A/N: This wasn't even on my fic checklist. I've literally got five different fics open that I wanted to get done in August but then wrote this instead while watching BloatedCrayon's art livestreams on twitch.
It's really short, it's silly - but I couldn't get the idea of these two meeting as babies and making sandcastles together out of my head.
Oi.
ooooo
"Hold still, Lee."
It was the fifth time this morning that Gai had to say these words as he attempted to rub sunscreen onto his wiggling toddler. He knew his baby was excited, but children only get one shot at having truly unblemished, baby-soft skin and Gai wasn't going to ruin that for Lee with his own negligence.
But Lee was so excited and squirmy!
In hindsight, it would have been smarter to put sunscreen on Lee when they were still at home, possibly while he was still asleep, because the sight of the ocean seemed to have triggered some primal response in his baby to go mental and summon rain with his dancing.
Perhaps Lee was a fish in a previous life. Gai thought he would make a very cute fish.
"Almost done…" Gai murmured, shifting a bit so he could keep Lee in place with one arm wrapped around his middle while the other blindly sought out the bottle of SPF 75+ he had packed in the beach bag. He just needed to get Lee's little face and then they were good to go…
But Lee was dialing up his youthful excitement. His two-year-old brain seemed to think he was perfectly ready to begin his beach day. Gai had almost lost his grip when his dad walked up with the umbrella and laughed at the struggle his son was facing.
"Here, let me take him," Dai offered, reaching out to catch his grandson before he could go rejoin his fishy brethren.
The wiggles were now accompanied by squeals and a bizarre grunting noise Gai had never heard his son make.
He really wanted to go play in the water.
Dai laughed and rubbed a streak of white on Lee's neck into his skin.
"Is somebody excited?" he asked cheerily, nuzzling a tiny nose with his own and laughing when Lee grabbed his hair and screamed happily.
"Okay, here we go!" Gai announced once he found the right bottle.
He reached to cup Lee's chin so he could hold him still while he applied this last bit of protection and finally release his son to the joy of the beach.
"Almost done, Lee – yes, yes I know you're excited, we are going to play in just one second… close your mouth for me, okay? Okay! Nope- wait, let me get your little ears…okay! Ready to go play, Lee?"
A thrilled shriek disrupted the seagulls.
This was why summers were so great! Every weekend the Maitos packed a lunch, sunscreen, towels, and an enormous umbrella, and drove for an hour to a quiet stretch of beach nestled behind retirement communities. Sometimes they would get an overnight permit and pack a tent, a charcoal grill, and all of the fixings for s'mores, but today they had only planned to stay until nightfall.
The second Dai relaxed his arms Lee made a break for it. Tiny feet hurled a tiny body toward the ocean, and Gai barely had time to process that the small shiny black mass streaking across the sand was his child's head before sprinting after his son.
Gai laughed when he caught up to Lee and grabbed his small waist from behind so he could scoop him up, and then continued his sprint to the water.
They yelled delightedly once the water was up to Gai's knees and he could freely fall forward and dunk them both under.
When Gai stood to give them air, he did so quite suddenly and tucked his head so he could tickle Lee's neck while he let out a sea monster roar.
Lee was laughing and slapping his father's chest, ignoring that his own hair was covering his eyes and blinding him. He wasn't scared of the sea monster. He had learned from numerous bath times that the sea monster was really his dad, and that hearing that roar meant tickles.
"Roar!" Gai growled, moving from Lee's neck to rub their foreheads as he hollered.
"Raghhh!" Lee yelled back.
"Oh! That was a good one! You're getting stronger every day, my little one! Soon you will be even stronger than me!"
As if to prove his father's point, Lee let out another roar and tried to launch himself out of his father's arms and back into the water. If Gai didn't have two years of practice holding onto his energetic and wiggly child then Lee would have done it, too. He moved so fast!
Gai walked back to shallower water, where it came to the middle of his tanned shins, and then sat down so he could hold Lee while he swam.
He tipped Lee forward and placed one hand on his child's stomach, then lowered him until he was on top of the water and the green turtles decorating the part of his swimsuit covering Lee's tiny butt were basking in the sun.
