Disclaimer: I do not own any of the characters in this story, and as such I am not making any money from these ramblings.

A Lonely God

Gaara understood his perspective had always been a bit off. And it was not because he was short.

He first realized the discrepancy the day he learned that the people he thought were looking down at him with scorn were, in fact, looking up at him in fear. Yes, there was hatred in their hearts for his existence, but it was built upon foundations of terror—terror for what they held dear, whether it be their possessions, their lives, or their power.

As a child, it had been a dizzying frame shift, feeling their keen horror slide from something he regretted and endured into something he relished in. After Yashimaru's death (betrayal, a voice had hissed in his mind), the last lingering desire he had to be accepted as equal was torn to dust. In his heart, his self-worth ascended to its place above them, and from this distance his eyes beheld them for what they truly were: lambs for the slaughter.

For years he stood alone atop his pedestal, the lives of others little more than meat for the grinder of his ferociously growing strength, until another disorienting event jumbled his worldview.

At the Chunnin exams, he had crushed and maimed his way through the darlings of Konoha's up-and-coming ninja only to be brought low by their trash, Uzumaki Naruto. Widely considered a screw up (and worse for the familiar scent of demon was on this boy as well), Uzumaki had dredged up the power within himself to defeat the container of Shukaku, whom the people of the Sand regarded as a God.

For the first time in a long time, he had to crane his neck so see. On the forest floor, covered with blood, he stared up a boy who was himself look down on by the dregs of the world. The incongruity, the sheer backwardness of it all was enough to give him vertigo.

What is more, it was enough for him to refocus his perspective. It had been the crucial pivot that led to his appointment as the Kazekage. It had been the moment that had, inevitably, led him to this field, where he sits in a haze produced by so much more than simply death.

"Everyone came running to save you!" says Naruto, who should be dizzy from the optical illusion of the scene in front of him, but is not.

His eyes cannot help but widen in the effort to perceive his surroundings in a way that will not give him motion sickness. Standing in hordes around him are the people of the Sand (my people, says a voice, and he realizes with a start that it does not belong to Shukaku), and though their faces are angled towards the ground where he lay, it is clear that they are looking up at him; their fear of him having been melted into fear for him, which itself was burning away into joyous relief on their faces.

And to make his lightheadedness yet worse, he could not even tell where his own eyes gazed. Up at them with wonder—with the eyes of the child he never was? Down at them with benevolence—with the eyes of a true hokage? Or past them, to the future—a place so much brighter than the past?

His heart felt swollen in his chest, as if expanding to fill Shukaku's absence, and he silently accepted that he would spend the rest of his life dizzy if made his outlook a bit more like that of Uzumaki Naruto.

Author's Note: I got dizzy myself writing this. Please let me know if I only imagined this made sense.