Remember

By Amazonian21

"You're shorter than I remember," he says, and then wishes he hadn't said anything at all. What a dumb thing to say, really.

She almost doesn't answer him, because it's one of those sentences you're never sure how to take. Is it an observation? An insult? Something to pass the time while waiting for your laundry to finish? She settles for raising an eyebrow and snorting.

He fidgets and wonders why this has to be the way he'll spend the next five minutes. He hasn't seen Sakura for five years now and can't say he's been all that upset about it. It was easier not to see her. She still looks good.

It was hard for her, however, not to see him. She was very upset about it all these years and is glad to see him in person at long last. This way she can let Gaara know exactly how little she missed him, how little she liked him to begin with, and how unimportant it is to be in front of him again. She makes this point clear by examining her nails and surreptitiously glancing at her watch while holding up her end of the 'conversation'.

"So...," she drawls, exhaling the word like a leaky tire, "what brings you here, anyway? Konoha's a little out of your way, I think."

'Not that she cares,' her nails say as she turns them in front of her eyes, 'she's just asking to be polite.'

"Mission," he says, satisfied that one little word can halt all future interrogation. Classified is classified, and she's ninja enough to know the hows and whys are no body's business. Prying isn't healthy or fruitful. Especially useful to him right now, because not only does it bring her up short and kill this stupid gab session, it also leaves her a little frustrated and annoyed.

He's doing one sentence answers again, and darned if it doesn't annoy her. She knows that he knows that she knows he knows she knows he's only doing it to cut the rug out from under her. That's what really gets her goat. He once talked to her in full sentences. She'd get paragraphs out of him. A novella could spill forth with the right prompting, and now he's giving her one word designed to shut her up.

Well. She considers talking anyway, just to foil his little plan, but suddenly she doesn't feel like it so much.

Sakura is twenty-five. Gaara is twenty-five going on twenty-six. They are ancient. They are the older generation of ninjas in charge of raising the newer generation of ninjas. Those upstarts are all amazingly talented, each with a ripe destiny yet to be revealed, but probably centered on the chunin exams.

It's guaranteed that soon Sakura's genin team will go through life altering trials and tribulations that will miraculously unleash their own unique powers and abilities. Within a few years they'll have worked hard enough to surpass her own skills, though she is now one of the legendary Sannin.

Gaara doesn't have a genin team, but he does have several ninja in his village dying to prove their strength against the Kazekage. They annoy him, but he is their boss, so for now he doesn't let it get to him. He will be allowed a peaceful retirement when someone replaces him. Suna no longer calls for a fight to the death for all who seek to be Kazekage challengers. This is probably for the best, because right now Gaara is still the strongest and would have been forced to kill many of his most able, most ambitious men. That would only weaken his village.

But Sakura and Gaara are no longer the plucky young heroes. They are the senseis, the boring has-beens with amazing feats to their names and adventures recounted around camp fires, but nothing new has happened to them in the last year or so. They might as well consign themselves to the pages of the history books because no one currently has their eyes on them. That is how it always goes, and how it has always been. Sakura talks to Kakashi sometimes, but not much. She got all she needed to hear out of him one day when she lit into the subject. He just looked at her and said, "Sucks, huh?" She agreed. It sucked.

They are boring.

And old. Looking at Gaara makes Sakura feel ancient.

Sakura looks at Gaara and remembers when he was possessed and insane enough to crush her to death slowly in front of her teammates because a raccoon in his head told him to. She remembers when she was crazy enough to land a punch on him three years later because he refused to help her rescue Naruto from Akatsuki wannabes. She remembers both of them living through their insanity long enough to meet up again five years after that for a whirlwind affair.

She doesn't, however, remember how that affair started.

Gaara remembers. Looking at Sakura, absorbed in her nails so falsely, brings back floodgates of memories. Deciding not to kill her for hitting him because he felt he deserved it- Naruto deserved all the help Gaara could give him, truthfully, but his people needed him more right then- and the pain of her blow relieved a little of the guilt he'd pretended not to have. He remembers her leaving with determination to save him herself, and she'd done it. He remembers sending her a private letter, an apology, later, and he remembers she wrote back that he could go suck a duck. They were so young. How did they not know that?

He remembers seeing her five years later in a small town in the middle of the rainy season. She looked awful. Some women might be water nymphs and frolic about in the summer showers like spirits of earth and air, but not Sakura. She was tired, she was wet, and she was pissed. It was so freaking attractive because it was so raw and unrehearsed. She was truly in her element, back then. She'd surpassed her great teacher and was acknowledged to be more powerful than the fifth Hokage. She could kill or heal with alarming alacrity and already had rumors following her wherever she went.

Was it true she'd been chasing down an army of rebels only to flick the ground with her index finger, creating a crater that swallowed up seventy-five men and their horses? It was. Was it true she then tore off the leader's arm in front of his men, only to immediately reattach it in front of their very eyes, all the while yelling that forgiveness would come their way if they'd stop killing Konoha citizens in the outskirts? Yes, it was. She did that. Back then.

He saw her, so confident and so deadly, and he decided she was what he wanted. That was it. She must have understood what he meant when he asked her if she planned on staying outside in the rain all day, because she followed him to his room without any other questions.

It was wild and raw. It was slow and sedate. It rushed, it never hurried, it was amazing and it lasted three whole weeks. Only some very creatively constructed letters kept their villages from coming after them as missing nin. The fact that he was the Kazekage and that Naruto was the naïve Hokage definitely helped, of course.

They talked. Gaara remembers talking as they lay in bed, sated and sleepy, and tranced out of their minds as they trailed lazy fingers over flesh and said words that meant more then than they could now. That was why his brain would not let him remember. They were Then words, and not Now words. He remembers the feel of comfort, the eternity of an hour, the speed of a week.

Gaara doesn't, however, remember how that affair ended.

Sakura remembers. She remembers endings. She is a woman of endings and retreating figures. She has done the math. She knows at exactly what altitude a person approaching the horizon will diminish to an invisible speck. She knows her calculations are correct because she checked her work when Gaara walked away, three weeks after pulling her out of a rain storm in a tiny village, casually saying, "Thank you" as he left.

Sakura was too young to hit him for breaking her heart. She'd been young enough to hit him for refusing to help Naruto way back when, but too young to know when violence was really necessary. She let him walk away, when oh how she wishes she'd made him crawl.

With no legs left.

Who says "Thank you" after three weeks like theirs?

But Gaara doesn't remember and Sakura doesn't remember so between the two of them their affair simultaneously never began and never ended, and this was going to be the longest five minutes either of them had ever spent.

Gaara thought about one word endings and Sakura's nails lied and lied.

A/N: For anyone who's gone back home, when home is not who it used to be. We are only getting older, you and I.

This will be a collection of unrelated one-shots when I feel the urge. I'm mostly flexing my writing chops, rusty as I am.