Something vast and heavy and infinitely beyond mortal comprehension. At once, the clouds darken. The skies become overcast. A shadow overtakes the setting sun. Bolts of lightning streak the suddenly overcast skies. A rumble of thunder that shakes the cups and rattles the papers on Lord Kazekage’s desk. And then, it rains.

A thick, gray curtain poured over the village. A torrential downpour the likes of which Mouse has only heard about in some far off land where the skies cried three hundred and sixty-five days out of a year.  

“The last gift from my dearest enemy I suppose. Or a curse… This used to be difficult,” she says, her voice somehow still clear and audible above the sound of the rain. “The first time I did this, it took everything. But now…”

As suddenly as it started, the rain peters to a stop. Some invisible pressure leaves the room.

“Now it’s not.”

Lord Kazekage regards the Miko then the skies with pondering slowness. “Impressive,” he says finally, with a casualness that is more fitting for a conversation regarding the weather than phenomenal feats of power. “But what does this have to do with the boy… and the mother? What is the point of all this? You didn’t just tell me you house the fragment of an eldritch abomination for nothing, did you?”

His questions jolt Mouse’s thoughts. That’s right. All of this talk of demons beyond even the Biju and world-rending power, all these secrets unveiled, but she has yet to answer the one question that started this all. Why?

Why did she ask to see the widow? Out of a sense of responsibility? Of guilt?

No.

There’s something else here. Something more. She’s waffling, dragging her feet. She is a child hesitating to confess to some naughty deeds.  

In his thoughts, Mouse goes over the event that precipitates this talk between Miko and Lord Kazekage. An attempt on the Miko’s life. Not the first one, there have been many more before that, ever since she made her position clear to the council and the village at large. But the first that she knows of. And the hands that delivered that attempt, a child’s hand. The move is well calculated. The dissidents in the shadow well knew whether it succeeded or not, they would still have struck a blow against someone they viewed as an existential threat to the village.  

Mouse peers into the Miko’s face down below. A lovely face that would not look out of place in Wind’s royal court, young in features, but her eyes are old. Something passes through in her expression, and she says.

“Because I needed to see… that they were real, as real as you and I. I needed… to stop pretending that there weren’t consequences to my actions, to my existence. And you…need to know…”

She withdraws something from the pocket of her dress, presents it to him. A bone pendant, speckled with blood. The child’s missing pendant it seems, the one the widow has been asking about, her gift to her son on the day of his graduation from the academy. The Lord Kazekage frowns, but she offers no more explanation.

“You have been hiding things from me,” she says softly. Despite the statement, there’s no hint of accusation in her voice. “What do they call me when your enforcers aren’t around to make sure they are nice and quiet?The Calamity? Bloody Maiden? She who walks on the bones of children to preach peace to a mercenary village? So many names for only one person. I know them all. I’ve heard them all.”

He freezes, face hardened in the blink of an eye. She’s not supposed to know that, any of that. That was an explicit order to all those who are allowed to interact with her. For her to know means that someone somewhere went against an order from the Kage. In other times, perhaps this could be overlooked. But in this time when ideological struggle threatens to tear their people apart? She smiles again in the face of his suspicion.

“Your people are well-trained. None of them tattles. But I don’t see the world the same way you do. People who are dead to you…”

Oh…

“… aren’t dead to me. And the dead don’t need to obey the Kage’s orders, do they?”

Lord Kazekage takes the pendant from her. He looks at it for a brief moment. Has she been keeping this since the day of the failed attempt?

“So now you know,” he says finally. “But does it change anything? To know that you aren’t loved by everyone in this village, that someone even now is plotting your death, that people died and will keep dying because of your actions… or your inactions. Now that you know, has your dream changed? Will you stop waking up tomorrow and go to work on your crusade? Has anything changed at all?” He looks at her long and hard. “No. Nothing has changed. It doesn’t matter that the world itself is against you. It doesn’t matter that everyone else tells you, you are crazy for even trying. You aren’t someone who will let that stop you from doing what you believe in.”  

She shakes her head in response.

“Context changes everything. And you… still don’t comprehend what I can do.” She pauses once, looks out the window.

“I feel them,” she says. “Their thoughts are thorns, and they think of me always. They have plans, and they know now that they can hurt me… even when you protect me, even when you shield me from the consequences of my own actions. If I stop holding back,” Her voice grows quiet, heavy, as if the thought of it alone is difficult to conceive. “… I can just reach out and… “

She stops there, unable to continue until Lord Kazekage prods her.

“And… what? You can just reach out and do… what?”

She doesn’t say a word for a full minute. When she finally does, it is with a quiet, almost muted voice.

“I can make it stop.” She looks at the bone pendant in Lord Kazekage’s hand. “I can make them stop. I won’t even need to step a foot outside of this room. Their minds are like clay. I can touch them, change them, and they won’t resist at all. Not like you.” Then up at him.

