"Who's there?" Kankurou shouts, vaguely in the direction of his workshop door but not enough to tear his eyes off the half-assembled wooden joint in his hands.
This question has very few good answers. Tuesdays are the only day of the week when he is free to work alone from dawn to dusk and, today in particular, the list of people he would be willing to see the face of is as short as his patience.
Lucky for the man on the other side of the door, he is still one of them.
"Baki."
"Wait a sec!"
The metal rod in between his fingers slides smoothly into the piece in his hand and he puts a clip on the other end to keep it secure until further welding. Then, he reaches for the switch under the desk and disables the door security.
"Come in!"
Temari says that this installation is barbaric and no room in a house should have poisoned traps set in it. Gaara says that if anyone loses a limb from trespassing into the workshop, he will not do the paperwork for him. Kankurou says that people can just learn to knock at a fucking door and that the darts are not lethal anyway, just very painful.
"Good afternoon."
"Hi."
One of the many reasons Kankurou doesn't like people in his space – aside from the fact that he doesn't like being interrupted when he works on a puppet – is that they all inevitably look at it in the same way: half-scared, half-disgusted and half-confused by the bits and pieces on every shelf, the masks and faces on the walls, and the heavy smell of paints, solvents, wood and heated metal, and that's too many halves for one person.
Baki is not immune to the effect the place has on outsiders, but he has a fourth half in him that Kankurou likes even less: sincere empathy and worry. Today of all days, he is too tired for that.
"Is there something wrong with my face?" he asks after a few too many seconds of Baki looking – squinting, but that may just be the darkness – at him in silence.
"Your paint is smudged."
Great.
A glance at the mirror discarded on the side of the desk informs him that his mentor is right. The purple strokes have washed off from his lower lids and pigment is stacking up in the creases underneath it. The situation is not dire, but not up to the standards that a man like Baki upholds either.
"I've been welding and sweating," he lies. "I'll fix it."
The answer doesn't change the heaviness of Baki's gaze on him, but he doesn't comment on the subject further and it's all that matters as far as Kankurou is concerned.
"So, who is the very smart administrative who makes you do their chores for them because they know I wouldn't open the door if they did it themselves?"
For a brief instant, Baki seems taken aback by the question but restores his usual composure quickly enough for Kankurou to almost doubt it ever happened.
"Mission desk," he answers. "You've got an injured man on your team for Thursday and they need you to pick a replacement. It's a bit urgent."
"Who?"
For all that Kankurou tries to be as intransigent as he can about his off-duty day, this isn't the type of task he should ask to be left at the door until tomorrow. (He could, but then they'd make the choice for him, and he doesn't like that idea much more. Baki probably knows that, and it's exactly why he's volunteered to bring him the news.)
"Matsuya. He took a hit for one of his Genin in an ambush travelling back to Suna with some merchants. Nothing bad, but given the stakes of the mission, you probably want someone at the best of their physical capabilities. They've made you a list of available people who've already done similar work with you. It's not long but-"
"I'll make do," Kankurou assures, reaching out to grab the note Baki is handing him.
This anti-terrorist mission is not an attack one, just a defence and dissuasion one while higher-ups from the Land of Wind meet up at the capital. It should, theoretically, go smoothly. While Baki is right to say he'd rather have people fully functional and reactive on the job – it's the type of mission that is usually uneventful, but when it goes south, it goes south – his entire strategy didn't depend on the missing Jounin. It will work out.
"Anything else?"
"Not from the desk," Baki answers. "Are you good? You look strained."
The list of people who ask this question to Kankurou is short – although still too long for his taste half of the time. The list of people who he is likely to give a real answer to is shorter. And, finally, the list of people who can tell apart from feet away the natural wear of his face paint over the day from the specific way it smudges and wrinkles when he's teared up a couple of hours ago is even shorter.
In an impressive feat of trust built up over two decades of shared work and life, care put into always keeping a respectful distance, and sharp attention to details, Baki makes it into all three of them.
"I'm fine," he still answers because it has taken him a while to drown himself in his work enough for the frustration raging in his belly to settle, and he's not sure he is willing to reopen the box he's painfully put away his emotions into today. "I had something of an uncomfortable realisation this morning. I will survive."
Baki nods silently, looks around the room again for a second or two, and then back at him, the redness of his hands from working without a break for the past couple of hours, the sawdust over his leather apron, and the tired lines of his face visible even through the paint.
"Do you want to talk about it?"
