A/N at the end.
Chapter 22
"Out." It was the way in which the Jounin sputtered and hastily vacated himself from his office that made him vaguely aware of the thorns in his tone. Aside from his biting response at a subordinate who was merely there for a routine job, the fact that Gaara deeply relished every opportunity to remain a recluse as of late was also one of the many signs to the aberration in his mood. Consciously, though, he avoided dissecting and making sense of his condition like it was a mental land mine. To him, dwelling on the issue was acknowledgment, and he'd rather not admit to the existence of these unusual symptoms as though it'd mean defeat.
A whistle rang out and robbed him of his temporary peace and quiet, followed by a string of words that made his focus aim sharply at his right-hand side.
"Who pissed you off in Konoha?"
Spoken with true liberty, the man with cropped brown hair continued to relax his back against the wall as he stood by a large potted Dracaena plant, completely immune to the atmosphere that was contaminated with tension and completely insensitive to the desire of his sibling to be left alone.
At Kankuro, Gaara furled his brows, stony eyes carving into his form.
"Woah, easy on the death glare," his older brother let out a half chuckle, while moving himself away from the wall and unfolding his arms to wave in his defense. But the playfulness in his manner soon dissipated, as he showed his interest as a concerned party. "You've been hella cranky since you got back from Konoha. Something happened there?"
He didn't like at all that Kankuro formed correlation between his fluctuating emotional state and the conclusion of his trip. But try as he might in his own denial, he knew very well the source for his agitation and frustration. So begrudgingly and quietly, Gaara gave him credit for his intuitiveness, but it was a recognition he attached no voice to under the present circumstance.
Wordless stares were exchanged for a minute, as Gaara continued to zip his lips together, tight enough for anyone to suspect that they might have been sewn shut. Taking his stiff silence as sufficient confirmation of his suspicion, his older brother went on to offer his available counsel, "Wanna talk about it?"
He almost wished that his older sibling hadn't so conveniently decided to keep his face free of paint markings today, because the sincerity that was instead drawn all over Kankuro's visage was made plain and visible. It was that genuineness in his eyes that reminded Gaara of their brotherly bond and their obligations toward each other as family; it compelled him to try to venture into a territory that has been left uncharted for so long even as he grew older...
Belatedly, he realized his character fault that was his double standard to his much valued and advocated honesty between him and his associates. When it came to sharing his own private thoughts and personal feelings, it wasn't always a two-way street.
Gaara shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He kept to his guarded silence for a moment more, a show of his deficit in practice to be human about his struggling emotions. His eyes temporarily averted the standing man—flicking from left to right in his otherwise empty office and looking for an alternative, an outlet—before they resettled on Kankuro. Seeing the brown-haired man's yet patient, yet encouraging expression, he figured the coping mechanism he had in his youth would not do. But the final push to accept his brother's offer came from a particular beast of gloom that'd been stirring within him since the day he last left Konoha; its need to be soothed was strong enough to bend the recalcitrant in him and force his locked jaws loosen...
That woman was affecting him more than he thought.
"Suppose," When his mouth opened, his voice came out gruff and slow. In his head, Gaara formulated his delivery as he spoke. Unlike his experience in navigating political rhetoric, his training in unpacking the inner issues that ailed him and molding them into words was... pathetically inadequate. So his first instinct was to tread with caution, and he amended, "One—a friend..."
"Uh-huh." Kankuro swiftly acknowledged, in a tone noteworthy for its eagerness. Opposite of him, Gaara's frown grew, as did a murmur of doubt inside him that said this was likely a bad idea.
"A friend was in a liaison." Gaara presented his hypothetical that was trimmed down to the bare minimum. It was under this veil of anonymity that he could gain some comfort to talk about his underlying problem.
Kankuro blinked, blurting out his words too quickly to remember the need for tact. "With a woman?" He had to double check.
A muscle in his eye twitched. Gaara clarified for his confidant while trying to keep his voice from rising. "Yes." He waited, then absent of any more reactions from Kankuro, forged on.
"And suppose, it was physical in nature..."
"Physical?" The older man cocked a brow. "Like you mean just fucking around?"
The crude word choice was grating on his ears. His gaze bore into the middle child of the family, with distaste, which the latter braced without any perceived effect. Kankuro simply shrugged, in a gesture telling him that at their age neither of them should feel juvenile around this type of language.
What he had with Sakura was more refined than that, Gaara pondered. It was unlike those fleeting superficial contacts he'd experimented with early on—having been indoctrinated at a more receptive point in his adolescence to his brother's belief that repression would lead to later problems in life.
Nonetheless, he affirmed, in his own fashion. "There was intimacy involved."
He'd dedicated the next pause in his account to more unabashed interjections, but none came again. The brief quiet moment was then left for him to phrase carefully that ultimate question, the one that made him spend his days and nights in perpetual restlessness.