That moment, it feels as though every drop of Mouse’s blood curdles in his veins. He thinks of what she implies, the consequences. The many rationalist personalities that make up Mouse’s gestalt consciousness scream in protest. This is insanity. She is talking of something so far above what they have seen thus far in this world that it bothers on being surreal. If this weren’t the Miko, he might have thought her a liar. But the more cynical personalities in him call for caution. This is the Miko. This is a power that managed to uproot seventeen million souls in the surge of its first awakening. Nothing is ever simple with her.

“I can… change this world… with a thought,” she whispers and in her eyes, it seems like something finally breaks. Her words, soft and quiet as they are, rebound in the chamber.

“No more violence. No more war. No more senseless death. No more child soldiers being given an illusion of a choice and forced to fight in the place of adults. No more little boy assassins like the one that died because of me and we will never have to face another grieving mother like we had to today. This world… “

Her voice breaks as something spills forth from beneath her usually moderate veneer. Anger, frustration, a cutting fierceness that she seems to display only in the face of Lord Kazekage…. And beneath even that…. teeth, and claws, and thorns, and eyes that looked up from the depth of the abyss.  

“… is wrong.”

Something ripples through the air. A quiet scream tears through space as everything visible and not seem to warp. Something stretches. Something tears. The fabric of spacetime is bent and twisted to its very limits. Something vast and terrible is trying to come through to their end of reality, beckoned by the sound of her voice and the black fury in that one word of hers, and the sheer weight of its presence is pressing down on Mouse with the sharpness of a thousand steel blades. Mouse’s hand twitches around the handle of his kunai. Useless. There’s nothing he can do, in the face of this dark goddess. Useless! For the very first time in his artificial existence, he feels the touch of terror.

“But I can make it right again. You always talk of the ends justifying the means. So what does it matter if I need to mold a few… if I need to…”

But it appears he won’t need to do anything, because suddenly the Miko comes to a jolting realization, as if remembering herself. At once, the dark fire in her face abates. Reality reasserts itself as she crumbles in her seat, trembling in fear and shame. Her cheeks are flushed and her breath comes from her open mouth in wet, heavy gasps. She looks away from a pale-faced Lord Kazekage and finally, Mouse sees a tear sliding down the curve of her cheek.

“But that’s… the beginning of the end, isn’t it? Road to hell and all that…” She whispers, voice hoarse, almost broken. She gets no reply from Lord Kazekage, only a heavy silence. Another minute passes as she slowly collects herself.

“That… is why I needed to see the widow, and why you need to know. I needed to see that she was real. People are not… clay… to be molded.”

What have we gotten ourselves into? In the brief silence that ensues, Mouse thinks, teetering on the edge of panic and paralysis. The seal vector that lays the foundation to his intelligence gestalt strains under a logical burden it was never designed to deal with. Protect. Observe. Obey. Those are the orders Mouse was given at birth, engraved upon the wetware that came from six different living beings. Protect the lord Kazekage. Observe the village and be vigilant for threats. Obey the orders he is given. But there is no protecting the lord Kazekage from the Miko. And no amount of observation would change the fact that she is an existence beyond comprehension.

Obey, he thinks. Obey the orders that are given. Kill her, a different part of his gestalt mind whispers. The vessel is made of flesh. She can die. There must be a way. This vessel was meant to be throwaway fodder.
Kill her, and we shall bring ruin upon the creators, murmurs another part as it wills their thoughts to the world outside them, to the impossibly blooming desert and the thriving trade that has come pouring ever since. She is foundation. She is earth and soil and water and sustenance. Kill her and all that will go away. We will once more be beggars in our own home.

Amidst that struggle, another facet emerges, gibbering in madness.

There is nothing to do but wait and see. It says. Upon the heart of a sleeping mad goddess, we have built our empire. We have drunk from her blood, eaten from her flesh, and built armors from her bones. The time for actions is long past, my brothers. It is done, this blood pact. And we drones shall oversee it til the day we die.

End Snippet

Chapter Text

Note: This snippet, unlike others I have posted in this sam series, is absolute non-canon. This is an early alternate draft I wrote for the reveal of Kagome's power (a tiny bit of it) in front of the ninja during the salvo of the Ninja World War. This is an alternate scenario where Kagome learns to harness and limit her power by locking it into the shape of a soul sword and then using said sword to... well... to whack Madara over the head. 

Hahahaha.... well, I'm intrigued by the idea of weapons that can differentiate good and evil in a setting like Naruto, where even people are treated like mindless tools, let alone things like weapons, no matter how powerful. 

Eventually, I decided that I did not like this idea enough and that I wanted to build Kagome as a character who is strong in a different way from the ninja and warriors around her. My idea for Kagome as a character in this story is "body of tofu, heart of diamond." Her manifesting such a visually and thematically aggressive weapon like a soul sword flies in the face of that. So I discarded this idea. Read it for fun on an alternate development route. 

