Hinata played with the tips of fire-red hair groggily. Temari told her that she was the only person to ever see him sleep truly and not just wake him with their arrival or the feeling of their eyes on him. This was special. This was something only she got to see. He curled around her comfortably through the arm she had under and around his head was tingling from blood restriction.
Hinata didn't mind if he was comfortable.
Hinata couldn't see much of his face. It was pressed into her shoulder. She could barely make out the mark on his forehead, but she knew his normal stony stressed face was relaxed.
Gaara's breath ghosted over her skin, reminding her of the night before. She blushed, burying her face in his hair. She had been ready. She had been ready to consummate their marriage. She never thought about wanting to do such a thing with anyone, let alone her arranged husband.
She had her crush on Naruto, but it had never been lustful, just bashful.
Hinata would have to talk about it with Gaara later. He seemed just as interested as she did, but something was bothering him. She didn't think it was something wrong with her. He would have said if it was. The only thing he tried to keep was his insecurities.
She sighed into his red mop and closed her eyes. She was a married woman now.
Sleeping in was not something he wasn't used to. He wasn't even sure he had ever seen sunlight from his bedroom window before. Hinata had been awake before him. He woke to an empty but still warm bed and the sound of water running.
His wife came out of the bathroom and began to crawl back into the bed when she noticed he was, in fact, awake.
"Morning." She smiled before snuggling back into the warmth of the blankets. He noticed the rest of her makeup had been scrubbed off, and she had red marks littering her face from her roughness.
He nodded, burying his face into her shoulder. "When do you want to get up?" He mumbled into her skin.
She hummed." I think when we get hungry." She noted.
He agreed. "We can have food brought."
"Spending your day off in your room all day?" She asked with a smile in her voice.
"Your room too, now." He reminded her.
"Yeah… Oh, but also your gift." She leaned back from him.
He hadn't thought about that. He had deliberately not thought about it. He was not a fan of not knowing things that concerned him. He didn't like surprises, and he didn't like that she had felt the need to keep something from him even if it was a gift.
She had put work into it. She had been working on it every day for weeks. Something she was making for him. He wasn't worth that kind of effort.
"Sure." He agreed, pressing the bridge of his nose into her neck.
It felt surreal, like something was wrong. Warm bed instead of cold and sunlight among the things Gaara already noticed but then not being in his office yet, even his wife not being in layers and instead of being a thin nightgown with a blanket over her shoulders, it was all odd to him.
They ate what they were brought as they talked, and he tried to figure out what it meant to him.
After eating, she decided it was probably best for them to get up.
Gaara watched her look around the room and turn red. "I don't have clothes other than this and my wedding robes in here."
"You may borrow something of mine to go to your closet." He noted.
Hinata was visibly relieved. Did she think he would have made her pile on wedding robes or wear the thin nightgown to go down the hall? He knew that being appropriately covered was important to her.
Hinata took one of his daily robes and wrapped it around her without a sash. "We will have to move my clothes as well today."
He nodded at her as she left.
"So, you think we should cover his eyes?" Kankuro asked with a smug smile.
"I don't think that's something he would be okay with that," Hinata mumbled, looking up at her husband.
"I would prefer not." He noted.
"No fun." Kankuro sighed. "I had a blindfold and everything."
"Okay." His wife led him by his hands. He had agreed to keep his eyes closed and trust her to not make him trip. "Stop." She let his hands go to stand beside him. "You can look."
Gaara opened his eyes to a large structure. He didn't understand. He looked down to show his confusion, and she smiled at him.
"It's a greenhouse." Hinata clarified, tugging him into the large, mostly thick glass building. "It is for the village's medical plants." She added.
Gaara looked around at unfamiliar plants in different stages of growth. The room smelled of wet earth and fresh leaves. The air was oddly moist even for a greenhouse. How had she achieved all this without someone mentioning it to him?
Hinata continued with no input from him.
"Some of these aren't even common in Konoha. They are a wedding gift from the Hyuga. Once the compound is finished, they will take over the care for it as part of the effort to help the medical center here." She stopped at the end of the hall of green. "I knew no matter what I made, you wouldn't get much use out of it unless it was a desk." She shrank. "And I wasn't good at carpentry." She looked back up with a shy smile. "But I know the village is important to you, so..." She trailed off to look up at him, searching for his opinion.
Gaara understood. Instead of making him something, she made something for his people. They would benefit from in a way only she could help them with her connections to a better climate. He was so deep in that revelation that he almost missed her moving again toward a small door in the back corner.
"This part is for us, though." She waved her hand for him to follow as she opened the door.
Gaara followed her to a more dry feeling room littered with little pots and lines of boxes with sand in them, all filled with cacti along with some plants in normal dirt he didn't recognize. It had shaded pieces to the roof, allowing the green plants to be moved out of direct sunlight.
He realized where she got the idea now.
"Kankuro-san said you liked them..." She mumbled, crossing the small room to one of the plants he didn't recognize to water it. "These are tea over here." She explained. "They will grow in this dry heat."
He took in the thought that this was what she had been hiding. He didn't give it much thought before now, but he did not think she could have possibly kept this much from him. She kept the building materials, shipments of plants and dirt, and the construction from him entirely. It made sense now, the sunburns she had healed constantly, the showers before coming to see him, the exhaustion and soreness. She had been doing massive manual labor.
Gaara crossed the room to her and curled his arms around her ribs, laying his face into her covered shoulder. "I should move a spare desk in here to hide for the council." He mumbled, answering her silent question.
