Several lifetimes later…

.x.x.x.

All the world, for as far as he could see, was wind and sand and unrelenting fury. Gaara stood at the center of a whirling sandstorm, but untouched by its screaming presence. He knew it should hurt, knew the sand should sting his flesh and scour it raw, but he felt nothing. The desert sun was high above him, searing down at the sandy world, but Gaara could not feel that either. All he felt was cold.

Gaara moved forward, and the sand swept along with him, battering around him as though to drive him back, but feinting away at the last moment, never touching. The sandstorm cloaked his world, cocooning him, protecting him and holding him prisoner. Still Gaara pressed forward, striving for the desert beyond him, a barren world of which he caught only glimpses. There were bodies laid out on the golden hills of the desert, but they were mercurial, barely more than shades, and they shimmered away like a teasing mirage within moments of being sighted. Though Gaara could never explain it, it felt as though somehow… he'd been forgiven for something.

And then the sand fell slowly away, and swept the desert away with it. In the mutable nature of this place, Gaara found himself elsewhere. No longer soft desert sand beneath his feet, but smooth hardwood floor, well scuffed by sneakers. Bright crepe streamers in school colors did little to disguise the basketball hoops, and clusters of matching balloons clumped around the ceiling. Gaara walked through the gym slowly, stepping around the folding chairs and tables grouped around the edges of the room. In the center of it all was a space clear of everything, and Gaara stood there, watching colored lights spin lazily over the silent tableau.

He knew the exact moment when he was no longer alone. Gaara turned slowly, to meet the one that had come to join him. Watching Gaara silently, he stood there, elegant and ethereal. His hair was long and unbound, the color of dark chocolate. His skin, in contrast, was pale, fragile-seeming. And his eyes were some indeterminate color, sometimes a pale lavender, sometimes silver, a shifting spectrum of icy colors. Despite the icy gaze, Gaara felt some of the coldness inside of himself give way to tentative warmth.

He smiled at Gaara, and spoke, though Gaara could not perceive the words. He held out his hand to Gaara, and Gaara took it with no hesitation. There was no music, and yet Gaara hardly noticed its lack, as the two of them drew into a slow dance. And then…

.x.x.x.

The dream ended there, as it always did. Gaara became aware of the musical chime of the alarm clock. That tone had been specifically designed to draw a person out of sleep gently, without startling them awake. Gaara smacked the silence button with force anyway, and the clock made a gentle, almost apologetic chirp of acknowledgement before retracting back into the wall. The sensors detected his waking patterns, and the lighting in the room rose accordingly.

And so another day began with the dream, as it always had. It was a peculiar sort of dream, the stuff of hardy imagination, for Gaara had never seen either a desert or a gymnasium in person before in his life, only depicted images in the holo-vids his siblings always watched. And he had certainly never met him, the man of his dream. And yet the visions persisted.

Gaara sat up, glancing to the computer console fitted flush into the wall at his right. A small green light blinked among its nest of gadgetry; the DreamCam 450 had been recording through the night, and Gaara had no doubt it had already compiled, labeled, and filed away the footage of that night's dream with all the others. Gaara felt no need to check it; the dreams were all the same. Though considered an anomaly by the nature of the human mind to dream the exact same thing night after night, Gaara took a measure of comfort from its unusual consistency.

Sometimes he felt the dream might be the only worthwhile thing in his life.

He reached for the computer console, and its sensors detected the movement. Automatically, the slim keyboard and control panel slid out from its compartment, positioning in front of him for ease of access. Gaara typed in his password, a few quick override codes, and a command to erase all of that week's recordings from the DreamCam.

He didn't think his most recent team of analysts would be able to decipher the dream any better than the last ones had, but still, Gaara had long preferred to keep the dream private. Temari would scold him for deleting the footage, but even she would be unable to decrypt his programs and recover the erased data. He didn't care; the psych-analysts had no right to go poking through his mind, even if it was only a recording.

They would be polite and professional about it, even though Gaara knew he frustrated them with his endless resistance to their studies. He was a fascinating character study from a scientific standpoint, but Gaara had a severe aversion to becoming someone's experiment. And for the moment, there was nothing they could do about it.

Like most people, Gaara had gone through the series of vaccinations and brain scans required for children, in order to assure they would grow up into healthy, productive members of society. Gaara was told these scans could pick up ninety-nine-point-seven percent of the chemical imbalances and brain abnormalities that led to or indicated mental disorders; Gaara had none of the typical markers. According to his medical report, encoded along with all of his other data in the microchip embedded in his wrist, Gaara was in perfect mental as well as physical health.

And so as excited as the psych-analysts would be to lock him in a room, reduce him to his basic components and figure out just why he fooled all of their high-tech equipment into thinking he was normal, current law insisted Gaara was to be left alone unless his disorder was something they could quantify.

Or unless he killed someone.

"And that," whispered a dark, wickedly gleeful voice in his mind, "is only a matter of time."

Gaara grit his teeth and pretended not to hear it. So the voice was awake as well. A voice that, as far as Gaara could tell, was the only symptom of this strange affliction of his, the one undetectable by the most advanced of medical scans. A voice that delighted in the pain and misery of others; more specifically, in causing the pain and misery of others. A voice that called itself "Shukaku."

"…'affliction,'" Shukaku mockingly quoted. "Is that all I am to you? I'm hurt, Gaara, really hurt. Here I thought we meant so much more to one another…"

"You know exactly what you mean to me," Gaara muttered, and regretted speaking immediately; he tried very hard not to acknowledge the voice in any way, ever. Somehow, Shukaku always managed to goad a response from him, anyway.

