A/N: This has been sitting in my laptop for maybe 2 years now and I forced myself to power through the creative block and finish it. I thought to write a story about Temari's journey to finding home in Konoha. Also, I find the notion that Temari would quit being a kunoichi just because she got married preposterous and I refuse to acknowledge that bit of cultural sexism. Side note, I haven't really watched more than the first 3 episodes of the Boruto anime, so if this doesn't conform to canon somehow... I don't really care. Have a good read.

She doesn't quite know what to make of the silver ring he drops on the palm of her hand. He is solemn and very, very careful when he tells her that there's no pressure, no hurry, no expectations. For once he's got no strategy, no hidden battle plans – no plans at all. He's just a man with his heart on his hands waiting for her to take it or leave it.

It's the single most difficult choice she's made in her entire life. She has years of rules and regulations ingrained in her head, her heart beats in the steady drum of duty, duty, duty, it's been drilled and beaten into her that she is not a person, she is a weapon, and that weapon has an owner, a purpose and an expiration date. Going ahead with this would be going against everything she's been taught, everything she believes, everything she is.

In the old world, doing this would have been considered treason. If she'd gone through with this, she would have been stripped of her status, exiled, hunted down with the rest of the unhinged murderers and traitors and people she had hunted before. She would have been denied entrance in her home country. She would have never seen her brothers again.

She looks down at the silver ring she's been cradling in her palm, at this (good, great) man that she's let past her walls and trusts with her life, and the trepidation blooms in her chest, twists, and shakes, and transforms and expands until it's defiance. The drumming in her heart speeds up with love, love, love and she fights down the fear, the hesitation, the insecurity, the little whispers of ideologies born in a war-torn land and buried in this shining new world they've just started to build.

She is a weapon and a person, and she belongs to no one, but she belongs with him. She's got a new purpose, and the bright, winding, ever uncertain road to the future stretches ahead, all hers for the taking. And this is not shameful, it's not disgraceful. Reaching for happiness is no treason, and she's going to grab hers with both hands and hold on tight with all she's got.

She is not the first to marry into another village, but she is apparently the first important one. Their wedding is blown way out of proportion because she is the Kazekage's sister and he is the son of the late Commander of the Allied Forces, and both are renowned war heroes of great importance to the Union. Their wedding is being twisted into a whole political maneuver to solidify the Alliance.

She tries not to resent it too much, knows that this will work in their favor in the long run, knows that her brother and the Rokudaime are manipulating the others for their benefit and that being upset with the people who are making her marriage a possibility would be childish and ungrateful, but it still stings. It feels too much like her father's schemes, like standing beside Gaara in Council meetings trying to discern not who's good, but who is the least awful. She can't do anything, though, and this is what stings the most, because she starts feeling like she's the one being manipulated.

When she steps out on the wedding site, she is decked in a ridiculous, pompous, overpriced kimono that weighs her down and makes it hard to breathe, the place is so stuffed with important politicians, foreign dignitaries, celebrities, public figures and downright strangers, she can barely spot their friends and family in the first rows, and she feels the subtle, constant hum of the combined chakra of a full ANBU army on standby, ready to intervene should an attempt at their lives come from the rogue groups opposed to the Union.

This is supposed to be a happy day, but the entire thing has turned into a circus and she just wants to get it done with so they can get the hell out of dodge.

And yet, there's a moment, when the officiant steps back and the Hokage and Kazekage stand together in front of them to give their blessing. It hits her just how grand this moment is. Here are two men from completely different villages, different backgrounds, different upbringing, brought together for joy as opposed to war. And all the people behind her, they've left their homes, and jobs, and families, and traveled so far to attend this wedding because yes, this had been turned into a symbol of the strength of the Union, but they are there because they believe in it. For the first time she believes her wedding might help solidify the peace and in that moment she feels proud to be a part of that.

The wildly kickass party helps.

And the wedding gifts are off the charts.

