Fic: Kindred, 2/?
The DR epilogue is fighting me, so here's a new chapter of Kindred instead. I've gotten the first eight chapters written out - been working on this since Christmas - so I should be able to post one chapter a week, after polishing, for a little while. Then I might fall back to one chapter every other week. I'm still behind with the reviews, but catching up! I do love them ^_^ In fact, after answering a batch, I feel like writing, hence inevitable distraction...
Disclaimer: Naruto is the brainchild of Kishimoto-sama, and I am not worthy. I merely borrow the manga's characters and situations, and make no money off of them.
Day One - 3AM
Gaara poured an extra cup of tea for Lee as he heard his lover walk down the stairs. He noted the way Lee moved as he entered the kitchen. Dead tired. And there was something...wrong in his posture. Weary. Care-worn. Almost defeated, if such an unlikely word could be applied to Lee. Gaara had the feeling he was going to have to hurt someone for the look of pain and hesitation in Lee's eyes.
"What's this?" Gaara asked, nodding at some grocery bags near the kitchen door. They hadn't been there when he'd come in earlier.
"Diapers mainly. Did you know that Suna only has one shop open all night that carries them?"
Gaara hadn't known Suna had any shop open all night that carried diapers, and his demeanour must have said as much. Lee looked at him wistfully, as if they were no longer living in the same world and he rather wished he could return to Gaara's.
"Explain," Gaara said, sitting down to his own tea and a bowl of canned soup he'd warmed up.
Lee sat down and stared blindly at the kettle on the hob. Gaara started on the soup while he waited.
"I got an urgent message last week," Lee said abruptly, while Gaara was swallowing the third spoonful. "I had to return to Konoha because of Katsuro. My first cousin. The head of the family, not that we have much of one. None now. At least none in Konoha."
"In order, Lee." Gaara was not liking the closed-off look in Lee's eyes.
"My cousin Rock Katsuro. He's the son of my father's older brother. Kichiro and Aki are Katsuro's sons."
Gaara nodded, then he frowned. "You never mentioned him. I thought you grew up with distant family."
"I lived with Katsuro and Uncle Osamu for a short time." Lee's lips tightened, but his voice remained steady. "Uncle Osamu and my father hadn't gotten along, but my uncle still took me in. Then Katsuro's mom died the same year as my parents - the war, you know. Taking care of two kids by himself meant a lot of work for Uncle Osamu, who also had his Chuunin duties. When it was obvious that I wasn't very talented-...well, anyway, I got moved around between families a lot when I was young."
Gaara wondered if Uncle Osamu was dead. It sounded like he was. Gaara hoped in passing that the man had died painfully.
He knew that being handed around distant relatives like that was something Lee still carried with him to some extent, in his burning desire to prove himself. Gaara's childhood had been a nightmare, but at least he'd been important, powerful and wanted. Until the assassination attempts started...but even if his existence had been unwished at that point, he had mattered enough to try to kill. Gaara's childhood stood in his soul like stained glass windows in a disused temple. He could look at them, but he felt nothing towards those cold, flat relics of the past outside a few flickers of old pain and hatred. That distance helped him keep some semblance of stability. And he had Lee, his family and Sunagakure to fill his life and the cold, empty places in his soul.
He was the Kazekage now, the shield that defended his people. When something threatened one of his precious bonds, Gaara stood between them and danger, and kept them safe.
And once they were safe, Gaara dealt with the enemy. Very, very thoroughly. There was no mercy in those circumstances, only cold ruthlessness and even a certain amount of satisfaction. When the threat was eliminated and the blood cleaned up, the part that Gaara liked to think was his new and better self would come back to the fore, and enjoy the love that touched him and surrounded him. But the monster within - Shukaku, and the part of Gaara that had become Shukaku over the years, the part that would always be with him, half of his soul and a useful weapon besides...that part stayed vigilant, always present, like the strong, deadly undertow beneath deceptively still waters.
Yes, he rather hoped Uncle Osamu had died screaming. Gaara had never figured out why one was supposed to forgive the dead for their trespasses. If they were dead, they could not make up for them, and the forgiveness would never be earned.
Lee had put his elbows on the table as he ordered his thoughts. His hands were before his face, one fist capturing the other, fingers gripping as if he was loosening his knuckles before a fight. Gaara waited.
