Work Text:
.x.
Her parentage was never in question. Sakura was the fifteenth daughter born to the Emperor of Japan. She was the only daughter of a noblewoman who had been sold to the Emperor when her father couldn't pay his debt. A woman who had failed to produce any more offspring since.
It was a fact. That was who she was. Who she was told never to forget.
And so she believed for eighteen years of being prepped for a marriage to some unknown man, whichever suitor her father decided brought him the most money or power. She learned her kanji, her cursive, her history, her airs and pomp, and her manners. Anything that would be needed to attract a high placed family to want to welcome her into hers, was taught to her.
She said "yes" to a stranger. To a man she would spend her life with. A man that refused to meet her until then. But she would do her duty. She would wait for him.
In the meantime, her father saw fit to send her to the allied camps to learn to heal. To learn to take care of people. She already knew how to serve her future husband and what to expect when she moved to his land to begin her new life. For now her present was spent tending to the injuries of soldiers who fought and died to keep her father's control of this land in his own hands. She got a taste of what life was supposed to be about.
With war and death rampant in the country, the shoguns fought over who had dominion where and who deserved to. The Emperor was just a figure head but he was an important one. He spent his days in meetings and adding this pomp and stature in the eyes of the lowly, commoners, and his nights whoring - with whores and wives. Sakura had so many siblings she didn't think it meant anything who she was, really. Or him. The father who didn't care about appearances.
And who had no control over what was coming.
.x.
He was the son of a whore. The devil didn't care about gender. His father was a whore. It didn't matter that he carried the title of shogun. It didn't matter that he was well respected. It only mattered that the man deserved to die.
Gaara caught him fucking the servant girls on a weekly basis and a noblewoman's daughter - or two - every other week. Rasa didn't bother to hide it anymore. His wife was expected to not care. But his children hated him for it.
Gaara grew up respecting this man; he wanted to be just like him and signed up to become a samurai, as his father had done in his youth, without a second thought. He wanted to get married once he turned eighteen, like his father did, and carry on the tradition of moving into politics and teaching everything he'd learnt to his children. He wanted to matter.
But on the eve of his sixteenth birthday he'd had enough. Gaara packed his bags and enlisted with the regular army and didn't look back. His father didn't bother trying to stop him but said he had to return to marry some rich man's wife in two years.
Not happening.
He never bothered to ask what the girl's name was. Nor to attend the meetings that had been organised between them. He should get to know her, his mother said, and he almost yelled back "like father is getting to know the servants?". Almost. She was to be pitied and he did. His father was a whore and a cunt.
But he couldn't bare to watch her suffer Rasa's indiscretions. So he left and didn't look back. His siblings went their own way too, also disgusted.
That was a decision he'd never regretted. Until the day he met the General's daughter and decided fate was indeed a fickle bitch.
.x.
Sakura wiped her forehead with the back of her hand before standing and stretching. The last group of soldiers had been hit by enemy arrows in a final attempt to rule the battlefield and were full of holes for their troubles. She'd been on her feet all night.
After years of tutelage, she was almost ready to be allowed to return home. She enjoyed healing people and was not looking forward to returning to the noble court. Her mother's latest letter had her afraid of what awaited her. She wasn't ill but talked as though her days were numbered. It made her want to rush to her side but it also left her fearful for her own well being.
Mebuki spoke of assassination attempts and having betrayed her Emperor. That she was going to hell for what she'd done. The raving comments also told Sakura that she was in danger.
'Don't come here.' She wrote. But it made no sense.
"Lady Sakura?"
She started before smiling at her newest patient. Sakura smiled widely at him. "Lord Kankuro, you need to rest."
He scoffed, failing to sit up in his cot. "I'm fine."
"Your arm was infected and you've been unconscious for days," she said, fussing over his bandages.
"You sound like my mother," he mummbled. And she tutted at him. "Are you busy after this?"
"Huh?" She frowned at him, confused.
"Uh," he rubbed the back of his head. "I'm not coming onto you, I promise. It's just, I asked out a cute nurse and she turned me down but if she thought it was a group thing... never mind forget I asked."
