AN: This is a prologue to the coming Forsaken Desert story. An OC/Gaara friendship exceptionally slow (and oblivious) burner.

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Sute is a child of the desert at night, she dances with wild abandon when she can battle hidden from the blazing sun eschewing the light like a true ninja for secrets and silence. Pale blonde hair like bleached bone gleams in the shadows lit only by stars on a new moon's eve. Her skin is dark and tan, no more so than most in Suna but seems doubly striking against her palette of white gold hair and Suna tan eyes flecked in gold. She dresses in brown and white, for the heat and shifting weather. Covered because the wind storms that come up at times in the dessert can flay skin and muscle from bones while one still is alive. Blue would complement her. It would set off her colors and be beautiful, even Gaara can admit to that.

Yet it is deepest of crimson, the shade nearly a match for the carnage reflected in his tresses that she adorns herself with.

It is a blatant sign to all in Suna and it's outer laying territories.

Sute is claimed by Gaara.

There are times he's tempted to cover her in the rich color, to see her drenched in her own life but he always refrains. After all, her loyalty, her trust for all he has tried to prove he should never hold it..

It is his before anyone else.

Sute is the only thing Gaara can truly call his own, and so she lives. Some times he wonders why the other mortals they meet cannot view the world, and him, as she does.

She's called him a rabid beast before, flippantly as if stating the temperature but with that wry smile that is only his, calm in the absolute surety that if he wanted her dead she would be.

If so, she's his bone had been his response.

Her response was a laugh.

She lives another night because he allows it.

She lives another night because those who are foolish enough to try and strike at her, when she could not move swift enough to protect herself, bleed out from his sand coffin.

Should Sute die, it will be at his whim and no one elses.

That Sute takes comfort in that declaration confuses Gaara, but it pleases him as well.

Their friendship is not normal, not healthy.

But it keeps him sane.

Barely.