A/N: Just wanted to warn you that the next chapter might not be quite as on time as the past two have managed to be; I'm about three weeks away from moving (permanently) across the country, and the packing is… not done. And instead of doing it, I'm busy trying to cram in as much time as possible with everyone I know from my hometown. Which may push the writing to a less-than-weekly backburner.

HOWEVER. This story is only a few chapters from completion (or I intend it to be), so do not fear: I am not going on another many-month hiatus this close to the end. I'll still be working, just slightly more slowly again. (:

Love, as always,
Kit

-/-

Actually, it turned out that my stomach had stayed right where it belonged; it was the rest of my blasted body that plummeted, ending in the same result of my stomach and throat being too damn well acquainted.

The weathered floorboards had split like wet graham crackers beneath me, something I would have expected had I paid a flea's worth of attention. Splinters scraped through my hair and snagged on fishnet; the fact that I was still falling told me that Gaara already wasn't going to stir himself and his molten desert to do a damn thing about it.

Well, fine. I'd fallen a distance the gods wouldn't have laughed at when Nami had thrown me off her cliff; a four-story rotting apartment building was no disaster. I crashed through the next level of soft wood, blinking back sparks in my vision as my head bounced, and then managed to flip over so I would land like a cat rather than an overturned turtle. Gathering a coil of chakra into my hands and feet—and doing a heck of a better job at it, after all that instruction I had cliff-diving—I braced myself for the next plane of floor.

I nearly nailed the landing, until my foot went through a hole the size of my fist. My ankle twisted as I tried to thrash free, and the weary old wood wasn't up to the task of supporting a round of panicky seizures. I dropped again, swearing—mildly—at least determined that the floor beneath me was on solid ground, and probably wouldn't send me any lower.

A smug pleasure seized me as I realized I was on-target for a perfect, silent touchdown, the kind that outstripped even the one I'd missed on the floor above. A moment later, a wash of gold painted my peripheral vision, sweeping under me, and I was staggering across grit like a mad cat, crashing sideways as Gaara hauled me back up.

"What the h—" I hesitated a fraction longer than necessary, on the verge of expressing my anger without care for his. But completely surrounded by his loyal sand as I was, I forced myself not to risk a maelstrom-death and finished, "—half-wit hopelessness was that for?"

"I do not want to kill you."

This was the six hundredth storm of confetti—completely unexpected, that is—he'd sprung on me tonight, and I scowled deeply at him out of bewildered shock before I remembered announcing earlier that he did. "Well, gee, that's a change," I muttered inadequately, and slumped back against a wall as his sand deposited me along the edge of the room, slinking away like a sea of scolded puppies. Gaara had no further response, and I wasn't willing to work up another effort at conversation, until I recalled that I'd been intent on asking about the Exams that had occurred when I was twelve.

"Tell—can you tell me about the plot against Konoha?" I said stiffly. "I sure don't remember anything happening."

"Nothing occurred. It failed."

"You weren't even here," I said reproachfully. "I would have seen you." Because I'd looked for him, still stuck unreasonably on that one childhood meeting, dammit. At least I was over it now.

"It halted outside the gates," Gaara said, voice cool. Perhaps cooler than usual, approaching icicle status rather than its normal freezing slush. "I do not wish to discuss it."

I considered pressing the issue, but subsided into a sullen silence instead, adding it to the list of mysteries I needed to solve. One: the laboratory in the Kazekage's Mansion, stocked with blood and inked and burned pictures of Gaara and me. Two: Saru Nami and her not-dead brother. Three: a failed plot against Konoha that Gaara was involved in. The list went on a light year longer than that, but damned if I could keep track of them all.

I dozed against damp wood, no longer afraid of sleeping in Gaara's presence. Mostly because he only seemed to be violent when I acted as a mosquito in his face, and there wasn't much I could do to rile him up while I was asleep, unless my snoring infuriated him. So far, he'd only murdered me in my dreams, not while I dreamed, so I deemed it relatively safe.

Waking when curtains of sunrise began drifting through the slatted wood, I found Gaara staring at me, which reminded me the real reason I hated sleeping in his presence. In return for the intense surveillance, which was what I mostly kept assuming it to be, seeing as he still didn't have working eyes, I offered him a scowl whose unseen intensity was interrupted by a yawn.

"Yes," said Gaara in the meantime.

I stopped with my mouth halfway open, trying to figure out what this one word could be a response to. Even if someone had told the kid that "yes" was a proper response to a yawn, he sure couldn't have known that's what I was doing at that moment. "Hey, kid," I said, "can you please stop launching back into conversations without introducing the topic?"

