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“Gaara?”
Gaara looks down expectantly. The small hand curled in his is damp with sweat. Metal takes to the River Country climate like a fragile flower, and no amount of sunhats or heat-wicking clothing his father swaddles him in seems to prevent him from wilting under the beating sun.
Seeming to realize Gaara’s stare is the only response he’ll be getting, Metal continues, “Why did Papa just lie to that lady?”
Gaara frowns. They’ve just passed through a checkpoint on the border of Wind and River on their way to Wave Country. Tanigakure has increased their security tenfold since the war (and the discovery of the Akatsuki hideout on the outskirts of their village), and they have border guards studded along the common thoroughfares all the way to the coast.
Gaara isn’t used to being asked for his papers. He’d merely stared blankly at the first guard to question his passport.
“I’m obviously the Kazekage,” he’d told the guard, who was holding the little book up to the sun and squinting.
“We get a lot of folks trying to fake their way in through here.” The man flipped the pages back and forth, then forced chakra through them to dispel any lingering genjutsu. “It’d be just like a criminal to try and hide in plain sight, thinking we wouldn’t question a Kage.”
Gaara had permitted the sand to uncork his gourd, and at that point Lee had jumped into the fray to talk the guard down from his stammered apologies.
So Lee has been handling the passport exchange ever since, leaving Gaara to mind Metal at the border crossings. It’s certainly no hardship. Metal is an impeccably well-behaved child, polite to a fault just like his father and innately fascinated with the clothing and food and languages of all the little villages they’ve stopped in on their short vacation. It’s been a unique sort of pleasure to see the world through a child’s eyes again, ignorant of war or any hardship more serious than a rigorous training regimen.
Said eyes—not nearly as wide as Lee’s but just as dark—are boring into Gaara now as Metal tugs at his sleeve once more.
“Did I say something wrong?” he says, in a child’s imitation of a whisper. “Sorry.”
“Don’t talk about lying when you’re near the guards,” Gaara replies, once he’s sure they’re out of earshot, waiting in the sparse shade of a scrubby treeline that offers no room for extra bodies to be concealed. Lee is still back at the guardpost, chatting up a storm with the especially loquacious guard, gesticulating enthusiastically. Gaara has no idea what Lee and this woman could possibly have to talk about; they’ve known each other for less than five minutes. “A shinobi is always discreet about deception.”
“Discreet,” Metal repeats, working the word over in his mouth like he’s memorizing it to write down in his notebook later. “Right!”
Gaara is not quite sure that Metal even understands what he’s said. He’s very young, and Lee still speaks to him in that teacherly, canted voice that Temari scoffs at as ‘baby talk’.
Gaara, on the other hand, sees no reason to talk down to children. They’ll either understand it or they won’t, and if they’re clever, they’ll ask for clarification before running off foolhardily with half-cocked information.
Unfortunately, the foolhardiness gene runs deep in the Lee family, because Metal crouches low down to the ground and scrunches up his mouth so that Gaara has to stoop down to hear his next words.
“Why did Papa discreet that woman?”
Gaara has to bite back a chuckle. Metal is very sensitive to that sort of thing, and he always assumes he’s being made fun of if Gaara so much as smiles at one of his mistakes.
“Discreet means something is a secret,” he explains, bending his own pedagogical rule just this once. Or so he tells himself. He finds himself making many such exceptions to his preconceived notions of childrearing when it comes to Metal. Maybe it’s the little part in the back of his mind that tells him he would have wanted to be a teacher like Lee, if he hadn’t become Kazekage. “We’re being discreet right now, because we’re talking very quietly, and we have our backs turned so the guard can’t read our lips.”
“Tomoa-senpai says lipreading is really hard!”
Naruto, in his infinite wisdom—and Gaara means this without the slightest hint of irony—assembled Lee’s very first genin squad from children who wouldn’t have stood a chance of graduating Konoha’s Academy when he and Lee were children. Tomoa is Deaf, and Lee took to learning Shinobi Sign Language with a vigor that he never exerted when Gaara first tried to teach him Sunan. Gaara’s grasp of the language is far more stilted than Lee’s (and now Metal’s) easy fluency—the facial expressions in particular are a challenge to remember, always a beat too late—but he can at least make himself understood.
Tomoa is probably Metal’s favorite of Lee’s genin team, and ‘Tomoa-senpai says …’ has been a common refrain in the household for the weeks that Lee and Metal have spent in Suna.
“Is that so?” Gaara murmurs, yet another popular phrase. Conversations with a five-year-old, much less one with debilitating performance anxiety, can be bewildering minefields to navigate. He crouches down, hands on his knees, to meet Metal’s eye.
There’s one such mine they’ve been skirting around for some time, and Gaara seizes it just as Lee in the distance throws his head back with a booming laugh, exclaiming, “Well, I certainly hope we make it there before the rain does!”
“Metal,” Gaara says. “What makes you think Lee told a lie?”