The Nara clan has no pretensions to be any more important than it is – and she cannot begin to explain how much that soothes her. They have their brains, and their deer, and their permanent seat on the Council and an almost tradition of serving as the Hokage advisor, and that is as far as they want to go. When she married into it, there was no bragging about getting the Kazekage's sister – there was just Yoshino bragging to her neighbors about upcoming grandchildren.

Their discreet nature keeps them from making a spectacle of her arrival, but when she crosses the gates of the clan complex for the first time, there's definitely some staring. Yoshino is waiting for them in front of their new house, and she's rallied some cousins to help with the move. Temari finds herself making small conversation with half a dozen Naras who vaguely resemble her husband and share the exact same hair style. She's come to know that his clan's men come in varying degrees of lethargy (usually just the right amount to drive their spouses crazy) and the fact that they showed up to help tells her either they are trying to welcome her to the family, or they are just too scared of Yoshino to go against her orders. Either way, Temari's fine with it.

There is a girl amongst them, a Shikari who turns out to be Shikamaru's cousin in somewhat close degree and she's by far the most excited with the new arrival. She'll be part of the Suna-Konoha Academy instructor exchange program next year and she could use some pointers. It's always a pleasure to talk about home, so Temari answers all the girl's questions and gives her a very detailed list of the dos and don'ts of living in Suna. They spend a good while chatting while unpacking her weapons and bond over their common hatred of eggplants and a mutual affinity for kicking ass. By the time they all leave, Shikari's already taking her side on where they should hang the cool painting they got from Ame's ambassador.

Later in the day, Ino (dragging Sai by the hand) and Chouji unapologetically barge into their home without permission, and are exempt from certain death by presenting takeout. After two hours of randomly plugging and unplugging cables while Shikamaru very irritably tries to convince them they should read the manual first, they successfully hook up the TV some celebrity hotshot gave them for their wedding, and celebrate by watching a movie. It's supposed to be a drama, but they can't take it seriously because the plot is bad and the acting is worse. They boo and yell at the one-dimensional stereotypical hero as he makes mistake after mistake, and start rooting for the villain halfway through, because he has better lines and a really cool beard.

Chouji ends up eating the whole dessert when they are distracted with the latest plot twist, and Ino keeps talking non-stop, explaining the movie to Sai and doing her best to curb his social ineptitude when he makes clueless observations that are sometimes funny and always awkward. But anyways, their friends are beside them, and she's nestled up to man she loves and they're all safe and sound and having a good time.

Over all, it's not a bad start to this new phase of her life.

Strangely enough, it's not the winter that throws her off the most, it's summer. The humidity is the worst. It seems silly that she could be this bothered by heat when she's lived in a desert her whole life, but as she incessantly tells people, it's very different. Konoha in the summer is a sauna – the air is moist, the heat clings to hair and skin, sweat runs down inside clothes. And the nights bring no relief, they're never any cooler, or at least not enough to refresh her after a day baking in the office.

The lively city takes on a sluggish, lazy atmosphere. People not so much walk as drag themselves across the damp heat towards their destinations, work productivity goes down several notches, children in the Academy are more likely to kill class because the only thing worse than an office in the summer is a classroom in the summer.

What's even worse is that it doesn't take long for her to catch the summer bug too. Although, to be fair, there's not much to do this time of the year. The chuunin exams are still a good few months away, the Academy instructor exchange program is running smoothly, and the Union seems to be doing alright at the moment. She goes over some reports from the other villages, stamps the occasional visa, writes some obligatory reports herself, checks the (little) work her underlings have managed that week, and that's about it. Everyone gets to leave the office a bit early.

She comes to appreciate the dense forest surrounding the clan complex, it keeps some of the sun out and cools down the house at night. She likes sitting on the porch in the evenings, sipping iced tea and waiting for the temperature to drop for the day. Sometimes Yoshino joins her and they sit together in companionable silence, waiting for Shikamaru to come back from tending to the deer. Sometimes Ino and Chouji show up and they spend the time chatting about the latest developments in the village – who's gone on what mission and who's going on a date. And sometimes it's just the two of them, husband and wife curled up on each other, dozing off on the cool night breeze to the sound of the cicadas.

