Serpent

Baki and his team were out in the Empty Quarter, the four sets of footprints stretching back into the haze on the horizon, red-gold sand dunes sculpted by the wind.

Gaara was ahead of them, small and frail and utterly alone, while the rest of them trudged after him with wary eyes.

Kankuro glanced up from where he was tinkering with Karasu- his new puppet- and stopped, the bottom dropping out of his stomach,

"W-what is Gaara doing?" His older sister stopped beside him, her face pale, hand tangling with his, sweaty fingers sliding against his palm. Baki caught up,

"Hey, brats, get mo-" and then was quiet like them, staring at this seven-year-old with the mind of a desert jackal. Gaara stood in the shadow of a dune, gazing down at a mating ball of rattlesnakes that writhed at his feet.

A whip of sand lashed out, serpent blood splattering against his lips, staining them red. Two halves of a snake flew towards them, the dying snake writhing still, fangs gaping as it sailed over their heads and landed.

Gaara knelt and thrust his hands into the ball, and none of them were brave enough to tell him 'no'. The serpents seemed to recognize this desert, their home, in human form, and coiled their way up his skinny, pale, childish arms to wrap around his neck like some sick version of jewelry.

Snake tongues flickered from poison mouths to kiss his face, his neck, his hands, and Baki realized that this was what Gaara had become, that the snakes of the desert who cared for nothing but themselves were what he looked to for love.

Gaara turned to them, hair like the blood of a serpent twisting in the wind, and Baki understood with terror in his heart that Gaara had become the desert's psychopathic god.

Package

The package arrived on every first day of the month, and it seemed to Temari that those packages were all that her youngest brother looked forward to anymore.

Gaara materialized in a swirl of sand in their living room, the plainly wrapped box clutched in his hands. He glanced over Temari and Kankuro, the two of them frozen on the couch with a pint of chocolate-chip cookie dough ice cream between them, and turned his back on them, silent, as he had been ever since his defeat in the Chuunin Exams. Kankuro spoke first, his spoon dribbling melted ice cream onto his hand.

"Hey, Gaara, what's in the box?" The terrible, tired gaze passed over them both, measuring, and Gaara slit the wrapping with his fingernail and opened the expensive wooden container with reverent hands. Temari pushed herself off the couch, dragging Kankuro with her- this was the first time Gaara had done anything for them in a month, the first time he had been in their presence for longer than a minute in three months, so if Kankuro fucked this up she was never speaking to him again- and looked into the box.

On a black velvet surface, a long hair shone. It was nearly a foot in length, burnished ruby-red in color, shining with an unholy gleam like fire beneath the earth's surface. She could feel Kankuro's hands itching to touch it, his love for shiny things rearing up again. She smacked his hand silently.

"What is it?" Gaara blinked, drawn out of some deep reverie, and finally, finally answered in a voice made hoarse by three months of silence,

"It's a hair from the Kyuubi's tails."

"What do you want that for?" Gaara looked back down at the hair with an expression mingling hatred and yearning, the look of an addict. "It- It makes things silent. Naruto sends me one every month. I braid each new one into the bracelet I'm making. When I have one from each of the Kyuubi's tails, the bracelet will finally work."

"What do you mean, it makes things silent?" Temari was surprised by how sharp her voice sounded, but Gaara sounded so worn that this needed attention. Pale eyes flicked up, pinned her in place.

"I have never known silence since I was born. Every minute of my life, I am not alone in my head. Every second, Shukaku whispers."

The box snapped shut, making her and Kankuro both jump. Gaara stared at both of them for a long, silent moment.

"Are you pleased that you know?"

Temari, numb with the knowledge of how long her brother had suffered, of the secret stories Shukaku had told him, could only shake her head.

Lost

Temari lay in the shadow of a rock outcropping on the borders of Suna, peering out over the dunes with her fan heavy on her back. The sun was setting, and the dunes were becoming purple as dusk came on ever faster. She took a drink from her water bottle and wiped her forehead with the back of her wrist.

"Damn envoys; if they got lost in the canyons, I'm not going to rescue them," she muttered to herself, screwing the top back on the bottle and slipping it into her belt. The biting heat was gone, swallowed up in the oncoming night, and for these few hours, the desert was peaceful.

She shivered, feeling the hairs rise on the back of her neck, and fought down the instinctive urge to flee from what was behind her. Turning over, she met pale eyes and a mouth set in a flat, blank line.

"H- hey, Gaara." Her brother- her brother- stepped closer. It was all she could do not to scramble away, even though she knew that whatever she did would do nothing in the face of Gaara. Sand trickled up her legs with soft hisses, slipping through the holes in her mesh to rub against her skin.

"Temari." His voice was too deep, too quiet, too sad, to be what he was, to do what he did. She didn't move, her throat almost swollen shut with fear. The iron taste of fear filled her mouth. Gaara knelt, still moving with that damnable slowness, and studied her for a long minute.

For a moment, with the sun behind him, outlining his body and his hair with purple-bronze light, he was beautiful. Beautiful even in the face of the demon that had inhabited him, the demon that was gone now. He reached out and touched her face, fingers raspy with sand.

"Ga-" she stopped short as the fingers moved, curiously impersonal, down her neck, tracing the line of her artery, and came to a stop just above her breasts. She swallowed.

