I listen to the will of the people, sometimes.

…When it suits me.

…If I was already thinking about doing it already.

This is the problem with my AUs, I may write to a portion of them but I do fully realize a world for the most part. So I delved a little deeper this time since I rather like this iteration of Gaara and Sakura.

Nya

=^.^=

Continuing my technology theme, sorta in part. I don't think it suits me really but I didn't want to abandon it. I'm a real luddite at heart.

It wasn't that he overbearing, or controlling—Sakura fully believed Gaara was both of those things but he would never get away with that with her—he was more pervasive.

If she had had a bad or stressful shift somehow food she hadn't ordered would appear at her door, already paid for including tip. Restless nights turned into impromptu outings to whatever coffee shop looked most empty, and they would watch boring documentaries on his laptop while Sakura dozed on his shoulder. Usually the wifi was shitty and the buffering would interrupt it, but he never complained. Every major holiday seemed to end in an attempted gift that Sakura inevitably told him to take back, to the point of it becoming ritual with them.

A new mixer? Where would I put it, my kitchen is too small and I don't cook much.

Fancy sheets and towels? A waste of money. Are you saying mine are too dirty for you?

Jewelry? You left it on the nightstand after we had sex, idiot. How do you think that looked?

His time was a precious thing, with lots of demands from people who in turn were important in their own right, so it wasn't like he was always physically there with her. But for Sakura, Gaara seemed to be omnipresent. Any text she sent would be responded to within an hour no matter how busy his day.

So clearly when the pattern broke, she got curious. It was the middle of the day on a rare off Sunday and she sent a feeler out to someone that she still wasn't entirely sure even liked her. Temari wasn't the sort of person who approved of much, and her little brother's new relationship was an unknown quantity to the cautious woman.

Gaara ok? Radio silence. Read the text Sakura sent. It was to the point which Temari would appreciate.

The text bubbles popped up, subsided, then popped up again.

Fifteen minutes later an actual reply arrived: He's standing in front of me reading a will.

Sakura's brows rose in surprise then knit with concern. That other life of his, the one that featured expensive parties and expensive promises, was not one he had particularly wanted her involved in because he would only describe it as 'treacherous'. In that world he had to be a leader, an example, a paragon. In Sakura's presence he got to be a regular guy, in as much as he could be regular, and she had respected that division to a point but this only served as another example of how she felt outside of him and surrounded by him simultaneously. Something had to give soon. He had to let her in or she would walk away.

If she could walk away.

Someone in his family must have died and named him executor of the will, and while Sakura could care less about who got what dishes she would have expected him to share some sort of emotion with her regarding the death. She vented to him constantly, and a little reciprocation would be welcome. Maybe she also wanted a peek into his mysterious other life.

There had been a reason for her disdain for debutantes and the trappings of the richy rich, though, and it all came flooding back to her when Gaara showed up at her door later that evening in his sedate black suit with a storm of emotion at his heels.

"How do you know Sasuke Uchiha." No hey, how are you, not that he was that kind of guy, but the words were thrown like a punch and Sakura felt her body recoil from the impact. Bile rose in the back of her throat at that name.

"We are not having this conversation in the doorway." Or ever, if she really let her preference be known.

He made a motion to enter, but her hand on his chest stopped him. The sneer he wore probably wasn't for her, but Sakura took it personally anyway. How the hell had all this happened and why was he angry at her? He knew her. She was an open book, or so she thought. (Ino snorted at her for claiming it, but Sakura maintained that she lived an honest life.)

"We're also not having it in this apartment." She glanced at the clock and the dusting of droplets on his shoulders. So it was raining, which meant no walk. There was a bar across the street, some dive she always skimmed her eyes over as she made her way home. Seemed like the right place to talk about Sasuke, and she'd need a drink anyway. "I'll meet you across the street in ten. Ichiraku."

He was alone in a booth under a broken light, which was unsurprising, but the empty glass in front of him was. Gaara wasn't a drinker, never wanting to be in a situation where he wasn't in control of his faculties. Whatever brought Sasuke to his attention had him rattled.

"I take it you had a bad day." Sakura started as she slid into the seat across from him. The table rocked on an unsteady foundation before her and she clamped down on the impulse to fold up a napkin from the holder and fix it. You couldn't fix the world.

"How do you know Sasuke Uchiha?" It was all gravel and barely question in that baritone of his. He signaled to the bartender and Sakura whipped her head around to see the man pouring two fingers of whiskey. She hoped that was only his second.

"He was my brother's…" Best friend? Rival? "Friend in high school. Before he got expelled our junior year." The truth was stranger than fiction, so tried to back it up to where it would make sense. "We'd known one another a lot longer than that. Our parents all were in the same line of work."