FtGoG Snippet: Alternate Draft: Searing Angel's Battle Hymn

She stands in front of the embattled shinobi army, facing the general of the other side. A slight woman who stands no taller than Neiji's shoulder, but somehow she seems to possess the gravitas of titans. In her hand she holds an impossible sword, bright and searing like a slice of the sun itself, and on her face she wears a look of easy defiance as if she is not standing in between a losing army and the enemy horde.

This is the Kazekage's Mistress? That Miko woman who is supposed to be a frail pacifist who couldn't hurt a fly if it were trying to murder her? Neiji thinks incredulously. As he contemplates this, the woman addresses the legendary Madara with the ease of one addressing her peers.

"How shall it be, undead warrior? Won't you meet me in battle and decide this once and for all?"

Madara grants her no answer, merely throwing a contemptuous look her way. The message is clear. You are not worth my time. But she is unfazed. Meeting his eyes from across the battlefield, she says loudly and clearly.

"Typical of you to think that only swords of steel and iron can cut. But in my world, the strongest of us battle not with irons or steels, but with weapons forged from our very souls themselves."

What? Sputters Neiji in his own head. He turns to his comrades, sees the same look of bewilderment in their eyes.

She brandishes her sword. "This is one such weapon, forged from my own soul. Mikazuki-Munechika." Despite being teammate with Tenten, Neiji knows little about weapons, no more than is adequate for his needs. He knows even less of weapons purportedly forged from souls, but even he can tell the blade in the Miko's hands possesses unknowable power. It is a terrifyingly beautiful blade. Searing, burning, a condensed star in the form of a sword, and given such an ironic name. It sings a wordless battle hymn that shakes Neiji's heart. He does not believe her claim of soul-forged weapons, but he can easily believe this blade is no less powerful than the Nidaime's legendary Raijin no Ken, and that is a blade small nations will wage war over. Madara must think the same because even he does not dare look at that blade with anything less than utmost regard.

She smiles. Her smile is threaded through with pity.

"Admire my soul do you?" she says, almost mocking. "But do you know its strength? Can you withstand its power? I will tell you a secret, pretender godling. I have seen your soul, and it is a pitiful, mewling thing."

Madara's face is frozen in a rictus of shock and anger. This is probably the first time somebody insulted his soul of all things. The black fire raged behind his back, a promise of terrible retribution for the slight. But she is not at all deterred.

"I have seen your heart, the frail, feeble heart that you hate, your truest desire that you do not even have the courage to acknowledge. You are not even remotely the all-powerful god you pretend to be." she points her blade at him in challenge. "Enter into battle with me, black-hearted fraud; I promise you, you will not survive a single cut from my blade."

Chapter Text

Note: I wrote this snippet about... 6 years ago I think. It's a scene depicting Rasa and Kagome's first date (sort of) and chronologically, it happens right at the end of Arc 1, after Sand and Leaf almost go to war against each other for real (and not the halfhearted invasion in canon) in the fallout of the Kazekage's failed assassination and clues pointing to Danzo of Leaf having his fingers in this plot... which then leads to Kagome basically inciting a civil revolt to stop the head honchos of the village from voting for all-out war.... hahahaha... This is the day right after all that madness goes down and the relationship between Rasa and Kagome turns explicitly romantic and physical (after Kagome's power allows him to have a heart to heart with his dead wife too) 

FtGoG Snippet: This ain't a love song

He led her by the hands away from the crowd. Even without his usual robe of office, people recognized him almost immediately. Some stepped back out of respect and deference while some others called out 'Lord Kazekage' before bowing. To those he gave wordless nods of acknowledgment but kept on moving, kept on pulling her away.

People recognized who she was too. "Miko-sama," somebody called out from the crowd. "Higurashi-sama" but unlike all of today and all of last night, nobody dared approach her. Nobody held out their hands to her, hoping to touch the physical form of something they saw as near divine. Nobody tried to claw their way to her, all the while begging for her to lift the veil between the living and the dead so that they could, just once, just once, see the face of dead loved ones. Not while the Kazekage himself walked beside her. She could feel the stares at the sight of the Kazekage and the Miko walking side-by-side, at the sight of their conjoined hands. She wondered if he felt as self-conscious as she was right now, if the thought of what the people must be thinking was circling the forefront of his mind. Probably not. This morning when they walked side-by-side the entire distance from his private residence to her assailed home, he hadn't looked as if he paid a whit of attention to the stares coming from people around them either. She supposed this was just one more perk that came with age. It must be nice to be so… unaffected in the face of it all. At a mere nineteen years old, Kagome couldn't claim to feel the same calmness as the people whipped up rumors around her.

