Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.

Thanks for the reviews FallenCrimsonStar, UchihaJennifer, and Barbara7chan! It's great to know that you like it so far. Just wait for what I've got planned!

'Sakura'

'Inner Sakura'


Her question was met with silence and downcast eyes.

"Was that normal for him?"

"Gaara has some…problems." Temari was whispering, she sounded scared.

"That wasn't 'problems'! I thought he was just cranky and antisocial! Is he seeing a doctor at least?"

"No, he's not. We thought…we thought he was getting better. It's been months since he had an episode like that one." She was still whispering.

"Why not?! Isn't that what he needs?! He's obviously not getting any better!" Her voice had risen to a low shout.

There was a long, stretched out silence.

"We can't."

"Why?" Sakura's voice softened. The older girl just sounded so broken and sad.

"The doctor would have to know the cause in order to treat him. He would want to know the whole story, and Gaara would be in trouble and so would we. We would probably be put in prison and he in an asylum."

Yes, this was a puzzle. But did she really want to know the answers?

'Well, fuck, we're already here aren't we?'

She took a moment to absorb this. They were involved in something. Something bad.

"How long has he been like this?" Her voice had become quiet too, whispering just like Temari.

"I suppose about seven years." She looked her in the eyes. "You can't tell anyone. We can do this by ourselves. I will get my brother back. I will do anything to see him smile. To hear him laugh, even if it's only once. I will get my baby brother back." She had regained that former vigor of spirit that she'd seen earlier, trying to force Sakura to understand her desperation.

"We'll do anything." Kankuro corrected, coming to stand behind his sister in a supporting gesture.

"…what happened?" People don't just break into pieces like that. At least, she had never heard of that happening.

"Gaara was… abused by our father. He blamed him for our mother's death…and I'm ashamed to say that we did too. When we were old enough to understand that it wasn't, it was too late. Our uncle was kind to him…until the day he told Gaara that her death was his fault. And…that day…it ended badly. He's never been the same." Temari's voice had gotten shaky by the end of her explanation.

'Well, damn! That's one heck of a childhood. And we thought ours was bad.' Inner Sakura's mouth was hanging open in shock.

"What happened to your mother?" She just couldn't shut her blabbering mouth, could she?

"…she died…while…" Temari was getting a little choked up. Usually she didn't allow her emotions to get the better of her, but tonight's events had been so emotionally stressing that she was barely able to keep them at bay. She wasn't even sure if Sakura would tell anyone else about their family's secrets. And if that happened, they would be separated, never to see each other again. She didn't think that she would be able to take that. Her strength of spirit would not withstand that particular crushing blow. Her chin started to tremble at the thought of what could happen, warning her brother of the potential tears that his sister hardly ever shed.

"While giving birth to him." Kankuro took over the conversation rescuing his sister from the embarrassment of the impending breakdown.

Suddenly, Sakura saw what this mess was. This mess was a family more broken and mangled than her own fragmented family. And they were going to see it through to the end. They obviously had more than a few skeletons hidden in the closet other than what they had just told her. But they were trying their best to move on. She had to admire them for that. The display of determination was admirable.

Temari saw the understanding flood into the young teenager's eyes. She breathed a sigh of relief. Temari knew she could trust her. For whatever reason, the girl had stayed to hear them out, and now she had accepted their relatively vague explanation for why things were the way they were in their family without insisting on hearing the whole story. And Temari would have thanked her a thousand times over just for that if the remaining shreds of her dignity had allowed it. But the moment where she had almost cried had been enough strain for one night.

"Well, if you're up for it, we'd still love to have you over for dinner." Temari successfully retained her former brightness in her voice. That was the Temari that her brothers needed; a strong one who could make enough money to support them and the strength of mind to help them get over their problematic pasts still haunting them. Being the eldest, she had been around the least while her father had beaten Gaara, and was the least affected by it. But that did nothing to diminish the pain she felt now whenever she saw the wreck of a human being she had callously allowed her baby brother to become.

Sakura only nodded. She looked toward the living room with trepidation. She still hadn't forgotten the agonized frenzy he had been in only a short while before.

"Come on. It's safe. He's always sort of in a comatose state after a fit." Softly, Kankuro took her arm and pulled her towards the living room.

She allowed him to lead her, leaning back on him for support, even if she had accepted that their family was totally screwed up under the surface, she was still afraid of the volatile redhead. He led her to a chair on the other side of the room from where he lied.

