Being a ninja is hard enough when you work for the good guys, let alone when you get reincarnated into a family of psychopaths.

Disclaimer: I own nothing but my spear and fire pit. The war goes well, but the gulls hold the northern shore.


Chapter 2: Adventures In Child Being

I spoke my first word at eight months old. The word was "testing," said in passable English after spending a few days making the attempt, and thus was regarded as the usual gibberish produced by babies by my family. I'd gotten a better handle on the language of my new home, but had decided I should get my mouth up to speed before attempting to speak it. A week later, having gotten my vocal dexterity up to par, I said my first word in my adoptive tongue. Carefully calculated to garner favor and, hopefully, put me on a faster track, I might have felt a touch guilty about manipulating my parents if I didn't suspect that they would approve of the guile.

The word was "shinobi," spoken as mother read to me from a picture book and accompanied by a stubby digit pointed at the warrior on the page.

"That's right," my mother cheerfully answered, "a shinobi, just like daddy." I may not have had the verbal agility to speak most of the language, but I could understand a fair bit by then.

A week later and I'd added "hungry," "good," "bad," "play," and "mine" to my spoken vocabulary to mother's delight and father's quiet approval. It had taken a long time, but I could finally communicate instead of screeching until the problem went away. What was more, with my motor skills improving to the point that I was sure walking was only weeks away, I could finally attain some degree of independence.

That said, I decided to slow down just a hair. Being regarded as clever would be useful, but I doubted I'd enjoy the pressures of a prodigy, especially when I inevitably plateaued. I wasn't actually that advanced, after all, I'd just gotten a head start.

Beyond that though, I didn't do much to conceal my oddities. I knew that I wasn't going to be content to trace out the path set before me by my fictional predecessor, the 'real' Kankuro. I didn't even know how he'd behaved before the chuunin exams, so there was no hope of emulation. It had taken all of a minute to discard the idea of hiding any actions until very late in the game, I was surrounded by people with a lifetime of training in finding and keeping secrets, and my own father was among the best of them. They'd eventually spot my reticence and drag the rest out, at which point it was probably a toss up between the loony bin and being executed as a demon.

Better to just act on my instincts and restrict the lies to my past rather than pretend to be someone I wasn't. Ninja, especially powerful or clever ones, tended to come packaged with a number of eccentricities, so any odd habits that carried over shouldn't be too devastating. After all, one strange act would draw attention, but one mixed in with a hundred was just Kankuro being Kankuro.

Thus, the next time Temari seized one of my toys I spent a long moment eying it contemplatively before nodding and declaring "Yours!" before crawling over to the box the rest were kept in. Taking each out in turn, I put on a show of examining each before either setting it in a pile beside me and saying "mine," or hurling it at my sister and repeating his first declaration. It was mostly arbitrary, but every one of the small, durable books kept in the box were deposited in a careful stack at my side. They might not have anything else to teach me, but I'd always loved books and refused to show even the simple ones anything but respect.

Every toy I deigned to toss Temari's way, I noted, was caught swiftly and effectively by her small, nimble fingers, even as her arms began filling up with the playthings. Back home, that would have been a remarkable feat of dexterity for a child that couldn't be more than three. Here, I suspected it was merely above average for a ninja child. I knew that she spent a few hours a day training, honing the reflexes that would one day snatch blades out of the air as easily as they did the doll I'd just tossed.

Finally, coming to a noise maker that I absolutely detested, I shrugged before tossing behind the box, wincing as the drum rattled between it and the wall. "Bad," I said simply, plucking a book from the top of his pile and flipping it open to the sound of my mother's gentle laughter.

[||]8[||]

My first birthday was a family affair. Being the Kazekage's son I had half expected a parade, but Suna didn't seem like a place for such a frivolous celebration and neither did my father. Still, my mother seemed to have convinced him that a small celebration would be appropriate.

Or possibly he'd done it on his own, I considered, watching him from my place in mother's lap. He was smiling, occasionally even laughing at either my mother's words or Temari's antics. I'd grown wary of him when I'd first realized who he was, what he would do. This was a man who would seal a demon in his own son and wield him as a weapon against an allied village. He should have been a sociopath, but, somehow, I didn't see any of that in him. He was a hard man, there was no doubt in my mind about that, but not to the extent I would have expected.