They walked in silence, further and fu rther away from the still-under-construction Higurashi clan house. Before long, the crowd thinned out and then disappeared altogether as they departed the main village street. At the next intersection, he took a left and pulled her into a small alley that stretched and wove and spun in sharp curves until they stood at the foot of a steep cliff by its end. Without a word, glittering silver and gold dust came to life under their feet, formed a cohesive carpet-like surface, and bore them up in the air. Near the top of the wall, a sharp dip in the rock created a concave pocket and it was here that their ride stopped. He stepped down onto solid rock pavement, turned around, pulled her in with him and then let the glittering silver and gold carpet disintegrate.

Kagome looked around the shallow mountain cave. It wasn't big and there was almost nothing here except for… well…a lot of dust and whole yards of vine climbers of the same type she had planted on the city's request some months before. Hyacinth beans. They were in full bloom, the flowers shaped like butterfly wings and carried with them a faint sweet scent. Here and there in the cave scattered the odd dandelion blooms. The carpet of grass she had grown in patches inside and outside of the village had been attracting odd flyers like them. Back home in Tokyo, she and Souta used to pick straying dandelions from their yard, their mother and grandfather not wanting the wild weeds to overtake the homegrown bushes and flowers. Over here, it had become a delight to these people, to see stray seeds finding a place to take up root in their land, perhaps their home. It was all very lovely in a quaint way, but this couldn't be all, could it? She turned to look at him.

"What did you want to show me?"

"This…" said Rasa. He made a gesture at the mouth of the shallow cave where a spectacular panorama of the village was in full view. He made a motion with his hands, and then the previously merely spectacular view of Sunagakure at night became…

She gasped in surprise as the skies lighted up in shimmering plumes of moss green and locomotive red coronas. Then the green became yellow and the red became a shade that tethered between purple and violet. The trails of light moved, coiled, danced as if they had minds of their own, as if they were some great and mysterious creature made out of light. They cast luminary columns down on the village below, for a moment painting the sandy-colored houses and buildings in new coats of red, green, and yellow. Distantly, Kagome heard the delighted cries of children and adults out on the streets.

Aurora borealis. She had read about it back in school and saw it once or twice on TV. She had thought, once she grew up and had the chance or the money, to travel to a place where she could see for herself the lights of heaven and its beauty. She had thought that only happened in polar regions either up North or down South, but apparently, it was not so, at least not here.

"You are going to catch something if you keep your mouth open like that," His remark broke her reverie. He sat down at the edge of the cave, pat the ground beside him and said. "Sit with me." High as they were, they had the perfect first-row seats. Kagome sat down beside him, turned to look at him.

"How did you do it?" she asked, because the Kazekage definitely had something to do with this. She had been living with his people, in his city for over two years and though she was a bit of a shut-in, she had been out at night many times. Never before had she been treated to such a sight. Besides which, it was just too timely.

He responded by holding out a hand above her shoulder, forefinger raised. She felt a charge, and then her hair, which was loosely tied and strewn over one shoulder, started standing up strand by strand as if she was holding her other hand against a running Van de Graaff. Then it stopped as he withdrew.

"Sunagakure is a bit too low on latitudes for natural polar lights, but the open desert means we get plenty of solar winds year-round. It's just a matter of…" He did that thing again with his hands. Immediately, the lights above them shifted, changed colors, changed shapes. "… fine-tuning the local geomagnetic field until it catches the right wind."

"I didn't know you could do that before," said Kagome, at once surprised and awed. She had never really thought about what else he could do with his control over magnetism other than move around stray bits of metal. Now that she thought about that, depending on his control, he could actually do… a lot… "That's… really neat. You must have been great at parties if you could do this."

The words sounded silly the moment they escaped her lips, and apparently, Rasa must think so too because she could hear, for a split second, what sounded like an amused snort.

"It's too flashy," he said. "We were at war ten years ago. Anything that flashy would draw a target on our village. That was the Third Hidden War. Before that was the Second Hidden War, still in my generation. Between the second and third, we had prolonged skirmishes with both Iwa and Konoha over several patches of land."

"Oh…"

"But… you are right," he continued, turning to look at her now with that sort-of half-smile that so very rarely graced his face. "Back when we did have parties, I was pretty great."

She blinked in surprise, then laughed. A tiny spark of happiness bubbled in her chest. They sat that way for the next ten minutes, in silence, just sharing in the sight of dancing multicolored lights.

Note: Would you believe me if I say I don't actually ship RasaKag and feel almost nothing for this couple? Hahaha.... eh... it's true. I ship Gaanaru and Kagome x character growth. Despite all appearances, FtGoG is not a love story... (unlike its AU, Clan War, which is explicitly a love story with 5 different romance routes) 

Even with the characterization work I put into Rasa, there are people who can accept him in a relationship with Kagome, and there are people who feel awkward about it. I understand. Really, I'm kinda amazed I can write this pairing at all. Haha... 

