Adult-FanFiction.org : Naruto

Rhythm & Bruise: Gaara's Story	By : Darkprism Category: Naruto > Yaoi - Male/Male Views: 1708 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto - neither characters nor story lines - and I make no money from these writings.

Chapter List
- 18
- 19
- 20
Burning, blackness, bile, and drowning became just another fight. Burbles filled Gaara's ears, he shrieked under the weight of water, and when he opened his eyes, he saw hundreds of bleeding angels in blooms of floating gossamer: all blind, all reaching, all grinning.
Gaara flailed and tried to get away. He didn't want to die -- he just wanted escape. Finally, definitely, ultimately, and cowardly escape, but Gaara willed himself toward darkness. He thought of the men he knew who came back from the other side, and the stories they told: a pattern, repeated and catalogued. He thought of peace and wondered why this wasn't easier. He always thought the Good Sleep would be like a blanket: something warm and tender that he would allow himself when he finally could take no more of cold and rough reality.
Instead Gaara found a contained inferno within the walls of the deep: a wail that wouldn't shut up, a pain that didn't ebb, a last frantic battle to overcome all odds. But Gaara wasn't sure he would win this round. He couldn't be effective on the surface, and that meant he suffered below.
Tears added to the gallons in the pool, and peace pushed like iron fists on Gaara's chest. When Gaara blinked again, everything was blue, black, and shimmering: desert mirage and far away miracles. He shut his eyes and something slam-wrapped around his middle and squeezed. Disorientation was the name of the final game, and Gaara couldn't work up a struggle. Pulled, tugged, shifted, and Gaara went limp in the arms of the biggest broken messenger who must have been sent from Gaara's personal hell. He knew it didn't make sense to hear wings flap--
They're all gone. Mere stumps.
--but he did; knew it to be a death knell even if it felt like salvation.
And then everything hurt.
Unrelenting force shoved through his center -- felt like it impaled him into bedrock -- and Gaara's body betrayed him as he gurgle-gagged on liquid heated to a simmer in his lungs, guts, and throat.
"Christ!"
Gaara blinked, tried to move, and he felt burdened by too much gravity. He coughed some more, groaning and going deaf with the sound.
"Goddammit… why…?"
The panting, angry words were spoken in a familiar voice, and Gaara made himself shift. This wasn't how it was supposed to go: Gaara was entirely conscious, more than enough aware to make him want to weep. He felt himself lifted, embraced, and pressed to a slick, heaving surface. His vision snapped focused like a rubber band, and he saw bicep, skin, ink, nipple. He kicked with his feet and heard the slow slosh of water -- he was on the edge of the pool in sodden clothing wrapped up in--
"Kiba?" Gaara attempted to say. It came out watery.
"The fuck were ya thinkin'?" Swaying motion like the ocean, and Gaara understood Kiba clung and rocked him. There were fingers in his hair, clutching at his head, and he felt stubble as Kiba tipped down to press lips to Gaara's cheek, throat, shoulder.
"No," said a voice that could have come from the high lord of hell, so rough and angry and final.
"Scared the fuck out of me, and if I hadn't been here, ya woulda--"
"NO." Gaara thrashed and dislodged himself from Kiba's grip. He slipped back into the heated water--
Solace, sanctuary… so why does it feel wrong to want it?
But hands caught his shirt and jeans. "Oh hell no ya don't, bitch," Kiba snarled, dragging a fighting Gaara onto the concrete around the pool.
"You don't understand." Gaara swore he screamed the words as he turned to crawl. Swore he shouted other things -- curses, condemnation, cracked cries. When he felt hands on his sides, Gaara rolled and aimed his feet at bare torso. Kiba grunted, twisted, and his naked ass hit ground. Stumbling upright, Gaara took a single step toward the house -- to find weapon, pills, glass, blades, something -- and Kiba grabbed Gaara's ankle.
