A/N: Don't anybody move! Yes, this just happened. You have been so pateint and I thank you all for that. Life events sometimes take us from our passions. You know. I can't promise that Part II will be as timely submitted as our earlier every wednesday schedule, but know that I AM doing it. I started. Here it is. Behold!

Six Months Later.

I waved goodbye to Etsu as I skipped out of the ramen shop. My walk home was easy, and my feet found the path automatically as the evening sun shined above the rooflines. The route from the food district to the mansion took me straight through the night market of Sunagakure, but the smell alone would have drawn me there regardless. It seemed like a slower night than usual, but the streets were still full of people, buying and selling their wares. Dark browns, tans, oranges and musty auburns all mixed together, all individuals but apart of the same portraiture. They were pleasant as I passed by their stalls, grinning like a fool. They all knew who I was, and I could name most of them just by their smudge. I thought there would be no benefits to being nearly blind, and it was true there weren't many but…there was one: I could smell everything.

One stall owner whom I knew but couldn't recall the name of, called me over. I could make out their blotchy form offer me something, and I took it readily as the exotic scent of saffron butter filled my nose. I munched on the roll the rest of the way home as the sun set. I wasn't allowed out past dark, mainly because night blindness was a real thing and no amount of muscle memory was going to keep me from getting lost. Suna was a big place and it was only getting bigger. It left Ojiisan a little high and dry on the night shift, but he never complained, especially when it gave him some time alone with Etsu.

Tonight, all that was left for me to do was go home and eat the mountain of carrots I was sure Temari was waiting to shove down my throat. 'Keratin is good for your eyes', she'd say. 'While you're at it, go ahead and shove these currents and spinach leaves down there as well.' I could just hear her now! I groaned and a bit of bun fell out of my mouth. I nearly choked on the snort that escaped me, but couldn't stop the giggles that followed. My lack of poise was hardly a laughing matter, but I really couldn't have cared less. I was just happy that I had finally been allowed to move back into the mansion after five long months at Ojiisan's house with Hiniku breathing down my neck.

The two of us were way past cabin fever for sure, and she had probably whined to Gaara non stop about it…but I was pretty sure Gaara was just lonely and that's why my sentence had ended. I mean, despite all the trouble I had caused, I was still his girlfriend. Five months was impressive…but far too long in my opinion. Hiniku didn't care, anyway. She practically said good riddance! But I owed her a lot more than she would willingly admit. If she hadn't of chosen the job she did, I could have ended up in a far worse place than sleeping in the bed next to hers for months on end.

All in all, at the end: the trouble, the tears, the blindness, the punishment…it had all been worth it. I hated to sound so well adjusted, but I was used to having my life turned on its head. I mean, I did go from being an abused street urchin to the girlfriend of the Kazekage. There wasn't a much higher high, or a lower low.

When I finally made it home, the maid stopped me in the foyer as she had every night for the last month. She made me roll up my sleeves and hold up each leg, putting each limb on display for her to inspect for injuries. Gaara's orders…but I think she started doing it before he even asked. I didn't really get why it mattered. So I had a bruise here, or a scrape there, big deal. It was more than plausible. I was blind! Besides…what good did it do him to know?

Once she gave me a thorough once over and poked at a nasty welt on my hip that I got from rounding the ramen bar too sharply, she deemed me fit to enter. She hunkered away to clean something while I soured, my good mood ruined by her pesky jabs. I sauntered into the kitchen just as the last rays of sun slunk under the windowsill. All the lights in the house were on, and I turned them all off with the flick of a switch the deeper I went into the house. Temari did it on purpose, for me I assumed, but it was really just a waste of electricity. Moreover, if I turned the light off, I could just pretend I didn't see the mountain of healthy vegetables sitting on the table waiting to gag me.