"Yes, I wish to rescue my…" He stumbled over the final word: "…family."

Oh, goody, I'd actually managed to change his mind. My capacity for change-of-heart speeches deserved lauding from Suna's highest cliffs. I sighed and gave a decisive nod that he couldn't see. That would entail breaking into the most securely-guarded building in the village, and I an untalented, unsneaky genin. I wanted to tell Gaara he had to stay here, extending my protection of Eiji to the rest of Konoha; I wanted the demon's wrath down on innocent heads less than I wanted a shuriken in my brain. But his source of power, so far as I had seen, was endless as the desert itself, and his ability to silence incensed shinobi would be the only thing that would get us inside.

"I have a condition," I said. He waited, and I added, "It's going to sound like an order."

He inclined his head very slightly; I took this as permission. "Don't kill anyone."

He didn't immediately kill me, which seemed a damn good start. I waited somewhat impatiently for him to ask why, ready to let loose an argument, but Gaara simply nodded again, leaving me speechless as a frog who'd swallowed a firework, the fight fizzling confusedly inside me.

-/-

I didn't plan. I was about as good at planning as a lemming was at flying. Grudgingly, I mentioned this to Gaara, feeling strangely obligated to warn him what he was undertaking. Some out of the blue urge to ask for help seemed to strike him, though at least it came hesitantly.

"Would your teammate—" He appeared reluctant to say names, but forced out, "—Eiji—assist us?"

"Eiji my teammate is now Eiji a chûnin, who probably wouldn't betray her Hokage like that." I paused. "Eiji my friend… might." A quick shake of my head sent hair whipping across my cheek. "But I won't risk her." I once again scowled at him, daring him to contradict me, despite the complete lack of effect facial expressions had on blind demons. He still didn't argue, and one way or the other, we ended up outside the Hokage's tower in a night that swept cool and crisp across our skin, devoid of a plan besides "don't kill anyone." I didn't know where the Hokage kept political prisoners locked up, so I had vague ideas of searching her office for information first; maybe if we made our infiltration quietly enough, we could escape and plan the actual rescue for another night. As if I'd actually plan for the next time either.

This was damn stupid. There had to be ANBU who couldn't get into this building, because ANBU guarded it. Gaara and his demon might have had a desert tsunami on their side, but we were still just genin and oh hell, I wasn't turning back now.

I was dressed in dark blue, the better for melding with the night; I pressed myself against the smooth wood of the building and begged all the desert gods that it would be enough. Flexing my fingers, I gathered lines of chakra to my extremities. At least Nami's uncharitable ejection had gained me something: I was now practically an expert at climbing. Scuttling up the wall, I slipped through a window and turned to lean back over the sill, watching Gaara stand in blind patience. Gods take it, I hadn't considered how to navigate him inside.

A thought and a twist of sand later, he had teleported up beside me. "How did you know where to go?" I hissed, covering a flinch.

"Your scent," he said calmly. I had half a second to be alarmed and revolted by this before he amended, "Your sand," and I realized the stuff saturated with years of my blood was, without my consent, jittering around in the masses under his control, leading him up to me.

"Great," I said sourly, and crept across the room toward the door. Hulking beasts that were shadowy furniture loomed from the walls; I ignored it, trying to do the same for the shallow quiver in the pit of my stomach that transformed every gloomy shape into our ANBU-borne death. Pressing my forehead to the door and pretending it was to help me concentrate, not to give me something solid to aid my calm, I slid a few grains of sand through the crack and into the unknown beyond. They couldn't tell me much—I couldn't bloody well see with them, although that would've been nicer than ice cream in a drought—but I could generally decipher what they came in contact with. At least, I knew the difference between solid unyielding wall and yielding human flesh. Unless my grit encountered something like a stack of sponges on the other side of the door; then all bets were off. My powers of discernment were not that great.

The hallway—assuming it was a hallway—appeared to be entirely free of cleaning supplies and living creatures. Cautiously, I eased the door open, sickly aware of the nervous bulk of Gaara hovering like an anxious bear behind my shoulder. He sure as hell wasn't making me any calmer.

We both edged out of the room and were a few feet down the hall when light footsteps echoed around the corner like harbingers of hell. It couldn't have been ANBU—ANBU wouldn't have had footsteps—but it was still danger. Still discovery, dammit. I chanced a look at Gaara, who stood with his head tilted quizzically to one side.

"Unconscious is okay," I said in a low, hasty voice, and the sand surged past me to prevent our untimely detection.