Gaara would like to think that Lee didn’t lie to a customs official on purpose. He has enough diplomatic untangling to do with the simple fact of his and Lee’s relationship. Hell, he had to fight tooth and nail to convince his own ANBU to let him out of the village without a full security detail, never mind with only a Leaf jounin and a child still too young to enter the Academy as his companions. He shudders to think of the consequences if it comes out that Lee has been deceiving foreign nationals. But he supposes it’s possible that Lee inadvertently answered some question incorrectly in the midst of all that mindless prattle.
Metal’s mouth pinches tight. He reaches out and picks at the rough bark of one of the nearby doum palms. Even close to the ground, the heat is intense; they’re still too far from the coast for a proper sea breeze, and the fronds of the doums are so high above that they offer scant little shade.
“Don’t do that.” Gaara lays a hand atop Metal’s. “The tree uses that bark to preserve its water.”
Metal looks up at him, wide-eyed. “Sorry.” He tugs his hand back in an instant, then turns to the tree just as quickly. “Sorry,” he repeats.
Gaara doesn’t waste his breath on mentioning that the tree can’t hear, and even if it could, it certainly doesn’t speak Shinobi Common, and therefore has no idea that it’s been apologized to. After all, it’s probably his fault that Metal’s picked up the habit. Gaara has been known to converse with his own cacti at times.
Metal pats the little hole in the tree’s bark as if his touch might heal the mark he left, then he looks up at Gaara.
“Papa’s name is Lee, right?” he asks, his little voice still pitched quiet as he can make it. “You just said.”
“Right,” Gaara agrees. He’s struggling to see where this is going.
“And my name is Metal.” He pounds his own chest and leaves a damp handprint on the white linen of his over-shirt. “Metal Lee.”
“Right.” Gaara chances a look over Metal’s shoulder to Lee at the guardpost. Lee’s rambling conversation shows no sign of winding down.
“Me and Papa have the same name, because he’s my papa.” Metal’s hand has dropped to the sandy earth now, and he’s doodling little shapes there. Gaara wonders if it’s yet another Lee family trait to be utterly incapable of stillness, or if Metal is more nervous than usual.
“Uh huh.” Gaara aims for an encouraging tone, but lands somewhere between bored and indifferent.
“Metal Lee,” Metal repeats, drawing a line between two blobby figures in the dirt that Gaara now realizes are meant to be people, “and Lee Lee. Because we’re a family.”
“Ah.”
“But he told the lady that his name is Rock Lee,” Metal explains, as though Gaara wasn’t joined to the boy by the hand when Lee handed over their passports. “He told her a fake name.”
Suddenly, Metal’s eyes widen until they’re almost as round as his father’s.
“Wait,” he hisses. “Is this a mission? Papa’s never let me go on a mission before!”
“It’s not a mission,” Gaara shuts down the line of inquiry before Metal can get himself too worked up. “It’s a vacation.”
“Oh.” Metal deflates.
“Rest and recuperation are just as important parts of a shinobi’s life as missions and battle,” Gaara reminds him, because goodness knows Lee doesn’t spend nearly as much time talking about letting the body recover as he does talking about putting it through punishing ordeals. “You won’t be in top fighting form if you never give yourself time to relax.”
“Right!” Metal shoots back upright, hand snapping to his forehead.
It takes more time than Gaara would like for him to get up off his knees. A joint cracks as he does, and he can already hear the lecture about stretching and conditioning in Lee’s voice in the back of his mind.
“Lee’s full name is Rock Lee,” Gaara says, once he’s shaken the dust from the hem of his traveling cloak.
Metal shakes his head ardently. “Nuh-uh.”
“It is,” Gaara insists.
“Is not.”
Gaara won’t be reduced to arguing with a child too young to properly throw a kunai. He gets enough sass and bickering from Kankuro.
He sighs, leaning back against the trunk of the tree and crossing his arms. “Why are you so sure of this?”
“Because …” Metal’s little face screws up, deep in thought. “Because … you always call people by their names if you like them. If they’re your friends or your family.”
If Gaara were even a hair more dramatic than he is, he’d be pinching the bridge of his nose right now. He cannot think of anyone less equipped to explain the intricate variations of social and naming customs to a child this age. He doesn’t even know where to begin.
So instead he says, “I see.”
A glance over the brim of Metal’s hat reveals that Lee is now bowing to the guard, thanking her profusely. Relief is just on the edge of sight.
“People like Papa, right?” Metal is scowling down at the dirt as if the sand-swept earth is the thing that has confused him.
“Lee is a well-respected shinobi with a great many friends and allies,” Gaara confirms. That, at least, is easy enough to answer.
“And you like him?”
“Of course.” The response slips from Gaara with hardly a thought. “I love him.”
“Because we’re a family.”
Metal’s sweaty little hand slips back into Gaara’s just as Lee turns and starts jogging over.
“Right.” Something around Gaara’s heart squeezes and refuses to relent even when he takes deep, steadying breaths.