The question is awkward and visibly uncomfortable to ask. Although Baki's frame still has its usual unshakable density, it shows that it takes effort for him to maintain this composure and pretend he can say this as easily and simply as he would anything else.
Neither of them is good at this sort of thing, but it's still touching that he is trying. Or rather, it makes it all the more touching for him to be trying, and to have been for fifteen years now. He is not asking this question because it comes naturally to him. He is not asking by reflex or habit. He is asking because he thinks he should, because he sees it as his responsibility to ask, and it doesn't matter that he doesn't like it or that it requires effort to be done.
Kankurou glances briefly at the clock on the wall. Three in the afternoon. In an hour or so, he'll have to go and pick up Shinki from the Academy. It'd be good if he had a meal before then, or it won't happen before dinner. He famously isn't above skipping a meal in favour of staying locked up in his workshop, but he's been pestered enough about it to at least be aware he should not be doing that.
"Have you eaten?" he asks as a response.
"Not yet," Baki answers.
At least Kankurou is not the only maladaptive workaholic bachelor of the lot. That's always comforting to know.
"How do you feel about eating the Kazekage's leftovers?"
"I ran into Ikanago this morning after walking Shinki to school," Kankurou starts retelling once he and Baki have collectively sorted through the foil trays of bits and pieces of food hanging around the fridge and arranged them on the kitchen table to share. It barely makes a meal for two, but Baki doesn't comment on it. Chances are Kankurou would not have eaten at all if not for his interruption, he knows that very well, and he doesn't want to create new unnecessary obstacles to it now. (He, on his end, would have eaten eventually. He would have eaten something better than dried leftovers, even. But he has volunteered to be here and won't complain about it.) "She asked me news about him, how it was going at the Academy, at the Tower, with me, with Gaara, shit like that. I answered elusively because I never trust what politicians are going to do with the knowledge they informally gather. Either she's asking as a person and I don't want to tell her anything, or she's asking as a councilwoman and she can do so in a former meeting."
This in itself wouldn't have been unnerving. Kankurou doesn't particularly enjoy having to deal with these shabby mind games, but it's part of the job and he's not too bad at it.
It's the next part that left him raging in his workshop for most of the day, and now that he's reaching that point of his story, he's not all too sure he wants to say it anymore.
He raises his eyes towards Baki who quietly chews on a piece of flatbread waiting for the rest of the retelling. The white cloth hiding the left part of his face shivers when he moves and the red lines of his paint on his right jaw undulate with every bite. His skin has tanned further and thinned and wrinkled since the time Kankurou first came to him with questions about the paint and Baki had sat him down for the longest conversation they've had together to date. He looked up to the man before that already – he wouldn't have sought him as an elder and a guide in his spiritual journey if he didn't – but this event and the impact it had on his life after that had set Baki as a reference in more ways than one from that point on.
The list of people Kankurou genuinely cares about not disappointing is yet another short one, but again, there is no doubt Baki is one of them.
"Then she said something about what a shame it was that I decided not to have children. That she was certain they would have been a valuable addition to the village, and that I would have been a great father."
"Why does that bother you?"
"That's what I asked myself too," by which he means, he replayed the conversation for hours, half of them spent bent over his workbench and half of them spent pacing around the room like a lion in a cage until he started tearing up. "The obvious part is that I've never chosen not to have children. I would even probably have loved that. I just can't have any because I'm a fag and I know from experience what happens to the wives and children of marriages focused on procreation too much to ever accept partaking in one."
For a second, Baki seems to intend to contradict him, then reconsiders. Kankurou wonders what he knows and what he's seen, he who must have known his parents, even from a distance, before his father became Kazekage and the family collapsed under the weight of the hat.
"But mostly, what the fuck does she think I'm doing with my days? With the job she has, she must be very much aware Gaara doesn't have a schedule that would allow him to be a single father with no support. I am raising Shinki just as much as he does. I am teaching several classes at the Academy. Half my squad is Chuunin hatchlings that rely on me to further their education because their former sensei are busy elsewhere given that we don't have so many of them on hand. Not to mention I'm the only senior puppeteer in the village, so most if not all of the new recruits still rely on me for advice and to mod their puppets regardless of whether or not I'm formally their teacher in any way. I cannot possibly be raising more Sunan children than I already am. If I were to have a child, I would have to either not raise them or give up on others of my functions to have the time to do that. She's talking about my ability to care for and teach to the younger generations like something that I'm depriving the village of and I'm not."