How should I put this? Rasa's not really someone you would naturally think about in terms of shipping or shipping materials, is he? But if you have read my stuff for a while, you would know it's the characterization that does the trick for me, not the shipping itself. Rasa (and Gaara) is chosen for the romantic subplot because that's how the story feels like it will go in my head. A natural direction coming from the characters interacting in my head... of sorts.

It's not really the kind of love story you see in books or songs. It's less people falling in love and more... two wounded people coming together in shared loneliness, mental isolation, and feelings of kindred after the trauma of losing their love (and having some of the fault in the death too). It's not a story where love heals, but rather a story about people healing themselves and in the process, allowing themselves the vulnerability of loving another person. 

It's a much more... adult, ordinary, and muted kind of love. You wouldn't really see teenagers or young twentysomething enthusing about something like this because it's just... not very exciting, is it? But it's comfortable, and it's accepting all the flaws of love. 

Besides that, I also decided to write Rasa X Kag x Gaara as a reversed mirror image of the O.G Kag x Inu x Kik. A way to force people to look at something very much similar from a different lens, so to say. 

Chapter Text

Notes: I wrote this snippet about 5, 6 years ago (around 2017 I think) for FtGoG - Clan War AU. It's a snapshot of the relationship and dynamic between Hashirama Senju and Kagome in the Hashirama route (which is a tragic, destructive romance route specific to Hashirama). At its inception, Clan War was designed as a quest / Choose Your Own Adventure story that marries elements of kingdom building story and multiple romance route mechanisms. The O.G. Clan War had 5 different routes and multiple possible endings. Each of these routes has different theme and is on their own way different kinds of story. Some are upbeat and comedic. Some are romantic. Some, like this one, are tragic. This snippet is a snapshot into one such route. 

 No Ordinary Love

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"Tell me of your homeland, little princess," he says as they sit down on the grass on the hill where her old clinic was to watch the sunset together. The horizon stretches before them. Green grass and blue skies slowly turning a breathtaking array of pink, purple, and gold. The breeze this time of the year is gentle, and it blows through the hillside, ruffling the reddening leaves and tangling through her hair.

Her hair is down today, he notes. She's in casual wear instead of formal. Simple cotton dress, bare feet and a single white lily in her hair instead of elaborately layered red silk and a golden crown atop a carefully coiffured head. It instantly makes her look ten years younger. Hence, the 'little' before her title, because she looks so young next to him, so… little. Tobirama will not be pleased to know his elder brother has chosen to forgo courtly etiquette in the company of the princess ruler of Gems yet again. The brothers have had talks in the past about this. Courtly etiquette and Hashirama's perilous lack of it in the company of royalty. As per his younger brother's advice—command, Hashirama amends in his head—he is not to address the princess ruler of Gems, who is quite possibly about to be acknowledged as a full Daimyo, as anything less than her full title of office.

Your royal highness. Your majesty. Most gracious, if he's going for something with a bit more flare. And if she's in a good mood and expressly permits it, then he may address her by her royal name, the one given to her by her adopted father—the late Gems lord. Under no circumstances is he to address her by her birth name, the one that he has so impudently made use of in their first correspondence.

Kagome. Higurashi. To this day, Tobirama still has had little to no success in finding the origin of the Higurashi clan and their relation to the Gems princess... if such a clan even exists.

Calling her princess is technically going by the rules Tobirama laid down. It's her title of office, after all. But putting the 'little' right before it and suddenly it's no longer prim and proper, no longer stiffly-mannered, no longer so... impersonal. Instead, the words are infused with a deep fondness that scarcely describes their fast friendship. It plays by Tobirama's rules and yet flouts them at the same time. His little brother is not going to be pleased when he finds out.

That is... if Tobirama even finds out in the first place. Hashirama smiles impishly at the thought of pulling the proverbial wool over his straight-laced little brother's eyes. After all, friends should not be so formal in the company of each other. And Kagome is not at all like those stuffy royal families back in the capital of Fire. She is candid, and cares little for frivolous courtly rituals if they do not serve the interest of her people. Some would call her an insolent rube among those of blue blood, which is probably why she's not popular with the great courts of Earth and Water, where there are no mutual trade benefits to cushion the princess's eccentricity. But Hashirama only finds this honesty refreshingly charming.

"Are you not bored?" She is smiling, now laughing. She sits beside him on the hilltop, bare feet in the grass. There are books in her hands and papers in her lap. Trade treatises from several semi-independent city-states at the border of Fire. Agreements of transfer of technology and mining rights, as well as the possible extension of the White Road as it is quickly becoming known. They have little to do with Konohagakure itself, but since he is on a diplomatic trip to Gems anyway, he has agreed to ferry them from the outposts to the hands of the princess herself. And then he has agreed to help her go through the minutiae of the proposals with his local knowledge. But he's not in the mood for hashing out trade agreements. It's a beautiful day today, and they aren't sitting in one of the many stuffy halls often used for similarly stuffy foreign diplomats. "I have told you of my homeland so many times."

