Ningenkakushi: Lord of the Desert

Awakening

Disclaimer/Warning: I will only be posting this bit once, so please read. Though this fic does NOT contain any graphic depictions of violence or injury, it is still a DBZ fic, meaning any form of injury or death that occurs within the canon manga timeline from chapter one all the way to the end of the Buu Arc has the potential to happen 'on-screen' here, too, at any time it is plot-appropriate. It's DBZ – people do get badly hurt and die sometimes, even if they do always get better eventually. Furthermore, all ships, endgame or otherwise, have already been decided and carved in unyielding stone.

Chapter 1 – Awakening

Sand. Sand and sky and heat. Those are the first things he sees, the first things he feels when he becomes aware of himself. He has hands – strong, with slightly blunt fingers – and he uses them to explore his face (it feels like a good face), his hair (long and wavy and dark). He looks down at himself – chest, abdomen, legs, feet with wriggly toes – and laughs, because he's a man. He stands, still smiling, not bothering to knock sand from clothes the same colour as it, rough yellow pants and jacket with an off-white shirt, looks around, throws out his arms, and laughs again for the joy of it, because he's a man, but he's also a desert, and this place, this place is his, because it is him and he is it, they're the same, one entity in two forms and he can feel it, see it, all.

He slides down the dune he's on, runs to the top of another, quickly growing accustomed to legs, arms, movement that is other than the rustle of sand or the billowing of wind or the rare patter-splat of rain. He's the Lord of the Desert given human form, and life is grand.

OoOoOoOoO

Everything is new and everything is strange, all these things he's known forever, that have always been a part of him, but which he's never seen before because he didn't have eyes to do so. He watches lizards and mimics the sinuous motion of snakes as well as any creature with legs can hope to imitate a living ribbon of muscle, lets scorpions run up his arms and hide in his hair and pockets, and runs with the wolves. Wolves. Of all the creatures that live on him, in him, he thinks he loves wolves the best – their strength, their music, their speed. He wrestles with them, plays with them, and, sometimes, he kills them. Not on purpose or even through neglect, but simply because he is a desert, and things die in the desert – from storms, from the heat, from becoming lost. And if it is his greater self and not his hands that kill them, the deaths are still at his feet.

It doesn't really bother him, no more than it bothers the wolves themselves when they kill rabbits or other game, or when the vultures come in turn for their own carcasses. They are true to their natures, as he is true to his, and they understand each other.

He prefers to see them alive, though, rather than as another set of whitening bones to inhabit his sands for eternity. The desert is the land of death, but it does not begrudge quarter to the living.

OoOoOoOoO

It is the wolves he loves best, but it is the creatures that look like him, the humans, that are the most interesting. They travel across him, going to places where nothing lives, nothing at all, and then they get surprised when they die there. The Lord of the Desert thinks that they aren't very clever creatures as he watches them from atop a sand dune, a snake curled around one of his ankles, hiding from the sun under one of his frayed pants legs.

Sometimes he calls the oasis that roams around him, like a vulture circling the sun, and lets the humans find it and cross through to the other side, and sometimes he calls his winds and blows through their caravans with the rest of the sand as they scream. Sometimes they live and sometimes they don't. Sometimes they find the oasis on their own or the winds come from beyond his borders, and he doesn't mind when these things happen. The desert is indifferent to human lives, after all, and he is Lord of the Desert.