The forest was split in twain.
Trees lay splintered in widening rings. Trunks sheared clean through, sap bleeding into churned sand. Roots clawed at empty air where earth had been ripped away. The air tasted dry, wrong — hot grit scraping the back of his throat like he'd inhaled from a kiln.
Sasuke forced himself upright.
The motion pulled something sharp through his ribs. His vision flashed white at the edges. His right arm trembled violently; the afterimage of Chidori still buzzed in his nerves like trapped lightning. His palm felt hollow, fingers numb and aching at once. He clenched them anyway.
He would not fall again.
Ahead of him, Gaara's body hung suspended in a cocoon of sand, splitting open from within.
The surface bulged outward in slow, grotesque pulses. Each expansion carried a sound too low to be called a roar — more like tectonic plates grinding together. The vibration crawled up Sasuke's legs through the soles of his sandals. He felt it in his teeth.
Something vast pressed against the seams.
Naruto stood in front of it.
Of course he did.
"You're not fighting alone," Naruto had said.
The memory scraped. Sasuke's jaw tightened until it hurt.
The sand ruptured.
A limb — too large to be a limb — forced its way out. It wasn't flesh. It was packed desert given will. A clawed arm the size of a watchtower crashed into the clearing and pulverized stone. Pebbles lifted from the ground before slamming back down in a shockwave.
The air pressure changed.
It wasn't wind.
It was weight.
Sasuke's lungs resisted drawing breath. For a split second he thought he might suffocate standing still.
His Sharingan spun.
Chakra flooded his vision in violent color. Not just volume — density. Thick, layered currents spiraling in contradictory directions. Ancient. Corrosive. It distorted the air like heat above a forge.
The sand monster's head began to push free, muzzle elongating, markings carving themselves in spirals across its surface as if etched by invisible claws.
Shukaku.
The name surfaced unbidden from academy fragments and clan whispers. A tailed beast. A weapon. A disaster bound in flesh.
Naruto didn't retreat.
He bit his thumb.
Sasuke saw the blood bead before he smelled it — iron cutting through dust.
Naruto's hands blurred through seals.
Sasuke felt it before he saw it — a second pulse igniting the space behind him. Not Gaara's storm.
Another.
Wild but focused.
Answering.
The summoning seal ignited.
Smoke detonated outward. It punched the breath from Sasuke's lungs and drove him half a step back. Pebbles skittered across the ground. Leaves shredded midair.
Something vast displaced the air.
When it cleared, a toad the size of a fortress crouched where Naruto had been.
Scarlet haori. Pipe clamped between blunt teeth. Eyes like molten copper narrowing at the devastation.
The ground sank slightly beneath its weight.
Sasuke's heart skipped.
Gamakichi's father.
No.
Gamabunta.
He had heard the name in passing. He had imagined something… large.
He had not understood scale like this.
Naruto stood on the toad's head, swaying slightly. Sasuke noticed that. The sway. The cost.
"Oi," the toad rumbled, voice vibrating in Sasuke's ribcage. "You dragged me into a desert."
"That's not a desert!" Naruto shouted, voice raw but unbroken. "That's him!"
Shukaku's face finished forming. One eye opened — a pupil etched in malice.
It turned.
It saw.
Sasuke felt seen, even though it wasn't looking at him.
The clearing seemed to shrink around the two giants. The sky dimmed behind suspended dust.
For a heartbeat, everything held still.
Sasuke's breath caught.
Then the world broke.
Shukaku's arm swung.
The air screamed.
Gamabunta moved.
Not lumbering.
Not slow.
He vanished from where Sasuke expected him to be and reappeared in motion, tantō flashing. Steel met sand with a crack that split the soundscape in half. The descending limb sheared apart in an explosion of granular shrapnel.
Sand tore across Sasuke's cheek like thrown knives. He threw an arm up too late. Grit got into his eye. He refused to blink.
The impact shook his teeth so hard his jaw rang.
Naruto didn't fall.