Sakura glanced at the nurse in question when Kankuro looked over at her. She was one of the new recruits who barely knew anything about medicine. Called Matsuri, or something. Sakura also knew that Matsuri was crushing on some other soldier who apparently refused to give her the time of day and had transferred out of this med-tent when the brunette girl wouldn't stop following him around. Kankuro might be just what she needed, since the rejection from the other soldier had affected her performance in surgery.
Sakura sighed. "I'll get her in the mess tent and you can bump into us."
"Thanks, Saku-chan." He grinned.
She shook her head. "And don't call me that."
"Okay, Saks."
She poked him.
"Okay, okay."
.x.
Gaara left the tent for two reasons. One: that Matsuri chick was getting on his nerves. Two: the flush of embarrassment he felt when he spotted his brother. He was talking to some pink haired physician and the brothers had not spoken for years. He knew Kankuro had enlisted but didn't give it much thought, since he kept to himself and took on the more dangerous missions. And he remembered his brother as hating conflict. But so much seemed to have changed.
Pink hair.
Something stirred in his memory but he brushed it aside.
"We're heading out." Baki, his commanding officer, hollered at him.
Gaara took a last look at the laughing man he'd once called brother (his eyes drifting over the pretty physician) before following Baki. The redhead had risen in the ranks so fast because of his power and prowess that even the General had stood to attention. The strange man that had connections to nobles and warriors alike.
The Emperor's favoured mass killer.
.x.
A month of blood stuck to his skin. Gaara didn't wash except to trek through streams. He smelled like the country side. It made for decent cover as he slinked into the shadows and pounced from bushes and hovels to kill his targets.
He'd become an assassin. After Baki's death and word spreading of the decimation of his entire platoon, he was reassigned to the darker, specialised killers. He wasn't a ninja. He wasn't one of them. But he drew as much blood as they did. He killed like he'd been born to it. Gone were the concerns over the brother and sister he'd left behind. The mother who had passed to illness in the last winter.
Six months ago he'd avoided Kankuro in a medical tent and now he stood, face-to-face with the man, unable to hide his true intentions. He'd been sent here to assist with a platoon that was trying to take out a rival shogun's family. They needed this family dead. They needed someone who could disappear into the shoin-zukuri in shadow and slit those throats without raising any alarms.
His father needed to appear to have clean hands in their deaths.
Times were changing and the old man was losing control. These enemies needed to die. And so they did. Gaara emerged from their home, covered in blood. He faced down his brother - the man who greeted him and thanked him for his service as though they hadn't once occupied the same womb.
Gaara's grip on his sword was tenuous even as he gripped it tighter. How he wanted to just charge the stranger in front of him. To show him who it was that deserved to be in the light and put the dark behind him. But then a mousy girl came out of the tent behind Kankuro.
His wife.
Matsuri had given into him after all. And her belly was full of his brother's child. She watched on at the silent exchange as though she had never followed Gaara around hoping to be the one to carry his children.
Who cares?
But it made him wonder if someone could. If the monster he'd become could have that. So his hand slacked and he lowered his weapon. This was not worth the aching in his heart. It was time to choose his fate and he refused to die here.
Gaara turned and fled back to the dark. Back into the pain of his life.
.x.
Her return home had not been the horror story Sakura had feared. Though she wished she'd not returned at all. She'd stood at the walls and contemplated fleeing her future. The man who'd been her betrothed had been killed in battle, she said. He was a stain on the memory of her family, so she was to pretend he'd never existed.
But she'd also heard rumours he'd simply defected. A runaway and potentially a traitor. The son rose high and she'd been falling from herself so far. Sakura could not climb the wall in front of her. So she let the guards usher her inside. To see her mother's corpse. The accident had been tragic they said. The poor woman died so suddenly they claimed. How sad.
Sakura did not spend much time in the presence of the body but even she had seen how only poison could make those pink lips turn so blood red. But what was she to do? She questioned the mortician. She asked to see the autopsy report. But nothing came of it. At last, her father sent an official to inform her she was being sent out again.
Where you'll cause less fuss.
And this was how she descended into infamy.
.x.
Sakura did not correspond with Kankuro and Matsuri after that first time they'd spent together. She helped him woo the girl and got out of there. Apparently, the man the brunette had liked was determined to ignore her and had gained a reputation for being blood thirsty, which was unbecoming of his noble status. No good was going to come of it.