I blinked out of my reverie as my mother offered me some kind of small, soft pastry that I could manage to chew. I snatched it from her with embarrassing eagerness and used still clumsy fingers to cram it into my mouth. It brought a measure of relief to the ache of teething and was delightfully sweet. I hadn't been particularly fond of sweets before my death, but I'd come from a world so saturated in sugar that the lack made me miss it, both the flavor and my old life. The taste reminded me of home, and consequently of all I'd lost. Whether fantasy or reality, I'd been away for a full year now.

Temari, seeing the tell tale signs that I was about to enter one of my moods and recede into myself, pouted. "Baby get all this," she groused, waving her arms about, "an' he doesn't even like it!" This was the first birthday that hadn't been her own as far as she was concerned, and the very concept set her on edge. It might have just been the terrible twos, but I thought I could already see the 'cruelest of all kunoichi' title she would claim.

"Temari!" My mother exclaimed, "be nice to your brother or I'll put you straight to bed!"

My sister turned wide imploring eyes upon my father, who snorted. "Behave yourself, this is your brother's day."

Temari responded by crossing her arms and shooting a glare my way, but not raising any fuss beyond that. Satisfied that things probably wouldn't escalate for the moment and eager to move past the brief unpleasantness, my mother lifted one of the slim packages from the small stack of gifts and pressed it into my hands. It was wrapped in red paper and easy enough to guess from the shape that it was some kind of book. Interested despite my distant thoughts, I tugged the wrapping off and allowed a small smile as I was proven correct. My grin widened and my melancholy faded as I briefly opened it and caught sight of actual text inside. All huge kanji that probably didn't say anything more than a single word a page, but it was still actual words instead of just pictures. I had missed reading, and this small step towards literacy was genuinely heart warming.

"Thank you," I crowed, closing the book and holding it to my chest.

"I told you he would like them," my mother said, hugging me close as she grinned triumphantly in my father's direction.

My father bowed his head and spread his hands, smirking as he replied. "As ever, I was a fool to question you."

The celebration continued in much the same fashion, taking treats between gifts and finding my spirits lifted. A fair number of them were books, my mother having observed how much I enjoyed the paltry set in the nursery. Mixed in were a handful of more typical toys, balls and small stuffed animals. The last was carried to me by a cloud of gold dust, which I dimly remembered as the Kazekage's bloodline but still found enthralling, my father chuckling at my wide eyes. It was a set of round edged wooden shuriken that I ran my fingers along for a moment before my mother put them with the rest of my gifts. I half expected her to shoot my father a disapproving glare, but she didn't bat an eyelash. She was probably a kunoichi, even if a retired one, and toy weapons would only be appropriate for a shinobi child.

By then my head was nodding, my young body still requiring far more rest than the adult one I had been used to. I started slightly as my mother passed me to father and the two walked me to my room, but soon began drifting again. Soon I was tucked into my crib and my parents quietly wishing me goodnight. The last thing I saw before my leaden eyelids slid shut was a flash of movement as one of the guards slid into position outside my window.

Life was full of similar juxtapositions, where everything would seem almost normal one moment, and the next the illusion would be shattered by an intrusion from the ninja world. Shuriken at birthday parties, my father's seeming superpowers, armed guards at bed time, the way my parents would tense ever so slightly at unexpected sounds. I was being raised by trained killers, but I was finding it hard to care about the no doubt copious amounts of blood on their hands. Hard to resent them for not being my 'real' parents. Maybe, I thought dimly, this is what Stockholm syndrome feels like.

Or maybe, a small but insistent thought answered, it's just what family feels like.

[||]8[||]

Over the next few months my routine shifted. Having mastered walking to the point that I was no longer in danger of toppling over while crossing the room, it had apparently been decided that I was in good enough shape to begin training. Each morning I would trail mother and Temari down to a courtyard that was floored with packed sand and scattered with boulders. The edges were shaded by overhangs and had plots of dirt growing carefully tended shrubs.

None of it was too strenuous, at the beginning I just joined Temari for part of our morning stretches as mother led us. My young body didn't find them very strenuous, but every time I got one well enough to do on my own another was added, my participation growing from five minutes to fifteen as I grasped them one by one. I suspected that my more aware mind was moving me along faster than usual, but I had no idea how to play stupid at stretching so it couldn't be helped.

I also learned that the wooden shuriken were meant to be more than toys as I learned to throw them. I wasn't expected to make them go very far, the target of a wooden post five feet away being the best my small frame could muster, but I was shown how to plant my feet and move my arms.

