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I used to go out in the brush sometimes,
So far out there no one could hear me,
And just burn.
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Tomorrow, Sasuke was going to kill Uchiha Itachi.
They’d set up camp near the Uchiha hideout. Their destination was about an hour’s journey away to their West. From his position, Gaara could make out the towering conical structure, so old and derelict it looked almost swallowed by the overgrowth, the setting sun burning fireball-brilliant rays on pink-orange grass.
The Mist swordman and the sensor girl kept up their bickering, but it was more muted than usual. They were tense because Gaara was tense. Sometimes, the sensor girl would cast surreptitious, worried looks at Sasuke. Gaara wanted to kill her for looking. Just a little. Just an idle, fleeting, familiar thought.
Sasuke himself seemed perfectly calm. Or as calm as someone coming close to avenging their brutally murdered clan could be. Gaara thought if it had been himself, he’d be much more openly murderous about it, but perhaps it was because Sasuke had had years and years to stew on that hatred, so that by then it was a cold and condensed thing, the leaden core of a dead star, rather than the kind of hot-white anger always on a precipice of boiling over that Gaara always had.
Looking back, the agitation most likely began when he had to pull a battered, beaten Sasuke from the mouth of the giant snake. He had felt a sensation he had never felt before: A freezing coldness travelling up and down his spine, as if he’d been dumped in ice water.
He hadn’t realized he had stopped breathing until Sasuke opened his eyes, and all the air rushed back into his lungs, making his vision swim and his head feel like a hot air balloon. Only then had he felt eyes on him, both the sensor girl and the Mist swordman sneaking unreadable looks. He was too winded to care, though, so he had snapped at them to bring Sasuke somewhere so he could heal and made a stretcher out of sand when he realized the swordman was trying to carry Sasuke.
Later that night, at the inn, Gaara stood next to Sasuke’s window, backlit by the weak light of the new moon. Sandstorm whipped in his mind and in his hand, Shukaku thrashed inside him. His skin felt like it would crack any second, shedding away Gaara the person, leaving only Shukaku, the monster.
Sasuke opened his eyes.
Gaara’s voice pulled sharp and taunt, needle-thin in the moonlight, “You know, I had a family once, too.”
At the mere recall of that memory, more sand whipped around him, rattling the wooden frames of the room. “My father was an asshole, as he was, but I had an uncle, too. He was nice and kind, and he would bandage my wounds after the fights.”
Quick footsteps were thumping in their direction. The sand raged. Gaara stepped in the direction of Sasuke’s prone form, one step, then two, then three. He kneeled down next to him. “He told me the pains of the flesh were easy. It was the pain here,” he jammed a finger at his heart, “that was the hardest to cure. That it could only be cured by love.”
Sasuke arched an eyebrow, “And then?”
Gaara’s hand was on Sasuke’s throat, “Then he tried to kill me. His last words were to tell me to die.”
His thumb smoothed over the skin on Sasuke’s neck, unnaturally pale and soft despite him being a ninja, and felt for the pulse jumping beneath. He imagined blood-red liquid flowing under his finger and pressed down where the pulse was the strongest, felt its liveliness struggle against him. Sasuke’s breath quickened, and Gaara could tell he was fighting not to start coughing.
“From then on, I swore to myself that I’d love only myself, and fight only for myself. If all other people exist to magnify that love, then there is no more splendid universe than this one.” He tightened his grip. He closed his hand over soft flesh and hard bones, feeling them resist the force of his hands. “One day, you're going to die anyway. If I kill you, you will become part of that love, too. Better die under my hands than Uchiha Itachi’s.”
Someone managed to pry open the sliding door to the room. It was the sensor girl, and she let out a horrified yell at the scene. Before Gaara could kill her, Sasuke wheezed out. “Karin, Suigetsu, go.”
“But-”
“I said go. I’ll be fine.”
“Sasuke, he’s trying to kill you!”
“And you idiots think I can’t defend myself? Go before you get killed!” Sasuke’s eyes started to bleed red.
They reluctantly left, but not before the Mist swordman turned around and said, with equal amounts of good intention and delusion, “If you kill him, I’m coming for you, sand monster.”
Gaara didn't bother to spare him a single glance.
For a moment, all the sounds left in the room were the rattling of wood and whip-crack of sandstorm. Sasuke had looked at him, kept looking at him, then reached out with shaky hands to catch a handful of sand. He seemed tense, all his muscles coiled and pulled taut, ready for violence. But he didn't move. The grains lay dormant in his hand, like they weren’t under Gaara’s control anymore. Gaara’s grip on Sasuke slackened unwittingly.
"Why me?"
Silence.
Sasuke looked at the sand in his hand, then at him again, “You know, you were right. We have the same eyes. The eyes of vengeance. No one else in the world could understand these eyes, just us.”
He reached out to pull at Gaara’s neckline, down, down, down, until he could feel Sasuke’s breath on his face. Then, he surged up to do the unthinkable - he dropped a kiss in the middle of Gaara’s forehead.
Gaara’s mind went static, the world blurred away in blinding white.
All he felt was the sensations of Sasuke’s kisses on his skin, strangely warm despite coming from such a cold person - butterfly kisses on his brows, the apples of his cheeks, the tip of his nose, the corner of his mouth, and then, finally, on the 愛 letter on his forehead.
“Tell you what, let’s make a deal,” Sasuke murmured, breath still ghosting on his forehead. Gaara’s face tingled; it felt like he was on fire, “Stay out of my revenge, and once I’m done, my life will be yours to take. You can do whatever you want with it. How about that?”
Gaara could feel his hands shaking. Under the pale moonlight, Sasuke’s pupils were blown wide, so black it was impossible to separate the pupil from the iris. He felt helpless, sucked into that void, falling and falling and falling.
