She made sure to set the boundary as soon as he landed in front of her. "It's creepy if you're stalking me."
Gaara paused, blinking, taken aback. "Then next time you can come find me."
Next time? Sakura wrapped her blanket around her shoulders uneasily. She wasn't sure she wanted to make a habit of this.
She didn't want to be a bother, she told him.
If he minded, he shot back, he'd let her know.
The open honesty of their conversation—however sharp-edged—was a comfort to both. And because they could be open, he could ask questions. "Why are you still awake?"
Nightmares of the future and past, she thought. But how could she condense everything she was feeling to things as small and specific as words?
Unwittingly, he helped her. "I know you're afraid—"
"I'm ashamed."
Sakura shifted towards the open street, he took a step, and they began walking. Motion helped the words come faster.
"It's that this is everything I ever wanted for myself. It's how I always planned my future—even when he was gone for years, even with every awful thing he did." She raised a clenched fist to her chest. "I knew he'd come back and get better and we'd be together, I knew it. And now he's back, and he says he wants to be with me, and—and his reasons make me sick. It's like my fantasy came true . . . but there's no room for me in it. Just for what everyone else wants. And what happened here scares the hell out of me—and I have no guarantee it won't happen to me, too. And instead of facing everyone who wants this to happen, instead of protecting myself, I ran away from them."
"Sometimes you need to make distance to protect yourself." Gaara thought of the people who'd shied away from him even before knowing what he was, and added, "And sometimes you know when something's wrong."
Instincts or no, it wasn't an outright threat to her life she'd run away from. That had to be part of it, she told him. She'd behaved like a coward.
There was nothing cowardly, he told her, in evading a trap.
"I don't know that it was a trap."
"I think part of you did—or at least recognized the danger."
She shook her head at the irony. "So I hide from one danger with . . ."
"You'll be safe here," he said, his voice chilly and hard.
I can protect you—
Sakura shivered. He thought it was from the cold.
"It's not like that," she tried. "It's a different danger: immediate and to me, instead of . . . well, because you're good."
"Sometimes it works out in either direction," he told her, his hands held out like scales. "What makes me dangerous is what makes me good. What makes you good is what makes you dangerous."
"You think I'm dangerous?" she asked, sure he was making fun of her.
"We all can be."
She wasn't sure if he'd just ruffled her feathers or stroked her ego. "Is that what you do when you don't sleep at night?" she tried. "Wander around and think a lot?"
He shrugged.
"Your thoughts on modifying your title to The Warrior/Philosopher Kazekage?"
"It's a mouthful." But he smiled to himself, relieved to catch a glimpse of the spirited kunoichi he'd known before.
Sakura watched him for a few paces and also thought of their past, of the person he'd been—and of how very much he'd grown. The beginnings of legend were already building around him: He'd suffered unthinkably yet come out of madness in order to lead Sand; he'd fallen and died in Sand's defense, yet had come back, willing to die again to protect it. Sakura realized she'd been there to see all of it—including this facet. She wondered what that made her.
The night remained cool and quiet around them. Amidst his city's silence, Sakura touched his arm and told him she was proud of what he'd become. He looked up at her, actually looked at her, in a way she knew Sand's younger kunoichi would kill to see—then closed his eyes, exhaled slowly, and whispered, "Thank you."