AN: This is Part III, one chapter left. Riana1, thanks for your review. I love the way you describe Gaara—"distance he demands with the sincerity he needs." Brilliant.

Part III

"I've set the surgery date a week from tomorrow," the Hokage informed Gaara. "Sorry it can't be sooner, but that's my next full day off."

Gaara nodded. They were outside, at the kunoichi training field, where the antics of the female shinobi made him keen to be free of the wheelchair. "I understand."

"The recovery time, assuming everything goes well, should be six months to a year. I'd want to keep you in our hospital for at least a month post-surgery, at which point it should be safe to move you to Suna's hospital, where you should remain for another month. You'll need daily therapy, of course, and if you don't have a specialist in Suna I'll send one back with you." Tsunade surveyed him, arms crossed over her chest. "I want us to be clear. This means no combat, no missions, no risk-taking. Not for at least half a year."

Gaara nodded again. It would be worth it to be able to stand on his own feet again.

Tsunade scowled at Naruto. "And I don't want to hear about you pretending that you're qualified to perform the tasks of a medic ever again," she told him. "You could have exposed him to infection. We're very lucky he's not a lot worse off."

"It's a hospital, old lady!" Naruto complained. "There's medical-nins everywhere!"

Tsunade's eyebrows drew together. "Regardless—"

"I asked him to," Gaara said.

His assembled company—Tsunade, Sakura, and Naruto—all looked at him.

"I'd expect better judgment from you, at least." Tsunade shook her head, a slight smile lingering around her mouth. "Promise me you'll at least notify a medical-nin the next time you decide you have to see your legs in the middle of the night. And don't let Naruto bandage you." She cast a displeased look at his legs, which she had re-bandaged herself. "That reminds me, Naruto, Shikamaru wants to see you. He has an assignment for you."

Naruto crossed his arms over his chest and scowled at his Hokage. "It's not going to keep me out of the village during Gaara's surgery, is it?"

"Unfortunately, no," Tsunade growled.

"Good! Good!" Naruto grinned at Gaara. "I'll see you later, then."

He disappeared in a cloud of white smoke, and Tsunade sighed and clapped Gaara on the shoulder. "I'd better be off as well. Take care of yourself. I'll see you next week." She disappeared much the way Naruto had, leaving him and Sakura alone by the fence ringing the kunoichi training ground.

"She's so familiar," Gaara said.

Sakura looked at him. "Hm?"

"Your Hokage. The way she speaks to you and Naruto...she isn't formal at all." He watched the line of wooden dummies on the field and the women attacking them. The black-haired kunoichi was back among them. "I don't know how to do that."

"Practice might help," Sakura suggested gently.

He considered that. "How do you begin?"

Sakura rubbed the back of her head, thinking. "I don't know," she admitted at last. "Maybe there's really no right way…maybe you just have to leap into it."

"That seems dangerous," he said after a pause.

"I guess it is," Sakura agreed softly.

Gaara watched the kunoichi.

"That woman," he said slowly, his eyes on the black-haired shinobi. "She keeps looking at me likes she knows me."

As though she had heard him, the kunoichi abruptly finished up her exercises. Scrubbing a sleeve across her sweaty forehead and retying her hair behind her forehead protector, she approached them slowly, her face set in an unreadable expression.

"Kazuki, right?" Sakura asked curiously when she stopped a few feet away from them.

"Yes," she answered shortly, her black eyes fixed on Gaara. He met her gaze impassively. Her face might be unreadable, but he thought he saw a spark of anger in her eyes. "You're the Kazekage, aren't you?"

He nodded, silent, waiting.

"Why are you here?" she demanded rudely. "You're not a Konoha nin. You're not even—"

"Hey, just a second," Sakura interrupted indignantly, stepping forward. "Konoha and Suna are allied, and anyway, what business is it of yours?"

Kazuki glared at her. "Allied? Hokage-sama is crazy to make an alliance with him. He and his friends attacked our village, killed our shinobi—"

"That's enough," Sakura began angrily.

"Wait." Gaara looked at the girl, at her angry face and her snapping black eyes, and tried to remember if he had seen her before, or anyone who looked like her. If he had, he could not recall it. He had long ago stopped recalling the individual faces of his victims; they all blurred together, like one collective mask of horror and pain.

"I don't know you," he said quietly at last.

Kazuki spat at his feet. Sakura stepped forward, her face going dark with fury, but Kazuki gave her a swift, contemptuous look, turned around and walked away.

