#self!write

[desertgourd]

warning for drug mentions, detox/withdrawal, character death mentions, general air of misery

he can’t remember ever being so tired. not on the long nights staring at a stucco-pocked ceiling with the hallway clock ticking out the raw and liminal stretch of night before the school bus arrived to throw him through another eight-hour gauntlet, and not when he woke in the hospital bed with grey skin and a tube down his throat and in his arm and two policemen waiting in the corridor like vultures. now he shivers on their living room sofa (it smells like cigarette ash, had since they’d lugged it off the corner of 164th and the Union Turnpike, and Kankuro’s growing habit hadn’t done it or his brother’s asthmatic lungs any favors) with two blankets up to his chin and his life in a shithole so deep it curdles his nose hairs.

he hasn’t eaten breakfast or lunch and the thought of them makes him want to vomit all over again. the bucket on the rug at his feet had been cleaned twice already since that morning but god praise Kankuro, or whatever powers that be praise him. Gaara’s last belief in a god died with the first time he realized he couldn’t go twelve hours without the needle. there was no sound except the thunder of footsteps and some mystery thudding from above that came with the territory of slumlord apartments in south Queens. three times in as many months Gaara had banged the hard end of a broom on the ceiling and each time a man with skin like cracked leather and circles of sweat dried yellow on his undershirt had screamed at him in a language he did not understand and at the time Gaara had been too far gone to do more than shut the door back in his face and slump back to bed for another hit. now he keeps to himself, mustering the energy only to pull the blanket over his head and rearrange his neck on the sofa to avoid the soreness he knows will come anyway.

he knows he asked for this and in more ways than one. he asked for it with the first mark in the crook of his elbow and every new one since (you know you can’t do this forever). he asked for it when the only man he ever loved in his life (the only man who ever loved him?) had begged him, god please, Gaara please, look at yourself, you’re dying and you’re the one who’s doing it. Gaara had heard the words on his tongue then in an echo of his childhood taunts (freakfreakfreak) and knew he must reject him before he had the chance to be rejected in turn, but the heartstrings yanked like fishhooks and Gaara had clung to him like a pup to its mother’s teat, and when he had left once and for all who could replace him? a series of encounters with men who saw him more as meat than the soul his broken body held, who took what they wanted and left the husk to rot. Gaara had seen that and compared it against every other man and woman in his life and called it love.

and then his father died.

the blood vessels between his eyes throb. everything throbs. the muscles in his calves spasm, his fists clench and unclench, his forehead sears like the sun and there is nothing he wants (nothing he needs) more than the one thing he cannot have. he’s spent the last three days begging Kankuro and Kankuro, bound by the will of their sister and the corpse of their last living parent and by the oath of his own brother, denied him, and Gaara had cursed him to Hell for it and then praised him and then cursed him all over again.

his father died and the knife Gaara never knew was wedged between his ribs dislodged and out bled everything he’d kept walled up behind a fortress of smack and stone since he was six. his father died and everything he knew about his world crumbled to ash.

(don’t you want to live? he’d been asked once. i don’t know. i don’t know how.) 

Temari had shown up at his door like a fairy godmother made of tough love and steel and picked her way through the wreckage of her brother’s life. did she understand that he was gone, that the smack had taken him hostage and there was no way to rip through the webbing with which it had constricted his life? was there a life left in there, even, and what did it mean when Temari was the only one who claimed to see it?

(get clean or i’m done. get clean or it’s over.)

and Gaara had picked himself up in a way he never had before. and picked himself up and picked himself up over and over again, because nobody had told him that being sober meant steps made of glass that slipped if you put your foot down wrong, that folded over on themselves so he would slide back past every one he’d climbed and had to start all over again. nobody had told him that the first one felt like dying and so would every one after that, and that the light they all said was at the end of the tunnel was good for nothing if it looked so far away he could barely glimpse it over the stairs extending endlessly in all directions like a labyrinth, a light, no more than a pinprick, some far-away star, which never came within reach no matter how hard he fought.

he curls in a ball on the cushion and finds he’s sweat through his clothes. has been sweating through them for a while, and the perspiration on them is cold and damp and rank and itches at his thighs and the small of his back. when he stretches to shift the fabric his muscles scream again and he remembers, infuriatingly, achingly, that his dealer is one text away, only that Temari has taken his phone (and his laptop for good measure) and there is nothing here but a light at the end of a maze of steps and he is lost. who is he doing this for again?

