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.