He crouched low, one hand pressed against Gamabunta's head, teeth bared in something feral.
Red chakra began to leak around him.
Sasuke felt it before he consciously saw it.
It prickled across his skin. His nerves reacted the way they did before lightning struck — hairs rising, muscles tightening without permission.
Not wild.
Not uncontrolled.
Focused.
It wrapped Naruto's body like heat distortion at first — thin, barely visible. Then thicker. Coiling. Clinging.
Sasuke swallowed.
That pressure.
Different from Gaara's suffocating weight.
This was sharp.
It cut.
It felt like standing too close to a blade.
Shukaku inhaled.
The sand around its mouth spiraled inward, compressing. Air shrieked as it was forced aside. A sphere began to form — dark at its core, spinning, swallowing light.
Sasuke's vision tunneled.
His instincts screamed run.
His legs didn't move.
That was not wind.
That was chakra condensed past reason.
Gamabunta leapt.
The ground imploded where he'd been.
The sphere detonated mid-formation as the toad's blade carved across Shukaku's muzzle. The explosion erased sound for a heartbeat. Then it returned all at once — a thunderclap that punched through Sasuke's chest.
Trees disintegrated into splinters midair.
Sasuke's knees buckled.
Pain shot up his thighs as he slammed into a broken trunk. Bark tore against his palm. He clung to it anyway. Refused to go down.
Naruto rode the motion above, red chakra flaring brighter, whipping backward like a banner in a storm.
"Gaara!" he shouted.
The name tore across the battlefield.
Shukaku hesitated.
Sasuke saw it.
Inside the massive sand construct, the outline of Gaara's true body flickered — small, suspended at the center like a heart inside a ribcage.
Naruto pressed his palm forward.
The red chakra surged.
It didn't scatter.
It converged.
It struck.
Not the sand.
The center.
Sasuke's Sharingan sharpened painfully. He forced more chakra into his eyes despite the burn.
He followed the flow.
Naruto's chakra threaded through microscopic fractures in Shukaku's form, vibrating at a frequency that disrupted cohesion. The sand lost rhythm. Lost synchronization.
Oscillation.
Interference.
Two systems colliding.
The sand's rotation faltered.
Shukaku roared — but the sound wavered, cracked.
Gamabunta pinned one massive arm beneath his foot and drove his blade down through the construct's shoulder, anchoring it. The ground split under the pressure.
"Kid!" the toad barked. "Finish it!"
Naruto moved.
He launched from the toad's head.
Sasuke's breath stopped.
Not at the monster.
Through it.
Red chakra engulfed him fully now — a violent shroud that distorted the air around his body.
He struck the core.
A single, brutal punch.
For an instant, Sasuke saw nothing.
Not light.
Not dark.
Just absence.
Then the sand shell fractured from the inside.
Cracks spidered outward in branching lines, racing across Shukaku's body. The massive arm collapsed into cascading grains. The head split cleanly down the center.
The storm stopped.
No transition.
Just silence.
Sand fell.
Not as a wave.
As rain.
Soft. Endless.
Naruto landed hard, skidding across torn earth. The red chakra flickered, guttered, withdrew like a tide receding from stone.
Gaara's body dropped from the disintegrating mass.
Small again.
Bleeding.
Unconscious.
Gamabunta snorted. The sound felt almost… satisfied. He withdrew his blade as the remaining sand sloughed off and pooled inertly across the ground.
"That's enough," the toad muttered. "You're out of chakra."
Naruto didn't answer.
He tried to stand.
His legs failed.
He remained kneeling in the wreckage, shoulders rising and falling in sharp pulls.
Sasuke stared.
His ears rang.
His hands were shaking and he hadn't noticed when it started.
The battlefield was unrecognizable. The forest had been flattened in a widening crater. Dust drifted down in lazy spirals through sunlight that hadn't existed moments ago.
And Naruto — Naruto — had stood at the center of it.
Not reckless.
Not lucky.