The accusation is all the more infuriating that the journey to get there was a tedious and painful one. If Ikanago had told him this a few years ago, when all his nights in Konoha were spent drinking until everything was closed and coming back to Temari's home wasted at four in the morning to be certain not to cross paths with Shikadai because most of his interactions with adults as a child were too traumatising for him to even remotely trust himself to handle one in turn, yes, he would have understand the criticism. And, as a matter of fact, Temari very much told him off for it, harshly, until he pulled his head out of his ass and changed his ways.
But he did it. He did it through blood, tears, and bile, and through the Council constantly on his back treating him like breeding livestock for his cursed bloodline, which most decidedly did not smooth the process. And he is still doing it. He is putting himself out there every single day trying to prove to himself and others his ability to nurture, support and help grow the children of the village he lives for.
"And she knows that," he continues. "This is exactly why she says I'd be good at it. It's because I am already doing it. But it's not enough. It's never enough. Because I'm too fucking queer for them and I will always be so long as I'm not signing with my name on a contract for life with a woman. And what they would read as a sign of dedication to my village if I were straight is seen as proof of betrayal and laziness instead. I used to think they were genuinely concerned about the lack of an heir for the hat. That once we'd have one, they'd be off my back. But we do now, and they're not. Because it's never been about that. Or at least not just about that. It's about taming me into a public denial of my queerness so they can pretend it's not there anymore."
Baki has stopped eating some time into his rant. Maybe because it felt out of place. Maybe because he doesn't want to eat too much food while Kankurou is talking rather than eating.
Kankurou wishes he would eat. He's not hungry anymore and he doesn't want to have to put any of this back into the fridge again and justify why he's not eating it.
When he stops talking, an awkward silence replaces his voice in the kitchen. There's nothing to say about any of this. That's the conclusion he's come to as well. There's nothing he can do about any of this. This is what he will always be seen as. The child of the Fourth who is good but could have been great if he wasn't a fucking faggot.
"You were the age I am now when my father died and you moved into the Tower for the three of us," he says after a moment, and when his and Baki's gaze meet over the table he can see in it the reflection of his own reminiscing, grief, and sadness. "You didn't have a wife. You didn't have children. You were just as married to your village and work as I am now. You were taking it upon yourself to help raise the Kazekage's children as I am now. You were making your entire life about your career and duty as I am now. Did anyone ever tell you it was a shame?"
Baki's visible eye is unreadable. It stares into him and pierces through flesh and time, through his inner core and all the versions of him he's known over the past fifteen years. Kankurou doesn't know what he may think of each of them and is simply left to hope he can live up to what Baki looks for in him. It's painful and stripping, as if his skin was peeled off and laid flat on the table. But he needs the answer to this question, so he keeps looking back.
After an eternity, Baki blinks, looks away, and shakes his head.
"No. They didn't."
Baki leaves the Tower that afternoon with a weight on his chest, like that of a snake coiled in his stomach.
Part of him regrets having offered Kankurou to talk to him. He is evidently not cut out to answer any of the things he has to say, and he knew that before it happened because the feeling haunting him as he walks through the narrow residential streets of the village and to the cemetery is one that he knows and that he has, notably, experienced many times before faced with the then boy and now man.
If he wanted to be gentle with himself, he would say it's a feeling of powerlessness. A feeling of hearing pain, and of hearing it from someone he not only cares about but the safety and well-being of whom he is responsible for, and of not having the tools to help in return.
But it would be easy if it was that. Experiencing and witnessing pain that no one can prevent or soothe is an inevitable part of a Shinobi's life. He has dealt with it countless times and is more than used to the constant dull ache in his gut.
The truth, the hard truth he doesn't want to spare himself from because he is not gentle, cannot afford to be, and does not want to be, is that he has the tools to answer that pain and has chosen, time and time again over the years, not to use them.
The truth, the hard truth, is that he has watched a young, talented boy trying to grow and bloom under the beatings of a desert that would not let him do so, has watched him break apart at the seams from the tension and solitude, and has decided it wasn't worth taking some of the blows for him.
The truth, the hard truth, is that he is a coward, has always been, and even today that knowledge is not sufficient for him to be sure he wants to change his ways.
He unties the knot of his forehead protector upon arriving on Yuura's tombstone, the way he's always done when alone with him, even when he was alive (Especially when he was alive. Alive and warm and breathing and hot lips and hands on his skin.) as if that gesture was in any way remotely sufficient to turn him into another man, one who could fail without soiling the pristine silhouette of the Shinobi under the hitai-ate. As if the Shinobi hadn't failed too. As if there was any place for a man to exist in the Shinobi after a decade of never letting himself be anything else. After a life of never letting himself be anything else, except-
This is the part where most would talk, probably. Converse with the name of a loved one carved in sandstone and the remnant imprint of their body in the ground and their soul in the sky. Confess and cry. Ask for guidance and speak.