She wasn't even invited to the wedding.
But she didn't care. Sakura returned to the medical tents and threw herself into the work. But she knew she couldn't keep this up for long. Soldiers would give her strange looks. Shogun under her knife would not call her Lady anymore when she visited them in recovery. And every night she sensed the hidden follower when she returned to her tent. Someone had decided she was trouble. What she could have done, other than question the healers back home, she didn't know.
But time was getting short as she started to get called into the med tent less and less. She was not as needed as before. She was getting a bad feeling. Rumours of how the war was turning away from her Shogun had her worried. Perhaps the children of the Emperor were being watched more closely? But nobody here should know who she was. She was just supposed to be another noble, not royalty.
Her surgery talents were being wasted.
After overhearing her superior talking to a soldier about transferring her to the front line to get rid of her, Sakura had had enough. She decided to take things into her own hands.
.x.
He followed the girl as she began packing and making her excuses to the soldiers that she was going for a run to get rid of hospital scrubs. He watched as she stole a horse and rode away as though the devil were on her tail. He was tempted to follow. So desperately so, that Gaara didn't bother questioning that urge. He took his horse and rode into the darkness of the night that surrounded the camp.
Pink hair.
She was the same healer who had helped his brother. The one who'd given Kankuro his happy ending with Matsuri. It had to mean something that he'd been assigned to watch her, and kill her if she tried to flee.
.x.
They did not get far. Sakura and the horse she'd dubbed shugo. A dark brown pedigree that she'd pushed to its limits in the span of the night. The devil was on her tail. But a day had passed and already she had to sell it for supplies. She needed to go incognito and figure out her next move. Sakura had no idea how to live as a peasant but she'd dealt with harsh circumstances before. Living as a physician in the middle of a war was not the lap of luxury of her former home of course.
And still she felt the weight of eyes on her like that shadow from the camp would not leave her alone. Something or someone was following her and she needed to get out of the open. Dyeing her hair and offering her services as a weaver seemed the sensible thing to do. Nobody noticed the girl walking among a crowd of similar girls.
A month later she was still being hounded by the darkness of her shadow and no amount of companionship from those she met and dallied with could throw off her feeling of being hunted. But the hunter did nothing. And she was letting everything go.
One day, her lowered guard would be the best of her.
.x.
He enjoyed watching her. She was his target but her desire to run from the same life he abhorred kept his knife in its sheathe. It kept his eyes feasting on her flesh instead of tearing into it with a weapon that he still wanted to use.
Gaara did not need to kill to survive. He was beginning to realise that. So he decided to take her lead and ingratiate himself into this new world. He found a dwelling and scrubbed the smell of the land from his body. It seemed to take months to finally be free of the blood. But nobody knew how much was still on him more than he did. It would be there forever.
But he finally looked like he belonged the day he purposefully, accidentally ran into her, knocking her groceries to the ground.
This was how the woman came to know him. She had been going by the name Amaya but introduced herself as Sakura the moment he asked. They both looked surprised at this and she realised who he was the moment he smirked, his canines almost looking like they were dripping in blood.
Her heart beat raced. Her palms were sweaty. Her eyes were wide.
But all he did was bow to her and offer his help in picking up her dropped supplies. All he did was ask her to allow him to pay for her dinner. All he did was touch her softly, carefully, to make sure she knew what he wanted from her.
And Sakura had no idea why she gave it to him. Waves of blinding light and rocking motions and crashing against each other; humming and moaning and joining and she was his. They came together in so many perfect ways. She didn't question why her shadow decided to love her instead of kill her. She was lost to the pleasure and the touches that gave her reason to let go.
To just let go.
.x.
News of her father's death and his father's brutal murder did nothing to stir them.
Sakura just smiled as the local gossip spread the news and the official reports came in. As though she were just another citizen. A dark haired girl who used to be pink.
Gaara helped her to her feet and they wandered out of the temple where they'd finally made their life official. Nothing else mattered. Their pasts were fake and they had their eyes on the future, instead.
That's how he became just some random farmer travelling into the area with his pregnant wife. And that's how she became the Blacksmith's Daughter travelling into the new area, pregnant and looking to start a fresh life with her new husband.
.x.