Categories > Anime/Manga > Naruto > Break Down
Warning: THE PAST TENSE HAS FINALLY RE-APPEARED!
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.
... Break Down ...
... by IWCT ...
... Epilogue: Shadow ...
They never celebrated Gaara’s birthday for obvious reasons. Indeed, Temari and Kankurou rarely visited on those days, and Yashamaru wandered off somewhere he could be alone. The Yondaime never celebrated this day, but he did not go to work either. So, what usually happened, what had happened since Gaara turned three, was that the two, Kazekage and jinchuuryki, stayed together the whole day, and never spoke.
In the morning they would meet in the kitchen. Gaara drank milk, and the Kazekage pulled leftovers from the pantry into something resembling a meal. Once the kitchen was abandoned Gaara would follow the Kazekage into the living room.
He sat in the living room and tried to make his stunned thought processes come together. Gaara would watch, hug his bear, or play with toys. As he grew older, Gaara just contented himself with watching. Once, when he was eleven he almost reached out to touch his father’s shoulder. But inside his head Shukaku laughed at him, and told him the Kazekage would never justify his existence. Dead or alive, Gaara’s father was the one person who would never give him a reason for living. His hand dropped.
The afternoons had the two of them going to the Mesa. The Yondaime would stop at the monument recording fallen shinobi, because it was only right that the Kazekage remember, and was seen remembering, but the memories of the monument were hollow. He would reach the Mesa after the few moments of remembering dismembered bodies, and he always did this alone, despite the fact that Gaara would shadow him like the ghost the boy was. He always stood on the Mesa alone, watching the desert and Suna spread out around him, holding up the sky above. Gaara stood there, at his right hand, totally alone, too.
They continued this ritual of standing alone, and thinking, until the starlight reduced the Kazekage to a blind man. Then they would go home. The days passed by each year, with occasional cosmetic changes (Temari brought flowers one year, they saw Kankurou at the graveside of his mother with a puppet another, Yashamaru came home dead drunk when Gaara was five, and he would never be there again on Gaara’s seventh birthday, Gaara killed an assassin before breakfast on his eighth birthday, a sandstorm was winding down as they walked north on the eleventh birthday), but nothing really important changed the act of the ritual. On Gaara’s birthdays they were always alone.
The Yondaime always wondered at the end of each day why he wasn’t fed to the sand this year, when he was at his most vulnerable, and would almost welcome the embrace that killed his wife.
Gaara always wondered at the end of each day why he was not fighting off wind element jutsu, and feeling the full force of the cold fury he knew was locked behind those expressionless eyes.
Then, one year, the Kazekage is not there when Gaara climbs the steps of the mesa. He brings Kankurou the next year, because it is too strange to be on the plateau, looking out at the desert, and not have someone to be alone with. But it is not just a cosmetic change this time. The world finally has moved on.
...
Kankurou's first glimpse of Konoha was exactly as he'd thought it would be. The village was prosperous. The children were happy. The women were smiling. He immediately hated them all. It was so easy to smile sinisterly, and want to impale every person wearing a leaf symbol with poisoned needles.
It was a lot harder, he discovered, a month later, and many years wiser, to forgive them for being right. Well, it wasn't so much “them” as it was “him,” the fox jinchuuryki. Still he had been right about Gaara when all these years Kankurou had been wrong. There was no way the apology Gaara had given them was anything other than the validation of the fox kid's view. Somewhere inside the demon, Gaara was still a person.
It had rankled Kankurou. He had enough dramatic flare in him to feel that there was no turning back. Gaara was now a person, and the conclusion of the drama awaited them at home in ways that not even Temari, with her smug older sister wisdom (she was the wise guardian of the play, Kankurou the fool, and Gaara had somehow gone from nemesis to hero) could foresee.
He'd been ready, ready for the first time in his life to stand up to his father. Gaara had always been a nightmare. But their father was a terror Kankurou had never gotten over. This time, though, Gaara had said that he was sorry. Kankuro was ready to defend Gaara, protect the slight eleven year old from the pitiless holes of the Yondaime's eyes.
