This is an interlude which is canon with Stairs of Sand storyline. It was actually meant to be funny all the way through, believe it or not, but it kept getting darker. Just so you know, Suna in 'Stairs of Sand' will not be as dark as the Post-Third-War, Economic-Depression Suna debuting here, mainly because in canon Suna did improve dramatically.
Also, Baki is awesome. I mean; WIND SWORD!

One thing that had baffled every non-Suna shinobi since the time of the Shodai Kazekage, was that all Suna-nin knew how to water walk as well as any Konoha-nin; despite living in a FREAKING DESERT!

Contrary to the popular theory carefully perpetuated by Suna-nin in the past, it is not because dune-walking teaches the same variation in chakra control as water-walking. Water-walking is completely different.

When walking on sand, the particles constantly shift, like water, but the pressure from feet will compact the grains into a relatively stable surface once you've sunk about two inches. But with water, you just keep sinking until you've hit the bottom. Therefore, two completely different exercises are required. Water-walking requires a constant, variegated flow of chakra from the feet, but dune-walking requires small stilts or spikes of chakra from the feet.

Well, that method didn't stay secret very long once the Hyuuga, Uchiha and various other chakra-sensors showed up. But all those other shinobi still gnash their teeth over how Suna-nin get a hold of enough water to teach water-walking. Living in a desert should mean that water would be carefully, if not stingily, conserved for important things like drinking.

Well, each village has it's own claim to architectural fame, usually in relation to their Shodai Kages. Konoha used to be grassland until Hashirama Senju grew a giant forest(plus houses), Kiri was a stinking fetid swamp until their new Mizukage dried out enough ground to build on safely, you get the general picture. But what the Shodai Kazekage did is still a big secret. What he did was use his Doton jutsu and sensory capabilities in order to redirect and merge the entire water table in 50 square miles of the middle of the desert. Resulting in giant, natural, self-filling reservoirs for the village to tap into; allowing a permanent settlement to actually be built. Yeah, three cheers for Shodai-sama.

It's also rumoured that the fact he tampered with the local geography was what started enmity between Shukaku the Ichibi and the fledgling shinobi Village. Oh well.

So yes, Suna is still very conservative about water, but the reservoirs mean that they have a large enough body of water for things like the compulsory swimming and water-walking lessons. They do it in the natural caverns underground, which is where the water starts before it's filtered by seals into another reservoir. And yes, they are COMPULSORY. Before they were, because most Suna-nin have an understandable cautiousness around water and used to decline these lessons, they kept getting drowned out on missions.

If you're lucky, you get an instructor who will talk you in slowly, give you some fundamental pointers, haul you out if you do something wrong and then drill it into your skull until it's instinctive. Unfortunately, being lucky usually meant that you were either a really good student and therefore worth teaching, or you had a politically affluent or shinobi friend/relative willing to either teach you themselves or spend time bullying/blackmailing/pulling rank/bribing someone else to do so.

The unlucky ones were handed over to whichever shinobi had had a falling out with their commander, some of whom had no patience whatsoever. Basically, Pot Luck.

Hey, Konoha threatened you with cat-catching, Suna threatened you with playing swim teacher.

It was how Baki was pressed into being the sensei/bodyguard/handler for all three of the Yondaime Kazekage's children.


Temari had been a keen student, with one of the strongest wind affinities he had seen. He had said as much to her father after her third water-walking lesson. Rasa-sama then said that if that was the case, then she deserved to be taught by the best; 'You, Baki'.
Yes, he was one of the best Fuuton-users Suna had; which was why he was needed on the front lines! He, the Kaze no Ken, would better serve his Village by killing it's enemies.

A week later, he was returned to the village with the left side of his face burned off by a Katon jutsu. As part of his light duties, he was assigned to instruct Temari in wind jutsu. The Third Shinobi War ended days later and he remained a sensei.

He later met Kankuro, with orders to provide swimming and water-walking lessons as well. Baki could see where this was going. Gaara, the new Ichibi Jinchuuriki was currently two, but was already noted for the automatic sand shield he possessed. Oh Fujin-Kami-sama, how was he going to teach him how to swim? Would the sand even work in water?

While Temari stood out for her strong Fuuton nature and Gaara for obvious reasons, Kankuro had always been...average. Having been one of those to see Rasa without the hat and veil with some frequency, Baki could definitely say that Kankuro would grow up to be almost the spitting image of his father. But to those who didn't know quite what their Kazekage looked like, the boy was just average. But through regular interaction, Baki could ascertain that Kankuro was very mature for his age, rather introspective and because of that often felt concealed irritation over those younger than him.

