Hours

Chapter 4

He knew that Gaara could have sent him to do anything. Track down a criminal, escort some official to safety, do reconnaissance on some new possible threat to the village. Since Temari went to Konoha, he'd been on training duty with the genin all week, which anyone would agree was light duty, and today, Gaara sent him on a routine patrol that only took him and his team an hour.

When he got back, Gaara greeted him at the door with a smile.

"How would you like some tea?" Gaara asked.

Kankuro quickly recovered and played off his surprise with a shrug. "Sure. I'd like that, I guess."

He found himself in the kitchen, sitting at the table watching his brother prepare tea. "Hey, how come you're down here with me, jan?"

Gaara delivered the tea to the table and sat down himself. "I'm taking a break."

"A break? Can you do that?"

"I am my own boss," Gaara said.

After a moment of stunned silence, Kankuro laughed. "I guess so."

"It's only for an hour," Gaara said. "I wanted to spend time with you. I knew about how long the mission would take. I wanted you to have time for your puppet workshop today."

Kankuro sipped his tea. "You're taking it easy on me, huh?"

Gaara nodded.

"Don't you think your decisions are going to come across as favoritism?" Kankuro asked.

Gaara looked confused. "I'm not your father."

"But you're our leader," Kankuro pointed out. "Don't you think it amounts to the same thing? Suddenly you're showing me all this attention, and Temari's not going to like it. She's going to think you're taking sides."

"I have taken sides," Gaara said. He sat down. "I've taken your side."

"But isn't that wrong?" Kankuro asked in exasperation, looking at the ceiling. "I mean, you have to be fair."

"Being fair is taking your side," Gaara said.

Kankuro wanted to throw his tea at Gaara. "How can you say that?"

"Because I've listened to both sides, and I've examined the data," Gaara said. "You're right and Temari's wrong." He furrowed his brow, looking at Kankuro with concern. "She's going to have to get used to that."

Kankuro chewed that over. "Okay, but that doesn't explain why you're taking an hour off." He gestured. "I mean, it's not mealtime, and it's not an emergency to spend time with me. We've spent time together all week. I don't feel neglected or anything, jan."

Gaara smiled wryly. "I thought if I stayed with you, I could get you to sit down for a while without thinking you had to do any chores."

Kankuro looked away, feeling outsmarted. "Yeah, it's laundry day, jan. I was planning on catching up on a few chores." He sighed. "Not that I'd rather do chores than spend time in my workshop. You know that. Sometimes I don't think I get enough time to myself."

"Then why did you plan to spend the rest of the day on chores?" Gaara asked.

"Temari brought home a whole sack full of dirty laundry." Kankuro scratched the back of his head. "Man, she sure complicates things, doesn't she? I had everything under control while she was away without much of a problem, but now that she's back I feel all…" He slumped in his chair and sighed. "Stressed out again."

Gaara sipped his tea, slurping because it was hot. He looked at Kankuro innocently. "So don't do her chores."

"Don't do her cooking or her clothes?" Kankuro protested. "Man, she'll beat my ass into the ground." He suddenly realized how bad that sounded. He rubbed the bridge of his nose. "It's not like I'm her wife or anything, but she expects me to do it and gets mad if I don't. And I really don't wanna deal with it right now."

"Why not?" Gaara asked.

"Because I still have bruises from yesterday!" Kankuro scowled and drank his tea too fast, burning his tongue. He set his teacup down abruptly. "If Temari proved anything yesterday, it's that she's willing to fight me to keep her spot as top princess. And I don't want it that much. I may be 'gay', according to half the village, but I'm not that gay. And besides. She's family. I'm not supposed to be fighting her." He stared down into his cup.

"Who says?" Gaara asked quietly. "If she gets violent, you should be able to defend yourself. I've seen you both in battle, Kankuro. You share the same rank. You should be equal."

Kankuro shrugged. He refused to look up from his tea. "But I don't want to win as much as she does. That's what it comes down to, I think. Temari cares more about being right. So I let her."