He felt defeated and relieved when he returned home. There was no more Kazekage. When the search teams found the flayed body Temari locked herself in her room for days, and Gaara just disappeared; Kankurou was happy. The Kazekage was gone. He had nothing more to fear, and everything to celebrate.
As he listens to the men reading the will, and dividing possessions, Kankurou treasures these thoughts. Temari stands proudly, a stoic ninja in the face of bad news. She gets the only thing of value their father had, Mother's trunk, with jewelry, fancy clothes, and books. Gaara is right beside her in this, his silence suffocating the thoughts about the Yondaime Kazekage that must be rushing through his head. He gets a book of fairy tales for his sleepless nights. Kankurou, standing away from the two siblings, gets nothing in the form of a burned hawk mask. The puppeteer just smiles. It's not sinister. The expression is happy, like those children in Konoha who laughed three months ago.
...
The thought was perplexing, but it was all Temari could think right then, as the lanterns were lit all over Konoha. Why, she wondered, did Konoha bother with calendar dates? Why did Suna not? It was the Star Watching Festival in the Hidden Village of the Leaves, but she knew that in Suna the festival wasn't likely to happen until Shukaku's Breath stopped, and the sandstorm died down.
“Could you please make your move?”
She looked across the board at Shikamaru, and then down at the board.
“Sorry, I was just thinking,” she replied, getting up. “My head's not in the game.”
Shikamaru was quiet for a few moments, but then he began to pack up the pieces. “Troublesome woman,” he muttered. This was the third game she had put off. Temari didn't understand why Shikamaru was so keen on it, since he'd always been a better strategist, and she generally lost the other gamed they played with sharp steel and shadows. “Yen for your thoughts?” he inquired.
“I was just thinking we always know when Gaara's birthday is,” Temari replied, looking at a red lantern with yellow dragonflies dancing on the stiff paper. “The day after the final winter storm when the flowers all bloom. Every year. But I couldn't tell you the date.”
“Huh. Well, that's how you do things,” Shikamaru shrugged, and stood up, the shougi set under his arm. Temari realized that he had grown. Once he was only as tall as Kankurou, now he topped her by an inch.
“What about your birthday?”
“Huh?” Temari tore her eyes away from the red lantern over his shoulder. “Oh, that's easy, the third sandstorm of summer. I was told Mother threw father out of the room, and he said--”
Shikamaru waited patiently as Temari trailed off. He had already seen the quicksand in the conversation. But the Sand shinobi seemed so distracted. It was almost unnerving Shikamaru. He was used to the tough, competent, warm Temari. They'd been having more and more awkward moments as they grew up, but suddenly he was seeing a distant ineffable Temari.
“He said,” she repeated and paused again. “Huh. I wonder who told me? Baki never, never spoke about him with anything less than total respect. Tsusho, maybe? Well, he said that he wasn't sure what was more dangerous, the weather, or her temper. I wonder if he ever loved her,” Temari trailed off, and began to walk away from their seats at the small ramen shop.
Shikamaru followed. He was certain that Temari was not entirely in Konoha right now, and he did not want the Suna liaison walking into things.
“You know, it's very quiet here,” Temari told him. “The sun is almost down, and I can't hear anything stirring. Back home the music will have been going since noon. Baki once told me that he missed the sounds of children only on the Star Watching Festival. It's the only day we really spoiled children. They could stay up as long as they wanted. They could have danced with their crushes as closely as they liked. Everyone used to speak of the Festival like there was magic to it.”
“Well, it's always been a favorite festival for everyone,” Shikamaru replied. “What stopped?”
“What do you mean?” Temari asked, turning her face towards him, and Shikamaru saw a flash of aquamarine in her eyes as they passed a lantern.
“Well, you were speaking in the past tense,” he explained uncomfortably, thinking confused thoughts.
“Oh. Everyone died just before I was born,” Temari replied.
“Right. Sixteen years ago,” Shikamaru replied, remembering the battles he was supposed to have studied. Most of the time it was too much bother. But Asuma had been in that one, and the tactics of the night were fascinating to hear from a live source. “The trap set in the residential houses.”
“You know,” Temari said suddenly, her voice cold. “I didn't have a single friend my age. And it wasn't because of Gaara. Not at first, anyway.”