Quietly, Baki feared for Kankuro. Suna was harsh, even more so since the economical collapse at the end of the war, and as such, any shinobi who didn't exceed expectations would be dealt with in less-than-ideal ways. Being the Kazekage's eldest son, expectations for Kankuro were higher than most; average just wouldn't cut it. Baki worried that if Kankuro didn't display some sort of marked ability soon, the council would suggest a breeding program to try and gain more shinobi with Jiton, like Rasa.

It was during the water-walking lessons that Kankuro found his calling; he had almost-perfect chakra control, and a big chakra pool as well!

Baki called in a favour from one of the Puppeteers he happened to know, who, after several tests, a lot of good-natured grumbling and the promise of a drink later, pronounced that Kankuro had the potential to become a Puppeteer prodigy if he put his mind to it.

Baki thought it was the promise of escape from the mediocrity Kankuro had sculpted for himself that made the boy throw himself into the Puppet arts. Baki didn't see much of him after that as Kankuro began to join the Puppeteers in their compound. Surrounded by reserved, deadly shinobi, immersed in a fighting style based on deception and donning a uniform that made civilians dismiss him as 'odd' and 'creepy', Kankuro became more confidant, more scathing, harsher, quieter; and all the more deadly for it.
Rasa and the council, wanting see exactly how far Kankuro had come, had Baki take him out on a mission. A C-rank 'cleansing' of a bandit camp on the border of the Land of Rivers. Kankuro's first kill.

With the Bunraku hood, black suit and Kabuki paint, Kankuro no longer resembled Rasa.

They stopped briefly for a rest and food, five miles from the bandits. Kankuro took the opportunity to check the systems of the puppet he carried and Baki took the opportunity to strike up conversation.
"What's the name of your puppet?"

"Crow."
Kankuro said it just as he removed the puppets head to wax the neck joint, letting Baki catch sight of the Red Scorpion Diamond hallmark. Baki swallowed dryly.
"Why do you have the Akasuna's...I thought they had been destroyed?"

"No, just put in storage. Yachi-sama gave me Crow and told me to reverse engineer it instead of building my own puppet."

Ryuishi Yachi, Head of the Puppeteer Corps, Baki realised. A man who had never seen eye-to-eye with the Kazekage. Gifting Sasori's puppet to the son of Rasa would be sending a subtle message of defiance, but could be passed off as humoring a young prodigy and trying to reverse engineer the puppet's abilities to strengthen Suna's Puppeteer Corps and therefore the Village. A dangerous game, and Kankuro was caught in the middle.

An hour later, Baki would watch as Kankuro took out most of the bandits with poisoned senbon and poison bombs from a distance. The few men who'd had the presence of mind to shield their mouths and noses with their sleeves and rags of cloth were huddled in the middle of the camp, weapons drawn and spewing threats and obscenities in equal measure in their terror.

Then, Kankuro strode out from the forest, face creased with a boiling anger that Baki was surprised to see. As a Puppeteer, Kankuro didn't need to break cover. What could have enraged the boy so?

Crow was hovering over his shoulder, the foremost set of arms crossed loosely around Kankuro's neck and it's three eyes swiveling in their sockets, like some grotesque, spidery parody of a lover. Kankuro's hands were held open in front of him as he kept Crow aloft with chakra strings. Since the strings were invisible unless you concentrated, it made him look like he was begging for some sort of divine supplication.
Factoring in the jagged patterns of the face-paint and the faint tendrils of the gradually disappearing poison smoke swirling around his ankles, it was positively eerie and demonic.

The bandits faltered and a few pissed themselves. Kankuro said only one word.

"Die."

Then Crow was among them, clicking and clattering, blades flying. Baki knews that Kankuro knews that those blades were coated with poison, but they flashed again and again, until Crow was up to it's elbows(?) in red. It took only three minutes.

Afterwards, Kankuro just knelt at the edge of the clearing, Crow slumped beside him. Baki retraced the boy's steps around the camp perimeter. He found the body of a teenage girl thrown carelessly under a shelf of rock. Sword wounds to the chest and abdomen. The bandit's work. Bruises from hands and fingernails on her hips and thighs as well as the torn, thin clothing painted an ugly picture, but not one he hadn't seen before. It was the thick blonde hair that gave him pause. Then he understood.