"I got a message last week. I had to go back to Konoha urgently. It turned out that something went wrong with one of Katsuro's A-rank missions back in April. One of his teammates was killed. So was an informant they were relying on. The mission was a loss."
Lee's face had become set and his voice listed out the details like a status report.
"It looked like Katsuro might have made a mistake and caused the problem. There was an inquiry, of course. Which is fairly standard, but it lasted a bit longer than it should have. I think the upper echelons suspected something wasn't quite right. In the meantime, he was suspended. It wasn't a reprimand, just a temporary thing, right, but you can guess how hard that is to bear for a Shinobi, even if you expect the inquiry to validate your decisions."
Lee licked his lips, his eyes stayed fixed straight ahead.
"Katsuro's wife, Naoko-san- she was a Chuunin, a really good one. It seems she tried to look into the matter behind everyone's back, to exonerate him from charges of carelessness. Or...maybe she was starting to suspect something too. We'll never know. When she found out he was contacting these outsiders- that's how the information got to the ANBU. She sent them a message. But it looks like she tried to talk to Katsuro too. Or maybe she was trying to intercept one of the people he was working for. She...um...she should have waited for the ANBU. Not that I blame her, I'd have done the same thing."
Gaara's cup of tea was motionless an inch from his lips.
"...He...he wasn't a bad person, you know. Uh, I haven't met him in years, but he-...I just couldn't believe it when they told me, but the ANBU have witnesses. Reliable ones. He got away though. He-..." Lee must have realized he'd lost his coherency and stopped talking.
"He was betraying Konoha in some way. The mission gone wrong brought him under suspicion. His wife found out, confronted him, so he killed her and escaped," Gaara summarized, fitting the half-spoken words together.
Lee nodded once. His eyes were still blindly fixed on the teakettle as they'd been since he sat down.
"I see."
Gaara examined Lee closely. His lover was taking the facts like a Shinobi, trying to remain functional and positive despite emotional duress, but it was obvious that all this had still upset him. By the sound of it, Lee and his cousin hadn't been close; not surprising if Katsuro had inherited his father's dismissive attitude towards Lee. But Lee would still care, even so. And there was nobody Gaara could hurt that would make it better.
"Do they know who was behind this? Where he went?"
"Under investigation."
Gaara stared thoughtfully into the depths of his tea. The man must have been pretty good to escape Konoha's ANBU. Or very lucky. Or have very powerful friends...Gaara was going to have to look into this carefully and get the many details that were missing from this account, but he didn't want to drag the information out of his lover.
"I'm not sure they'd tell me if they did find anything," Lee muttered. "My security clearance wouldn't cover an investigation into treason. They only summoned me back because I'm nominally the head of my family now, until Kichiro is fifteen. I had to sign some papers, and also the ANBU wanted to make sure I hadn't heard from Katsuro, and give me the usual advice if he contacts me. The kids...you're probably wondering about the kids. I checked with their mother's clan first, but-..."
Lee ducked his head so all Gaara could see of his eyes was a curtain of bangs and the two fists helplessly gripping each other.
"Her clan weren't-...They didn't want-...I guess in the circumstances, I can understand their reaction. She had no direct relatives left, anyway. So...my family is a side-branch to a larger clan. I have a lot of second and third cousins. I grew up with some of them."
Once more that pinched look about Lee's lips. Gaara suddenly had a mild urge to reach out and touch him...a strange impulse, one he would not have felt a few years ago. He didn't obey the urge now. He stayed still and waited.
"Some of them have kids. It would have made sense for them to take in Chiro and Aki. But they-..."
Lee was suddenly on his feet. The kitchen chair toppled backward. Lee spun quicker than Gaara could almost follow, catching it and righting it before it could hit the ground.
"You should have seen the looks on their faces." Lee's voice was choppy with reined-in outrage as he glared at the chair's back. "When they talked about taking the kids in. Like they were talking about this terrible burden. Great-Aunt Mailin even mentioned the stain on the family name- she doesn't share our family name! They said-"
"I know what they said. They would have said the same thing in Suna."
Lee looked indignant. Gaara could understand why, intellectually, since Lee's cousins had been the innocent victims in this, but this reaction was bred into Hidden Villages and for good reason. Failure on a mission, or failure to protect the team, endangered the whole, their very way of life. Treason even more so. The threat of reprisals against family members, even if it was simply being ostracized, was one more way of insuring unquestioned loyalty.