Shikamaru did not like her tone. He almost felt that she was blaming him for something that had happened before either of them had been born. But what could he say? That it was not his fault? They were both realistic enough to know that if Konoha got into a war tomorrow he would do everything that his teacher had done.
“That's war, sometimes,” he shrugged. “You were our enemies.”
“Sometimes,” Temari replied, “I don't know why we aren't still.”
They continued to walk along. They had left the lanterns far behind. Temari seemed aimless in her direction. She could not see the sky properly, and what was the point if you could not see it on the night of the Star Watching Festival? She wheeled ever higher into the rapidly descending sun, and came to herself when she felt Shikamaru's hand on her arm.
“There's a bit of a drop there,” he commented dryly, before getting out a cigarette.
Temari looked down at the nose of Konoha's Second Hokage. They must have climbed the stairs without her noticing. She cleared her throat. “It's really stupid for you to smoke those. The health risks alone are greater than a shinobi of your caliber should chance.”
“My caliber?” Shikamaru asked, flicking ash off the end of the cherry glow.
“A man who could go into a war zone and come back out intact,” Temari replied.
“Huh. Asuma says that kind of thing doesn't happen,” Shikamaru told her, inhaling once again.
“I know,” Temari looked up at the stars. “There's a great healer up there, they say,” she motioned at the sky. “All of our disciplines in are up there. Healer, story teller, builder, crafter, merchant—all of them are in the sky except for the obvious one.”
“Shinobi,” Shikamaru agreed, “it's a Suna myth, right? We have the great figures of the wars--,”
“Killer,” Temari interrupted. “My father once told me. That's the missing constellation. Suna's prized killers.”
“You come from a very grim village,” Shikamaru commented.
“I know,” she sighed, and undid the ties in her straw blond hair. “But we still love one another. We always will.”
She watches as lights and music filter up through the leaves blocking the village from the sky. The night is tinged with a bittersweet magic, that leaves long enough for her to kiss Shikamaru on the cheek, and make him laugh at a bad joke. This is what her father wanted for Suna, Temari thinks. Or if it is not, she does not care, as this is what she will make for Suna.
Disclaimer: I do not own Naruto.
... Break Down ...
... by IWCT ...
... Epilogue: Shadow ...
They never celebrated Gaara’s birthday for obvious reasons. Indeed, Temari and Kankurou rarely visited on those days, and Yashamaru wandered off somewhere he could be alone. The Yondaime never celebrated this day, but he did not go to work either. So, what usually happened, what had happened since Gaara turned three, was that the two, Kazekage and jinchuuryki, stayed together the whole day, and never spoke.
In the morning they would meet in the kitchen. Gaara drank milk, and the Kazekage pulled leftovers from the pantry into something resembling a meal. Once the kitchen was abandoned Gaara would follow the Kazekage into the living room.
He sat in the living room and tried to make his stunned thought processes come together. Gaara would watch, hug his bear, or play with toys. As he grew older, Gaara just contented himself with watching. Once, when he was eleven he almost reached out to touch his father’s shoulder. But inside his head Shukaku laughed at him, and told him the Kazekage would never justify his existence. Dead or alive, Gaara’s father was the one person who would never give him a reason for living. His hand dropped.
The afternoons had the two of them going to the Mesa. The Yondaime would stop at the monument recording fallen shinobi, because it was only right that the Kazekage remember, and was seen remembering, but the memories of the monument were hollow. He would reach the Mesa after the few moments of remembering dismembered bodies, and he always did this alone, despite the fact that Gaara would shadow him like the ghost the boy was. He always stood on the Mesa alone, watching the desert and Suna spread out around him, holding up the sky above. Gaara stood there, at his right hand, totally alone, too.
They continued this ritual of standing alone, and thinking, until the starlight reduced the Kazekage to a blind man. Then they would go home. The days passed by each year, with occasional cosmetic changes (Temari brought flowers one year, they saw Kankurou at the graveside of his mother with a puppet another, Yashamaru came home dead drunk when Gaara was five, and he would never be there again on Gaara’s seventh birthday, Gaara killed an assassin before breakfast on his eighth birthday, a sandstorm was winding down as they walked north on the eleventh birthday), but nothing really important changed the act of the ritual. On Gaara’s birthdays they were always alone.
