"How are you liking the new couch?" Kisame asks upon entering the workshop's lounge with what probably is his and Sasori's lunch in hand.

"It's very nice," Kankurou answers, trying to balance out expressing enough gratitude to be polite with toning down the truth a notch from "I would have killed myself already if it wasn't there."

Sasori installed it sometime during his recovery – presumably purposefully so that Kankurou would have somewhere to sit or lie down if he needed to, although he has not cared to admit that out loud yet – and in the couple of days Kankurou has been back to work, it has already been a lifesaver. He didn't think he would struggle this much because working at home had started to go fairly okay now, but he obviously underestimated the toll that the commute would take on his body.

Since Sasori hasn't explicitly stated his worry about the matter though, Kankurou hasn't been discussing it either. He takes breaks when he stops being able to bargain another half hour of work with his three functioning self-preservation brain cells and his master doesn't comment on it. It's as comfortable a deal as it can be.

Kisame is not that reserved, as previous events have already proven.

"I'm glad! It was a bit of a hassle to bring in, but it definitely makes the room cosier. You'd think Sasori would have appreciated comfort once out of jail, but he's been a grumpy old man at heart ever since he was young and seems to enjoy making things hard on purpose. At least your surgery will have had the upside of forcing him to upgrade this place."

Said grumpy old man enters the room upon the words, as if able to detect his partner speaking ill of him from any distance.

"Is this your new thing, Kisame? Trying to attack the esteem my pupil holds for me every time I let you in the same room as him? Because if that is so, I might just leave you outside next time."

By now entirely invulnerable to Sasori's threats and criticism, Kisame answers with a loud bout of laughter.

"With your food? I'd love to see you try. Why don't you rather prove me wrong on the grumpy-old-man point by sitting your ass down and sharing a lovely and light-hearted lunch with all of us?"

It's a weird dynamic they have, Kankurou thinks as the two bicker some more but Sasori ultimately complies with the activity (but sits on the floor next to the low table, just as Kisame did despite his talk about the couch).

Well, no. The dynamic in itself is not exactly weird, it's banter and poking between two people who love each other and have known each other for a long time, and likely a hard one for at least part of it. (It's unclear yet if the both of them have met before or during their sentence – or even maybe after and it's just a coincidence that they both so happen to be ex-inmates – but either way doesn't really change that they must have been through some things together.) What is more surprising, is that Sasori of all people would be involved in such a relationship, and Kankurou can't help but wonder if the point he makes of not letting himself soften for Kisame's teases and playfulness is something he always does, or an act he only pulls because he is there to see it.

He is not, however, remotely brave – or reckless – enough to ask the question. It would be a shame to lose his job this far into it.

"So, how's the recovery going?" Kisame asks halfway into their meal.

This is half small talk, probably, but he also looks genuinely interested in the answer, and he has been involved in taking care of him so far – the doughnuts, the couch and all that – so he's probably owed a slightly developed answer.

"Better now," Kankurou admits. "The first two weeks were absolutely awful, but it's mostly just a game of patience now. I've been staying at some friends' so I don't have to face the stairs from my studio. I hope I can go home in two weeks maybe."

He says "hope", but it doesn't sound – or feel – as positive as he thought it would be before saying it. The first half of his recovery has been spent going quite literally insane about finding his independence and autonomy as soon as possible, to a great physical cost if it had to be, but now that he caved in to some friendly help, he is forced to reconsider just why and how he's valued doing things alone until that point.

He thought that letting others in would make him feel trapped and indebted in a way he couldn't possibly bear to be. And it does, sometimes, but not remotely as much as anticipated.

The main thing he hadn't imagined before these past weeks was how mutual the support would be. He was scared of being taken in like a wounded pet and protected and forbidden to act on his own. But, while Kiba and the others have most definitely been keeping an eye on him and trying to nudge him into being gentle with himself and not doing more than he can, it has never deprived him of his own responsibilities, and of his own autonomy.

All of them have accommodated their routines and needs to make space for him, but not in a sacrificial way. In a way that demands for him to be equally part of the arrangement. In a way that makes him responsible for their cohabitation, responsible for being mindful and of putting in the effort to make it work where he can. It's fair. It's good. It's comfortable. He didn't think it could be.

"Well. We'll see," he concludes after a moment of silence.

He can't stay there forever anyway, can he?

"So, do you have a cool scar?" Kiba asks one evening, sitting on the couch next to him.

The prospect looks exciting to him for some reason. His eyes are shiny and smiling, and his whole chest is leaning forward to get closer.

"I have a scar. I don't know if it's cool, though."

He also doesn't know if he wants to have that conversation.

It's been going a bit better lately, with his body hair regrowing on his belly and hiding it a bit. With getting used to the bag and its presence and its rhythm. With having taken the time to sew himself a fabric belt for it so that it would rub against his skin as much during the day, too.

It's still definitely not easy. Looking at his body – in general, and that section in particular – is a bit inevitable. He has to clean. He has to change. He has to take care of himself in whatever ways he can and should. He's getting used to it, slowly, but there is still rarely a day where the sensation and knowledge and sight of it doesn't sink into his skin, threatening to melt and swallow him if he stays there to stare at the abyss taking shape instead of trying to find something grounding elsewhere until the feeling recedes.