And summer will always be a bit too hot and humid for her taste, but she's got to admit that nothing quite beats a summer storm.

It's not that she doesn't like Shikamaru's friends, because she does, she really does. She might have been a bit overwhelmed by them in the beginning, but the years of acquaintanceship as both the ambassador and his girlfriend have made her think of the slightly dysfunctional misfits rather fondly.

Ino and Chouji are a given – they spend so much time together because of Shikamaru that her life would have been a lot harder if she didn't like them. Knowing how important the three of them were to him, they'd tried their best to be on good terms, and after the few bumps on the road to learning to share a husband and a friend, she can genuinely say she likes them both.

Ino is loud, vivacious, and despite Temari's earlier reservations about her boisterous nature, she finds herself enjoying her company. The two can always have a good time talking shit and putting the fear of the gods in their husbands. Chouji is sweet and fiercely loyal, and she is honestly a little flattered every time he offers her a chip because it probably means he approves of her.

Also, she's grown particularly close to Tenten, as strange as it sounds considering how disastrous their first meeting had been. They've developed a sort of friendly rivalry (not unlike Ino and Sakura) in which they trade half-hearted insults and defy each other to sparring matches. She can always count on her for some respite from the constant domesticity and a good workout.

She gets along well enough with the rest of the Konoha gang, and it's no chore to attend whatever social function they plan on the rare day off. Still, a small, niggling voice drums consistently in the back of her mind: these are his friends, not mine.

And it bothers her. It bothers her because she is in his village, living in his house, within the complex of his clan, and everyone she knows, she's met through him. And as much as she likes his relatives, likes his friends, likes Konoha, she's aware that when push comes to shove, he's the precious boy they've known their whole lives and she's the foreigner. If there are ever sides to be taken, they will all stand beside him and she'll have nowhere to run and no one to turn to.

And the kunoichi in her can't bear to feel that vulnerable.

She had never realized how comforting it is to simply walk the streets of your own hometown. She finds that out the first time she leaves the house for groceries and reaches what she'd been sure was a market just a year ago to end up in a hair salon. She is used to Suna's winding streets and narrow alleys, to the shifting paths and the areas that simply disappear when it's sandstorm season, she did not think she would have trouble navigating Konoha – if only because their roads are paved and tend to remain in the same place. She did not account for the technological boom, the exponential population growth and subsequent area expansion. The village has doubled in size. For the first time in years she feels like she might actually need a guide again.

And there's something else.

No one knows her here. As the Suna Ambassador, perhaps, as the Kazekage's sister sometimes, but no one really knows her. And Temari is not even much of a people person, she can be quite content by herself for days before the solitude starts to bother her, but this is different. She goes out and the joggers call out greetings as they rush by, the elderly walking their dogs stop to chat, the mothers and fathers pushing strollers and rocking babies all wave and comment on their offspring's growth, salespeople greet customers enthusiastically and ask about their parents, the woman on the next table at the tea house gets a 'family friend' discount.

She doesn't have that. She didn't grow up here, these people don't know who her parents are, or ask about her brothers, or stop her on her way to work to make conversation, or help her pick the best oranges because you've been buying at their stand for the past ten years.

She only realizes she misses it now that she doesn't have it anymore, and sometimes the longing hits her so hard she has to stop and consciously rein it in.

But she is an ambassador, making allies is literally in her job description, and if she can fix the tattered relationship between their villages after the Suna-Konoha invasion, she can carve herself a niche in this community. She stubbornly frequents the same places for the next few weeks, observes the interactions between the natives, makes mental notes and takes pointers from the other's responses, makes sure to learn their names in advance so she knows what kind of people she's dealing with.

By the end of the month, she is acquainted to the entire foreign relations department, all the old ladies in the park, the hair dresser in the salon near the market, the pizza delivery guy, two managers at the bank, Yoshino's favorite fruit stand merchant, the cashier in the restaurant outside the Hokage Tower, the ramen guy, and Tenten's building's doorman.