The Yondaime always wondered at the end of each day why he wasn’t fed to the sand this year, when he was at his most vulnerable, and would almost welcome the embrace that killed his wife.
Gaara always wondered at the end of each day why he was not fighting off wind element jutsu, and feeling the full force of the cold fury he knew was locked behind those expressionless eyes.
Then, one year, the Kazekage is not there when Gaara climbs the steps of the mesa. He brings Kankurou the next year, because it is too strange to be on the plateau, looking out at the desert, and not have someone to be alone with. But it is not just a cosmetic change this time. The world finally has moved on.
...
Kankurou's first glimpse of Konoha was exactly as he'd thought it would be. The village was prosperous. The children were happy. The women were smiling. He immediately hated them all. It was so easy to smile sinisterly, and want to impale every person wearing a leaf symbol with poisoned needles.
It was a lot harder, he discovered, a month later, and many years wiser, to forgive them for being right. Well, it wasn't so much “them” as it was “him,” the fox jinchuuryki. Still he had been right about Gaara when all these years Kankurou had been wrong. There was no way the apology Gaara had given them was anything other than the validation of the fox kid's view. Somewhere inside the demon, Gaara was still a person.
It had rankled Kankurou. He had enough dramatic flare in him to feel that there was no turning back. Gaara was now a person, and the conclusion of the drama awaited them at home in ways that not even Temari, with her smug older sister wisdom (she was the wise guardian of the play, Kankurou the fool, and Gaara had somehow gone from nemesis to hero) could foresee.
He'd been ready, ready for the first time in his life to stand up to his father. Gaara had always been a nightmare. But their father was a terror Kankurou had never gotten over. This time, though, Gaara had said that he was sorry. Kankuro was ready to defend Gaara, protect the slight eleven year old from the pitiless holes of the Yondaime's eyes.
He felt defeated and relieved when he returned home. There was no more Kazekage. When the search teams found the flayed body Temari locked herself in her room for days, and Gaara just disappeared; Kankurou was happy. The Kazekage was gone. He had nothing more to fear, and everything to celebrate.
As he listens to the men reading the will, and dividing possessions, Kankurou treasures these thoughts. Temari stands proudly, a stoic ninja in the face of bad news. She gets the only thing of value their father had, Mother's trunk, with jewelry, fancy clothes, and books. Gaara is right beside her in this, his silence suffocating the thoughts about the Yondaime Kazekage that must be rushing through his head. He gets a book of fairy tales for his sleepless nights. Kankurou, standing away from the two siblings, gets nothing in the form of a burned hawk mask. The puppeteer just smiles. It's not sinister. The expression is happy, like those children in Konoha who laughed three months ago.
...
The thought was perplexing, but it was all Temari could think right then, as the lanterns were lit all over Konoha. Why, she wondered, did Konoha bother with calendar dates? Why did Suna not? It was the Star Watching Festival in the Hidden Village of the Leaves, but she knew that in Suna the festival wasn't likely to happen until Shukaku's Breath stopped, and the sandstorm died down.
“Could you please make your move?”
She looked across the board at Shikamaru, and then down at the board.
“Sorry, I was just thinking,” she replied, getting up. “My head's not in the game.”
Shikamaru was quiet for a few moments, but then he began to pack up the pieces. “Troublesome woman,” he muttered. This was the third game she had put off. Temari didn't understand why Shikamaru was so keen on it, since he'd always been a better strategist, and she generally lost the other gamed they played with sharp steel and shadows. “Yen for your thoughts?” he inquired.
“I was just thinking we always know when Gaara's birthday is,” Temari replied, looking at a red lantern with yellow dragonflies dancing on the stiff paper. “The day after the final winter storm when the flowers all bloom. Every year. But I couldn't tell you the date.”
“Huh. Well, that's how you do things,” Shikamaru shrugged, and stood up, the shougi set under his arm. Temari realized that he had grown. Once he was only as tall as Kankurou, now he topped her by an inch.
“What about your birthday?”