Baki doesn't talk. There's nothing to be said to traitors. Especially not to this specific one and especially not about Kankurou who almost got killed in the crossfire.
Still, he finds himself always coming back to him after always swearing he would not.
He tells himself it's because he is a traitor, too. A traitor for the times he's spent with Yuura's hair under his fingers. A traitor for the times he's spent sitting under the Kazekage statues' gaze with Suna's insignia on his forehead and the taste of another man on his lips. A traitor for the time he's spent looking at Kankurou in an always unfair and losing battle to defend his humanity before the Council and chose to keep his mouth shut and his memories locked.
It's always easier to tell himself he comes here because of hate, rather than because of love.
The relief of Suna's hourglass is rough and chipped under the pad of his fingers. He should take a moment to polish and clean up his plate soon. But for today, it is fitting. He thinks back to Kankurou's tired gaze in the workshop, with large shadows cast over his face by the light of his desk behind him. He thinks back to the washed-off paint under his eyes and the upset and frustration making his hands tremble over the table in the kitchen. He thinks back to the way he looked him in the eye after a moment, so evidently thinking of him as a dream out of reach and a model he carved himself after without ever finding back in the mirror the unmovable force he was seeking.
Hiding himself is an act of safety, of course – he cannot possibly let anyone see what he doesn't bear to see himself. But he's always told himself it was an act of duty, too. An act of selfless devotion. That he couldn't help who he was – what he was – but only what he did or didn't, and could choose loneliness over pleasure and affection to serve his village and his people. That doing so was noble.
Now, thinking back to Kankurou's pained expression and the countless times he's let it happen before without a word, he wonders how he can possibly think of himself as serving Suna when he is capable of looking away from the hurt of one of its children.
There is no answer he can give to that question tonight. He had an opening, yet again, to reach a hand and utter a word of solidarity and closeness, and decided to pass it up. But there is one to give, one day, if he is brave enough.
He dusts his pants upon getting up and ties his forehead protector back on. He will let the man here for now and hope he can shine through the Shinobi when that time comes.
"Mission report!" Kankurou announces upon entering his brother's office and slapping a couple of pages on the corner of the desk. "Did you miss me?"
Gaara looks up and a discrete smile appears on his face.
It has taken time, but Kankurou's humour has eventually grown on him after a little decade. This is not a small victory. It is even, perhaps, Kankurou's greatest victory of them all.
"Greatly," he answers. "I have so much belated paperwork for you."
Gaara's humour, on its end, has yet to grow on Kankurou.
"Did everything go alright?" he mercifully asks rather than dive further into this upsetting matter.
The question is mostly just a courtesy. If anything had gone substantially wrong, he would already be aware, and Kankurou would be making a different face. He may consider it his duty to bicker with Gaara so that he "stays light on his feet because nobody else provokes him these days", but he is not the kind to be boastful and light-hearted about actual serious news. There is nothing important to be said about his mission that isn't on the pile of paper that was just placed on his desk and he is only asking because he wants to show Kankurou interest when he has an occasion to.
It's touching.
"One of my duos ran into a little situation that ended up not actually being related to our job at all, but they handled it pretty well. That young girl, Yomogi, I like her. She's smart and fast. Makes good decisions on her own. I hope she joins the squad for real eventually."
"You should tell her," Gaara notes.
"I have."
She and Amagi would make a great pair. An unruly one who will give him some grey hair, no doubt, but great. Amagi has the knowledge of the field that she still lacks despite her good instincts, and she'll have the brains to redirect his energy a bit more efficiently than he does himself, all while both enabling each other's boldness.
They will be hell to handle, but such a pleasure, too.
"I hope she listens to you, then," Gaara concludes. He trusts Kankurou's judgment wholeheartedly and never asks a question whenever he has that type of excitement on his face. "Oh, I almost forgot. Baki told me he wanted to see you when you'd be back. He's probably in his office right now, if you have a minute for him."
Kankurou winces. This little trip outside of the Tower plus the adrenaline of staying alert and on the field for the past four days has done wonders to the dissociative sluggishness that had taken hold of him for the last couple of days. He doesn't want to go back to this discussion already. (He doesn't want to go back to this discussion at all.)