The guest sat down and watched him. His face was so peaceful, serene as he slept. She noticed how small he really was. His thin frame was more relaxed as he slumbered, making him appear to collapse in on himself. He looked so much like a child, so innocent, Sakura found it hard to believe that he was the one who had elicited such bone chilling cries.

"He looks so peaceful." She whispered.

"He's not sleeping. He can hear you." A harsh, mocking, yet somehow strangely quiet voice came from the small body that had lied to her and told her it was sleeping.

Green eyes snapped open and fixated on the pink hair and trailed down to the emerald irises that were open wide in surprise.

His eyes stayed on her for a few moments.

"Kankuro, book." He whispered hoarsely.

The middle child got up and snatched a large text from a stack that was near the window. He handed it to his little brother who sat up and grabbed it quickly, flipping to a page that he apparently remembered from having read it before.

They stayed that way for a while. Sakura occasionally asked Kankuro something inconsequential or commented on a random topic, but for the most part there was no speaking.

She found that Gaara could read ridiculously fast and turned the pages of the text every few seconds.

Her lingering curiosity eventually got the better of her and she walked over to the waist high stack of books lying underneath the windowsill. The book on the top of the stack was only slightly smaller than the one Kankuro had gotten for him to read. It was a math text and its title alone was completely incomprehensible to her.

She turned to Kankuro and raised an eyebrow. He just shrugged, managing to portray that he didn't understand it in the least without actually using his voice to tell her.

She retreated to her seat again, processing this new piece of information.

'So the tortured, possibly insane hottie is also extremely intelligent? I change my mind. Let's stay. Once you get over the whole crazy thing, he's really the complete package, isn't he? My type has officially changed. I'm goin' after the bad boys!'

'So now you show up? Where were you ten minutes ago? And you have no tact or sensitivity, do you?'

'Huh?'

'Never mind. You're just as hopeless as ever.' Her inner had successfully thrown her train of thought off its tracks.

"Alright, ya chatty bunch, dinner's ready!" Temari's cheerful voice broke the silence unexpectedly, causing the green eyed girl to jump slightly in her seat. Temari was evidently trying to act as if this afternoon's incident had never happened. But Sakura still wasn't used to loud noises, having lived with her distant mother and utter lack of siblings for so many years in almost complete silence.

Sakura and the middle child got up and headed to the kitchen. Gaara took his time and mentally marked his page before slowly getting up and sauntering over to the kitchen.

Tacos. That one word should explain the state the kitchen was in now. Just tacos. Everywhere. And nachos. Of a sort.

"I didn't know what you liked, but I figured that tacos were pretty universal." Temari had a sort of embarrassed look on her face.

"Oh, that's fine. Tacos are great. Good choice." She mumbled quietly.

"Yeah, well. You haven't tasted Temari's cooking yet. Hey!" Kankuro had to dodge the angry fist to the gut that Temari had thrown his way.

She laughed internally at their antics. Her stomach grumbled, upset that she was inhaling the scent of the food instead of shoveling it into her mouth like it wanted her to.

Kankuro, of course, was the first to pile an impressive mountain of food on his plate. Sakura followed but only took a small portion because, although she was hungry, she knew that her stomach had an incredibly low capacity and was lying to her. She followed the older boy to the line of barstools where he flipped a switch. She jumped slightly as the back wall of the kitchen moved and slid to the side to reveal a large flat screen.

"You guys really decked the place out."

The only response she received was an amused smile of humble acknowledgement from Temari.

They flipped on a sitcom and, of course, proceeded to completely ignore it. She surmised that it had been turned on to make up for an awkward moment in conversation if it should occur or to entertain her if she got bored or left out of the, well, there was nothing else to call what they had just begun, an argument.

Gaara slipped into the stool at the end of the row of stools. She glanced over at him; her uneasiness over this afternoon's events had not entirely dissipated. He was troubled, and if she had learned anything in her fifteen years of living around her troublemaking friends, it was how to tell when the shit was gonna hit the fan. This was close. Although he seemed calmer now, she couldn't force her guard to lower. She was still on high alert for the next meltdown.

'You know, in a sad sort of way, their family is still more of a family than ours is.'

