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Time passes in a very odd fashion after the failure of the Konoha Crush.
There are the first days of running back to the village and Gaara’s weight on Kankurou’s shoulders for part of the trip, and as weak as his legs might be from the chakra depletion of his fight with Shino, there’s something so fragile, so light, so broken, so different and delicate about his little brother that he can’t find himself asking for a break or refusing to give a hand.
Then there’s the discovery of Rasa’s death and it’s numbing more than it’s shocking. For a moment, no one talks to them. The residential floor of the Kazekage building is empty except for the three of them, all councilmen and high officials too busy with the investigation, the scrutinizing of the whole administration on the lookout for moles and traitors, and the diplomatic exchange to avoid an all-out war with Konoha to send someone to check on the Fourth’s offspring just yet. None of them is a Chuunin, none of them is major, and as much as they should be the default pool of hires for the next Kazekage, this seems out of the question for now.
Throughout all of it, no mission orders: there’s no time and too much alarm for the village to send its troops for anything else than security emergencies, too much conflict with the daimyo to get any missions from the Land of Wind anyway, and it has been specifically commanded than none of the Sand Siblings should get out of the protected walls of the tower because of the risk of further assassination attempts and other acts of treason against them.
Temari and Kankurou have never been extraordinarily close. Of Gaara, of course, because it just never seemed possible even if they had wanted to. But of each other, too: enough practice for Baki not to sigh at their lack of cohesive teamwork on the battlefield (though honestly once Gaara joined their team they mostly stopped being needed in any way to begin with) and the inevitable amount of crossing paths in the corridors or kitchen when living in the same building (though Gaara has been exceptionally good at avoiding them entirely for the past six years, presumably because he mostly moves at night), that’s about it. Temari thinks Kankurou’s cocky and nosy. Kankurou thinks Temari’s a buzzkill and takes herself way too seriously when she’s only one year (nine months) older than him. Gaara thinks both of them are too noisy and childish when they should know better. Both of them mostly just think that Gaara is freaky and too dangerous and unstable to mess with. They don’t need to get along anyway, just to refrain from punching each other in the face over the house chores and the sharing of food and space, which they’ve succeeded to do so far, mostly.
But something’s changed.
One day Gaara asks Kankurou if he needs help washing the dishes and he’s so disarmed he finds himself stuttering and stumbling on his words trying to answer he’s fine. The only time he’d ever seen his brother remotely interact with a plate was to throw it across the room at his head for raising his voice a tad too loud after Gaara complained about him being (eight minutes) late.
Gaara has probably always been silent and discrete, but until that point, he was also carefully avoiding both of them, so they hadn’t entirely taken the measure of his ability to just appear and disappear next to them at all times of night and day. Every time Temari or Kankurou jumps seeing him, his forehead bends in a brow-less frown, his mouth curves into a slight pout, and his hand sometimes comes to rest on his chin. It’s not an expression they’ve ever seen on him. It’s not angry, it’s frustrated and focused, like he’s processing a lot of information and trying to build something with it. This in itself is extremely unsettling, because Gaara doesn’t build anything. He destroys.
One day Temari jumps at the arm of sand passing next to her head to open a cupboard in the kitchen. Gaara’s never actually hurt her (yet), but she knows what the sand can do, and she knows their common blood, while still being something of a protection, doesn’t make it safe in any way for her to be around her brother. Gaara does the face again.
Little by little, he learns to clear his throat or knock before entering a room. He starts using his sand less too. Before, he was barely ever seen un-crossing his arms. Grabbing things, closing doors, fighting, threatening. The sand could and would do all of it for him. It’s weird using his own muscles. He has to get on the tip of his toes to catch things. Sometimes it’s not even enough. His joints feel rusty and painful after he’s been moving them around all day. The feeling of touching all those different textures and materials with his skin is uncomfortable. Many things are cold or hot, wet or sticky, and the sound and vibrations when his skin or nails brush against them are too often disgusting. The sand didn’t care about all that, but his flesh body does. Sometimes he wants to give up, but the effort is worth it. It’s not too perceptible at first, but with time Temari and Kankurou start to get less wary, they put less distance between him and them whenever he’s in the room, and they get less jumpy, until, eventually, something fully shifts in the way they look at him.
He likes it as much as he hates it.
Feeling loved is something, not entirely new, maybe, it did feel like that with Yashamaru, until…
Feeling loved is something unfamiliar. It’s powerful and it fills him, somehow, without having ever known he was empty before. He thought he only lacked sense and purpose, and while this is also one, it is, at the same time, something entirely different and more than whatever he had imagined.