He had directed that power.
He had aimed it.
He had broken a tailed beast's transformation.
Sasuke's chest tightened until breathing felt optional.
The hospital roof flashed in his mind.
The water towers.
The difference in destruction.
He remembered saying he would handle it alone.
He remembered driving Chidori into Gaara's shield and feeling it stall.
He remembered the sickening certainty of insufficiency.
Naruto had not stalled.
Sasuke's Sharingan dimmed without him willing it.
The sand at the crater's edge stirred weakly — not rising to protect, not reforming — merely trembling in confused aftershock.
Naruto dragged himself forward inch by inch.
He stopped inches from Gaara.
There was no triumph in his posture.
Only exhaustion.
And something else.
Sasuke didn't want to name it.
Concern.
Behind them, wind moved through broken branches. It sounded thin. Fragile.
Gamabunta vanished in a burst of smoke, leaving only heat and the echo of displacement.
Naruto looked small again.
Small and human.
Sasuke felt something crack — not pride, not ego.
Certainty.
He had believed power was linear.
Train.
Perfect.
Overtake.
Climb.
But this—
This was something else.
Naruto's strength had not come from refinement alone.
It had come from collision.
From refusing to yield.
From a source Sasuke could feel but not trace.
Not just effort.
Not just bloodline.
Something messier.
Something he did not have.
Gaara coughed weakly.
The sand trembled — then settled fully.
Naruto exhaled and tipped sideways, collapsing onto the torn earth.
For a moment Sasuke remained standing.
He didn't realize he was swaying until the ground tilted.
His knees finally gave out.
He hit the crater floor hard enough to jar his spine.
He didn't try to get back up.
Above them, the sun pushed through drifting dust.
Clear.
Bright.
The invasion noise distant now.
The sky looked open.
Sasuke did not feel open.
He felt behind.
The weight wasn't human.
Humans were dead weight or live weight. Gaara was more like one of his puppets—something hollow filled with something heavy.
Kankurō adjusted his grip, boots skidding on the slick, mossy branch.
The coarse fabric of his flight suit was sodden with sweat, the material bunching and pulling against his skin with a heavy, abrasive friction that made every leap a struggle.
His suit was already smeared with grit.
"He's shedding," Kankurō hissed, revolted and horrified in equal measure.
The sand armor—usually so perfect, so impenetrable—was sloughing off Gaara's skin in heavy, damp clumps. It didn't feel like sand anymore. It felt like wet clay.
Schlupp-fwat. A clump of the gray-brown sludge slid off Gaara's calf and hit a leaf below, the sound wet and heavy, lacking the clean rasp of dry sand.
Clumping, heavy, ugly stuff that smelled of iron and damp earth.
"Shut up and move," Temari snapped from the branch ahead.
She didn't look back. She kept her fan closed tight against her back, her posture rigid. She was terrified.
Even through the smoke, Kankurō could see the white-knuckle grip she had on the spine of her fan, the wood creaking under the pressure of a hand that wouldn't stop shaking.
Kankurō could see it in the way she checked the tree line every three seconds.
She wasn't scared of the Leaf pursuing them. She was scared of what was breathing against Kankurō's neck.
"We need to stop," Kankurō gasped, lungs burning. "Just for a minute. My chakra is—"
"No stopping," Temari cut him off, voice sharp as a wind blade. "Sasuke Uchiha is fast. And that... that other one."
She didn't name him. The loud one. The orange one. The one who had done the impossible.
Gaara groaned.
It was a jagged, rattling vibration that Kankurō felt through his own spine, a sound like a dry stone being dragged over wet leather.
It wasn't a normal sound. It was a wet inhale, a drag of breath like lungs scraping against ribs.
Kankurō nearly dropped him. His heart hammered against his ribs. The sand on Gaara's shoulder bulged, shifting like a cocoon trying to decide if it wanted to protect him or eat him.
"Easy," Kankurō whispered, his voice trembling. "Easy, Gaara. It's just us."
