Chapter Text
“I don’t know! I found him like this.”
“Like this? Sleeping?”
“I didn’t know he could…”
Gaara creased his brows to a frown and the voices fell silent immediately. He shifted his weight—heavily, sluggishly—and tried to figure out what had happened. Something didn’t feel right, something right there, barely out of reach of awareness—
He wasn’t quite ready to follow this train of thought. His thoughts felt sluggish, too scattered to offer him any kind of explanation. Had somebody managed to drug him?
“We should get someone.”
“I don’t know.” There was a pause. “It doesn’t look like he’s going mental.”
“Shut up! He might hear you!”
That one stung. A little. Even after all this time, even though it wasn’t like Gaara didn’t understand. Of course people were still wary around him—even afraid. It couldn’t be helped. His reputation had preceded him as early as when he’d been a child, and it had only grown during the war.
The war…
Gaara’s mind lingered on the word. But before anything could come of it he shied away, cowardly. He wasn’t ready to get into it. Not yet. Not now, when voices were talking about him in a way he hadn’t experienced in years—at least not this bluntly. Not so openly. Not in that quiet, muffled way that told him they didn’t want him to hear them because they were afraid; afraid of what he would do to them, afraid of him.
Not voices that sounded so awfully familiar.
“Gaara? Can you hear me?” The feminine voice was speaking again. Although she sounded a little louder this time, Gaara could tell with a sinking feeling that she was standing a safe distance away from him.
“What are you doing?” It wasn’t more than a hiss, from the male speaker this time.
Gaara opened his eyes to be met with the semi-darkness of his childhood room. He let his eyes wander to the window that allowed the last sun rays to shine through before nightfall. His eyes widened, taking in the sight.
Suna stretched out before his eyes. Suna, standing and whole. Suna, unmarred by the years that had gone by. His memories of the village may not have all been fond (few from his childhood were) but Suna had always been his home.
Genjutsu was the first thought that struck him, but as soon as his eyes fell on the other occupants of the room, every other thought was wiped from his mind.
His siblings were young. So impossibly young. Kankurō couldn’t be a day over eight, maybe nine. Temari was one year older.
She stood closer to him—just a few steps away—and watched him from wide, wary eyes. She wore casual clothing, thin enough to be comfortable in Suna’s desert sun, with her sandy blonde hair held back in four ponytails. A wave of nostalgia rose up in Gaara’s chest. She’d worn it short after a stray attack had burnt off two of the tails.
It hadn’t sunk in how strong of a pillar she’d become in Gaara’s life until she’d been gone. He still had nightmares about the day she’d fallen, trying to lead one of their troops to safety.
Determined, Gaara shoved all his memories away in the very depths of his mind, right alongside all the emotions he wasn’t ready (would never be ready) to face.
Kankurō lingered just behind Temari, one hand clutching the door handle and his legs positioned to break out into a run. His clothes were similar to the ones their sister wore, and he wasn’t wearing his make-up. Gaara couldn’t remember if he’d worn it at all at this age.
Kankurō had died not long after Temari. He’d charged headfirst into one battle after another, wasting no thought to his own safety until it killed him as well. It had been nothing short of suicide. Gaara had known it even then. He’d understood it.
The only reason he hadn’t followed in their footsteps was because of the people still relying on him.
But here they were. Breathing. Alive. Gaara shouldn’t have felt anything but joy and endless relief to get to see them again, no matter their age—if it weren’t for the way they looked at him.
Gaara pushed himself up and tried not to take it as a physical blow when Temari flinched away.
“Hey Gaara! Are—are you alright?” The smile plastered on Temari’s face looked more like a grimace. Her fists were clenched at her sides, shaking. Gaara was sure that the moment he made a threatening move, she’d bolt from the room right after Kankurō.
“I’m fine,” he answered quietly, not trusting himself to say anything more.
“That’s great! Amazing. We’ll just, uh, leave you to it then!” Still that cheerful, happy tone. Unbothered. Unpracticed, sitting awkwardly on her child-like features.
Gaara hated it. He recognized it. Temari had been forced to speak to him this way their entire childhood, placating him, working hard not to give him a reason to harm her and Kankurō.
He nodded, even though seeing them go was the last thing he wanted. But seeing them shake in terror from his presence was worse than being on his own.
“Alright!” Temari flashed him one last, wobbly smile before she hurried after Kankurō, who had left without wasting another glance at his brother.
Gaara sat back in his chair, took a deep breath and started to organize his thoughts. They still felt all over the place.
Memories were pushing at the borders of his mind like insistent flies, holding the confusion and suspicion of finding himself back in his childhood at bay. Gaara let them in before they could slip away and leave him none the wiser.
Another battle. Another hollow victory. What was the point of fighting a seemingly endless war when slowly but steadily there didn’t seem to be anyone left to relish a victory?
Blood clotted up the air. Icy heat pulsed through his body, piercing, burning—
Gaara winced at the phantom sensation. Had he been injured?
Someone coughed. They spoke—a husky, rugged voice forcing out word after word in short, determined jolts. Sunshine-colored strands of hair, falling messily into dull, gray-looking eyes that were supposed to shine in an almost blinding sky blue.
Naruto. How long had it been? Was he alright?
A second voice at their side, far calmer than it ought to be considering their situation.
Gaara’s memories left him there. The second person must have been Shikamaru. The three of them had been traveling together.
It wasn’t much. He remembered being injured. He remembered Naruto and Shikamaru at his side. He remembered… Had they been planning? Was that the reason this—the past, his past—didn’t feel as unbelievable as it ought to have?
At a loss, Gaara turned to look at the surreal picture of his home village through the window.