“Metal!” Lee stoops and scoops his son up into his arms, uncorking a peal of giggles, then leans over and kisses the top of Gaara’s head. “I’ve just thought of the most wonderful training exercise!”
“What is it, Papa?” Metal squirms and laughs.
And Gaara assumes that’s the end of that particular conversation.
He’s wrong, of course.
Gaara is sitting under an umbrella at the beach, enjoying the sight of Lee’s sleek body diving between the waves, when Metal comes sprinting up the shore in a flurry of wet sand.
“Gaara!”
Gaara sets down the book he’s been pretending to read on the towel beside him and adjusts the brim of his floppy hat.
“Yes?”
“I found a lobber!”
The sand here is iron-rich; it’s a minute relief to Gaara to know he can at least reach for his Magnet Release if his own sand gets waterlogged. Metal is splattered up to his knees with its red pigments as he tears up the beach and skids to a stop, panting, in front of Gaara’s towel.
“A … lobster?” Gaara guesses. The waters of this little cove should be much too warm for those particular crustaceans.
“Yeah!” Metal grins. He’s missing a small handful of his baby teeth in the front of his mouth, and his breath whistles through the gaps.
Gaara finds himself smiling back as he holds out his palm, flat and open, to accept whatever it is Metal has clutched so excitedly behind his back. “Well, hand it over.”
Something moist and arthropodic and clawed drops into Gaara’s hand with a splat.
“Ah.”
A little curl of sand winds up from the dry topsoil of the beach and seizes the beast by its tail to haul it into the air.
“This is a sea scorpion.” The red sand caked into the creature’s armor plates must have confused Metal. Gaara supposes he’s likely only ever seen lobsters cooked. “You shouldn’t play with them. Their bite can drain a shinobi’s chakra in minutes.”
“Oh no!” Metal leaps back immediately, tiny hands forming defensive sandy fists in front of his chest. He starts to chew his lip.
“You’re safe,” Gaara reminds him, dispatching the creature some meters up the shore and back into the water with a flick of his wrist.
“Are there more of them in the water?” Metal watches as the sea scorpion rights itself and scurries off into the current.
“Yes.”
Metal’s eyes go huge. “Will one of them bite Papa?”
Lee’s head bobs between two massive waves. He shakes the water from the ends of his hair, sending sparkling gems glittering across the sea’s foam-latticed surface.
“Lee knows better than to play with things that will bite him,” Gaara replies. Except for me, he doesn’t add. Not that it always stops him, either. Gaara’s fondest wish for years has been that Lee would un-volunteer himself from the Beast Eradication Squad, after seeing him emerge from the Forest of Death one too many times with a fistful of knotted serpent tails and smoking black fang marks across his knuckles, but so far he’s had no such luck.
The point is, Lee does know better. Whether he puts that knowledge into practice is another matter entirely.
“Oh, okay.” Metal is a child who’s quick to anxiety, but he’s also surprisingly easy to placate. He plops down on the sand beside Gaara’s towel on his belly, propped up on his elbows.
“Do you want your towel?” Gaara nods at the overstuffed beach bag beside him. Lee appears to have somehow doubled the volume of the bag in packing it, a bit excessive for a day at the shore.
“Nope.” Metal sets about digging a hole in the dry sand with the single-minded determination of childhood, setting aside small stones and shells as he digs.
“You’ll have an easier time with that closer to the water,” Gaara comments, as the hole’s sides cave in for the third time.
Metal just shakes his head, casting a glance over his shoulder at the waves’ gentle lapping. “There might be more lobbers there.”
“Sea scorpions,” Gaara reminds him, turning his attention back to his book. He’s read the same paragraph several times at this point.
“Sea scorponyms,” Metal says agreeably.
After a few silent minutes, that little voice chirps up once more, “Hey, Gaara?”
Gaara waits a beat.
“Is your name Lee, too?”
“No.” Gaara dog-ears his page and sets the book aside. It’s becoming increasingly unlikely that he’ll get any further reading done today. “Why do you ask?”
“I was asking Papa about his name earlier, and he said his name is Rock Lee.” Metal frowns in concentration as he wrests a particularly stubborn shell from the sucking wet underbelly of the sand. “And people can be called whatever name they want to be. And he doesn’t mind that everyone calls him Lee and that it’s not mean or rude and I shouldn’t tell people it is.”
This must have occurred when Gaara was out at the little beachside market, shopping for their dinner and responding to the few urgent hawks that managed to track him down even in a foreign country. The job of Kazekage pays no deference to something as insignificant as a vacation, after all.
“Mhm.” No one in the Lee family has ever been able to let a topic drop once it’s been raised. It’s among Lee’s more irritating qualities.
“But you’re our family, too.”
Gaara’s chest muscles are suddenly quite tight. He resists the urge to lift a hand to his breastbone.
“I am.” The specifics of Lee and Gaara’s exact titles and relationship are necessarily vague, owing to the requirements of Gaara’s position and the still-infant precariousness of the pan-Shinobi allyship, but the moment Metal came into the picture, Lee had been very firm on this fact.