Before she popped out of some unseen corner, I jogged upstairs to my room to shower and ask Beju how his day had been. The pup would never admit it, but I think he missed me more than Gaara had. He'd watched me pack with mild suspicion when I left for Taki, but when I didn't come back for weeks, Hiniku said he blamed himself for not stopping me, or hiding in my bag when he had the chance. Although that apparently didn't matter when I made it back home safely. He barely even lifted his head as I packed the rest of my things under guard and was escorted from the premises. I guess he felt guilty but was more upset, and those emotions were just so exhausting for a ninken. I bet he napped a lot while I was gone. He sure napped a lot now.

"Hey boy." I said brightly as I threw the door to my room open. He was mid lick, his tongue rubbing over his paw, when he lazily dragged his eyes up to me. I don't think I'd ever seen a more disinterested expression on a human or dog. He huffed a response before going back to his grooming. His fur was just so much more interesting than me. So he was guilty, mad and now bitter. I sighed as he licked his way through the stages of grief, and shed my outer layers into a pile by my armoire. "Do anything exciting today?" I prodded the puppy, partly just to be annoying. He slid his eyes over to me again and huffed, like he didn't know 'human-speak'. I swear he knew bigger words than I did, but when he was this puppyish, he reverted to yips and barks like he was a normal dog and not a trained Shinobi aide.

"Well I saved someone life today when they choked on udon. That was interesting." It was a lot less cool than it sounded. Some old man had sucked down the last of his ramen, apparently forgetting you're not supposed to breathe and eat at the same time. I heard him struggle and knew he needed help when he knocked a whole bottle of sake over the bar into the fryer, ruining an entire batch of tempura. Etsu almost didn't let me save him just for that.

I laughed to myself and nearly had both my sandals off before my door flew open and Temari waltzed in. Surprisingly, she missed my eye roll as she came swooping in like a tempest.

"There you are." She said and uninvited, climbed onto my bed behind Beju.

"Here I am." I muttered and tossed my boots in the corner by the rest of my dirty clothes.

"Did you see the stuff in the kitchen? You better not have already eaten." She said and tickled the puppy's ears absently. I loved Temari deeply, I thought of her as my sister…but just the sight of her now-a-days made me want to run for the hills while she chased me with produce. Yoshino had said it was my ultimate punishment: the aftermath. Everyone had to process change their own way, and Temari's way was to try and fix it.

"I guess I missed it. Silly me. I must be blind or something." She wrinkled her nose at my joke. Apparently even I wasn't allowed to make jokes at my own expense. Nothing about my condition was a laughing matter to her, even though I had accepted my fate. We usually stopped here though, this was the line. If we went any further, feelings would be hurt—or worse: revealed. It was like it had been after Giia died, or after one of my episodes. They treated me like I was going to break. I thought I had finally snapped them out of it, but after Taki I was back to being porcelain. They couldn't say anything, lest I crack. But even though this caginess kept the peace, it made things awkward, and I don't know how many times I'd apologized for it. That and the whole leaving thing.

I was never going to live it down. And probably never step outside the village again, but that was beside the point. I had a very clear set of goals now, at least.

Step one: learn brail.

Step two: map out the city and memorize it.

Step three: learn what each person smells like and how to differentiate. That one was going to be impossible, but I had a few that already stuck out. Gaara smelled like sand…which sounded so cliché, but it wasn't like a dry dust sand. He smelled like the desert after a rainstorm, where lightning had struck the silt and made glass. That's a better description: he smelled like glass. Kankurou smelled like wood, usually sandalwood, or whatever medium Jo was using at the time to mend his puppets. Temari was the hardest to peg. She had the wind in her hair, and always smelled like something different. She had the lingering scent of Shikamaru on her half the time, but also smelled like the ocean to the west, or the mountains to the north. She was a lot of different things, and it matched her personality more than she wanted to hear. I tried to describe it to her once, but she just shook her head and said she smelled like Nara sweat, and that's all it was. Of course, it wasn't above me to make a joke about how she got that Nara sweat all over her, and she would proceed to annihilate me.

