sunshineverse | [february and backstory catch-all/open]

Who: Gaara, open!
Where: Various places; primarily starting in Sunagakure and ending up in Konohagakure.
When: The first half of February. If otherwise, dates will be provided.
Notes: Gaara's holiday in Konoha, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love the jinchuuriki. Mingling, top-levels and threadjacking all welcome. If you're not sure if they have CR or what stage their CR is at, contact me and we can work it out! If you'd rather we did a backdated thread, just put up a date first.

[ 1. In which Gaara has specifically sought you out and this is either alarming or business as usual. ]

For politeness' sake, Gaara sent sealed messages to anyone he was invited to visit before he set off from Suna. Not only do those messages give ample warning, but the seals on them are formed out of just enough magnetised sand that they act as radar pings; he can sense where each scroll is to some degree of accuracy. He got lost in Konoha once, and almost started an international incident. This way is easier.

[ 2. In which you just run into him, which is either alarming or business as usual. ]

The benefit of arriving via official channels and through the seals and front gates rather than simply escaping Sunagakure in an adolescent rage like he used to is that he's not being pursued by special ops. Without that added level of paranoia, Gaara is free to wander around as he waits for his sand-seal messages to reach his friends. He has a few more presents to buy, after all. He never bothered to learn anyone's favourite foods, so he's now watching other shoppers to try to guess. Carrying everything from Suna would have been pointless, especially since he only heard about the celebration a week ago. Which is another bonus of being on official leave in somewhere other than Suna: he can use a small curl of sand to hold his bags without causing a mile-wide panic.

[ 3. Backstory wildcard! Pick a date, any date. ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

However alarming Gaara's first visit to Konoha had been, Sasuke's relationship with Suna's wayward scion had reached the point when he fully expected both visits and a kind of half-hearted, unsubtly-competitive jostling camraderie whenever he received notice that Gaara was going to be around. The seal itself was distinctive enough that he'd known as soon as he'd received it to expect the sender to follow it without too much delay.

It was a an unexpected uptick to his day after the failed attempt to find a sparring partner in Adela -- really, she needed to get a better sense of her limits, unless her bloodline didn't require much control -- and Sasuke found himself rather looking forward to the meeting, slowing his afternoon jog around the village to make his seal easier to track.

The slowing wasn't necessary per se, but it certainly made the locating process easy. Out of a kind of half-baked formality, Gaara had waited until the seal had travelled nearly the entire way along the jogging route before making himself known.

Primarily because his method of 'making himself known' was a sand arm twisting up out of the ground in an attempt to trip Sasuke up, and it would have been rude not to wait until he was warmed up.

And ah, there it was. Sasuke felt the flare of known, if not precisely familiar, chakra right as the arm wormed up out of the ground. There was no way to arrest his own momentum to avoid it, slow as he was moving, and so in a split-second redistribution of body weight he vaulted up and over the reaching limb, bridging the jump with one hand before landing lightly on top of a fence.

"Welcome back to Konoha," he said, addressing the air at large until Gaara decided to show his actual self.

The hand grasped briefly at Sasuke's heels before melting back into an indistinct cloud and flowing past him back to a tree just off the path, like an eager dog playing hide-and-seek. Thus revealed, Gaara didn't bother keeping up the henshin and appeared crouched on one of the lower boughs.

"It's good to be back," he demurred. And then, for propriety's sake and to offset the fact that a few enterprising flurries were making their way around to Sasuke's blind spots, "How are your family?"

The thing that had taken the longest to get used to about Gaara was the strange sincerity of his statements when it came to Konoha, even when he was working to distract away from the movement of his chakra. Most shinobi had village loyalty bred into the bones, but Gaara seemed to genuinely enjoy his time in a foreign country and a hidden village other than his own.

"They're well," Sasuke answered, because that much was at least true, barring Itachi's illness and continued irresponsibility about it. "And yours?"