The reaction the children had faced wasn't deliberate; in fact most of the villagers might not even have done it knowingly. But the fact remained that the offspring of a traitor to Konoha would get a cold reception there, and Leaf was probably one of the most open-minded and lenient of the villages in the first place.
Lee was gripping the back of the chair and staring blindly at the kitchen door, away from Gaara.
"Kichiro and Aki had already slept in two different homes when I'd arrived, and their father hadn't even been gone four days. He just looked...Chiro, I mean. He doesn't know, of course. He knows his mother is dead and his father's not coming back, but he doesn't know the details. But the way he looked at me, at them- the rest of the family..."
He glanced briefly at Gaara. "I'm sorry, I should have asked you first. But I didn't know how quickly a message could reach you- and I didn't want Chiro and Aki spending a minute longer with those people. Not with all that going on. I left as soon as I could. We arrived here earlier today."
Today- last week- how long to sign those papers, meet with his clan, and take that decision- Gaara finally did the math and connected the result with the odd way Lee had moved earlier, as if dangerously exhausted.
"Lee."
"Sorry, sorry, I know, I ran too fast."
"Carrying two children?"
"It was okay, Shizune prescribed some medicine, something to help them sleep at night for awhile. Kichiro's been having nightmares. I put them in these big carry-all baskets, and they slept most of the way-"
"I was thinking about the strain to your body," Gaara ground out.
"...I couldn't take too long. They're both so young. I couldn't take three days."
"How fast did you go?"
"Not unreasonably fast," Lee said mulishly, which meant that Gaara would never learn how quickly his lover had made this trip.
Faced with Gaara's unblinking stare, Lee twitched with something like his usual self and held out a triumphant finger.
"It was a worthy challenge! Consider it extreme training! A trial of Youth and Endurance! Gai-sensei once ran-"
Gaara's glare could have sliced a joint of meat into cold cuts. Lee quickly gave up on that line of argument.
"Anyway," he said firmly, sitting back down with the air of one moving on, "I put them to bed, then realized I'd run out of diapers. I wasn't able to take that many with me, the ANBU are still going over their house. I might have to go back to Konoha in a few weeks to settle the estate. We'll see. As for the kids, don't worry, they're only here for today. Well, I thought I could keep them here till Sunday, but now that you're back, I'll go tomorrow morning and find a place in town I can rent for us, just until things settle down in Konoha and people forget-"
Gaara's teacup clicked loudly as he set it down on the table.
"You are going nowhere. You are staying here."
Lee looked at him, visibly distressed. "But Gaara, I can't- where would they go?"
"They're staying here too, if you've decided to shelter them."
"I can't impose two kids on you in your own home!"
In the cone of light cast by the kitchen lamp above the table, the motes of dust suddenly swirled in a disrupted pattern. Gaara could feel the chakra crawling along his skin, overflowing from the part of his soul that was more wounded now than when the boy had called him a bloodthirsty demon to his face.
"This is our home. This is your home too."
The words had come out in a soft, cold tone that harkened back to old, dangerous times; Gaara's usual reaction to a pain he hadn't expected. Lee blinked, but then he gave Gaara a steady look that soothed away the ache as much as Lee's touch had earlier.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that. You know that." He was obviously drained, both physically and emotionally, or he would have protested a whole lot louder and longer, but Gaara could still hear the love and sincerity in his voice, and the darkness within receded a few steps. "But the kids can't possibly stay here. It would be a terrible imposition on you. You don't know how much- how much trouble children that age are. They make life very complicated. They're noisy, they require a lot of care- you have huge responsibilities, and you work from home a lot. You're very busy. You really don't need this."
"No. But I need you."
Lee looked at him for a long moment. Gaara stared right back. The dark things inside were still riled, but he was forcing them back under control for Lee's sake. Gaara had little to no empathy for normal people ordinarily, but Lee was different; he was Gaara's lover, and his friend. Gaara knew him in ways he didn't know other people, and he knew this side of Lee all too well, he'd struggled with it before.
Lee was a force of nature, strong and determined to fight his own fights. He set himself impossible challenges, righteous goals, he went full-out to get what he wanted with his own strength, and he'd lay down his life for the sake of a friend. But when it came to letting those friends help him in turn...even Gaara. Especially Gaara. The closer you were to Lee, the less he wanted to ask for, as if it were normal that he give his all and never expect much in return. As if he had to earn everything Gaara wished to give him.