"Fuck you," Kiba bellowed and yanked Gaara's leg out from under him. Gaara went down hard on knees and elbows, calling out and coughing up more water, bile, and God only knew. He snarled over one shoulder when a body tried to pin him down, and Gaara's mind shifted to red-black haze. Punch, kick, scrabble, claw, bite, and the two of them rolled away from the pool, knocked over a table, and Gaara screeched when the metal edge of a chair dug into his back. His head slammed onto pavement a second later, and he saw stars.
"Stop it!" Kiba screamed, his face an inch from Gaara's. His mouth was bleeding, his cheek was bruised, and he clamped Gaara's wrists to the ground with his knees.
"Nnah," Gaara gasped, pain slicing its way up his spine to register in his brain. "Kill you… kill me… don't understand… Get… get off of--"
"Gaara! Snap the fuck out of it!"
"I have to!" Gaara screeched, and if he couldn't move his arms, Gaara would use his legs. He jerked up a knee, and Kiba's eyes went wide in pained shock. Tailbone or balls, Gaara didn't know where he struck, but Kiba's slur of anger gave Gaara a second's reprieve from Kiba's hold. Gaara upset the Inuzuka's balance and began to slither away from the other man. Pavement bit, skin flayed, and a cold, rational voice told him the location of the nearest gun; gave him a picture of shooting Kiba and then himself and suggested that these actions would bring resolution.
Another voice--
Southern, sweet, tender-slow.
-- begged for Gaara to stop, to think, and to just--
"Motherfucker," Kiba roared, flipped Gaara onto his back, and in a slow-motion freeze-frame Gaara saw Kiba's fist rear back in the nanosecond before it connected to his jaw. Pain politely waited for a beat before engulfing his entire head.
"Bitch!" Gaara spat and tried to leverage a hit into Kiba's gut, but the Inuzuka deflected and smacked Gaara's arm to the ground.
"The hell is wrong with you?" Kiba garbled, body sliding as Gaara rolled.
"Let me go!”
"Ain't gonna fuckin' happen!" Kiba landed with full weight on Gaara's chest, making him suck wind, but still Gaara reached for purchase to claw away from… from…
What am I doing?
"Damned near killed myself gettin' here," Kiba babbled, words a rush as he continued his efforts to contain Gaara. "Tryin' to fuckin' get through to yer thick-ass self, and jus' when I thought you were listenin' fer a fuckin' -- cut that out!"
Kiba rammed a weak elbow into Gaara's ear to make him stop biting. The same elbow shoved Gaara's head back, and Gaara caught a crazy wrong-side-up view of the back door and house. Cat sat in a window, head cocked and curious.
Why am I fighting?
"Listen, sweetheart," Kiba demanded. "Ya ain't offin' yerself on my fuckin' watch, I don't give a shit how--"
"Wasn't trying to," Gaara rasped, frustrated that he couldn't explain, and coughing a cry when he realized that the part of himself he hated more in that instant was the one trying to get away -- not the one pinned and trapped.
I want him… I wanted him… before…
"Then what the hell were ya doin'? Gettin' a chlorine fix?"
One of Gaara's hands broke free, and he slapped at Kiba until his fist found a grip in Kiba's hair. The Inuzuka snarled, resituated, and bent Gaara's other wrist down until Gaara screeched in complaint. "No!" Gaara cried.
"Then… what…?" Kiba panted, and now he sounded like he did next to the water: aching and lost.
Gaara tossed his head side-to-side and then did it again, harder. The world rushed by in a blur of lights, stars, and Kiba's face. There was no time to sort anything out when Gaara worked so hard not to think, and it all felt so impossible. He didn't feel suicidal -- he felt worse: unhinged and gone, broken and splattered from a fifty story fall. He wanted to scream for help, die of shame that he couldn't fix anything and couldn't end himself, and the only thing within his grasp was--
Kiba.
--a fighting solution. Skin scraped, wet clothing ripped, and Kiba tussled with Gaara until they came to rest with Gaara halfway on one side: Kiba's fingers around Gaara's throat, his knee between Gaara's legs nearly crushing balls, and Kiba's hand holding Gaara's arm bent to the point of breaking.
