(no subject)
Fic #5: Now I Lay Me Down
Request: Naruto: Five times Gaara didn’t go to sleep and one time he did
Requested by: appending_doom
Length: 840
Rating: PG
Notes: Standard disclaimer about my having not seen Naruto in years, please to apply. I, uhm, did some research on Wikipedia. But mostly, I made shit up. Sorry if there are horrendous inaccuracies, ha ha. Ha.
I.
Gaara didn’t sleep the night he was born.
While most babies are alert and cry and fuss for a while and then drift off into the peaceful sleep of the newborn, Gaara did neither. He looked around with grave interest, but did not cry. He did not make a sound. And when the lights went out and everyone around him was resting, he stared at the ceiling, awake, silent.
It was as if, somehow, he knew.
II.
It was not uncommon for Gaara to go days without sleeping, or even weeks with nothing more than a brief, hour-long cat nap here and there. So even under normal circumstances, nobody thought it was strange for him to do so.
After Yashamaru died, Gaara didn’t sleep for two weeks straight. Not even the smallest nap. He barely even closed his eyes. The pain from the mark in his forehead faded in time, but the pain inside that he couldn’t understand no matter how he tried never did. And every time he started to drift off, he could feel Shukakku screaming inside him, pushing, expanding outward until he felt that his mind was going to explode.
III.
Recovering from his injuries after Suna’s failed takeover of Konoha was something that Gaara would have preferred to do back home. Being forced into the Konoha infirmary along with all the injured Konoha-nin was annoying. He would have rather licked his wounds in private.
Unfortunately, nobody could be spared to take the injured back, and too much else was going on. Gaara would have snuck out on his own if he thought that he could have managed it, but, well, there were a lot of other ninjas around. And it was probably better to avoid a fight, no matter what Shukaku wanted out of him. After all, the only reason his injuries were getting treated at all was because Naruto had, sort of, in his own way, vouched for him.
Gaara got the distinct impression that most of the other Konoha-nin would have been happy to see him rot.
Which was fine. He wouldn’t have expected anything else.
As he lay there staring out the window, he heard the scrape of a chair as Naruto plopped into it. “Can’t sleep?” he asked.
“Don’t sleep,” Gaara corrected.
There was a pause while Naruto seemed to be thinking about how to proceed with this. Then he shrugged, and, much to Gaara’s surprise, didn’t ask any questions. “I brought cards,” he said.
It was as good a way to pass the night as any.
IV.
The night Gaara became Kazekage was a rather interesting one, not the least of all because his siblings both thought he was somewhat insane. Well, that wasn’t saying much, since his siblings had always thought he was somewhat insane, and had been, in fact, perfectly correct.
Why Gaara would want to devote his life to protecting the villagers who had hated and feared and scorned him was something that neither Temari nor Kankuro got. That was okay with Gaara. He sort of liked being a mystery, truth told, so it was better if they didn’t always understand him.
So there was some sort of formal ceremony and Gaara resisted the urge to say something about his father’s unfortunate demise, and accepted the role and everything that came with it. He swore to protect the Suna village until his dying breath, regardless of how Shukaku wanted it.
He lay in bed and stared at the ceiling all night long, wondering if he truly was insane, wondering if he would be able to tell if he was.
V.
Gaara knew that he should be relieved that Shukakku had finally been taken out of him. He was relieved, actually. It was just that the relief was tangled up with a hundred other emotions as well - fear that he wouldn’t be able to protect Suna, anger at himself for having been caught, guilt over the deaths and injuries that had resulted.
Still, he thought, at least he would finally be able to get a good night’s sleep.
He lay and stared at the ceiling all night long, not sure whether it was out of habit or out of mental turmoil, unable to sleep at all.
VI.
But he did sleep the next night.
Naruto, recovered from his injuries, had been making a pest of himself all day. Gaara finally caught up with him and told him that if he didn’t behave himself, he would be forced to do something extremely nasty to him. Naruto, of course, wanted details on this theoretical nasty happening. But mostly he just wanted to talk. He was Naruto, he was triumphant, and he sat across from Gaara and slurped ramen and noisily bragged about how awesome he had been over the past few weeks and how strong he was now and how his dream of being the Hokage was now only inches away -
And somewhere in the middle of it all, Gaara leaned back in his chair, closed his eyes, and slept.