"Don't mind her," Sakura said tersely after several moments had passed, her hands unclenching and falling to her sides. "She's an Otoe. They're all like that."

"Otoe?"

"One of Konoha's ubiquitous clans." Sakura smiled, but her eyes remained troubled. "They're very protective of Konoha, and…well, let's just say we don't send them on any diplomatic missions. They hate outsiders. They've been very angry with Hokage-sama for all her work strengthening Konoha's alliances and making friends with our former enemies." Sakura's eyes darkened briefly at the mention of any offense to her beloved teacher. "Most of the family was killed off in wars and conflicts under the Third—I heard there are only Kazuki and a few older brothers left." She shrugged. "The brothers will marry and repopulate the clan soon enough, though. Then they can protest Hokage-sama's policies in greater numbers."

"I see." Gaara watched the faces of the kunoichi, looking for features he knew, trying to test his memory. No spark of recognition came to him. "Did any of her clan die when I…when Suna and Sound…"

"I don't know," Sakura said uncomfortably. "It was a long time ago. There were a lot of casualties."

Trying to dredge up their faces was like searching through a black well, a blank hole in his memory. There was little he remembered from that time other than pain, and rage, and Shukaku's voice. And Naruto, who had saved him.

"I shouldn't be here," he said at last.

"Yes, you should," Sakura said firmly. He looked at her, surprised by the strength in her voice. "There are some people who will always complain. But like I said, Konoha doesn't turn its back on its patients." She smiled at him. "Or its friends."

He watched the kunoichi again, wordless, not knowing how to respond to such generosity.

"Thank you," he said at last, feeling the words utterly inadequate for what he wanted to express.

"You're welcome."

They had left the calabash gourd in a corner of the hospital room, next to his bed, and he hadn't touched it since waking. The sand inside it remained immobile. He did not command it, and there was no enemy here to protect him from. Until the night he had looked at his legs and seen what had been done to them, he had barely even noticed it was there.

If he never touched it again, never used it, the chakra running through it would eventually fade and it would be nothing but ordinary sand, not impossible for him to manipulate, but much more difficult. He could not let that happen. He needed it now more than ever, now that he was immobile and helpless, his chakra greatly weakened from injury and unable to maintain his armor. He needed the calabash's sand, already enhanced with his chakra, to be his solid, impenetrable defense.

And it came from the desert, from the wild place where he had been born, a part of him as much as legs or hands. Gaara of the sand. He wondered where that notion had come from.

He barely needed to call it before the sand popped out the calabash's stopper and poured into the room in a hissing rush, a million tiny grains surrounding him like so many eager children. He let it play at creating mindless shapes and patterns, testing it with subtle movements and silent commands, finding it responsive to his smallest gestures and the thoughts he had only begun to have. But you didn't protect me from this, he thought at it. You didn't save my legs.

It cringed away from him as though scolded, fleeing back to the shelter of the calabash. "Stop," he said aloud. It obeyed, a long stream of sand quivering in midair between him and the gourd. He sighed and relinquished control, letting it ribbon around him tentatively again, wondering where this tendency to personify its actions had come from. It had only ever done as he wanted before. Maybe it still did. Or maybe it never had.

He reached into the ribbon and closed a hand around some of the sand, rubbing his fingers through it to feel the familiar texture, the dryness and warmth of it. It smelled of the desert, of wind, and as he breathed it in he felt something that was like pain or a pull in his chest: a longing for Sunagakure, for its burning days and cold nights and vicious storms. For the villagers who trusted him with their lives, for Baki's confidence in him, for his former student Matsuri, for Kankuro and Temari, his brother and sister. For home.

He let the sand sift through his fingers and join the rest, and watched as it wound its way back into the calabash. There was no need to test it. He knew that it would carry him.

The night before his surgery was filled with an electric tension that wasn't his. Sakura did not come. Gaara waited to know what was happening within Konoha's walls, watching the black sky outside his window and knowing that he was immobile and weakened, his defenses low, and nearly helpless. He did not like the feeling.

Naruto came, appearing in the window with the moon at his back and his eyes bright with tension and excitement. "We're under attack. It's a small group, Shikamaru thinks, but they blew up part of the south wall. Sakura's there already, to look after the injured."

Gaara felt his fingers tighten in the sheets, the instinct to fight in Konoha's defense nearly eclipsing the knowledge that he couldn't. They were allies, Konoha and Suna, he and Naruto. "I can't fight," he said, and his voice sounded peculiar to his own ears, as though tight with emotion.