It's safe to say he'd rather not dwell on any of that with Kiba if he doesn't have to.

"All scars are cool," his friend argues.

The statement is still playful, but his tone is different from what it was with the first question. It's softer and deeper. His thoughts on the matter visibly go further than consideration about coolness.

"They're proof of healing," he continues as if to prove Kankurou right. "Of changing. I think it's neat that we can literally be cut open and still fix ourselves on our own. Tell me that's not cool."

Although Kankurou is not remotely in a state to hear about being cut open, the point does land. It lands all the more that Kankurou has seen Kiba's body, a little. Enough to know he has his fair share of them, littering the inside of his forearms and he's pretty sure at least part of his thighs that he's got a glance of in instances of Kiba wearing baggy-enough shorts to let them show. Certainly some of other kinds too, on his chest at the very least.

Kankurou doesn't deal with his remotely as gracefully. It's weird and hard enough to have a body. That it changes and keeps track of what happened to it is frankly just too much. He'd happily be an unidentified blob with no shape or memory of one it might have had once, but that's not an available option, or so he's heard. The best life has to offer is the opportunity to avoid thinking about it as much as possible and ideally play with whatever he can use to cover it up.

"I suppose it is quite cool," he still admits. "I'm not showing my belly to you though, you can back off. I'm cold, I have a sense of personal space, and there's a bag of shit attached to it."

He's not cold, but everything else is true, and he does need the always-cold persona as an excuse to stay in large hoodies for at least the rest of the spring and not be forced to consider the actual outline of his body until he forcibly has to.

Kiba scoffs.

"I own a dog. If you think you can scare me with poop in a plastic bag, think twice," he argues, but still sits back a handful of centimetres.

Fair enough.

"You don't have to show me, I don't care," he continues. This is probably half a lie – he would have loved seeing the cool scar, and maybe even the poop in the plastic bag – but Kankurou will take it. "But I mean it. Surgery's tough. I was completely out of myself when I got out of my hysto and it's way more minor than what you had. You're looking better. I'm proud and I'm glad."

Kankurou frowns.

"You were?"

He can imagine Kiba as the whiny kind when in pain, maybe, just out of liking the attention and drama. Imagining him distressed about it harder. Imagining him distressed, at all, is hard, but somehow everything he's seen of him and his home and his close ones recently makes it obvious that it happens.

Kiba laughs.

"Jesus Christ, yeah. All of it was awful. I definitely needed it, it has made my life infinitely more liveable, and I don't know how much it could have gotten otherwise, but it took a great deal of Shino talking me into it before I could really consider the idea of signing off for being rolled unconscious in a room full of strangers who were literally there to shove surgical instrument in cunt."

"They do it through there? What the fuck."

And to think he was being upset about instruments in his guts.

"Not always but, yeah. Anyway. Between that and the deadnaming and the fucking needles…"

"You're scared of needles?"

Kiba winces, and shakes himself like a dog. He's awfully cute.

"Who likes them?"

"Certainly not me," Kankurou agrees. Certainly not in the same way that Kiba doesn't like them either, but still. "I just thought you had to. For hormones and shit."

He's not all too sure what the "and shit" may or may not encompass, but it feels rude to ask, so he doesn't.

"Oh, I have a very well-oiled system for that. Shino does the shots, and I complain the entire time."

That's certainly a strategy.

Not that Kankurou can judge. It's probably healthier than "Any pain I can't straight avoid, I just take while gritting my teeth."

"Is it painful?"

Kiba shrugs.

"A bit. I used to bruise more easily than I do now, too." He sighs. "I just don't like being stabbed while butt naked. There's nothing pathologic in that, is it?"

"I suppose that's fairly reasonable," Kankurou admits.

Silence settles between them for a moment after that, a lot of which Kankurou spends watching Kiba scroll away on his phone and vape on the couch, wondering what he must have looked like in the early days of his recovery, and what he would have thought if he had seen Kankurou during his.

He stands by keeping all of them away for the first week. Regardless of what might have been their reaction otherwise, he wouldn't have been able to handle their presence. Despite everything he's revising his judgement about lately, he still knows that. But now he realises maybe the sight of him wouldn't have scared them so much. Or rather, probably would have, but not in the way he thought it might.

He thought being seen like this would have exposed a part of him too foreign and unwanted. He thought it would have deterred them. Being let to see new parts of Kiba – and, in more marginally because he knows them less, of Hinata and Shino – albeit it not being the same as what he could be showing too, makes him realise this is not the effect it has on him at all. None of their vulnerability and needs and struggles make him want to step back, even when maybe he doesn't know how to react to them and feels incompetent and out of his zone of comfort and knowledge. It makes him grateful and, maybe more importantly, it makes him feel safe.

The more they allow him here, the less reason he has to fear that they wouldn't do and feel the same in return for him if he did.

The thought might not be enough to push him to name out loud all that he may have swiped under the rug before them, but for what might be the first time in his life outside of Temari and Gaara, it does push him to glance at the possibility of doing it one day.

"Thank you," he says, and Kiba looks at him while cocking his head like a confused puppy. "For hosting me here."

The gratefulness is, arguably, about a bit more than just the opportunity to have a bed here for a couple of weeks. It's about the opportunity to have a home here, and everything that three of them have made it mean so far.

He shrugs.

"And I guess the scar is pretty cool."