He released his own chakra as he spoke, carefully bracing himself to move as soon as he sensed more intent that what was around him now.

Gaara's deviant loyalty being the one thing he could hide from the Kazekage, he guarded it almost as jealously as he guarded his friendships with the ninja he was loyal to. Even as sand twisted into barbs and shot towards Sasuke's back and legs, he was enjoying himself with nothing to prove, and that was the difference. He was even coming to actually care about people like Mikoto and Itachi, even if only as figures mentioned through Sasuke. They were important by proxy. Sometimes he wondered if that was what a Kage felt.

Speaking of which.

"Also well. They're both here." He didn't bother including the Kazekage, but then again he never did. "The puppet corps' timber supplies are running low, so we convinced Kankuro to come with us."

All three siblings being in Konoha wasn't precisely unusual, but it was also more common to see Gaara in the company of just one, or more frequently a retainer of -- yes, there were the chakra signals of the usual Suna special-ops team charged with keeping an eye on him. And there was the surge of chakra near him, Sasuke's eyes flickering red as his hands spun seals with the ease of long practice.

The sand barbs embedded into a section of wood, Sasuke reappearing next to Gaara with a faint puff of smoke.

"We certainly have plenty of timber," he acknowledged, making a gesture at the piece of wood clattering to the ground. "I'm sure Suna is welcome to some."

He released chakra from the hand bracing him on the tree as he spoke, cracking through it to slice off the segment Gaara was using.

"That's good t--"

Crash.

The Suna ANBU at least looked as bored as they usually did; one was reading a book behind a chimney and the other was picking dirt from under her nails in an alley just off the path. When the branch sheared off and sent Gaara plummeting like a stone to the ground below, they just glanced over for a second at the noise.

And then looked away again. Nothing new there.

Even Gaara didn't look particularly surprised, but then the gourd had exploded outwards into a huge, cushioning hand seconds before he landed. Almost lazily, a sand clone dropped out of the higher branches to resume the close-range fight.

He could get to be a good deal older than this and still find something funny about just how much weight Gaara had on him, Sasuke mused, watching without moving as the Suna-nin just dropped into the waiting cushion of his sand. The constancy of it -- of Gaara in general -- there was at least that, he thought, and it was with a certain amount of fondness that he turned to face the chakra he sensed over his shoulder.

"So if your brother is here for wood," he started, gathering lightning chakra to his hands and feet -- a low-level buzz, none of the flashy visibility of Chidori's more standard variants -- and waiting for the clone to come to him. "What is your sister looking for?"

Likely Neji, if the besotted interested he'd showed at the Suna festival had found fruition of any sort, but Sasuke wasn't enough of a gossip to imply it directly. That, and Temari had made a very strong impression some years ago. It wasn't that he was intimidated by her, of course, but he had an inkling that she likely would not appreciate having her personal affairs casually discussed by her brother.

"I didn't ask," was the bland reply that likely confirmed Sasuke's suspicions. Both of her intentions, and her probable reaction to their gossiping. No one would admit to being intimidated by his sister, but neither would they willingly cross her. It was probably why she made such a good diplomat.

Gaara got to his feet as the clone launched a simple combination move, shades of Rock Lee's taijutsu style in the way it shifted stances but its weight still too much to make them effective. Come to think of it, Sasuke would make a decent ambassador for the same reasons. "There will be an official reason, but I don't know it."

Sand clone meant some earth chakra basis, Sasuke figured, the typical courtesy of leaving the Sharingan out of friendly sparring barring him from checking with any level of precision. Gaara wasn't all earth, but earth was the most natural for his control, which meant when Sasuke wove out of the pattern of the taijutsu, he swung in low with a jab at a critical chakra centre, lightning chakra crackling briefly around his fingertips.

"There will be," he repeated as he moved, amusement finally curling his mouth openly. "Then in the meantime, you don't have any official engagements, do you?"

[february and backstory catch-all/open]

02/10?

shur

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