Shikamaru has no idea who all these people his wife started mentioning are, but he's happy she's fitting in, so he nods and asks if Kyo's poodle has gotten over the psychological pregnancy yet (even though he doesn't know Kyo. Or his poodle).

They have their first real fight.

They do bicker occasionally and they often get annoyed at each other, but they hardly ever fight, and Temari's more upset than she thought she'd be. As these things go, it starts as something stupid. He's bothered by something and he won't tell her what's wrong. She asks nicely, then prods gently, then full out nags, and he still won't tell her. And she'd let it go, does so normally, knows that big head of his thinks too much and needs time to work through stuff, but it's been weeks now and he's fidgety, irritable and everything makes him scowl and snap and that's not the man she married.

They argue, and she is so mad at him she walks out the door to cool her head before she pulls out the weapons. She marches out in a fury – two, three blocks away, until the stomping has softened to steps and the anger gives way to worry. They haven't been married all that long, but they'd been friends, partners, for years before. She can't understand why he wouldn't trust her with whatever's bothering him. And she's not even mad anymore, she's just… Sad.

She wanders aimlessly for a while longer. The night air is cool on her skin and the streets are filled with people leaving work, couples on dates, families out for a meal, and her fellow shinobi on patrol. She vaguely recognizes some faces, but it's no one she really knows. The hurt throbbing in her chest twists further. It's too late to show up at Tenten's for a spar, she can't call Ino and Chouji because they'd probably take his side, Yoshino might just yell at him and make matters worse.

And for the first time since she's moved here, she misses home with a fierceness that takes her breath away and positively aches. Because she can't disappear in this place of leaves and greens, she can't hide from the world in the walls of the watch towers, she can't climb the roof of the tallest building and lie down to let the constellations and nebulae comfort her. She can't even see the stars properly here, there are too many artificial lights. She's yet to find her own personal safe haven.

She sits on a booth at a tea house, nurses a cup of green tea morosely for lack of what to do. She's calm enough to go home, but the thought of it feels wrong. She's the one whose head is a mess now, and her heart is a chaos of sad hurt miss home miss brothers he doesn't trust me love him so much why won't he trust me nowhere to run lost lost lost.

She feels a flare of familiar chakra approach, and she looks up in time to see Ino plop down on the seat in front of hers. She doesn't even say anything, just picks up the menu and skims over the options for a second before signaling to the waitress and ordering chamomile tea. Temari keeps expecting her to burst into a righteous angry speech about hurting her precious best friend's feelings, but Ino just sits there, sipping her tea and waiting for her to talk.

When the silence hits the fifteen minute mark, she finally caves.

"Did you talk to him?" she asks.

Ino shakes her head. "No. But Chouji did, and Chouji called me and I came to find you, because I figured you could use an ear."

A sound caught somewhere between a laugh and a scoff leaves her throat. "What? Are you seriously going to willingly sit there and listen to me ramble about our stupid fight?"

Ino doesn't even blink. "Yes."

Temari is a bit taken aback. "I'm going to spend hours complaining about Shikamaru, this is going to be boring as hell. Are you sure your ear can take it?"

"Honey, I have to listen to Sakura moan about Sasuke at least once a week. If anything it will be refreshing to hear different problems from different people."

Temari took a deep breath and let it all out with the next, "He is such a pigheaded idiot, ohmygod, I could just bash his face in with a fucking bridge!"

Ino nodded solemnly, motioning for the waitress again. "Let it all out, sister, I'll get us some cake."

That was the day Ino's designation changed from 'Shikamaru's friend' to just 'friend'.

Her brother summons her to oversee negotiations with a small village on the outskirts of Wind Country sometime after the first snow fall. She doesn't get to say goodbye because Shikamaru had already been away on his own diplomatic mission in the exact opposite direction, but it doesn't bother her too much. She's too excited to be back in the field after these months of desk work. She passes by Yoshino's house to announce her departure, and lets her know when she's likely to be back. The older woman immediately drops everything she'd been doing to prepare her a meal to eat on the way, makes herself deaf to Temari's protests and assurances that she'd packed and not to worry. She pushes the finished product into her daughter-in-law's hands and wraps her in a tight hug, telling her to do her best, and wear warm clothes and come back safely.

