Author's Note: My second completed Naruto fic. Yay. Tell me if it's awfully similar to "Uchiha", though I like this one much better. Much better. Anyway, read and review, please! Kudos to the Gaara shrine "Insomniac" for the name info. Standard disclaimers apply.

It was supposed love. Yashamaru always told him that it was his mother's love that caused the sand to protect him all the time. It was supposed to be that her spirit's constant presence was there to comfort him.

Love was supposed to heal everything.

Love didn't exist.

Yashamaru was lying; his mother didn't love him at all. She hated him. She never wanted him in the first place, from the time he was a single, developing cell in her uterus to when she died at his birth. Her last words were used to condemn him. She used her dying breath to name him Gaara.

Love was in his name. It's the second character, right after ware. Ware ai shura, his name was in kanji. I love carnage. Or, the way she meant it to be: demon who only loves himself.

That was all he was to anyone. A demon. She wanted him to kill and cause suffering, so she could have her revenge.

Love was on his forehead, too. He had had it tattooed it there himself, with the sand he could alone control. And he remembers, very vividly, the night he did it.

He had been just sitting there when another masked assassin attacked him. There's always one, he was thinking, staring at the sand shielding him from the weapons he had not seen. But then the mask came off.

There, lying seriously injured, was Yashamaru. The only person he had thought cared about him didn't really love him afterall. Wasn't it Yashamaru who was always there to soothe his emotional pain when all the villagers scorned him? Wasn't Yashamaru the one who told him about the medicine called love? Here his uncle sat, weakened, and told him the truth. How he had tried to love him as the legacy of his sister, but how he really despised him all along.

"Please die," Yashamaru said, and set off the bomb he had placed on himself.

And so, in his tears, in his unbearable anguish, he had the sand carve the character "love" on his forehead.

Because it didn't exist.

He would no longer try to be liked, or cheer anyone on, or think of his family as anything more than pointless pieces of flesh unwillingly attached to him. The truth was right in front of him, manifested as the pile of rubble Yashamaru had created when he attempted to take his nephew with him into oblivion.

Gaara existed, and he vowed to himself that his existance would not be wiped out, regardless of how much his father--or anyone else, for the matter--willed it.

Love did not exist.

The sand was done etching it into his forehead. That was the first time he bled, and the last he would feel pain for a very long time.