Another handful of sand falls down into Metal’s pit. Metal groans his disappointment, and Gaara exerts just the smallest amount of sneaky chakra to keep the other, more unstable walls from collapsing, too.
“So …” Metal grabs a handful of shells in one grubby fist, then begins setting them down, one-by-one, in a line along the edge of his sand pit. “Metal Lee, L—Rock Lee, and Gaara Lee.”
He sets the third damp shell down with an air of finality, looking up at Gaara’s face for confirmation.
Gaara shakes his head, and Metal’s bushy, salt-crusted eyebrows crumple into a look of frustration in the middle of his forehead.
“Oh. Is it because of, um—” Metal picks up the shell he named Gaara—it’s a mossy sort of grey and doesn’t resemble Gaara in the least—and stares at it with all the intensity of concentration his little face can muster, as if its unremarkable surface might contain his answer. “—um. Culture?”
Out in the water, Lee has begun to body surf. The waves carry him close to shore, and the breeze ferries his whoops and laughs the rest of the way. Gaara briefly considers sending a bit of sand out in his direction to alert him, before he says something to Metal that he ends up regretting. He quashes the thought before the hand of red sediment is even fully formed at his side.
Lee is having fun. Gaara can handle the inquiries of a child. Frankly, Metal’s questions are far less asinine than half the requests the Council passes across his desk.
“Did Lee teach you that, too?” Gaara murmurs.
Metal nods eagerly in response. Overhead, a few clouds scuttle and chase each other across the sky. The afternoon sun is diffused by the sea breeze’s deception, belying the weight of its beams.
“Come sit under the umbrella to talk. You’ll get sunburnt.” Gaara pats the space next to him.
Metal’s bony little shoulders are already pinkening as he scrambles onto the towel and folds his sand-skinned knees up in front of him. Gaara prods him, and the fingermark on his skin takes a disappointingly brief time to return to pink from white. He and Lee have both been slacking in reapplying the boy’s sunscreen. It’s an unforgivable act of carelessness—Lee will be worried to death if his son gets sunsickness—but they so rarely have the chance to shirk their duties and just relax.
Fathering a child is an even more demanding position than that of Kazekage, apparently.
Gaara takes off his hat and plops it on Metal’s damp and shaggy hair. The hat’s band is far too large for his tiny skull, and the brim flops forward over his eyes before Gaara readjusts it so Metal can still see.
“Lee is right,” Gaara says, once he’s satisfied that Metal is as protected from the sun as he can get him. “The difference in naming conventions is a cultural one. In Konoha, a person’s clan name comes first. Nara Shikamaru is from the Nara Clan. Uzumaki Naruto is from the Uzumaki Clan.”
“He’s the Hokage!” Metal whips his head around so fast that the hat slips to hang off one protruding, pink-helixed ear.
“Just so.” Gaara reaches out and tugs the hat back into place. “So all of Lee’s friends assumed that Rock was his family name. But Lee’s clan doesn’t hail from Konoha, and their names go in the opposite order: personal name, then clan name.”
“Rock Lee and Metal Lee!” Metal exclaims. He holds up the two shells—which bear no closer resemblance to their eponyms than the shell he’d dubbed Gaara—in his chubby, sand-filthy fingers.
“Correct.”
At the terse praise, Metal glows brighter than the sunbeams reflecting off the glass-clear waves. Then something seems to give him pause. He sets the two shells carefully on the ground beside the towel and wastes some time in rearranging them, his mottled pink shoulders hunched.
“Papa says we don’t have a clan,” Metal says, after quite some time of fidgeting. “Just like I don’t have a mama.”
“You don’t,” Gaara hastens to correct. Lee has endeavored to keep his son from having any contact with his family of origin, for obvious reasons. Though why he decided Gaara was any better a role model or caregiver is still a source of some consternation. “I should have said ‘family name’. Your personal name is Metal, and your family name is Lee, because you’re from the Lee family.”
“But you’re also part of our family.” Metal’s fingers twist into the sand.
The atrophied muscles of Gaara’s heartstrings tug once more.
“Yes.”
“And your name isn’t Lee.”
“Right.”
Metal’s fingers tunnel deeper into the earth. “So … what is your name?”
“Gaara.”
“No, silly!” Metal giggles, but when he turns to look up at Gaara from under the wide brim of the hat, his face switches right back to that deathly serious intensity. “Your other name!”
“Gaara,” Gaara repeats.
“Gaara … Gaara?”
“No.” Gaara stifles a snort. “Just Gaara.”
“Just Gaara?”
“Suna doesn’t use clan names or family names. A shinobi can be granted a title of status, or earn one with particularly impressive battle tactics or an especially unique jutsu, but that is neither common nor necessary. My full title is Sabaku no Gaara, Sabaku no Hyoutan Ouji, Sunagakure no Godaime Kazekage—Gaara of the Desert, Prince of the Sand Waterfall Gourd, The Fifth Lord Wind Shadow of the Village Hidden in the Sand—”
Metal’s eyes are massive, just as round as the umbrella overhead.
