If the other Kages thought he was even quieter than usual they didn't remark on it. The only one who seemed to sense anything unusual in his behaviour was Temari who was on bodyguard duty. She sent him a long look before she took her place behind him. He didn't think she in a million years could guess what had shaken him. She certainly wouldn't guess that he'd woken up with a warm woman under him, her lips a breath from his, her body pressed against his, looking up at him with huge, dark eyes. If that hadn't disturbed his thoughts enough he'd also been taken unawares. He had never in his life been caught off guard. When he slept it was usually in short, fitful spells often filled with nightmares. Tonight he'd slept the night through for the first time he could remember and on a floor no less. After having been lulled to sleep by Koizumi Sayuri's even breathing in the darkness. He didn't know why her presence calmed him sometimes and then stirred him up the next. He had no time to think about it and it was making him testy.

He couldn't concentrate in the meeting because he kept wondering what she was doing and whether she'd remembered to eat or if she'd gone straight back to work and would pass out again. When the thought of her fainting and hitting her head on something occurred he gave in and sent Kakashi to check on her with the excuse that the Konoha ninja was an excellent Earth Style user and could easily pick up the new jutsu with his Sharingan.

POV

Kakashi stuck his head in the tent and found Koizumi Sayuri behind a desk with precariously piled books heaped around her. Her hair was scooped up and fastened with a pen, another was stuck behind her ear and a third she used as she scribbled at a furious pace.

"Koizumi-san?" She looked as if he'd just woken her up and she blinked in confusion at him for a second.

"Kakashi-sensei." He'd never been her teacher but he was a teacher nonetheless.

"Just Kakashi is fine. Can I come in?"

"Just Sayuri then. Of course, come on in." Absentmindedly she rubbed her hand that was aching from writing for too long.

"Thank you." He stepped in, his hands in his pockets as was often his habit when there was no novel clasped in them. "Gaara asked me to come see how you were getting along and see if you needed to use me as guinea pig", he said as he curiously went around the tent, tilting his head to read titles of books and squinting at obscure symbols.

"Oh. Well, I'm almost done, I think, and then I can teach you the jutsu, then Gaara and then we can split the Earth Style users between us and pass it on." Kakashi nodded and wondered why she sounded so hesitant.

"That sounds like a good idea. You've done well, Sayuri, with this jutsu. Your parents would have been proud." She smiled at him uncertainly and Kakashi realized that her close-range combat jonin shinobi parents may not have been too happy to have a daughter who specialized in research. He didn't really understand reasoning like that. So far he didn't know how many clones he'd killed in combat but Sayuri had from her desk come up with a way to easily beat his number – if the jutsu worked as planned.

"The other Kages just accepted the idea. Gaara spoke highly of it at the strategy meeting this morning. Tsunade-sama wanted me to tell you she's very impressed." The smile this time was more real and he was glad he'd managed to find the key to turn in her head.

"Gaara also asked me to me sure you ate." He smiled inwardly when he saw her shocked face. He'd been as surprised by the request of the Kazekage but he'd been glad. The young Commander had been through a lot and if there was something to help him deal with the responsibilities he had, Kakashi was more than happy to oblige.

"Oh, I can't possibly right now, I'm almost done and-"

"I don't think there's room for arguing, it's by order of the Commander of the Allied Shinobi Forces." She opened her mouth to protest and then closed it again, nodding her consent with her gaze trained to the ground close to his sandals. Wasn't this interesting, Kakashi thought, the Kazekage's admiration was obviously returned by little Sayuri. There was an interesting turn for you, the tension between the reserved Lord of the Sand and the info-nin from Konoha. He thought he could see why the Kazekage felt protective of Sayuri. She was of a delicate build and was clearly not taking good care of herself. He also didn't think what Sayuri felt was the common fan-girl admiration Gaara received a lot but a more real affection independent on whether the Sand leader was the Kazekage or the street sweeper.

Gaara's fate had always tugged at his heartstrings since there were so many similarities between his and Naruto's pasts. They had both fought prejudice and hate and come out victorious as the heroes of their respective villages. Still, while Naruto easily made friends Gaara was more reserved and kept to himself mostly. This protectiveness was a good sign, and Kakashi decided to help whatever it was along. The young man definitely needed all the friends he could get. He held up the tentflap and let her pass him and she smiled shyly. Yes, he decided, he would do his best by young Sayuri and Gaara of the Sand.