But with love, something else, probably even stronger and more visible, grows in his siblings’ eyes that he can’t bear the sight of. It’s fear, but not the same kind as it used to be at all. Not of him. For him.
He’s heard it first in Kankurou’s voice on the day of his fight with Naruto, but it took some time once home for this shift to fully settle and be visible again. And it’s terrifying. He’s never been safe, it’s somehow the centre of the story. But he’s never been safe because he’s powerful. Or used to be. None of his enemies or allies (which is often just the state before) had ever looked at him like he was fragile, breakable, vulnerable.
And now.
Temari and Kankurou frown at him sometimes, but not like they used to. Not in anger. In a way that is filled with the thought of “Should I say something?” “Should I do something?” and it makes him wanna crawl inside of his own skin, add layers and layers of sand again until there’s no way they can keep looking at him as if his a frail little boy.
Then one day, when they’ve eventually been allowed to go out to train after Temari threatened to destroy half of the Kazekage tower with her fan out of the absolute exasperation and restlessness of being locked in all day long, Gaara breaks.
He feels it before it happens, in the weakness of his legs, in the cold sweat on his back, in the black dots clouding his vision, but not soon enough to stop it. It’s too hot, and most of all, he’s been doing too much. He’s been trying to train without the sand, not to scare his siblings, fearing he might break all of the progress he’s made in them trusting him, or at the very least in them not dreadfully fearing him. But it’s too hard, too painful, too draining, and the exhaustion catches up with him in the form of lead being poured into his too-weak muscles, his sand barely managing to cushion his fall.
---
“What the fuck was that?” Kankurou exclaims, too loud, too close, too soon into Gaara’s face when he wakes up again.
He’s been laid down in the shade of a nearby wall, his scarf folded under his head as a makeshift pillow, though it doesn’t seem to be doing much for the aching in his neck and back.
Temari lets out a sigh that sounds like a grunt.
“Kankurou stop yelling, how the hell do you think this is going to help!”
She pushes him by both shoulders as she says it, effectively forcing him to put a little more distance between Gaara and him, but invading his space with her own frame as she does.
There’s some bickering that he can’t fully process, voices getting louder and messier in his brain as the tension crackles in the air between them, and for the first time in many occurrences of this kind of situation, his main reflex is to wish he could disappear, rather than thinking about breaking their neck in half with his sand.
He doesn’t realize the way it rattles on the ground, climbing over his legs and arms and floating in the air around him in an attempt to create yet another wall, yet another cocoon. As much as he’s been trying and learning to be more aware and more deliberate in the movements of his sand over the past weeks, a lot of it is still very much a reflex, and the constant vigilance and reflection and effort put into controlling every of his thought, emotions and impulse that usually past through on their own to inhabit it are draining in a way he’s never experienced before.
Temari and Kankurou both freeze.
The clenching of his fists, mostly meant as a reaction, and an out to the frustration, overwhelment, and lack of ability to engage his brain into actually acting on the situation, only serves to make them back down further.
If he could, he would get up and run away, but everything in his body is painful and shaking and his head is already spinning way too much without him moving an inch. If he could, he would take a deep breath, make the sand fall back down on the ground, and say something - an apology maybe, or some reassurance - but his mouth is too dry and his throat too raw, the hustle under his brain too loud, and the presence of both his siblings next to him, however moved he might be by their worry, too invasive.
“Go away,” is what he manages to produce with a croaking voice that is half-whisper half-bark, and it works wonders to gain a little more personal space, but the scared expression on Temari and Kankurou’s faces are barely worth it.
They exchange a concerned look over him, trying to work out whether to stay or leave, talk or shut up, act or fly. At this stage, both of them have grown somewhat trusting of Gaara’s genuine efforts to change his behaviour and get closer to them, but none of it can be enough to erase fully the reflexes burned in their flesh through years of living and working with him, and none of it erases Shukaku’s presence, power, and influence either way.
After a moment of tense immobility and silence from the three parties, Gaara finally moves, sand pushing in his back to help him sit up and hands coming to cover his face, fingers clenched against his forehead.
“You alright there, buddy?”
Kankurou’s voice has nothing of the nonchalance of his words. It’s quavering and uncertain, all the assured big brother energy he’s trying to push in it failing miserably to prevent the fear and unease from coming through.
“I-” He winces at the pain growing stronger under his skull. “I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, right, that doesn’t really answer my question though.”
Temari huffs.
“It’s because your question is stupid. Of course not, he’s not alright, he just fainted, are you fucking blind? Maybe if you stopped being up his throat forcing him to talk he could actually take a breath.”
If there’s one thing Gaara has learned about Kankurou (and Temari seemingly hasn’t), it’s that there are little things less effective at making him quieter than asking him to stop shouting.