A family was walking through the streets, two women and a girl who might have been their daughter.
A stray cat scurried around the edges of the market, hoping to find scraps left behind by shopkeepers.
A group of villagers stepped out of a bar in one of the darker alleys. Rude gestures turned to shoving, turned to punches, several of the villagers allowing themselves to be drawn into the drunken brawl.
Gaara hadn’t realized he’d been smiling until it slipped from his face. What a meaningless conflict. He expected—and demanded—better from his people. If he felt any more settled in this foreign body of his, he would have gone done there to confront them himself, break up the fight, round up the villagers and make them disappear in a cloud of sand, a spectacle, an example, crushing and tearing and squeezing—
Gaara jerked away from the window, his eyes wide and his heart beating several paces too fast.
Those weren’t his thoughts. Those weren’t his urges.
That voice, distant and nearly forgotten, the feeling of agitation, rage and bloodlust, urging him to act, to kill—
Gaara’s eyes snapped open, unfocused. It couldn’t be.
But now that he had felt it once, the presence in his mind was unmistakable. It had been with him for a great part of his life, had cheated him of his childhood, had made him bloodthirsty and unstable.
Gaara had come back to his childhood, the flawed seal inked onto his skin and the voice in the back of his mind whispering for blood. All of a sudden it felt appealing to find whoever’d had the glorious idea of time jumping and making them Shukaku’s very first human sacrifice.
When Shikamaru woke up it was not to the sound he remembered losing consciousness to—which, while slightly unsettling, was not half as unwelcome as it could have been.
He kept his eyes closed and groaned at the stiffness of his limbs. He didn’t want to think back to what had caused it and decided instead to simply enjoy not finding himself in any kind of agonizing pain.
He didn’t sense any danger in his near surroundings, settled down and thought back.
The wasteland stretched out for what seemed like miles around them. Silence, save for the two other people with him. A soft voice, speaking with him quietly but determined—no, arguing with him—and a second presence next to them, strained words and rattled breathing and horrible, wet coughs—
Naruto!
Eyes snapping open, Shikamaru realized what it meant that he couldn’t hear his friend anymore. He leaped up, looked around and stretched out his perception as far as he could, searching, hoping, begging for Naruto to be alright.
Nobody else was here. Not Naruto, lying beside him (bleeding and gasping but alive). Not Gaara, breathing heavily and barely keeping upright (with a wound he suspected was much worse than his friend admitted). He was alone.
He wasn’t just anywhere.
“You’ve got to be kidding,” Shikamaru muttered, to no one but himself.
He was standing on a wide field of grass, right next to a group of trees and the curve of a narrow river—one of the training grounds of Konoha. He couldn’t remember which one it was, but he could remember how much time he’d spent doing nothing here as a child.
The three of them had argued, he recalled. They’d searched for a solution, some kind of plan, anything except the insane scenario they had planned for countless months that they’d been on the run.
The suggestion had come from Naruto—no surprises there—as nothing more but an innocent remark none of them had taken seriously at the time. He had noted how far he’d mastered the seals and techniques developed by his mother’s clan, laboriously collected by them month after month in the form of nearly illegible, incomplete scrolls, the notes of a clan full of geniuses.
They couldn’t have hoped to win the war for a long time. There simply hadn’t been enough of them left. They’d spent their days traveling in small groups to ensure they weren’t easy to track down, constantly on the move. Their life had seemed an endless sequence of hiding, fleeing and desperately searching for a solution, anything they hadn’t thought of in the months, years that their lives just as well might have come to an end.
On the off chance of completing the half developed technique Naruto had managed to dig out from who knew where, they’d tracked down any remaining clues that may have been left by Naruto’s clan members. It was at that time that Shikamaru had thought—not for the first time—how little credit Naruto was given for his intellect.
He’d done it, in the end. Naruto had one day announced (ecstatic and nearly vibrating out of his own skin) that he had completed the strange space-time jutsu he had mentioned to them now and again over the course of the last months.
Then they’d been found. There’d been no warning. They hadn’t known the enemy was onto them, though they should have been smarter than to stay in one place for so long. But Naruto had needed time. He hadn’t been able to accomplish anything with them on the run with no end, so they’d settled down, let him train and complete the technique.
With the enemy on their heels, they’d run out of time to make plans.
It had ended with Naruto choking on his own blood before them, Gaara not admitting to anything, though Shikamaru strongly suspected a serious injury to the stomach. Both of them had been desperately trying to come up with some kind of way out, because what Naruto was trying to explain to them sounded so impossible, so final.
In the end they had listened, of course—trying (and failing) to ignore how it got harder and harder for him to breathe, how the life drained out of their friend right in front of their eyes.
Shikamaru let his eyes wander, taking in the sight before him. This particular training ground was near the border, giving him a clear view of the Hokage Monument. He looked up at the four Kage, gaze lingering just a little longer on the Fourth. The sun was already sinking, casting its last daylight over the village he loved.
Eventually, Shikamaru heaved himself up from his seat in the grass, stretched and let out a sigh. He didn’t want to think about everything that was to come. There was so much he needed to do. So many people he needed to meet.
His features softened. At least he wouldn’t have to face all of it alone. If he’d arrived in the past unharmed that meant two other people had come with him. His thoughts drifted off to Suna briefly, hoping Gaara was alright. It was regrettable, but he would have to hold out on his own for a while. Shikamaru sighed, idly wishing they could have had more time to plan.
But Gaara wasn’t the only of his friends who’d come with him.
Mind made up, hands in his pockets and trying to look as carefree as possible, Shikamaru started looking for the man who would one day, once again, become his Hokage.