But, before either of us could step over that line, the front door downstairs opened and closed, signaling the arrival of the Kage.

"Gaara must be home." I said quickly and got up, leaving her on my bed with Beju. I peeked over the banister down into the living room as Gaara sauntered in. He looked tired, and it was deserved. Most people thought that I was only at the admin building to annoy him, as his needy girlfriend, but in reality, I did the bulk of his paperwork. He'd probably signed his name more in the last six months than he had in his entire life. His fingertips were always stained black and he looked paler, like he hadn't seen the sun in weeks. Which was literally impossible in the desert, but somehow he managed it. I had the nerve to ask him right after I was allowed to move back in if it meant that I could go back to work as well, but he just gave me a look.

I still wasn't in anyone's good graces.

So I was pretty much just biding my time until he hated the look of paper. It wouldn't be much longer now.

"Tadaima." He mumbled as he face planted on the couch, Kankurou coming in lazily after him.

"Okaeri." I hummed as I hopped down the stairs. But before I could make it to the brothers, the maid from before appeared with her nightly injury report, and I veered off into the kitchen. I especially did not want to be there when she told him I had yet another disability related incident. I sat down at the table and braced myself for the inevitable—

"Daagana." A voice called and I shoved a carrot in my mouth to keep from groaning out loud. Any day now he was going to ask me to come back to the admin building! You can't slam into chairs or burn yourself on fryers in an office!

Instead of Gaara, though, Kankurou appeared in the doorway to the kitchen with his usual smirk.

I could live and die by that smirk. It had been my only companion for a long few months. Kankurou was my rock in the ever-changing tide of Temari's mood, and my advocate when even Gaara was treating me especially unfair. He swaggered into the kitchen, my big brother, took one look at the vegetables heaped on the table and gave them a disgusted look. It nearly matched my own. There was a moment of pause before he asked,

"Wanna get some gyoza?"

"Absolutely."

The Chuunin exams were almost here again. It was weird how we could go from not having them for two years, to having one every six months. At least this time around, more countries were willing to participate. From what Temari had told me, there was at least a squad from every village. But at the same time, it meant that she was going to have to go to Konoha for a few weeks to help plan since they were again hosting. I ordered an extra bento of dumplings for her trip as a peace offering. At least while she was gone, I wouldn't have to drown myself in beet juice.

The week following her departure was uneventful. I barely saw anyone, they were so busy and I was…not. Finally, after days of dinner with myself, I asked Beju to walk me to the admin building so I could take Gaara something to eat. He'd been holed up in his office for days, scribbling on scrolls, ordering Shinobi about. It was fortunate we had the arena built already or he might have stressed himself to death. After all, there would be no making another one…

That was the other thing that no one dared speak of: I was blind…and powerless.

I wrapped a bento in a cute little cloth and lead a whining Bejumaru out the front door.

At first, I wasn't entirely sure what to do with myself. The black had been a part of me my whole life and it felt like I had just started to tap into its potential. Tack on the actual components of the Dark Release and it was like I had been handed the keys to a treasure box…and then had them brutally taken away. My power never made me who I was, but I will admit…it helped. I never would have freed myself from my mother, or had a reason to be taken in by the Nara's. I never would have met my biological family—as short-lived as that was. This curse my mother thought she had plagued me with was actually what had liberated me.

And now…it was gone.

To say that I panicked at the time would not be honest enough. In reality, I had a full-blown melt down. It felt like I was learning to crawl again, like I lost my sea legs or something. I was empty and bleak, like the desert. The dunes I loved so much seemed to mirror my heart that had once been so full of power. After Yato-jiisan had died and I lost my sight completely, I thought that would be the worst of it. It was the kind of disability I could handle, plenty of shinobi were blind and learned to compensate. I couldn't exactly name any off the top of my head but I was sure there were some.