On one exhale, he freed it, and he felt the vulnerability he couldn't control in his voice that made his sentence end barely louder than whisper:
"Why would one party experience distress once the relation discontinued?"
A small frown of puzzlement appeared beneath his brows, as Kankuro concentrated his undivided attention on him. "What kind of distress?"
Closing his eyes, Gaara dived deep within to try to pinpoint those feelings and articulate the intangible.
"Anger, a sense of betrayal," he swallowed and ground out, simultaneously feeling the labels he used triggering a build-up inside him. Then there were those dull aches that rolled through his body in waves from wounds that he couldn't see or comprehend.
"Hurt…" faintly, he aired out, feeling an ounce of strength, as well as pride, leaving him.
From the other side, those dark orbs considered him carefully. With pensive slowness, his confidant followed up, "Alright. Let me ask this: Who initiated this relationship?"
His own eyes came down in an unsure blink, unsure of the direction in which the older man guided their exchange. Still, for a moment, he thought of the answer to his question.
True, she might have been the one to spark the fuse, but it was he who fanned the fire.
"—the friend."
"And was there a clear understanding between the two people what kind of relationship it was?"
"Uncertain."
Humming in thought, his brother rubbed his chin and finally gave his verdict, "Well... I'd say you—"
A pointed look was shot his way, warningly; and Kankuro corrected himself, albeit with a roll of eyes and unsparing emphasis in his tone, as he finished up the rest of his diagnosis, "The friend caught feelings."
"Explain."
"I mean, it's hard to stay detached..." Kankuro began to scratch the back of his head, as he supplied his knowledge on the topic, "there has to be basic physical attraction to start a relationship, even casual ones, right? The tricky part is that the attraction feeds into this reward system we humans are physiologically wired for—I read about it before. It's all about the brain chemicals, man. The more we have something that makes us feel good, the more we become dependent on and attached to it."
"And if a line is not drawn, it's only inevitable when one person develops a deeper emotional bond with the other, if not both—I guess even more, if there's also some compatibility in personalities, temperament, values, and whatnot."
Word by word, his mind digested his sibling's explanation. It all but sounded like an addiction that he'd fallen captive to, a case of overdose that'd severed logic from his brain. So more than anything he was desperate for a cure to his afflictions. "What is the remedy?"
"One can do two things: Just let it go and let time heal all things. Or..."
Candidly, the brown-haired man advised him, his gaze set on him in an elongated eye contact, "Take a chance and let the other person know how you really feel about her, and maybe there's an opportunity to start something meaningful."
The second-person pronoun in his brother's speech filtered through this time without so much an objection in the form of a scowl or verbal warning. The barbaric urges he'd left behind him as with his childhood sprang up and rattled him from within, grudging against adopting either suggestion.
So killing something was not an option?
The first solution was in order, Gaara concluded sourly, since the second was eliminated by the one key detail he'd left out on purpose: Sakura Uchiha was married, and she'd made it clear that she wanted nothing more to do with him...
"Hey."
He hasn't realized he'd lost focus of his companion until he found sight of Kankuro again at the vibration of his voice.
"If you need some distractions, let me know."
His brother's direct address at him, completely intentional now, provoked him less than what he'd actually insinuated. A look of pure disgust was all he threw across the room. Then he was bending down to reach for the gourd resting by the leg of his desk. With a need for release, he rose out of his seat and headed for the door.
Brushing past a nonplussed-looking Kankuro on his way, Gaara briskly departed his office and set out for the sandy dunes beyond the border control.
His hands thrust forward. Pyramids of sand erupted from the rumbling earth. At the crossing of his arms, the masses crashed into one another on command and quaked the ground beneath his feet. Minuscule grains filled the hot air he vigorously panted in. Perspiration stuck to his skin, Gaara looked on, to the edge of the desert where the sea of cloudless blue began.
Finally. It'd dawned on him.
Slowly and surely it crept up on him, flooding him with a sense of normalcy that nothing in his life had provided thus far, not his job, not his siblings, not his people—those nights at the dinner table with Sakura and Sarada, he felt like he belonged.
A family, a wife, a daughter… This whole notion hadn't come across him, but the more he indulged the more he grew accustomed.
He'd become emotionally invested. He was emotionally invested.
It was finally apparent to him that things couldn't have unfolded otherwise. He was never meant for a conventional storybook romance. It was long-time coming, when he'd made himself a guest of the Uchiha household, when he'd entered her home with an unguarded heart. He'd approached her with familiarity and ease that came as the basis of a friendship; and none of the kind of apprehension and awkwardness he had attempting at a partnership with his ex-fiancée, a mere stranger of the opposite sex.
Because, given Sakura's status, he'd foolishly assumed no possibility.
