CHAPTER 8: Breakdown

Temari was awakened by a presence in her bedroom.

It was on edge, its powerful, uncontrolled chakra radiating over her in a way that was anything but friendly. Enemy nin, her senses told her. Fan beside the bed, kunai under the pillow, prepare to defend yourself. She was about to make a move when the person spoke.

"Temari. Wake up," her youngest brother's voice said.

She opened her eyes with a jolt to see him hovering over her bed, black-rimmed eyes wide in the moonlight. "Gaara!" she did her best but failed to say calmly, heart beating hard in her chest. She reminded herself that her brother was sane now, that he wasn't going to hurt her, but she took hold of her fan just in case. "What're you doing here? It's…" she looked briefly at the clock, "almost 4 AM…"

But as her eyes grew more accustomed to the light, she realized something about him was off. Or more off than usual, she supposed. "Gaara, what's wrong?"

"Temari, what are preservatives?" he demanded in a pinched voice, his chest rising and falling too quickly.

She blinked and wiped her eyes. If this was a dream, it was a very unsettling one. "Preservatives? Like in food?"

"The book Naruto brought says I can't have them. They're bad for the baby."

"Well Gaara, maybe if you eat them all the time," she answered with caution, "but you eat healthy--"

"The book says I can't eat them. It says they're bad for the baby," he told her again, looking somewhere into the blackness of her room. His eyes were too wide, his strange green pupils alarmingly distended. His right hand was trembling.

"Gaara…" she started, trying to think of a way to calm him down because this wasn't looking good. "Have you talked to Lee about this? Where is he?"

"He's asleep. Temari, cookies have preservatives in them, don't they?"

"But Sakura says you're fine. She says the baby's fine. You don't have to worry about eating a few cookies, alright?"

"I haven't been eating enough protein either," he continued as if he hadn't heard a word she said, bending over himself and clutching roughly at his belly. "That's bad for the baby too. The baby needs protein to grow strong."

The sight the small bulge at Gaara's middle pressed tightly against the linen of his clothing unnerved Temari indescribably. "Gaara, why don't we go get Lee…"

"And I need folic acid. I'm not getting enough. It's bad for the baby. The baby needs it. And I was outside too long yesterday, on patrol. It was too warm. Heat will hurt the baby." Gaara's chest was heaving with chopped, uneven breaths. He sounded as if he was beginning to hyperventilate.

"Gaara, the baby is fine--"

"NO!" he cried, gripping his forehead. The cork on his gourd popped, the sound eerie in the silence of the night. "I ruined it! It was brand new and perfect and I ruined it!"

Temari watched in horror, breath caught in her throat, as the sand slithered out and up Gaara's back, across his chest, and down his legs. "Kankuro! Lee!" she screamed.

Gaara rocked back and forth, his arms wrapped around his belly, the sand twisting around his forearms, rustling about the floor at his feet. "I ruined it! I ruined it! No, NO!"

"Gaara!" Temari did her best not to panic and squatted down a safe distance away from him. She held her fan tightly at her side. "You didn't ruin anything. Everything's fine. The baby's fine, you're doing a good job, okay?"

"Temari, wh-- oh shit!" she heard from the door.

"Kankuro, go get Lee!" she yelled.

"What the hell's--"

"I don't know, he's freaking out! Go get Lee NOW!"

She didn't bother to wait for a response, turning quickly back to Gaara, who was making pained gasping noises and scratching his nails deep into his tousled hair. The sand streamed in rivulets across the pale skin of his face.

"Gaara, Kankuro's getting Lee, okay. Everything is fine. You're fine, the baby's fine, everything is fine!" Her voice edged on hysterical, and she knew she wasn't fooling anyone.

Gaara's response was a muffled gurgle, and she felt the chakra swirl out of him alarmingly. Damn, she should've left Kankuro with him and gotten Lee herself. She was hardly qualified to be talking her pregnant brother down off a proverbial ledge. She's had to do that once, literally, to a young Chuunin who'd cracked under the pressure. After about three minutes, she'd gotten sick of it and told him to just jump and get it over with. Though it had worked in that case, the man then collapsing into a sobbing heap, she didn't think she'd try the same methods here.

"Gaara!" Lee exclaimed as he appeared in the door, his already large eyes growing even wider as he saw the state his boyfriend was in. Temari didn't think she'd ever been quite so happy to see him. "Gaara, what's wrong?"

Kankuro was directly behind Lee, standing in the doorway as the Leaf nin rushed in. Temari thankfully backed away until she was beside her oldest brother.

"Gaara, it's going to be alright," Lee declared. "I'm here now."

"What the hell's going on?" Kankuro whispered, rubbing at his left eye.

Temari said nothing as she watched Lee approach her brother, who was still rocking and moaning, hands trembling as they grasped at his stomach. "I ruined it," he murmured. "I ruined it."