Twenty-eight times she has told Hashirama of her homeland, that impossible, shining place of light and peace and little children growing up knowing of wars and battlefields only through textbooks. He doesn't think he will ever get tired of hearing of that place.

"What do you want to hear about this time?" she acquiesces finally. He leans back to lie on the grass. Closing his eyes, he asks, and then listens, basking in the moment.

The first time she told him of her homeland was a year and a half after the first Kage Summit. Despite the barrier of stations and courtly decorum, they became fast friends. Theirs was a bond born out of mutual desire for peace and harmony and the will to see it through despite the countless voices that said what they wanted could not be done—that it was in fact, madness. It helped that relations between Konoha and Gems was especially good. In the aftermath of a failed peace negotiation between Suna, Konoha, and an especially recalcitrant Kiri over a nasty border dispute issue, she said 'Do not lose heart, for I believe in you', and dispelled the gloom of defeat as easily as the squall dispelling the last remnants of a stormcloud.

The conviction in her voice surprised him. It spoke of unshakable faith. It spoke of boundless patience. It spoke of will that would not be deterred by temporary setbacks. And all this was offered to him when he was at a moment of rare low, humiliated, reminded of harsh reality, of how men were always quick to reach for swords and knives to settle contending claims, when he had nothing with which to offer as proof that he could do what he was setting out to do.

She sat him down and told him of her homeland, a place so distant none here on the continent ever heard of it, a place where she could never hope to return.

"Your mad dream," she said. "I lived it, once"

She spoke of a city where the lights never went out. She spoke of a prosperity hard to believe in, a country where there was food aplenty even to the lowest of the low, the poorest of the poor. She spoke of schools and hospitals with doors wide open even to those who had nothing. She spoke of leaders who bowed their heads to the laws of the land as any other ordinary person, just as it should be. No matter one's station, all stood equal before the eyes of the law. She spoke of children growing up knowing of wars and battlefields only through textbooks. These children had choices. They could choose to live their lives as they wished. They could choose to be a soldier, or they could choose to be a farmer. They could choose to be a doctor, or they could choose to be a craftsman. None could force them to pick up a sword and go to a battlefield to die senselessly as cannon fodder for someone else's ambition.

More than anything, this was the one thing that struck him the hardest. Belatedly, he realized he never had a choice. He was born a shinobi. He was raised a shinobi. And likely, he would die as one too, out in the battlefield and far from home, his last breath to the sounds of violence and bloodshed, die fighting a war so that a distant Daimyo could settle some petty dispute with similarly petty people. His first memory was when he was a three years old toddler, when his father took him from the warm embrace of his mother and pushed cold, hard steel into his yet chubby fingers.

Best get him used to the kunai, the man said.

He made his first kill when he was five, kneeling over the bloody corpse of another child from some other clan, trembling and wet with blood and pain and rage and confusion and frustration. I do not know this boy, he remembered thinking frantically at that moment. I do not know him. He did nothing to me. Why do I have to kill him? Why does he have to kill me? Why do we have to fight? Why do we have to suffer?

Shut your crying boy, he remembered his father saying. Shinobi do not cry. Stand up and be a good soldier.

He had no choice. He got to choose nothing. His choice was robbed from him. Since the moment of his birth, everything was already decided for him, how he lived, where he lived, his friends, his love, his children, his death. For all that he was the leader of his men, for all that he was celebrated as one of the strongest, if not the strongest shinobi of his generation, Hashirama did not even have the most basic right afforded to the children of the little princess's homeland. He was absolutely helpless in the one thing that mattered, powerless in the one battle that mattered.

"If you weren't born a shinobi," she asked. "Then what would you like to be?"

What a whimsical question. It belonged in the realm of pointless wishful thinking. He was who he was. He had been a soldier for more than three decades, and nothing would unmake that at this point. What she asked could have come from the mouth of a child. But he humored her anyway.

If he had a choice, if he got to choose, who would he choose to become?

"I would be a farmer," he said. "Or a gardener." He liked trees. He liked trees a lot. Sometimes he used trees to stab people, other times to spy on them. More than a handful of times, he grew giants of trees to whack Madara over the head with and upturned the earth under his feet. A soldier used whatever was available to him. But if he didn't need to, he probably would like to settle down in some distant, quiet place where he could grow and tender to them for as long as he wanted. He would get to watch them grow slowly, their delicate leaves unfurling and tiny flowers budding, like a proud father over his children. He would get to take pleasure in the slow act of nurturing and watching over them. He would have the time. He would have a simple existence, a simple life, quiet but lacking of hard choices that broke his heart to make every time.

"Or a florist," he added after a minute of thinking. He liked flowers too. Flowers were useful, aside from looking pretty and smelling nice. They could be made into food, into poison, into medicine. They could even be used as bait for bees, and then the bees used as bait for bears. He liked bear meat. Bear meat was great. Always in abundant and the jerky kept for a long time even in bad field condition. Perhaps he could even become a bear farmer. Was there such a thing as a bear farmer?