In Gaara's estimate, having Lee love him, live with him and put up with Gaara's eccentricities, which went from the mildly strange to the dangerous, should earn Lee anything he wanted. But still Lee hated to ask him for anything or ‘impose on him'. In part because he'd rather brashly tackle problems by himself and defeat them in a glorious challenge. But at the far back of this attitude seemed to lurk some kind of fear; perhaps that if he couldn't stand on his own, Gaara might decide he was a burden and not worthy of him. Gaara suspected, without being able to put his suspicions into words, that this attitude was linked to Lee's upbringing. He hated this scar from Lee's past with all the passion his strange nature could conjure, though he didn't know what to do about it.
They'd had this sort of argument before, and it ran through the silence between them without having to be put into words, thankfully, until it came to its logical conclusion.
"Thanks," Lee whispered, reaching blindly for Gaara's hand. Gaara returned the touch with a firm, reproving squeeze of Lee's fingers. Thanks were not needed. Thanks were for favors, and this wasn't one. This was necessary. So be it.
A ghost of a tired and rueful grin lit Lee's face. "To tell you the truth, I wasn't looking forward to living apart from you, even if I had been planning on seeing you a lot...But don't worry about a thing!" That was said with a bit more of his usual energy, and what Gaara had learned thoroughly by now was the ‘Good Guy Thumbs Up Promise Pose'. "I'll take care of it all! They won't go near your study, and I'll make sure they don't make too much noise, and- and- I'll take care of it all! You won't have to do anything."
Gaara nodded in agreement. That would be for the best. He had no human instincts to help him deal with a child, and Chiro was afraid of him anyway. The less they interacted, the better for both.
"You should go get some rest," he told Lee, picking up the teacups and his bowl.
"Yeah, I probably should," Lee admitted, which meant he'd really pushed himself hard, Gaara noted with an internal growl of exasperation. "How about you?"
Gaara paused in the act of dumping the dishes in the sink. Good question. Which raised another.
"Why did you tell the boy we were roommates?"
Lee blinked, and blinked again, and then went a bit pink. "Well, what else was I going to tell him- no, Gaara," he said sharply as Gaara opened his mouth, "you don't tell children that age that we're- stuff like that. It's not right. They're too young to understand."
Gaara agreed that the baby was probably too young to understand, but the older one should be able to process the information if you kept it simple. Gaara wondered if this was Lee being, well, Lee, or if this was one of those more general customs and obfuscations humans adopted, particularly where sex was concerned, that made little sense when you looked at them rationally. One thing was certain: the child Chiro had better not ask for Gaara's version of this, because the Kazekage didn't have time for that sort of nonsense and would tell him the truth, and too bad if the kid couldn't take it. Chances were good that it wouldn't kill him.
The chances were even better that Chiro would run a mile rather than talk to Gaara at all, so the situation would undoubtedly never arise. Since Lee was the children's titular guardian, Gaara would not debate the issue, and thus that made them roommates while the children were here.
"Roommates, despite the terminology, do not actually share a room in a house where several are available," Gaara pointed out.
Lee looked like he'd just swallowed a lemon. Apparently he hadn't thought that far ahead yet.
"I could use a couple hours of sleep tonight," Gaara added, running a trickle of water into the sink. "I didn't rest well in the capital. I should be able to do it in my study if the children are quiet enough."
"Sorry..."
That earned him a Look. Lee looked like he was about to apologize again for having apologized until he must have remembered just how annoyed that made Gaara and turned it into a cough instead.
"It's only for tonight," Lee declared. "Then tomorrow I'll set up one of the empty rooms for me and the kids. I think we have a spare futon somewhere-"
"Tomorrow, we'll set up a room for the children, and you will stay in our room. There's no need for me to monopolize the bedroom if I only sleep an hour or two a night. The study will serve well enough for that, and the further away from strangers I am, the better for all concerned."
Lee opened his mouth, but his objections disappeared behind a large yawn. He sighed, walked over to Gaara, kissed him and said: "We'll talk about it tomorrow."
Gaara decided not to argue. It had been a long night for both of them.
TBC...
Next week should be the epilogue for DR, if I can get it out, otherwise that will be bumped back another week and it will be the third part of Kindred.