"Don't worry," Naruto said, mistaking the emotion for fear. "They won't get near the hospital. We'll protect you."

He wanted to tell Naruto that he wasn't afraid for himself, that he never had been. That death was nothing, just another emptiness, but he understood now what Naruto had shown him—that he could protect people, that he wanted to protect people, and that was worth dying for.

"Be careful," he said.

Naruto grinned, gave him the thumbs up, and was gone.

He called the sand out of the calabash, all of it, and halved the lot in two with a quick, curt gesture.

"Go with him," he said quietly to a half. "Protect him."

The sand streamed swiftly out the window and caught the light of the moon, a long, pale ribbon that soon disappeared into blackness. The rest wrapped itself around him as it had so many times around his victims, but it didn't tighten, didn't crush. Far more precise than any human medic could ever be, it lifted him and righted him on the floor, without allowing the slightest weight on his mangled legs. He let himself pretend for a moment, let himself believe the illusion that he was standing on his own two feet as he looked out the window, searching for tongues of flame that might indicate the wreckage of the wall or shadows of Konoha nin rushing to protect their own. Soon. Soon, and he would not only stand, he would fight again.

Kazuki was at his window.

It happened so quickly that his control over the sand nearly slipped. She was there, crouching on the windowsill, the black-haired kunoichi with her eyes full of hate and a knife in her hand.

Ah, he thought.

She lunged at him and wrapped him in a peculiar embrace, her arm around his waist and her hand gripping the back of his white hospital yukata, her face pressed into his shoulder like a shy maiden's. "For my brothers," she whispered against him, and she pushed her fist into his stomach.

There was no pain. Only the overwhelming sense of invasion, of wrongness, that made the sand—as much as wasn't needed to hold him upright—swarm around her and yank her away from him. He looked down and all he saw was the hilt, the black lacquered hilt that pressed into the side of his belly just below his ribcage, and the blood that flowed freely red over white cloth.

He felt cold. He wanted Suna, wanted its ferocious heat, and reached a hand to her as though beseeching. The sand swam over her skin.

"Sabaku…no…sousou."

The familiar words pushed past his lips as though by their own volition. He wanted to live. He was going to die, again, and he wanted to live. Kazuki's black eyes stared into his. She made no sound.

"Forgive me," he said, and closed his hand into a fist.

The sand compacted in a crunch of breaking bone. Her eyes bulged, the whites pooling red from burst capillaries. Blood bubbled from her mouth. She coughed up her life's fluid, spat it from her mouth and died.

Gaara wrapped his hand around the knife beneath his ribs and pulled it out. With it went the last of his control over the sand and he collapsed to the floor, feeling nothing, pain neither from his legs nor from the gaping wound in his stomach. Only cold. He shuddered and gasped for his last few breaths, and then Naruto was there. He sensed him more than he saw him, his vision already growing dark. Naruto's hands seized his shoulders and shook them roughly.

"Open your eyes! Open your eyes, Gaara, don't you dare die! Sakura!"

"I'm here!" Another presence; more warmth at his side, and then coolness on his abdomen. "It's deep. He needs surgery, fast." She was so calm, so gentle, compared to Naruto. "Tsunade's coming, Gaara."

Her palms pressed down hard on his belly and vicious pain drove back the darkness. He gasped and fought to buck off the pressure. Naruto's arms wrapped around his shoulders, holding him still, and Sakura pressed harder. Not gentle at all.

"There's so much—can't you stop it?"

"No. Not till Tsunade—I can try to slow it, at least. Do what you can to keep him awake."

Pressure. Naruto's arms, Sakura's hands. He was still so cold. The pain was fading again.

"Wake up, you bastard! I will kill you if you die!"

"Stay with us, just a little longer. You're going to live."

Their faces swam in and out of his vision. He tried to tell them that he was all right, that he barely even hurt anymore. That he wished he could see Suna one more time, and speak with his siblings, and sit in council with Naruto when he became Hokage (because he would, he knew it as much as he knew anything), but that the life he'd managed to salvage out of horror and pain was enough.

"Don't try to talk, Gaara, just listen to us. You're going to be fine, you hear me? Tsunade's almost here. Hold him, Naruto!"

"I am!"

"Harder! Hold him as tight as you can. Don't you let him go, Naruto. Don't you dare let him go."

To be continued.