POV

Kakashi was friendlier than she'd imagined. He had always seemed nice but she seldom saw him with anyone besides his team and sometimes Guy-Sensei. But he had accompanied her to the food tent and shown genuine interest in her work, listening to her, joking with her. She wondered why he wasn't married. He was obviously handsome under his mask and very charming, especially when he smiled, he squinted a bit when he did and it made him look like a happy hedgehog. Maybe he just hadn't found the right person. She shook her head; it really wasn't any of her business.

She looked back down on her calculations, saw the numbers begin their usual dance in front of her eyes, moving at will, switching places and turning into each other. She understood other people didn't experience the same dance when they looked at a series of numbers, charts or codes but to her it had always been a natural thing. She had worked in the code-breaking unit for a while but however much she enjoyed the puzzle of it she liked research better, but it was at times like this when she got to use both her love for numbers and her inquiring mind that she was at her happiest.

Suddenly she was startled by a noise and she looked up to see the Kazekage standing in front of her, his arms crossed, face impassive.

"I've been here for two minutes now, did you really not notice?" He gave her such a piercing stare she felt as if he were trying to look into her. She felt stupid and pushed her papers away to not get distracted again. "Do you know what someone could do to you in even less than two minutes?" His deep voice sounded silkier than usual and she shivered, not in fear but in…anticipation? Why, she wondered, why did he only see her when she was doing moronic things like stumbling or fainting or enjoying a private moment of calculations unaware of her surroundings?

"I was ordered to find a solution as quickly as possible and that's what I was doing, I wasn't on guard duty", she said defensively.

"No, but you are guarding possibly the most important secret we have at the moment. I'm going to post guards around this tent."

"What? But I-"

"Could someone from outside make sense of your research?", he interrupted.

"No. Maybe. If they had time", she said feeling foolish.

"Like if they for example caught you unawares and killed you? Or snuck in and captured you?" She was dumbstruck. She had been careless. She knew she probably couldn't defend the research forcibly but…it had never been this important before, she hadn't thought twice about it.

"Fine." He nodded in his curt manner. He looked around and she was aware her tent was a mess but there was a system to it that only she knew. There were bookshelves that came out of storage scrolls and most of them held storage scrolls that led to the book she needed or in some cases more scrolls. It was a complex system but it worked for her and meant she could bring an entire, nearly weightless, library with her. Shoved in a corner was her bed, unmade as usual and for some reason him seeing her bed made her blush.

"Kakashi said you were ready to teach me the jutsu so we can each pass it on." She furrowed her brown in confusion, as far as she could remember she'd told the older Konoha ninja she would go over to the Kazekage's tent tomorrow morning to show the jutsu but he must have misunderstood since the Kazekage was standing in front of her in her messy tent. She was done however so now was as good time as any.

"Oh, right. Well…", Sayuri looked around for another chair but the only other place to sit in the room was her bed. She thought she saw panic flash in his eyes as she looked over at the bed before he sat down on the floor. She must have imagined it, why would her bed scare him? Sayuri grabbed the most recent calculations and sat down next to him, spreading the papers in front of them.

It didn't take him long to catch on and after repeating it flawlessly three times she deemed him ready to pass it on. The sand they'd used for practice was lazily swirling in the air and in the light from the lone candle in the tent it glinted like gold. The noise from outside had died down and the breeze whooshing through the gaps in the fabric was the only sound that could be heard. It felt a bit surreal to sit in the soft light with the Kazekage and watch the dancing sand, as if she were dreaming. Sayuri reached out a hand to touch the moving sand. Lazily it swirled around her hand and up around her wrist touching her skin in soft feather-light strokes as it drew intricate patterns in the air.

"Are you doing that?" She turned towards him and met his eyes, the pale green almost glowing in the dusk. He nodded and she broke the eye contact, feeling as if the sand moving for her was too intimate, that the tent was suddenly too small and that the feather-light strokes were his hands instead of the sand.

