Content warning: Non-graphic mentions of past child abuse and death.

"What if he dies and I never get to suck his dick?" Kiba asks in a genuinely pained sigh where he's sprawled over the bed, his head on Hinata's lap and her hand combing gently through his hair.

Shino's familiar text-to-speech voice rises from where he's sitting beside the bed.

"Don't worry there are other dicks in the world."

Kiba whines.

"Yeah, but I wanted to try his… I really like him, you know?"

Shino simply nods. He's been hearing about it in great length for a month already and he's really hoping those two are going to make out anytime soon because this phase of the process is seriously starting to drag on. He's not annoyed at Kiba for having a crush, it's all in all quite endearing, but god is that boy slow to make confessions.

"He's not going to die," Hinata tempers. "He's getting surgery precisely because it's less risky than not getting it. He'll be out in a few hours, you will see him tomorrow, and all will be well."

"You don't know that."

The argument is mostly made as a matter of principle. Of course, she's right. She's always right, as Shino would put it. (And maybe it's not true, maybe Shino's a little sappy on the edges, but he still has to admit she has the most reliable common sense of the three, especially at a time like this one when his is drastically impaired by longing feelings about boys.) It's just that he's been agonizing with anxiety and pent-up feelings ever since Tenten's call about Kankurou's change of plan, and considering there wasn't enough time for him to go back to the hospital before he'd be put under, he didn't have many other options than lie there and complain about it.

At least he's getting nice head pats. Silver lining.

"It's your fifth coffee," Gaara states as Temari gulps it down like it's a shot of tequila, his own first one still warm and half full in his hands.

She shakes her head with a hum, taking a second to swallow before she can answer.

"Sixth. I had two this morning with Tenten and Kiba."

"Oh."

He's not entirely sure what the normal amount of coffee to have in a day is, his body doesn't really react to caffeine at all and it's frankly just about the taste and the grounding feeling of the cup in his hands for him, but the way she drinks them makes him think she probably wouldn't have that many on a regular day.

"What?"

He must have been staring. He turns his eyes down to his fingers instead. He's still not very good at reading her. Not that he's good at reading anyone, frankly, but he's been seeing Kankurou enough for the past year and a half to have somewhat found his way around his expressions and posture. He's decidedly not there with Temari.

"Sorry," he says.

She doesn't answer.

Their duo falls silent for a moment after that, and while he doesn't mind, Temari is growing more restless by the minute and seems about to consider a seventh expresso.

She takes a big inhale suddenly, like to try and clear her mind from whatever kind of thoughts she was lost in. Dead mothers, if he had to take a wild guess.

"He's gonna be alright, don't worry," she says like she's answering him expressing concern when she's obviously the most distressed one of the two.

Even he can piece two and two together and realize she's doing it to reassure herself without letting it through too much.

"He's hard-headed, your brother."

He decides he doesn't like it. He's in the process of learning he might be the less emotionally stunted of his siblings and changing that fact is apparently the role that has fallen upon him.

"I know, but you're still allowed to be scared," he comments, and Temari blinks at him like she expected to hear anything but that from him, and maybe she did.

She seems to attempt to say something but no words get out, until eventually the tension in her body relaxes a bit, and her shoulders slouch.

"I'm sorry."

"About?"

"I should be able to handle this better."

"Why?"

Her fingers clench a bit around the empty paper cup in her hand and he wonders how much he can push before she snaps. The only certitude he has is that he doesn't know her enough to guess and that he will have to find out by trial and error.

"Because I'm the big sister."

Here it is. Again.

"We're only three years apart and Kankurou already said this morning he didn't like that you'd use that to stop sharing with us."

The cup crumbles into her fist. Maybe this is the limit.

"It's not that easy."

"Why?"

The breath she takes in makes him think she might be about to shout at him, but it cuts midway to turn into a tense sigh. She throws the cup in the bin with the five other ones.

"Let's get some fresh air."

"You were very tiny when you were born, you know that?"

Gaara turns his head towards her, still walking at her side, shaved brows frowning a little out of confusion as to why she would say that.

"Yes," he simply answers because it doesn't feel like there is much more to say about it.

He hasn't really seen photographs of himself as an infant, presumably because everyone was too busy with his mother dying and him being in intensive care to take some, but he knows the outline of the story. Very early labour. Sick baby. Internal bleeding. Loads of tubes. Death

"What I'm trying to say," she continues. "Is it's not the first time I'm waiting for a brother in a hospital."

This doesn't make her point fully clearer, but it does explain why she would bring that up now, he supposes. It's not the first time he notices his siblings seem to often need winding routs to find the proper way to express what is on their minds, and although he'd much rather think first and talk second, he has come to accept that it's sometimes necessary to let people go through their own thought process, so he waits.

"I don't remember a lot from mom. But I remember her singing to us before we got to bed, and I remember touching her belly when you were in there."

The idea of being inside of someone's belly, or worse, having someone in yours, makes his nose wrinkle. She continues.

"After she died Kankurou and I got in the habit of singing to each other. Our Hebrew was terrible, it still is if I'm being honest and we don't even have the excuse of being toddlers, but it was something familiar and comforting."

There's something infinitely gentle in the way she talks about it, her voice smoothing out in such an unusual way even he can easily notice it. He finds himself wondering what her singing voice sounds like. Maybe he'll get to hear it too one day.