When she's crossing the clan's gate, Shikari is leaning against the wall with literally ten bottles of water, babbling away about how she knows you have to keep yourself hydrated while crossing the desert and that there is no such thing as too much water. Midway through assuring her that yes, that sweater was warm enough, Temari feels like she's being watched, and when she turns around she sees several of her husband's clansmen hanging around the front gates in odd postures like they'd tried to find something to do the second she turned. Shikari rolls her eyes.

"We all want to wish you safe travels, Temari-san. I just happen to be the only one with guts."

There's mumbled protests from the general direction of the clan complex and some laughter and then a series of rushed 'goodbyetravelsafecomebacksoon' and the courtyard is empty in seconds.

It shouldn't matter so much, but it fills Temari with warmth to know that even when her husband is not around his family still wishes her well. And what the hell, this was her family now, wasn't it? She was a part of this clan now. It's not logical, but it feels like that thought keeps her warm all the way to Konoha's main gates.

She trudges through the bitter cold as fast as she dares. There is snow still on the trees, so she takes to the ground, even though it's covered by the sludge of melting snow and wet dirt in most places. It's not the most pleasant journey she's ever taken, but there is something refreshing in the wind. It burns her lungs and bites at her face, rushes in her ears and knots her hair even further, but there's adrenaline in her bloodstream – a rush of anticipation.

And she moved to Konoha of her own accord, chose a life of love and companionship over braving the long haul alone, and there was never a moment in these last few months when she'd felt trapped, or caged or like her wings had been clipped, but she realizes she'd missed this. The traveling, the negotiating, the battle of wits. She hadn't been trained as an ambassador, she'd been a last resort in troubled times, but she'd learned on the job, picked it up as she went along, studied history and politics and taught herself to pick up on quirks and behavioral hints, learned how to read a person, how to dig underneath and unearth secret agendas. She'd built the Ambassador persona over the years, until it was as ingrained in her as the rules Baki had drilled in her during training, and…

And it's an ambush.

When she gets to the village, she's greeted by mercenaries at the front gates. She manages to dispatch a warning message to her brothers before she's found out, and she might be a little rusty – she's not proud to admit she'd been slacking a bit on her training this winter – but she is still a Sunagakure kunoichi, a jounin at that. She can deal with a couple hired mercenaries.

They're done for by the time Kankurou and his team arrive. She'd gotten a bit more scrapes than she would have liked – an angry burn on her left shoulder, ears ringing from a well hidden exploding tag she'd noticed a bit too late. The nice sweater Yoshino had knitted for her is now covered in scorch marks and… She has the impression the tips of one of her ponytails are charred.

But she's grinning.

She'd missed this too. The traveling, the negotiating, the battle of wits, yes, but also… Fighting. Heart pounding against her rib cage, the swing of her tessen, the rush of chakra humming under her skin, the thrill of the danger, the prey. This, she was trained to do. And she was very good at it.

A week later she's back in Konoha, lying in bed with a new scar, wrapped around a husband whose worry radiates off him in waves. She knows she'd given him the fright of a lifetime when she'd removed the bandages to let Sakura check how they fared the trip, knows it must've been hard to get back from his mission to an empty house and his mother saying 'Son, there's been an ambush…' but there are words in her throat that have been lodged in her chest, hidden away from even herself, for a few months now and if she doesn't get them out, she knows she will only end up shouting them at him later on.

"I'm not going to quit," she breathes out, and it carries all of her pride, her strength, her upbringing, her morals, all she is and all she was and all she might come to be.

There is a long, deep intake of breath beside her, and when he answers it's three parts resignation but there's something in the curling corners of his lips that lets her know there's a bit of admiration too, "I know."

He wouldn't love her half as much if she did.

There's a watchtower in the ruins of what used to be Konoha's East gate, back before Pain's invasion. It had never been graced by the rebuilding efforts. War had hit soon after, and once that was over the city had expanded further West, where the forest didn't grow quite so dense and the new gate had been pushed further accordingly. No one had thought to remove the remains of the last stretch of the crumbling walls.