This game was actually called 'turtle'. Lee would stay on his stomach and move his arms and legs while Gai held him above water and spun him around. As Gai moved around in the water he would periodically lift Lee so his son could take excited, gasping breaths of air, but he always held Lee in the same turtle position.
Lee could play this for hours.
The bathtub at home didn't have a lot of give in its space and for a child as energetic as Lee the more space there was to turtle around, the better.
Thank you, ocean.
Lee loved the turtle game, but his favorite thing was to play with his new friend Gaara.
Even for a two-year-old, Lee didn't have many friends back in their town. It seemed like there just weren't a lot of children his age to make play dates with.
So far Lee had only ever really spent time with one other child. Tenten was sweet, and she liked to throw things at Lee and he liked to run around and try to avoid them. Fortunately she threw small, mostly round things so this game amused Gai and Dai instead of alarming them.
But for the summer Tenten's family went to the mountains so they could enjoy cooler weather, which left Lee without his buddy for a few months.
Gai had a lot of energy, probably too much in fact, and had no trouble keeping up with his son, but it was good for babies to play with each other. Lee's father and grandfather didn't want him to spend the whole summer with only them to rustle with.
So Gai was delighted when on their very first weekend trip to the beach, another family with three young children appeared.
The parents were absent, Gai had learned that the mother passed away and the father was a busy man, but Baki took care of these children and took them to the beach because he knew their father wouldn't.
Temari and Kankuro were just a bit too old to have fun playing with Lee. They were big enough that they could swim without assistance, which meant they were allowed to play in shallow water all by themselves.
The youngest child, Gaara, was still a baby, only a year old, and had been sitting on a towel looking unhappy when Lee first sprinted over to him and presented him with a seashell. At first, Gaara had seemed upset and screwed up his face at the presence of this bowl-cut ball of enthusiasm with eyebrows much too full for a toddler. Gai had come over and after the glare he got from Baki, had tried to take Lee back to their own area, but Gaara started crying. He didn't let up on the crying until Lee decided he knew something the adults were missing and sprinted back with another seashell.
Gaara stopped crying and they had been inseparable since.
The boys spent that first weekend playing in the sand building castles and digging for mollusks because Gaara didn't even have a swimsuit. Baki hadn't anticipated on going in the ocean, much less on meeting another child Gaara would want to play with.
When they came back the following week, Gaara's diapered butt was covered in a red suit and his chubby arms and legs sported water wings.
Although the families were only able to make it on the weekends, they had come every week for the last two months and now Lee and baby Gaara were buddies and Gai was thrilled.
Baki was also relieved to have help with watching the children since he could now leave Gaara with two thick-browed men and make sure that Temari and Kankuro didn't tempt any sharks by swimming out farther than they should.
Gaara didn't like the turtle game, it made him wail when he was tipped forward, but he did like to sit in the ocean, wearing his wings and frowning at the water while Dai held him up as they watched Lee play the turtle game.
Gaara also wasn't big on building sandcastles, but would instead grab fistfuls of sand and offer them out to Lee so he could put them on the castle. It was still a joint effort, Gai reasoned, but this way involved a lot more of Lee running around and Gaara watching him with dark lids and a gaze that made him look much older than one.
The benefit to this discrepancy in activity levels was that the babies got tired at the same time and they could take their naps together.
They would play all morning, then around noon the adults would corral the children to come up to the towels and have lunch, and then Temari and Kankuro would run off to continue their game of 'who could give Baki a heart attack first' while Gai and his father set the babies on the towels, angled the large umbrella just right, and watched Lee and Gaara sleep.
Gai and Dai would lie out on either side of the boys and enjoy the warmth of the sun tanning their skin.
Two hours later the babies would wake up, have a snack, and then pick up where they had left off.
It made for wonderful weekends and a really great glow for Gai's skin.
But this was the last weekend of the summer, and Gai wasn't sure what was going to happen after today. He wanted to find a way for Lee to continue playing with his friend, but the families lived near each other and it didn't seem likely.
Gai was pulled from his musing and rude ignoring of Lee's fabulous turtle impression by the sounds of kids shrieking.
He looked up to see two familiar blond and brunette heads streaking towards the water.