He buried the girl with a weak earth jutsu. Wind's more his specialty, but he could do earth; it was the first time he'd used it to bury someone though. He walked back to the ruined camp. Kankuro's hands trembled, but his face was as if carved from alabaster as he smeared his fingers in the blood on Crow's arms. Baki kept his mouth shut as Kankuro daubed the red onto his face; his eyelids and upper lip. It looked out of place next to the rich purple on his forehead and cheekbones.

As they left the forest and entered the scrubland, Baki stopped and waited for Kankuro, politely looking away as the boy dry-retched into a bush. He said nothing as he passed him the water bottle.

When they stopped for the night, then Baki spoke. "I found the girl you saw." Kankuro tensed. "I buried her." Kankuro said nothing, but his shoulders relaxed.
"She resembled Temari, didn't she?" Baki continued. Kankuro could have been carved from granite with how still he was.

"Please don't tell them." Baki almost missed Kankuro's voice with how quiet it was. "Please don't tell them I lost control."

Baki didn't feel anything, which worried him, but he pushed it down and ignored it. "I won't. And I don't blame you, either."

When they got back to Suna, Baki gave the mission report. He said that Kankuro broke cover in order to aid his puppet in herding the men more efficiently, and Kankuro checked they were dead with Crow's blades. He wondered if his Kazekage knew he was lying by omission and he found himself resenting the hat and veil that Rasa wore, because he couldn't see if Rasa was even listening. A foolish thought. A shinobi always listens and Rasa is, if nothing else, a shinobi.

When they left the tower, Baki pulled Kankuro aside, and pressed half of his own pay for the mission into the boy's hand. Baki noticed that because of his shaking hands, the stripes of blood were uneven and where he had smeared his eyelids, the blood had dried cakey and thick on his eyelashes.
He forestalled any protest with an upraised hand. "No, it's yours. You're going to go home, wash your face, eat a hot meal, then hug your sister and tell her you love her. Am I clear?"
Despite his still shocked expression, Kankuro shut his mouth and ran off.

Later, having tempted his Puppeteer friend to the bar with the promise of a free drink, that Baki asked why Kankuro had streaked his face with blood. He got his answer. Apparently, when a new Puppeteer was sent out on his first kill, his face was painted in the design of a warrior, but the pattern purposefully left incomplete. The Puppeteer was to complete the design with the blood of his first kill, marking him as a full, 'blooded' warrior.

Kankuro was nine and a half.

Baki bought a bottle of sake and took it with him back to his room in the barracks. He bought a bottle not big enough to make him drunk, he was on duty tomorrow after all, which meant he could still remember the mission, and the explanation, with absolute clarity when he woke up the next day.

When he ran into Kankuro that morning, the boy was much clearer-eyed and looked as though a weight had been lifted off of his shoulders. 'Thanks, Baki-sensei,' he said after they agreed to meet up for a spar that afternoon; as a blooded Puppeteer and a newly-promoted Genin as of last night, Kankuro now had some fluidity with his training schedule.

It was the first time Kankuro called him 'sensei'.


Baki knew about Gaara. Who didn't?

Besides, Baki had been in the Village a nearly year ago when Yashamaru, Gaara's handler, disappeared and Shukaku was released. That night, he realised what the Kazekage had done. He had only half-chained a god of destruction.

His own child! The thought still left a bitter taste in his mouth. The shinobi in him admired the lengths Rasa had gone to, killing his own heart to try and better the Village. But the human in him was disgusted; an unborn child, his own blood, an insane, empty shell for the Shukaku. Wrong.

Baki went back to the barracks that night, intent on using up his saved water allowance in one long shower. He kept an eye on the window. His gut was telling him that something was off, and it had been right in the past. Someone was watching him. He could feel the eyes burning into the back of his neck, but every time he turned around, the feeling vanished.

The lights flickered and went out as a heavy, malicious chakra permeated the air.

Baki knew that chakra. It was unmistakable, inhuman. Everything was screaming at him to run, run away. He knew he couldn't run though. He lived in the desert; the sand would find him and embrace him no matter how fast he ran. The near-silent hiss of shifting sand in the shadowed corner of his room almost sounded like an agreement of his thoughts.

"You are the Kaze no Ken."