"Ruined what?" Lee asked calmly. He too kept a slight distance from Gaara, though closer than Temari had been sitting. Temari thought it was reckless, getting so close when Gaara looked about as sane as he'd been during their first Chuunin exams. But she sure as hell wasn't going to be the one to step in.

"The baby," he moaned, "I ruined it."

"What are you talking about?" Lee looked as if he wanted to comfort him more, maybe hug him, but he wisely refrained.

"I ate cookies. Cookies are bad, the book says they're bad. They have preservatives. I ate them. I ruined the baby, and it's too late to make a new one. It's all my fault."

"Gaara, Sakura-san says the baby's fine. You didn't eat that many cookies… well you did sort of eat a lot--"

Temari wanted to smack him.

"--but the baby's fine! If the baby wasn't fine, Sakura-san would've told you!"

"…it was so perfect… a perfect brand new thing… nobody made it bad… and I ruined it… it's ruined now, it's not brand new and perfect… I ruined it… it's ruined…" he trailed off, mumbling incomprehensibly.

Temari gasped and Kankuro swore under his breath as Lee, a sudden look of determination on his face, leaned toward Gaara and reached directly into the sand slithering dangerously across his chest.

Gaara didn't try to push him away, and the sand itself seemed disinterested in Lee's presence. Temari wondered how long he'd been able to do something like this and when he got the incredibly stupid idea to try it for the first time. No one else on the planet would dream of touching Gaara when he was like this… well, maybe Naruto, but that was because he was an idiot. More of an idiot. Whatever. In any case, the next time she saw him, Temari was going to strangle him for giving her brother that book!

"Shh…" Lee said quietly, drawing Gaara into his arms. The sand crept up his forearms and slid over his toes, but he didn't seem to notice. "The baby's fine, I can feel it. You're just worried because of how much you love the baby."

Gaara jerked at this word, 'love,' and Temari heard Gaara gasp and try to pull away. "No, no…"

"This does NOT look good…" Kankuro murmured from beside her.

Tell me about it, she thought. In a low tone she told him, "I'm sure by now this has been noticed, and people have been evacuated. But why don't you go and make sure, just in case he…" she swallowed, not wanting to think about what might happen if Gaara lost it in the middle of the village. "Just go."

"Yeah, sure thing." He sounded relieved to be leaving.

Meanwhile, Lee was talking to Gaara, and her brother was mumbling back, but what they were saying was too quiet for Temari to hear. Whatever it was, it sounded private, and probably highly disturbing, so she decided to give them some space and wait outside the door. There was nothing she could do to help anyway.

She paced the hallway, the weight of her fan across her back comforting, and hoped Lee would diffuse the situation quickly. No matter how much of an oddball screw-up as he was and how infuriated Temari got with him when he did moronic things like impregnate her Kazekage, he usually seemed to know what was best for Gaara.

Perhaps ten minutes later, the tension lessened, Gaara's chakra noticeably subsiding, and she went back in. Her entrance was met with the sight of Gaara resting in Lee's arms, his head tipped to one side, his eyes closed. She felt her panic rise once more when she thought he might have fallen asleep, but then she realized Gaara was just resting, Lee rubbing his shoulders softly. The gourd sat calmly beside him, corked and falsely innocent-looking.

"Temari, could you please bring us a glass of warm milk and some rice?" Lee asked quietly. "And have a message sent to Konoha that we need Sakura-san to come back."

She nodded, convinced everything was under at least some sort of tenuous control, and was only too glad to leave. On the way to the kitchen, she met Kankuro and pawned the food duty off on him. "What the hell happened to your eye?" she asked her brother, when she noticed it was swollen and turning a nice shade of purple.

He winced. "Uh… when I tried waking him up, Lee sorta…"

Temari rolled her eyes. Of course he hadn't remembered what waking the Leaf jounin from a sound sleep tended to earn the waker. Namely, loudly incoherent mumbling and a semi-conscious barrage of fists. Idiot.

After sending a hawk to the Hokage, Temari headed to Gaara's office. This had gone on too long in secret, the Kazekage's condition known only to her, Kankuro, and a handful of questionably trustworthy Leaf nin. ANBU needed to be alerted, as well as the head med-nin, and probably the elders. Her brother's condition wouldn't be able to be hidden for much longer, and she needed to ensure that it met with the least opposition possible and didn't weaken his influence over Suna.

But mostly, she needed to be sure Gaara would come out of it alright. No matter what he got himself into, how badly he messed things up, he was still her brother, and she would protect him. She would protect them all, because they were family.

But that could wait until tomorrow.

Temari had had enough of family for the day, and she needed a bit of a distraction at the moment. Grabbing a large stack of papers off Gaara's desk, she dug through the mission requests and found herself something suitably violent.

Reconnaissance? No. Interrogation? No. Prison inspection? Definitely not.

Ah, here it was! Criminal apprehension, use of deadly force approved.

Life was good.