"If you weren't the princess of Gems, if you weren't the healer who could stave off even death, what would you like to be?" He turned the question on her. She went quiet and still, deep in thoughts.

"I would be a school teacher maybe," she said finally, and then with more certainty, added. "I would marry the man I loved. We would live a quiet life. We would grow old together, and die one day."

Her voice held such sadness to it. Hashirama knew this sadness well. She had lost someone. This loss was old, but never forgotten. Hashirama himself had tasted the same kind of loss. Years ago, when he was but a young boy about to become a man, before he met Mito and wedded her for her sweet smile, her Uzumaki last name, and her patience in the face of his occasional bouts of foolishness, there was a girl with warm, twinkling brown eyes and a dimple in her cheek when she smiled. She was one of those rare front line kunoichi, a budding talent at Genjutsu. When he turned fifteen, she used her Genjutsu to show him the skyline of the capital during the New Year festival. She filled that skies with a thousand fireworks in red, in green, in blue, and yellow. Then in the next battle, she met the Uchiha. She was a very good Genjutsu master, but to leverage Genjutsu against the Sharingan was like trying to put out a forest fire with a thimble of water. He was allowed to mourn her for three days, then the next fight beckoned.

Not everything was perfect in the princess's impossible homeland, of course. Not everything was good, nor everyone happy. She told him of terrible wars waged with steel and fire on a scope he couldn't even start to imagine. She told of weapons capable of wiping out entire countries in the blink of an eye. She told of the scars that lingered for decades in the land, in the water, in the people. But for every one atrocious thing that existed in her homeland, there were two more wonderful things. She told him of groups of people, sects, organizations, that sought to help with no care for borders nor allegiances. She spoke of medical care and food provided freely to the civilians of enemy country. She spoke of men and women of privileges discarding their status and easy life to venture into the worst places, into the most war-torn and destitute places to provide help without looking for recompense. She spoke of people, ordinary people with neither riches nor power propping them up, standing up for justice, for fairness, for truth. These people didn't always win, but their statements were heard, kept, remembered, and maybe one day acted upon. She spoke of the times—rare but they did happen—when people put aside their differences and came together to enact a universal good. Her world was not naive to war and conflict, but in the times of great disasters, they still knew to set aside their grievances to stand together as one. They knew to learn from the mistakes of their past. There were countries devastated by great wars and yet in the years to follow, they rose like a phoenix from the ashes, made new and whole and better than they were before.

In the little princess's homeland, for every warmonger baying for blood, there were two voices of reason speaking up for peace and harmony and understanding, and three more condemning senseless and pointless violence. Her world was not perfect, but its imperfections only made it all the more real in Hashirama's eyes, all the more… attainable.

"Your dream is not mad," she said to him. "It is an admirable dream, a brave dream. And I know, for a fact, that it can be realized. I lived it once, after all."

Faith, pure and simple, and said in so many words. There was not a shred of doubt in the princess's voice. She could not have known how much that meant to him. In his quest to change the world, Hashirama had been called many things. A mad man. A colossal joke. A traitor to the ideal of ninja. A liar. A fraud. He had even been accused of attempting to create a new world order via the use of the new hidden village system as engines of war on a scale never before seen. That he chose to pursue his vision nevertheless meant always having to explain himself, always having to prove himself, to reason and rationalize, to fight for every inch of recognition and acceptance… even in the hearts and mind of his followers. In his entire life, only one other person had ever accepted his dream so easily and readily. Now, there were two of them.

… He really hoped she wasn't going to turn around one day and tell him that she was looking forward to taking his head from his shoulders just to prove that her way was the better way… like that other one did. She was a good kid (young woman, he amended in his head), a bit eccentric maybe, but she had a good head on her shoulders. And as far as monarchs went, she probably was the best one hands down that he had ever had the pleasure of meeting. So… he would really hate it if he had to, one day, do to her what he did to Madara.

That conversation stayed between the two of them. Hashirama told no one of the princess's homeland. The origin of the reigning princess of Gems who held power over life and death had always been a topic of great interest to many people in power. Some sought this knowledge in hope of gaining leverage over her. Others thought her origin might hold the key to her impossible powers. Tobirama too had his spies and his informants ever on the lookout. He was more than sure that his little brother would get at least something out of the bits and pieces she had told him so far. And yet he breathed not a word.

There had been many who thought to ask the princess directly. They were all rebuffed. Irony that it was to Hashirama, who had never even thought to ask, that she gave the answer, however vague it might be. He recognized the gesture for what it was. One of trust. A gesture given from one friend to another. He had heard the longing in her voice too, the bone deep homesickness, the old sorrow that never went away. He would have sooner forfeited his pride as a shinobi than betray that trust. But that didn't mean that he didn't get curious, didn't mean that he didn't want to hear more, to know more about this strange, impossible, wondrous world that was the little princess's homeland.

