They found her on a mission near Wind Country — unconscious, scraped up, dressed in strange clothes, but alive. When she woke, she could speak just fine, only quiet and dazed. No memory of how she got there, no idea where “there” even was.
With Sunagakure closer than Konoha, Yamato led the team to bring her to the Sand Village. Medics treated her, and now she stood outside the Kazekage’s estate while the others discussed her fate several steps away.
She wasn’t ignoring them — just overwhelmed. She’d slipped off her shoes and let her feet sink into the sun-warmed sand, eyes half-lidded as she breathed through the disorientation. The warmth grounded her. Familiar in a way she couldn't explain.
Naruto nodded toward her. “See? She’s not panicking.”
Kankurō muttered, “Or she’s in shock.”
Temari crossed her arms. “She understands everything we’re saying. She’s just quiet. Keep it together.”
Without warning, Gaara stepped away from the group and approached her.
She turned slightly when he neared, eyes calm despite everything.
“Does the sand comfort you?” he asked quietly.
“It’s warm,” she said, voice low. “Feels… familiar."
“You’re not afraid,” he observed.
“I’m… confused. But I’m not afraid.”
Something in his expression flickered at that—not surprise, but interest.
“You may stay here,” he said. “Until we understand more.”
She blinked, slow. “You’re sure?”
“I am Kazekage,” he replied simply. “If I say you stay, you stay.”
Her shoulders eased, just a little. “Thank you.”
And from that moment, the decision was made.
Time passed more smoothly than anyone predicted.
She kept to herself at first out of caution. But as the days folded into weeks, she adjusted — and the village adjusted around her.
By the second week, she was navigating Sunagakure like she’d lived there for years. By the third, the guards stopped asking why she was heading into administrative halls. By the fourth, she wasn’t knocking on the Kazekage’s office door anymore.
She stepped into Gaara’s office one morning with a stack of scrolls tucked under her arm. “These are from the patrol unit. Left in the wrong pile. Again.”
He looked up briefly. “You sorted them?”
“Someone has to,” she said, already crossing the room to set them where they belonged.
No one told her to stay. No one asked her to leave.
Sai once commented that she “blended into the office ecosystem like a desert fox,” which Naruto pretended to understand.
She wasn’t staff. She wasn’t a guest.
She was just—there. And Gaara allowed it without question.
She spoke more now. Not a lot, but enough.
When Kankurō complained, she said flatly, “You’d get your requisitions approved faster if you stopped misplacing them under snack wrappers.”
When Sai asked about her adjustment, she threw a rolled scroll at his head with pinpoint accuracy.
When Naruto forgot she was behind him and said Gaara needed to “stop being a cactus,” she snorted into her tea.
Temari loved her immediately.
The first time she brought Gaara lunch, he stared at the neatly wrapped portion she set on his desk.
“You haven’t eaten,” she said. “And I don’t want Temari yelling at me because you passed out mid-sentence.”
He accepted it with no further argument.
After that, it happened again the next day. And the next. It became routine.
They started taking short walks during his breaks — sometimes in silence, sometimes with her pointing out things in the village he rarely paused to notice. He listened when she talked, and didn't mind when she didn't.
Villagers began to recognize them walking side by side — not Kazekage and stranger.
Just… two people who moved in the same direction.
She started waiting for him in the late afternoons before heading out.
One evening, gathering her things, she paused at the office door and glanced back.
“Same time tomorrow?”
He met her gaze. “Yes.”
She smiled — genuinely, easily, and left.
Temari watched her disappear down the corridor and muttered under her breath: “He’s absolutely gone. He just hasn’t realized it yet."
And somewhere behind his calm exterior, Gaara already had.