Powerless, however…civilian. It was almost a swearword. I'd never gotten along with that side of life; in fact, I could count the people in my life that weren't Shinobi on one hand. Even then, they were still affiliated in some way or another. Being a ninja was in my blood. Having powers or jutsus or a Kekkei Genkai simply meant that it was my destiny to serve in that capacity. Now, when all of that was gone…where did I fit? I couldn't find an answer. Neither could Gaara, and he was by far less willing to admit that I wasn't his equal anymore.

I let out a sigh. Maybe I was just his annoying girlfriend after all.

When sight finally came back into my eyes, although blurrily, I thought the power had come back as well. But the moment I tried to summon my black, it lashed out at me again like it had when I tried to save Old Man Yato. I'd had to wrap my shoulder for days after, hiding the tear its tantrum had left in my flesh. But the worst of it all…was that I there was no more Gaara and Daagana sparring. There was no more 'we' time. That was probably why he was so desperate to find a cure, because we had built ourselves upon our mutual monstrosity. Gaara couldn't handle being alone again. I had to remind him again and again that it wasn't like I was gone. I was still here, I was home, he wasn't alone. But here now was never going to make up for where I had been then. When everything had gone to hell.

My fingers tangled in the hair on Beju's neck as he guided me to the admin building. He'd huffed and puffed about going out, saying he was tired or he had things to do. Really though, what other things did a puppy have to do? But when I told him I was going with or without him, he begrudgingly relented. He had grown another foot or two once the last six months, and his head was at my waist now. We trudged along in silence as he steered me down the streets, one turn to the next. I was fairly confident that I knew where I was, but when it was this dark, I would never be sure.

"Why did you insist on going so late?" Beju finally muttered as we turned another corner. Apparently we were taking the back way, because I wasn't sure we were supposed to take that left three turns back, but the dog led on.

"Gaara probably hasn't eaten anything all day, and you know he can't sleep. What if he passes out from exhaustion?"

"Have you ever, in the history of Suna, heard of that happening?" Beju asked crossly.

"Well, no, of course not. Gaara always has it under control, but—"

"Then why do you suppose it's going to happen now, randomly, after all these years?"

"I'm sorry. When else do you think it'll happen?"

"Never, because the Lord will never let it happen."

"You say that like you haven't seen his eyelids droop. Or watched him sway under a strong breeze after a tough battle." I growled. "Gaara is perpetually worn-out. He's at risk all the time, but especially now, when the whole world is watching him."

"The world was watching you once too. Look how that turned out." He yipped as I pulled his fur hard.

"Can't you be a normal dog, just once?"

"I don't pretend to be things that I am not, Lady."

"You know I still hate it when you call me that." I mumbled and he just lifted his jowls in a smirk.

"I know."

We followed along the curve of a large round building that I was sure was the backside of the admin. So we did come the back way. Probably because Beju didn't want anyone to see me in this state, eyes darting from one black blur to the other, not knowing my right from left. The people understood that I had been harmed on my 'mission' but they didn't know the full extent. Hell, I didn't even know the full extent.

Isao wrote monthly, and with his letters he had graciously sent us scrolls upon scrolls explaining the Dark Release at length…but even after everything we understood about my Kekkei Genkai, it didn't necessarily apply to me. Because I just had to be the outlier—the freak. It was exactly as Aunt Azumi had said:

Giia tried to use a chakra-based curse on a girl with a chakra-based Kekkei Genkai. I was immune it its ruinous effects but not to it frying my proverbial circuits. I was broken and there was no one on earth who knew how to fix me. Sakura thought it was fascinating, of course, but she thought that of most medical marvels. Her research was slow though, due to the travel required. Gaara had forbidden my travel for the foreseeable future, and though it made me angry, I had agreed obediently. I just kept telling myself that soon this would be over; it would go back to normal. Even if normal meant blind, that would be fine. Just not inept.

Not like I was now.

