Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto.
The sun beat down on her accusingly as she stared at her bloodied hands.
Sari had been called on the mission because of the need for a medic; she was a med nin, in her third year of training, who specialized in the healing of wounds and in field surgery.
It was only the second time Sari had ever left the village; the first time she left was with Matsuri, Ittetsu (1) and the rest to try and bring the Kazekage home.
The Kazekage led the mission; he still liked to lead missions, though he usually only took the most dangerous ones so they would have a higher chance of success.
Sari had no idea how it had gone so wrong.
She began to regain consciousness in earnest, enough to stop staring at her hands and think, her brown eyes blinking at the landscape.
Sari could remember now. She could remember how the sand had been soaked with blood, could remember how it had flew across the sky like a desert hawk.
She remembered how she had fought, how she had been wounded. She remembered how she had been too drained of chakra to do anything for herself or the others.
She remembered how, one by one, each of her comrades died. Except for the Kazekage.
He had fought on; he had a sort of tunnel vision when it came to battle. It had probably been the smell of blood that had alerted Gaara to what had happened. Sari watched in numb fascination as he took in the scene with widened, disbelieving eyes. She watched as he lost composure in frightening entirety, as he cursed and even wept. And she watched as he showed absolutely no mercy on the fleeing enemy. Their only remains now were their heads, lined up in a row in the shade of a rock; no carrion bird came for them.
Now, she struggled to stay awake, and tried to rub the blood off of her hands with sand, not wanting to remember how it had gotten there. –His eyes, that man's eyes as I killed him. I've never seen such emotion, I've never felt someone else's fear like that. Will I ever forget it?— She drew in dry, hoarse breaths.
Gaara rooted around the bodies of the fallen Suna nin, hoping beyond hope that he would find a survivor.
Sari shuddered as blood dripped through and coagulated in her long brown hair (women, any women, in the Land of Wind don't normally wear their hair as long as she does, and when—if—she gets home she's going to hack it off until it's as short as Matsuri's) and dribbled down her neck. Some of it got into her mouth. She coughed.
"Sari! Sari!" Gaara had heard her quiet, shaky cough, and the reverberation of him running across the sand was resounding in her ears.
"H-Hai, Kazekage-sama," Sari whispered hoarsely, spitting the blood out and feeling satisfaction as blood and spittle hit the sand.
Before she knew it, he was at her side. Sari saw a head of dense crimson hair as red as the blood slipping from her body, worried pale green eyes, and not much else. She just struggled still to wipe the blood off of her hands.
Gaara watched this, his eyes narrowing shrewdly. He took in the blood-drenched kunai dripping life fluid near her knee.
"Was it your first time?" he asked her, his voice rasping in what almost sounded like sorrow. Sari looked up, amazed to see how gentle his eyes were; she winced, and wished the occasion to see that gentleness was different.
"Hai," she whispered, looking down. Suddenly, insanely, Sari felt foolish. Gaara-sama's been killing since he was a small child; he must think I'm so stupid, so pitiful. It was my first kill; I barely had enough energy left to do that. I couldn't even heal my teammates; I could only watch them die.
But Gaara only nodded, and told her to hold still as he saw to her injuries; he must have known that she was too drained to heal them herself.
Sari flinched as he washed the wounds with alcohol (it was a crude antiseptic used on the battlefield in place of proper disinfectant, which was much more expensive); she was sure her skin bubbled where the alcohol hit it. She could hardly believe that just yesterday she would have felt a thrill riding up her spine at his close proximity; now she was too tired to even think, let alone feel.
Gaara took a small, cylindrical case out of his pack and opened it; Sari's nostrils were hit by a familiar noxious odor. The foul-smelling purple paste he rubbed over her wounds was a coagulant; it would harden over external wounds and keep them from bleeding and protect them from an outside source of infection. It was watertight and wouldn't crack or melt in the desert heat; it had actually been designed for desert use. As long as she only had external wounds, Sari would last until they got back to Sunagakure.
As soon as he was done attending to her wounds, Gaara began to see to the bodies of the fallen Suna nin. He gave Sari his water canteen, and Sari, knowing that her own was missing, understood and took a long draught of the water inside. Gaara could go much longer without water than she could.
One of them was still alive; he was gasping and gurgling blood, trying to loosen the white linen veil at his throat.
Gaara knelt over him and listened to him whisper. "Please, Kazekage-sama," the man whispered. "Please…"
Sari's eyes widened in horror as she watched. Gaara did not crush the man with his sand. Instead, he wrested the kunai the man had been holding in a death grip away from him, and in one quick, clean movement, thrust it through his skull.
"Why…why did you do that?" she asked him, horrified.
Gaara shook his head bitterly, staring down with odd tenderness at the now strangely crumpled face of the man he had just killed. "He wouldn't have survived," he murmured hoarsely. "And that was much quicker than any death the desert would have afforded him." He wiped the dead man's blood from his cheek.
It was desert kindness. A Sand nin would sooner kill their comrade than see the desert do it for him.
In that moment, Sari began to realize how little she knew him. The young man she had had a crush on for over a year was in fact a very different man than she had imagined. She wondered if she could grow to love the real core of Gaara too, and not just the Kazekage she had known.
She thought that maybe it would be.
Gaara moved the six fallen into a shallow pit he had dug into the earth with his sand manipulation, after removing their canteens and hitai-ate's. It took all of twenty minutes to find rock to pile over the communal grave after putting a layer of sand back over it.
Finally, he began to tend to his own injuries. Gaara's injuries were considerably less extensive than Sari's, but he went through the same process.
Then, he drew a drawstring sack and thrust the four heads of the enemy nin inside of it, slinging it over his left shoulder. The burlap bag sluggishly dripped blood as he walked; Sari shuddered at the grisly sight.
"What do we do now?" Sari forced out. Her eyes, desperately making contact with Gaara's, communicated her real question. How do I go back to normal, after what I've seen and done?
It seemed like just yesterday that Matsuri had hugged her goodbye as she left and her younger friend had good-naturedly whispered her jealousy that Sari got to go on a mission with "Kazekage-sama".
Now, Sari had seen and experienced death in a far more up-close-and-personal way than she ever had when she lost a patient in the hospital, and she didn't see how life could ever be the same again.
"We continue to live," Gaara answered her. He put a hand under the crook of her arm and hoisted her up. "It's all we can do."
1: Ittetsu was the shinobi who started crying when Gaara was revived; Matsuri hit him over the head for crying.
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