Chapter 516: A Promise That Binds
Naruto and Gaara stood side by side on the balcony while the night wind moved gently around them, carrying the particular dry quality that belonged to Sand Village's evenings.
Above them, the stars were absurdly bright. Out here, away from Konoha's glow, the sky was clear in a way that felt almost excessive.
"It's been a while since we've done this." Naruto leaned against the railing with both hands, tilting his face up. The stars reflected in his blue eyes, tiny points of light crowded across the dark. "Sand's sky really is something."
"Yes." Gaara's response was quiet, and his gaze was not on the sky. It was on Naruto's profile. "Your last visit was several months ago. Three months, to be precise."
"Three months? Has it really been that long?" Naruto scratched the back of his head, a little sheepish. "Things have been busy lately. There was this one troublesome old man who needed me to handle something..."
"But I'm here now, aren't I? And I remember what I said."
"...Yes."
Gaara's reply was brief enough to carry no readable tone at all.
Naruto glanced sideways and found Gaara looking down, his attention fixed somewhere below the balcony that Naruto couldn't identify.
"What's on your mind?" Naruto asked. "Something bothering you?"
Gaara was quiet for a moment. Then he spoke.
"Naruto. How dependent on someone do you think a person has to be before it stops being normal?"
Naruto blinked, not immediately sure what he was being asked.
"Dependent? Like how you rely on Kankuro and Temari?"
"Not that kind." Gaara shook his head. "The kind where... you think about them when you can't see them. When you can see them, you want to stay close. And when you see them getting close to someone else, you feel..." He paused. "Uncomfortable."
Naruto's mind went directly to Satsuki. That description was essentially her relationship with him in miniature.
"That sounds pretty normal to me. It just means that person matters a lot to you."
"Matters a lot..."
Gaara repeated the words. Naruto watched him, and a thought arrived.
"Gaara." He said it carefully. "If you had the opportunity -- say, the ability to bring back someone who had died -- would you use it?"
Gaara turned to look at him, a flicker of confusion in those pale eyes. The question felt like it had stepped out of a myth. Bringing back the dead was something not even the Sage of Six Paths was guaranteed to accomplish.
But it was Naruto asking.
So Gaara thought about it seriously.
He ran through the faces. The people who had died in war. The people who had given their lives for the village. The people he had killed with his own hands. And then, three specific people bound to him by blood.
His mother.
His uncle, Yashamaru.
His father.
"Yes." He said it with quiet certainty. "I would."
Naruto's eyes brightened.
The Gaara in front of him and the creature who had once known nothing but killing shared no resemblance anymore. This Gaara could miss people. Could carry regrets. Could want to make things right.
He was thinking with his heart now, more than anything else.
"Yeah?"
Naruto smiled, already beginning to work through the possibilities. He could bring back Gaara's mother. Yashamaru too. Give Gaara a real surprise.
As for Rasa -- that man was probably somewhere in the Pure Land's countryside, living as an animal and eating whatever he could find. Fitting enough.
"Who would you choose?"
He asked it expecting an answer he could already see coming.
But what he got was something else entirely.
"I would save the chance."
Naruto went still.
"In case something happens to Naruto someday..."
Gaara turned to face him. His eyes held no hesitation at all -- only a seriousness that left no room to question whether he meant it.
"I would use it to bring Naruto back."
"...What?" Naruto stared at him, mouth open, the response he had been preparing completely derailed.
This was nothing like what he had imagined.
But Gaara was not joking. His expression made that obvious. He was looking at Naruto the way someone looks when they are saying something they have already settled within themselves.
The reasoning, to Gaara, was simple.
He did have three people he had lost. His mother, Karura. His uncle, Yashamaru. And his father, Rasa -- though Rasa had never factored into Gaara's considerations. The man who had treated him as a tool, a monster, a failed experiment held no place in his heart.
His mother and Yashamaru -- those were real losses. On countless nights, he had wondered what his mother had been feeling in her final moments when she gave him that protective power. He had remembered the careful way Yashamaru had wrapped his wounds.
But if he had to choose between them and Naruto --
There was no contest. Naruto was first, and the gap between first and everything else was absolute.
The person who had pulled him out of the dark. Who had shown him what it meant to have bonds. Who had made him feel, for the first time, that being alive was something worth feeling. If that person died, Gaara could not find a single reason to keep going himself.
So there was nothing to hesitate about.
"Well, uh..." Naruto tried to steer back. "What if the chance wasn't only once? What if you had several uses?"
Gaara considered this.
"Several?"
"...Then I would want my mother back. And Yashamaru."
Naruto exhaled. There it was.
The path to get there had been more unexpected than he had planned for. He had also come away with the unwanted knowledge that Gaara's attachment to him ran considerably deeper than he had recognized. But the destination was right.
The conversation settled into a comfortable quiet.
They turned together and looked out at the stars. The night wind moved through, carrying the dry scent of Sand Village, and with it the faint sound of shifting sand somewhere in the distance.
Naruto stood there and thought about what had just been said, and something complicated moved through him. Gaara's reliance on him was apparently much more than he had understood.
Then Gaara drew a slow breath.
He reached into his pocket and took out something small.
It was a glass marble -- perfectly round, catching the moonlight with a soft, diffuse glow.
"May I..."
Gaara started speaking. His voice was tense in a way Naruto could hear clearly. The Kazekage who was almost never anything but composed was holding that small glass sphere with fingers that were, barely perceptibly, trembling.
"...Ask Naruto for something?"
Naruto turned to look at him. "Sure. What is it?"
Gaara took a slow breath and held the marble up between the two of them.
"This is a mineral that was recently discovered near Sand Village. It is called Sand Crystal." His voice was careful and deliberate. "It can hold chakra. Whatever is sealed into it stays preserved, indefinitely."
"There is something the village says about it."
"Sand moves. The desert's grains travel with the wind -- like fate, unpredictable, never staying still."
"Crystal is permanent. To fix flowing sand into a crystal is to keep something close forever."
His thumb moved slowly across the surface of the small sphere.
"So..."
He raised his eyes and looked directly at Naruto. What lived in those eyes was a gravity that was very difficult to say no to.
"I want to ask Naruto to store some of your chakra inside this."
"Not ordinary chakra. The kind that... carries your presence. The kind that makes it feel like you're nearby."
"So that when I can't see you. When I need strength. When..."
"When I feel alone -- I can look at it. Hold it. And know that Naruto is somewhere out there, alive and well."
A pause.
"Is that all right?"