.:You and Me:.

Chapter 1:
A Memory Glance



NOTE: THIS IS NOT A YAOI FIC. IT IS A FRIENDSHIP FIC.

*

Loneliness is a silence of agony.
Only friendship can fill it with joy.

*

It truly was remarkable how kindred spirits found each other—even if the invisible threads that bound them were formed from the worst of life's uncharted abyss of experiences. It is therefore no surprise that when Gaara saw him the young Kazekage froze in his tracks and stared as if witnessing a scene from a dream so long past yet so acute in emotion to his being. Beside him, siblings Kankuro and Temari backtracked and stood beside their younger brother, eyebrows raised in curiosity.

'Gaara? What's the matter?' Temari inquired, emerald eyes blinking in the glaring sun.

Entranced, and seemingly deaf to the world around him, Gaara did not answer. So complete and sudden was his motionlessness that his body seemed to have frozen in time, like a figure in an old photograph.

Perplexed and spurred by a driving curiosity, the two elder siblings followed the scarlet-haired youth's gaze until theirs fixed on the object of the Kazekage's silent watch.

There, beyond the iron gates, hidden away in the far corner of the Suna ninja academy playground, a little boy huddled alone and still, as his peers jumped, laughed and shrieked far away. Clad in a little white shirt, mud-brown trousers and mitten-shoes, and dark brown oversized hat like that of a train-driver, he had nothing to mark him out from his equally dull surroundings. Bent legs drawn close to his body as if to comfort himself, face buried in his little knees, he was the epitome of sorrow. The boy seemed to inhabit a dark, desolate world of his own, and he buckled under its crushing black weight. The voices and people seemed so far away—deserts and oceans apart—from the boy they so wilfully ignored. He was a little ghost; invisible, damned to haunt their happy lives like a sad memory, unacknowledged and unconsidered, forgotten in the whirl of careless disregard and nonexistence, and left to waste away in tears.

Gaara registered all these symptoms of loneliness as his own, all the pain rushing back in a million fragmented, raw memories of the past. Gazing at the pitiful little creature, he saw himself, alone in the twilight, huddled and trying to implode into himself to block out the pain, with no-one lending even an atom of regard for his sobs.

A horrible, sickening rise of emotion swelled in the young Kazekage's stomach. Feeling a hard lump lodged in his throat, he licked his lips to speak, and managed a husky murmur.

'Is there...any business to attend to right now?' he asked his siblings, pale aquamarine eyes never leaving the reincarnation of his lonely younger self.

Kankuro and Temari looked at each other, and their eyes locked in understanding. Their brother had a mission, and he was determined to see it accomplished.

'Nah,' Kankuro assured. 'You're fine for the moment. Don't take too long though.'

Gaara nodded silently, and in a rush of wind, was gone.

His siblings shared another knowing glance, nodded, and departed for the village centre.

*

Moments later, Gaara was within the playground of the academy, and making his way purposefully across to the far, far left of the sandy area where the boy sat. The moment he arrived, a stunned crowd of children gasped and exclaimed in excitement, chattering and giggling around their young leader. Not wishing to stoop to the level of his peers by ignoring them, Gaara silently nodded and waved a hand to them, all the while walking his chosen path towards his target.

When the young red-haired leader motioned for the children to disperse, an order to which they hastily obeyed, Gaara approached the boy, alone.

The child seemed too wallowed in his sorrows to notice the presence of the elder standing before him. Sensing a kind of familiar uneasiness in the boy, Gaara lowered himself and knelt to his level, and waited in silence, wondering how to reach him.

After a few moments of reflection, Gaara spoke up in calm, assuring tones of one who wished to pledge his harmlessness to another wary and defensive.

'Good morning,' he said. 'I came to see you, because I can sense you are very lonely. Are you in pain like this every day?' The question contained a heartfelt quality of understanding—the feeling of words spoken for their meaning rather than their effect— that caused the boy to raise his head to gaze into the eyes of his Kazekage.

The boy's face was sweet, and held a certain forced maturity in its tapered features, particularly in the dulled chestnut-brown eyes framed by a messy mop of identically-coloured eyes, grown to the extent that it appeared the boy wished to hide away from the things his eyes bore—the stinging scorn of others.