“—but that’s a bit of a mouthful. I prefer to just be called Gaara.”
“Oh.” Metal’s tense shoulders relax. “Phew.”
“Gaara, Metal!”
Heavy footfalls approach their umbrella at a pace far too rapid for a human, but just right for Lee. They both look up just as a tanned, muscular arm punches the salty air, held high.
“Look what I found! Sea scorpions!”
“Gaara?”
Gaara looks up from the stove’s single burner to find Metal standing in the doorway to the little kitchenette of the house they’ve rented. His bowlcut is all stuck up along one side of his head, his eyes gummy with sleep. He rubs his eyes with the back of one chubby fist. He looks for all the world like the idyll of childhood naivete.
From his other hand trails the ‘crab bucket’ he’s been attached to at the hip ever since he discovered he could retrieve tiny hermits and sand lice from their burrows on the beach. The bucket is presently empty—Lee refused to let Metal leave the shore without liberating his ‘new friends’, despite Gaara’s comment that the creatures would likely die from the shock of being removed from their homes and roughly handled by a child—which offers Gaara a small measure of relief. At least he doesn’t have to worry about Metal tracking wet sand all over the tidy quarters of the beach house.
“Where’s Papa?” Metal smacks his lips around cheek-wrinkling yawn.
Gaara sets his sand to mind the noodles simmering in their sauce—supper will keep for a few minutes—and wipes his oil-spattered hands on a dish towel as he turns to regard Metal properly.
“He went for a run. He didn’t want to wake you. How was your nap?”
“Uh-huh.” It’s not, technically speaking, an answer. Metal sets his bucket on the grooved wood of the thin pine dining table before he plants both hands in the seat of a chair to haul himself up into it.
The chair rocks perilously, and Gaara sends another small amount of sand to stabilize its legs on the slick tile floor while Metal settles in. Metal grabs hard onto the edge of the table and grunts, straining.
It takes Gaara a moment to realize he’s trying to pull his seat in. The sand urges the chair forward just a bit, enough to start it moving so Metal can pull himself in the rest of the way.
“Thank you!” Metal chirps, ever polite. The bridge of his button nose wrinkles. “It smells like fish.”
“That’s because I’m cooking fish.” Gaara pulls out the drawer of the small grill to show the bony mackerel roasting inside.
“Oh.” Metal sniffs, scrubbing at his nose with his sleeve.
He’s wearing the long-sleeved coverup that Lee insisted on putting back on him the moment he noticed his son had the slightest pink beginnings of sunburn on the thin skin of his shoulders. Gaara doesn’t have a hankie handy, so he lets the gesture rest. Lee will scold Metal when he finds the crust of snot on his sleeve later, he’s sure. No use belaboring the point.
“If you live at the beach, do you have to eat fish every day?” Metal pipes up.
Gaara allows a wrinkle to cross his brow. “Fish are an ample food source here on the coast, so people who live here eat it frequently. But—” he adds, at Metal’s bewildered expression. “—I don’t think they eat the exact same thing every single day.”
“How come we have to, then?” Metal’s spinning the bucket between his hands, and its plastic bottom screeches on the tabletop.
“Because there aren’t any natural water sources near Suna other than the groundwater and oases, so I don’t get to eat fish very often.”
“I don’t really like the fish,” Metal announces.
Gaara won’t be passing that little outburst along to Lee. Lee thinks it sacrilege to dislike any food—something about disregarding the good fortune of a full belly—but Gaara doesn’t see the harm in it. After all, his own taste for fish is restricted to just a few species, and you couldn’t force-feed him marron glacé even if he’d gone a week without eating.
“I like the salty meat. The glizzards.”
A boy after his own heart. Gaara’s lip twitches in a smile.
“Gizzards?” Gaara hazards. “Or lizards?” They’d eaten both when Metal was visiting Suna.
“Yeah, the glizzards,” Metal repeats.
Well, he’d consumed each with equal enthusiasm, so Gaara doubts it makes much difference which is truly his favorite.
The kitchen timer dings, and Gaara turns back to the stove to remove the fish from the grill and take the pan of noodles off the heat. He doesn’t bother with the oven mitts, which are shaped like fish with gaping mouths to form the thumbs. Instead he simply lets his Sand protect him from the heat.
“Hey, Gaara?” comes a voice from right at Gaara’s hip.
Gaara startles, and it’s only the quick action of the Sand stabilizing the other side of the pan that stops Metal from ending up with a face full of boiling hot soba.
“Metal!” Gaara snaps, even as he says a quick prayer of thanks to his mother’s spirit. “Don’t come near the stove while it’s on. You could have gotten burned.”
“Sorry!” Metal hustles back to the table, and this time when he sits down, it’s beneath the table, not in one of the chairs. He has both arms wrapped around the plastic bucket in an embrace, and its sides creak with how hard he squeezes it. “I’m sorry! Please don’t be mad.”