He'll have to hope this is actually about some admin shit or another.
"Alright. I'm on my way, then. Are you taking care of Shinki tonight?"
Gaara nods.
"I'm going to grab a pile of work, relocate to the kitchen and bet I can still get a bit more done while he's around. You go and enjoy your post-mission afternoon."
"I'll probably be back early, if you need any help." It depends a little on how that talk with Baki goes, but he's in the mood to stay optimistic and assume it won't be so bad he will need to drink his brain off until two a.m. and will be able to go home at a decent time and in a decent state. "Good luck with the paperwork."
"Thank you, Kankurou. Have a nice day."
Most of the walk to the Eastern Temple is silent. Baki offered that they'd go together first before having a talk, and Kankurou agreed because he didn't look worried this time, he looked nervous, which is worse.
Worried means it's Kankurou he fears for. It's unpleasant and it doesn't say good things about the impression he must be making, but it's understandable.
Nervous means he fears for himself, and Kankurou is not sure he wants to know what sort of thing can make such a man tremble.
Baki asks about his mission, still, for small talk just like Gaara did, and Kankurou answers a little, but they both know this isn't what he's called him for and the conversation dies out pretty quickly.
This isn't the most comfortable ambience to pray in, but there's still something comforting about sharing this moment with Baki. It's been a while since it happened, and years since the time they regularly did it together.
It brings back memories of them both sitting down before the mural of the temple like this, of their faces and bodies illuminated by the reflection of sunlight against gold and glass and water, of Baki talking to him about the paint, about his journey with it, the memories of his father wearing it, the memories of his first time laying it down and what it has been for him throughout the decades to live with the mark of An on his skin. It brings back memories of Baki's surprise and then pride when Kankurou would answer his teaching with facts gathered during his countless hours of snooping around the Great Library and the Tower's archives in his thirst for knowledge and connection to a culture and village he didn't know how to talk to yet. It brings back memories of Baki's hand on his back at Rasa's funerals, and his occasional offers to come to pray together after missions in the years that followed that Kankurou wouldn't accept half of the time as a teen and regretted not to as an adult.
Baki usually whispers in his prayers. Mouths words that Kankurou doesn't try to pry on because he knows better than to disrespect his privacy but that he enjoys having as a background noise along with the gurgle of water moving in the pipes on the wall.
But he is silent today, and so, after a moment, Kankurou starts to sing.
He's never been great at it, but it still has always felt right. The borrowed words are easier than to try and find his own. This is a theme in his life somehow. Uniforms, puppets, traditional paint over his father's features looking back in the mirror. The things he finds comfort in are never the ones that are his.
He likes older texts the most. Those from before the settlement of Suna and the slow disappearance of traditional nomadic desert languages in favour of Land of Fire speak. Those he excruciatingly learned in dusty transcriptions with all his ten-year-old spite and desire to show he could know something special and had some smart in him too. Those he mourns the loss of by holding onto the fleeting words of slang here and there that have survived the continental political shift of the Hidden Villages Era and linger on the lips of Sunan people and that he notices with a smile and heart pinch in conversations. The sound of them rolls on his tongue like beads of water in a dry mouth, quenching for a moment the need to belong to something that he can never define but always intimately knows is there.
Baki doesn't move for as long as he keeps singing and then for another minute as the noises of the temple and the distant streets take back their territory over the remnant echo of his voice in the air around them. Then he bows, stands back up and waits for Kankurou to do the same before leaving the room.
"I've been thinking about the conversation we had the other week," Baki says, unsurprisingly.
He could have called Kankurou for something entirely unrelated, but there hasn't been any other heavy matter between them lately, and if it hadn't been about Kankurou specifically but something greater, Gaara would have been in the known too. Whatever he wants to say is personal, this much is evident.
"More precisely, I've been wondering if I've ever known of anyone in a similar place as you are now, and the answer is I haven't."
"I know."
He has browsed through enough compilation of Council meeting reports, birth and adoption certificates, and other archive documents in his quest for a precedent, for the proof on paper that someone before him has stood where he stands now, and refused to bow, and found a way not to, to know there isn't any. Or rather, to know that there isn't any that was written down for their stories to be found one day, which is different, but ultimately not less lonely of a conclusion. (But ultimately lonelier of a conclusion.)
