This is an alternative universe fic. Events prior to the stories start have not proceeded as in canon.

This story contains subject matter intended only for a mature audience

This chapter is available with better formatting at Obesum

An alternative universe Naruto fanfic.

By yasuhei

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Chapter One

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She had chosen him on looks alone, and she regretted that now. She should have found some other way to choose her partner and her victim, because really she should have been able to tell how pathetic this one was. He was terrified of her of course, everyone feared her and mother. The fear was gratifying and wonderful; it made mother happy, and it made her feel alive. Most of the time she was numb, feeling nothing except for the aching hunger for violence or others pain. Times like this though, when she was close enough to not just smell the fear but to feel it also, times like this she felt like she had woken from the half-slumber of her mundane existence. She was straddled over him, sitting on his thighs, and she could feel his legs trembling against hers, feel the light dew of clammy sweat that fear was bringing to his skin even in this cool, dark room. It was only when she could feel things like this against her that she was truly sure she even existed.

Sabaku no Gaara needed to feel her prey's fear trembling against her skin.

But terrified or not, this boy was too pathetic. She could feel her mother's displeasure pressing against the back of her mind. The man's fear must have been too great for his mind or his body too handle, because although his fearful gaze kept dropping from Gaara's face to her bare and jutting breasts, his body remained completely impotent. His cock lay lifelessly between his legs, as small and as shrivelled now as it must have been the day he was born. Her own irritation at the fact was far outshone by mother's, but she held that back, because if she allowed mother forward then she would destroy him, and if he wouldn't become hard for her then he didn't deserve a swift death.

She wanted him to feel the uncertainty that she had during her very first time, not knowing whether he liked it or hated it, whether he was joyous or despairing, and afterwards she wanted to look him right in the eyes as he realised that she'd had what she wanted, and now she was going to kill him. She wanted him to know she controlled him down even unto that level, that she had the power to take it from him. Her own first lover had tried to kill her, and that was a gift that she wished to share this man, only she would succeed in the killing. She always succeeded in the killing, no matter what else failed. Only it was so much satisfying when she couldn't make them bed her first.

She stooped closer to him, reaching out slender fingers to caress the side of his beautiful, delicate face. It was his face she had unwisely chosen him for, and although she regretted it immensely right now it was still pretty enough to almost make her smile. It was a work of art, and destroying it would still be satisfying. Nothing beautiful could be allowed to live, nothing at all, eventually, save for her.

She let her forefinger trace his lips as she began to talk to him, quietly and throatily. "You need to make it get hard now, because if you don't, I'm going to make it really hurt when I kill you."

Her hand slipped between his thighs, beginning to caress there too; demandingly but also gently, as if she really did want to bring him nothing but pleasure. It made little difference though it did twitch a time or two, but largely it remained limp and small, too little even for her to wrap her slender fingers around it. Vocalising her demands on him seemed to do little to increase his cooperation. Perhaps it even did the opposite.

As a man, he really was just useless to her.

Inevitably her patience wore through before he came anywhere close to giving her the reaction she desired. Slowly she slid her self higher up his body, so that she could lay her self down upon him and press her stomach and breasts against him while keeping her head high enough to keep watching his eyes. Confusion filled his eyes, for at first he didn't notice the fine particles of sand moving against him, carefully widening his pores and trickling slowly beneath his skin.

"You have failed me"

Her voice was as soft and gentle as the touch of a feather, but he realised what she meant nonetheless. Panic filled his eyes as he felt her sands begin to flex their might within him, and as a beautiful and serene grin spread across Gaara's face. She loved the feeling of another's skin flaying from their body as it pressed against her own, and god how she loved his screams.

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It was just too hard. Naruto had never played the game of Shogi much before, and asking him to learn it right now seemed like a bit too much. Remembering how each of the pieces were supposed to move was a complex enough task for him on its own, but that wasn't all he was supposed to be doing. He and Sasuke were supposed to be devoting the majority of their attention to the goings on around the village - the game of shogi was supposed to be nothing more than cover.

It was alright for Sasuke. There were probably dozens of people who had been willing to teach him to play when he was growing up. As for himself, even if he had been interested... He stomped on that thought, leaving it unfinished. The last thing he needed now was to get more irritated with his surly team-mate, getting constantly crushed in the board games was bad enough. Besides, if he was honest with himself, he was well aware that Sasuke had hardly had a problem free childhood either. He didn't have much right to complain about things being easy for the other boy.

