"Guess again!"

"Guess again"?! What happened to making a plan?! I glare metaphorical kunai into Sasuke's back as he runs out from behind our hiding spot, teeth grit in an impossible-to-measure level of frustration. From his pocket, he yanks out a handful of actual kunai and whips them at Gaara, who simply absorbs them into his demon arm and laughs.

"Here!" he shouts. "You can have them back!" But instead of regular kunai, they're flaming?! Flaming, for Chūnin's sake!

Sasuke raises his arm to protect his face, and by some miracle, they all miss him, anyway. I sigh heavily in relief, the only thought in my head in this same moment being of how badly I wish I could become one with this tree. Being a tree can't be that bad. No matter how many times you're cut down, you can always just keep growing.

I hug the tree and groan into the bark. "Life would be so much better if I were a tree!" I shout.

A few minutes later, "This guy's a freak," Sasuke says, winding around the trunk of the tree. This time, I get to glare kunai at his dumb, stupid face. He glares right back. "What?"

"'What?'" I repeat, mocking his voice before voicing my earlier thought to him. "We were supposed to strategize! This is a lot more than just a silly match now, Sasuke—this demon of his is no joke! But you're obviously thinking it is since you keep putting yourself in harms' way without a plan!!"

"We don't have the time to make a plan," he hisses back at me. "This guy isn't right in the head."

"Oh, thanks, Mister Obvious," I snap. Sasuke rolls his eyes. "Sasuke, I'm being serious; if you aren't careful, then—""I'm always careful," he interrupts. I gape at him.

"No – you – are – not!" I insist with emphasis. "In case you've already forgotten, you nearly died in the Land of Waves! And who was there to make sure you stayed alive? Me."

"Don't remind me," he mutters, lips suddenly pursing together. I flush, accidentally recalling the memory, myself.

"R-Right... M-My point is, you have a really bad habit of doing stupid things. You were even late for your match today!"

"I'm not trying to get myself killed on purpose if that's what you're saying."

"I bet if you were on time today, Gaara wouldn't have started freaking out during your match," I say pointedly, and I untie my headband from my waist. "Not to mention, his chakra is insanely high right now. What chance do we have, really?" I pull back the fabric and flash the metal of it in Gaara's direction. He's looking frantic, desperate, even.

"If you're going to be so negative about this, then just stay here and keep hiding," he says.

"I'm not being negative, I am being realistic," I argue through my teeth. I sigh deeply at him, before looking back into the reflection of my headband. "Listen, Sasuke, we've gotta think this through. Anything can happen, and we have to—" I gasp sharply "—get down!!"

I grab the collar of Sasuke's shirt, accidentally dropping my headband, and pull him into me, just as Gaara's demon arm swipes through the air where we'd just been sitting. We fall off the branch, and I send my chakra to my feet and move my hands to Sasuke's arms. I start swinging my body, gaining momentum quickly—Sasuke groans from the strain on his injured arm (I'm sure), while I start to feel it in my gut, my surgery scars searing. I'm finally able to release him, and he propels himself several trees away.

Ducking under the same branch, Gaara sees me before he can even notice Sasuke. I let out an involuntary screech and start sprinting in the other direction of Sasuke, Gaara and his chakra hot on my heels.

Should I be glad he's following me instead of Sasuke now?!

The longer my scramble to find a large enough clearing takes, the more the treeline begins to narrow out, and the more Gaara's difficulty to follow after me becomes. The large demon arm that trails behind him when he leaps from branch to branch keep smacking off of them. Another thing I'm thankful for—my heavy breathing is starting to make my lungs ache.

My eyes quickly scan the area on my way through the trees. Where the heck did Sasuke go?! I wonder nervously.

"Why?" Gaara suddenly shouts at me, making me flinch. "Why do you always run away?!" Or... maybe not at me.

I freeze in my tracks, coming to a heel-dragging halt—luckily, the clearing I'd been searching for is only a few meters away—and turn back to face Gaara. On the demon half of his mutated face, his yellow eye continues to search for Sasuke, while his human eye makes direct contact with the two of mine. I'm startled by the familiarity a new ache in my body greets me with, enough so that I'm brought down to my knees for a lack of strength.

It's happening again.

One thing is glaringly clear: where I find myself now belongs to nowhere but the Hidden Sand Village. Having learned back in the Academy that the Land of Wind is comprised mostly of deserts, and being that Gaara, whose body I'm now in, is from the Hidden Sand Village, it only makes sense to assume.

Not too far away from where we stand, I spot a large group of children, likely half my age and seven in number, playing a game that requires them to kick a head-sized ball around a playground. Whatever the goal of their game is, I couldn't begin to guess—there's no goal posts.

I look down at myself—at Gaara. Considering how close I am to the ground, I realize he can't be much older than the other children. He sits on a swing, not bothering to try and swing on it other than what the wind provides him.

