A/N: Something I wrote last year and lost. Contains a random OC. Not very significant, though.
"Here," a light voice says, and Gaara lifts his head from his arms to see mussed dark hair and a smiling face before his teddy bear is thrust into his face. "You dropped him earlier, right?"
With the greediness of a child expecting to have something taken away, he rips the bear from her hands and hugs it desperately to himself. Not quite knowing what to do with this strange creature that had shown niceness to him of all people, he stared for a moment, nostrils flaring as he breathed in her scent, large seafoam eyes taking in the girl with full intent to memorize her.
"Thank you," he murmured, face half-buried in worn cotton fur before he vanished completely in a whirl of sand.
She never even got to ask his name.
It is dark and one of the deadest hours of the night when young Aya finds herself twisting from the realm of sleep, some unsettling feeling washing over her heart and causing her to pant sharply into the darkness of her room.
She's a big girl now and not supposed to be dependent on night lights to keep the monsters away, but her eyes seek comfort in the natural light of the moon illuminating the foot of her bed to assuage the fears left behind by both her fading nightmare and current unease. It takes a moment of silent contemplation before she realizes that something is wrong and that there's a shadow that shouldn't be there on her coverlet—and she jerks her eyes to the window, eyes widening in fear.
Pale eyes stare at her from her window, and she can feel the hard tha-thump of her heart as she shakily raises her covers over her chin in a futile attempt to hide her trembling.
It's the boy from earlier and something is wrong with his face—the color is off and it looks like—
Blood, there's blood on his forehead, trailing sluggishly down his face, and the look in his eyes is one of wild anger instead of the shy loneliness from earlier in the day when she had last seen him. Her body trembles at the aura of danger that surrounds him like a veil and something in his face twists as the scent of her fear reaches him.
Sand, dark and rustic shatters the window blocking him from her, and Aya releases the pent up breath she's been holding into a full scream that's filled with fear and she can hear her parents calling out in alarm the next room over, but she can already tell that this boy who wasn't really a boy with those so-angry eyes was going to kill her before they could reach her—
And suddenly he was gone.
Furious, animalistic cries rang out into the night followed by the panicked screams of the villagers. Buildings groaned as they crumbled on their foundations and an earth-shattering roar is all she can hear as she's bundled up in her mother's arms and rushed from the shaking building. Their warmth barely permeates the chill that had settled in her heart from the sight she had awakened to. The despair, the betrayal, the loneliness…
Above her head, her mother clutches her tightly, her body trembling as Aya's father leads them to the safety of the town's storm shelter. The sounds of explosions and the ominous rushing of sand isn't quite enough to drown out the battle cries and screams of Suna's finest nin as they ceaselessly throw themselves at the beast that had been unleashed that night.
And above the sight of the crumbling city, a lone man watches, his eyes hard as he calmly sheds the white robes that denote him as Kazekage in preparation of the battle to come.
