Of all the beliefs that have been ingrained into those who are born of the sand, that flexibility of spirit has the power to turn any battle to their advantage is perhaps the one that made Suna endure. The great machination of the village –its inhabitants and those who watched over them- thrived upon the adaptability of single individuals; and once a cohesive stance was acquired, it would harden, weathering storms that would have surmounted the fiery stubbornness of Konoha or the impractical delitescence of Kiri.
Kankuro knows this. He is the son and the brother of two Kazekages, and the blood in his veins –even if it's only a fraction- comes from the giants who roamed the lands and chose the unforgiving desert as a home, many thousands of years ago. He knows that Suna will endure, will overcome, knows that even these dark days will pass.
It took five days for the nomination process to be over and during that time, Kankuro pretended not to know anything. Instead, he wandered through the streets without his face paint and tried to assess the damage. When the faces of the dead-eyed women and children he'd seen during the day began haunting his dreams, he locked himself up in the Kazekage's office and went through lists of the dead. Jounins, chuunins, puppet masters – some of them he'd trained with. His eyes weakened from the poor light and he developed a nasty chest cough, but he didn't come out until he'd run his eyes over every single name and committed it to memory. It took him two days and three nights, and when he stumbled outside, they pressed a scroll into his hands.
"You're our only hope," Baki told him as Kankuro shivered and coughed. "They'll accept you as a leader."
Two of the ANBU flanking him moved forward to catch Kankuro as he fell. "Please," Baki said, his eyes not leaving his, making his desperation briefly –disarmingly- palpable. "For Suna."
Temari's angry. Kankuro reflects that on some level, Temari has always been angry, even when they were kids who played in a separate room from their monster of a brother. She hides it well but carries it close to her heart, pulls it out of scrolls with the razor-sharp edges of her fan, and when she fights, she fights everything they were told as children and the weight of the belief that this could all have been prevented if she was smarter, kinder, slower with her judgment.
Kankuro knows the feeling. He used to lock his door at night and go to sleep with a kunai under his pillow and a puppet close at hand; now he understands that his home, Gaara's home, was the one place where he had nothing to fear.
"Are you gonna do it?" she asks aggressively. Her entire upper torso is bandaged heavily. The reason the council didn't pick her probably had something to do with the fact that she looks pale and fragile like this, two steps away from death's door. Kankuro isn't worried, though. He knows his sister. Her near-death was no more than her version of a temper tantrum.
Kankuro twists the scroll around in his hands. "I haven't thought about it," he says honestly.
Temari narrows her eyes at him, but doesn't comment. "I'm surprised they came to you," she says. "I mean, it's not like your ideals are any different from his. You'd have done the exact same thing."
Kankuro looks at her blankly. Thanks to our ideals, there are kids without fathers out there. Suna didn't suffer as heavily as Konoha, but this was still a level of destruction that surpassed everything Kankuro believed in. And it would have all been avoided if they'd followed in his father's lead and trusted no one, and certainly not have rushed to Konoha's side in an unwinnable war.
"How is he?" Temari asks quietly.
Kankuro reaches out and touches the back of her hand. She looks at him for a long moment, her eyes beginning to water, her bottom lip shaking. Still, she doesn't cry.
"I see," she says. The only concession she makes is flipping her hand and gripping his tightly, looking lost and reaching for her brother in the darkness.
Suna is a village built on legends. There are stories of chakra undulating like sand to sweep one's loved ones away, of kings buried up to their necks that kept the beating heart of the desert alive. There are ones about carpets and caves, and how on the full moon, the sand rose like the sea and took away the most beautiful woman to have ever lived. That last story was a particular favorite in the village; it's said, that with this woman went the spirit of the man that loved her, and he was destined to wander the desert whenever the moon was full, searching until he found his lover so that they could both return to the sand.
Temari used to say, "They're just stories, stupid," but Kankuro liked to the idea of truth hidden between the weave of the words, the same way he liked the way that after spending enough time in the desert, it began listing slightly towards the sun, almost a pathway to the uninterrupted blue of the sky.
He's had chakra strings attached to his brother and sister since he was old enough to throw a senbon, so it takes him just under ten minutes to find Gaara sitting in the desert where there were no shadows to seek cover in. He sits down next to him, lightly cursing the regulations of puppetry that demanded that he wear black at all times.
Gaara inclines his head and looks at him. "Kankuro," he says questioningly.
Seeing Gaara like this, Kankuro's more inclined to believe the old legends than ever. It's not hard to imagine his little brother wandering the desert, half-man half-spirit.