"You know it's wrong," Gaara said.

Kankuro shrugged again. "So what?"

"I care more about you than I do about Temari," Gaara announced, jarring Kankuro into attention.

He stared at his ototo.

Dead silence rang in the room. Gaara raised an eyebrow and looked at him expectantly.

Kankuro struggled to breathe, much less find his voice. "What? What did you say?"

"I said it." Gaara's hands tightened on his teacup until he shook. "It's the truth. It's favoritism. Between the two of you, I love you more."

Kankuro was dimly aware his mouth was hanging open. He licked his lips and looked around the room, trying not to imagine dozens of hidden shinobi waiting to report back to his older sister. Finally, his gaze rested on Gaara again. "How could you say that?" He couldn't get his voice above a whisper. "How could you say such a horrible thing?"

Gaara's stoic expression was unremorseful. "I don't care. It's the truth. I love you more than I do her. When we were kids, it was always you I fantasized getting close to. Never her." He cut his hand across the air.

"Guh. Gaara…"

Gaara folded his hands on the table. "I will always treat you two as equals, to the best of my ability as Kazekage, but when it comes to disputes that happen between you, I am tempted to choose your side indiscriminately."

"But…but what happens when…" Kankuro didn't know if he was shaking because he was terrified, or if he was thrilled. Just the fact that he could feel thrilled filled him with nauseating fear that he was a bad person.

"When you're wrong, I'll tell you," Gaara said.

Kankuro let out a breath he didn't realize he'd been holding.

"But when you are right and Temari is wrong, don't think that I will hold back against her out of some sense of sentimentality," Gaara said. "It's not there. I don't have any sentimentality towards our sister. You might, but I don't."

All Kankuro could tell for sure was that he felt numb. The numbness was the same as when someone told him his father died. The same numbness he felt when he thought he'd lost his only chance to be an older brother. But as far as he could tell, he hadn't lost anything. In fact, he felt that there ought to be an opportunity in this. In his headspace, he knew that: something good had just happened. But he was too numb to grasp it.

He lifted his cup to his lips and drank his tea, autopilot gestures with no one home.

"Niisan?"

"Yeah?" Kankuro asked shakily, not making eye contact.

"What are you thinking?" Gaara asked.

Kankuro paused. "I don't know. That's the problem."

"I thought this would make you happy," Gaara said softly.

"Yeah. Yeah, it does." As soon as Kankuro heard Gaara say it, he knew it was true. "It does make me happy." He set down his cup and frowned. "Well…no. No, it doesn't." Although he couldn't immediately say why, he knew that was true too. He only had a vague sense of wrongness.

"Why not?" Gaara asked.

"Because…" Kankuro chewed his lip. "Because I think…you should love us both equally."

"Why?" Gaara examined his face. "Why? If it's impossible for me to do, why?"

"If…If you just…" The room blurred as Kankuro realized why he suddenly felt so miserable. "If Father had just loved us all equally, nothing bad would've happened to us. We would've been fine. But because he played favorites, we got hurt all the time, and he turned all his attention on Te –" His voice cracked. He swallowed. "Temari." He hung his head. "I wanted to make myself the favorite, and that's why I was a bad person. I wasn't trying to fix it, I was only trying to take advantage of Father's tendency to play favorites for myself. I was always trying to prove myself to him so he would choose me as the favorite and dump everyone else. But that's horrible. That's how a kid feels, not an adult. I shouldn't want to be the favorite over anyone else. I shouldn't want anyone else to get dumped. But I do. And that makes me a bad person. I want you to play favorites, and that's wrong."