"Most of the memories I can share of queer Shinobi my age and older are memories of people who were discrete and silent. Who were known still, sometimes, but only of the type of knowledge that doesn't disrupt the flow of life and works and politics because it is never named and never addressed. If a few were brave or proud enough to speak up for themselves and refuse to hide, none rose to a rank comparable to yours. Or mine. There was some lenience, but it came along with the requirement of making their love small and invisible, and Suna's cemetery has seen many Shinobi crying lovers lost at wars who were never named."
Baki's tone is factual and composed, but the constriction of his postures betrays that this story costs him to tell. Maybe because he is not one to tackle emotional matters and is only doing so because he thinks Kankurou needs him to. Maybe because he is ashamed of that fact and of what it says about his village, but still wants Kankurou to know.
Kankurou doesn't like either option and doesn't want to hear about it either. He knows all of this too much for it to be said to him.
"I guess I have that for myself," he still answers, unconvinced. "And I can see it in the younger gen too. It's getting better, I know. There's more space, more words, more people who grow up with the idea it can show and they will be okay. I should rejoice, surely. And I do, for others. But it seems I came too early to be granted this sort of acceptance. Or maybe I'm just too much my father's son, I don't know."
Baki clears his throat nervously.
"I'm sorry. I must have misspoken. I am not saying this to mean you should be grateful or happy this isn't what your life is like. I very much know how uncomfortable your position is and I would never expect you to deny or belittle it."
He pauses, and Kankurou looks at him with a frown. As much as Baki has never made a single negative comment on his sexuality, even in subtext, and as much as he has attempted to weigh in in his defence within the Council on occasion, he has also never made an admission of support and empathy this explicit.
Their eyes cross for a second before he averts his gaze.
"I am saying this because I've been one of them."
The words stop Kankurou in the middle of the empty street, his sandals stuck to the dirt as a gust of wind gushes through the alley and ruffles the black fabric of his hood and the white one of Baki's turban a couple of feet before him.
He has stopped too and, for a long minute, doesn't move while Kankurou stares at his silhouette from behind.
"Who knows that?"
"You."
The wind keeps blowing in between the buildings and in between them, light and undisturbed by the heaviness of both their bodies, planted like rock pillars merged with the ground beneath their feet, but the noises of the village in the distance come through distorted.
Baki's first statement has suspended time in its path, but there are no words for the implication contained within that second one.
"Why would you tell me?"
Kankurou can barely imagine the efforts and sacrifices it must have taken to keep such a secret from every single person in his life for decades, and the idea he might have somehow caused him to break all of it is unbearable.
"I've come to realise I'm not the man I wanted to be," Baki answers. "And I'm not sure I ever will, but I can do this at least."
"What do you mean?"
Baki turns around this time, and gestures to him.
"Come," he says before starting to walk again and Kankurou has to take a few quicker steps to catch up with him.
After another handful of minutes through half-empty streets, they reach the entrance of the cemetery and Baki goes to sit on one of the benches scattered around the place, gaze lost in the field of graves for a moment before he speaks again.
"It's been a pleasure to watch you grow, Kankurou. And I'm so proud of the man you've become. I can't make up for the rest of the Council, probably, but I hope it still counts for something. You're the closest thing to a son I will ever have."
It counts for way more than just something.
Kankurou nods and tries to swallow the saltiness of tears building at the back of his throat.
"But it's been hard, too," Baki continues. "And painful. And after fifteen years I still wonder what I could have done differently to make your life easier."
"Life's not supposed to be easy," Kankurou objects, half because he believes it and half because the thought that things could and maybe should have been different is still too painful to fully acknowledge some days.
"It's not," Baki agrees. "But it's not supposed to be lonely either. You're a child of Suna. Your village should have protected you. It didn't. I didn't."
"I'm alive, am I not?"
The affirmation does not seem to do much to soothe his mentor.
He doesn't answer.
"The first person I ever heard talk about your sexuality was your father," he says instead. "You were eight, and I don't know whether or not he really believed you were gay, but when I was appointed as your and Temari's instructor, he was adamant you needed a firm hand to toughen you up and force discipline into you."
Kankurou chuckles cynically.
"Good thing he's dead then, cause he'd be quite disappointed with the job you've done in making me straight."
Baki's brow frowns as he glances briefly in his direction.
"Sorry, I'm joking."
Not the right moment, maybe.
"I didn't say anything at the time. You don't talk back to your Kazekage about his own children. I was very honoured to be granted this place and didn't want to lose it. What could have I said anyway? That I disagreed, and it was fine for you to be soft? That I disagreed, and it was fine for you to be gay? I didn't believe either of those things. So, I nodded and got to work. And for a while, it was enough. Although your ninjutsu was less than impressive when I met you, your first step in puppetry changed everything. You were good, and you had the obvious potential to become great and the hunger it takes to get there. I've never doubted it from the day you came up to me and said you wanted to wear the paint. You had certainty in your eyes. Determination. I didn't ask what happened or why your nose was broken. I opened the door and decided I would be there every step of the way."
