In These Moments We Remember How To Breathe
Disclaimer: Naruto does not belong to me.
He doesn't look like her. He recalls thinking, seeing his nephew for the first time. There are none of the Kazekage's harsh features or traces of his darkened gold sand, the child's hair is a bloody red, as red as his mother's hands when she damned the Kazekage with her last breath, and his eyes are a bright green rather than his dead mother's warm grey.
Yashamaru will hold onto the memory and this child who looks nothing like his beloved sister, and obey his kage even as he silently hates him. He is the Kazekage's right hand first, standing within the shadows of golden dust.
As he holds the newborn child he knows that this boy will write his own legacy in blood. The cursed name is light upon his tongue. Gaara.
He isn't certain what the Kazekage is thinking, when he lets Gaara loose upon Suna. Too young and too jaded, with dark circles around his eyes because he will not sleep lest the Ichibi consume his mind. Shukaku, he says one day, hands clasped around his worn, stuffed, bear. Mother's name is Shukaku. It sends a chill down Yashamaru's spine but the Kazekage's face is a golden mask and he will turn his youngest child into a monster for his village. Yashamaru is glad that he will never be a kage.
Gaara is five when he asks Yashamaru. "What is love?" He looks up with off-teal eyes and Yashamaru sees it then, in the shape of his eyes and the turn of his lips. Karura, he thinks, and he knows then that he loves Gaara and will always, long after the ghost of his sister fades.
Gaara is six when Yashamaru comes home gingerly holding his injured side, blood seeping through the new bandages. The boy is silent as he helps him clean the wound and replace the gauze. Yashamaru knows that he is thinking of the grains of sand that shield him, because Gaara has never bled, not like everyone else. Monster.
"It's okay if you hate me." He murmurs, fingers splayed across his lap. "Sometimes I hate how I am too."
Yashamaru pulls him close to his chest, ignoring the way his side twinges painfully and the sand shifts in warning. "I don't hate you", he whispers. "And it doesn't matter what the villagers say."
I love you, he wants to say, but doesn't because he is still the Kazekage's right hand first and foremost.
"Others may not love you, but you will always love yourself." Is what he says instead, imagining Karura's face. It is the most he can say.
You are a child of the sand, but you are also one of my own.
When he dies, Yashamaru hates his kage overwhelmingly. More than that, as he looks into Gaara's half-mad gaze he wants to say I'm sorry, I didn't mean it, I love you.
He doesn't.
Author's Note: I've been dying to write Yashamaru for a while. -squints-
Too often, things that we wish we would say go ignored over trivialities.