The blinding radiance of the desert sun shed its rays on Gaara, spanning outwards so that the man seemed awash in light. The child stared with a kind of bewilderment, as if witnessing an apparition of a guardian angel. Such understanding had forever been a vague notion to him, and now here it was before his very eyes.

Inconceivable relief.

Silently, the boy nodded, biting his lip.

Gaara's eyes narrowed gravely. Of course. He could see it so clearly in those eyes—eyes he himself once had: sullen, lonely orbs of despair yearning for hope, yet slowly drowning in the darkness he sought to escape.

Now Gaara knew how Naruto felt when they first fought. The bitter clarity of empathy mingled with the pain of memories.

Instinctively, the young Kazekage stretched out a hand, and placed it on the boy's shoulder, gazing him straight in the eyes. The boy twitched under the gentle human contact.

'Don't worry,' he told him. 'I will help the pain go away. I will heal the wounds in your heart. You don't have to be alone anymore...' his voice wavered slightly at the last few words, but Gaara closed his eyes and composed himself.

Opening them, Gaara removed his hand from the boy's shoulder and touched the left side of his chest, where his heart was.

'It hurts here, doesn't it?' he said quietly. 'It's so unbearable you don't know what to do. But I can help make it better, believe me—I know the pain, the pain of loneliness, and a very special person who understood exactly that same pain, helped me escape it. I can help you the same way, but you need to have faith in me. We can do it together.'

Gaara paused for a moment, giving his words time to sink in to the boy's thoughts.

Suddenly, Gaara saw the boy slump forwards, and felt a warmth press against his chest. To his amazement, the boy was clutching his body like he had been searching for him since the day he was born, sobbing. All the pent up tears were now flowing from the boy's eyes and into the fabric of Gaara's grey holster vest, absorbing the pain spilling from the invisible wounds in the young one's heart.

Placing a hand on the boy's head, Gaara waited in silence and let him cry himself out.

When he had calmed somewhat, the boy looked up into Gaara's face with shining eyes.

'M-m...my...my name's... Tarō, Kazekage-sama...' he lisped, blushing self-consciously as he felt for the first time the authority and power of the young man he had just shamelessly cried on.

'Gaara,' came the sincere reply. 'Call me Gaara.'

Haru stared in awe as the Kazekage gave him a small, affectionate smile.

And for the first time, Tarō smiled too.

*

The bell rang, loud and interrupting, and both jolted. Tarô hastily stumbled to his feet, bowing to Gaara with fervent gratitude.

'H-hauu...I-I'm sorry, I have to go!' he stammered, grabbing the large dark train-driver hat that had fallen to the floor as the boy had hugged Gaara.

Gaara nodded, and rose to his feet.

'I must be going too,' he admitted. In all honesty, the young Kazekage would rather have stayed longer, but he had important matters of the village to attend to.

Tarō nodded, his face radiant with joy indescribable. He fidgeted on the spot, unsure of what to do with himself. These feelings fluttering and tickling inside his body; so alien yet so pleasurable to his senses. He wanted to understand them. He wanted to understand why his Kazekage understood him like no one else had.

'You must not be late,' Gaara reminded, motioning to the playground slowly emptying of children bustling through the front doors of the concrete edifice looming over them, before folding his arms.

Tarō nodded bashfully, waved, and sped off to join his peers. Gaara watched in silence as the boy shuffled up the steps, sought him out with his chestnut-coloured eyes, now bright with hope, waved one final time.

Gaara raised one hand to return the gesture, and the boy disappeared inside the building with a grin spread all over his face.

*

Standing alone in the deserted playground, dust swirling across the earth with the whistling wind, Gaara felt something. A warm, elated feeling he could not quite grasp. Was it...satisfaction? Contentment? Whatever it was, it meant he had succeeded in reaching the poor boy. Now, it was a gradual, easing process to the life he was now living—void of the agonising empty feeling in his soul, and the rage of the world seeming to revel in his pain.

He knew full well that balancing this responsibility he had taken upon himself, as well as the burden of being Suna's Kazekage, would not be an easy task, to all intents and purposes. However, as the saying so rightly stated: 'Where there's a will, there's a way.'

With that adage in mind, Gaara turned on his heel and vanished into the wind.

*

Writhing in the shadows of the desert shrubs nearby, a dark eye seethed with a black grudge. The air turned sour with its poison barb, and soon everything was ripped to shreds.

*