After all, he didn't think he'd get tangled up with a married woman; and he didn't think that she could worm her way into his exposed heart with her kindness and charms, with how she'd light up in their conversations about their respective passions and interests, with those rosy-cheeked smiles that warmed all the veins inside his body, as well as her gentle and delicate gestures that touched the part of him hungered for closeness and companionship the more he sampled it.
Despite the baggage he hasn't quite let go since his youth, he'd learned that it was possible for a stoic person like him to develop attachment to someone that went beyond friendly ties, which was... favorable news. The bad news? It was over before it was even allowed to start.
The feelings he'd procrastinated to pick apart and analyze, the sentiments he'd failed to act upon had all doomed him to this ending, to his emotional demise.
The things he longed for increasingly with each trip to a home far away from home were... not his to take. He was a moron to entertain the idea, thinking he deserved it, playing house with someone else's family...
He was. A complete, indisputable fool.
With gnashed teeth, Gaara pushed his open palms upward into the air, conjuring colossal waves of sand that roared forth and leveled every sandy peak in their paths. The winds howled at his ear side, along with the voices from within that made mockery of him.
All of a sudden he felt himself thrown back into the dark empty past, where he was deprived of that simple dream of his.
Now that Sasuke was back, there was no need for him, and he'd been tossed away like a used tool. That night on top of the Hokage Monument, after passing days in the unknown and resisting unsettling mental images of Sakura with another man (but truly he was the other man); she'd dismissed him, dismissed everything they shared, in a matter of minutes. Knife-like were her words that cut him open until he bled unexplained rage, and he was gripped with his own stark speculation:
A substitute—was that what he was to her all this damn time?
The way she was so unkind in her silence to him, when he'd quietly implored her for an explanation, a justification, made him turn on his heels without a second of hesitation. If she'd made up her decision about him, he wasn't the type to beg for reconsideration. In muted fury, he chose to just walk away, because he'd matured enough to curb back his impulses to lash out.
The sands swirled around him, whipping his hair into his face violently; but he kept his gaze, hard and indignant, at the horizon.
From the good memories grew that sense of betrayal he'd felt and related to Kankuro. These wakeful nights, he could still hear her soft voice in the dark whispering to him intimate things, even as his tired and bleary eyes found her no longer next to him. She was always so guarded with her words and emotions when it came to the Uchiha; her actions spoke for her instead. On one occasion, one of those many evenings when they traded body warmth, she'd asked him questions as she caressed him; questions he didn't understand at the time came one after another until they led to her questioning her own relationship with her absent partner. That was perhaps the most transparent she'd been with voicing her doubts about her marriage. So why?
Why did she still choose Sasuke over him?
The thought he didn't consciously control startled him, and Gaara stilled, huffing and puffing as the arid desert heat burned at his lungs. He wanted Sakura to choose... him?
"Love... Have you found it yet?"
He didn't know why those words, her words, surfaced in his head. For him, it didn't compute then just like it didn't now, and he'd said no to her...
He had said. No.
Suddenly, he felt the fatigue, the soreness in his muscles from the overexertion of his training. He felt drained, physically and mentally. Before him, the landscape had transformed, and his heavy eyes scanned the barren land.
"Love... Have you found it yet?"
The same question repeated louder and louder in his head, and he felt the same distinct aches from that damn thing again throbbing in his chest.
Surely this isn't…
In rivulets, sweat trickled down from his forehead, over the old scar that hurt, into his eyes; and he couldn't blink away the sting.
Surely…
Something irritated his cornea and scratched his parched throat then... Something threatened to run down the side of his face at the expense of his dignity…
"That was incredible…"
Gaara cursed himself. Even with Sakura thousands of miles away, the thought of her distracted him dangerously too long to fail to notice the chakra signature of another presence. Instantly on guard to the foreign voice, he spun around, his protective sand circling him at waist-level.
But the sand glass symbol on the small one's headband indicated that he was one of their own.
"Kazekage-sama, will you teach me?" the boy asked, moving his gaze from the stretch of flattened land before them and upward to him.
The determination in his dark mossy eyes reminded him of the Genin he'd mentored back in Konoha. And briefly, he wondered if the young kunoichi from Leaf had made improvements to her usage of her Sharingan, but he quickly rid his mind of the pitifully irrelevant thought.
Gaara stared back at him, mindful of the coils of black sand that danced about the boy erratically. "What's your name?"
"Shinki."
A/N: Sooo yeah I changed up how Gaara and Shinki met, which in the series felt a little random to me, like in a "let's-slap-a-kid-on-him-cuz-everyone-else-is-married-with-kids" sorta way.
To my Guest/Anon reviewer that let me know there may be followers of my work who don't have accounts, I'm encouraged by your support and I thank you for your lovely comment! And to my other Guest/Anon reviewer who commented on Sakura's character last chapter, I appreciate your feedback and will be more thoughtful when doing character studies as I progress in my writing.
Happy 2020 to you all!