This was too risky. There were too many variables. And why did Sasuke think Gaara would even want-
He looked into Sasuke’s eyes again. Eyes like his, eyes so dark with hatred and pain and betrayal; a raging storm no other could even fathom the bruises it made inside their bodies. Just them. Moonlight danced in black pupils like rippling waves. If these eyes ever close for good, he won’t ever find them again.
He was so lonely. He was so, so tired of being lonely. This was the first time in a long time that he felt he wasn’t alone in that loneliness.
“I can’t go back anymore, and neither can you, Gaara.” Sasuke’s voice was soft but certain in the stillness of the room. The raging sand had ceased. Pieces of broken furniture littered the floor. Amidst the eye of Gaara’s destructive storm, Sasuke had chained Gaara to him with four simple words. “It’s just us now.”
And so, with his head hung and all the fight drained out of him, all Gaara could breathe out was:
“You’d better keep your words, Uchiha Sasuke.”
Then he bent down, and bit at Sasuke's lips until he drew blood.
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And so, tomorrow, Sasuke was going to kill Itachi Uchiha. For some strange reason, he decided that night was just the right time to wash his hair in the nearby stream.
Gaara watched him, transfixed. Sasuke had set aside both his outer robe and his inner shirt, so he was naked from the waist up. He ducked his head over the shoreline and splashed water into his hair, his upper body curved into an arc, lean muscles on his neck and shoulders pulled taut. Droplets of water trailed glimmering lines from his hair down his neck, pooled at the dip of his collarbones.
Sasuke reached for the shampoo bottle and started lathering it all over his hair. His hands made steady, rhythmic movements, back and forth to massage the shampoo into the hair, then rougher scrubbing to get rid of all the dirt and dandruff.
Gaara came to sit next to him. “Want some help?”
Sasuke spared him a look. “No.”
He continued his scrubbing. Cloudy foam bubbled formed on his hair, fell on his hands, his shoulders. Gaara imagined they’d pop if he touched them.
Sasuke sighed. “Stop gawking. Go away.”
Gaara shrugged. “You can’t make me.”
Sasuke might have scowled at him - it was hard to see properly because of the angle - but he didn’t say anything else. He reached for a water dipper and started rinsing the bubbles out. Golden sunlight glittered in his hair like stars.
After rinsing, Sasuke washed his hair a second time - he always washed his hair twice, to make sure it’s perfectly clean. It’s a childhood habit, Sasuke had let it slip one day, one of the few precious pieces of personal information that Sasuke ever let him, them, know about his foggy past before their journey together. That was, of course, except for the greatest tragedies of his life that everyone knew of. If Gaara wanted to be cruel to Sasuke, he wouldn’t hesitate to twist the knife into the heart of that irony whenever he felt like it, but Gaara had stopped wanting to be cruel to Sasuke for a while now.
When Sasuke was done, blue hour had settled over them, hazy and ephemeral. They made their way back to where the other two had started a fire, the crackling embers lending some warmth to the creeping chill. Gaara took out a towel, and Sasuke, sitting cross-legged, tilted his head backwards.
The Mist swordman and the sensor girl seemed to have finished dinner and were curled up on two different far sides from the fire, already either dozing off or pretending to sleep.
Gaara bent down to start towel-drying Sasuke’s dripping wet hair. Sasuke’s hair wasn’t soft, it felt exactly as it looked: Coarse and thick and wild. The more time he spent with Sasuke, the more he became fascinated by how it seemed to have a mind of its own, sticking in whatever physically unnatural or downright impossible directions as it pleased. This, too, screamed Sasuke: Of course, his hair would be as stubborn and bullheaded as its owner.
He started going through what by then were familiar motions: Starting from the scalp, slowly working his way down the ends to squeeze out the excess water. Repeat that twice or thrice, then alternate between blotting and rubbing the hair. Divide the hair into smaller sections, then repeat.
This was something Sasuke asked him to do when he was bedridden after the fight with Deidara - he was too tired to do it himself then, and had asked Gaara out of a moment of weakness and annoyance. Then Sasuke had gotten better, but they didn’t stop.
The moon hung low over the soft skyline. From his position, Gaara could see moonlight gleaming off the ivory-white juncture of Sasuke’s neck. Impulsively, Gaara reached over to touch it, feeling for jumping pulses underneath paper-thin skin.
Sasuke tried to slap his hand away, but he held on tighter. Not touching, but gripping.
“You can’t die tomorrow.” He told the top of Sasuke’s head. “You have to keep your words.”
Hushed silence. Gaara went back to towel-drying Sasuke’s hair. They were coming loose now, tiny locks of hair falling all over the palm of his hand. Sasuke’s head was still slightly tilted, baring his neck to Gaara. Sasuke was the first one ever to bare anything vulnerable to Gaara.
“I meant it,” Gaara said again, hands still at work. “You can’t die tomorrow. I won’t allow it. If you want to die so much, I might as well kill you right here.”
Sasuke just snorted this time, the threat not stirring him even a little. “Your temerity is astonishing.”
Gaara was nearly done towel-drying his hair when Sasuke spoke again, “I don’t intend to die. But if I do,” Gaara opened his mouth, “let me finish. If I do, try to retrieve my body and bring it back to Konoha. Give my eyes to a boy named Uzumaki Naruto, you might remember the bumbling idiot in my team from the chuunin exam. He would help you. It’d be,” he trailed off, “think of it as my last gift to you both.”
Gaara gave Sasuke’s hair one last rub, then stood up. “I’d prefer the entirety of you rather than just your eyes.”
This time, Sasuke just gave him a laugh.