"It was my father," Kankurou says. "My nose, I mean."
Baki nods.
"I figured it might have been."
Rasa had found Kankurou wearing his first attempt at face paint and could not fathom his crybaby of a son might have the spirit and maturity to know what he was doing and actually make that big of a commitment. What could he know, after all, of responsibility and duty in his position, and how could he possibly think he was ready to give himself body and soul to a god when he couldn't live up to the simple exigence of his father and the Shinobi world? And how is a father to forge humility into a son if not by carving the knowledge of violence into his flesh until it sticks?
Sometimes, when going out of a particularly excruciating Council meeting, Kankurou thinks he could get this angry at someone ruffling his feathers in the wrong direction. Sometimes, he understands what happened.
But he has, also, never raised a hand on someone for this reason – poisonous darts at his door notwithstanding – and living with Shinki now, he knows he never would.
Baki continues.
"The first time I heard someone else than your father speaking about you in a similar way, you were fifteen and he was older than you are now."
Please, no.
There is not a single person Kankurou wants to have this conversation with, but Baki might be the last one of them. Of all the people that could see him and imagine what he may have looked like being abused in a toilet stall, please not him.
"I assume he must not have been very fond of your father and the work he did during his mandate, because he sure liked the idea that one of his teammates had fucked the Fourth's brat. I don't know if it was really about his teammate or if he was talking about himself but wouldn't say it that way, but I didn't doubt much that whatever it was about had indeed happened."
Baki risks a glance in his direction that Kankurou doesn't reciprocate.
If he's already reached his – rightful – conclusion, he doesn't need more help than that, and Kankurou certainly does not want to encourage him to think about it further.
"And I didn't say anything," Baki says again, with as much composure as he can muster but not enough to fully hide the cracks in his walls. "I didn't say anything to him, and I didn't say anything to you. Not then and not later, days after days of living at the Tower with you and your siblings and hearing you sneak out at night and seeing you in the morning with eyes blurry with alcohol or hungover. And I didn't have the excuse of hierarchy this time. I didn't have the excuse of believing you may need the violence. You did not, and I never thought that." Through all the guilt and failure, he wants to assure this, at least. "But I was scared. Of what people may think if I defended you. If I was on your side too much. I could not stand for you and what you were and what was happening to you without stepping over the line of matters I refused to be involved in because I didn't want to give anyone a chance to suspect me. You were queer, and people knew it now, and I didn't want to be, so I chose not to stand by your side."
"But you did."
Baki turns over to him at the interruption with slight surprise on his face, behind the pain and shame.
"You said things. You asked me. If I was okay. If I needed a chat. Or anything else. You offered to train with me, to go to the temple with me, to talk with me when we would come back from missions and have some time at the Tower because you knew I'd be better off with you than left alone. You were there. And you never stopped being. You knew what I was, what I was doing, what was being done to me, and you never looked down on me. You're the only one who never did."
Emotion catches up with Kankurou as he makes his list, vibrating in his throat and stinging in his eyes. He cannot possibly let Baki believe that he was never supportive or present, or that he didn't see it, or that it didn't matter.
"Did it stop anything from happening? Or did it just soothe my conscience for a moment?"
"Some of it, yes. I have to assume."
It made a difference, in any case, to come back to a home where there was someone. Someone he would never talk to, but that he knew he could, in theory. A lifeguard that would be there as a last resort. Should he have nothing left but death under his feet one day, he would have had that, too.
"I was a coward," Baki still answers. "And I'm sorry. You needed my protection more than I needed safety, and I've still favoured the second. You needed support, community and the knowledge that there was another path for you than the one you were on at the time, and I didn't give it to you. You were a child, and I was responsible for taking care of you and protecting you and I didn't. I trampled every reason for which I've become a Shinobi of the Sand because I was simply too weak to risk my life and status for a child of my village who needed me."
Under his words, the outline of a second affirmation appears slowly, and he goes on with it before Kankurou can stop him.
"But you're not like that. You are braver than I am. More righteous. I know you would never keep your mouth shut if you found out what happened to you happened to Shinki."
The mere mention of it is stifling. It swells in his throat and ribcage and threatens to choke him if he imagines it for one more second.