This time around doesn’t depart from the rule.
“Hey, fuck off, I’m trying to help here! Do something if you’re unhappy about it!”
“I am doing something. I’m asking you to shut up because you’re only making things worse with your big dumb mouth,” she hisses through gritted teeth, and while she is arguably less loud than their brother, he can’t completely say her intervention is helping the situation either.
The more their arguing continues and grows worse, the less Gaara is able to filter or process any of it, until he finds himself completely drifting without anything left for him to hold on to, and he feels the rush of his chakra back into the sand, spikes piercing out from the ground all around them as he screams.
“Shut up!”
The wind swiping through the silent and deadly still training ground is hot and stifling, and he finds somewhere in him the strength to push himself up on wobbly legs, his walking made of intermittent stumbles and falls as much as actual steps as he leaves the place in a hurry under his sibling’s gaze.
---
Ignoring each other is not something they’re untrained for, and the rest of the afternoon passes in an all in all familiar fashion. Gaara (presumably) stays in his room doing god-knows-what, Kankurou only gets out of his workshop to retrieve snacks and water while working on a new senbon trap for Karasu, and Temari does shuriken training in the middle of the living room because “That’s where I have the longest distance to do it since we’re locked in here and if you’re not able to dodge them when I’m not even aiming at you in the first place, frankly you don’t deserve to be a shinobi anyway and your death won’t be that big of a loss.”
Really, it shouldn’t be that much of a bother. Gaara had A Moment, it’s not like it’s the first time this happened, and he didn’t even try to kill someone while at it. A month ago, it wouldn’t have been an event. And a month ago, ignoring him, and ignoring each other wouldn’t have been an effort. It would have been easy. (It wouldn’t have. None of that had ever been easy or comfortable, just familiar and acceptable because there wasn’t a single sign that any kind of other option was available anyway, but it’s probably not something any of them has the resources to word yet.)
Now, things are different. Now, everything in the situation is itchy and uncomfortable, like a too-rough, too-coarse, too-thick fabric that you can never settle in, that keeps reminding you of its presence and of how it constricts you. Now they have to deal with a whole range of emotions including “worry” and “guilt” and “missing the feeling of actual caring human relationships”.
“Do you think Gaara is okay?” Kankurou asks after dodging a kunai passing through the corridor on his way out of the toilets.
“Wash your hands before you talk to me,” is the answer he gets, Temari’s eyes still locked on the wooden target she put on the wall.
“Why the fuck do you care, I don’t talk to you with my hands?”
It’s not like he’s in the habit of not doing it at all. Most times.
There’s the sharp thud of a shuriken hitting the plank after an angry throw as he reaches the kitchen sink.
“What did I just say?”
He can’t refrain from letting out a loud sigh.
“I’m literally doing it right now! God, why do you need to be such a bitch?”
Whatever the rest of the complaint was meant to be is cut sharp by a kunai placed under his throat and, for a few seconds, only the sound of the open faucet behind him breaks the lead-heavy silence of the room.
“Watch your fucking tone.”
The metal is cold where it brushes against his skin as he swallows.
He should know better by now than to push Temari’s buttons whenever she’s in that kind of mood, but evidently, their relationship has been even smoother than he had noticed recently, to the point of forgetting about basic survival rules.
There’s something odd in the way she looks at him though, it’s even more closed and angry than during most of their fights over the past years, but at the same time so much more emotional and sadder. Hurt.
“Are you okay?” he asks tentatively, foregoing the commonsense-driven idea of shutting up and getting the hell out of there.
The blade pushes closer.
“Why are you asking?”
If he’s being honest, he’s not even sure he knows. Like most times since their father’s death and Gaara’s seeming redemption, he (and, he suspects, Temari as well) has no fucking idea what he’s doing. He’s not sure the choice he’s making at the moment is right, but he knows any other feels wrong.
“You don’t- look okay,” is what he finds himself uttering, the muscles in his shoulders strangely relaxing while the kunai under his chin doesn’t move one bit.
“When has that ever been your problem?” she retorts, jaw clenching and eyes desperately trying not to let anything more than anger pass through.
Maybe a few weeks ago he would have fallen for it. Not anymore.
“Never,” he admits, surprised himself by the casualness of his tone, but it’s true, and pretending otherwise wouldn’t do any of them any good. “But only fools and dead men never change their minds.”
Somehow it seems convincing enough, and after a few seconds of intense staring down, her weapon finds its way back to the pocket strapped to her leg.
“You’re fucking weird today,” she states before turning away, and he thinks they might have reached their quota of interaction for the day when she stills, not turning back to face him when she speaks again.
