A/N: It's been years since I read, watched or viewed anything about Naruto, and yet my imagination still floats back to the characters sometimes. After one of those phases I had a terrible urge to talk about Temari, and here we are.

It's probably important to note that I have zero respect for series canon these days, so what I add and what I take away are entirely arbitrary and at my discretion. I picked and chose the bits of post-Shippuden stuff that I wanted to use, but this can be considered an AU for practical purposes - or perhaps more precisely, canon-adjacent. If you see something that doesn't fit with what you know, that's probably why. I wrote this entirely for my own amusement, so that's just the way it is.

This was vaguely intended as a prelude to a longer, more plot-filled story, but I lost interest too soon for that, as usual. Still, I enjoy this piece on its own. Hopefully you can too.

Disclaimer: Yada yada, my words, Kishimoto's world and characters. No money is being made from this nonsense, in case that wasn't crystal clear.

Chapter 1 - Daughter of Sand

Temari was eight years old when she laid her first killing blow on a human being.

Her training had begun at the age of five, as did her brothers'. As a rule, children in Suna started early and trained hard, and their father insisted that they were to be no exception. There was no time wasted.

So her genin missions began at seven, under the close tutelage of her sensei. She proved exceptionally sharp, intelligent and efficient in following orders, and without mercy or concern when it came to violence. When asked, she said she found it interesting. It never struck her to wonder about morality - after all, she was only seven, and the adults around her told her who to hurt and that it had to be done. Why would you question it, then?

The first person she killed was running in the dark. Their team had been following him for a day, hunting him through the spiny rocks like hounds on the scent. Temari left the others, went ahead, guessing where he would turn next. She guessed right. Waiting for him in the dark she prepared her kunai and her poison darts, and when he appeared between the stones and the shadows she didn't think twice. She spun her fan and he heard nothing, dying silently with a row of spines running across his face, filling his flesh with so much poison that he had no time to feel more than a tingle.

When she had given the signal to her team to say that their mark was down, she left her perch and went to look at him. Blood poured from his cheek, his nose, his eye where all were pierced, but she found herself looking at the hitai-ate around his head, where one of her needles had lodged into his skull through the cloth. She saw the marking on the plate: The symbol of Suna. It was that, and not his death, that made her wonder at what she had done and why.

She never found out what they had killed him for. He had run, they had pursued. It was their duty, and she could only assume that he had shirked his. But she wondered for a long time.

The last time she killed was when she was twenty-two.

After the war, after everything was back to normal, she was working, like always. She took a solo mission to the north of Suna, chasing a missing nin. It was S rank, and Kankurou asked her if she was sure she wanted to go without backup, but she knew having other people along only slowed her down. If she lost, well, then she deserved to. She travelled without stopping for half a week, hunting across the emptiness of the deserts, through heat of day and cold of night. In the silver shadows of the waning moon she chased a stranger down, and when she found him she took off his head with her fan, left his body to be consumed by the desert, and went home. But as she carried the head, bagged and strapped to her belt, she looked at the hitai-ate in her hand, with its symbol of Suna scored for treason, and she began to wonder again.

Within a few weeks she had decided to take some leave. She'd earned her fair share, and since her little brother was her boss she was able to get a few months off, no questions asked. With that she took off alone, this time running east, into the sun.

There was a welcome waiting for her, as she'd known there would be. It was quiet and warm and steady, and that was all she needed. The offer had been made quite some time before, but he didn't seem to care that it had taken her a couple of years to make up her mind. He opened the door for her with a dry smile, and they spent the day in bed while she rested and he ran his fingers through her hair. She asked him, 'How many people have you killed?', but he said he couldn't remember. When he asked why, she shrugged. She was only wondering again.

Temari got married when she was twenty-two. She retired then, too, because changing allegiances from Suna's ANBU to Konoha's wasn't easy, and it took too much political wrangling - besides, she'd had enough of the kind of work that it involved. They bought a house on the outskirts of town, where it was quiet, and she found that spending her time at home and in the garden was actually quite nice. She relaxed, got her hands dirty in the earth and the kitchen, finally got around to learning how to sew like she'd always meant to do. She spent time with her husband's friends' wives, because she didn't really have any friends of her own, not even back home. After not very long she got pregnant, and she found herself thinking - really thinking - about family.

Hers had always been strange and hard. Their father had been too distant and wrapped up in work to much live up to that name, and their mother had been dead before Temari had begun her training; she could barely remember anything about her, just the slight shadow of a smile and gentle eyes. She and her brothers had become a kind of force of nature over time, bound together by ties of pain and anger more than anything else, but she loved them fiercely, and once Gaara had begun to find his way back to them they had grown close. But things never stayed the same for long. They still saw life through the lens of their duties, and she wasn't sure if she could anymore.

Now she was part of a clan, she had been wrapped up in it and adopted by them all, but she didn't feel like she belonged. They welcomed her, laughed with her, gave her their food and their shelter, and yet she sometimes found herself thinking that she was more like one of her brother's puppets than a person when she was with them. She went through the motions, did and said what was expected of her, and when she got home in the dark she was alone again, even with her husband sleeping by her side.

How could she make sense of it? Maybe it was just that she was broken. Lying in bed with the moonlight creeping through the blinds, she laid her hands on her slowly growing belly and hoped that her child wouldn't learn to kill for a long, long time. Perhaps that wasn't the reason she couldn't find a place where she felt right, but then again, perhaps it was. She had no way of knowing now; what's done is done. There was no going back fifteen years and staying her hand.

Sometimes she wondered, as she watched her son grow, what she would have been like in a different place and time. But that was an idle fancy, no use to anyone.

So time went on, as it always does.