Naruto Fan Fiction ❯ Onyx Rain ❯ Gray Dream ( Chapter 2 )

It was cool at night, to put it mildly. It was also black. There were no villages besides that of the Hidden Sand - it was built around the only known oasis. No one was headstrong enough to build a city in a place where it only rained three times a year. That made the night blacker than black. It turned the festering, sweltering day into a depressing ocean of silence that stretched to infinity. There were no city lights and no people. There were no crickets to chirp, no owls to hoot, no frogs to croak. It brought a feeling Gaara was familiar with - the feeling of being alone.

Gaara felt the familiar presence of sand buzzing around the air about him like a swarm of gnats as he forced it to animate itself. Willing the grains to calm, he wrapped them around himself like a blanket. He didn't sleep, though. He hardly ever slept anymore. Nightmares of past, present, and future plagued him, and he didn't enjoy the prospect of having to consider any of them. Gaara fought sleep for as long as he could, but he hadn't had any the night before, and so he lost the final battle.

Gaara didn't experience any terror that night, though.

Instead, he dreamed of rain.

Gray, pounding, roaring rain, splattering on him and soaking him from head to toe. He dreamed of standing in a knee deep puddle while a tempest raged around him, ripping away his gourd and plastering his fiery hair to his face. He dreamed of struggling to stand and finally giving up, splashing into the puddle. Then the rain quieted, the thunder became distant, and it slowed to a tit tat on his head, drumming on his skull and echoing for a hundred thousand miles. The storm clouds shifted and rolled and boiled, but didn't regain their earlier violence. Gaara squinted through the rain at a hued curve that had appeared in the sky. Colors he hadn't learned the names for, lined up in bands, bending so slightly to the right-

Gaara sprung awake, scattering sand with a grinding, smashing sound. He lifted one hand to his chest and felt his pounding heart, he listened to his own gasping breaths. His crystalline eyes flicked from side to side, attempting to quickly assess the situation. His eyes caught the first light of dawn, creeping up on him from behind the dune he leaned on. Gaara stood, brushing sand off of himself. The sand was different today. It was more scratchy, more irritating-Gaara caught himself quickly. The sand was the same as yesterday, he hadn't added any more blood to it. It hadn't changed. Nothing had. Pushing the strange dream out of his mind, Gaara ascended to the top of the dune to meet the first light of day.