another shiver rips through him. skin like ice. tongue against his upper lip and he tastes snot. he stomach clenches and he retches again only there is nothing left but the shooting pains in his gut and an ache in his jaw. he drags himself into the evening hours by the skin of his teeth. Kankuro stops in from work and Gaara smells chicken soup, takes a spoon (the feel of it too familiar, molded too perfectly between his fingers, it’s enough to send him reeling), manages not to gag back up a few mouthfuls of broth. he can feel the judgment from his eyes like holes burnt in balsa wood. Kankuro looks at him like a stray dog he’d pulled in from the rain and is he so wrong? yet was he not the same brother who shoved him out in the storm to begin with?

at some point he knows he’ll sleep again, will take a joint or two to get the job done, barely held in his shaking hands, fire on his tongue. he will drift into some uneasy form of half-consciousness broken by memories of what was and what could have been and nightmares of that which is yet to come. somewhere, there is hope, too far to reach but glittering far up there, the North Star. he thinks he can follow that. if he can sleep and make it through this day and the next and the next, if one day at the end of it all he can look back and see more steps behind him than there are ahead, he can make it. for Temari or Kankuro or everyone else he’s failed, or his own damn self. he can do that. he'll follow that North Star home. 

[desertgourd]

tw: drugs, addiction

one.

Absolutely not, Kankuro says. Are you insane?

Gaara counters with the assurance of taking the smallest possible dose. He hasn't slept in three days. His head feels like an ant farm slighshotted against a wall. A tiny, unreal edge scrapes at the edges of the earth, the light too pale, shadows sketched in all the wrong places.

I'm not letting you ruin your life. Go smoke a bowl and take a melatonin like the rest of us.

But Gaara has already formed this habit just to reach at sleep's frayed edges, just to catch a whiff as it feints his grasp. It doesn't work anymore. If Kankuro's shit ruins people's lives so badly, why does he do what he does?

They're going to get it from somewhere. At least with me they know it's safe. They know it's pure.

Then it will be safe with Gaara. He needs to sleep. Begging is unlike him, yet here is prostrating for the sake of some deformed imitation of mental health.

Kankuro does not relent. He does not realize Gaara had asked for his blessing, not his permission.

He copies the motions of the anonymous bodies rolling in and out of their lives. Where memory lacks, the internet is his scripture. He hisses as the needles pierces his inner elbow; save routine vaccinations he has never even had his blood drawn. Gaara depresses the plunger easily and watches the stuff enter his body with the same sense of horrified wonder as losing your virginity on a pity date.

He sleeps ten hours straight. It is pure bliss, until morning rockets him back to earth and he lands hard on his ass. He collects himself with a frigid shower and enough coffee to jumpstart a corpse.

Just the one time. It ruins people's lives, after all.

two.

If Kankuro notices, he says nothing. He'd done such a small amount. Barely anything at all.

Is this all it takes to sleep? To feel normal? Now that such a simple solution exists his usual night terrors become intolerable. The thought of the vial stares at him through a million eyes of white grain. It niggles at the back of his mind for days, a stubborn loose tooth.

In the end, how could the canoe of his resolve resist against a monsoon?

Out like a light. Gaara has never slept like this in his life.

three.

Sleep quickly becomes a convenient excuse. Gaara discovers that when he is high he does not think about his father, his uncle, or his mother. It dulls the panging realization that he needs twice as much, now, for the same punch as that very first time. He ignores Kankuro's hard, suspicious eyes boring holes in the back of his head. None of it matters. Dope envelopes him in its safe warm dark. Dope catapults him into the ocean three thousand miles deep, floating in the utopian silence of eternally empty space. He is untouchable.

four.

Kankuro flumps into the sagging loveseat next to Gaara and says they need to talk. It's a bad time. Gaara has taken too much. Not enough to be a problem, though Kankuro keeps a stash of Narcan on hand in case of emergency, but enough that his leaden limbs have staked him resolutely to the earth, and that it would be an incomprehensible effort to open his mouth, much less operate the finer muscles in charge of speech.

Instead Gaara eyes him through his peripheral vision, focused on nothing. When Kankuro's lips move they remind Gaara of a darting lizard in search of insectile prey. He pictures himself as a larvae encased in silk: Rolled tight in sticky womblike warmth, shielded from the outside world, a powerhouse of violent beauty bubbling just beneath his skin.

Christ, Gaara. Do you even see yourself?