Disclaimer: Naruto is the brainchild of Kishimoto-sama, and I am not worthy. I merely borrow the manga's characters and situations, and make no money off of them.
Day One - 3AM
Gaara poured an extra cup of tea for Lee as he heard his lover walk down the stairs. He noted the way Lee moved as he entered the kitchen. Dead tired. And there was something...wrong in his posture. Weary. Care-worn. Almost defeated, if such an unlikely word could be applied to Lee. Gaara had the feeling he was going to have to hurt someone for the look of pain and hesitation in Lee's eyes.
"What's this?" Gaara asked, nodding at some grocery bags near the kitchen door. They hadn't been there when he'd come in earlier.
"Diapers mainly. Did you know that Suna only has one shop open all night that carries them?"
Gaara hadn't known Suna had any shop open all night that carried diapers, and his demeanour must have said as much. Lee looked at him wistfully, as if they were no longer living in the same world and he rather wished he could return to Gaara's.
"Explain," Gaara said, sitting down to his own tea and a bowl of canned soup he'd warmed up.
Lee sat down and stared blindly at the kettle on the hob. Gaara started on the soup while he waited.
"I got an urgent message last week," Lee said abruptly, while Gaara was swallowing the third spoonful. "I had to return to Konoha because of Katsuro. My first cousin. The head of the family, not that we have much of one. None now. At least none in Konoha."
"In order, Lee." Gaara was not liking the closed-off look in Lee's eyes.
"My cousin Rock Katsuro. He's the son of my father's older brother. Kichiro and Aki are Katsuro's sons."
Gaara nodded, then he frowned. "You never mentioned him. I thought you grew up with distant family."
"I lived with Katsuro and Uncle Osamu for a short time." Lee's lips tightened, but his voice remained steady. "Uncle Osamu and my father hadn't gotten along, but my uncle still took me in. Then Katsuro's mom died the same year as my parents - the war, you know. Taking care of two kids by himself meant a lot of work for Uncle Osamu, who also had his Chuunin duties. When it was obvious that I wasn't very talented-...well, anyway, I got moved around between families a lot when I was young."
Gaara wondered if Uncle Osamu was dead. It sounded like he was. Gaara hoped in passing that the man had died painfully.
He knew that being handed around distant relatives like that was something Lee still carried with him to some extent, in his burning desire to prove himself. Gaara's childhood had been a nightmare, but at least he'd been important, powerful and wanted. Until the assassination attempts started...but even if his existence had been unwished at that point, he had mattered enough to try to kill. Gaara's childhood stood in his soul like stained glass windows in a disused temple. He could look at them, but he felt nothing towards those cold, flat relics of the past outside a few flickers of old pain and hatred. That distance helped him keep some semblance of stability. And he had Lee, his family and Sunagakure to fill his life and the cold, empty places in his soul.
He was the Kazekage now, the shield that defended his people. When something threatened one of his precious bonds, Gaara stood between them and danger, and kept them safe.
And once they were safe, Gaara dealt with the enemy. Very, very thoroughly. There was no mercy in those circumstances, only cold ruthlessness and even a certain amount of satisfaction. When the threat was eliminated and the blood cleaned up, the part that Gaara liked to think was his new and better self would come back to the fore, and enjoy the love that touched him and surrounded him. But the monster within - Shukaku, and the part of Gaara that had become Shukaku over the years, the part that would always be with him, half of his soul and a useful weapon besides...that part stayed vigilant, always present, like the strong, deadly undertow beneath deceptively still waters.
Yes, he rather hoped Uncle Osamu had died screaming. Gaara had never figured out why one was supposed to forgive the dead for their trespasses. If they were dead, they could not make up for them, and the forgiveness would never be earned.
Lee had put his elbows on the table as he ordered his thoughts. His hands were before his face, one fist capturing the other, fingers gripping as if he was loosening his knuckles before a fight. Gaara waited.
"I got a message last week. I had to go back to Konoha urgently. It turned out that something went wrong with one of Katsuro's A-rank missions back in April. One of his teammates was killed. So was an informant they were relying on. The mission was a loss."
Lee's face had become set and his voice listed out the details like a status report.
