A/N: This is certainly one of the most ambiguous and paradoxically planned out stories I've ever written (and one of the few I've ever published) and I won't pretend this will make much sense until the moment of it's conclusion. Information on the situation is slowly revealed as the story goes, though still I'd like to push that a.) I gave up reading the latest of the Naruto manga chapters recently, b.) this story is set post the manga anyway-even if it never ends... and c.)just for back up, it's slightly AU. Even so, I hope people who love mysteries, angst, romance, and solving puzzles will enjoy it and not find the twists too easily discernible, or clues too difficult to pick up on. Any and all feedback is desired and welcome :)

And The Fingers Linger Here

{"Look- "he says, grips her bones and makes her touch.We're the same.}

Chapter Two: Summer, day 1 six months before.

The first letter of the week goes well forgotten in later times, when only doubt swells at the sore back of her throat, bubbly like sugary acid. She pauses coldly in thought as she writes it, not because she is unsure (she knows exactly what she wants to say- scream into his face) but because she knows he might scream back, or worse, plead. She contemplates who she is now, and scribbles out the "fuck you" and settles for a steely review, greeting, and farewell. Hyuuga style. Theres'lotsofsandit'sniceheresincerelyyourssakura. The letter she receives in return reads: It's not fucking new years. Her pen flies to shed angry tears she hasn't shed since she was a whiny, stupid, girl. But all she can write are gray words, her face slack, pen gripped tightly:

There's too much sand. What are you doing to me Naruto?

But then that one has to go too. She's a grown up. She knows what politics mean.

She doesn't mention colors.

{x}

The first time into the desert she had fears too, but they differed in that she was younger then (now it's twenty-one going on a hundred and three) and the things running through her veins where pumped by a fresh heart. Adrenaline has coursed through her veins like shrapnel of the people she loved and strength has coiled at the pit of her stomach and flowed freely from her finger tips. Now she eyes the dunes with sinking paranoia beneath a burning sun, running a cold sweat in over a hundred degrees. Sand scratches at the insides of her shoes, rubbing further at the smoothly calloused calves of her feet. The desert heat comes in from all directions in a likely depiction of true inferno- the sand emits waves of heat as they trudge through it, and the sky offers only hot breaths of air and scalding light that touches the bared, light skin of her arms and shoulders until they are raw and blister.

Her brisk trek across the desert is careful, but not full of purpose the same as it was the first time. She contemplates a fake limp every fifteen minutes, just to find a way to get herself some time. Slow the hours, drag the time. But this is a futile attempt; the ANBU flagging her at all sides watch attentively, oblivious to her temper, feeling self-important of their mission. Their pace is quick- as quick as possible over sand- automatic, pretentious. She wishes she could stop them, trudge slowly behind. Make them stop looking so damn proud. There are six of them- a number overdone on Naruto's part, and all of them stand stick straight, like twigs: snap, snap, snap.

In truth, they watch her with shiny admiration, and when they speak to her she feels old, like her role as a student has long been reversed, and now she takes the title of master. She's not cruel by nature so she laughs with them kindly, and when they stop for meals she still sits with them, passes canteens around like they are children, and she is their mother, when they're supposed to be able to risk their lives for her. But she alienates herself from their reverence, and they don't even see it. At night she assuages her throat, sore from forced laughter around the camp fire, with honey and lemon concoctions from her pack, and thoughts of home. In the morning she's always first to wake and greet the guard on late shift, a slight girl with a white mask in the shape of a valiant bird- she gives her most beguiling smile then talks about the weather(dry again, sand again, I think I see a pattern) and no one suspects that she lies, hair splayed and grainy with sand in her tent every night, eyes trained only on the flack material of her tent , and tries to ignore the tightening of her jaw and the quick thumping of her pulse in her ears when she thinks she hears mechanic wood clanking over dunes.