Afterwords, the two of us would enter into a game of tag or hide and seek. I had expected Temari to outclass me in tag, she had enough coordination to run properly where I still had to spread my arms for balance at any pace faster than a walk, but she trounced me just as thoroughly in hide and seek. She stalked around boulders as I checked them, scarcely making a sound. Soon enough I learned to look for the tiny indentations she left in the sand, but it still took me much longer to find her than for her to find me.

A couple weeks in, mother deigned to join a game, making it two on one to keep it 'fair'. Even pretending that she couldn't spot us right away it didn't take thirty seconds for her to haul us out from whatever rocks we hid behind. When it was her turn we spent a solid ten minutes looking before giving up, only for her to haul us into the air by our ankles as she stood up, shaking sand from her hair and laughing at how we hadn't noticed her literally beneath our feet, the two of us squawking in indignation before joining her laughter. Tag wasn't even an option with her casually darting at speeds too fast for our eyes to follow.

All told, the little workout never lasted more than an hour before Temari would get led off to a more formal training session and mother and I would return to the nursery. There, I would crawl into her lap and she'd read to me out of one of the picture books until I nodded off, exhausted by the morning's session. In the afternoon there would be less strenuous games that I quickly surmised were disguised training, like catch or a version of rock-paper-scissors that used the five elements. There were tickle fights where I noticed she would go for vital areas as I tried to slap her hands away, and once she even sang softly as she struck, "throat, spine, lungs, liver, jugular, subclavian, kidney, heart," which left me shivering in more than just laughter. It was moments like these that reminded me that, while not the worst, Suna had never been called nice.

Absorbed in training and learning the language in both spoken and written form, I couldn't help but feel that I'd forgotten something. It wasn't until three months into my training when my mother, smiling brightly, told me I'd be getting a little brother that I realized what it was.

I'd known Gaara would be an issue, I'd made plans to reach out to him, try and rehabilitate him early, maybe even stop his psychotic outlook from manifesting to begin with. But those were all abstract schemes that I'd failed to tie to what had become my world, focusing on the details without seeing the big picture. It had been all too easy to see everything in front of me as real and all those future events as just a story I'd read. Too easy to forget that before I could do anything with Gaara, my mother, and after more than a year of being in her gentle presence near constantly I had no trouble thinking of her as such, would die.

[||]8[||]

Six months later my stretches had extended to take up a half hour, though mother couldn't quite lead us in several of them due to her condition. Temari was alternately thrilled by the idea of a baby and distraught at having our parents' attention divided even further. Mother was her usual soft, cheery self, if a touch less agile, and father was doting on her, a surreal sight if I'd ever seen one.

And, as for me, I'm not ashamed to admit that I got a little bit clingy. Who wouldn't, knowing what was going to happen? I'd viewed my foreknowledge as a boon when I'd first arrived, but in those months of her pregnancy I would have gladly lived in ignorance. My father disapproved when I first resisted joining Temari with the tutor, but mother convinced him to give me a little more time before I had to.

So when Chiyo arrived at the nursery and told my mother to follow her I naturally panicked, lifting myself off the floor and darting to my mother's side as she stood from her seat in the corner. I don't know what I'd hoped to accomplish, no one would listen to a toddler, but I had to do something. "Mama, don't go," I pleaded, wrapping my arms around her leg and clinging as fiercely as I could.

The old woman cast her calculating eyes over me for a moment before turning it upon my mother and arching an eyebrow. Chuckling, my mother ruffled my hair as she said, "he's been worried about me for months. I'm sure his father will watch him during the procedure."

"Fine," Chiyo answered, "bring the brat along, it's no concern of mine if you coddle him." She turned and left as my mother pried me off her leg and took my hand, leading me off into the compound. Eventually we arrived at a chamber that I vaguely identified as the one I'd been born in, the Kage's family too vulnerable to assassination at the hospital. My father was already there in his robes of office and accompanied by ANBU and medic-nin, and a man I recognized as my uncle.

"He insisted on coming," mother said, smiling at my father's inquisitive gaze.

His eyes lingered on me for a moment and I could feel him weighing me up, considering my swift advancement next to my recent displays of sensitivity. Of weakness. Ours was a line of powerful shinobi, and even if I didn't have the family's wildly erratic magnetic bloodline he expected me to carry on that tradition. I had every intention of fulfilling that expectation, chakra was too alluring and weakness too dangerous for anything else, but my refusal to join the tutor, the way I stuck to mother... It didn't speak of strength.