Gaara reached across the table and squeezed his hand. "You're not wrong. You deserve sometimes to feel special. That's what you told me. You told me it's right to want to feel special. You told me it's a right. That I have to feel special, or I'll go away. Cease to exist." His voice picked up speed and emotion. "That I can't exist if I can't feel special from the inside, but I also can't exist if someone doesn't make me feel special from the outside. You said that was what was wrong with the village's treatment of me. They didn't make me feel special. So I was afraid of ceasing to be. I was afraid to cease to exist because they made me feel invisible, and I started to think I was –"

Kankuro's head snapped up. "No. No, don't. Stop." He squeezed his brother's hand back. "You're right. They were wrong to do what they did. You do need to feel special. And I want you to feel that way, because you're special to me."

Gaara whispered, "But who makes you feel special? Who keeps Kankuro from vanishing off the face of the world?"

Kankuro felt the pained expression split across his face. "You do. You do, Gaara. You're my ototo. Being your older brother is the most special thing in the world to me." He shook his head. "I could never disappear now that I have you."

Gaara took a deep, slow breath, methodically exhaling tension. "I'm glad. I want you to be here. I want you to be here for the rest of my life. If Temari really is leaving to marry Shikamaru sometime in the future, then you're all I have."

A smile tugged at Kankuro's mouth. He looked away. "I'm not all you have. You have a whole village, jan. What's just one guy?"

"The difference between being alone, and being special," Gaara said softly.

Kankuro inwardly melted. He flopped back in his chair. "Okay, okay, jeez. I give up." He raised his hands. "I'll spend time in my workshop if it makes you happy."

Gaara smiled. "Mm-hmm." He stood up. "Well, back to work." His smile morphed into a tiny smirk. "If I don't find you in your workshop, I'm going to punish you, Kazekage to jonin."

Kankuro laughed. "Okay, fine. I won't sneak off and do Temari's laundry."

"I knew you were thinking it," Gaara said, abruptly solemn.

Kankuro scratched the back of his head and grinned sheepishly. "You know me."

"I ought to. You're my niisan."

They parted ways.

Kankuro had to admit there was a little bit of a bounce in his step compared to before the conversation.

Before dinnertime, Gaara took Kankuro aside and explained his plan. In spite of misgivings, Kankuro agreed. They'd try having everyone cook for themselves tonight.

Oh, boy, Kankuro thought. But I'll do it. God, if it makes Gaara happy, I'll do it. I don't wanna disappoint him by chickening out.

So they each chopped their own vegetables and picked out their own meat, and fried their own noodles. The only thing they shared was the kitchen tools. Surprisingly, it only added about fifteen minutes to the cook time. And they both agreed that having their food be really piping hot when they got it was a plus.

"And, I don't like celery like you do," Gaara pointed out. "I only tolerate it. Now I don't have to have any at all."

"That's true, jan." Kankuro ate a piece of diced celery and grinned. "More for me."

They just sat down at the table when the front door banged.

The whirlwind entrance he imagined for Temari wasn't that far off. She came storming in, chakra crackling, hands already balled into fists.

"How was your day?" Gaara asked politely.

Temari gave him the evil eye. "You sent me on the worst mission ever."

"What was so terrible about it?" Kankuro asked. "I thought it sounded pretty routine. Take down a target, teach a bunch of kids how to ambush stuff without being seen."

"They should've been stuck back with the D-Rankers," Temari protested. "They were terrible. I had a girl with no confidence, who burst into tears the moment she did something wrong, a fat guy, and a lazy nerd who just wanted to look at birds!"

Kankuro laughed.

She glared at him.

"I can't help it." Kankuro held up his hands. "I remember them. I had the same bunch of guys. But your descriptions are awfully harsh, jan. They weren't that bad the way I remember them."

Temari steamrolled along as if she hadn't heard his comment at all. "And there was this guy who couldn't throw in a straight line if he wanted to. He thought he was hot shit because he was handsome, but he threw like a girl with a lazy eye." She threw up her hands. "And he kept hitting on me! I had to tell him that if he took a pass at me one more time, I'd slam him into the ground. Lucky little bastard believed me." She folded her arms.

"I didn't choose the mission to give you a hard time," Gaara said. "They needed training and you were the one with the most compatible skills."