"Law enforcement." Gaara supplied, having heard bits here and there from her about her family.

Sakura sighed. "We all grew up together but Sasuke's life was… different." Difficult. Isolated. Always trying to live up to a brother he both idolized and despised. "His family's word was law, practically. He was like, I dunno, a prince or something." She had said it to herself in her own mind a million times growing up but saying it out loud as an adult made her feel supremely stupid.

The drink arrived and Sakura caught the attention of the server. "White Russian, whatever vodka is fine." She got carded which raised her spirits a little, but that self-satisfied smile didn't last long when she turned back to Gaara.

"The point is I haven't seen him or heard that name for years. So you're going to tell me what this is about first and then I'll tell you more." She crossed her arms, baiting him with the story he desperately wanted to hear.

"We share a distant relation." Gaara started, haltingly. "She passed. He was there today at the reading of the will. Temari said I needed to talk to you in front of him,"

This seemed totally innocuous.

"He heard your name and said he was surprised I would be with you. He said you had dated for a while and how it was clever you had found another branch of the family to climb."

Sakura's fist met the top of the table, making the napkin holder fall over. She tried to pull herself together while she seethed. The comment had been meant to hurt Gaara, because he couldn't see the partial lie in the barb, but Sakura mostly cursed how all the upper crust people seemed to be related. Guess you couldn't let the money out of the family, literally in some cases.

"You can't possibly believe I designed our meeting. Or that it was some ruse to get your money!"

"Of course not," Gaara replied without hesitation, but it was followed with a comment like a whip crack. "You slept with him." The words were all venom.

That was almost half her lifetime ago, he was nuts. "You're going to listen to my story." Sakura tried to pull back from the righteous white hot rage giving her a headache and say her words calmly. They were in public after all, and the weird blue haired man at the pool table kept looking over in their direction and laughing. Shark tattoo, not even a good one, what a jerk. "And at the end you're going to apologize to me for being a bastard." She was shaking, nails digging into the vinyl seat with enough force to hurt her.

Their drinks arrived and Sakura drained hers before the waiter had time to walk away and then handed him the glass to refill. The milky drink sat on her tongue, coating it in sugar, and the bile threatened to rise again but she forced it down along with her anger. She had fought for control of her temper her whole life and she wasn't going to make a scene now.

"I thought I loved him." The words were more wistful than she meant them to be. "Lies are more convincing when you tell them to yourself over time."

It hadn't been easy to convince him to go with her to the dance. Sakura had had to practice feigning indifference in the mirror for days, saying the words over and over until they came out just right. Ino had called her crazy, Sakura preferred thorough.

He lived in a crazy huge house in a gated community, and Sakura knew he had his own motorcycle but no car so she would have to plan accordingly, hair, dress, shoes, bag, etc. It all needed to be able to look good before and after. She approached the problem with the heart of a military tactician. Wars had been fought with less planning than she put into this date.

Date.

The word thrilled her. It wasn't really a date, she was just going with him to the debutante ball that he was told he had to attend (she had heard this through Naruto) and abhorred the idea of because he was only just sixteen and had no intention to network or pick a bride or whatever else went on at these things. A relative had bought him a ticket and told him to go or they would cut off his personal allowance. It was time for him to come out of hiding, his family had said. Loners weren't successful, and success was everything to the Uchiha.

"Maybe I can go with you, shield you from the other dumb girls." It should have raised red flags that he always spoke of women in the pejorative, but she was ever blind to his faults.

The white dress was impractical, and cost her way more money than she wanted to spend from her meager little savings account. Her father had handed her a couple twenties, and she had supplied the rest without telling him. Naruto's mom had commented it was pretty, but she wasn't a dress kind of woman so it slid past the parentals.

Naruto had wrinkled his nose at her.

"It looks like a wedding dress. You're freaking me out."

He wasn't totally wrong, and she had bought it at a bridal shop after all. It was a special dress for a special night.

Sasuke was late, but that he came at all filled Sakura's innocent heart with joy. His suit jacket was wrinkled and his pants looked dirty on the bottom as if he had sped through a puddle on the way here. He and Naruto silent saluted one another, and Naruto joked about killing him if he laid a hand on her in the wrong way. The amused snort from Sasuke should have been another warning sign. Sakura was blinded by his handsome face and fathomless eyes.

They were only at the dance for an hour before he pulled her out to 'get some air'. It had taken her a half hour to repair her hair and makeup in the bathroom after they arrived so all told Sakura had only spent a half hour in her fantasy where couple twirled in waltzes and ate fancy food around the periphery. She didn't even get to dance.