The second time, he was the one who asked. Another low moment. Another instance of mutual bloodshed that could have been avoided had all sides reined back their egos. Another round of ridicule and doubt. They said war might not be avoidable around the coast of Kiri and Kumo. Too much bad history, not enough patience. They said he was a fool for trying to avert what was all but unavoidable. It looked like this time around, they were right.

Despite what some might think, Hashirama's patience was not without limits. His perseverance had an end. In spite of his conviction, he was a man still. He made mistakes. He had regrets. He doubted. This was one of those moments. Standing once again in the joyful serenity of Gems capital, he felt at once mad with frustration. He felt like a fool on a colossally stupid errand. Was he doing the right thing? Or was he just acting the part of a cosmic joke? Were his detractors right about everything concerning his dream? Or was this just an isolated incident? For one terrible second, he felt utterly alone. He was a madman in a sane world, his whims indulged by his loved ones. He was a sane man in a mad world, trying his damnedest to get everyone to draw back the curtain and take a long, hard look at a possible future. And everyone around him was laughing. Hashirama the fool.

In that moment of wavering faith, he sought her out. Trembling with uncertainty, he said.

"Your homeland, tell me more. I want to know. Show me everything and tell me how."

Her world was a glittering place, where there was beauty beyond his dreams. She might be far away from home, but she was slowly but so surely turning this nation into its mirror image, doing the very thing he was trying to do, except succeeding at it where he was failing bit by bit. He could see there was so much to learn, so much to do. It was so close and yet so far. He saw himself walking the streets among her people, in the shining city that saw her birth, surrounded by strangers that were just like him.

In her presence, he was cleansed off doubt and hesitation. Her voice and her tales dispelled his frustration. Her existence was the proof that his dream could be made a reality. Looking at her, he thought.

I am not alone. There is at least one more person in this world who believes in the same thing I do.

The thought gave him more strength than it should.

From that point on, their talks became a habit, a ritual with no set date. When it became too much—when reality became too disappointing and men too petty to fight for, when his self doubt and his frustration became too much for him to grapple alone and he dared not burden his loved ones with something even they would not be able to bear—he came to her and they talked, quietly, candidly, as people walking parallel paths were wont to. She was the confidante, the pillar at the end of the Earth. Next to his frail glass heart that scarred and marred and fractured at every instance of doubt, hers was unbreakable, unstoppable, undeniable. She was the absolute certainty, the inexorable tide, the future that could be, would be. Her existence was proof that all he endured had a purpose, all that he did had a purpose. It was not all for nothing. Her world was a vast place. They could talk for a hundred years and not cover all the wonders and wisdom that it harbored.

For a hundred years, Hashirama could get lost in the heart of her glittering kingdom, and would not be sad for it.

The sun sets. The story ends.

He hears the quiet steps of her body guards cresting the hill, in look of their mistress. He knows what that means. Time's up. She needs to get back to being the princess ruler, and he the first Hokage of Konohagakure. Still, he takes a moment and savour the last of the story. Its sweetness. Its promise. Its strength.

He turns to her, sees her stretch and yawn. Princesses don't yawn. It's against courtly etiquette. Tobirama would scowl in disapproval if he saw. But she does in Hashirama's presence. Just like everything else about her, he finds that refreshingly charming, and not a little bit endearing.

"Little princess, your tagalongs have found us, it seems."

She turns around, fixes him with a look.

"Why do you keep calling me little? I'm not that much younger than you."

Listen to them go. Are these the kind of talks that should occur between the princess ruler of Gems and the warrior lord of arguably the greatest ninja village? He finds he does not care, and knows that her bodyguards will not comment without their mistress's express wish.

"No," he hears himself agreeing and is a little bit surprised. "No, you aren't." They are a little over ten years apart. For some, an unbridgeable divide. For others, the blink of an eye. He does not care about this either. She is the little princess.

She makes to stand up. In the light of a dying sun, he watches her. Her dress is mussed around the edges, stained with green and rumpled from having been sat on in a decidedly unprincessy manner. Her shoes are still missing. He has no idea where they are. Her hair is ruffled. That was done by him, indirectly. The white lily in it is somewhat lopsided. Caught in a whim, he reaches out and fixes the lily in place for her. A little bit of his chakra goes out and then into the flower. He watches its petals darken, going from a creamy off-white to a pinkish red and then to a deep, rich, lusty crimson. A red flower nestled in her dark hair, offset by the pale white of her skin and the blue of her eyes. A tapestry unfinished. Irrationally, he feels the urge to add to it, to complete it, to reach out and...

She catches what he does out of the corner of her eyes then looks at him as if in question.

"It brings out your eyes," he says.

It really does, he thinks with a sinking feeling like that of a man free-falling from the highest cliff of the earth.

For a hundred years, Hashirama can get lost in her glittering kingdom, and will not be sad for it.