He wouldn't let it happen again.
Kankurou had left to take care of some other business; Temari had taken Sakura back to her place to get her settled. Both his siblings moved with the controlled, anticipatory wariness of shinobi preparing to face an old foe. But Gaara . . . Gaara paced the halls, seething.
And he'd tried so hard to put his past behind him; he'd tried for years to step beyond his own atrocities, he'd fought to earn the acceptance and respect of Sand—and to a greater extent than he sometimes felt he deserved, he'd succeeded.
But then she'd turned up: the medic who'd once reminded him of Yashamaru, suddenly being pushed into the same situation that'd resulted in his mother's death, his father's hatred, his possession by Shukaku, and a staggering number of murders by his hand.
With anyone else he might've been able to look the other way, might have been able to pretend any tales of the circumstances surrounding the Uchiha's marriage hadn't reached or impacted him. But damn it, he knew her.
He couldn't stand for it.
A familiar pressure built across his shoulders, squeezed his temples—and stopped Gaara in his tracks. He closed his eyes, acknowledging the physical symptoms and what they meant, then turned and left the building. He didn't speak to anyone on his way to the training grounds; he picked one far from Sand, and checked thoroughly to be sure it was empty of human life.
Then he destroyed it as violently as a snow globe thrown onto stones.
Small cyclones tore up the sparse plant life; sandy claws crushed boulders. Gaara forced the ground into a great yawning whirlpool, pushing until the earth itself groaned like it was dying.
Not again.
Pitting himself against inanimate objects distracted him from thinking about tales of misery and madness and suicide among women who found themselves only valued for their bloodlined progeny, from thinking about his father's strangely distant expression in a surviving wedding picture. But unbidden, the words and images surfaced anyway—and though he knew everything about the impulse was wrong, the chance the pink-haired kunoichi would decide to return to Leaf and her impending marriage made him want to lock her away and scream at the door to her prison until his throat was raw.
Not again.
Far underground lay bedrock. Gaara reached, straining, and wrenched up a slab the size of a building. It'd been far enough down to glisten wetly in the sunlight. He glared, then drove sand against it like thousands of tiny sledgehammers—seeking weakness in the stone, then shattering it.
Not again. Not again. Not again.
This violence was bloodless and victimless and not at all what he really wanted—but his exertions would keep his shinobi safe.
Breathing deeply, Gaara sat on his heels amidst the newly-created sand dunes, his hands loose against his thighs. Throwing a tantrum wouldn't fix anything, he told himself. He could always tell himself that—after the fact. But at least now he could think a little more clearly; at least now he could face his siblings, the Leaf-nin, and the residents of Sand without stumbling beyond the bounds of his station or his publicized degree of sanity.
Gaara stood, looked in the direction of his city, and scowled. Now, though . . . Now he needed a plan.