Gaara exhales hard through his nose, spreading out his fingers deliberately where they’ve clenched into fists, willing himself calm.
“I’m not angry.” He double-checks that all the heating elements are off before he crouches down, shuffling across the floor at Metal’s eye height. He reaches out with one hand under the table. “I was worried you were going to get hurt.”
“Sorry,” Metal repeats, and though his eyes are watery with unshed tears when he eases them open, he reaches back to take Gaara’s hand. “I just wanted to ask a question.”
“Go ahead.” Gaara squeezes the sweaty little hand clasped in his, but he doesn’t try to pull Metal out from his hiding place.
“Are you and Papa married?” Metal is studying the emptiness of his bucket once more.
Gaara founders. How did they get here from questions about traditional seaside dietary practices?
“No,” he admits, though it pains him to do so. It’s not that he doesn’t want to be married to Lee, it’s just that marriage in Suna has very … specific implications.
The door that serves as the main entrance to the small clapboard house is glass, looking out over a rough paved patio and a little stone walkway that trails down into the quiet coastal village. Beyond it lies the ocean, and it’s here that Gaara turns his attention now, never letting go of Metal’s hand. Above that glassy surface, the sunset sky is the colors of a Konoha autumn, the cornfield yellow of the sun fading into a marigold orange and maple-leaf red cloudscape. That future season feels all too far from the balmy summer evening they’re sharing now. The next time Gaara will be able to see Lee and Metal is the tri-village summit with Mist scheduled for October.
Gaara wonders if his heart is hardened, that it doesn’t fill him with regret that their next meeting should be so far off. On the other hand, the only thing that could bring them together before then would be a major international emergency, so perhaps Gaara isn’t so wrong to be content with what he’s offered. Stability is nothing to turn his nose up at, and the long stretches between intervillage meetings speak only to a hard-won peace.
“Is that why you and Papa don’t have the same name?”
Gaara settles down onto the cool tile floor for the long haul, curling his legs under him. After a moment’s hesitation, Metal abandons his bucket to scramble from under the table and into Gaara’s lap.
“That’s part of it,” Gaara begins to explain. He wraps an arm around Metal’s middle and hauls him into a more comfortable position. He could easily stand and move them to the chair, and perhaps it would be more prudent to, but he’s loath to disturb this casual comfort. He tries not to be captivated by how casually Metal grabs and plays with his fingers, as if he’s not the least bit frightened of the hand that once crushed his own father nearly to death.
Of course, even if he and Lee were to marry, it would be unthinkable for the Kazekage to take the name of a foreign clan. Much less one as disgraced as the Lees. Lee has done a fair amount to establish his own reputation separate from his family’s, but there would be no stopping his relationship to the Stone Village’s infamous Lee Clan from being revealed if their relationship were to be entered into law, as a matter of public record. In fact, Gaara is shocked that the link hasn’t yet been uncovered, as much as Suna’s gossips enjoy speculating on their Kazekage’s public dalliances with a foreign jounin.
Not that Gaara’s relationship with Lee is a dalliance. But that’s always how it’s framed. Like something temporary to be cast aside when Gaara finally grows up and agrees to a proper marriage, the sort with a bride selected by the Council.
“Like Auntie Tenten and Uncle Neji,” Metal’s little voice interrupts.
Gaara doesn’t bring up that it was actually a minor scandal when Neji announced he would discard his allegiance to the Hyuuga and adopt the mantle of his wife’s family. The small clan of sealing experts that Tenten originates from keep their full names secret—the proper name is believed to have the power to seal a person’s soul—but Gaara supposes Metal would have been present for a number of their clandestine ceremonies, given how close Lee is to his former team.
Metal continues unawares, “That’s how you tell everyone you want to make a family and that you love each other.”
Gaara pretends that comment doesn’t ache.
Metal bends Gaara’s thumb and pinky into his palm, and when he holds Gaara’s hand up to the light, the nails on the back of Gaara’s three outstretched fingers remind him of three seashells.
“So, how do people know you love me and Papa?”
How does Gaara even begin to answer such a question?
Because he put the security of his position at risk by assenting to appear in public hand-in-hand with Lee for the first time, all those years ago? Because he’s already resigned himself to the death of Suna’s Kazekage line with him, because he will never accept another spouse that isn’t Lee? Because his mother’s spirit reacts to danger to Lee and to Metal as if the risk were to Gaara’s own flesh?
Gaara’s heart could be ripped from his chest and left beating on the floor right now, red blood seeping into white grout, and it would be kinder.
“That’s—” Gaara’s jaw works. “That’s not how things are done in Suna. The joining of two families is an official contract, solidified only by the production of an heir who carries both lineages’ jutsu. Such a union is simply an unthinkable impossibility with an unrelated village, not to mention that—”
He can tell Metal has lost the thread by the way he drops Gaara’s hand, spinning around in his lap to frown up into Gaara’s face. There are still crusty little remnants of sleep in the corners of his long lashes, and Gaara wipes them away with a thumb.
