DISCLAIMER: I do not own Naruto, or any of the characters or content therein. They belong solely to their respective copyright holders. I am making no profit off of this work of fanfiction.
TITLE: Siblings
FANDOM: Naruto
AUTHOR: claustro_phobia (Ikuni Kea Ko)
RATED: PG-13
WARNING: Dark themes, brief language, gruesome imagery
PAIRING: None.
AUTHOR'S NOTE: This is a story about the Sand Siblings, otherwise known as Temari, Kankuro, and Gaara, obviously. I wanted to write something from a point of view other than Gaara's concerning their childhood, and this fic was born. I hope you enjoy it.

Siblings

Chapter One

My strongest memories of my childhood are of wandering the halls of our house, trying to tune out the sobs that seemed to reverberate throughout the entire structure. It would be pretty to say that I didn’t know how much my little brother suffered; it would be easy to deny that I knew anything was wrong. But the truth is often ugly and unsightly. I knew. I just didn’t care.

Deep down, somewhere dark and hidden from sight, a little part of me smiled every time I heard something shatter behind that perpetually shut door; a tiny twisted piece of me thought, “Good. Suffer. You deserve it.”

I was very young when our mother died. I’m not sure that I remember it, or if my mind simply conjured up images to match the stories told to me in later years. I do think that I remember the woman herself; vague impressions of a person left behind like a faded handprint on my memory. I wasn’t allowed to see the body, but people talked. She had been ripped open from the inside out. Some implied that the monster had crawled out from the bloody wreckage between her legs, others contested that it had emerged from her torn stomach.

I was told that I refused to believe mother had really died, so I ran to the room where it had happened. They say that my father found me crying, curled into a tight ball against the only patch of wall that wasn’t painted with my mother’s blood. If I concentrate, I can recall the smell and taste of blood, clotting thick in my throat; I can see red walls, impossibly red. I don’t know if these things are real, but they’re there, inside my mind, always waiting to overtake me.

Our house was divided into two sections; the portion of the building where my other brother, my father, and I resided, and the portion that lay beyond The Door. Most children’s fathers assure them that the monsters aren’t real; mine reminded me that the monster was on the other side of that door daily. My uncle was also on that side of The Door; Yashamaru was charged with keeping the monster alive and out of sight.

I used to lay awake every night, listening to the wailing cries of a baby brother that I had never laid eyes on, and thought of only as the thing that killed my mother.

One day, four years after the death of my mother, The Door trembled under the pounding of tiny fists from the other side, as I came in from the sand storm that had begun its wrath as my brother, Kankuro, and I played in the street. Hoarse screams rang through the house. I hid in my room, and covered my ears.

A month later was the first time that I ever saw Gaara, the monster, the thing, it.

I awoke to screams. That was nothing new, except that these screams belonged to Kankuro. My little feet pattered down the hall, as my father reached the bedroom door ahead of me.

“GAARA, GET AWAY FROM HIM!” I had never heard my father’s voice so angry, so desperate.

I had stopped before the door, suddenly frightened. I edged around the frame, and peeked inside. Kankuro had retreated to the far side of the room, and crouched on the bed there was what looked like a brown bundle of cloth, except this bundle had auburn hair and a teddy bear clutched to its chest. And it trembled. Bundles didn’t tremble. Father stood over it, bellowing curses at it.

“Gaara-sama!” My uncle was suddenly there, pushing past me as if I wasn’t there. The little thing scurried across the bed, crying Yashamaru’s name, as my uncle scooped it into his arms. I didn’t see my uncle often, but I knew that he was a kind, gentle man. “Kazekage-sama, I’ve told you before, you can’t keep him locked up like this. He is a child!”

“It’s no child of mine,” Father’s face distorted with a snarl of disgust, as he pointed to the quivering mass held protectively in Yashamaru’s arms. “It could have killed Kankuro.”

“He’s four-years-old, I highly doubt murder is the first thing on his mind, my lord,” Uncle had never addressed father in such a cutting manner before. Every word seemed to have a jagged edge to it.

“He…he wasn’t trying to do anything like that…” We all looked at Kankuro where he sat on the floor, his eyes wide and white. But he cleared his throat and continued. “He was just there when I woke up…and I…panicked…”

Father made another noise of repulsion. “Don’t defend it, Kankuro.”

After that, things changed. Gaara was allowed into our part of the house for an hour a day, as long as Yashamaru was with him. I shut myself in my room for every single one of those hours, staring at all the different fans that decorated it, dusting them, and arranging them Just So. But I felt the monster’s presence just down the hall, like ants marching between my skull and brain.

There came a day when a shaky knock on my door interrupted my time with the fans. A scared voice drifted through the crack between door and frame. “Te…Temari?” He knew my name. Who had told him my name?!

I froze, pressing my forehead to the wall. Don’t move. Maybe if I stayed very, very still, the scary thing would go away.

There was another knock on the door, this one higher up, and sturdy. “May we come in, Temari?” It was uncle’s voice.

“No!” I covered my mouth. Now they knew I was definitely in here.

“Now, now,” Yashamaru’s voice cooed soothingly. “That’s not very nice, Temari-chan. Your baby brother just wants to say hello, that’s all.”

That thing isn’t my brother!

“Oh c’mon, sis, open the door!” The handle turned and Kankuro opened the door.

I shut my eyes and clung to the wall. If I didn’t turn around, if I didn’t see it, maybe it wouldn’t be there.

I heard my uncle laugh softly. “He doesn’t bite, I promise.” His hand on my shoulder guided me around, and I opened my eyes by some silent command. I searched the room for the monster, and I quickly found that auburn tuft of hair, trying to hide behind the door frame. A solid green eye without a pupil peered around the wall, and deep black lines framed the socket that went with it.

Uncle knelt on the floor, smiling, motioning for the monster to come closer. I didn’t want him any closer, but Gaara entered the room anyway, the large stuffed teddy held to his chest just like before. He instantly and instinctively clung to Yashamaru’s outstretched hand, his alien eyes searching the floor as if he’d dropped something.

“Hello…” his voice was small, as if the voice was something that could curl up into a ball and hide.

I stared at him, and all I saw was bloody walls, and the empty side of the bed my father slept on. I stared at him until my silence forced them all out of my room.