“It’s strange, feeling both scared of him and for him.”
He nods.
“Yeah. It is.”
---
Both of them are woken up by a loud crashing noise coming from the kitchen in the middle of the night.
Both of them are evidently expecting to find the other to yell at, rather than a tiny redhead curled up on the floor in a pool of broken dishes.
Both of them freeze.
It’s not that it’s the first time Gaara has broken a plate, but the last time around he wasn’t scared of that. He hasn’t really looked scared of anything so far, to be honest.
Kankurou snaps out of his torpor first at the sound of Gaara sniffling.
“Hey! What happened? Are you injured?”
It should be a stupid question because Gaara is never injured, that’s kind of his thing. Yet, they’ve seen him bleed twice already recently. Yet, he’s here, frail, ridiculously so, shivering on the ground and jumping at the least of their sound or movement. Yet he’s fucking crying.
“Kankurou, give him some space,” Temari says once she’s managed to shake off part of the uncanny feeling of seeing Gaara like this.
Her tone is firm but less brutal than what it was in the afternoon, and Kankurou is also seemingly more inclined to listen. He backs down from a step or two, sitting where he finds a spot that looks somewhat devoid of broken dishware shards, back resting against a cupboard behind him.
Temari stays standing up a comfortable few meters away from her brothers.
After a moment, Gaara’s breathing changes a tad, his mouth opening like to say something, but it takes another couple of attempts for the air to actually make its way into words.
“I’m sorry.”
Kankurou bends down with a frown and a hand on Gaara’s shoulder, evidently having a much harder time than Temari understanding the concept of personal space.
“Hey, it’s alright, everyone breaks stuff, it happens.”
To be fair, it probably actually happened more than needed (or healthy) in this household. Apparently, siblings weren’t supposed to constantly throw shit at one another when pissed off, or so Rasa had said on one of the rare occurrences he was actually home to see any of it. It did not really stop them.
“I- didn’t want to wake you up,” Gaara utters as an explanation.
Kankurou rubs what he intends as a reassuring circle against his shoulder but that mostly achieves to blur his ability to produce thought further.
“Okay, that’s considerate, but you did, so um- now that we’re here maybe tell us what’s going on?”
As much as he would want to answer, maybe explain, maybe reassure, maybe apologize again, the layers between his train of thought, himself, and the outside, are growing way too thick.
He’s becoming every second more uncomfortably hyper-aware of each spot where his clothes fold and press against his skin, his sand armour having fallen off in most places from the exhaustion and chakra depletion. Kankurou’s hand on his shoulder blade is warm and heavy, and while there’s still, somewhere, a comforting haze springing out of it, the way it makes the fabric move against his back feels like glass paper.
“Hey, Gaara!”
His eyes blink open, consciousness cutting through the fatigue and overload at the sound of Kankurou’s snapping voice. Evidently, he’s been saying his name for a while already.
He seems to relax a little when their eyes cross.
“You’re fucking shivering. Are you sick or something? Temari can go fetch you a blanket.”
“I’m not cold.”
He’s hot, actually, too much so, and sweat tingles at the back of his neck.
“My sand is not answering to me,” he eventually adds.
Kankurou removes his hand like he just burned himself on him. Temari jumps off the wall she was leaning against.
“WHAT?!”
Gaara’s entire body tenses at the sound, his head burying further under him like he’s scared his siblings are about to beat him up and Kankurou can’t help but wonder for an instant if that’s what he used to look like as a kid in front of Gaara’s threats.
“That’s why I dropped the plates.”
As much as he’s been trying to do without the sand for the past weeks, today has been enough (too much), and he isn’t tall enough yet to use the wall-mounted cupboard without it either way.
“Is it a problem with Shukaku?”
Kankurou would wish, really wish for his voice not to sound like that, broken and scared and obviously failing at pushing back the vision of blue eyes, drooling teeth, and blood to the back of his mind, but it’s too late for Gaara not to have picked up on it already.
“No.”
It’s too sharp, too firm, too cutting. Gaara pauses, trying to gather enough focus and strength to sit up, and Kankurou’s right: the tremor in his arms is even worse than it was when he first entered the kitchen.
“I need- help.”
“What for?”
It’s Temari asking this time and her voice is completely different than before. It’s not as annoyed as it used to be, nor fully matching the pale and scared expression her face had taken at the mention of the demon. It’s tender, somehow, and as much as it’s something Kankurou has been starting to be able to pull off more and more regularly over the past weeks, her, not so much.
“Eating.”
---
“What the fuck do you mean, you haven’t eaten in days?” Temari shouts while Kankurou’s busying himself with boiling water for rice over the stove.
