He looked exactly like a child his age should not have been allowed to look. Five years old, small and narrow shouldered, with limbs that still carried the faint softness of early childhood rather than the sharp lines of someone already hardened by training. His hair was a deep, rusty red, cut unevenly and left to fall wherever it wanted, hinting at no one caring enough to tame it.
His skin was pale against the desert night, made starker by the heavy dark rings beneath his eyes, thick and permanent, it did not come from a late night sleep but etched by years of never truly resting. His eyes were the most striking part, large and sea green, fixed and unblinking, holding a calm that felt wrong on a child, too steady, too watchful.
There was no innocence in his expression, but there was no malice either, only a blank, distant stillness. His clothes were simple and loose, practical rather than cared for, hanging on his frame.
Bare feet rested on the stone without hesitation, toes curled slightly against the cool surface, and for all his quiet presence, he looked unmistakably young, painfully so, a child carrying the weight of something far older than he was.
What was most terrifying was the gap in his chakra network. It sat in his abdomen, a hollow space that lacked something fundamental, filled instead with something wrong. The chakra there was violent, tangled with constant anger and rage, pressing outward without rest. My skin shivered and the hair on my arms stood up. My instincts screamed at me to run, loud enough that for a moment I almost thought I was hearing an actual voice.
It felt like being in a car about to slam into another at full speed, that split second where your mind locks up and every muscle fires at once. Fight meant death. Flight was the correct choice. I was already preparing to flicker away when I noticed his eyes.
He was begging me to stay.
Not with words. Just with that quiet, fixed look. He was alone, truly alone. Most people probably fled the moment he tried to speak, driven off by fear before he even finished a sentence. He fidgeted slightly, like he was bracing himself to be abandoned again, preparing for another night spent by himself. That broke something in my chest. He was five years old. No one deserved to be treated like that for a choice that was never theirs.
I took a deep breath and forced my instincts down, crushing them despite how hard they fought back.
It felt like standing at the top of a roller coaster just before the drop, panic sitting right at the edge, waiting for the smallest push to send it spiraling. My thoughts were a mess, fear gnawing at my focus, but I kept reminding myself who I was looking at. A child with a horrible past and an even worse future. I steeled myself and asked, "Do you want to see my drawing?"
The look of surprise on his face was immediate. Like he had expected me to run already, to bolt the way everyone else in his world did. I wanted to, badly. Every part of me did. But I stayed, if only out of stubborn defiance toward my own fear.
I held out my notebook. Gaara hesitated, cautious, like he expected to be rejected or attacked at any moment. After a few seconds, he slowly reached out and took it with both hands.
His eyes widened as he flipped through the pages. The night sky. The kites. The village as seen from Sena's flat. He stared at each sketch like it was something unreal, something he was not supposed to be allowed to see. For the first time, his empty gaze shifted, a faint light flickering behind it.
Carefully, I extended my chakra senses.
I detected a shinobi nearby, probably a chunin based on chakra volume, assigned to watch him and report if the seal ever loosened enough to cause a rampage. They did not react to my sensing, which meant they were likely not a sensor. That, or the constant chakra leakage from Gaara's unstable seal drowned out everything else.
I could not see the seal itself. Not directly. Touching its location with chakra to force a clearer reading would have been suicide. But I could sense what it did to his chakra network, and from that, I began to piece it together. I saw where it integrated into his system and how it reacted under emotional pressure. From there, I started forming a rough idea of its function, even if the details were incomplete. I recognized echoes of sealing principles I had studied, distorted and pushed to extremes.
Seeing a jinchuriki up close was incredible. And terrifying.
The seal enthusiast in me could not resist. I coated my eyes with chakra, pairing it with my heightened senses toward seal formulas, and began studying what I was seeing. Pressure points. Flow direction. Feedback loops.
The seal was deeply flawed. It was a constant tug of war. The One Tail pushed outward with brute force, and the seal answered by slamming it back down, over and over. There was no balance. No give. The host suffered for it every second. I felt even worse for him.
Gaara's voice broke my concentration. "They are beautiful."
The tone was almost joyful, though I could tell the emotion itself was unfamiliar to him. I forced my lips into a smile, my nerves screaming as I stood next to what felt like a nuke. Still, I gathered my courage and said, "Do you want me to draw you?"
That did it.
His emotions spiked, sudden and intense, and his seal reacted immediately. More structure flashed through my senses, along with a surge of that terrifying chakra. He was overwhelmed by something as simple as kindness, and the system inside him strained under the response.
He sat down nearby and nodded eagerly, the movement stiff but unmistakably happy. That alone eased my panic a little. I took the notebook back and said, "Relax. Just breathe. Enjoy the weather so I can draw you properly."
He nodded again, trying very hard to act normal.
I began drawing a vague outline of the seals based on what my chakra and sealing senses had picked up, essentially working backward by observing the effects first and then trying to guess what seals I could write to imitate that effect, or when I could not, what functions might cause them. I went deeper and deeper, outlining the seal's influence and its connection to his chakra network, testing theories against the little information I had. It was complicated, and I was probably wrong in many places.
But by using what I learned here and cross-examining it, filling in the missing pieces by studying Master Shuzo's extensive sealing knowledge outlined in his scrolls, I felt certain that if I fully committed to this project, maybe I could figure that seal out. And if the future went differently, I might even help that poor kid stabilize his seal instead of being a walking disaster.
However, I would be lying if I said that was the only reason. The hardest seals in existence were the tailed beast sealing ones, and to me, that made them irresistible. It felt like staring at an impossible final boss in a game, something so complex and unfair it bordered on absurd. I knew that if I ever managed to solve it, to truly understand and overcome that kind of seal, the sense of achievement would be absolute. The kind of euphoria that only comes from cracking a puzzle you were never meant to solve.
Thankfully, Gaara did not know how long sketching actually took, so my delay went unnoticed. When I felt I had learned as much as I safely could, I finally focused fully on the sketch itself. The fun part would come later, when I tried to translate the functions I had sensed into proper seal formulas. I found myself excited to try.
After some time, I was finally done. I let out a slow breath and looked down at the page, my panic easing just enough for something softer to take its place. The sketch showed Gaara standing atop the village wall, small against the open sky but not swallowed by it. The stone beneath his feet was rough and uneven, yet he stood steady, framed by the vast stretch of night above Sunagakure. The stars were sharp and bright, scattered across the sky in quiet abundance, their light reflected faintly in the curve of his eyes. Above him, kites drifted and danced, their strings cutting gentle lines through the darkness as they caught the wind, colors muted by night but still alive with motion.
Gaara was drawn mid moment, one hand lifted to his hair as the wind tugged at it, strands flying freely instead of lying flat and still. His expression was different from how he usually looked, softer. There was a small smile on his face, not wide or dramatic, just enough to show he was enjoying something without fear of it being taken away. His gaze was tilted upward, following the sky. For once, he did not look like a child standing alone. He looked like part of the night itself, touched by the wind, held under the stars, existing in an eternalized moment of pure happiness.
I held the notebook out to him quietly. He leaned in, eyes scanning the page, and for a few seconds he said nothing at all. Then he extended his hands, gripping the notebook, his fingers tightening slightly around the edge, careful, like he was afraid the drawing might disappear if he touched it too hard. He kept staring at it, at himself standing under the sky, and the smile on his face mirrored the one on the sketch, then it stayed there.