The war broke Gaara's heart. It demanded too much of him, of the people that he would have died himself to protect, of the love that came to his defense and the love that he had for his village. They had dragged Gaara out of the battlefield that day, his armor shattered and soaked by blood and the tears that were still running freely, hiccupping names and words and phrases like a child.
The Hokage had died that day, along with hundreds of other Leaf and Sand shinobi. Kankuro had a lung punctured and wasn't supposed to survive the night, so he'd spent it sitting beside Gaara's bed, holding his hand.
"Hey," he says now, looking at his brother. Gaara seems unaware of the sun directly overhead. "I, uh, wanted to talk to you."
Gaara inclines his head. The action implies a thousand years of weariness, and Kankuro feels a brief flash of anger, almost reassuring in its familiarity: He's just sixteen years old, for fucks sake.
"They asked me to take your old job," old, because the first thing Gaara'd done after returning to Suna was resign as Kazekage. The people hadn't risen up against them, hadn't cause an uproar about all the lives that had been snuffed out without a second thought, but everyone knew it was just a matter of time. Gaara's resignation effectively dealt with the eventual backlash of the war. It would've been regarded as clever if not for how openly Gaara was grieving each and every single death.
"But I was thinking, maybe I shouldn't take it."
Gaara stays silent, looking far off into the distance. When they were young, just to stop him crying, Kankuro used to tell him stories about how his mother followed the line in the sand and walked straight into the sky one day, and he wonders if Gaara still remembers, or if even those words were flung into the charybdis of hate that defined his childhood.
Kankuro continues, "I realize that Suna's in desperate need of a leader right now. It should be you, kid." Gaara looks at him sharply, but Kankuro silences him. "I need you to know that. That you're exactly what our village needs, like it or not."
Gaara makes a noise. Kankuro ignores him, and ploughs on. "But you're no use to anybody like this, and I'm not sure I'm the Kazekage type. Dad would say-" he snorts, and not just because of the way that even now, Gaara's face begins closing off. "Well, let's not think about what Dad would say. The point is, you and this village need taking care of." He inhales. "And I was thinking, Baki's been around forever. It's about time someone pushed him to the foreground."
Gaara's staring at him now, mouth slightly open. Kankuro feels almost proud of himself. "What about-"
"I've been kind of a shit brother in the past," Kankuro says matter-of-factly. Gaara looks like he's about to protest –the little punk- so Kankuro says, "shut up and listen, kid."
Amazingly, Gaara does.
"At some point in the future –preferably, after you hit the legal drinking age," this earns him a hard glare, and Kankuro chuckles. "this village is going to forgive you. it's going to accept that what you did was exactly what the situation required, that you acted like not only an excellent shinobi, but a man with a good heart. It will accept you like it accepted you before, because every single man who died that day was proud to be in your service, and eventually everyone will see that."
He takes a deep breath. Gaara's expression has blanked out entirely. His near-invisible eyebrows are raised. "And until then?" he asks, and Kankuro nearly crows in delight because that's real, actual hope in his voice, just a flicker, almost unnoticeable but there.
Instead, he says, "Until then, you're going to help us restore order. You'll be a lowly errand boy like the rest of us, working on balance sheets and payrolls and taking care of benefits for widows. You'll be yelled at by Temari for being too slow with your adding and subtracting, and you'll patrol with the rest of the jounins."
"What about you?" it's just a whisper.
Kankuro sighs. "I'll be right beside you, brat," he grins at the naked shock on Gaara's face. "Baki can be Kazekage until your fated resurrection. Two Kazekages in the family is more than enough, don't you think?"
Gaara's mouth opens and closes a couple of times, and Kankuro laughs. Then he reaches out to ruffle the auburn hair and makes sand scatter all around the vicinity. Gaara scowls.
"I'm proud of you, Gaara," he says, still smiling. Gaara goes very still, but then he leans his head into Kankuro's touch. He exhales, and his shoulder slump, and Kankuro wonders how much of a burden he just eased. Not as heavy as the hat and cloak that Gaara put on nearly two years ago; not as heavy as Naruto Uzumaki's dying words as he made that last seal. But Kankuro thinks that this- his hand on his little brother's shoulder, the desert that sloped towards the heavens around them- this is something.
And then he says –because he knows it's true, as sure as the knowledge that's been slashed into him by the rough eddies of the desert wind, because this was a place where the lessons were harsh but never forgotten- "It's all going to be alright."
A/N: Written for the 'fall from grace' prompt at hc_bingoon LJ. Gaara hearts reviews, so leave some love for the kid, 'kay?