AN: Yes, revamped. And after this chapter, taking a sharp plot twist. But we'll get to that. In the meantime: the needlepoint joke is credited to irri of the "Lethal Empathy" community. Beta-ing done by randomsome1 (or, as ff.n would have it "randomsomeone"). I recommend her stories highly. OK, people, here we go again…

"Son, let me tell you something. Men are no good without any women."
-Nara Shikatou

Chapter 6

Predictable

Sakura spent the next day sleeping in before Kenji showed up. He had planned to take her around the village, but they were waylaid almost immediately. A few of the buildings on one block had been so badly damaged that they couldn't simply be repaired, but had to be knocked down and completely rebuilt. Sakura was more than willing to contribute to the destruction of the remains. In fact, it was a nice stress reliever. The kunoichi laughed in satisfaction as her fist shattered the remains of a solid stone wall, leaving a pile of rubble in its place. "How did you do that?" Kenji asked, awe in his voice, as she delicately picked a chunk of gravel out of her petal pink hair. She smiled, and shrugged. No need to tell rival shinobi everything, friend or not.

The gratitude of the people she helped for those few hours went a long way for her state of mind. Kenji's flattering admiration did too. The only real dark spot of the day was the quiet inner debate that carried on in the back of her head while she worked and joked with Kenji. Part of her demanded that she avoid the roof, and the man she had met there, for the rest of her enforced time there. Another part of her laughed bitterly at her cowardice and wondered if the years of training under Tsunade had changed her at all.

Her mind warred back and forth between self-doubt and scorn. If she went, it would be uncomfortable, and not only because of the awkward way that she left last night. Gaara was calmer than she remembered, and of course years of separation meant that it was hardly fair to judge his character on the handful of memories she had of him as a twelve year old.

Sakura involuntarily raised a hand to her chest, as if to prove to herself that she could breathe, that nothing was constricting her lungs and her ribs to the point of cracking….

Stop that, she ordered herself. She was just being a melodramatic coward. She forced herself to think of other things, to pay attention to the city around her. Learn about the weird customs and habits. Tease Kenji about the self-conscious way he kept patting his hair into place. Admire the delicate blown glasswork. Eat the funny roasted snake meat on a stick - vaguely gross to think about, but once past the strangeness, not too bad. Smile at people but make it a point to flash the official visiting-nin badge whenever someone looked suspicious.

Around moonrise, Kenji was obliged to leave to run a few messages from the Kazekage's office. Sakura, a bit tired from heaving chunks of rock wall around, went back to her guest quarters and slept for awhile. She dreamed of a heavy, bloody claw that flew at her, wrapped itself around her body and crushed her tightly, and a pair of wild eyes that bored into her. The eyes were black, and then red, and the darkness around them chattered like a thousand dying birds. The claws became fingers that smeared the blood on her face as a demon's mad grin lunged for her throat.

Sakura woke around sunset, heart pounding. It took her a few moments to dispel the screeching in her mind, to force herself to breath normally.

The city was coming awake for its second wind. Sounds of people yelling and someone plucking at a stringed instrument of some kind drifted in through the thick windowpane. She could easily go wandering around again, and then come back to her room and maybe sleep some more, or practice some jutsu, or…

Sakura scowled fiercely at herself, clenching her fists in her lap. Had years of study under a legendary Sannin done her nothing? Was she still, deep down inside, the meek and panicky girl who huddled in fright as others faced the danger for her? No, damn it! She'd given in to the anxiety last night, broken off and in effect run away because he made her uncomfortable. True, it would be stupid to treat Gaara lightly, just because he seemed calmer and responsible. But then again, he was older, and in their encounters, he had been the calm one when she had stuttered and flared in irritation…

(A monstrous laugh, and blood smeared across sand-cracked features.)

Had she changed at all?

Sakura willed her shoulders to fall back, as naturally as possible. She forced her breathing to be calm and light, natural. Everything about her body, her posture, her expression, had to show him that she was relaxed, at ease with the screaming unnaturalness of him. To show fear or hate or any sign of discomfort would be dangerous and stupid. "Good evening, Kazekage-sama," she inclined her head. He made no response, but moved to stand beside her, arms crossed and face blank.

"You hide in formality."

She wanted to sigh in frustration. Well, that didn't take long. "You hide in aggression," she shot back. She crossed her arms to match his, but kept her eyes on the desert spread out beyond the jagged cliffs. "You seem particularly eager to drive me off tonight."

"You seemed interesting." He shrugged. "At first. But when I returned, you were disappointingly contrite and boring. Why else would I bother with you?"

She started to snort derisively, but checked herself. "I usually try to avoid being rude. But if you prefer, I could easily stand here and insult you some more."

A shrug. "If that's the best you can do."

