Day 8
Day1; Continued
×愛×▬▬▬×愛×▬▬▬×愛×
This wasn’t like him.
He had a meeting to get to, the council had been expecting him after the end of his address to the genin and he’d effectively blown them off, now wondering just how long they would have before a messenger was sent looking for him. Anxious, uncertain, with his heart pounding quietly in his chest, Gaara ignored the urge to wipe the sweat off his palms and kept his eyes locked on the woman in front of him.
Sakura Haruno stood a few yards away from him in the center of their chosen training ground, she was stretching out her shoulders and her neck, making a clear show of her confidence in facing the new Wind leader. There was a smirk pulling at her lips that hadn’t disappeared since he told her to stand at the ready, and a glisten in her eyes that he couldn’t attribute to the glaring sun. She had even called him by name on their way over and, with how accustomed he was to the honorific title of Kazekage by now, the sound of his name on her voice sent a peculiar feeling swimming in his gut.
Again, he wondered what she could have done to earn the privilege of such assurance in herself, she definitely knew something he didn’t, and he was second guessing his decisions.
Only now, after leading her to the distant training field undisturbed by visiting genin, had Gaara thought of how this might look to an observer. The last time they encountered each other, skillsets aside, they had been at the same level of rank. Now, he’d catapulted himself to a level of station that was far beyond her own; he sat at the pinnacle while she stood at the starting line. The city, his city, was hosting the very race she was trying to start, and he would be called on for judging of the contestants. If they fought now, would it call her judging into question, could it disqualify her? Unprecedented, he was certain that none of his fellow chunin contestants had challenged the Third to a match before the tests began, just where had she gotten this idea from?
For the second time, he tried reason. “You’re positive about this, Sakura?” he asked, unsure of how to navigate her odd request. The exams technically hadn’t started yet…
She nodded, her arms outstretched above her head as she leaned side to side, the top she wore riding up on her midriff. Gaara glanced away. “Mhmm,” she hummed, now busy with adjusting her hair.
In no other world would Gaara have allowed a potential opponent the time to straighten themselves before a fight, but the way she patted down the dirt on her apron skirt and worked the knot out of her shoulder gave him pause. Somehow, she’d drawn him in and made him curious, he was bewitched by the possibility of her growth and tempted to forgo his formalities to uncover its cause.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” he heard himself saying before he could finish the thought.
Pausing, Sakura smiled and glanced over at him. His breath caught in his throat. “Yes,” she sighed. “I suppose you certainly could if you wanted to.” He was confused, this was an admission he hadn’t expected of her given her intrepid request for a match. Admission or not, her eyes still shown with that knowing and self-assured glint, an unfamiliar intrigue welling up within him. “But you’ll find I don’t bruise as easily anymore.”
Without a visible command, the quark on Gaara’s gourd could be heard popping out of place and the quiet hissing of sand soon filled the air. Sakura bit her lip to contain her grin, he found himself wishing she had let it show; it was exciting him.
He was the Kazekage, however, so he couldn’t be allowed to get ahead of himself. “There will be no blood spilled here,” he assured.
To which Sakura shrugged and responded, “I’ll try to remember that.”
A twitch of his brow and quick scrunch of his nose was her reply, and their match commenced.
With a force that would have sent her fellow genin shaking in their boots, his sand charged her. It surged forward, breaking around him like a current diverted by a stone in a river. The air between them, suspenseful and pregnant with tension, had erupted with the screeching sound of grain on grain as the wave crashed over her. Gaara lost sight of her as the wave ran her down and, when the sand writhed under his command, he felt a resistance against it that wouldn’t move.
Then the blow came.
Suddenly, he was back to two years ago, standing in that pit arena as unexpected shock wiped his mind clean. Such strength, such speed, so much so that his future opponent had to mimic the tactic just to get close to him. The sand forcibly dispersed against his command and out of the fray came not Rock Lee, but the very reason for the lump in his throat, the adrenaline in his veins; Sakura Haruno. She had stood fully facing his oncoming attack and bore herself down against it, digging in her heels and pushing back until it broke apart, and then she rushed him.