Hinata giggled, placing one hand over his arms and the other into his hair and turning to kiss his temple. "I knew you would like it."
Hinata giggled as the replica sand beast ran between her legs past her to jump onto her bed or rather deformed on the ground, streamed up, and reform on her bed.
"He seems to be more than excited I am moving in." She giggled, leaning over to pet the sand mass.
"Is there any furniture you would like to keep from in here?" Gaara glanced around the room.
"I don't think so. None of it is mine." She noted. "I only came with clothing and trinkets." She had barely set anything out. The room wasn't really that lived in. She had merely stored her items and slept in it. She spent any personal free time in Gaara's office.
"Do you use the vanity? I don't have one." He noted.
"No, I had no use for it more than a desk before, and now I have an office, so I haven't used it." She glanced at the dusted abandoned surface.
"Then, this should be an easy transition." She nodded in agreement.
With all her clothes moved in, what trinkets she looked at daily set out, and what little else she had in a box, he glanced over as she looked at what was in it. She still had the box she had brought from home. Most of the items hadn't even been taken out of it as it sat in the bottom of the wardrobe.
"I'm not sure what to do with these. Guess I could put some of it in my office." She mumbled, looking at it thoughtfully.
"You are welcome to display them in here." He told her, sitting down to glance in as well.
Hinata shook her head. "They haven't much place here." The tanuki wedged himself under her arm and into her lap, where she gladly pampered him.
It was an odd array of things. Weapons in a bag that didn't look her type, weights he had never seen her use, jewelry pieces he'd never seen her wear, small shelf sitters, and books that didn't suit her taste.
"What is all this?" He asked, picking out one of the books.
"Gifts mostly, the weights were from Lee-san, and the weapons are mostly from Tenten-chan. They are from when I still planned to keep my title and were trying to make me stronger. I wasn't good at weapons handling, and the weights were much too large." She picked up the small case of jewelry. "These are from Ino-chan and Sakura-chan mostly. This one is from Kiba-kun's sister." She continued to explain the oddities in the box, who gave her the books on their interests, and why she kept them.
"Usually, people don't know what to get me, so I get some odd gifts." She finished her explanation.
"Why do you keep them?" He asked, setting the book back down.
"Because they are from people who are important to me, they don't need to be good gifts." He didn't understand the sentiment.
'I think we should just burn it.' Shukaku mumbled as his form stuck it's nose up at the box and turned for more attention.
'I don't think she would appreciate that.' Gaara noted picking up the box and putting it at the bottom of the closet as it had been in hers.
"I guess that works."
She laid out on her stomach on the bed. A mass of sand curled up and laid on her back with its head glancing over her shoulder as she flipped through a picture book. Gaara looked curiously from beside her at the pictures.
"I don't remember some of these earlier ones." She hummed and flipped back on unfamiliar pictures.
He stopped her hand gently as he found interest in one. "Who's that?" He noted a picture of a pregnant woman smiling and holding a shy toddler trying to hide her face from the camera.
"My mother." She tilted her head, looking at the woman she didn't remember all that well.
"She looks just like you." He mumbled, looking over the other pictures of her and Hinata on the page.
"You can see that in Hanabi-chan too when she smiles just right." She smiled at the thought. "Her cheeks round out, and the hardness she gets from father softens."
"I look nothing like my mother. Kankuro looked the most like her." His voice held no upset, but she worried talking about his mother might make him uncomfortable.
She continued through the pictures. "She got big when she had me." She pointed at the difference between the belly. "She gained weight everywhere with me. They didn't know she was pregnant at first. They had just thought she was gaining weight from stopping her training to start trying for heirs. She was also getting rather sick when she had Hanabi-chan, so it makes sense the pregnancy was different."
"Does it upset you looking at these." He wondered, glance over at her.
"No." She hummed. "I think it's a rather sweet wedding gift. I don't know where nii-san got all these, some of them I have never seen before." She noted pictures of her father's brother and his wife, Neji's mother before she died on a mission before he was barely a year old.
"This is your first team." He nodded at a picture of her, Kiba, and Shino, all chubby-faced and wide-eyed. Hinata was sitting rubbing Akamaru's stomach with Kiba, Shino stood off to the side, a picture their teacher likely took. "Why are you always covered in bruises in these younger pictures." He took hold of the page, flipping through the next couple of pictures of her preteen to teen years.
She hadn't noticed, but he was right. Always bruises on her neck were shown by her short hair and hands, even sometimes on her face. It was ignorable for the most part, but when looking through years of pictures, it did make it noticeable. "The Hyuga has a harsh training regimen for their heirs. Father, Neji-san, and Hanabi-chan probably gave me most of those."
She felt his face buried into her shoulder. She dropped the page to lose her hand in his hair. She liked his new learned way of showing comfort and attention.
"It wasn't that bad." She mumbled to him.
Gaara said nothing. He only curled his face deeper into her neck. She knew his childhood was so much worse. Why is he feeling bad for her?
Hinata hummed, trying to think of what would make her stop thinking about it, and began to giggle as she found it. She tried to think against it because it wasn't something they hadn't talked about, but the thought of his potential reaction got funnier as she thought about it. He perked and looked at her in confusion. She covered her mouth to keep her laughing down, but it wasn't helping. "Do you think I will get big when I'm pregnant?"
He stared at her blankly for a second before his face turned red.