He wishes there were words to explain exactly what the thought of food means to him: the disgust and overload of the smells and tastes and textures in his mouth when he usually wouldn’t do as little as to let anything touch his skin without the sand armour as protection, the sickening feeling of being full and having to wait hours for his body to be clean, light, untouched again, and the memory of the poison - getting into his blood, leaving him shivering, covered in a cold sweat, retching and throwing up in a weak body that wouldn’t answer him properly anymore - making him want to spit out everything the second it crosses his lips; and maybe there are words, but none that he can figure out how to use right now.
“I don’t like it,” is what he finds himself answering.
Squatting in front of him, Temari’s lips open to let out a comment about how that’s not really the question, how whether you like it or not you have to eat, or you die, but her voice breaks before she can say any of it, the thought of “Maybe that’s the whole point.” suddenly crossing her mind.
On the ground, Gaara hasn’t stopped trembling.
“Can I touch you?”
He shakes his head, hugging his knees tighter against his chest.
“Okay. That’s fine. Can you tell me why it is that you hate eating so much you would rather be in the state you are in right now than do it?”
Gaara’s not sure Temari has ever talked to him like that. As much as she’s been more understanding and respectful of his boundaries than Kankurou, who, arguably, is trying, but ultimately not understanding most of it, she’s never really been doing so in such a soft and caring way. Motherly way, if he has to guess. Not that he has the knowledge to be sure, but-
“I don’t.” It’s hard to change his thoughts into words through the hypoglycemia-induced brain fog, but it does seem like the more he does, the clearer the path from himself to the outside becomes. “I don’t want to feel like that.”
“Fine. Great. Then what’s the issue?”
“Eating is- hard.”
“Why?”
There’s nothing judgmental or aggressive in her tone, which, in itself, is disorienting, but there’s incomprehension, and it’s not that easier to handle because he doesn’t know how to explain, doesn’t understand why it’s not obvious, why he’s seemingly the only one to feel any of this, doesn’t know if it’s because of Shukaku, because of the sand, or if it’s just him and he’s just that damaged.
It used to be easier. There were more leftovers when Rasa was there, things he knew he could safely eat because his siblings or father had had some too and he had made sure no one had passed through the kitchen since. He used to be less tired, too, but now, trying not to use the sand as much, and making the near-constant effort to control his voice and words and looks and movements while spending time with Temari and Kankurou to prove worthy of their trust, everything was just so much harder and more painful than summoning the concentration it took to gather bearable and safe enough food had become increasingly impossible.
“It’s disgusting. And scary. I-” He pauses and shivers. “I don’t want to be poisoned again.”
“Why would you be poisoned?”
“Because it’s the only-”
He’s stopped mid-sentence by the memory of his blood flowing out of the wound the Uchiha boy carved in his shoulder. It makes him wanna crawl into the lifeless sand on the floor and bury himself there.
“It’s the easiest way to get to me,” he eventually corrects.
“But who would do that?”
“The council. The people who killed our father. Our father too but not anymore because he’s dead.”
She doesn’t bother asking if it happened before, the “not anymore” part of Gaara’s explanation makes it clear enough. Her eyes briefly cross with Kankurou’s with a matching worried frown as the conclusion settled between the two of them. As much as they knew about Rasa’s fluctuant position towards Gaara, the way he went from investing all of his hope into this “project” to abandoning it entirely to rehabilitating him in the Konoha Crush plan, the exact extent of how far he had been willing to go to set their brother aside had not been as clear as it was becoming right now. In hindsight, it might be a good thing he wasn’t there to witness and react to the complete failure of the use of Shukaku during the invasion.
“When did it happen last?”
“I think- last year. I don’t know.”
It’s harder to keep track of the time when one doesn’t sleep half of the nights.
Kankurou interrupts before Temari can press the matter.
“Your meal’s ready, let’s sit together, yeah?”
---
“Kankurou, you had dinner already,” Temari sighs as he serves himself next.
“Gaara said it helped that I would have a taste.”
He picks up a bite with his chopsticks.
“You’re not having a taste, you’re eating a whole ass bowl of rice!”
He feels the irritation and anger starting to stir in his gut, but opts for pushing it down, taking a glance at Gaara tensing on the other side of the table.
He shrugs.
“So what? I’m 14 and in my growth spurt, I need energy.”
“You’re just using Gaara’s struggle to get extra food.”
His mouth is already half full again when he answers.
“Why do you care? There’s enough for all of us and you’re not my mom.”
There’s not much grit in his voice and he’s more pouting than anything else, but he still realizes how wrong his sentence was the second he gets a glimpse of Temari’s face.