“Huh?” Temari tore her eyes away from the red lantern over his shoulder. “Oh, that's easy, the third sandstorm of summer. I was told Mother threw father out of the room, and he said--”
Shikamaru waited patiently as Temari trailed off. He had already seen the quicksand in the conversation. But the Sand shinobi seemed so distracted. It was almost unnerving Shikamaru. He was used to the tough, competent, warm Temari. They'd been having more and more awkward moments as they grew up, but suddenly he was seeing a distant ineffable Temari.
“He said,” she repeated and paused again. “Huh. I wonder who told me? Baki never, never spoke about him with anything less than total respect. Tsusho, maybe? Well, he said that he wasn't sure what was more dangerous, the weather, or her temper. I wonder if he ever loved her,” Temari trailed off, and began to walk away from their seats at the small ramen shop.
Shikamaru followed. He was certain that Temari was not entirely in Konoha right now, and he did not want the Suna liaison walking into things.
“You know, it's very quiet here,” Temari told him. “The sun is almost down, and I can't hear anything stirring. Back home the music will have been going since noon. Baki once told me that he missed the sounds of children only on the Star Watching Festival. It's the only day we really spoiled children. They could stay up as long as they wanted. They could have danced with their crushes as closely as they liked. Everyone used to speak of the Festival like there was magic to it.”
“Well, it's always been a favorite festival for everyone,” Shikamaru replied. “What stopped?”
“What do you mean?” Temari asked, turning her face towards him, and Shikamaru saw a flash of aquamarine in her eyes as they passed a lantern.
“Well, you were speaking in the past tense,” he explained uncomfortably, thinking confused thoughts.
“Oh. Everyone died just before I was born,” Temari replied.
“Right. Sixteen years ago,” Shikamaru replied, remembering the battles he was supposed to have studied. Most of the time it was too much bother. But Asuma had been in that one, and the tactics of the night were fascinating to hear from a live source. “The trap set in the residential houses.”
“You know,” Temari said suddenly, her voice cold. “I didn't have a single friend my age. And it wasn't because of Gaara. Not at first, anyway.”
Shikamaru did not like her tone. He almost felt that she was blaming him for something that had happened before either of them had been born. But what could he say? That it was not his fault? They were both realistic enough to know that if Konoha got into a war tomorrow he would do everything that his teacher had done.
“That's war, sometimes,” he shrugged. “You were our enemies.”
“Sometimes,” Temari replied, “I don't know why we aren't still.”
They continued to walk along. They had left the lanterns far behind. Temari seemed aimless in her direction. She could not see the sky properly, and what was the point if you could not see it on the night of the Star Watching Festival? She wheeled ever higher into the rapidly descending sun, and came to herself when she felt Shikamaru's hand on her arm.
“There's a bit of a drop there,” he commented dryly, before getting out a cigarette.
Temari looked down at the nose of Konoha's Second Hokage. They must have climbed the stairs without her noticing. She cleared her throat. “It's really stupid for you to smoke those. The health risks alone are greater than a shinobi of your caliber should chance.”
“My caliber?” Shikamaru asked, flicking ash off the end of the cherry glow.
“A man who could go into a war zone and come back out intact,” Temari replied.
“Huh. Asuma says that kind of thing doesn't happen,” Shikamaru told her, inhaling once again.
“I know,” Temari looked up at the stars. “There's a great healer up there, they say,” she motioned at the sky. “All of our disciplines in are up there. Healer, story teller, builder, crafter, merchant—all of them are in the sky except for the obvious one.”
“Shinobi,” Shikamaru agreed, “it's a Suna myth, right? We have the great figures of the wars--,”
“Killer,” Temari interrupted. “My father once told me. That's the missing constellation. Suna's prized killers.”
“You come from a very grim village,” Shikamaru commented.
“I know,” she sighed, and undid the ties in her straw blond hair. “But we still love one another. We always will.”
She watches as lights and music filter up through the leaves blocking the village from the sky. The night is tinged with a bittersweet magic, that leaves long enough for her to kiss Shikamaru on the cheek, and make him laugh at a bad joke. This is what her father wanted for Suna, Temari thinks. Or if it is not, she does not care, as this is what she will make for Suna.
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