They spend four nights in the desert like this, in-between liveliness and tired eyes, and when the time does come, Sakura has cut herself away from her bright eyed followers enough that when she thanks them gently for their services, it still feels like Naruto has tossed her tenderlessly into the barren city that is Suna. She is determined to go in and get out.

And all of it-It's all because Naruto wouldn't send the Kazekage some third rate medic-nin. Village Politics are difficult, dealing with foreign allies even more so,(She has good firsthand experience sitting in Naruto's office for hours, explaining things over and over again)but she knows the offer runs deeper than a sign of political loyalty; It's genuine affection on his part for a friend. She momentarily wishes Naruto couldn't do that to people, enchant them, change them and mark them with his sunlight so they'd never forget him. She forgets being scrutinized and tested, the aspiring eyes of her guards, getting hailed a professional, a sage, and remembers being twelve and jealous that Naruto could do that, and that she and Sasuke could never stop him. She's doing it for him, because he commands her as kage, and asks her as her closest friend.

So she walks briskly, feeling dryer than a dying raisin, all secret business, pink strands of hair sticking to her sweaty forehead, into the desert metropolis, into the towering Kazekage's mansion, where she rendezvous with someone's receptionist and she is asked to wait. There, indoors, where the room is cool, and an ocean of sand does not fill the vast majority of her sight, her anxiety subsides as she takes a seat in a bland wooden chair in the corner of the room and sighs. Her skin once smooth and milky has taken much abuse from the sun, and her hair, even piled high at the top of her head in a messy up-do, strays and sticks wetly to her neck and face. Fatigue eats at her, and she thinks in distaste how ironic it is to resort to sitting in the waiting room when she's adopted so well to walking through the hokage tower like she owns it. When a robed woman steps through the office door, trying her best to smile at her as she asks her to follow, Sakura gathers her things in the scope of her arms and readies the papers, only to have them sent fluttering across the kazekage's office floor seconds later. She apologizes profusely, and bears a forced smile that stretches her cracking dry lips so it stings.

She'd seemed to have forgotten how red Sabaku no Gaara's hair was.

{x}

Sakura remembers well the exchange that lead to her sudden excursion into the desert, and down memory lane. It went something like this:

"Please, Please, Sakura, Please"

And the strongest man in the Hidden Leaf Village bent at his knees and nearly kissed her feet. He'd go on too, if she'd let him.

She did not.

Too much changes over the years, and since that terrible year they turned sixteen, an entire lifetime, an era, has taken place- and gone. The best she can remember is a lot of sobbing, fumbling, that lovely inauguration- by then, no one could have doubted him anyway, because if she was twenty-one going on a hundred and three, Naruto was at least a thousand- and late, late, late, nights trying to wash out somebody's blood, even in the evenings, in those sickly white hospital scrubs, before she realized, that was what it meant when things went right. So many things happened, she realized she'd cried for all the wrong reasons before. So many things changed, but Sakura's calloused hand still grasped her new hokage's, and Sunday nights she'd be there, she'd be his secretary, his battle strategist, and the first to bring out the liquor if she could. She'd be every god damn piece of his furniture at some point, because it was just the two of them, and they knew it would be lonely from the start, after they'd been done with their third counterpart.

.Done.

She was battle hardened, fierce, the rumor going around in the labs. But Naruto Uzumaki was Hokage. And somebody's girl was dying. Somebody's girl was dying, and Naruto looked at her, and those eyes told her he wouldn't let Gaara lose someone he loved like it'd happened to the both of them. Sakura hadn't even known he'd been engaged, let alone involved, but:

Her name is Akari, they met three years ago- Sakura could care less. She wants to get it over with. She wants to get home. She folds the briefing letter from Naruto deceptively neatly back into it's envelope and tosses it into the pile of all her other things.