Beju sniffed sharply and the fur under my hand bristled.

"What is it?" I asked quietly, clutching the bento to my chest and scanning the darkness. Kankurou was going to kill me for leaving the house without a weapon. But they took them all from me! And in all technicalities, I did have a defense: I had a dog.

"Whoever you are—show yourself!" Beju barked into the darkness, barring his fangs like I had never seen. He was close enough to me that I could make out the whites of his teeth and the pink of his gums. His hackles were raised and his back was ridged. Whatever it was he saw or smelled…it was dangerous.

A little ahead of us, from around the corner of an alleyway came a short but wide hulking mass. It was swathed in black, and I had to squint to keep it from blending in with the rest of the darkness. To me it looked like a giant turtle shell, slowly skulking towards us. Whatever it was made no noise aside the occasional tink and pop, like an old woman's joints cracking.

"What the hell is that?" I hissed at Beju, but before the ninken could reply, a blur of tan whooshed past my middle, forcing us to jump apart, and me to lose my grip on him. I landed easily; the ground was a constant at least, and I could make out Beju's rusty colors as he rebounded immediately from the whip-like smear. Against the dark brown of the building, the light tan line looked like a stray brush stroke across a dingy painting; an obtrusive mar on a once beautiful piece of art. The tip of it writhed like a snake's head, swaying side to side, eyeing us.

"Run lady! Get to the admin building and find Lord—" Suddenly, the whole sky exploded in a brilliant firework of color. A blinding white outlined in red and oxidized yellow. There for an instant and then gone in a blink. I couldn't even make out the smoke cloud it had surely left behind.

"We're under attack!" I cried as something dripped onto my cheek. The sudden coolness snapped me from any panic that was about to engulf me as I brushed it with off with my fingers. It was a glob of something, matte and russet. When I rubbed it between my thumb and forefinger, it felt gritty and smelled like… "Clay?"

"Lady—" Beju barked again as he tried to reach me, ducking under the dividing line the whip had made between us. But it was what the whip had been waiting for as it swirled around faster than I could see and smacked Beju out of the way. He flew into the wall behind us and then to the ground with a crunch. A noise I felt in each and everyone one of my bones.

He didn't get up.

"Beju!" I screamed and took a desperate step towards his outline. As quickly as it has assaulted my pup, the whip zoomed around my ankles and then coiled around my body. For a moment it surrounded me, and then, like it was pulling in the slack, it tightened until I couldn't even move. The bento clattered to the ground and right then, I shouldn't have cared, but the color caught my attention and I whimpered.

Where was Gaara? What was the explosion? Where was anybody?!

All during the assault, the alien turtle shell had never stopped its trek towards us, until I could finally see that this whip was actually a tail, and that turtle shell had a head.

"Who are you?" I demanded, struggling in its segmented line. Its voice was like rocks being beaten with rocks, gravel crunching underfoot.

"I have come for you." Simple words that sent ice down my spine. Its voice was unearthly, and there was no way it was human.

"Who are you?" I shouted again but then choked as the tail squeezed me unbearably tight.

"You are a debt unpaid." Its words flitted over me, like sand stinging my face during a storm. Inexplicably soft, but terrifying and deadly. My head lulled back as my lungs screamed for air and the blood rushed to my head. It was suffocating me. Crushing me death. In the sky above us, I could see shapes swirl against the stars, colors that had no business being up there. Tan and matte against a black sky. I knew that sandy color well, it was Gaara. He was hovering up there opposite someone, and I watched as his sand attacked them.

There were more than this turtle.

"Are…you…Ame…" I managed to squeak out, my face going almost purple. It had been almost three years since the raid and yet I attributed every bad to Amegakure. It was stupid of me, and I couldn't even blame it on the lack of oxygen.

"No, I am Suna." It said, and it was the last thing I remembered before the ally echoed a sickening pop that sounded from my chest and my eyes rolled back in their sockets.