blah blah blah fanfiction

I really ought to reread the Naruto manga, just to remind myself that it's more than crappy filler (anime, I'm lookin' at you), badly paced fights (Dear Sasori: you suck), and rabid fantwits (oh, Chuunin, your wank brings all the boys to the yard). It might also help me, y'know, work on chapter five of the stupid fic.

In the meantime, however, I've finished the Gaara/Temari snippet for the sandcest drabble series, and I've edited the Temari/Kankurou one so that it's not as dull. (Interestingly enough, the version that I posted here was a second draft, but I think for the final I'll be reverting to the original with some minor trimming.)

Here's the Gaara/Temari, in all its one-sided glory. (I dislike the pairing intensely, for the record. I dislike any sort of Gaara het, because I see him as having far too many mommy issues to have a healthy relationship with anyone a girl. Though really, once you're writing incest, all bets are off.) It still needs work (everything needs work), but I'm halfway pleased with it.
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"Soft" (approx. 250 words)

Gaara settles his chin on his desk amidst stacks of papers and scrolls, and lets his eyes drift closed with the heavy, ever-present weight of exhaustion. The building is empty and filled with a rare, all-encompassing silence in the sleepy hours of morning. He lets the silence sink into his skin and rests, for a moment.

He thinks of his sister, but he does not think of her as his sister; he does not know how to. "Family" is still too unfamiliar a concept, still too raw and strange. So instead he pictures Temari wearing the same smile their mother wears in all of his blurry, sepia-tinted photographs, and he thinks she is beautiful. Gaara wonders if her skin, snow-pale as it is, would be as cool and inviting to the touch as it seems; if the gentle swell of her breasts and the pout of her lips would be smooth and honey-sweet beneath his tongue.

Outside the window, the moonlight turns the desert into an ocean of soft blue curves, but Gaara knows the moonlight is deceptive. There is nothing soft about the desert- there is no softness in the killing heat, or in the rough grit of sand. The desert is not kind to softness.

Temari is as deceptive as dunes drenched in moonlight; Gaara knows that her softness is all illusion, carefully crafted to hide the winter-keen knife-edge of her smile. If he were to touch her, he would feel nothing but the coarseness of sand beneath his fingertips.

The dull pain in his forehead and chest prompt him to open his eyes; he is through with resting for the night. Grains of sand shower from the corners of his eyes as he blinks slowly, and returns to work.
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*insert commentary on Oedipal complexes and other psychological things I have no qualifications to discuss*

Now I just need to write the Kankurou one...and then finish Wind, Sand, and Bone, and maybe work on Bone Harvest, since that's the Kankurou fic I really want to write. (I started it back in, oh, February. *eats ridiculously low productivity*) And Blindsided, of course, but that goes without saying.