We dragged the victim—a clerk, perhaps, we sure didn't take the time to examine him in detail—back to the room that had been our point-of-entry, and then I hurried us off down the hall. I make a new dragonfly-quick decision to choose speed over silence; I knew Gaara could silence anyone who verged on spotting us, but we had to find what we were looking for before someone discovered a trail of hapless fainters. He only had to take out one more guard like this, alerted by a scuff of sand or a pulse of chakra, before we stumbled onto a door flanked by two statue-like shinobi.

Gaara's sand had already surged toward them; they had come to life at our approach, not fooled by our clumsy attempts at sneaking past ninja mountains better than us. My own sand flipped heedlessly backwards, away from me. Rotating, intending to snatch the recalcitrant golden fleas back to me, I caught a wing-quick glimpse of shadows leaping away. I grabbed Gaara and hauled him into the room whose guards he had just removed, muttering prayers that the place would yield some useful information, because the hidden guards had just run for backup and we wouldn't have long.

Luck struck us like lightning: it was someone's office, if not Tsunade's, and papers scattered the desk as the remnants of a summer storm. I lunged forward and began rifling through them, looking for some clue about Gaara's family with a muttered suggestion that he do the same for some of the drawers.

He could have taken it as an order and complicated the hell out of our already-difficult situation. He didn't, thank the gods, simply moved toward me and stood patiently in by the desk, not even bothering to point out to me that he couldn't very well do any damn thing to help without eyes. Somehow, someday, maybe I would remember that I had blinded him and stop expecting him to act as if I hadn't. That day was not, as the gods frown on me, the one where I was breaking into the Hokage's domain.

No footsteps yet approached; either our death came silently (entirely possible, since it came on little ninja feet), or reinforcements were slow to gather. I shuffled through useless drudgery about economics before I finally caught the word Sunagakure in my desperate skimming.

"Hey, think I found—" I stopped so abruptly Gaara might have killed me, cutting off voice and breath with his sand. He twitched toward me, and I frowned deeper than a sea trench. "Hold a hat on, this stuff is talking about—" I flipped a page. "—It is a recent plot. What the hell." Gaara flinched, his sand quivering on the ground, but I didn't actually think it was in response to my cussing. It seemed he didn't want me to keep reading, but I already had. "Tsunade believes you came to Konoha intending to take me back to Suna. What—" I barely managed to keep the lid on another —the hell and looked up at him, breathing deeply to contain anger that threatened a volcanic eruption.

Several things were hitting me at once, pelting me like a hailstorm. If they caught me, they could do to me whatever the hell they wanted; I no longer belonged to Konoha, and Suna wouldn't claim me, preferring to distance itself from any potential implication. Especially since I'd come here without permission. About as many people as longed for tornadoes would miss me.

And if we did escape, I could never come back. Gaara and I had jutsu too damn distinctive for our own good; our sand was everywhere—or at least his was, I didn't have enough to spare—a clear indication of who'd been messing with the important paperwork and knocking out guards. Tsunade probably wouldn't send shinobi to follow me back to Suna, but if I ever entered Konoha again, I'd be trapped like a firefly in a jar, with the same consequences I had previously considered.

I had returned to Konoha, the village I had rejected as home; I had come to accept it as a home I had left; and now, gods damn the desert, I was being forced to give it up again because I'd felt the need to preach morals to a possessed redhead I didn't even like.

Well, I'd better start liking him after I'd gone through all this for him. That was my last sour thought, before I said, "We're going to be caught, Gaara."

His sand roiled a raging meadow of gold and he said, "No."

"We're about three breaths from it." I folded my arms, then thought better of it and started rearranging the papers on the desk, trying to disguise what I'd been looking at. "We can get the hell—heck, sorry—out of here and never come back and maybe not be caught." I glanced up, but for once he wasn't staring at me as he waited for me to continue.

"This paper references where your teammates are being held," I said flatly, the only defense I made against the unreasonable state of this offer. "I know how to get there. We can nip down, fight them out, and then leave here and never come back. We have about ten times more chance of being caught and all being stuck in a dank hole of a dungeon. You have five seconds to decide."

"Yes," he said.

"Well, that makes things easier," I said irritably, and dove for the window, tugging grains of his sand to lead him in my wake.

-/-

He did not know who she did this for. It couldn't have been for Temari and Kankuro—as far as he knew, she had never met them. It couldn't have been for either village, for she disobeyed both in her scheming.

It couldn't have been for him; she made it clear what she thought of him.

Her motives eluded him, and that made him—him and the demon, who was used to being in control, not manipulated for unknown reasons—restless. Nervous.

Worse, he—he who had never owed allegiance to his siblings or his village or anyone but himself—didn't know who he did this for, and that unnerved him to the core.