A/N: Comments, even if
they're just a simple "You're awesome!" or something are very much
appreciated.
A History of Grief
by Pridefall
Demons knew the price of
power; were instilled with a small amount of it at birth and given a desperate,
psychotic need to acquire more and more of it throughout their lives until
there was nothing left for them to hoard to themselves except the ashes of the
fallen and the brief, fleeting moments in time that allowed them to stand tall,
and proud, and beautiful.
Shukaku remembers when he
was beautiful. Remembers in the darkness of the night, when the black-shelled
insects and lizards tip-toe across the earth and the moon hung over the world
like a great, luminescent tear in the universe, and burrows further and further
down into the cooling earth to think long and hard about they who thought
otherwise.
---
And this one smiled like
the sun, wandering the desert like a lowely sirocco across the sands while
innocently searching for something he was missing; and this one cried like a
wolf without her cub at the moon that did not care, finding something she would
never want to find again in the darkness and vanishing into the jaws of
unforgiving desert like a drop of water cast into the sun.
And this one had a laugh
like a warm breeze, soft and easy and pure, while this one had a fury like a
dark tempest, deep and black and foreboding, his words harsh like grinding
stones and his eyes shining with so much hatred that he--
"Give her back!"
Was taken, just like the
rest.
--
Power was a disgusting,
twisted thing. It corrupted everything it touched without qualm or compromise,
and demons craved it like the sweetest of all ambrosias -- treating those who
had it with equal amounts respect and envy while treating those who did not
have if as if they were toothless misers clutching forlornly at the first and
last piece of gold they ever unearthed from a vein that dried up too soon, too
late, for them.
These demons were consumed
first, allowed to swell up with as much power as they could handle before they
were split open and devoured like ripened fruit, their dreams and their desires
for greatness spilling out into the world like the innards of a carcass left
out too long in the sun.
---
And this one never saw it
coming, and this one stood, dumb-founded, as his hands broke and his chest
caved in seemingly of its own accord.
And this one laughed like a
mad child, and this one wept like a scorned lover, and this one stood tall in
defiance while the sands slithered up his legs and this one ran for his life,
screaming into the jaws of the inevitable. Each one sought to live their life
as they saw fit, and each one died, as they all did, eventually, because
everything was committed back to the earth, in time.
Shukaku is the earth.
---
Hierarchies amongst the
demons are enforced through millennia of murder. Crude, wholly tyrannical
empires are carved out from the land and built on the backs of the fallen, and
though humans were much the same -- screaming, dying, and bleeding that same
beautiful dark and thick hue -- they each tasted different from one other as
if, somehow, even though they looked the same on the outside they were all
different on the inside, and this…This bothered Shukaku.
Demons had no set form; no
gender or species that unified them under one banner. They were each unique in
their different interpretations of chaos and anarchy, so what made humans, so
rigid and static in the grand scheme of things, so special?
If you cut them both, did
they not bleed the same blood?
---
And this one weathered the
storm but faltered at the last moment, and this one had a solid plan but poorer
form, and this one tried to trick him into weakness and failed.
And this one thought suave
words and mortal tricks would prevail, and this one was hungry; so very hungry
as to think to challenge him, and when he won, she smiled a soft, sad smile and
said "Devour me, my love", and he did, from her feet to her skull, he
did, just as she would have wanted him to.
Yes, just as she would have
wanted to.
Everything comes back to
Earth, in time
--
Shukaku memories are like
an ever-flowing river. He can pick them apart easily, swimming through the
morass of the ages and moving from moment to moment like a silverfish cutting
through a stream, and this, he believes, gives him a certain amount of humanity
his brethern demons do not have.
Shukaku remembers things.
Shukaku memorizes
things.
He knows that which other
demons will never want to know; knows that which other demons will never come
to know, and he keeps these relics of remembrance sacred, because as demon he
knows the future better than he knows the past, and realized earlier than most
that all that has come to be was decided long, long ago.
---
And this one tasted of
fire, of sacrifices and sweat and ash and the things that separated men from
children and warriors from killers. He knew when to scream, knew when to fight
and when to run, and rallied his people against the monster that threatened their
homeland like any good hero would have in his place. They fought for years,
pushing each other back and forth across the desert until it came down to the
man, the demon, and the final stroke to end it all.
"For all of those
who have died by your hand, you die now, you monster!"
And Shukaku took the man's
head off at the jaw, because where heroes stupidly went for monster's heart,
monsters went for hero's neck and let history sort out the glorious
details.
There was no room for
anything else.
---
He is older than the earth
and the sun and stars, and all of the upstart demons who think they are more
powerful than he, but he is also tired. He has watched the ages come and
go like slowly tumbling rocks down a cliff-face; has seen the changing fetishes
of his kin and partaken in their politics; in their scheming and their
ever-changing whimsies. He has rhymed with them, he has danced with them, he
has butchered and eaten and proclaimed bloody, immortal fealty to them during
war while making love with them during peace, and now...
Now, he is old.
---
Everything back to the
earth, in time. Break down, and blossom.
---
Now, nothing makes sense,
and he digs down deeper into the earth, his muscles groaning and aching like
severed limbs, and Shukaku sleeps, and Shukaku forgets.
---
And this one, yes, this one
who once that looked at him with wide, innocent eyes before the ground opened
up beneath him and swallowed him whole, who now looked at him and expected him
to cower, this one he needed, but now something was different.
Now, now this one
was important, but he was not his and would never be his.
---
Gaara dreams, sometimes, of
things he does not understand. Of formless, dark things that whisper to
him in his sleep and claw at him when he is awake; of a hunger for…something
more than sand and death and blood, but when he wakes…When he sits up in
his bed, screaming out Naruto’s name as the heat of his orgasm causes Shukaku’s
sand to crystallize around him, he forgets of these things, and slowly falls
back to sleep again.
---
No, he would never be
his.
- Fin