Lee's head also looked up and he paused his 'turtle noise' to yell, "Gaaraaaaa!" at a volume Gai found downright impressive for a toddler to reach.
The same seagulls ruffled disgruntled wings and decided they might find a better time on a different stretch of beach.
Gai laughed and scooped his baby up so they could greet his friend. He could see his father walking over to Baki to take Gaara so their towels and umbrella could be set up since Temari and Kankuro were unhelpfully trying to ride waves with their tummies.
Once they were on the sand, Gai set Lee down so he could run toward his friend.
Gaara couldn't run yet, but he could stand on his own, and when Dai set him down as Lee approached he was able to hold himself up and hug Lee back once tan arms were squeezing him.
"Gaaraaaa!"
Gaara couldn't speak yet, either, but he could say, with his quiet voice, "Wee."
Gai and Dai wiped hot, masculine tears from their eyes at the loving display of youth while Baki refused to join these idiot adults in their weeping and denied any stretching of his own heartstrings as he popped open a large rainbow umbrella.
Dai helped Baki finish setting up while Lee held Gaara's hand to help him waddle over to where his grandfather had put out the plastic toys necessary for building a sandcastle.
Gai carefully walked behind the boys, to make sure Gaara wouldn't fall down (Lee could pull a bit too enthusiastically sometimes), and then sat down behind next to them to watch a masterpiece of sand come together.
After an hour or so of Gaara helpfully handing Lee clumps of wet sand and Lee packing them into their plastic molds, Gai picked up Gaara and took Lee's hand to lead them back to the towels so they could have some water and Baki could reapply Gaara's sunscreen.
Although Temari and Kankuro were able to stay out in the sun for hours, Gaara had red hair and exceptionally fair skin and Baki made a point to douse him with an extremely high SPF on the hour every hour. Sunscreen, a white t-shirt, and a little sun hat and Gaara was ready to go.
Baki took off the hat and then shirt when it was time to put on the water wings and play in the ocean, but Gaara's skin wouldn't allow him to sit there in just a bathing suit the way Lee and his siblings did.
Dai had been sitting with Baki, drinking the protein fruit smoothies he always brought in a plastic pitcher, and he pulled his grandson up onto his lap to share his drink when Baki stood to take Gaara from Gai.
"Are you having fun, Lee?" Dai asked, rustling the dark hair he had passed on to Lee while his other hand held up the edge of the smoothie cup Lee was drinking from.
Lee's tiny hands were also holding onto the cup, and without removing his mouth, Lee looked at his grandfather and nodded happily.
"Do you need a diaper change?"
An equally enthusiastic shake of the head nearly sent smoothie flying.
"Gaara does…" Baki mumbled, laying the baby down so he could complete that most joyous of tasks.
Once fresh diapers were on clean bottoms and two babies were covered in more sunscreen and given water, Lee tugged on Gaara's hand again to drag him back to their castle.
They resumed their positions, Gaara sitting down and scraping up the sand with his chubby fists, and Lee trying to see how tall he could make the castle before it fell over.
Temari and Kankuro came up after another hour to give their brother a kiss on the cheek and see what Lee was building, and then they grabbed their boogie boards and went straight back into the ocean.
After the visit from the older children, Lee decided their current course of action was terrible and he had been building the castle all wrong. Clearly building up towards the sky as high as possible was a fruitless endeavor and he should have been building the towers around Gaara since he was obviously a sand prince.
Gai watched these thoughts play out on Lee's expressive face and laughed when his son began his new architecture.
Gaara continued to hand sand to Lee until he was surrounded by towers and confused as to why he was on one side of them and Lee was on another. His face screwed up like he was going to cry until Lee stepped over the wall he had built to sit next to his friend.
That was the only way for the sand prince to properly enjoy his castle.
Dai read his son's mind and ran over with his phone to take pictures of the boys in their castle as he loudly praised them for the hard work and beautiful craftsmanship.
When Temari and Kankuro returned once more, panting from their water sports and asking for lunch, Gai and Dai scooped the babies up and brought them back to the towels for food.
