White Moon Reminiscence
Matsuri did not falter beneath Gaara's probing stare. She repeated her suggestion calmly.
"Gaara-sama... is it not time to speak? I believe that Uzumaki-san has the qualifications to know."
Boruto jumped at the chance to plead his case.
"If you don't say anything now, then none of the truth will ever become clear!"
The Kazekage's sobbing faded away. After a minute, the man was back under control, more or less. His eyes were reddened from tears and his voice was halting and rough, but there was no doubt that he had regained his sense of reason.
"...Perhaps you are right, Matsuri."
Teal eyes studied the blond diplomat under a new light.
"Your name is... Uzumaki Boruto, correct? I thank you for giving me this chance to speak the truth that I kept hidden inside my heart all these years."
Boruto couldn't help but gape at Matsuri.
"You know about Sakura, too?!"
"I do."
She is after all, the only other person in the whole world who fully accepted Gaara the way he was. And as a fellow woman, she had always believed that Sakura's heart was a story that needed to be told to the right people. And now, the best person has finally arrived.
Uzumaki Boruto. Son of Uzumaki Naruto, and the only Konoha ninja who came to the funeral service held in Sakura's honor. He wasn't asked to come; he had been in Suna at the time and he happened upon it. But he did drop in to give his condolences, and he was properly respectful as well unlike the other curious visitors who sneered behind folded fans and the backs of their hands.
It had been for that reason alone that Gaara agreed to meet this blond guest in the first place.
Gaara sat up straighter in his chair.
"...Now, I shall speak. I first met Sakura... Haruno Sakura, a handful of years after the Third Secret War. She came to me from across the endless desert, from a big wide world beyond the village walls, and I was but a child."
Boruto's jaw dropped.
"So the girl you met when you were a kid was really Sakura? But how? It should've been impossible for Konoha ninja to enter Suna during those days!"
Gaara simply nodded and continued.
.
.
Near the end of the Third Secret War, Suna and Konoha came to an alliance despite once being enemies. Yet despite the alliance, Suna and Konoha were paranoid of each other.
Suna especially was struggling from the aftereffects of war. Gaara was meant to be the Yondaime Kazekage's experiment, all to create a weapon that could replace their lost numbers with sheer might and protect the village. He was eventually deemed to be a failure, and was slated to be killed.
But Gaara was already being slowly and quietly killed, on some level.
Nothing is as empty as living a life that isn't yours. The council elders, the Kazekage, the villagers... they all treated him with a distant coldness and healthy fear of his powers. Even with his own uncle Yashamaru by his side, the pain of loneliness, of emptiness still cut him so very deeply that his own protective sand couldn't save him.
And then it happened.
The moment Gaara's eyes laid upon Sakura's figure and her whimsical magic tricks with a stone was the turning point.
The exact moment that she smiled at him and beckoned him closer was when that sad little boy became truly alive.
.
.
"...Hm?"
Sakura stopped playing with the stone when she sensed another figure close by.
When she looked up, she saw a child with the most darling face she'd ever seen. His teal eyes were wide, and his little mouth was open mid-gasp. He resembled a Nara deer that froze whenever you spooked it. Clutched to his chest was a stuffed bear.
Kyaa! He's so tiny and cute! I just want to give him a big hug!
Inner Sakura squealed and cooed without restraint.
Outwardly, Sakura stayed composed and flashed the boy a grin.
"Hi!"
To her shock, he cowered away from her. A bunch of sand swirled around the kid's body, encasing him within a ball.
It was obviously some kind of Suna-style jutsu, but there wasn't anybody else around. So it was the kid's own doing. But why was he...?
"Wait! You don't need to hide!"
A tiny hole formed on the ball's shell. She saw a single eye peek at her.
"...n't hurt me."
"Huh?"
"Please... don't hurt me."
His timid plea made her jaw drop.
"No! No way, I'm not going to hurt you at all! More importantly, you came to me because you wanted something, right? Well, what is it?"
She didn't dare drop her smile, hoping that it could reassure him of her good intentions.
The sand ball crumbled away.
He stared up at her, his eyes still wide.
"I- I wanted to know what you were doing..."
"What I'm-?"
Sakura looked down at the stone in her hand.
...Ah. He probably saw those sleight of hand tricks that she had been practicing. Wait, how long had he been watching her?
She giggled as a sudden idea popped up in her mind. She had been feeling really bored out here, being unable to practice jutsu. Her teammates were no better, always sleeping in the day and horsing around at night and causing their sensei trouble.
This was the first time a Suna villager spoke to her directly, and she wouldn't let the chance to make friends go to waste! Besides, who knew when exactly the merchant caravan her team was guarding would finally leave the desert?
So she gave the little boy a mischievous smile.
"You're interested, huh? Well, why don't you sit in the swing next to mine and watch closely~"
Those jade eyes sparkled with wonder.
.
.
When she left Suna, Gaara swore to himself to become a strong shinobi, strong enough to make independent decisions and leave the village by himself.
He would do anything to be a part of that wide, wide world beyond the village walls. Anything to be with her once more.
But that wasn't quite enough.
From his conversations with Sakura, he found out that tensions were running high between all five major villages, and it would be difficult for him to move form place to place if he were truly a strong shinobi. They would doubt his intentions, accuse him of treachery, or perhaps attempt to kill him the same way his uncle did. These war torn lands were still bleeding from years of death and paranoia.
Gaara had loved books, loved them even more after meeting her. Inside his heart, the budding ambition to become a writer was born from his enjoyment of the books. But he put this aside when he decided to become a diplomat. Books wouldn't help anyone in those dark times.
He worked at it with all that he was, with all of his energy.
Even when he discovered that she had gotten married, he kept at it.
He knew that she felt troubled by the cycle of mistrust and the course of his studies enlightened him on many things. Somehow, the direction of his dream changed. He began working towards forging sincere bonds of trust between wildly different cultures.
The war against Akatsuki happened. The Shinobi Alliance happened.
Gaara and the remaining jinchuuriki willingly released their bijuu when it was all over, and they vanished without a trace.
And yet, even with the dawning of the new age, his work seemed to never end. The vision of a peaceful world seemed so very far away...
There will always be people who strongly object to the Alliance. There will always be people who won't ever open their hearts.
Disappointments were piling up alongside his work.
One day, Gaara woke up and discovered that his drive to succeed had completely died.
Unable to move on without knowing the reason why, he took a a leave of absence from his duties for the first time in almost ten years.
He came to Konoha.
It wasn't on a whim. He came specifically to this place because he had been avoiding this village on purpose. He had been avoiding Sakura on purpose.
Why bother, when she was living her own life happily? Why approach her when their meeting in Suna was perhaps nothing special to her at all?
A silly belief that he carried with him to his adulthood.
Gaara regretted it now.
When he was a child, he'd taken a leap of faith, a wild gamble, to get close to that mysterious foreign kunoichi. He'd done it again a year later when he escaped from the village to find her in that border town.
So, for one last time, Gaara would take another gamble, another leap of faith, to see her again.
TBC...