"A girl tried to kiss me, Temari." Hysterical laughter bubbled in her throat, confronted with this idiotically stupid thing, her brother who had never received a loving touch in his life suddenly being fawned over by all the girls in the village.

"The sand repelled her. She was lucky she wasn't permanently damaged." And oh god, those fingers were moving again, curving to cup her breast in one deceptively slender hand.

"She talked too much." His hand flexed. Electricity sparked through her body, and it was wrong, so wrong, but this was Gaara, the avatar of the desert, wild and tragic and pitiless, and there was no one on the earth that could truly say 'no' to Gaara, least of all her, because she had failed him so many times.

"I realized that none of them want me for me. They don't understand what I am." He leaned closer, until she could see the fine red dusting of eyelashes against the darkness of his eyes.

"You do. Naruto and-" a pause, then, for this old wound, "Yashamaru told me love heals all wounds, even those of the heart. Will you heal mine?"

She breathed out a silent 'yes.' Gaara's expression didn't change, but the clever fingers left and he leaned forward and suddenly there were lips on hers, and she was kissing back, and it was terribly wrong, but when had Gaara- hell, even she, the best kunoichi of Suna- given a fuck about morals, because this kiss was so terribly good.

They separated at last, and she opened her eyes to see Gaara studying her again, his eyes no warmer than before. He licked his lips, pink tongue darting out to catch the last taste of her, and said,

"I will get the envoy. Go home." She stood on shaky legs, fan rattling on her back, and nearly didn't catch the murmur of his voice,

"Wait for me whenever darkness falls."

Tell Me

Kankuro hardly ever gets truly angry; sure, he gets pissy, especially when confronted by Gaara's total strangeness, how alien and remote he is from all human thoughts and ways. Anger is something saved for later, in the bedroom.

Because he's angry at Temari for letting this happen, and he's angry at Gaara for needing it- even though it (whatever 'it' is) is so much better a way to feel alive than killing random people with a flick of his fingers- but most of all he's angry at himself for wanting it, for never feeling as safe as he does in Temari's bed with the green covers and weird stains.

Gaara has never been human- never since the day Kankuro looked up from his breakfast and saw his little brother standing in the doorway with blood dripping from a new symbol on his forehead and realized that it was too late, too late, too late, too late to pull him from the shadows- but in bed Kankuro allows himself to think that Gaara was once something near human.

Because when Temari drapes herself over his back and kisses his throat while he slams himself into Gaara, nails raking over sand armor in another confirmation that he sleeps with a demon, he mutters against the darkness,

"Tell me tell me tell me-"

(that my brother is human, that my sister isn't as fucked up and psychopathic in the head as I know she must be, that I'm not what the Kazekage said I am)

And Gaara's back arches and a howl that carries the rumbling of sand in it tears from his throat in a sound not fit for human ears.

Claim

Gaara sits at his desk, ink spattering the tips of his fingers. Temari glances at them, swallows, remembering- fingers twisting inside her, knife-like with their knowing and the pain/pleasure they bring- before she looks away, leaning against the wall. Kankuro is across the room, slouched in an armchair, staring at a schematic for a new puppet, but she knows that he is seeing none of it, his mind occupied with reliving the feel of sand whispering across skin like the breath of the dead. Kankuro is the one she can call her brother, the one whose mind she knows, whose pain she feels.

Unlike Gaara. The pen scratches across another sheet of paper, the sound loud in the silence of the office, before the sound ceases. She dares to sneak another glance. Gaara is gazing at her, his eyes inscrutable, blank, devoid of everything. The side of her mouth quivers in a nervous smile.

Gaara stands with a rasp of starched cloth, luminous in the darkness of the office, and crosses to her, pins her to the wall with his hands on either side of her head, venom-green eyes boring into her. She sees Kankuro tense over Gaara's shoulder, knows that he is remembering Gaara's appearance in his bedroom, the way Gaara coerced him into fucking him, skin against skin and breath mingling with breath.

"Kankuro." Gaara's breath- it smells of blood, still, even after all these years- shudders against her face. "Temari." His hand cups her cheek, and she realizes with a start that it is bare, free of sand, free of barriers, for the first time.

"Both of you," something old and feral gleams in his eyes as he almost snarls the next words, "are mine." A hot mouth, burning and dry like dust borne on the wind, latches onto her neck. Her knees turn to water, fingers clenching in his robes, but she retains just enough of her sanity to think,

'We've always been yours, we're nothing without you, you wind, you devil, our God.'

Her nails dig into his shoulders, leaving half-moons of red, Gaara's tongue scribbling archaic designs on her skin. Gloved hands rest on top of hers, and she opens her eyes to see Kankuro staring at her, before he leans forward, pressing Gaara's lean, lithe form into her. She turns her head blindly and they are kissing, tongues sliding, curling around each other, the kiss bitter with the knowledge that they are willing slaves to their brother's insanity, that his whim is their command.

They break apart, Kankuro's paint smeared, hood askew and brown hair falling down in haphazard tufts. Gaara is watching them both from between their bodies, the arch of a brow showing that he is pleased.

"Both of you, my room, at one." Temari lets her head fall back against the wall, assenting.

Because they are all he has, and the guilt that they feel for his suffering is enough.

Because their tiny, fucked-up family is all that there is.