"I would not," he agrees.
Saying something about it would require ripping his entire guts out and slamming them down on the table. It would be excruciating and terrifying, and he knows why Baki didn't. But he would. He undoubtedly would.
"You were right the other day," Baki says after a short second of silence to let Kankurou process his own words. "All else equal, the Council would not treat you the way it currently does if you were straight. And that is a frustrating truth. But I'm not an example of that. The safety and approval I've built have a price. You may not have ever had the opportunity to make the choices I've made, because the closet was stolen from you before you got to have a say in it, but should you have had it, I don't believe you would have made them anyway. You are good in ways that I am not. The children of Suna are lucky to have you."
There is no holding his tears back this time. They've been hanging at the corner of his eyes for a while now, pulled and pushed by the comings and goings of fear, sadness, anger and emotion, but they are properly pouring now, staining his cheeks and leaving salt on his lips.
Baki chuckles. It's a little sad and constricted, too, and there are some pent-up tears in it as well, but he, on his end, might be strong enough to keep them there.
He raises a hand to rub Kankurou's back roughly and gives his shoulder a squeeze.
"I'm sorry," Kankurou sniffles, trying to wipe his nose to no avail.
"It's okay, you've earned it," Baki assures.
The sound of his sobs and snorts pitifully fills up the cemetery for another handful of minutes after that before he somewhat manages to regain control over his lungs and general body fluids.
"Thank you."
Baki nods.
"For what it's worth," Kankurou offers, "I don't think I would have liked it if you had been outed for me. Like you said, the closet has been ripped from me like a lot of things, I would not want to be the cause of you losing it against your will. It's your secret for as long as you want to keep it. I'll die with it, I mean it."
Maybe Baki is right. Maybe he would have never been him. Maybe he could have never been him. And maybe it is good. But he knows him and gets him, still, immensely and intimately so. He doesn't need to say a word for Kankurou to respect his choices.
"Thank you."
Baki keeps staring at him after these words, and an uncomfortable expression draws on his face.
"What?"
"Your paint is smudged again."
Fuck.
"Right, shit, um-" Kankurou utters, fumbling around his pockets for something to fix his mess with. Usually, he has at least oil and a mirror somewhere to take it off if needed and, more often than not, a spare tin of paint to reapply on the go.
Today, however, he has dumped all his gear in a corner of his bedroom upon arriving at the Tower and didn't think he'd need anything on his way to drop his mission report to Gaara. He's got nothing.
"Do you have spare oil? I'm sorry. I wasn't prepared to go out."
"Of course," Baki answers, diving a hand into his robes to pull out a bottle and a cloth in the same swift movement, along with a small mirror.
It's not the same type of oil as the one Kankurou uses. It's a bit thicker and less fragrant, but it will do all the same and there's something intimate and touching in being allowed to put it on his face. This is something Baki carries with him everywhere he goes, held close to him in one of his pockets. This is something he uses every day, but only when no one is around to see his face bare of the decisions he's made in life and the way he's chosen to show himself to the world. And Kankurou gets to be a part of that because he is that close and that trusted.
A look in the mirror soon confirms his initial assumption that the paint is not salvageable this time. The lines under his eyes have smeared over his cheeks badly and the paint has worn off in the wrinkles over his temple and at the corners of his mouth. He needs to take it all off and do it again once home.
The list of people Kankurou is comfortable seeing him bare-faced is essentially null. It inevitably happens – in moments of illness or injury that won't let him wear it, after incidents that force him to take it off like today, when he is called for one emergency or another in the middle of the night – but it's never pleasant. Even with his closest and most trusted people, he would rather avoid being perceived like this as much as possible.
This time, even Baki doesn't make it.
He must know that because his eyes stay fixed on a point before him the whole time and, after a second of thinking about it, Kankurou decides not to follow his gaze. Baki will not look at his face when he knows he'd rather hide it. Kankurou will not look at the grave he's chosen not to name.
"Thanks," he says when he is done, handing his items over to Baki and shrugging uncomfortably in his uniform to try and shake off the feeling of nakedness invading him already.
"I should let you go home, now," Baki comments once the bottle and mirror have disappeared back into his robes.
"You're not coming?"
He half knows the answer already.
Baki shakes his head.
"I think I'm going to stay here for another bit."
And Kankurou cannot be there for the things he has to do and the people he has to see.
"Very well."
"Say hello to Shinki for me."
"I will."
"Have a good day, Kankurou."
"Have a good day, Baki."