Not a challenge, she thought, eyeing him carefully. He's not here to fight me, physically or otherwise. Then why the hell…? Sakura leaned on the low wall that edged the roof, arms still folded. "You're bored." She stated, and allowed herself a grin as he turned an assessing glance at her. "Well, in that case," the grin broadened. "I'm not going anywhere. I think I'll just sit here and try to get on your nerves."

"Why?"

Telling him the truth – that she couldn't think of any other way to talk to him that wouldn't end in another awkward retreat – was not a good idea. She shrugged instead, still smiling. "Well, it isn't like I've got anything else to do."

You are an idiot, Inner Sakura told her firmly. A great big idiot who is just asking to be crushed to death.

Oh well. Too far now. "If insulting you does the job, so be it. If not, I can always just chatter on my own." That might actually be a viable option, she realized even as she said it. It covered the long uncomfortable silences, and it might just get him to talk, if only to shut her up. "I can't help but like the scenery here. It's all so - " she gestured vaguely out. "Vast. No trees, no tall buildings to hem it all in. I know it's not possible, but the stars seem further away here. And it's like there's more of them. If you're high enough to see over the mountains, you would think the sky and the sand beyond them just went on forever."

She hadn't really thought about it before, had just been talking for the sake of filling the air and possibly aggravating him. But now that she considered it, it was true. If she looked out at the endless stretches of sand, she could well imagine that she was hovering on the edge between infinite dark sky and infinite pale sand. The intense…freedom of it all was almost crushing in its own way. She was tiny and insignificant, her entire life a brief flicker across the eternity of this place that had seen a thousand lives like her own, and would see a thousand more when she was gone…

She shuddered just a little, the skin on her arms prickling. She regretted it instantly. Did he see - ?

"It unsettles you."

Of course he saw it. Damn him.

She sighed, and rubbed her hands up and down her arms for a second. "Why do you think people have such difficulty facing the concept of eternity?"

"Because it is unknown," he answered instantly, easily. "And they fear the unknown."

His answer made sense – all her life she'd seen many examples of people driven to conquer and control that which they didn't understand. "Why do we waste so much time fearing the unknown?" She murmured, picturing a friendly face with blue eyes and wild blond hair, and a village unanimously turning their backs on it.

"They assume it's dangerous."

"Is that necessarily a bad reaction to have?" Sakura remembered her days at the academy, with Iruka-sensei drilling into them the long list of shinobi rules for conduct both on and off duty. "Sounds like the shinobi rule. You know: 'Always be on your guard.' Or something to that effect."

Another shrug. "It's a survival instinct, because inside most people know that they are frail and weak, and easily killed." He laughed shortly, coldly. "The human body is one of the more inefficient and useless forms found in nature."

"To a point, that's true," she agreed at last, biting her lip thoughtfully. "I mean, name another animal in the world that walks upright without a tail to balance it." She held up a hand against the faint half-moon. "Not much in the way of claws, either. Or fangs." Green eyes flicked pointedly towards him. "Not even you." Gaara ignored her in a manner that suggested he was very good at ignoring things he didn't feel like noticing, and could go right on ignoring her all night, if he felt so inclined.

Sakura regarded him thoughtfully, fully aware that she was staring. But he was still glowering motionlessly at the night, either not noticing or not caring. "I wonder if we fear eternity just because it's unknown," she said at last. "Is it really that, or is it that we just don't like the idea of being so small in comparison?"

"There's no such thing as eternity."

She quirked an eyebrow.

He flicked a few fingers at the sky. "Eternity is the idea that something does not change, that it has always been one way and will always remain that way. But nothing stays the same. This place, for example, wasn't always a desert. At some point it was something else. And someday it will be something else again."

Sakura laughed quietly. "I don't know what would bother me more," she admitted. "That there is such a thing as eternity, or that there isn't."

Gaara didn't answer, but somehow his silence felt less deterring than it had before. It bolstered her courage, made her feel a little more confident. Maybe she was tougher than she thought, after all.

"What do you do all night, every night?" She asked, trying to keep the conversation going…and, well, maybe just to satiate a little curiosity. She glanced around. "Sit up here and contemplate eternity? Prowl around and watch people sleep?" Now there's a truly disturbing thought, Inner Sakura shivered. "Read? Meditation? Tanuki needlepoint? You've got to be doing something to fill the time."

Gaara glanced sidelong at her. "Tanuki needlepoint?"

She laughed, delighted both with her own silliness and the faint smile that hovered briefly on his own face. It was almost a thrill, to see amusement in him that wasn't tinged with cruelty or malice. She waved a finger at him. "Joke."

The silence dragged out between them again, but she was determined to let him initiate the next conversation. This was a weird conversation, and if he actually did keep it up, it was only bound to get weirder. But she felt buoyed by her lack of fear, more awake than she'd been in days, and besides, the night sky really was beautiful. She hadn't expected to feel so…at ease around him.

"Do you dream?" He demanded suddenly.