Temari knows this because she's hidden inside it, bruised and bleeding and needing a rest for her aching ribs after a rescue mission gone wrong. They'd managed to steal the kidnapped child away and deliver him back to relieved parents before hell broke loose. Her team had disbanded in an effort to divide their pursuers but she'd been stuck with the close range fighter, and she couldn't get away soon enough. He'd hit her with an attack that had her tumbling down three, four meters down branches and foliage. She'd landed on her arm, knocking her head on the way down to boot. She'd barely gotten her breath back, but she high tailed out of there as fast as she could, head spinning, seeing double, gritting teeth against the acute aching in her right arm.

She lost him on the borders of Fire Country, but pushed through as much as her injuries allowed, putting as much distance as possible between the two. She'd stopped at the tower because she'd been on the brink of collapsing, and it seemed as good a place as any. Part of the roof had collapsed, but there was an entire section stubbornly holding together, it provided shelter from the cold night wind, and it was high enough that she had a good view of anyone approaching in any direction. She'd found emergency provisions on a cobwebbed cupboard – some rations, a sleeping bag, a medical kit. They looked as old as they probably were, covered in dust and debris but she figured an expired disinfectant was better than no disinfectant.

She'd managed to dress her wounds and fell into uneasy sleep for perhaps half an hour. It wasn't nearly enough to replenish her chakra reserves, but it was enough to make sure her the cut on her leg stopped bleeding and she pushed through the pain and exhaustion to drag her mistreated body across the main gates, into the village.

She'd gotten a trip to the hospital and a chewing out by both Ino and Sakura for her efforts.

Once she'd been released from the hospital – and her husband stopped fussing over her like a mother hen – she'd gone back to the tower. She'd taken the stairs this time. Some steps were missing, but she could easily jump over the gaps. She'd spotted the corner she'd huddled against that gods awful night, recognizable by the medical kit open and bloody gauze left behind in her haste to reach the village. It was just a stupid crumbling watchtower, but if it hadn't been there, she might not have made it.

She came back the next week, with a new medical kit and rations.

She didn't know what exactly drew her to it, couldn't theorize much more then perhaps it reminded her of the nights patrolling Suna's walls, but even that wasn't quite it. It was such a peaceful place, this stretch of forest forgotten by the rest of the village. It was a good place to sit and reflect when the agitation of the city became too much. She'd kept an eye out for anyone else but no one did come. She'd vaguely asked Shikamaru about it once, and he'd barely batted an eye before stating the East gate had been destroyed during the invasion and rebuilt somewhere else and nothing more came of it.

She couldn't let it go, though. She kept coming back, whenever she was stressed or overwhelmed, when they had an argument, when she needed to be alone.

She never told anyone where it was, not even her husband.

It hadn't been intentional and heaven knew why she'd picked such a place, but she'd found her safe haven.

The months pass by in this new sense of normalcy they've built.

Temari wakes up curled around the husband she loves fiercely, works half her days in the foreign department office and does her missions the other half. They meet their friends for dinner when their schedules match and often get spectacularly, embarrassingly drunk midway through. They talk shit about the neighbors, burn many breakfasts and nearly die trying to have shower sex. They complain about their jobs – even though they both know neither would want to be doing anything else. They gossip about their friends and colleagues, buy more houseplants than they know what to do with, argue over whose turn it is to do groceries and laugh, laugh, laugh and fight a few times in between and somewhere in there a couple tears slip in – and it's not that it's simple, but… It is. It is. Living this life with him is so easy and there's nothing complicated in this and she loves it.

She loves this. Loves him, loves them all, loves this village.

And months later, when her brother looks at her over the bundle of wooly blanket and pink sleepy baby whose tiny finger grips his uncle's tightly, and tells her with those earnest green eyes that can look right through her soul, "You are very happy, sister."

She couldn't deny it in a million years. Can't even gather strength to feel embarrassed or to scoff. She is happy. She is so happy.

She's found home, and she's holding on to it tight, she will until she breathes her last.