In the end Naruto moved his remaining silver general forward to threaten Sasuke's Bishop. It taken him 5 minutes to decide on that move, whereas Sasuke's follow up came instantly; a knight that Naruto hadn't noticed took the silver general.

It made him want to scream out in frustration, but since they were on a mission he didn't have that luxury, and settled instead for a subdued mutter.

"I still don't see why we couldn't have gone with Kakashi sensei. This is stupid and boring. Nothing's happening here that needs watching for."

His opponent snorted barely seeming to lift his eyes from the board as he replied. "Someone needs to investigate the village, and we aren't with Kakashi because the meeting requires subtlety. Some people on our team still haven't mastered that skill."

Naruto glowered at that, but said nothing. Sasuke sometimes had a point, but why'd he always have to be such a bastard about making them?

"Well even if we have to sit around here, why do we have to play this stupid game?"

They both knew the answer to that one, but Naruto hadn't been able to resist asking anyway. Two young men playing shogi outside a café was good cover. Unremarkable enough not to be particularly well remembered, and gave the perfect reason to sit still for a long time and observe the goings on around them, and listen in to the other diner's conversations. Sasuke gave him the answer his question probably deserved.

"Idiot."

Futher down the street, not too distant from them, Sakura looked like she was having a better time of it than Naruto was. She was back at the vendors cart again, where she had spent most of the morning chatting with the stall operator. In between their chats she'd been visiting the various stores, looking at what the village had to offer, trying on clothes, and listening to the women's gossip. Naruto would much preferred to have her job over his own.

Well almost...

Maybe not the part where an older man was flirting with her, and maybe not the part where she was trying on girls clothes either. Apart from that though, Sakura's job was much better. She didn't have to keep getting her ass kicked at this stupid game at least, and she looked like she was having something approaching fun.

"Why don't we stop playing for a bit, and get something to eat."

Sasuke snorted, but actually lifted his head from the board this time. "How often are you planning on eating today. Already you've..."

He broke off mid sentence as the both felt it, a brief, intense flash of something like killer intent, but different enough to be almost its opposite. Killer intent was a tiny sliver of chakra sharpened down to a razor edge in order to have maximum effect, whereas this was more like water hurled from a bucket - a huge amount of power, but completely without focus. The water had hit Naruto, but that didn't change the fact that most of it had splashed on the wall behind him.

A glance in the direction of the emanation showed only a single girl and for a second he couldn't believe that she might be the cause, for she was dressed in a fine civilian kimono of russet silks, with beautiful flowers picked out upon it in black and yellow thread. A second take proved him wrong however. She didn't stand like a civilian, or walk like one, the set of her face was too full of fury. The cut of her hair was too outlandish also, her ochre locks cropped short and messy around the front of her face, and hanging down her back in dozens of thin and long pony tails. It was striking, rather than elegant, and nowhere near conservative enough for any civilian lady that Naruto had ever met.

There were other clues too, that she was more than her manner of dress implied, and as she walked closer to their table more and more of them became apparent. The dark rings around her eyes that spoke of drug abuse or severe sleep deprivation, the scent of recently spilled blood that wafted over from her direction, the way her hands twitched erratically whenever they were at rest, and lastly, the seams of her kimono. Around her legs the material was forming small bunches along the seams, cloth shifting against cloth in ways that it wasn't supposed to. It wasn't a real seam at all, just a series of temporary, sparsely placed stitched, designed to break at the first violent motion. In a moments notice her kimono could go from something tightly constrictive to being perfectly suited for combat. It was something that no one but a kunoichi would consider wearing.

Her eyes, he realised as she came to stand beside their table, were simmering with barely suppressed anger. Had she realised that they were ninja of a foreign power already? If she wished to call them out now things could become messy quickly. Kakashi's orders were to cause as few ripples as possible, to remain in the background, and do nothing that might cause his contact or their combined quarry to flee. A quick glance at Sasuke confirmed that he seemed every bit as alert as Naruto felt. He too had moved back from the table giving him the room to leap aside should evasion become necessary.