He is maggot-infested roadkill. Inside of him the horde of grubs have eaten all the bad parts out, gnawing up every ounce of grief and guilt and shame. In their place they secrete hot white dope, building him into something pure and new. It's a poor glue; once he stands up all the fractured parts of him will crack at the seams and fall over. Until then, he feels so good he might cry.

He wonders if by being consumed he will be reborn as them, the way life can never truly die, only transfer from one source to another. The lines between the drug, the world, and himself blur as he considers the concept of immortality via ego death. Ashes to ashes. Creases wither the edges of Kankuro's face Gaara doesn't remember seeing before. The lizard surrenders.

You're not even here, are you? Fucking hell.

He blinks, and he's alone. The sun shines at a new angle from beyond the grime-streaked window. Its freezing rays speckle light onto his alabaster skin. The need tugs deep in his navel.

Gaara's legs hurt all the time, now. He wakes with restless feet and twitching, cramping joints. He does a double-take when he glimpses himself in a mirror on the rare occasions he leaves his room. Who's that cadaver?

He convinces himself can't be doing anything too wrong if a tiny pinprick is all it takes to cleanse the venom and dissolve the decade-old clog in his heart. To make him strong. The withdrawal only lasts as long as he lets it. In this he finds some type of power. He is in complete control.

[desertgourd]

  Five days after Yashamaru’s death, Rasa wakes to Gaara screaming bloody murder in the dead of night. Images race through his mind - flames licking up from an exposed outlet; Gaara motionless on the floor, bleeding out from a head wound; a wild animal clambering through the open window with gnashing teeth and frothing gums - and he runs.

  He bursts into the room to find only the boy. Though unharmed, Gaara crouches in bed with his back jammed against the wall, knees pulled up tight, chest heaving like a madman. His finger is a beacon jabbing at an empty space by his bureau. In his half-conscious stupor Rasa only picks out the words Uncle Yasha cried over and over, a maddening and hypnotic chant turned rote from terror.

  Rasa, not entirely heartless, sits with his son that night. He does not touch him but to feel his forehead, pushing past sweat-matted auburn locks. He tucks the boy back in and flicks the nightlight on. The next morning they speak nothing of it, Rasa merely making himself a second pot of coffee, Gaara no more or less morose as usual.

  One month after Yashamaru’s death, Gaara has woken shrieking three more times, always with wild eyes and a frantic finger fixed on nothing, always insisting Uncle Yasha in that same panicked, near-incomprehensible babble. His siblings wake for two of these episodes; Rasa pushes past their bleary little heads as they poke through the doorway at the brother they barely know. Each time Rasa confirms no bodily injury. Each time he urges the boy to sleep with an edge to his voice that grows ever less tender and increasingly impatient.

  Some time later, Rasa steps out of a three-hour meeting with a migraine and immediately receives a call from Gaara’s second-grade teacher. He has been drawing pictures, and she thinks Rasa ought to know. They frighten the other children, and if she's quite honest, Sir, they disturb her as well. She would like him to come in and see them.

  Rasa has neither the time nor willpower for a children’s art show. He explains the circumstances, the upheaval in his boy's life, then has to explain again, stiltedly, when Gaara's teacher asks for clarification: your son did not live with you, his own father, beforehand? The conversation is not entirely accusatory, nor is it friendly. She suggests Gaara speak to the school counselor, but his father disagrees with an executive voice which leaves no room for argument: He is fine. Feeding into this attention-seeking behavior will only encourage it. Six-year-olds do not need psychological help. He will simply have to learn to toughen up.

  Three months after Yashamaru’s death, Gaara has learned the following: He has learned not to scream. He has learned, when he jolts awake to see his dead uncle hovering over his bed, skin corpselike gray, stringy hair like rancid, clotted straw, eyes and mouth gone, replaced by soulless, gaping static voids, to huddle beneath the covers with his hands pressed to his face so hard he sees stars. He has learned to answer "Good" when someone asks how he is feeling, and to draw pictures of houses and school busses and the dog that lives down the street, for these do not upset his classmates or prompt calls home from his teacher. He has learned that, in life, the person he must depend on most is himself.

[desertgourd]

  The worst part about sobriety is the loneliness.

  The clinic social worker had warned him from the start. Any connection to his former life would drag him back into the darkness, she explained. His biggest challenge would be the struggle to forge from this darkness new connections, new bonds that would thrive in the life he must build for himself. One cannot lace a plate with cyanide and expect to survive the meal.