"The hell?" Kiba bellowed.
"Making it stop," Gaara hissed.
"What?"
"I have to make… it… stop."
"Make what stop, baby?"
"The… the…" Gaara couldn't find words, couldn't move, couldn't call up strength. He sobbed a cry he hated himself for making and went lax under Kiba.
"Got ya, baby," Kiba whispered, instantly bending closer though his hold stayed steely. "Tell me, sweetheart. Just tell me?"
Gaara shut his eyes to hide from the pain and--
Love.
--pity in Kiba's voice. "Born wrong," Gaara said with numbed lips. "Killed Mother. Uncle burned. Father died. The angels come when I can't run or fix it -- can't stop it. Need drugs, can't do 'em, and there's nothing I can…Can't do anything, and I didn't kill the goddamned Dogs, and--"
"Okay, sweetheart… it's all okay…"
"It's never fucking okay!" Gaara screamed and echoed off the stucco. His neck cracked from the force of its turn, and Gaara forgot the next part of his angry litany when he saw the water's surface roil and steam behind them; saw things lift straight up into the air, emerging from the depths in sick heaps of wilting flesh and cloth. No eyes, no noses, only gaping maws for mouths, claws for hands, and the bone-broken wings beat hard to get closer. Blue-green mossy toes touched pavement; skimmed in a glide--
"Baby?" Kiba glanced at the pool. "What d'ya see?"
Gaara opened his mouth to yell -- curse the monsters back to hell, closets, and shadow; lecture illusions on their state of false existence -- but, inexplicably and to Gaara's utter horror, what escaped was no battle cry but a steady torrent of broken wails. "God… no… please, oh God… no..." Tears streamed down his face, and he weakly flailed, unable to look away. "Ki… Kiba…?"
"Oh…" Kiba said, and the single syllable came out wet. Kiba unpinned Gaara, lifted him.
"I can't do it anymore…" Gaara hiccoughed against Kiba's bare skin. "I… I… just want them to go away… oh for fuck all, make 'em go…"
"Okay, baby," Kiba answered, and he covered Gaara's eyes with one hand.
Gaara despaired to tell Kiba that it wouldn't work; the nightmare things of failures past loomed evermore near: so close, so very close. Years and years and nothing ever made them go away; nothing ever unmade the truth of Gaara's bad birth. He'd tried everything, nothing, and all points of interest in between. It didn't work, and nothing ever would, because no one could ever--
"Love you, Gaara," Kiba whispered, rocking, petting, holding, caressing. So real, so warm; a bonfire blaze in a barren tundra wasteland. Close enough to burn.
Safe… so safe…could he really be…?
"You… no…" Gaara tried to tell Kiba to stop, but quit when hope sparked as the shuffle of spirits unreal ceased to fill Gaara's ears. No wings. No approaching destruction.
Just silence and the sturdy rhythm of a solid heart.
"Love ya with everythin' I got and all I ever will be, sweetheart."
It's him.
"And ain't nothin' touchin' the man I love," Kiba said with steady conviction that made Gaara hold his breath and blink against Kiba's palm.
It was always him.
"Don't care what it takes, where we gotta go, what help I need to find, or what I gotta do, Gaara."
Shaking, weeping, and finally beaten, Gaara let himself get folded into Kiba's embrace, and the hand on his face shifted to press him into Kiba's chest and arm. "We got each other. Nothin' can touch us."
And Gaara felt electrified with the sudden shock of belief. It filled him up: a hungry, happy holy ghost.
"And all ya gotta do…"
Gaara waited and wanted without shame, hearing everything for the very first time.
"Is close yer eyes and hang on to me."
Gaara's arms flew around Kiba's neck: hugged him, tasted him, smelled him, and knew what was real.
"Good, baby. Good."
~*~
- 18
- 19
- 20
You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.You need to be logged in to leave a review for this story.
Report Story

Rhythm & Bruise: Gaara's Story