“What I mean to say is—” Gaara draws a thin breath and lets it out shakily. “—there are many different ways to become a family. Names are just one part of it. There are other important things, too, like having children together or sharing a home.”
Metal’s pinched little frown only deepens. “But me and Papa live in Konoha, and you live in the big house in Suna.”
“Right.” Gaara winces, and wishes more than anything that Lee were here right now to soften this blow. Lee has a way of smoothing away all the rough edges of harsh reality. There is no easy way to articulate how much Gaara would like to be able to wake up to Lee and Metal’s joyous training noises every morning, no matter how early, or how much he wishes he could cook dinner for them every night. But the decisions he and Lee both made when they were far too young to envision such a future have stripped that choice. And now the entanglements of Gaara’s many responsibilities feel at times less like a comforting web of bonds and more like a fisherman’s tightening net.
He stares out at the darkening, leaf-toned horizon, and he thinks about what Lee might say in the face of this question. He turns back to look at Metal's eager, searching gaze, the dark of his eyes and the crumple of his brow so like his father.
“Sometimes,” Gaara says, “being a family is just a choice you make. Choosing to love each other no matter what stands in your way.”
Just then, the glass door shrieks open. Lee stands in the opening as if summoned, his sweat-shiny edges all golden from the sunset behind him.
“Hello, you two! I didn’t expect to see you there. Are you playing a game?”
“Papa! You’re back!”
Metal’s kicked leg sends the crab bucket skittering across the floor as he scrambles out of Gaara’s lap and rushes to his father’s side. Lee hauls his son onto his hip before he crosses into the kitchen, setting something paper-wrapped on the table with a heavy, wet slap.
Gaara climbs gracelessly to his feet. He stares into the glassy eyes of the flat-bodied fish Lee has deposited before him.
“I thought we could cook it for dinner tomorrow!” Lee thunders. “I know flounder isn’t quite to your taste, Gaara, but isn’t it wonderful to try new things?”
He seems not to notice when Gaara and Metal exchange identical, despairing glances.
“Metal’s been asking a lot of very interesting questions this week,” Gaara murmurs into the breadth of Lee’s clavicle, where the collar of his sleep tanktop has drifted down to expose bare skin.
It’s close to midnight, and the pale moonlight through the curtains reveals Metal whuffling little snores at the ceiling. He's splayed out in the camp bed beside them, arms and legs akimbo in a perfect mimic of Lee’s standard sleep posture. It’s the first night that the moon has been bright enough for him to fall asleep on his own, rather than clambering up between them on the room’s large bed.
It would be best if Lee breaks his son of this habit before he begins the Academy next year, where simulated away missions will be part of the curriculum. Shino is surprisingly doting for a first-year instructor, but Gaara doubts even he would be amenable to a student climbing into his bedroll from fear of the dark. Gaara assumes Lee knows this, so he hasn’t raised the topic. Besides, there’s a sweet sort of comfort to it—the three of them all in one bed, Metal’s tiny body wedged between the two of them like a particularly bony hot water bottle.
For a moment, Lee’s breathing is so steady and even that Gaara assumes he, too, has fallen asleep.
Gaara reaches behind himself to fumble for his wax earplugs. They're his sole defense against the mighty whistle of Lee’s snores. He has no idea how Metal puts up with it, night after night. The walls of their Konoha apartment are so thin. Gaara fell asleep without them exactly once, at the very beginning of their relationship, and had been shaken from his fragile slumber by a cranking growl that more closely resembled a bear’s roar than anything he’d expect to come from a human’s mouth. He’d gone out and purchased the earplugs the following day, and they’d been a nightly staple ever since. Whatever small disadvantage they afford his nighttime defenses is more than made up for by being alert enough the next day to properly regulate his chakra. Better that than stumbling through his day a groggy, shambling mess. Besides, Lee’s reflexes are faster even than Gaara’s, and he’s lucky enough to be able to fight in his sleep. He could defend the both of them without ever waking, if it comes to that.
“Hmm? Is that so?” Lee’s hand finds the back of Gaara’s head clumsily, fingers combing through the disheveled mats there. The damp salt air has turned Gaara’s hair into an unmanageable ball of frizz, and he’s more or less given up on brushing it, at least for the duration of their vacation. He’s already broken two comb teeth trying.
“He wanted to know why my name wasn’t Gaara Lee.” Gaara drops the wax plugs back onto the bedside table, bringing his hand back to curve around Lee’s ribs once more.
Lee snorts. “That’s ridiculous.”
But even without the jinchuuriki eyes that allow him to see in the dark, Gaara would know Lee’s flush by the heating of the skin beneath his cheek. The blush builds on him until it’s hot as the coals they roasted their sweet potatoes in last night, a feast for their final evening of vacation.
“I believe the exact question was something like, ‘how will people know that I love the two of you?’”
Lee grimaces, scrubbing a hand roughly down his face so that all his features stretch and warp in its wake.