  The silence suffocates his first night alone. After unpacking his scant belongings he steps through the routine he has been taught to establish: Dinner (instant ramen), journaling (a few bullet-points here and there; the habit never sticks), and a long walk after dark (his new neighborhood is so quiet, so safe; he feels like a round peg in a square hole and the isolation closes around him like a vice). He drinks a mug of tea and with it, enough melatonin to knock out a horse. This is the strongest drug he is allowed to take without prompting an asthma attack.

  Later, Gaara lies in bed and scrolls through the contacts in his phone again and again, his eyes rimmed red and swollen with exhaustion, and realizes he has nobody.

    Deidara is gone. Raven is gone. Kankuro is around, but Gaara can’t, not yet, it’s too close, the reminder too painful; he doesn’t think he’ll ever set foot in their old apartment again. Temari? Hundreds of miles away, too busy with her new life as the successor of their father’s company and dealing with the various affairs he had left behind (Gaara had received his share of the sum from selling their childhood home, but Temari controls it, of course, doling out a monthly allowance in case he decides to do anything stupid. He knows he should thank her for it. He has his life to thank her for).

    And Kiba. He doesn’t want to think about Kiba.

  He spends another two hours staring at the ceiling. He watches the curtains sway in the wind, a smudge of bats flitting from tree to tree. He counts his breaths, then the seconds between the traffic light cycles beyond his window.

  Eventually, mercifully, dawn breaks. His body is an anvil sunk in this quicksand of a mattress, his limbs like taffy, yet he hauls himself from it and towards the shower. He is due for his shift in two hours. He does not cry. 

[desertgourd]

warnings for drug mentions and angst

The time is eight forty-three in the morning and Gaara stands outside the methadone clinic like cattle before the slaughter.

He isn't the only one. A group of mothers with Kool-Aid dye jobs lean on the handles of their strollers and suck down cigarettes while they gossip about the shirtless construction crew across the street.  In the one week since his acceptance into the clinic he has never seen them break from their pack. They were not unkind, speaking to him only to ask if he is waiting on the coffee machine, or to thank him for holding the door, or to watch my purse while I piss, can ya, thanks hon. Yet in time he has ceased to see them as individuals at all, their existences reduced instead to a congealed mass for which he harbors an sort of instinctual but impersonal distaste, the way he does for tilapia or waking up with a crick in his neck. Today, as he wills away a migraine latched onto the back of his skull, his patience wears thin.

He leans back against the brick wall of the building. It's nondescript, so much so that he passed it three times and was ten minutes late for his initial intake. No sign above the door. Shoved between a knockoff luxury purse store and a third-tier travel agency that hasn't seen good business since the second world war. The weather is mild, which is why the security guard is making them all stand out front until the place opens instead of letting them loiter in the lobby as he had the last few days of rain. Gaara has uncrossed and recrossed his arms at least five times. He inspects the backs of his hands, pale, cracked dry over the knuckles. Gnaws on his lower lip, tasting metal. Presses his fingertips into the cool blue veins shining through the bronze of his skin, ignoring the mottled dots that make the flesh of his inner elbow look like something out of a crime scene. He’s never been fidgety, but when his body wages a war against itself it is all he can do to quell his nerves blazing like live wires and the acute sense of suffocating in his own skin.

Eight fifty-one. He sinks down to a crouch. One of the mothers flicks her eyes over him then dismisses him, not worth her concern. She's barely five years older than he is - pushing thirty, at most - but her face is already a knotted web of wrinkles beneath the heavy foundation and eyebrows like bits of string tacked on somewhere below her hairline. It is a face that has weathered through more lifetimes than she cares to count, who knows acutely that in this world the only choices you have are to go forward or to die.

Two buildings over a pair of older men hunker down on the stoop of a deli with their hands shoved in their pockets and their chins up at every passerby. Loosies, loosies, loosies, they mutter in turn, a cultish chant. Fi dolla headphones, fi dolla, JordansBeatsSony, get em fi dolla. His toes clench until the muscles send spasms up his calves. He stands, leans again, chews the inside of his cheek, watches them from the corner of his peripheral vision. Gaara knows one drag will send him to the hospital with stopped-up lungs but god he'd take anything over the nerves.

A wave of fury slaps him so hard it nearly knocks him off his feet. Fuck Temari. Fuck her self-righteous bullshit, the superiority she lorded over him like a prize, fuck the way she clawed her way out from their hell unscathed while he bore the brunt of who knows how many generations of poison, passed on like a defect, like a disease.

Fuck that she cared.

