Chapter 588: Family?
"Gaara, time to get up."
Around midday, sunlight came in at an angle through the window, drawing bright rectangular patches across the wooden floor of the corridor.
Kankuro stood at the door to Gaara's room and knocked a few times on the doorframe.
Recently, because Gaara's mental state hadn't been good, most of the Kazekage's duties had been handled with help from Kankuro and Temari. The two of them had been running back and forth -- reviewing documents, sitting through meetings, receiving envoys from other villages -- effectively turning themselves from combat-type shinobi into half-administrative officials.
Without quite noticing when it happened, they had become figures in Sunagakure's upper leadership. Today looked like another day when Gaara's sleep was off.
Kankuro sighed outside the door and lowered his hand from the frame. Though someone had already told him to just go in and wake Gaara directly, he stood at the threshold with his hand on the handle and hesitated.
Life as it was now -- he still sometimes found it hard to make it feel real. The fact that his brother seemed to genuinely have a companion...
Kankuro opened the door and went inside. The curtains were still drawn. The room was dim. On the bed, Gaara lay properly dressed in pajamas, eyes closed, but his breathing was unsteady and his color didn't look good.
"Don't... don't go... I haven't..."
Then, very quietly, in broken fragments, sounds slipped from Gaara's lips.
He was clearly in a nightmare. Bad enough that he was talking in his sleep.
Kankuro quickly bent down and reached out, giving Gaara's shoulder a gentle push. "Gaara. Gaara."
The light rocking and the sound of his name finally made Gaara open his eyes. His pupils drifted out of focus first, sweeping the ceiling blankly, then slowly moved to Kankuro's face.
"...Kankuro?"
"Sorry for waking you without asking." Kankuro drew his hand back from Gaara's shoulder. "You looked like you were having a nightmare."
"Yes. I was." Gaara sat up from the bed, the blanket sliding to his waist. He kept his head down, his gaze slightly unfocused. "It was a frightening dream."
"Come on." Kankuro let his tone go deliberately light. "The great Kazekage, shaken by a dream?"
"...I'm sorry for worrying you."
"...I wasn't actually criticizing you." Kankuro's voice carried a trace of exasperation. He raised his hand and tapped Gaara once on top of the head. "Skip the apology."
Spending time with Gaara as he was now, Kankuro sometimes felt as though their childhood had happened in a dream. Something distant and not quite real.
That creature who had been like a walking nightmare -- something that could kill him at any moment, that had kept him living under the shadow of death at every hour -- had become this. This younger brother who was kind and dependable, and who sometimes even leaned on Kankuro for support.
The gap between those two Gaaras was so vast that Kankuro would sometimes look at the Gaara in front of him and wonder whether he'd remembered the past incorrectly. Whether he'd been too sensitive.
Fear and heartache. Two completely different feelings, aimed at the same person. The distance between them was enormous.
"What did you dream about, though?" Kankuro asked. "What kind of nightmare manages to shake you?" He didn't think Gaara was the type to be frightened by ghost stories.
"...I dreamed I was back at the Chunin Exams. The ones held in Konoha."
Kankuro felt a sudden jab of pain -- not physical, but the specific anguish of "why did I open my mouth," the kind that made you want to slap yourself.
"And what happened in the dream?" He kept his voice as level as he could. "Did you accidentally hurt Naruto back then? Or did Naruto not come to help you?"
He thought for a moment and added: "You know Naruto's strength at that point was already far beyond whoever was pulling the strings behind the scenes. That Orochimaru who attacked us was nothing to him. Whatever you dreamed, you were just scaring yourself."
"No."
Gaara shook his head. "It was the first time Naruto... spoke to me."
"He... shared the bento he made with me. I wanted to take it. But I couldn't control my own body."
"I did the same thing I did that day. I acted exactly the same way I did then. I glared at Naruto. I ignored him completely."
Gaara's voice rose sharply, filled with self-reproach and regret. "Why did I do that back then?"
He turned to look at Kankuro, and found him pressing both hands over his head with a look of visible anguish.
"Kankuro... are you alright?"
Kankuro was screaming internally. Stop. Please. I don't want to hear any more of this.
But he forced his expression back to something neutral and lowered his hands.
"I'm fine... don't worry about me. Come on, get up. By the way, what's going on with Shukaku?" He redirected immediately.
A few days earlier, Gaara had mentioned it.
Shukaku had been in some kind of strange state lately. The moment the chakra barrier eased even slightly, the creature would launch into a terrified, rambling monologue inside Gaara's inner world -- mouth going like a wound-up spring that couldn't stop. Saying things like "is that ghost still there," "have you gotten rid of that thing yet," "are you trying to get me killed."
"It's still frightened somehow. I reached an agreement with it -- it quiets down, and I find a way to keep it safe."
"What did you do?"
"I lent it Mother's power temporarily."
"What?" Kankuro's eyes moved quickly to the sand-yellow gourd at Gaara's side.
"It's alright." Gaara shook his head. "It's only temporary. I just need to take Mother's chakra back before any fighting starts."
But it was not quite that simple. That power was not an ordinary ninja tool -- not something that could be casually lent out and casually recalled. It was the last thing Karura had left Gaara. Something she had condensed at the moment of her death, formed from her own life and love, a protection that belonged to Gaara and no one else.
The situation had gone like this: the biggest condition Shukaku had demanded was that the Naruko puppet be thrown away. That condition, for Gaara, was more or less equivalent to being told to die. So Shukaku had backed down and stopped pushing. But Shukaku's fear hadn't gone away, and neither had the constant muttering. Its posture inside Gaara's inner world -- the "if you don't get rid of that ghost I will not stop bothering you" stance -- left Gaara with almost no peace.
So Gaara had come up with this arrangement, temporarily sharing his mother's love with Shukaku. For what it was worth, after several years of cohabitation, Gaara and Shukaku's relationship had improved considerably. They bickered constantly, but Shukaku had become a tailed beast willing to occasionally lend Gaara its own chakra freely.
For now, Gaara temporarily didn't have the power that automatically defended him with sand.
There was, however, a detail Gaara hadn't thought through carefully. That power was something Karura gave to Gaara. It was for Gaara alone -- for "my son," not for "a tailed beast." So could Shukaku actually use it?
Gaara slowly climbed out of bed and walked toward the bathroom. At the empty space beside him -- the space where nothing was -- his expression didn't change. But his eyes went faintly dim for just a moment.
"What is Naruko doing right now?" Gaara's voice drifted back from the direction of the bathroom.
Kankuro's brow twitched. He gripped the doorframe, leaned forward slightly, and glanced toward the living room.
He saw the figure -- the one in an apron, busy in the kitchen, moving with a fluency that didn't look like any puppet he had ever made.
That figure had been the one to tell him to go wake Gaara up, saying the food was almost ready and he shouldn't drag his feet. Kankuro had said he'd go, and then he'd gone.
Now he stood here, watching Gaara's back disappear into the bathroom, listening to the sound of water running, and his mind kept turning over that thing which never quite felt real no matter how many times he encountered it.
"Cooking..."
He looked down at his own hands.
Was his craftsmanship really that good?
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