She stood there silently, her eyes flicking between Sasuke and him, taking them in with long, considered looks, as violence boiled slowly behind her eyes. Naruto found that he was on his feet, though he wasn't sure if he'd got there to maintain the semblance of polite courtesy, or to ready himself for a fight. Inside the pit of his stomach he could feel rage beating outwards, a great keening to answer the violence in the girl's eyes with their own - to spill her blood and to lap it up from the ground. But courtesy was not yet beyond him.

"Hey, can we help you or anything?"

But it wasn't Naruto who her eyes settled upon finally, and it wasn't him to whom she spoke.

"You look strong," she paused for a moment, cocking her head to the side like an inquisitive bird, her eyes continuing to burn into Sasuke. "Yes. You will do. Take me to your bed."

She had presence, Naruto had to give her that, and Sasuke was struggling with it. He could see the hairs on his head lifting slightly, and the muscles around his jaw and neck tensing outside of his control, straining even as he tried to remain relaxed. With the aura that she was putting out at him, Naruto was surprised that Sasuke didn't react more strongly, and that when he spoke his voice was still even.

"No. I'm playing a game with my friend."

Her gaze shifted to the shogi board for no more than a second before returning to the dark haired boy.

"You have checkmate in 4 moves. Take me to your bed."

Naruto hadn't realised that the end of the game was so close, but that wasn't he was noticing now. As Sasuke returned her words with a silent and stony refusal the twitching of her hands was increasing in intensity, until she was making truncated clawing gestures in the air besides her hips.

"Your face is pretty, and I want it. Take me to your bed now, or I will crush your friend's bones to dust and when I kill you I will make it hurt worse that anything you can imagine. I won't hurt your face, so I can watch your fear, and so that afterwards I can keep it."

There was little physical sign of danger from the girl, but an aura of violence was oozing out from her so strongly that Naruto could almost taste it. She was ready to kill someone at the next refusal, and he had been team mates with Sasuke for too many years now to dare to believe that he'd give in to any part of her demands. Even if he hadn't been able to guess at his answer, Sasuke's refusal was written plainly across his body, in the tensing of his jaw and shoulders.

There were times when knowing a jerk like Sasuke better than anyone else in the world was a great embarrassment to Naruto, but times like this it could be a life saver. He was already moving by the time Sasuke opened his mouth to say "No." The girl hadn't been lying about trying to hurt him first, because the chair immediately next to where he had been standing shattered in a spray of sawdust.

Not sawdust, Naruto realised as he dodged further away from the girl, but sand. More of the stuff was lifting from the cobbles of the street, mixing together with the yellow mist about the chair and forming into a thick, rope like shape that stood upright, swaying menacingly towards him. A kunai skittered across the cobbles and past him, and he realised that Sasuke must have attacked, though he had seen neither the throw nor the deflection. And then he was dodging, as the rope of sand used the momentary distraction as an opportunity to attack - reaching out towards him, slithering through the air then darting forwards like an attacking snake.

Avoid attracting attention at all costs, Kakashi had ordered them, and Naruto wondered whether he'd think fighting against huge ropes of sand in the middle of the village's main street counted as inconspicuous. Probably not, he'd guess. They needed to take this fight out of the village. They couldn't afford to let too many people notice them, and they certainly couldn't afford to create enough of a disturbance that it might disrupt Kakashi's meeting.

The sand came in low, and he had to leap over it. He would have passed it by with plenty of room to spare, but the rope twisted and corkscrewed, coming back towards him while he was still in midair, almost clipping him before he landed and rolled away. The sand itself came down hard, bursting on the ground like a wave breaking against a cliff, losing cohesion for a moment. It took but a second or two for it to again reform into the rope, but that was time enough to allow Naruto to launch a volley of shuriken towards the girl, and buy Sasuke a chance to move away from her. He too must have realised they needed to get out of here, and it seemed that even the bull-headed Uchiha wasn't stupid enough to let a fight like this endanger the mission.

The girl seemed content enough to stand almost perfectly motionless, allowing the sand to pursue them alone, but as Sasuke and he backed further and further away the attacks from the sand began to become more and more clumsy and inaccurate. Was it that there was a limit on how far she could effectively control the sand, or was it that from so far back she couldn't precisely tell where the sand was in relation to them? Either way, it made the task of dodging it considerably easier, until the girl finally abandoned her position and started stalking after the two of them.