Back home green grass grows selfishly, crawling fresh and long over the expanse of anything in it's way, and though she's yet to have tried it, because it's just that sad a way to die, Sakura is sure if she lay out in the village brush for a good long while, it'd start to slip around her limbs and grow right on her. But here in Suna, she can tell, looking at her dull reflection in the mirror hanging in the guest room- the greenest thing she'll see is a glimpse of her own eyes. Seeing the color of her eyes so clearly in contrast with the muddy, blown away colors of Suna brings a feeling of nakedness-exposure into her stomach. She grimaces.

The whistling of a sandstorm sounds on the other side of the steep windows she's made sure stay hidden behind a peculiar array of stark cloth, and grimly, she notes it has been no less than an hour since she arrived. She spurns the mirror then, hopeless and dry, and turns instead to the grand luxurious bed centered along the broad middle wall of the room. She drops like a rag doll there, filthy, taking some twisted immediate joy in the spoiling of the expensive patterned sheets. This is so backwards, so wrong of her immaculate white gloves, her clean cut methodical hands. She is caked with all sorts of grain, all kinds of feelings, but her face, remains unlined and steely, because she's worked for it that way.

Like this, she folds her arms carefully over her abdomen, and plans, thinking diagrams and species- a poison and an antidote. She hasn't met her patient yet, she can't tell the hue of her skin off the bat, take a blood sample, and raise a firm hand to her shoulder and comply the fixing stares with a recited concoction. She's hoping to anything, though, your deity and mine that she can. The scrolls in her pack grew heavier in the desert, and now they weigh tons, and she swears she won't lug that across when it doubles if they don't hold an answer.

But.

But the problem is no one knows what it is-

How long has it been? How is she fairing? She's holding notebooks already, and on instinct, fifteen minutes after she'd arrived she'd interviewed faces and eyed the crowd for traitors.

She woke sickly early the same morning. Didn't wake at all the next-

The battle was hard, she even fought so bravely but we've tried everything- and the servants- they felt so sincere.

At least she woke at all- The doctors were so lost, they watched with anxious eyes; they are shamed.

-Chiyo is dead. It's the kazekage who speaks it, eyes addressed direct, and hair very red. (his mouth is thick and formed around the second syllables of the woman's name, and Sakura remembers seeing Chiyo's corpse,). He had paused before, hesitant, to try the words she certainly knows.

.

We don't have a clue, but she might have known. Everyone says it, or directs it with their stares.

But no one can say it's a pity she's dead or they'd risk taking the life of their leader, because Chiyo gave her life for Sabaku no Gaara. Sakura thinks this carefully and rounds a careful circle over the following thoughts to get back safely where she started. She makes the journey unharmed.

Her dilemma means, she decides, only one thing, and it means all hopes lie in her ability- heavy on her shoulders.

Little more than minutes later, she bathes(rinses), turns the water to its coldest just to spite the desert, then walks out dressed, immaculate and business like.

She can barely manage a smile now, when she doesn't even have the children, the ANBU officers from before to make her soft and praise her. She only tries to school the tiredness from her eyes, soften her mouth into less stern lines, and opens the door to his office. She's ready to see what he looks like since she last really saw him at sixteen( or was it fifteen?).

This is what she sees:

The kazekage stands over his desk, her recommendation letter in hand, face serene but for the downwards curve at the side of his mouth. Sakura wonders if he could possibly be displeased with her. He might be mildly surprised, when he turns and their eyes meet as she waits at the door. His build is sturdy and much taller than she last remembers, broad in the shoulders like Naruto is now, and what Sasuke might have looked like. It occurs to her this is a grown man, and not a boy, as much as she is a woman, though his face is smooth, clean shaven, no stubble. For a moment she wonders if she should bow- his secretary is coming into the room horrified with her straight back. His fiancée is waiting somewhere in the building, though the thought of seeing this lone figure, handsome, and near expressionless, hold anyone closer than at arm's length, is strange.

"It's best we start quickly."

One last curious glance into his eyes- they are safe, and almost green, like hers.