Fuck that even though she deleted all his old hit-ups off his phone he can still name a dozen street corners where he can find bliss again, and fuck how badly he wants to. The need for it curdles every cell in his body, digs into his liver and throat and the beds of his nails. He thought it'd get easier. In a way it has. Gaara has come miles from his shivering lump of a body in the throes of withdrawal, from Kankuro all but spoonfeeding him soup for days, from his own father's funeral which he, of course, missed. But the road before him stretches to an end he cannot see, and if anything terrifies Gaara it is unpredictability. Put one foot in front of the other, said the case manager he is mandated to see twice a month as part of his treatment. Every second you spend looking back is a lost chance to look forward.

A few yards off - where the brick wall cuts off into a chainlinked-fence parking lot - some noise bubbles up from the flock of women. One of them has slighted her friend’s boyfriend of the month. Or accused another of stealing her last pack of Newports. Or made to snap in the face of some kid and the kid's mom didn't like it. A repeat performance; same act, different play. The disagreement rises to a yell, a child screams, and Gaara only glances over to make sure they aren't about to drag him into the fray.

Two past nine. They're late. His temples sear and there is one person he wants to call but can't, and one person he knows he should but he can't do that, either, or won't, for an entirely different reason. He'll be in and out in twenty, and then he can spend the rest of the day doing fuck-all (it's his day off, thank god, he'd be halfway to calling in sick otherwise, it's some miracle he hasn't been fired). Maybe hit up Kankuro for lunch. It isn't like he has any other friends. Maybe take a Benadryl and knock himself out until dark. That one isn't a counselor-approved activity but it's a hell of a lot better than the way he used to spend his afternoons. Always forward, never back, right?

The spat by the parking lot subsides. They tap away on their phones and shoot furtive glances at each other in the aftermath, ignoring the whimpers of their toddlers. Cliques forming and reforming. They're on their second or third cigarettes each, judging by the accumulated butts crushed in the gum-pocked concrete beneath them. Anything to take off the edge. Gaara finds himself envious, then disgusted by them, and then by himself.

When the doors to the clinic swing open at five past Gaara shoots in like a bullet, scrawling his name in the lobby sign-in sheet and punching the elevator button before the scent of dollar store perfume and baby formula can follow. Half an hour later he walks out on a cloud. Past the men panhandling on the corner, past a parking attendant wrangling a few truant teens off the lot. It’s a far cry from what he’s known for years, a happy meal to-go compared to a five-course dinner at the Ritz.  But it staves off the worst of it and makes him feel a little more in control of his own body and whatever ruins are left of his life, so he'll be back tomorrow. And the day after that, and the day after that, until the three-month mark when they trust him enough to not scarf down a week’s supply in one go. He wonders, as he swipes his card onto the bus and shuffles into the first open seat, if that is now how he must measure his future: Dollops of time snatched between the fuel he needs to survive. A desperate scrabble toward a future looming in the distance, unknown. It’s what he’s used to, only this time the process is approved and monitored by a team of medical professionals and he feels a little less like death doing it. This time he is a little less alone.

The bus shuttles down the dense city streets, streets Gaara has seen a hundred times and will see thousands of times more before his journey ends, although he doesn’t know this yet. He doesn’t know that with each foot he puts in the right direction the path before him grows tenfold, new tufts of green sprouting from cracks in the cement, clouds clearing to the sort of yellow-gray sky after the storm. It isn’t something something he will realize until he looks back and sees the forest bloomed around him, the fruits borne of the very seeds he’s sown.

For now he counts each stop and turn, a knee tucked to his chest, and doesn’t even mind when a pothole jolts him half to the floor. He merely picks himself back up again. Strange how habits form.

Maybe he’ll go see his brother. It’s been a while.

[desertgourd]

 Time had gripped him in its crushing jaws and spat him out like rotted gristle. Deidara left. Raven left. Kankuro was gone. Kiba was dead. His job, fed up with the showing up late and dipping out early, fed up with his absence altogether, kicked him to the curb. His landlord followed suit once the checks stopped coming, with all the belongings he could not fit on his back tossed into the dumpster to be picked through by vultures. Before Gaara knew it he had nothing.

 He has nothing.

 He cannot remember the last time he ate. He cannot remember the last time he shot up, although his twitching, feverish body shrieks for a need he no longer has the means to fill. The past month (two? three?) blurs across his memory, a guessing game of scents and sounds and color pulled together in fraying patchwork, like a dementia patient stuck in the midst of the Cold War. But the pieces don’t fit and the jigsaw falls to the floor, abandoned, like everything else he knows, like his own forgotten self.