One of the children kicks the ball just a little too hard, and it lands on a tall cliff, just a little ways away from the playground. I gasp in Gaara's voice, but it is much softer than the Gaara I've come to experience. He sends a bit of his sand toward the ball and brings it back down to him before looking to the children.

"It's him," I catch one of them whisper. In my chest – Gaara's chest – I feel an ache. He smiles.

"... here," he says quietly, extending the ball out toward them.

"It's him!" another child emphasizes, as if they hadn't already hurt his feelings.

"It's Gaara!"

"He's really creepy."

They run off in the other direction, save for one child who'd only been knocked around in her friends' escape. I feel the smile on Gaara's face falter when she starts walking toward him. Subconsciously, it seems like; Gaara sends his sand after the other children, to make them stay along with their friend, but it grabs at their ankles and starts dragging them back.

"Gaara!" The girl who had remained runs to him, eyes wide with concern and fright. But she's moving too fast for him—Gaara screams in a fright of his own and sends his sand to stop her.

"No, Gaara!" a new voice shouts. A man with long hair suddenly appears between Gaara and the girl to cover her head, taking the brunt of Gaara's sand attack. "You can't do this!"

"Y-Yashamaru," I breathe in Gaara's voice, and as if scolded, he looks away, releasing the children. I'm suddenly expelled from Gaara's body, tossed onto the sand beside him. I look between him and the girl to find her trembling in Yashamaru's arms.

"I..." Her voice is so quiet; I don't think Gaara could have heard her. "... I just w-wanted to play with you."

Somehow, I can.

As if stolen from me, the air returns to my lungs, and I drop on all fours, coughing.

"S-Stop it!" I cry, my voice cracking from how dry my throat is. "I don't want to see these things anymore!!"

Why does this keep happening?! Why do I have to keep feeling everyone else's pain? Seeing their memories? Isn't it enough that I can't even deal with my own? The first time, it was hearing Lee's scream from his match while we were in the hospital. Then, it was seeing Sasuke's training with Kakashi-sensei through Sasuke's eyes. Now this? What is it that triggers it? I thought it might be physical contact, but I didn't touch Gaara, and I still saw his memory.

I take my one hand and touch my other—a hopeless attempt at trying to see if I could somehow experience my own lost memories, as I'd figured it would be.

Still shaking, I look back up at Gaara. He'd gone still, rooted to the branches he squats on but screaming. Is he fighting with that demon of his? That Shukaku? I force myself off of my knees and back onto my feet. If not... maybe I can trigger a bit of clarity.

"Gaara!" I shout up at him. His head snaps down at me—I swallow. "Gaara, who was that girl you just saw? The one in your memory!?" As he struggles to contain himself, I start after him. "Gaara! What was her name!?"

As a final effort to catch his attention, I pick up the kunai I'd dropped when I saw his memory, and fling it toward him, purposely missing him.

"What was that girl's name, Gaara?!" I ask again.

"... K-K..." He groans loudly, threatening to go back under by the looks of it.

"Gaara!!"

"... K-Kishi... bi..." Gaara goes still, and then, "Kishibi!!" as if remembering something horrible. As risky as it is, I dare to move closer to him, and leap up into the tree several across from him.

"Kishibi wanted to be your friend, Gaara! You said before that you had no emotional ties! There's one right there! She wanted to be your friend, Gaara—your—kyah!"

I'm... falling? Blinking rapidly at the air above me, where I'd once stood up in the trees now stands Sasuke. On my way down to the forest floor, the crackling blue light coming from his hand does not go unnoticed. At the last second, I steel myself enough to land in a thick bush and not on the hard ground.

"Thanks for distracting him," Sasuke calls down to me, sparing me a quick, red-eyed glance. The Sharingan! "I was able to build up enough chakra for another Chidori."

"But Sasuke! You don't have enough chakra—"

The same blackness as all the times before now fills my vision, cutting me off, and I grit my teeth.

A man who looks like Sasuke stands before a smaller version of him. Like Sen, he, too, looks familiar to me, in the same familiarity between all other Uchiha. I know I've seen him before, somewhere. A photo. A dream.

Or a missing memory.

I come to in time to witness Sasuke drag his Chidori straight through Gaara's demon arm, the sound of both the chirps of his Jutsu and Gaara's howls of pain filling the forest in a violent echo. I take a moment to rub away the dull throbbing in the side of my skull before he rises up, as if nothing had even happened.

"I see," Gaara says. "So, that's what it is!"

But the fact that Sasuke's been able to injure Gaara twice now is still unreal to me.

"Now it's clear to me, exactly why I've been looking forward to this! This pain... What a thrill it will be to crush such an opponent capable of wounding me so badly! Such a victory will make me feel what it truly means to be alive! There's more... so much more!"

H-He's not wrong about that.

A great river of sand spills from a wide crack in Gaara's gourd. I stare on, horrified, as it forms a solid tail. All the loneliness Gaara has inside of him... this must be how that Shukaku can manipulate him so terribly! But how can we stop something like this?!

... I decide to stay in the bush.

Updated October 17th, 2022 | 2,051 words