She smiled a little – this conversation was almost predictable in its unpredictability. Maybe she was getting the hang of talking to him. "Yes. All the time."

"Why?"

She blinked. So much for getting the hang of it. She'd expected the question to be "What?" But "Why?" Well, why did anyone dream?

"I don't know" She tilted her head back, looking up at the half-moon. "My father told me once that dreams were messages from the spirits. My friend Ino used to say that they were wishes or fears. I've always thought of them as things that your mind is trying to tell you, things that maybe you missed or wouldn't think about in the daylight."

"Truths," he summarized, giving her a sideways glance.

"Yeah." She hesitated, but the curiosity was too strong. "Do you? Dream?"

He snorted. "I don't sleep. Didn't Naruto tell you?"

"I meant…" Before she could finish the thought, the full meaning of his words hit her. You remember me, she realized. You remember me from when we were children. You remember that I was with there when Naruto fought you, and you almost killed me.

"Haven't you ever slept?"

"A few times," Gaara turned his head fully towards her with a sudden jerk. His face was twisted into sharp angles, lips pulled back in a freakish parody of a smile, black-rimmed eyes dilated. His maniac grin bared way too many teeth, and the moon tinted his skin the faint blue tinge of a corpse. Oh yes. He remembered her. And he was enjoying the memory, it seemed. "You wouldn't have liked to see it very much." His voice became rougher, agitated. "And I didn't dream. I only woke up again, to find myself surrounded by body parts and covered in blood and entrails."

Show no fear, she reminded herself, refusing to let her body flinch or her face wince, refusing to lean away from the leer and the dark excitement in his voice. That was way too quick; he switched from calm to killer in seconds. It was like a fire suddenly catching on oil, flaring up to consume her.

It had to be deliberate then. He changed too fast for him to be really gone. He's trying to scare me, so when I cower or run he can laugh, mock me, maybe even kill me from pure contempt. He's just trying to get a reaction out of me.

Well, it's about to fucking work! Inner Sakura gulped as he leaned in, long tongues of sand whirling up around him in agitation. His eyes slid back and forth over her face, hunting for the panic, and if he saw it, it would all be over. There was no doubt in her mind about that. "Doesn't appeal to you, does it?" He growled at her, with an edge of insane laughter in his throat.

I am not a panicky little girl. Sakura's resolve was shakier than she would ever admit, even to herself. She forced her heartbeat to slow, quieted the jabbering voice in her mind that wanted her to flee and flee now.

I will not be afraid.

She reached up, fingers outstretched, and brushed a few strands of red hair back from his forehead.

Gaara froze. The undulating sand became solid, as if it had suddenly and inexplicably turned to rock. She felt like she was suddenly sitting inside of a sculpture, a bizarre statue of a woman pressing her fingers to a marble man's face inside a whirl of petrified tentacles.

The demonic grin was gone. The angles of his face were less harsh, rounder, more human. His eyes were still wide, but now they stared at her with all the confusion of a small, lost child. In that one stone moment, Sakura felt something tighten in her chest that was neither anger nor fear. What must it be like to grow up, she wondered, when everyone's too scared to even touch you?

She traced her fingertips along his hairline until she reached his ear. Any second now, he was going to pull away, snarl, grab her wrist and snap every delicate little bone in her hand -

He closed his eyes.

Predictable unpredictability.

Granted this strange privilege, and with an odd fatalistic sense of having nothing to lose, Sakura let her fingers roam where they would. She brushed her knuckles down his temple, let her thumb trace the edge of the blackness around one eye. She moved slowly, carefully, lightly, but without hesitation or pause. She was afraid that if she did hesitate, it would somehow shatter the spell. Her fingers trailed along his cheekbone, over the ridge of the nose, down and around his lips. They were closed now, but they fell apart again slightly as she slid her fingertips over them, just enough for the heat of his breath to glide over her palm.

He opened his eyes again, and the intensity of his stare made her fingers falter, her breath catch. But she kept her hand where it rested along his jaw, and her eyes steadily on his. He's looking for the trap, she realized.

"You don't like to be touched?" she whispered softly, because somehow it would be wrong to let him carry on his paranoid search for danger.

"People don't touch me." His voice was very hoarse, and the quiver was barely noticeable. But she heard it. "I don't touch people. I destroy everything that I touch."

"That doesn't answer the question."

Very slowly, he straightened. She dropped her hand. The sand tentacles came alive again, folding themselves back around his body protectively, as if she were some kind of threat. Then, with an abrupt jerk of his head, he vanished.

Sakura clutched her arms to her gut. Her thoughts were chaotic, whirling. Speaking of unpredictable, she thought weakly. I certainly never saw that coming.

Obviously, neither had he.

Sakura raised her hand up level with her face, staring at it as if she'd never really seen it before.

What, in the name of all that was holy, was she doing?