 The last week sticks to him stronger, but in a fog: Sleeping in stations before he can sneak on an unattended Greyhound. Begging for train fare only to be kicked off without proof of purchase. A granola bar and half an apple a day. Sweat stains eroding the fabric of his threadbare shirt, the only one he still owns. Narrowly escaping arrest when he jumps from the back of a cab a mile from his destination and books it, murmuring only the mantra branded into his brain, a mind-numbing record on repeat:

 I’m sorry. Forgive me. I’m sorry.

 He makes the journey from New York City to Arizona in one piece, mostly. He doesn’t recall a time his limbs did not ache. He doesn’t recall a time when his head did not threaten to pound itself out of his skull. His bones are made of seaglass and they cut to the touch, but they shatter, too.

 Their father’s house sits unchanged from the decade ago he last lay eyes on it. His sister inherited the entire estate, last he heard, and promptly set about gutting the entire indoors - to flip? to modernize? or simply to erase the last vestiges of their childhood once and for all? - but the outside remained firmly untouched.

 Nostalgia corrodes his skin like acid. His feet ascend the front path as if they have forgotten how to walk. Something in him has never allowed him to throw away his key, the same one looped on his ring for nearly fifteen years now, dulled and brown from age. The lock is shiny new brass against antique mahogany and when he tries the key it won’t even slide through the grooves. But the mail slot still works. A narrow metal flap, barely two inches in height, he used to stick his arm through it and feel for the deadbolt on those latchkey-kid days before receiving a real one of his own. He was a child then, and he still feels like one now, but overgrown, or grown in all the wrong places, the stretch marks of repressed memories ripping across his brain more pronounced and red-hot than any physical scar he’s ever seen.

 His arm now is skinny as a naked twig in winter, and it snakes through easily. The cold metal burns against him.

 The door opens with a creak. Somewhere inside, an alarm system lets out a warning beep.

  Exhaustion seeps through his every pore. The moment he steps over the threshold he drops, scissors to the strings supporting his marionette. His knees hit the front mat hard but he no longer feels pain (or he does, but in such a constant he no longer differentiates it from the feel of wind across his face or his tongue resting against his own teeth). Further inside sounds movement. He would be afraid but he has been afraid for so long it has become as essential to him as breathing.

 Temari? His voice is crumpled petals in a fist. Sunspots at the corners of his vision. His body is done. His journey is over. The door shuts and he sags against it, the hard wood unforgiving, comforting, somehow.

 More movement, a flurry of footsteps on stairs. A distinctly feminine voice roughed at the edges, strained - is that disbelief? or just disappointment all over again?

 “Oh my god -- Gaara?”

 The last of his vision whites out, and he loses himself completely.

[desertgourd]

"What's done is done." And isn't that a bitter truth to swallow? For all he'd done to make you into the wicked weapon his village required, for all the hatred and doubt and misery poured overtop your head, you've come out no more a demon then you'd been the day you were born, so small and frail in the arms of a mother who had always loved you. A love he'd denied you the truth to all your life, now left plain and clear in your very face. "There's no going back now." ((golden-kazekage

@golden-kazekage

  The harsh winds eroding the skin from their faces, stripping the oils from their hair. Gaara on his knees, panting from effort, the desert terrain around them a disarray of upturned cliffs and shifted dunes and deep potholes grooved into the earth. The last half of the afternoon a slate of black in his mind. There is blood on his hands, on his sandals. His father’s face: Beady eyes, wrinkled nose, frown like the jagged edges of a broken cup. Not angry. Just disappointed.

  The shing of a kunai past his eardrum, the heavy thockthockthock as a dozen more collide with a stream of gold erecting an arc around five-year-old’s shoulders. When he looks back he glimpses the flash of a mask in the night, then nothing but darkness. When he screams, the mask does, too. The sand filters back tinged gritty pink.

  Eyes he does not recognize beneath the white film of a Kazekage’s robe. Orders to attack squashed as he seeks his own retribution, his own revenge against the freak with lightning for hands, against concepts of humanity he possesses no context to understand. Who dares liken him to humanness? Where is his father? Where is his father?

  “Since your death, I have been supported by Kankuro, Temari, and my friends more than I could ever imagine possible. I have worked to overcome my past: What I did, and what you did to me - to us. We have gotten this far without you.”

  His voice is cold and flat as a brick of marble. His eyes wet, just barely, the sheen of a beetle’s shell.

  “I want to forgive you. But is that all? Do you feel nothing?”