Lee sat cross-legged on a towel while his father fed him fruit salad and gave him juice in a sippy cup. Lee always tried to share his lunch with Gaara, since he was a good friend, but Temari and Kankuro never accepted his offerings of strawberries and juice. They had big-kid food – they had sandwiches.
Lee also liked to feed his father and grandfather. It was nice that his dad wanted to feed him, but Lee was strong enough to hold a fork all by himself, and while his movements were sometimes awkward or jerky when he handled it he could certainly use his hands to pick up fruit and smoosh it in his dad's mouth.
Such a sweet child.
Thanks to the ever-conscientious Lee, everyone on the towels got their daily servings of vitamin C, and once small bellies were full, Baki went out with Temari and Kankuro so they could swim past the second sandbar, and Gai and Dai laid the babies down for their regularly scheduled nap.
Gaara had a hard time falling asleep, and would sometimes fidget or cry if he saw that Lee was asleep when he was supposed to be awake and keeping Gaara company. But the adults discovered, to the delight of the youth in their hearts, that when Lee reached out and held Gaara's chubby fist with his own that both boys would go out like lights.
Dai had hundreds of pictures of the boys sleeping while they held hands – and every single one of them made him cry.
They were just so cute.
For two hours the babies slept on their backs with their hands curled together, safely nestled under the shade of the umbrella with the sound of the ocean purring in their ears. Gai woke Lee up with a kiss on his forehead and then two more on each of his cheeks when his son blinked sleepily and then smiled at him.
Lee woke Gaara up by rolling over to his friend and giving him the same forehead kiss, although his was a bit wetter, that his father gave him.
In Lee's two-year-old opinion, this was the best way to wake up.
Gaara seemed to agree. He never fussed when Lee woke him up like this.
Since Gai and Dai had been using the naptime to tan, they put more sunscreen on the boys, then they each picked up a baby and went to the ocean for some cooling off.
Dai held Gaara while they watched Gai and Lee play turtle until Gaara decided he had enough of Lee paying attention to something other than him and kicked his legs until Lee ceased his aquatic buffoonery and joined him for fun with shaking out sea weed and looking for fish.
That game never lasted long, Lee didn't have quite the same patience for it. But since the fish, tiny crabs, and other sea life they found in the sea weed were like tiny treasures, Lee took up this torch and would dig his hands into the wet sand or paw around on his hands and knees in the shallows looking for seashells and mollusks to present to Gaara as gifts.
Now this he could do for a long time.
Dai held onto the things Gaara's small hands couldn't and encouraged his grandson with sincere praise over every tiny shell.
Gai took this opportunity to help out Baki with the energetic youths he didn't have the fortitude to keep up with and grabbed the strings on Temari and Kankuro's boogie boards so he could drag them up and down the shoreline while they clung to their boards on their bellies and shrieked and laughed.
Baki went and sat down.
Hours later, when the sun was starting to set and it was no longer safe to be in the water, after snacks masquerading as dinner had been polished off, shells had been tucked into plastic baggies, sunburns had been spotted, sand had worked it's way into places it had no business being, boogie boards and umbrellas were packed away, and two babies were falling asleep in strong arms – it was time to say goodbye.
Temari and Kankuro hugged Gai and thanked him for playing with them all summer. Baki shook Dai's hand and thanked him for watching Gaara so often, then turned and shook Gai's and echoed his sentiments.
"We'll be back next summer," Baki said before Gai could ask.
Gai looked down at his yawning son in his arms and his heart clenched. The boys wouldn't get to play with each other again for a whole year. It was a shame; the boys were good for each other.
"We look forward to it! Lee, say goodbye to Gaara."
"Bye bye, Gaaraaaa," Lee mumbled sleepily, rubbing his eyes. With a surprising burst of energy he launched forward towards his friend with his arms stretched out, and Gai had to once again use his quick reflexes to keep his son from falling out of his arms.
He stepped forward, closer to Baki, so that Lee could give Gaara the hug he was going for.
"Bye bye, Gaaraaa," he repeated.
"Wee," was all Gaara could say as he hugged his friend back.
Until next summer.
ooooo
A/N: My nephew is two and my niece is one so I kept pausing and going 'okay, how do those two act' so that's my frame of reference.
Now back to previously scheduled writing.
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