"You mean Kankuro scared them all off with his creepy puppet jutsu," Temari said sourly with a glance in Kankuro's direction.

"I did not," Kankuro protested. Her words were like a blow to the chest. Since when did she call his puppet jutsu creepy? She used to kick the ass of anyone who said that.

"Kankuro has been training genin all week," Gaara said. "It was simply your turn."

"The minute I get back from Konoha?" Temari scowled and folded her arms. "You're just doing this to punish me."

"I sent you to Konoha because I trusted you." Gaara looked perplexed. "It was a complicated reconnaissance mission, and I knew that you could do it. Besides, you requested to be closer to the border. You asked me for first pick of all the Konoha missions, and that's what I did. I gave you first choice."

"Yet the moment I get back you're treating me like a criminal and asking me to babysit little kids," Temari said. "Where's the logic in that, little bro?"

"They needed to learn your skills, from a tough taskmaster," Gaara said. "I gave you the genin to whip them into shape. They needed it." He gestured. "You've performed your duty, so please make your supper and get comfortable."

"I don't wanna make my own supper."

Kankuro grinned. "Who's the little kid now, jan?"

A muscle in her jaw rippled. "What'd you just say to me?"

"I said –"

She took a step forward. "Did you just say I'm a little kid? Is that what you said to me?"

"Don't get so hot and bothered about it," Kankuro said. "It was just a joke. A quip. You know, banter? Like we always do?"

She tossed her head. "Oh, it so was not. And you know it. You just called me out to my face. What do you think I'm gonna do?"

"I'm hoping you just pipe down and cook some dinner so you can get out of our hair," Kankuro said dryly. He pointedly took up his chopsticks. "We're having a good time here. At least we were until you showed up."

"Excuse me?" She looked from one to the other. "This is my house, too, and I have a right to be here!"

"Then follow the rules," Kankuro said. "It's not like it's that hard."

"You can't make up stupid ultimatums while I'm gone and then call them rules as soon as I'm back," Temari said. "I told you last night. That shit's not going to fly with me. Wise up."

Gaara cut into the conversation effortlessly, even though his voice was soft. "Because I am Kazekage, you live here for free. If I were not, you would not be here at all. You would be somewhere else, having to cook and clean your living space, and paying rent for the privilege. I don't see why you have to argue." He stood up. "All you have to do is get some meat and cook it, and then fry your noodles. You don't even have to do that if you don't want to. You can order takeout if that's what thrills you. But you can't come in here and yell at us, when we've done nothing wrong, and make demands for respect when you won't respect us."

Temari took a step back. She stared at her ototo for a moment before answering. "I didn't ask for no respect. But that's exactly what I got. I not only had to put up with your disrespect before I left, it was the first thing I faced when I got back. You sent me on an insulting mission far below my skill level, and then Kankuro had the good grace to mock my pain and refuse to make my day a little easier by doing just one or two little things to change my outlook that no one cared how I felt." She folded her arms. "Now you've gone and ruined it all. I hope you're happy." She turned on her heel. "Because I'm not going to be." She ran from the room.

Kankuro stood up abruptly. "Temari –" He reached out to her.

Gaara grabbed his niisan's arm. "Let her go." He nodded. "If she wants to sulk, let her. This is a time of personal growth for all of us. She's not going to convince me otherwise."

"But she's not sulking!" Kankuro protested. "She's hurt! And she's hurt because of what I said." He ran a hand through his hair. "Jeez. What've I done? I was trying to fix it and I made it worse – again! I didn't know she would react that way to my bantering with her. I thought that would make it normal for her. I didn't see she was going to think I was picking on her."

Gaara pulled him closer and put a protective arm around him. "Then stop beating yourself up about it. It's not your concern. If her feelings are so sensitive that she can't bear to listen to the truth, then she'll have to get bruised until she learns to roll with the punches. That's just the way it goes for shinobi. You either learn or you get hurt."

Kankuro felt his chin trembling. "Yeah? Well, that's how I learned to keep my mouth shut!"