But somehow she ended up on a moonless night in at a viewpoint in a park that they legally shouldn't have been in past sunset with her skirts bunched up around her waist. Sasuke had taken her there to complain about his family and rage about the unfair restrictions they tried to put on him. She sat there, bored and a little cold, and made soothing nonsense replies until he turned to her with something crossed between desperation and anger and kissed her hard.

If it looked like romance and smelled like romance then it had to be romance right? It's what she had wanted wasn't it? Even if she had tried to push at him at first, she had asked for this hadn't she? That's what he told her, anyway.

God, she had been such an idiot.

She didn't tell Naruto until years later, when the self recrimination didn't make her loathe her own weakness so much. By then Naruto and Sasuke had stopped talking entirely, really once Sasuke got expelled for nearly killing some kid in a fight for just saying Itachi's name in his presence and sent to some boarding school somewhere, it hadn't made any difference that he wanted to beat the ever loving shit out of the Uchiha prodigy. She also wanted to beat the shit out of him by that time.

For taking her innocence so cavalierly and under dubiously consensual circumstances.

For killing her dreams of romance and, for a long time, faith in men entirely.

But most of all for showing her the depths of her own foolishness over a pretty face with a tortured soul.

Sakura was still cradling half of her second drink, speaking as if in a trance, and when her words ceased she drained the last of it despite the ice having made it objectionably watery.

Eyes bright and defiant, she looked back up at Gaara meaningfully. "Guess I didn't really learn my lesson about the whole handsome and tormented schtick, right?"

Gaara was unreadable for a moment, but that murderous aura had not let up for the entirety of her story.

"I'll fucking kill him." He finally said. "I'll tear the limbs from his body and pulp his bones, but not before I skin him an inch at a time."

Gaara was starting to look a little excited at the prospect, and finally Sakura remembered the other reason he didn't drink: he wasn't supposed to because it would interact poorly with his medication.

"Don't you dare," Sakura said, "Firstly, because he's not worth your time and secondly, because I deserve the first go at him." She pointed an authoritative finger at him. "Your job is to be better than him."

She paused as Gaara seemed to digest this.

"You are better than him."

His face softened a little, then wrinkled with distaste.

"You know what happened after he got expelled?" Gaara said before pushing the last of his drink away from him. "He got sent to my boarding school. My father had recommended it because of its reputation for rehabilitating troubled young men of a certain social caste." Gaara had pointed out a few scars on his back from the canings he had sustained there so she knew Sasuke's presence had probably just exacerbated a hellish situation for Gaara.

It wasn't fair that one person could cause so much pain to others just because they themselves were in pain. Sasuke's selfishness was really what had isolated him all those years ago. Sakura, Naruto, and half a dozen of their peers would have been ready to embrace him in a heartbeat. As much as she wanted him to suffer, she had a feeling he did already.

"Granny Chiyo never approved of me. We weren't related by blood, my grandfather was her fourth husband. She said I was heartless, just like my father." Gaara pulled the drink back to him. "But she made me executor…" He was lost a moment, thoughtful and calm, but sad. "She would have approved of you if she had met you. I see similarities."

Sakura almost didn't want to breathe. He was sharing with her. Voluntarily. And not as pillow talk. Her astonishment ate away at her continued irritation at him for this whole scenario.

"You don't shove weird hard candies at me when I visit, though."

"Should I?" Sakura asked, allowing a smile to peek out.

His shudder was all the answer she needed. Whatever bomb had gone off between them had done all the damage it was going to do and they were still standing. She even still liked him. Maybe more.

She had to file that thought in the back of her mind for now. She didn't want it sullied by tonight's trip down memory lane.

"Well, I suggest you pay for our drinks and come back with me to wait until I declare you sober enough to take your medication. And if you get a clue and apologize I might even allow make up sex to be put on the agenda before the month is out."

It was as pushy as she could get about it, since ordering him to say sorry about forcing her to relive one of her worst memories would be pointless. Gaara just stared at her like she had grown a second head.

With a sigh, emotionally exhausted, Sakura stood up and began to walk to the door. She hadn't even made it to her building when trembling hands grabbed her up into a tight hug.

"I'm sorry," his voice was a whisper and even with his lips right by her ear she barely heard his next words. "Don't leave."

It wasn't perfect, and it might not even be healthy, but this relationship was hers and she was going to hold on as tightly as he was right now. If her sixteen year old self had seen this in the future, maybe she would have held out for better. Gaara was no Sasuke.

"I'm no quitter," she reassured the redhead, and turned around in his loosening embrace to give him a peck on the lips. He was going in for more as she felt him respond already to their closeness. "But I'm also no pushover. You're sleeping on the couch tonight."

"I'd like to negotiate for better terms."

Sakura's laugh rang out in the empty street.