Having dispersed a path for herself, she weaved around a side-sweeping blow that aimed to trip her feet and closed the paces she took between them quickly. Another surge, she readied a blow, and Gaara watched as her fist made contact with his sand and crumbled it. Then she was upon him, one well-placed blow after another, his shield faithfully coming to his defense each time. She was different than Lee, though, she was pushing him.
Gaara found himself retreating a step, wanting to welcome some space between them; so close and so raw, he kept distracting himself by taking notice of her and not her attacks. Punching, kicking, dodging, she danced around his counter attacks; he was pushing his speed, increasing the strength of the sand, estimating how forceful he could be, and she matched him at every turn.
Finally, breathing hard with a sheen of sweat across her skin, she broke through the hardened shell of his sand shield and forced him to swiftly retreat a few steps. Finally getting some space between them then; he hadn’t hardly even moved and yet he was already sweating. Sakura stood there holding his gaze, resuming her casual demeanor as she rose from the stance of her strike.
Adjusting the fit of her glove, her hips swaying as she shifted her weight, Sakura smirked at him; mischievous and altogether boastful. “Didn’t see that coming, did you?”
The sand churned and ungulated at his feet, expressing the stirring of its master’s excitement; no, no he had not. Upholding his promise of not harming her was going to require strategy, it seemed. So be it. With a sudden heaviness to the air that surrounded them, not unlike the electric charge of an oncoming storm, he raised his arms as tendrils of sand lifted from the ground and rose to the sky, gathering there. Sakura faltered back a step, eyeing him cautiously as that heavy rhythm thumped against the beating of her heart, before finally breaking her gaze to assess her situation above.
She squared her feet with her shoulders, her fists clenched at her sides, ready to strike, but what exactly could she do when the sand began to rain down on her in little droplets too small to strike away? Sakura held an arm above her head, shielding her eyes from the fine grains falling around her, and Gaara took his opportunity to snag her ankles in a coiling of sand. He pulled her down. She gasped, a small yelp escaping her lips as she was submerged within the sandy earth, a whirlpool of grain swirling around her and beginning to harden.
He'd only pulled her in up to her waist, though the one arm she’d been shielding her eyes with was spared from getting locked in. She watched as the sand around her began to harden and she started writhing against it, Gaara could feel her struggling to release her legs from their bindings below the ground. It was no use, he had her held tight, and she glared at him.
The remaining sand in the air soon ceased its whirling and fell, Sakura continued to struggle. Now thrashing, she used her free arm to repeatedly bash her closed fist against the hardened ground, as if trying to crack apart the sand that he’d tightly secured around her.
He exhaled steadily and stepped forward. “Not bad, Sakura,” he commended, she still had her eyes squinted in a glare though it didn’t feel as though she was cross with him. “You’ve certainly made improvem-”
The explosive sound of the ground shattering silenced him all at once. A plume of dust flew into the air and splinters of the sand he’d trapped her in shot out like shrapnel, causing him to cover his eyes and his sand to spring to his defense. As the shards reached him, his shield reabsorbed them back into the amassing growth behind him and, with the air clearer now, he spied a swath of pastel and a dim glow of green.
He hadn’t seen that coming, either.
Gaara called forth his sand once again, summoning a wall that cut off her war path straight to him. It only lasted a moment before it succumbed to her advances and shattered. Another lunge back, another wall, another solid punch that left it crumbling. She’d nearly reached him, but he used the sand beneath him like a springboard and leapt away before she could make another strike. This time she’d been close enough for him to feel that buzz from her attacks and he could see now that she was using chakra to amplify her power. Her precision and adaptability with strength, speed, and control were on full display as she met each of his attacks with her own.