"You must have amazing chakra control to be able to move such small objects in such an intricate way", she blurted out to break the illusion of intimacy. Moving his sand for his own amusement in a half-lit tent was probably nothing he considered intimate and she needed to snap out of it before she did something embarrassing. "Must have made all your friends jealous with your sandcastle skills when you were a kid." She watched the sand, saw it stop for a second before it began its slow swirling again, as he said,

"I didn't have any friends when I was young."

"Oh", what did you say to that? Sorry? "Did your parents play with you?" She looked back at him and saw that now his hands were fastened on the moving sand.

"My mother died when I was a baby and my father viewed me as an experiment for the sake of the village that unfortunately went wrong. My uncle raised me for a while." She heard a faint one of bitterness in his tone and her heart bled.

"I'm so sorry." She hadn't been able to make her parents proud but she had always known they loved her.

"Don't be. For what I've done I deserved worse."

"No! No, I don't think you did. I think you were just a little boy who never knew he was loved and it shaped you. You can't shoulder the whole blame for the outcome and for the mistakes you've made you have a lifetime left to make up for them."

"You know what I was?"

"I had to study Jinchuuriki for an assignment from Tsunade-sama. You came up." He was silent for a while and she was afraid she'd said too much.

"What about your parents?" She blinked in surprise, it was the first time he had asked her a personal question and before she could stop herself the truth tumbled out.

"They always loved me but they were never proud of me. They were disappointed that I showed no aptitude for their lifestyle." She picked a handful of sand from the floor and let it run out of her fist into the palm of her other hand.

"They were in ANBU, close-range combat shinobi. They could never understand me. I only wanted them to be proud of me but no matter how many high scores I brought home on my written tests they would always ask me why I wasn't better at shuriken practice since I could calculate the exact speed and angle required to hit the target or if there was a book where you could learn taijutsu. They were good people and they loved me but it always hurt to know they wished I were different. They died thinking I would be a genin for the rest of my life. I wish they knew I made jonin."

"They do", he said calmly and she turned to meet his gaze. She saw no lie in his eyes, no simple wish to only make her feel better, he truly believed what he'd said. It calmed her in a way no empty assurances that her parents were proud of her ever had. She smiled and then looked down to see a small, perfectly detailed sandcastle with towers and pinnacles sat in front of her.

POV

Gaara watched her eyes turn from quiet sadness to astonished pleasure from something as simple as a turn of his hand, rearranging the sand. He'd never seen eyes as expressive as hers, they were completely unguarded and every emotion seemed to flash in them. And yet, when he'd told her about his childhood he'd seen no judgement in them, no pity, just an endless understanding. She'd waited for him to tell her before bringing it up, even though she'd known from the start that he had been a monster.

Usually people seemed to ignore his past now that he was a respectable citizen and a Kage but she hadn't shied when he had brought it up or offered the pity that put his back up. If anything she had only seemed sad for the boy he had once been, which was similar to how he felt himself. He wondered how any parents could fail to see how incredible she was, and only asking for acceptance in return.

"…really beautiful and the details are amazing", her voice tuned back in his mind and he realized she was still praising the little sandcastle.

"Do you want to keep it?" Her eyes widened,

"Can I? I mean it's your chakra reinforced sand, I know you only have a limited amount and I wouldn't want to take any away from you?" The castle was about as big in circumference as her hand and about 20 centimetres high and he wondered if she realized that the amount was miniscule.

"I can get new easily, especially such a small amount."

"Then I'd love to keep it." She smiled at him in a way that made him unable to look away. Quickly he got up.

"Won't it break if I move it?" He reached out his hand and felt the sand do his bidding, solidifying, even if it looked no different.

"No it'll stay that way. Unless I die", he smiled bitterly.

"What?" Her eyes seemed huge.

"If I die there's no chakra to keep the sand together", he explained.

"Oh…right. I hope it never breaks then", she said and his heart did some weird thing in his chest.

"The chances have improved with your new jutsu." He turned to leave.

"Goodnight, Kazekage-sama", she said, still on the floor with the little castle in front of her. He stopped and considered for a moment.

"You may call me by my name", it sounded stiff and pompous in his ears but he seldom asked anyone to call him by name, it suggested a closeness he rarely felt.

"You can call me by mine, then. Goodnight…Gaara." His heart did the weird thing again, feeling as if it forgot to beat for a second and then caught up by giving a harder beat when she said his name,

"Goodnight, Sayuri."