Naruto Fan Fiction ❯ Onyx Rain ❯ Pink Dawn ( Chapter 6 )

The first beams of gold spread their way across the desert. They curled around each dune, both red and yellow, and they melted the stony night sky into a brew of rose and apricot. They gave an ethereal sparkle to each grain of sand on the dunes and effectively illuminated the only two people who were apparently stupid enough to be in the desert in the middle of a drought.

Gaara awoke to the unpleasant feeling of someone lightly kicking him and muttering with consistency the same words, over and over.

"Wake up. Wake up. . . . . wake up. . . . wake up. . . . ." the voice was saying. In a break of its consistency, it chose to add "Dumbass. . . . ."

Ignoring the blatant insult that had been so lazily thrown at him, Gaara sat up. He brushed some sand off of his worn clothes, and turned to his companion. He stared at he until her speech finally began to make sense.

"Got anything on you that we can eat?"

Gaara didn't answer - but he did pull out some of the cactus bits that he had taken from the monstrous jade cactus when he was retrieving water. These he immediately began to chew on, and when he made no move to share, the girl snatched some from his hand. She put the pieces in her mouth - and made very interesting faces in reaction to the taste. Once she was finished swallowing, her voice began to fill up the empty space between her and Gaara in what Gaara considered a waste of breath.

"I think I've got a rag that you can use to clean those sands with. I hope you weren't thinking that you only had to do some miraculously good deed to clean those sands, no, you have to clean them by hand and. . ." She paused, thought about what she just said, and gave up. Any conversation with the fiery-haired boy in front of her would be completely one-sided. "Anyway, you dropped this."

The girl handed him a senbon. Gaara stared at it before taking it and rolling it over in his hands. He recalled using only one senbon so far on his expedition in the desert.

"In the future, don't kill so needlessly," the girl continued in the miraculous display of intertwining sense with babble.

She began to rummage through her own clothing for a few minutes before finally pulling out what turned out to be a slightly damp, dirty washcloth. Gaara hadn't been listening to her rant earlier, but he could easily figure out what she intended to make him do. He said nothing, but took the washcloth and made his way down the dune towards the veritable sea of red sand that was spread out in front of them.

Gaara kneeled before it and ignored the beastly aroma that came from sun-baked blood. He took a handful of the rusted sand in the washcloth and began the slow process of scrubbing it all clean.