Barefoot

by skrblr

-

I'm a redhead (hence automatic obsession with Gaara), so I've got pretty much no melanin. Anyway, I was wearing dark pants and black shoes yesterday, and suddenly caught a glimpse of what I thought was my sock, which was somewhat unexpected since I wasn't wearing socks. A closer look revealed that it was my foot. Freakishly white. And thus, while I was supposed to be faxing Lymes Disease reports, I was writing this.

I've always dealt with rather esoteric categories prior to this venture into the Naruto-verse... so I'm a bit nervous to be writing for such a potentially large and knowledgeable group... Please let me know what needs improvement!

-

Kankuro had never seen the tops of his little brother's feet. His toes always peeped out of his sandals, small and perfect like the rest of him, but while Temari and he, Kankuro, tended to wander barefoot around the house, Gaara seemed to consider being shoeless equivalent to being naked, and Kankuro had no desire to see that.

This explains why, when he passed the new kazekage's office one day, he did a doubletake and grabbed the doorframe for support.

As usual, the large room was neat and bare, six chairs lined up along the smooth clay wall like six metal soldiers. The desk - mahogany wood imported by the previous kage - had three carefully-aligned stacks of paper, with a vial for ink near the edge, conveniently placed to let whoever sat in the hard brown chair expend as little wasted motion as possible.

However, no one sat in the chair.

Gaara stood beside his desk, gripping the extra folds of white robes at his hips to leave his ankles exposed. His face was as blank as ever. Eyes that had been staring down flicked up when Kankuro started clinging to his doorframe.

"Are you seriously -" Kankuro stopped. Gaara would've raised an eyebrow if he'd had one.

"Do you need something?" Gaara asked. An errant breeze riffled through his choppy red hair, catching Kankuro's hood and nearly lifting it off his head.

It also swept the sand Gaara was standing in.

The sand he was wiggling his toes in.

The world had just undergone Armageddon. Kankuro had witnessed it. The demon-possessed, insanely powerful, formerly mass-murdering Kazekage's toes were happily squirming in a cheerful mound of red-gold sand. Moreover, his sandals were set together in front of the desk, meaning that Gaara - Gaara, who'd retreated to his room, locked the door, and set up a Third Eye to make sure no one was watching whenever he outgrew one set of sandals and had to get new ones; Gaara, who'd nearly 'Sand Coffin'ed the nurse who'd tried to remove those shoes during the checkup after the Naruto fiasco - was barefoot.

Kankuro couldn't resist. He stepped closer, hesitantly, fingering one of the mini marionettes he always kept in his pockets. Gaara looked into his painted face impassively, feet still wriggling in the sand.

There was a layer of black clothing underneath the kazekage robes, a layer that so sharply contrasted against his skin that Kankuro burst out, "Geez you're white, Gaara!"

No response.

"Like, freaking corpse-white, dude! Like, Orochimaru-white!"

"Did you ever actually see his true form?"

Kankuro mumbled something, spontaneously started stripping. Gaara's toes stopped wiggling.

"What are you doing?"

"Look," he said, tugging his arms out of his black tunic. Gaara was grateful that there was something of an undershirt still present. "See," he continued, rolling up his pants and throwing his own shoes to the side. "This is what normal people look like after fifteen plus years in the desert." While the skin he usually covered with cloth was a few tones lighter than the tan exposed parts, even that looked honey-colored. Gaara folded his arms inside the flowing protection of his robe. Kankuro leaned against the desk and propped one foot next to Gaara's.

"Seriously, man. You need to spend more time in the sun." He snorted, realizing the ridiculousness of that on a variety of levels. Then the sight of their feet side by side caught his eye again. They both had five toes, and they were mostly the same shape, but there similarities stopped. His own was relatively dark, slightly hairy, and big. Gaara's was translucently pale, flawlessly smooth, etched with blue veins and sharp tendons, and a heck of a lot smaller.

"Gaara, you have girly feet."

Gaara blinked.

"These are manly feet," Kankuro explained, waving his in the air. Gaara's nose twitched. The older brother pointed to Gaara's feet. "Those are girly." He moved on to their arms, pulling one of Gaara's out of his huge sleeves.

"That's not much better." Again, his was tan, fuzzy, and, this time, ripped with epic muscle. And no, of course he wasn't vain. It was just the truth, especially next Gaara's scrawny, colorless, hairless, scarless arm.

"Manly arm, unmanly arm," Kankuro said. "See the difference? Sunshine. And vegetables." Gaara slowly dragged his arm back into its folded position.

"Do you have a reason for disrupting me?" Kankuro gulped.

"Uh... What exactly was I disrupting?"

"Bonding time with Mother."

"I thought you had to kill people for that," he said, ever sensitive and subtle.

"While that is true for Shukaku, Mother is slightly separate in certain ways," said Gaara. Kankuro pondered this.

"Can I bond with Mother too?"

Thus, when Baki came to the kazekage's door a few minutes later, he found the two most sadistic students in the history of his teaching career wriggling their toes in a little heap of sand.

He'd never thought someone's feet could be that white.