“That’s probably my fault. Sai-kun and Ino-san had their commitment ceremony right before we left for Suna, and I did a rather poor job explaining why he adopted her clan name as his own. I’m sorry you ended up having to be the one to explain that to him.”
“I didn’t mind.” And for all of his hesitance and reticence, Gaara really didn’t mind it. Sharing parenting duties, for as long as the three of them are together, certainly goes a ways towards solidifying the fragile structure of family they’ve built. Answering the endless questions of a curious young mind is just one part of that. At least Metal hasn’t gotten to the point Shikadai has, where he just responds to every explanation with, ‘Why?’
“I just know he can be … a bit of a handful. With all of his needs. You can always let me know if he’s bothering you.”
Gaara chuckles, turning his face into Lee’s chest and breathing deep the salt-sea-sweat scent of him.
“Please. You’re a handful. Metal is … barely a thimbleful.”
Beneath his ear, Lee’s chest starts to shake as he tries and fails to subdue his laughter.
“Shh,” Gaara hisses, pinching a tender spot between Lee’s ribs to hush him. When his guffaws finally subside to uneven, snorting breaths, Gaara looks back up at him.
“Does it bother you?”
There’s not much of Lee to be seen from this angle, with the room this silvery-dark. The bulging column of his throat, a familiar scar on the corner of his jaw, the fine fall of a few strands of dark hair like ink on their white pillowcase.
“Hmm?” Lee shifts with a rustle of sheets, and the mattress springs complain beneath him. “Metal? Of course not.”
“No.” Gaara refuses to meet Lee’s eye, even as Lee props up on an elbow to frown down at him in confusion. “That … I didn’t take your name. That we aren’t able to properly marry, and that you two aren’t able to come live with me in Suna, or me in Konoha.”
Here it is, laid bare, the thing that’s been digging at Gaara all week, as surely as little fingers leave channels in the sand. Lee talks quite the brave game about the infinite variations of family structures, and Gaara has gone along with mimicking those messages for Metal’s sake, but he can’t help but wonder if Lee wants more. If what they have is lacking in some way.
“What? I—no,” Lee stammers. “I understand the … complexities of your position. And Metal does, too. He and I have talked about all of this before. He’s just … he’s just young, so he gets caught up in his hopes and dreams.”
“I hope he never loses that innocence.” Gaara turns away to look at Metal’s placid, sleeping face, his rumpled hair aglow in the moonlight. As he watches, a tiny hand creeps above the blanket and gropes blindly along the coverlet, finally settling on the handle of the crab bucket and falling still. “I’d like for it to be something that we could hope for.”
“I would, too.” Lee pushes the hair back from Gaara’s forehead, the heel of his palm covering up Gaara’s scar as he cups his skull. He winds his fingers in the curls, soft friction on Gaara’s tender scalp. “But Gaara—”
“Would you say yes?”
“Huh?” Lee’s scratching fingers fall still, voice caught in his throat.
“If I asked you to marry me?” Gaara shakes off Lee’s grip and rolls over fully to lean on his hands, braced over Lee’s body. His next words are too brusque, too intent to properly be called a whisper. “If I asked you to join your family by law and by blood with mine, would you want that? If I could change the laws and make that happen? You’d have to give up Konoha, just as Temari had to give up Suna, but—”
“Is … this a proposal?” Lee’s eyes are glassy with unspilled tears, but his expression is more confused than joyous.
“No.” Gaara’s shoulders slump as he sags back down to Lee’s chest. “It’s just. Speculation. If it was something you wanted, I could—”
“I’m perfectly content as we are.” Lee’s hand finds Gaara’s waist beneath the thin sheet. “If you want or—or need things to change, that’s fine, but don’t go running off causing a political kerfuffle for my sake.”
“I … no.” Gaara shuffles their limbs into an alignment that satisfies him, and then settles. “I miss you both when we’re apart, but I also know that’s the way things have to be. No one person can have everything.”
“I don’t know that I agree with that, but I’m willing to wait to have everything if you are.” Lee’s hand is warm on Gaara’s skin up under his sleep shirt, and the squeeze he gives him all steady, comforting pressure. “And if it can never happen, that’s okay, too. Whatever form our family takes, I’m happy with it.”
The heel of Lee’s hand draws a line down Gaara’s spine. There’s a dull crackle as he rubs over a particularly tense patch of vertebrae.
“You haven’t been doing your stretches,” Lee scolds, but there’s no heat in his fond whisper, and a few more passes of his hand have all of Gaara’s muscles unknotted, boneless and breathing deep.
“Say, Gaara?” The rumble of Lee’s voice is so low that it barely stirs Gaara from his doze.
“Hm?”
“Are you happy? With the way things are with me and Metal?”
Gaara presses a soft, clumsy kiss to Lee’s chest. The heartbeat beneath is tidal locked to the lap of waves barely audible outside, and his skin tastes like brine, warm with the memory of late summer sunshine.
“You two are my family. Of course I’m happy.”