Skidding on her heels, her boots slid against the pebbled earth, and she turned on a dime to offer him no reprieve. Sakura had seen him fight Lee, she witnessed the first hit he ever took, and knew the only place to achieve her victory would be right up in his face. Sweaty, muscles burning, and nearly spent with how much chakra it took to effortlessly appear to break through the sand barriers, she closed the space to him to continue the onslaught.
Landing, Gaara pulled up the earth between them to put yet another wall in her way, but he wasn’t so naïve anymore, and before she even broke through the first, he erected another. A loud boom echoed throughout the grounds, he hadn’t anticipated such a forceful display from her, and Gaara figured that any longer and they would draw in some curious spectators. The first wall had fallen, and he predicted as much when the second shattered moments later; he’d been expecting her to come charging him down like a battering ram and he was ready for her.
Bursting forth from the shattered bits of the hardened sand wall, Sakura was already cocking her arm back in place for another full swing; her face gleaming in the sun, eyes burning, her gloves smoking with friction of her blows. She was coming for him.
With as much power and control as he could muster, he let her within get striking distance, faking out that he was pulling his shield up in defense, but at the last second, he forced it down, allowing her to cross a threshold few others ever had.
Genuine surprise flashed across her face as her expression switched from deadly intent to a desperate back pedal. The heels of her boots caught the earth and she pulled back her swing; a foolhardy attempt to redirect all that momentum she had built to crash through his numerous blockades. With such an opponent, she’d channeled enough chakra into her fists and her muscles that she could’ve rivaled Lee for the best right hook, but she hadn’t sought to actually hit him.
Fumbling, she gasped, “Gaara! What-”
He grabbed her wrist before she was able to step away, that momentum she carried still tipping her forward, and he pulled her along the trajectory. She yelped, not expecting him to outright grab her, and when he pulled her through, her foot snagged her heel and she teetered to the ground. Gaara followed her path, redirecting her arm around and behind her back, pushing her down until her knees met the sand, and he secured that deadly right hand of hers with an iron grip on her wrist.
Shuttering as he inhaled, Gaara stared wide eyed and without words to the woman he had pinned beneath him. In the few short minutes that they’d spent facing each other, she disheveled her hair, covered herself in dirt and in sand, the dust off the ground stained her clothes; marring her skin, scuffs shown on her forearms and smudges on the pale skin of her legs.
The charged energy of the fight was static, palpable in the air, and then all at once it was broken by the musical sound of her laughter.
“You got me!” she laughed, her voice light and full of the smile that was certainly blessing her features. Gaara released her wrist and stepped back. Resting her hands on the ground, Sakura’s body was shaking and she was beginning to feel the exhaustion of just a few minutes in hot pursuit of a nearly untouchable man.
Heart pounding, brimming with subsiding adrenaline, and captivated by the sound of her laughter after facing him in a match; Gaara leaned down, a hand touching her shoulder and guiding her to lean back and stand. He suddenly disliked the idea of her in the dirt because of him and, still giggling with her excitement, Sakura accepted his extended hand and pulled herself up from the ground.
“That was dirty,” she teased, wiping her dusty gloves on her clothes and combing her fingers through her strawberry pink locks. “You made me think I was going to hit you.”
He could offer no excuse in his defense; she had been so relentless, forced her way so close, he figured all he could do to win without injury would be to do the opposite of what she would have expected of him. Much like, now that he thought about it, she had done to him. Uncertain, frozen by choice, Gaara flexed his hands at his side, a desire winding tight within him that he couldn’t name and couldn’t push away.
Sakura faced him fully then, that bright smile still echoing the laughter in her voice, and her emerald eyes locked onto his; unwavering, unafraid, and he succumbed.
Impulsive, more so than even in his youth, Gaara brought up his hands to cradle her beautiful and beguiling face, silencing the sudden confusion she muttered before he bent down and touched his lips to hers.
×愛×▬▬▬×愛×▬▬▬×愛×