My uncle broke the moment with a laugh, "so, now you're making all three men in the family wait on you, Karura?" He teased, "let this be a lesson to you, Kankuro, women control our lives and none of us will ever escape." This earned him a slap to the back of the head from mother, and father's gaze softened as it was drawn back to his wife. "Well it's true!" He declared, raising an arm to ward off further assaults.

"Obviously," my mother responded primly, "but you're not supposed to say it."

He rounded on father with wide eyes, "Kazekage! Defend your loyal subject!"

"Sorry Yashamaru," my father deadpanned, "acceptable losses to a superior force." My uncle bowed his head in defeat.

Despite everything, the exchange brought a smile to my face, and even Chiyo cackled to herself as she took my mother's arm and led her into the room. Both my mother and her brother had a gift for putting people at ease. Suna would have been a darker place without them... Would become a darker place without them, I supposed.

The thought was sobering and my smile faded as a medic closed the door and the three of us took a seat on a bench opposite it in the hallway, my uncle lifting me up to sit between he and my father. "Don't worry kid," he said, ruffling my hair as I looked up to him, "Granny Chiyo is the greatest seal master in Suna, and I know for a fact that every one of those medics is the best we've got."

I tried to smile back at him, but his words brought little comfort. Suna wasn't known for sealing or medicine.

[||]8[||]

I don't know how long we'd waited, but my father shared my worried expression. Some time before we'd begun to hear Chiyo barking urgent orders to the medics. A little after that and she'd shown her face briefly to order Yashamaru to join them and help. Now my father waited anxiously while I sank into despair. I'd begun sniffling and, instead of the reprimand I half expected, he wrapped an arm around me and pulled me to his side. That, if anything, only seemed to make it worse. My father was a hard man, but that only meant he was reliable, an unbending pillar. If he'd begun to crumble...

Finally, Chiyo opened the door and stepped out, head down and expression distraught. "I'm sorry," she murmured sadly, "she doesn't have much time."

In an instant my father was on his feat and across the hall, killing intent pouring off him as he pinned Chiyo to the wall and half formed gold dust glimmered in the air around him. "What did you do?" He snarled, the old woman's acceptance of his wrath only serving to stoke his anger.

"Most children have their own distinct chakra network by this stage of pregnancy," she answered in a tone both clinical and sad, "but theirs still intermingled. When Shukaku's demonic chakra was added... The boy is protected by the seal, but Karura has nothing to stave it off."

I couldn't make out what my father shouted next, having gotten off the bench myself and darted through the open door. Inside, the medics stood morosely in the back, one bracing himself against the wall, all of them clearly exhausted. My uncle stood on the opposite side of the bed, hands cloaked in green and pressed to his sister. He didn't even look up as I ran to the bedside, focusing every ounce of his concentration on maintaining the flow of medical chakra.

I could hear her speaking softly as I gripped the side of the bed and tried to haul myself up, cursing my stature all the way. I managed to get my chin just over the edge and was greeted by the sight of my mother lying on her side, one arm curled around the unnaturally small form of my newborn brother. I was shocked by how weak she looked. She had never radiated the same invulnerable presence that father had, but she had always been strong, seeming able to protect me from anything.

"Kankuro," she said, eyes shifting lazily to me, the soft edge of cheer in her voice tearing at me even more than the weakness in it. "This is your brother, Gaara. He'll need you to watch over him." Her gaze unfocused and slid back to Gaara and her voice became too soft for me to follow.

"I... I promise, mama," I answered, tears now streaming freely.

Moments later, when my father swept into the room and Chiyo pulled me gently away, I had already closed myself off from the world. I'd seen all I needed to. Suna could crumble, Konoha could burn, and the whole of the elemental nations could fall to ruin and I wouldn't care, so long as I kept that promise. I had a mission, and I intended to see it through.


A/N: Trying to get through childhood without dragging too much, but it's gonna take awhile since I've got to develop a father who got all of a dozen lines and a village that only has enough named characters to count on my fingers. Didn't even have to use my thumbs.

Speaking of names, I'm open to suggestions for the Siblings' surname and the Kazekage's name. Names are hard guys, they're had and I don't understand Japanesse.