She chuckles.

"Kankurou used to be a damn crybaby as a child." The natural roughness of her voice comes back a little as she swears, but not nearly enough to cover the turn of tenderness this discussion has undeniably taken. "He cried more than you at the time, and you were a newborn. He doesn't remember her now, but I think she was missing mom a whole lot at the time."

She winces.

"Rasa did not like that, at all. To be frank I'm not sure he ever wanted kids in the first place. I'm certainly not trying to find excuses for him, but I think one day he got home and found himself with three kids, a dead wife, and no idea of how to handle the situation, and everything just got worse and worse from there. I think he was too hurt and frustrated with his own life to be able to bear any kind of emotions from us, especially from Kankurou. Even as a kid already he looked like him a whole lot, and I think Rasa couldn't stop seeing himself in him, and couldn't take it. If we got too excited about something it was unbearable for him in comparison, and if we felt sad or hurt or scared it was a too brutal reminder of his own grief and feelings of failure and it was even worse. I learned somewhat quickly to express an acceptable amount of feelings in front of him, but Kankurou had a much harder time doing that."

Although he did live with his siblings until their father's death, Gaara must admit most of his memories of that time came down to the shouting of Rasa, the overwhelming smell of booze, and the blurry weight and noise of his own meltdowns. Probably a few memorable slaps in the face too, but not that much, not as much as the feeling of Yashamaru grabbing his wrist and hissing threats to his father. He wonders if Kankurou and Temari would have had memories of the sort if Karura had lived long enough to take them by the wrist too.

"I had never seen him cry before today. I mean, as an adult," he comments.

Then again, he hasn't seen most adults in his life cry so that doesn't indicate that much about Kankurou's tendencies to do so.

Temari frowns.

"He cried today?"

He nods.

"When we were together this morning. I said I was happy to learn about him and he pulled me into a hug and started sobbing. I must say I was a little taken aback. Is that surprising?"

As much as he does know and understand Kankurou much better than Temari, he's not yet to a point he can answer this question himself. From where he stands, shedding a few tears after the last 24h his brother just had doesn't seem exactly disproportionate.

"I don't even remember the last time I saw him cry."

It seems to pain her, for some reason.

"Didn't you just say he cried a lot?"

"I said he used to."

There's suddenly something very harsh in her voice, and while he does think it's not directed at him, he's not entirely sure of it either. Maybe he shouldn't push more than that.

"What changed that?" he still opts for asking, because they're evidently past the point of avoiding tough subjects right now, and because, after all, she's the one who brought it up in the first place.

He's also almost certain that Temari is the kind of person to be able to just answer "fuck off" to a question if she so desired.

"I'm not sure," she admits. "But what I know is that it was a painful process. When he started getting the hang of it, of how to mask pain and fear and craving for affection, that's when things really started to go south for him, mental health-wise. I always imagined part of the reason why his psychosis is what it is was because it's the only way he found to have his emotions exist somewhere. In a matter of months, he stopped crying almost entirely, stopped expressing worries and asking for help or support, but none of it was natural or remotely healthy. He never stopped feeling the need for all of those things, he just came to the conclusion it put him, us, in too much danger to have it show through, so he started keeping everything in, and eventually it blew up in his face. Maybe I'm wrong, I don't know, but it's how it felt."

She sighs.

"My point is, being a protective big sister is not something that I only do out of principle. It's something I do because I've seen Kankurou crying and bruised more times than I can count, more time than I have been myself, and that his survival, and by extension ours, because, in a much different way, he was also necessary to me, depended on me doing that, and I couldn't have let him cry even if had wanted to, which I didn't, because it put us in danger. It's something I do because he literally drove himself mad training himself to ignore his emotional needs to protect me, us, and it's the least I can do in return."

"Our father has been dead for ten years, no one is going to beat you up now," Gaara notes. "And as you put it yourself, this is not a hit you can take for Kankurou either way."

Her jaw clenches and unclenches a few times like she's trying to chew back her anger or frustration or maybe guilt before she talks.

"I know," she says curtly. "I'm just answering your question, and the answer is, it's not that easy to lay back, because I'm fucking scared he'll get hurt if I do, and whether or not this is rational doesn't change shit."

He's not sure if she's angry at him or herself or both.

She pauses for a second, shoulders slouching a bit.

"I also can't help but think if I were travelling less for work, if I had been more present, if I had asked about him more, maybe I would have noticed his flare-up sooner, and maybe I could have convinced him to see his doctor before it came down to whatever this mess is."

Herself it is.

"I have been seeing him every week the whole time and I didn't notice anything. You said it, maybe it costs him, but he is pretty good at masking now."

She gazes back at him for a moment, effectively pushing him to look away.

"I suppose you're right."

Her tone is falling back to a gentler colour. She resumes looking at the paved alley before them and the waving trees of the hospital's park on the side.

"I understand that you can't stop feeling responsible for him," Gaara starts after a while, and it's sort of true. There's evidently something visceral to this need that he doesn't fully get, not on an intimate level at least, but it does make sense that she would feel like that. "but maybe at least we could share a little."

He stumbles on his feet as Temari suddenly grabs him by the shoulder to pull him closer without stopping her walk. It's not the most comfortable position, but if that's what it takes to make her accept some level of support he'll take it for now.

"I guess I can try that out, yeah."