Welcome to the Human Race
The morning tea was piping hot, and alone in the kitchen, Temari felt free enough to curse as it burned her tongue. Of course, Kankurou entered as she spoke, and grinned at her.
"Careful," he warned her, "you'll never get a husband with that kind of a mouth on you."
She shot him a glare worthy of a kunoichi of her standing, but as a shinobi of his standing, he ignored it.
That, naturally, was when they felt the chakra pulses. A second mouthful scorched the back of her throat, and Kankurou dropped the cup he was holding as the chakra - Gaara's chakra - shot throught the room. She cast a startled glance in Kankurou's direction, finding him shooting a similar gaze in hers, and the two began running, from a dead stop to full speed in time only a shinobi can truly appreciate. To the naked eye, Temari might have supposed if she'd a had time to consider, it might have seemed that they simply disappeared.
Of course, she didn't have time, because in the split second it took them to begin moving, Gaara's chakra disappeared as suddenly as it had come upon them, and they pushed themselves to an even greater speed.
The second wave came over them, and Temari lost her footing on the smooth slope of a store, and Kankurou reeled under the shock. She was already standing again by the time the power disappeared. She had caught herself nearly as quickly as Kankurou did, but was still left several feet behind. Two more pulses passed by them in the time it took to reach the city walls, and this time both were ready.
Kankurou passed out of sight and though Temari followed only seconds later, it was still too late to see anything but Kakurou's painful introduction to the wall. She stared for a second, searching him for injury, though she couldn't see much under the lump of sand that held him pinned. Another second passed, her eyes searching for a reason behind the way the sand compacted around her brother's body, bringing a pained grimace to his face. It was a second that saved her.
Gaara returned his hand to his side, face pinched into an expression that - had he still been Shukaku's vessel - surely would have meant the city's destruction. The power Temari felt around her flickered out, disrupted, and Kankurou slumped, unconscious, to the ground; not dead, she hoped, because there were so many faces she knew: Baki-sensei, Matsuri, Tamoya, Hokure, Fusen, and Gamio.
Gaara's chakra, raised so quickly and greatly that she nearly choked on it, turned her eyes back to her leader, to her little brother. She glanced at his hands, pressed together in a familiar pose. Carefully, she pulled the fan that she had snatched from the corner of the kitchen to it's greatest width, and spoke.
"Gaara," she said quietly, calling him to sense. Not that it worked. Gaara gave her a half-second before the immense chakra turned on her, a lump of sand ready to pin her to the wall as well, to join the bodies of her friends and family on the ground. The half-second was enough. With no time to speak the activation words, she flung her own power out, layering it along the fan's edge, and batted the sand away.
Gaara flinched, hands dropping to his sides to stare at her. His face twisted even more: anger, hatred, grief, mixing with coutless other emotions she couldn't even guess at pulling his brows down lower over his eyes, lips lifting into a snarl that showed how tightly clenched his teeth were.
Temari, against her instincts that screamed that there was a danger - a great one - standing directly in front of her, closed her fan and set it on the ground. "Gaara," she said again. "What's going on?" She very briefly considered asking about the very softly groaning bodies behind, and decided to leave it until later.
Taking a step closer, the thought that she must have lost her sanity in the same instant Gaara did passed through her mind.
"Dispel me," he snarled, and she blinked.
"What?" she asked, voice coming perilously close to high pitched. She cleared her throat, wary of showing the fear that coursed through her to Gaara.
"Summon your chakra, and dispel whatever illusion is on me," he said again, his own voice and expressions slowly returning to their usual impassvity.
"Alright," she said, and gathered her chakra in her fingertips, feeling Gaara's attention take in her chakra signature as a shiver down her spine. Carefully, she pressed her fingers to his forehead, and murmured, "Kai".
Gaara's eyes closed, feeling her power send ripples through his. His eyes opened, took in the view before him, bodies slumped against the city's outer defensive wall, and frowned in wide eyed horror. "It didn't work," he said, and if Temari had not been so close, she never would have heard him.
"What do you mean?" she pressed, "What's wrong, Gaara?"
"The city's still standing," he very nearly accused her.
"Of course it is," she answered back. "Why wouldn't it be?"
"Because I saw it destroyed!" his voice hissed, and Temari couldn't help the shiver it evoked in her.
"You can't have!" she hissed back - again, against her better judgement - "we haven't been attacked in over a year! And who would be stupid enough to, with Leaf and Uzumaki Naruto as our allies?"
Gaara's mouth opened, and for a second his expression flickered to confusion. "I saw Naruto die, too," he said. "In the market." His eyes met hers, and his voice was once again accusatory. "Kankurou died in the training grounds. Baki and Matsuri died in my office. They needed my help!" Gaara was panting for breath, and Temari abruptly recognized one more expression in the mariad on Gaara face: fear. Then they faded away to confusion again. "You died," he said. "Chakra control... it was like no one had ever learned to control properly. Nothing was working." The fear returned. "I... they couldn't kill me. The sand protected me, and I watched you all die because I wasn't strong enough to stop them. There were too many. And then they burned the city."
He stopped talking, lips pressed tightly together. "How?" she asked, because it was the only thing she could manage after the onslaught of Gaara's words. "How did they burn the city? You can't burn sand." Gaara blinked, as if that had never occured to him, and Temari felt more questions rise to her mouth, pushing at each other to get out. "For that matter, when did Naruto get here? The last time I heard, he was still off search for his rogue nin team mate! And why wasn't anyone with him? I highly doubt anyone would let him go anywhere alone! And Matsuri doesn't have clearance to your office! And, and it's not possible to disrupt an entire city's chakra control, and Kankurou never goes to the training grounds, and you still haven't told me who 'they' are!" She finally finished, breath rising out of her in sharp gasps. Her voice had tailed into hysterics at the end, but Gaara's gaze had turned inward, and his chakra levels had returned to normal, and she clenched her jaw to keep from saying any more.
"I was in my office," Gaara said, "and then Matsuri died... she screamed. Then I noticed, Baki, and he was already dead, and I ran to- no, I can't have. I turned left, that takes you to the residential section. But I was... I ended up on the training grounds. And then... I was in the market. But how did...?" His voice had steadily become more and more quiet, until it it was soft enough that Temari couldn't understand what he was saying; she could only hear his tone, confused and afraid, his hands raising to clench at his hair.
Temari chanced a glance at the bodies - people - slumped against the wall, and noted that Baki's eyes were open. He made no move to interrupt her, and she made no move to acknowledge him. Temari turned her attention back to Gaara, and found him staring at her with an expression she'd only ever once seen before - at the end of his first, and only battle with Uzumaki Naruto.
"How?" he asked her, and she hoped she was right when she answered. She steeled her tone when she spoke, banishing any possibility of his doubt from her mind.
"It was a nightmare. A dream," she reached out tentatively to stroke his face. He flinched imperceptibly, and she changed her course, laying her hand on his arm. A pair of groans heralded Matsuri and Kankurou's awakenings. "You must have fallen alseep at your desk."
Gaara's expression steeled. "I don't sleep," he accused.
"No," she said, though not in agreement. "Shukaku's vessel didn't sleep. Humans sleep all the time, every day, sometimes more than once a day, and sometimes they sleep in." The last was shot over her shoulder, at Kankurou, who shrugged and gave Gaara a shaky grin.
"Welcome to the human race," he said. And Gaara relaxed under her touch.