Fatherhood of a Different Sort

The need seems great, but Yashamaru does not take Gaara out of the hospital right away. He goes first to the head pediatrician for his recommendations—what food will Gaara need, when will he need to bring the child in for check-ups, what does he think the rate of growth will be for a baby born so prematurely? Yashamaru really doesn't have that much in-depth experience with infants. He's baby-sat Temari and Kankuro on multiple occasions, but he was never their sole caretaker and when they were hurt or ill their parents took them to the nearest hospital, not to him.

Yashamaru looks for Chiyo in the hospital, hoping to ask her a few more questions (and hoping that she'd not meant it when she said she was leaving), but she is nowhere to be found. The receptionist says she didn't say where shew as going. She's probably returned to her home. He frowns slightly, feels a pang in his chest and pushes it down. Like I would like to be.

He will speak to her later. Yashamaru has no desire to chase after Chiyo, no desire to wend his way along the village wall (he has no fear of meeting trouble in the shanty towns; he can handle any trouble that comes to him) to find the house Chiyo shares with her brother. There will be time for that yet.

The pain begins to numb. His harshly-beating heart begins to calm. Yashamaru is a shinobi with a mission, a medic with a patient in need of his care. He is not, in these moments, a young man who has lost his sister, or a teenager suddenly in charge of a child. As long as he is not that, he can be calm. He can compose himself and step forward with a clear goal in mind, as long as he is not that.

Yashamaru leaves the hospital and sets off for a nearby grocery store, buying formula, and then to a department store. Even if Gaara cannot sleep, he will still need something soft to lie on while he's still too young to walk, so Yashamaru buys a few blankets to that effect. A small bolt of cotton cloth will be cut into strips to serve as diapers. Yashamaru has no idea what he'll do for clothes; even the section for prematurely born children doesn't have clothes small enough to fit Gaara. I'll think of something, Yashamaru tells himself, and moves on.

Maybe there's a crack, a small crack, when he takes his purchases home with him and realizes that he forgot to buy a cradle.

In all likelihood, the oversight came about as a result of Gaara's inability to sleep. Who would think of buying a cradle for a baby they know to be incapable of sleep? But it's an oversight, and what medic or ANBU agent would allow themselves such an oversight?

Yashamaru squeezes his eyes shut, and takes a deep breath. He could ask for use of the cradle Temari slept in as a baby; he doubts he would be refused. But… I don't think I could muster the will to ask him for anything. Instead, Yashamaru takes the laundry basket Arata and Nafisa left behind when they moved out and sets it on a table in his bedroom, so at least it won't be on the floor, and stuffs the blankets he bought inside. It will do.

Now, to collect Gaara.

-0-0-0-

The sun is climbing high in the sky when Yashamaru steps out of the hospital, his nephew wrapped in a hospital-issue blanket in his arms. Most of the vendors' stalls on Market Street are open, though some are lagging, a symptom of the unseasonably warm winter. The wind kicks up dust in the streets, and Yashamaru winces and blinks against the grit that gathers in his eyes.

Gaara, though, is silent. He cried for a bit in the hospital, thin, piercing wails that seemed more bereft than angry or upset (Though Yashamaru knows it's impossible for Gaara to be cognitive of loss, he wonders if it's possible for a child to be instinctively aware of their loss. Maybe it is possible.). Those wails died down immediately when someone, in this case Yashamaru, picked him up. Now, Gaara is silent. His eyes are half-shut, squinting against the sun. Occasionally he looks up into Yashamaru's face, or out at the source of some noise—a customer haggling with a vendor or shrieks of laughter from children playing in the street or the bleats of goats or sheep being shepherded to the auction square.

Yashamaru looks down at Gaara and tries to discern any hint of Karura's features in his face. With her older children, it's easy. Temari's resemblance to her mother is immediately apparent to anyone who looks at her. It's less obvious with Kankuro, but he looks like his mother around the mouth and jaw. With Gaara… He doesn't know. Yashamaru's brow knits as he stares down at him. Maybe Gaara is too small (he can't remember if he did this when Kankuro or Temari was born), or too alien, a porcelain-skinned child playing host to a demon.

He prays he will see a resemblance as Gaara grows. The treacherous thought comes: Perhaps you don't see a resemblance because you don't want to. You don't want to see any likeness to her in him when he was born in her blood. You only seek to deny him that much, for the sake of your own wounded heart. Yashamaru presses his lips together, troubled.

As he enters the Immigrant Quarter, steps off the main road and begins to pick his way through the narrow streets and alleyways towards his home, his mind begins to fill with questions.

For how long will I take care of Gaara? Until he is grown, or until he is old enough to become the living weapon of Sunagakure? Will Kazekage-sama take him from me when Gaara is in no more need of care, and will need to learn to become a weapon instead? Will he be taught to forget everything about human warmth and love?

What will be demanded of me when he gets older? What role shall I play in Gaara's training? Will I be called upon to teach him cruelty? Yashamaru looks down at Gaara, who stares back up at him trustingly. He feels his heart clench in his chest. For the good of the village…

Sister…

The interior of his house looks no different than it did the last time he entered it, but somehow, this house has suddenly become to Yashamaru as the house of a stranger. The furniture, the shutters over the window, the faded rug on the floor, none of it looks familiar. A photograph of Karura sits on a table in the living room; Yashamaru pushes it down as he passes by, unable even to look at it.

Yashamaru sets Gaara down in the laundry basket. All ambient noise drops away, replaced with resounding silence. His heart begins to pound again, blood racing, blood roaring in his ears.

It should not be this way.

Yashamaru has never thought much about the idea of having children of his own. The vast majority of his life has been spent embroiled in war, both the Second War and the Third; he was too consumed by war to consider pursuing a relationship, and never became close enough to anyone he would have wanted to marry. He had always expected to be a large part of his niece and nephew's lives; it would have been remiss of him not to be.

(That will not be, however. It has been tradition in Kaze for centuries that orphans are given to their mother's family to raise, and that the same is to be done with children who have lost their mother if, for any reason, their father is unable to care for them. No one would have blinked if the Kazekage had just given all three of his children to his brother-in-law to raise. Though none of the other kages of this nation had children, it was far from unusual for the past leaders of the country to have their children fostered among kin, rather than brought up in their own household.

The Kazekage does not feel it wise for Gaara to be brought up under the same roof as his siblings, and on this score, Yashamaru agrees with him. As much as it pains him to admit as much, there is no telling how much control Gaara has—or will have—over Shukaku and its sands. Kankuro and Temari are too precious to take such a risk with their lives.)

Yashamaru never expected this, though.

A year ago, if someone had told him that his sister would die and he would be left to raise her youngest child alone, he would never have believed them.

But it was a long, tumultuous year, as they all have been.

The rest of the day passes in a haze. When the baby cries, Yashamaru feeds him or changes his diaper or holds him close to his chest and does what he can to soothe him, whether humming softly or bouncing him up and down or just holding him and counting the moments and praying that Gaara will stop crying. Yashamaru himself eats nothing, says nothing, can barely keep track of his thoughts.

When he lies down that night (there's still light slanting through the closed shutters, so maybe not night after all), sleep does not find him. He lies awake beneath the tangled sheets, staring up at the ceiling, waiting. For what he is waiting, Yashamaru is not sure. Whether it be for Gaara to start crying or for tears to run down his own cheeks, whether it be for his heart to stop beating, whether it be for the demon to begin rampaging, he does not know. He suspects that his heart, paying no heed to his mind, may be waiting to harken to a voice that will never be heard again.