He chokes while swallowing.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t-”
She doesn’t stay in the room long enough to hear the rest of his sentence.
The walls tremble when she closes her door.
Neither he nor Gaara says a thing at first after that, until the silence gets so heavy it’s becoming stifling. He takes a deep breath in an attempt to free some of the pressure in his chest before turning to his little brother, still in front of his almost full bowl.
“Sorry. I’ll take care of that later. Let’s just finish dinner first,” he says, sticking his chopstick back into the rice before him, but the heart is not much in it anymore. “I’m sorry it’s not haute cuisine,” he adds, more to be comforted by the sound of his own words than to initiate an actual discussion.
As much progress as he’s made in socializing recently, Gaara’s definitely not there yet.
“It’s fine,” his brother answers. His voice has started regaining some of the usual composure it had lost when they found him in the kitchen earlier and something relaxes a little in Kankurou. “I prefer plain foods anyway. They’re less overwhelming,” he adds, glancing at Kankurou for a few seconds, just long enough to see him cocking his head and to note that his face looks weird without the paint.
He hadn’t looked at him enough to notice it lacking until that point.
He goes back to staring at his bowl.
“Well,” Kankurou eventually comments with a chuckle. “You’re in luck then because I’m a shitty cook! Temari says my dishes taste like sand.”
Gaara takes the time to swallow his bite before answering.
“They don’t.”
It’s said like a simple statement, as if it wasn’t somehow implying Gaara had tried eating sand recently enough to remember what it was like.
Kankurou doesn’t comment.
“Why did she get mad at you?”
“Temari?”
“Yes.”
He stays silent for a moment, fiddling around with the food left in his bowl. Maybe she was right. Maybe that’s more than he can get down.
“You know, Temari and I, we were not doing that much better with one another than you with us, or us with you.”
“Did she ever threaten to kill you?”
“She put a knife down my throat just this afternoon.”
Gaara feels his lips drawing a silent “Oh.” He hasn’t been very attentive to whatever has been going on between his siblings until very recently. He’d caught up on the bickering playing like white noise in the background, but never truly assessed whatever end it could come to. Not that he would really have cared about the two of them slaughtering each other, probably.
“Did you ever threaten to kill her too?”
The flavour of guilt knotting in Kankurou’s gut at the question (at the answer) is not one that had ever really awake at the time of the event. Maybe he’s been underestimating how much himself has changed since they came back from Konoha too, and how much of a long way he still has to go.
“Yeah,” he admits before trying to air the thought out with a deep breath. “Listen, what I’m saying is, the three of us trying to be an actual family and all, I know it’s new for you, and difficult, but it’s new for us too. And Temari’s the big sister, yeah? She would never say it, but I think she feels responsible for us. She’s the only one who remembers Mom and she thinks she’s the only one who can give us a bit of what she received back then, and that she has to. Which is stupid, if you ask me, but it’s what it is.”
Gaara nods.
“I’m sorry I killed your mother.”
The slight clunk of Kankurou’s chopsticks hitting the side of his bowl as they slip through his fingers echoes in the silence for a second.
“No one thinks that.”
“Not anymore,” might be a more accurate way to put it, maybe, but not one he can hear himself say out loud.
Gaara doesn’t answer.
“You know why I’m saying it’s stupid for Temari to think she should play the mom?”
Gaara’s gaze moves to the side as he seems to think about the question, but never crosses his.
“No,” he eventually admits.
“Because I’m happy to just have a sister. That’s what she is, and that’s okay. Same goes for you. I have a brother. I’m satisfied with that now. I don’t want to debate what else could have been.”
Green eyes finally rise to his level for a second before leaving again.
“Thank you.”
Kankurou resists the urge of giving him a brotherly tap on the shoulder. Baby steps.
“Any time, Gaara. Now, please finish your fucking bowl because it’s 2 am and I still have to try and fix whatever mess I made with Temari before I get some sleep.”
---
“You awake?”
Kankurou’s voice comes to her muffled through the door. That’s one other thing that’s changed recently. Knocking at each other’s door. Asking for permission. Caring. Though she had started doing it much earlier than Kankurou, once he had decided to put up poison traps in his own room as an answer to her and others (Rasa, the councilmen, Gaara, on occasion) barging in unannounced. “I’ll use every new test to make it more precise. Next time it won’t miss you,” he’d stated, cold, angry, and threatening, after she’d cursed at him for the senbon that had flown mere millimetres from her face.
She considers for a second the idea of not answering, but the inflexion in her brother’s voice makes it clear enough that he came to apologize, and it presumably would do both of them good that she’d let him do.
“Mmh.”
The door cracks open, the light of the hallway stinging her eyes at first where she’s sitting up on her bed
“You okay?”