Sakura looked at the three of them, even with Gaara's distant behavior and apparent detachment from his housemates, her inner was right. Her mother's depression hadn't gotten any better in the years after her father's death. Mrs. Haruno had always been so bright, happy, and vibrant with the abundance of life that she emanated. Not a day had passed without her gasping to catch her breath after an intense fit of laughter, or she and her late father sharing a loving glance. Something always gave her mother that spark that naturally made other people want to dance in merriment alongside her.

It was like she didn't even know her now. She wasn't even a shadow the same person Sakura had known and loved anymore. She could still be heard late into the night crying over the loss of her beloved husband. She never let it show to the neighbors and did her best to hide it from her young daughter. But there was no denying it. She was still mourning her husband under the crushing weight of his absence. There were no more smiles simply because she could, no more spontaneous dances in the middle of the kitchen with random fruit, gone were the days that her mother just sat down in the sun and enjoyed its warmth. She tried to take care of Sakura and be there for her the best that she could, but had failed. Her father wasn't the only one who had died that fateful day; he had taken her mother with him in the car crash. Now there were only two strangers living under the one roof.

It had been a long time since she had called the quiet building her home. Now it was just the house she lived in. No real ties to it remained.

While she had been reminiscing the past and the present, Kankuro and Temari had initiated in a heated discussion on whether she would take the third bedroom on the second floor or if she would sleep in her bedroom tonight. It was unspoken that she wanted to sleep upstairs due to the fact that she was worried about Gaara's fragile state of mind. But Kankuro was profusely refusing, saying that she made too much noise because she always had to get up in the middle of the night for various reasons.

She looked at them in envy. Their family was on the mend and hers was still falling into a pit in shambles and she was unable to do anything.

Her pink head happened to glance at Gaara, and was surprised to see how little food he had. It was only a few bites…and it didn't look like he had eaten anything at all, just looked at it. He noticed and his eyes slid to look at her out of their corners without turning his head.

They were completely emotionless. The lack of expression…it was even less than her depressed mother displayed in a whole month. His siblings had filled her in on most of what she wanted to know. But what they had told her wasn't the whole story. No, they were probably waiting for him to tell her, if he would tell her at all. Most people don't just spill their secrets and pasts the moment you meet them, unless they were drunk or high. And she was under the impression that they were neither.

She hurriedly turned back to her food and continued to eat the tacos that were actually quite good, despite what Kankuro had said about his sister's culinary abilities. His eyes were unnerving.

'And you think I'm rude? How could you even think such things about our generous hosts?'

'You're so annoying.'

Inner just smiled.

Dinner passed quickly, taking more time than it seemed to, and before they knew it the clock read that it was almost nine.

They said their goodbyes, Gaara being the only one who didn't say anything, and Sakura rushed home, remembering the amount of homework she still had to do. When she arrived, her mother had disappeared into her room and left the house eerily quiet after being around the Kazes and their boisterous manner, excluding the one persistently quiet sibling of course.

She flew through the homework, with the exception of one question on her Global Studies sheet that had her stumped for about ten whole minutes. Post-homework, she took a shower, changed into her pajamas, and flopped down on her bed.

Contemplation was inevitable once she stared into the darkness, wide awake. Who would have thought that she would meet such people? She had friends, but these days, between them living so far away and how concentrated she'd been on her schoolwork these past few months, they hadn't really hung out in what was going on a year. She only had classes with a few of them and she had realized that she was really out of the loop. Sakura hadn't minded of course. Friends were friends and hers would never truly abandon the pink haired girl, she'd made sure of that before she'd allowed them to be her friends. But these people were so strange. One was a deranged psychopath with some major issues her needed to work out, one was a raging carving fanatic, and the third was a cheerful blonde who graduated from law school and was trying to pick up the broken pieces of her family and glue them back together. So why had she felt more at ease with them than with anyone else in a long time? It didn't make any sense. They were practically strangers, for all she knew, Kankuro and Temari could be in a gang and Gaara could be high on drugs. No matter how much she thought about it, she couldn't come up with a good, solid reason. Maybe it was because they had been so open with her. Maybe it was because they hadn't expected a thing of her. But who could be sure? She had known them a grand total of thirteen hours. You couldn't expect to know a person after that little time. That was nothing compared to the years she had known her other friends. But then why had she felt so welcome? So accepted among their ranks? If there was an answer, it was one she couldn't find. Her restless mind allowed her to fall into a much needed rest eventually, and finally allowed her to enjoy a dreamless sleep.