The name Takeo (warrior) is taken from the incomparable ncfan's fics. Go read them...I aspire to write on that level someday. This is my first fic, please be kind...yadda yadda yadda...and review too! I want feedback, as this is a new writing style for me...
Maybe in the beginning, he had loved her. When he had first seen her, she had forced him to notice her with her sphinx-like indifference to the Suna elders' meaningless chatter. He had been forced into attending the meeting, and it had been dragging on for hours. After she had caught his attention, he kept a careful eye on her for the rest of the meeting and every one after that. He never let her notice his attentions (he was a ninja, after all). Shortly after he was appointed Yondaime Kazekage, they were married. To all the Land of Wind, their union marked the end of a protracted and bloody war and the beginning of a reign of peace. Their first child was a girl, and while he was not displeased, he wished she was a boy (she always knew that, from the very beginning of her life). It was an easy birth, as was the second (a boy this time, who would grow to resemble his father solely in looks). But the third, the third would be different.
Like the Sandaime, their unborn child was doomed to become a puppet, a minion of Suna, forced to obey its commander's every whim (but this puppet would have a mind of its own). He watched, silent and impassive, as his wife (his once-love) was taken to the sealing chamber, her eyes as blank as gray-green stones. He watched, and did nothing, as the sand crept in, silent and inexorable as the fall of night over the dunes, and encircled her growing womb. He watched, ignoring her pleas, as she thrashed and twisted, caught in her nightmares' bloody jaws as they prowled the room.
But for all his seeming indifference, sometimes he still lay awake in the dark hours of the night, wondering if she would survive the coming birth, if somehow the ease of the first two would transfer to the third. Quickly, he would clamp down on his wandering thoughts and remind himself of the damning truth (all his fault, he knew, bone-deep with the kind of certainty that only years of following your instincts could bring). She was the sacrifice, the only thing capable of permanently sealing the Shukaku into his child. Over and over, he repeated this to himself, his mantra to make him believe that she was nothing more to him (even if he had loved her once).
The night of the birth, he stood in the sealing chamber (dark, hot room that she had not left since that fateful day eight eternal months ago), deaf to her curses on his village, blind to her crippling pain, nose numbed to the smell of hot, sticky blood streaming on the floor, fingers not feeling the sand sliding over them. He stood in the miniature Hell he'd created and felt nothing, his heart colder than ice, harder than stone, as his wife died before him. The child (a boy, as he had hoped) was pulled from the clutches of the sand wide-eyed and silent as Death, the long tendrils still dripping with his mother's blood writhing with displeasure. He allowed Karura one final blow (as if she could harm him now) with the child's name and turned away. Takeo walked out of the chamber with measured steps, leaving his wife's corpse in the place he'd locked her living body, leaving the shattered remains of his heart with the dark blood pooling on the floor (he would never love again).
Her ghost would haunt him until the very end.