She didn't move fast, but she didn't really need to be able to. Any projectiles they launched towards her were effortlessly deflected by a shield of sand that rose rapidly about her whenever she was attacked, and their own retreat was slowed by the need to dodge the rope of sand as it darted and thrashed back and forth between the two of them. It only got worse when a second rope rose from the scattered sand around them and joined in with the assault.

It was lucky that the village was relatively small, and that they had not been too far from the outskirts, else they might never have made it out to what could charitably be called a forest. The land was so flat here that even this far inland the wide and slow mowing river was something of a tidal estuary. Silt and sand had collected into clusters of thousands of tiny, semi-permanent islands along its west bank, and it was across these that the trees had spread. The trees had caught yet more silt, and now rather than part of the lake it had become something of a salt-water wetlands. Aside from patches of farmland, it was the only thick vegetation for miles. Here they were safe from prying eyes, free to fight to the fullest of their abilities.

But the forest had challenges of its own too. The ground was often waterlogged, almost but not quite a swamp. The trees - thin, spindly, dark things with shockingly bright green foliage that shed crystals of salt as you brushed against them – grew from both the sandy, muddy land, and also from the patches of water itself. The stretches of water varied from being so shallow that you barely got your feet wet, to being deep enough to let you sink to your neck in saltwater and mud. Usually it was possible to splash easily through the water to avoid the chakra cost of running across it, but occasionally they were far deeper than they appeared, leaving you waterlogged and dangerously immobile in the face of attack. Sometimes also, what seemed to be solid land turned out to be silt so loose that your feet sunk right into it. Only the training they had done here earlier with Kakashi-sensei prevented Naruto from making a dozen mistakes that could have easily cost him his life.

The only consolation was that the girl's sand seemed even more wary of the patches of water than Naruto felt, doing its best to stay clear of them, but that still wasn't enough to offset the hindrance to movement from moving through the wetlands. Their ranged attacks were proving hideously ineffective; kunai and shuriken were deflected effortlessly, and though Sasuke's ranged fire jutsu could fuse the sand to glass they weren't enough to break through the girl's defences, and there was plenty enough sand around to replace any that was lost that way. Naruto was sure that if he could stay close to the girl for long enough that he'd be able to break her defences with his Ransengan, and Sasuke could probably manage the same with his Chidori. The problem was getting close enough without being crushed to pulp by the swirling sands. Already two dozen of Naruto's shadow clones had met such a fate, and he was struggling to think up a way around that. From what he'd seen so far assault en masse wasn't going to cut it. She was too dangerous, too powerful. The girl was a monster.

And that was all it took, that last, single mental word. At the mention of a monster Naruto's very own monster, the Kyuubi no Youkou, responded, stirring to full wakefulness.

'Let me fight her.' The back of Naruto's mind bulged with sudden pressure as the Kyuubi tried to communicate, and caused enough of a distraction that one of the sand ropes almost caught him. 'Let me kill it. I will rip it from that pathetic human, and eat its heart.'

Frantically dodging the girl's attacks, it took Naruto a moment to catch up with what the demon inside him was saying. Rip it from her body? Did that mean what he thought it did? Was the girl they were fighting really another Jinchuriki like him? If the power she was displaying really did come from a demon, then it was damn lucky that they had moved away from the village.

He grasped the Kyuubi where it pressed against his mind. The demon was right, Naruto was going to need its power, but he was damned if he was going to let the demon wield it. It clawed at him, thrashing in his mental grip, and howling in rage. Experience had taught Naruto that if he wanted to maintain control over his actions that it was much better to take Kyuubi's power by force than to accept what he offered. He was happy to accept help from Kyuubi, but only after carefully checking the fine print, and never again in the midst of battle. Haku's corpse had taught him that lesson long ago.

Pulling hard on Kyuubi's power, wrapping it around him like a swirling red blanket, Naruto charged the girl headlong. Finally the sand tagged Naruto as he sacrificed defence for attack, and the flowed over and around him, surrounding him like a sheath. But it was too late for the sand now, because now he had leashed his own beast. The sand burst away from him as if caught by the gust of a hurricane, and his right hand filled with its own swirling winds, glowing softly but menacingly blue.

He would end this quickly.

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Chapter One, End.