"You know you can't ignore me, Gaara," the voice continued, in a tone suggesting that Gaara was being hopelessly obtuse for even trying.

The voice was right, of course, and that made it so much worse. Gaara couldn't ignore Shukaku. Perhaps it was just that his will power wasn't strong enough. Or maybe it was more than that; maybe the very nature of his mental disorder prevented him from resisting the insistence of the voice it had created. Gaara didn't know, and if he were being honest with himself (which he tried to do as little as possible) he didn't really care. It didn't matter if it was a personal weakness or something worse that led to his inevitable breakdowns. He couldn't stop them either way. And so things just got worse…

The first time, everyone assumed it was an accident. Gaara had only been five years old, and couldn't possibly have known that mixing the chemical cleansers he'd found under the sink would produce a potentially deadly gas. Luckily the life support and environmental functions of their home had detected the gas and sounded the alarm before anyone suffered irreparable respiratory damage. Gaara had been scolded thoroughly for playing with the cleaners, the child-locks were upgraded on the cupboard, and that was that. Except that hadn't been that…

The second incident could still have been an accident, but it made everyone a little uneasy. Gaara was only six, after all, and he really shouldn't know where the brake line on the car was, much less how to cut it. And it could have just been coincidence that the alarm, the one that should have gone off when the car's optimal functions were compromised, had been disabled. It was a good thing all vehicles were built with extra safety features for the unlikely event that the driver wrapped the car around a tree…

But by the third time, when Gaara was seven, it was no longer possible to make excuses for his behavior. No one knew where Gaara had gotten a hold of the tazer, or how he'd managed to sneak it past the school's security scanners. What everyone did know was that a mechanism that had been designed to deliver enough voltage to disable a fully-grown man was not meant to be used, repeatedly, on a six-year-old classmate. Gaara never did find out if the boy came out of his coma.

That was the first time his family had packed up and moved. But not the last.

Because everywhere they moved to, Shukaku came with. And though the voice grumbled quite a bit over how everything in this day and age had so many damned safety protocols to prevent injury, always Shukaku found some way around those protections, and someone would get hurt. There were fires, and explosions, and electrocutions, and a few near-asphyxiations. Critical injuries, though no deaths by some miracle. But Shukaku kept hoping. And kept trying.

And so Gaara's family kept moving. Always one step ahead of those that would see Gaara punished for the havoc he wrought.

Sometimes he wished they would just catch up already.

They'd just moved to this new town at the end of the summer. Gaara had a whole new team of psych-analysts to study his every move and make wildly overblown diagnosis based on whether he chose Cheerios or Pop Tarts for breakfast. Temari had made her obligatory, "And this time we'll start over right," speech, doing her best to put on an optimistic front even though she wouldn't even unpack her suitcase for the first two months in their new house. Kankuro, as usual, spent as much time as he could plugged into his video-game system, preferring to give his mind up to computerized alternate realities than face the fact that Gaara was his brother. And Gaara… was but a mere hour away from his first day in yet another new school.

.x.x.x.

Not that there was anything really new about it, Gaara reflected as he pushed his way though the overcrowded halls of the school. All the schools he'd ever been to looked the same. Not just similar; exactly the same. They had, of course, all been built from the exact same plans, all up to the proper codes and compliant with the Educational Facility Requirements. After all, it was important that no building in which children spent their developmental years portray any hint of character, personality, or décor that could in some way be detrimental or influencing to their tender developing minds.

All Gaara knew was that it was really damned weird to walk down the exact same hallway in seven different cities. You shouldn't pull that kind of shit on a crazy person.

At least the faces were different, even if their attitude toward Gaara never changed, no matter how many times he moved. He could see it, as he walked toward his assigned locker. He was the new face in the crowd, but everyone's eyes scanned past him, hardly even noting his brief occupation in their line of sight. They had their own friends, their own pre-established lives, their own plans for the future. Gaara had none of that.

"Hey," Shukaku said. "At least you've got me."

"You're not what I'd call 'fair compensation'," Gaara pointed out, once more slipping in his eternal devotion to ignoring the voice in his head.

"I'm worth more than you know," the voice taunted back. "Who else do you know with my encyclopedic knowledge of every method to kill a person known to man? There have been evil dictators all throughout history that would have killed for half of what I know."

"Wouldn't that have kind of defeated the purpose?" Gaara wondered.

Shukaku didn't get it. "Huh?"

"If they would have killed in order to learn how to kill- oh, never mind. Why am I even talking to you?"

"Face it; you may hate me, but I'm the closest thing to a friend you have," Shukaku said proudly.

Gaara groaned. "I should have been smothered at birth."

He'd said that out loud, earning a few bizarre looks from the other students moving through the hall around him. He ignored them. His first period class out to be right up here on the left…

Intent on finding their way to their own class, another student brushed past Gaara, heading toward one of the side halls. Gaara wouldn't have spared him any more thought than he would to anyone else, except there had been something about him. Gaara turned to look…

… and froze in his tracks.

It wasn't any more than a glimpse, and Gaara could hardly be sure he really saw it, if he didn't know those features so very well. Hair unbound, the color of dark chocolate. Pale skin, in stunning contrast. And eyes of indeterminate color, sometimes pale lavender, sometimes silver.

Gaara stood in the middle of the hall, heedless of any others around him, staring at the point where the man of his dreams had disappeared into the crowd.

"Shukaku?" Gaara asked at last, addressing the voice in his head voluntarily for the first time in his life. "Is it just me, or do you get the feeling that we've… done all of this sometime before?"

"It's just you," Shukaku assured him blithely. "You're probably just imagining things."

.x.x.x.

It is the nature of insanity to repeat the same actions, and expect to get different results.

The End.