Just us. The people you haven't killed yet.
The forest around them smelled of ozone, wet timber, and the smoke drifting from the village they had failed to destroy.
Kankurō looked down at his brother's face. The Love tattoo on his forehead was stark against skin that had gone deadly pale. Under the cracking armor, Gaara looked small.
Broken, Kankurō thought, and the word tasted like ash.
Gaara wasn't supposed to break. Gaara was supposed to be the weapon that broke everyone else.
Pain was a color.
It wasn't just white; it was a flat, over-exposed glare that bleached the color out of his thoughts, leaving the edges of his mind feeling frayed and brittle like sun-rotted silk.
White. Blinding. Absolute.
It throbbed in the center of his forehead, right behind the mark, radiating out like cracks in a mirror.
Gaara floated in the darkness of his own mind, but the darkness wasn't quiet today. Usually, it was filled with the Shukaku's screaming—a constant, hungry roar.
Today, the Shukaku was silent. Sulking. Beaten.
In its place, a voice echoed. Not a demon's voice. A human voice. Rough. Broken. Honest.
I know what it's like when everyone looks at you like you're a mistake!
The words hit Gaara harder than the physical blow.
He tried to push them away with sand, but there was no sand here. There was only the memory of the impact. The headbutt. Bone on bone.
The echo of the impact carried a dull, hollow resonance that hummed in his teeth—the first time he had ever felt the unfiltered kinetic shock of another person's existence.
A sound that was sickening and too human.
It shattered the logic Gaara had built his entire life around.
He fought for others. He was strong.
I fought for myself. I was weak.
The equation didn't balance. If love was weakness, why did the Uzumaki win? If solitude was strength, why was Gaara currently being carried?
The confusion felt like cracked glass inside his skull. Sharp edges rubbing together.
The memory shifted.
Suna, years ago...
The clinic smelled of antiseptic and dry heat.
The stinging scent of medicinal alcohol bit at the back of his throat, mixing with the scorched-earth smell of Suna's mid-day sun baking the stone walls.
Small Gaara sat on the table. His feet didn't touch the floor. He held the ointment jar in small, trembling hands.
"Does it hurt?" he asked.
Yashamaru smiled. It was the only smile in the world. It was the light that kept the darkness at bay.
"A little," Yashamaru said gently, wrapping the bandage around his finger. "But physical wounds heal quickly."
Gaara touched his own chest.
There was no blood there. No bruise. The sand stopped everything. But it hurt. It hurt so much he couldn't breathe.
"What about here?" Gaara whispered. "Why does it hurt here?"
Yashamaru's expression softened into something that looked like pity, or maybe sorrow.
"That is a wound of the heart," Yashamaru said. "Physical medicine cannot cure it."
"Then... how do I cure it?"
"There is only one cure," Yashamaru said.
He leaned closer. He smelled like sun-dried linen and safety.
"Love."
The word was a dry, abrasive texture against his tongue, tasting of old dust and the copper-tang of the blood he'd bitten from his own lip.
Present Time
"Love," Gaara whispered.
The word felt like sand in his mouth. Gritty. Abrasive.
He opened his eyes.
The world was moving. Green blur. Brown trunks. The smell of old blood. He was moving, but he wasn't walking. Someone was holding him.
Gaara stiffened. His instinct—honed by six years of assassination attempts—screamed: Kill.
The sand at his waist stirred, hungry and angry.
"Gaara!"
The voice was terrified. Kankurō.
Gaara blinked, the world sharpening into focus. He was draped over Kankurō's back. Temari was leaping ahead of them, carving a path through the leaves.
They were... escaping?
No. They were carrying him.
"Put me down," Gaara rasped. His voice sounded like lungs scraping.
Hah-skrrr.
The sound was thin and airless, as if the sand still clogging his throat was turning his breath into sandpaper.
Kankurō flinched so hard he nearly missed his footing. "Gaara. You're... you're awake."
"Put. Me. Down."