“I’m tired. Make it quick.”
There’s only so much warmth and gentleness she can put the effort into expressing right now.
Kankurou doesn’t answer right away, his silhouette rocking left and right a tad as he shifts his weight uncomfortably on his feet. She can guess the outline of his hand fidgeting in his pockets.
“About earlier. I shouldn’t have said that, I didn’t think before opening my mouth, I’m sorry.”
“Yeah, sounds like you, I buy it.”
It’s snarky but not made to hurt. This too is new.
Kankurou chuckles.
“Well- yeah. You should have left me some of the brains if you didn’t want for it to end like that.”
“Gaara’s intellect is doing just fine though, maybe that’s just a you problem.”
Playful mockery is easier to pull off than a heartfelt expression of gratitude, of course, but right now, she’s pretty sure it’s also more efficient. The lightness of the silence that follows is proof of it is any if needed.
Kankurou’s tone is unusually soft when he speaks again.
“Mom, how was she?”
It’s not a question she’s had to answer very often. Or ever, really.
“Prettier than you,” she answers, but there’s not even any bite to it, it’s really just a way of stalling for time.
Kankurou doesn’t make an attempt at a comeback.
“She was… bright,” is what she eventually finds herself answering. “She was kind, and gentle. I don’t know what to tell you, she was like what a mom is in a 3-year-old’s eyes I guess.”
“Yeah, well, that doesn’t mean much to me.”
It’s not directed at her but the hurt in his voice tightens her chest all the same.
“Sorry.”
A shrug shakes his silhouette.
“It’s fine.”
The silence that settles between them is not heavy, but it’s sad and maybe it’s even worse. At least heavy is something they’re used to.
“Well then,” Kankurou lets out, pushing himself off the door frame he was leaning against with a sigh. “Gonna go catch some sleep.”
It calls for an exit, but he finds himself staying there, fingers clicking against the wood.
“You’re um- you’re a good sister Tems. Good night.”
In the sharp outline of his silhouette, his hand raises as a goodbye, and he’s out before she can find anything to answer.
---
“What’s that?” Gaara asks with a frown at the sort of black pouch Kankurou’s handing to him with both hands, shifting his weight on his feet like he’s embarrassed about it, or maybe excited.
“It’s my anti-poison kit. Well, a copy of it. Modified. For you.”
It’s not exactly a rare sight seeing Kankurou somewhat tip-toeing or hesitating around his words, but usually (at least it’s Gaara’s best guess), it arose from the conflict between his wishes to assert his position as the older sibling and the knowledge that his little brother could in fact very much kill him for it if he felt the desire to do so.
It doesn’t sound like it’s what’s happening today though, and more problematic than not being able to fully figure out what emotions are clashing inside of Kankurou, he’s not really sure what his are made of either.
He takes the package.
It resembles weapons storing pocket most shinobi wear, but stiffer, probably. There’s a hoop at the back, presumably to pass a strap through and tie it wherever he sees fit on his clothes, and a magnet closing the lid on the top.
“I thought about what you said the other day,” Kankurou carries on with that same surprising feverishness in his voice. “The thing with poison being one of your main if not, for most opponents, only weakness. It’s true. And, well, Temari and I we can - and we will! - try to help you feel safe enough that you don’t starve yourself again, but the truth is, there’s no way to promise it won’t happen again, here or on the field.”
Gaara nods, fingers tracing the outline of the seams of the object in his hands. The stitches are even and regular, proof of cautiousness and delicacy that his brother rarely shows publicly.
“I’d love to tell you there’s a way to build immunity to all or at least some of this stuff, but there isn’t. I’d be out of a job if there was. Working with poisons… It’s meant to be painful, crippling, and inescapable. It’s cruel and it’s ruthless. It’s a bitch move.” He chuckles. “I would know.”
He pauses to look at Gaara for a moment, his little brother’s eyes carefully studying every inch of his craft, and if he didn’t know better, he’d say he’s not listening to him at all. But he does know better, he does know Gaara has been sincerely trying to connect with them over the past weeks, and he decides to trust his process.
“I always have first aid anti-poison material around when I work because, well, I’m trying not to poison myself, ideally, of course, but accidents happen and I need to be prepared for that,” he explains, pulling a chair to sit down in front of his brother on the other side of the kitchen table. “So I thought maybe it could help if I pulled up a kit like that for you. I tried to make it as simple and suited to your specific needs as possible.”
With further inspection, the whole thing is unfoldable, the front panel opening with a zip once the lid is out of the way, so the pocket can lay flat on a table. There are four vials on the right side, and a small bottle and a sort of L-shaped tube Gaara has very little idea what it could be used for in the middle section.