The voice is raspy from disuse, but it is a child's voice nonetheless. But only in pitch; a child's voice is not dead and flat like sandpaper. And Baki knows that it is not a child talking.

"You are Gaara," he says back. He doesn't know what else to say. He takes a deep breath and turns around. He would prefer to look his death in the eye.

The boy is skinny, clothed in regulation black shinobi pants and shirt, the only accessory a length of white cloth wrapped around the waist and over one shoulder. Under the dark skin around the eyes, the skin sags slightly from lack of sleep. The rest of the visible skin is flawless, unnaturally so, the only exception the vivid red of the kanji on his temple. A shifting cloud of sand circles his feet, like a twisted cat curling around and marking it's property.

Baki feels a tendril of chakra reach out and brush against his chakra network. He's felt it and done it a myriad of times before; it's a basic way for shinobi to identify each other. But this chakra is alien, he can almost hear it screaming for blood in the back of his head, as deep and as uncaring as the sandstorms known to flay a man to the bone in minutes. The chakra caresses his own as if enjoying the pain it causes him and Baki catches a glimpse of the mind behind it. Huge, colossal, old, and different. It's... it's like trying to swallow a mountain whole. A flash, and there's hate and bloodlust enough to burn the very heavens, and a deep, drowning darkness like his lungs are filled with sand.

It's only been a second, but Baki finds himself on his hands and knees on the floor, dry-retching as a fine mist of sand swirls around him. He looks up, and finds himself practically nose to nose with the Jinchuuriki. He freezes.

Those eyes are a washed out jade green. Blank and cold. There is no mercy in those eyes.

A small hand comes up and closes in on his face, close to his eyes. He wills his heart to stop beating, because it's too loud, and it will give away his position to the enemy and what is he saying?!

The hand never touches his skin.

The veil that hides half of his face is swept aside. He can't bring himself to care. It feels like that chakra already stripped him to the bone. And, he might look monstrous, but he knows that he is nothing compared to the beast in front of him, wearing a child's skin.

Baki knows what he looks like under the veil. His eye was permanently sealed shut and his ear is slightly droopy, but he still has hearing on that side. The skin looks like a candle melted in the sun, whitish-pink and flabby folds.

"Why do you hide it?" The boy rasps, head tilted a little to the side in a way that might have been cute on a normal child, but on Gaara just screams predator.

"Otherwise, people stare." How is his voice so calm when he's frozen on the inside? Gaara blinks once, slowly. His hand withdraws and the veil falls back into place. Baki keeps still, as Gaara rises and backs away.

When Gaara vanishes in a whirl of sand and shadow, Baki's arms give out and he sprawls on the floor. He doesn't care; he's fucking alive. He can only chalk it up to Gaara's curiosity as to what sort of man his new teacher is as the reason why.

Baki thinks back to the toddling four-year-old he once knew, wide-eyed and terrified by the water and holding hands tightly with 'Yasha-oji.'

What happened that night? What broke the child inside and let in the beast? Only the Kazekage and his counselors know that for sure. You forged a weapon, Rasa, but then it broke. And now, it's not just cost you your wife and child, but all the shinobi and civilians it's killed and you've marked off as collateral.

Baki remembers the Third Kazekage back from when he was a Chunin. The Third loved this Village, but he loved the idea of it. Rasa sees only the buildings, the money; he doesn't see the people's will crumbling. Baki thinks that if the Third could see Suna now, could see Gaara, he would be so very disappointed.

Now, all he's got to do is survive an unstable and bloodthirsty Genin Jinchuuriki until Gaara somehow makes Chuunin. Fujin-Kami-sama smile on them all, because Shukaku undoubtedly won't.

The 'swimming-lesson' plot bunny started out as 'How do Suna-nin know how to water-walk?' 'Where does Suna get it's water from?' 'Wouldn't it be logical to have a lot of the Village underground?'

Then I wanted to do a scene where Kankuro goes all creepy with Crow hanging around his neck. Then, I remembered how calm Gaara originally was at the beginning of the Chunin exam and it was Temari who said 'He's been getting more and more agitated as the Chunin exams progress', which led to me thinking 'How would a calm(albeit creepy) Gaara handle having a sensei(and respect one) while still being 'as long as there are still people to kill in this great, wide, crowded world, I will never disappear'?'

For full effect:

Listen to Naruto OST Glued State while reading the swimming lesson part, Naruto OST Student and Teacher Affection for the Kankuro part and Naruto OST Nervous for the Gaara part.