Gaara turned him away from the door and hugged him with deliberate firmness. "Don't do that. Don't blame yourself for what are her problems."

"It's not Temari's problem I'm an inconsiderate asshole!"

Gaara pressed Kankuro's head down onto his shoulder. Kankuro tensed, then realized the implications of fighting his way out of a friendly gesture. He let out a breath and relaxed. Surprisingly, he felt much better as soon as he did. He wrapped his arms around Gaara and hung on.

He didn't think he'd ever been hugged so much in his life. All of a sudden, Gaara was breaking all the barriers of their culture, showing affection in the most basic of ways – with touch – and Kankuro found suddenly that all the arguments he'd been taught to believe about social contact being embarrassing didn't hold water. He just didn't feel that way. He liked it when Gaara hugged him. And he was beginning to wonder if he'd care someone saw them this way.

Gaara spoke quietly. Kankuro felt it through his brother's chest. "Why do you fly off the handle every time Temari accuses you of being inconsiderate?"

"Because I'm made that way, jan. I can't handle it."

"I don't believe that."

"Why not? Everyone else does."

"Because you're stronger than that."

Kankuro froze.

"If someone called you a coward, or an idiot, you'd never let them get away with it," Gaara said. "If you thought someone meant that you were a coward or an idiot, even though they didn't say it outright, you would still call them on it and correct them – with your fists if necessary. How come the same kind of words from Temari hurt so much?"

"Because she's my friend," Kankuro said, burying his face in Gaara's shirt. "She's my sister. She's supposed to be on my side."

"But you don't let me say those things either, and I'm supposed to be on your side," Gaara said. "You didn't when I was insane, when I was mad at you. You didn't ever let me say those things. It's only when Temari says those things that you get upset like this." He patted Kankuro's head.

Kankuro imagined that Gaara felt like he was petting a cat. The image was silly, and a little weird, but it made Kankuro smile. "Well, I'm supposed to take care of her."

"Why?" Gaara asked. "Isn't Temari supposed to take care of you, too? Why does it have to be so one-sided?"

Kankuro sighed. "Dad, again. Dad told me – I was razzing on her. I didn't like her very much. When I was younger. And she didn't like me. She'd pick on me, and I'd retaliate, but then Dad would catch me, and he'd make me pay for it. He never saw my side of the story. He only saw Temari's. And she'd say that I made the whole thing up, of course. She got away with it every time, so she always did it."

He took a deep breath. "One time I got caught out pulling her hair. And that was it, man. That was finished. Our old man took me aside and he told me that if he ever caught me doing that again, he'd tan my ass so hard I wouldn't be able to sit down for a week. He said I had to take care of her, and I had to ensure her happiness."

"What?" Kankuro read several levels of outrage in Gaara's soft voice.

Kankuro clenched his teeth. He really didn't want to start crying. "I asked why. He said, 'If you loved your mother, you will ensure her happiness in this world.' Temari's. Her happiness." He fisted handfuls of Gaara's sleeves. "I got the message that her happiness means everything, and mine – my happiness doesn't mean shit."

Gaara patted the back of his neck. "But you know that's not true." Gaara sounded lost. "Your happiness means a lot to me. I couldn't live with your unhappiness. I'd have to fix it."

Kankuro raised his head.

They stared at each other.

"I'm not Father," Gaara said.

Kankuro felt his legs suddenly shaking. He held onto Gaara with all his strength, hoping that his knees didn't buckle. He didn't know his insides could turn into water like this. He'd never felt this way before in his life. It's like all the strength is sucked out of me. But…I don't feel bad. His voice was as shaky as he felt. "I guess not."

"Let's do dishes," Gaara said.

Kankuro nodded.

They went into their routine side by side.

Gaara smiled at him. "There's one good thing about this conflict tonight."

"What's that?" Kankuro asked dryly.

"Since Temari didn't cook, she didn't dirty any dishes."

Kankuro laughed.