“There are different types of poisons, implying different ways you can react when you get exposed to them. Venoms are produced by animals, mostly snakes and scorpions and they are dangerous when they get into your blood, that’s why I sometimes use them on blades and senbon for example. They won’t do anything to you if you ingest them unless you’ve got some internal wounds, which arguably is a possibility, but all in all, the odds that someone would try something that uncertain and that you would at the same time have severe enough internal damages that it could actually get in great quantity into your bloodstream are very low. Because they are proteinaceous, you can theoretically build immunity to them with small-dose injections, but you would never be able to do that for every venom in existence and it’s quite a dangerous and long process with unpredictable results. In your situation, seeing as there aren’t that many people out there who would be able to get a scratch on you anyway, I don’t think that’s relevant. Just in case I still put out antidotes for the most common ones in your kit, the injection pens here, but I’m not even sure the sand would let you use them either way. Then again, you’re not really at risk for that, so don’t worry too much about it.”
The more he talks, the more the earlier tension in his voice and frame melts, his eyes shining with interest as he dives deeper into his explanation. Gaara notes to ask him about his craft more often.
“Most other poisons, either natural or synthetics are not the kind of molecule your immune system can do anything about and, likewise, not really the kind to have antidotes either. There are some that your body can build resistance against with habits, like alcohol, but they will still have an effect when you take them, and it will probably mess your organs up in the long term so, again, wouldn’t advise trying that. The only thing you can really do when exposed to this kind of toxins is try to clear yourself off it or wait for your body to do that on its own. In case of ingested poison, you can use the bottle, here. They’re activated charcoal pills, it’s a substance that can absorb most poisons so that your organs don’t. While it doesn’t work on every single toxin out there, it’s still quite polyvalent, and there are virtually no adverse effects, so you know you can take it freely if you ever have symptoms of the sort. It would work a little quicker in an already liquid form, but it’s a hassle to transport so pills are usually what we bring on missions. I’m also thinking it’s probably more friendly to use considering your, um- I don’t know, issues with tastes and textures.”
Gaara doesn’t get the chance to process exactly what kind of emotions the fact that someone would actually care about that, and consider that it matters to any sort of degree triggers in him, but in a sense, he’s grateful for it. It’s most likely not something he would be in the capacity to express right now either way.
“Thank you.”
“Of course.”
It’s said in passing, like Kankurou thinks it’s really evident somehow.
“I don’t really know if toxic fumes could be an issue for you or if the sand would be enough protection but, if you’re ever exposed to them the main thing to do is to go away, and quickly. In a hospital, we would put you under oxygen, but that’s not really an option on the field so the priority is to stop breathing in poison and get clean air as soon as possible. What we can do though, is use a bronchodilator, so a treatment that increases airflow in the lungs, that’s what this thing is,” he says, pointing at the last unexplained object of the kit. “There’s a canister of powder at the top which is the active substance. When you press it it releases some, that you then breathe through the tube. Now, if you ever have to use it, you must make sure that you are fully out of danger, because if you use it while still, even a little, exposed to toxic fumes you’re going to increase your intake of them, instead of airing them out, and we don’t want that.”
“No,” Gaara agrees.
Silence stretches between them for a moment, Kankurou’s nervousness taking its place back into fidgeting fingers before he speaks again.
“I um- I know- I guess it doesn’t solve your whole- food issue thing. But I thought maybe it’d be at least a little soothing to know you have this just in case something happens again.” He shakes his head. “I’m sorry maybe it’s stupid.”
“It’s not.”
The weird pause before Kankurou’s answer makes him think he’s probably supposed to say something more. Or something else.
“Okay, um- great then?”
“It’s considerate. I like it,” is what he opts for adding as an explanation. “I’m sorry. I haven’t received gifts in a long time. I’m not very trained for that.”
“Yeah, figured.”
Not that Kankurou’s more used to it (be it receiving or giving, really) but he can only imagine the whole killing thing didn’t help Gaara grow his social skills over the past years.
“Well.” He gets up with a sigh. “We should get going, Temari’s intimidated the council into giving us training ground permission today, I really could use the opportunity to stretch my legs and unwind a bit, and I’m sure you wouldn’t want to miss on her using me as a living target practice, would you?”
Gaara nods.
“It does sound fun,” he agrees and Kankurou is almost sure that’s a joke. (Gaara hasn’t yet reached the stage where anyone has attempted introducing to him the idea of smiling just yet.)
He can’t help but chuckle imagining Temari’s reaction if Gaara picking up on his humor were to become something settling for real.
He gets up with a clap of the hand.
“Okay, let’s go!”