"It looked like Katsuro might have made a mistake and caused the problem. There was an inquiry, of course. Which is fairly standard, but it lasted a bit longer than it should have. I think the upper echelons suspected something wasn't quite right. In the meantime, he was suspended. It wasn't a reprimand, just a temporary thing, right, but you can guess how hard that is to bear for a Shinobi, even if you expect the inquiry to validate your decisions."
Lee licked his lips, his eyes stayed fixed straight ahead.
"Katsuro's wife, Naoko-san- she was a Chuunin, a really good one. It seems she tried to look into the matter behind everyone's back, to exonerate him from charges of carelessness. Or...maybe she was starting to suspect something too. We'll never know. When she found out he was contacting these outsiders- that's how the information got to the ANBU. She sent them a message. But it looks like she tried to talk to Katsuro too. Or maybe she was trying to intercept one of the people he was working for. She...um...she should have waited for the ANBU. Not that I blame her, I'd have done the same thing."
Gaara's cup of tea was motionless an inch from his lips.
"...He...he wasn't a bad person, you know. Uh, I haven't met him in years, but he-...I just couldn't believe it when they told me, but the ANBU have witnesses. Reliable ones. He got away though. He-..." Lee must have realized he'd lost his coherency and stopped talking.
"He was betraying Konoha in some way. The mission gone wrong brought him under suspicion. His wife found out, confronted him, so he killed her and escaped," Gaara summarized, fitting the half-spoken words together.
Lee nodded once. His eyes were still blindly fixed on the teakettle as they'd been since he sat down.
"I see."
Gaara examined Lee closely. His lover was taking the facts like a Shinobi, trying to remain functional and positive despite emotional duress, but it was obvious that all this had still upset him. By the sound of it, Lee and his cousin hadn't been close; not surprising if Katsuro had inherited his father's dismissive attitude towards Lee. But Lee would still care, even so. And there was nobody Gaara could hurt that would make it better.
"Do they know who was behind this? Where he went?"
"Under investigation."
Gaara stared thoughtfully into the depths of his tea. The man must have been pretty good to escape Konoha's ANBU. Or very lucky. Or have very powerful friends...Gaara was going to have to look into this carefully and get the many details that were missing from this account, but he didn't want to drag the information out of his lover.
"I'm not sure they'd tell me if they did find anything," Lee muttered. "My security clearance wouldn't cover an investigation into treason. They only summoned me back because I'm nominally the head of my family now, until Kichiro is fifteen. I had to sign some papers, and also the ANBU wanted to make sure I hadn't heard from Katsuro, and give me the usual advice if he contacts me. The kids...you're probably wondering about the kids. I checked with their mother's clan first, but-..."
Lee ducked his head so all Gaara could see of his eyes was a curtain of bangs and the two fists helplessly gripping each other.
"Her clan weren't-...They didn't want-...I guess in the circumstances, I can understand their reaction. She had no direct relatives left, anyway. So...my family is a side-branch to a larger clan. I have a lot of second and third cousins. I grew up with some of them."
Once more that pinched look about Lee's lips. Gaara suddenly had a mild urge to reach out and touch him...a strange impulse, one he would not have felt a few years ago. He didn't obey the urge now. He stayed still and waited.
"Some of them have kids. It would have made sense for them to take in Chiro and Aki. But they-..."
Lee was suddenly on his feet. The kitchen chair toppled backward. Lee spun quicker than Gaara could almost follow, catching it and righting it before it could hit the ground.
"You should have seen the looks on their faces." Lee's voice was choppy with reined-in outrage as he glared at the chair's back. "When they talked about taking the kids in. Like they were talking about this terrible burden. Great-Aunt Mailin even mentioned the stain on the family name- she doesn't share our family name! They said-"
"I know what they said. They would have said the same thing in Suna."
Lee looked indignant. Gaara could understand why, intellectually, since Lee's cousins had been the innocent victims in this, but this reaction was bred into Hidden Villages and for good reason. Failure on a mission, or failure to protect the team, endangered the whole, their very way of life. Treason even more so. The threat of reprisals against family members, even if it was simply being ostracized, was one more way of insuring unquestioned loyalty.
The reaction the children had faced wasn't deliberate; in fact most of the villagers might not even have done it knowingly. But the fact remained that the offspring of a traitor to Konoha would get a cold reception there, and Leaf was probably one of the most open-minded and lenient of the villages in the first place.
Lee was gripping the back of the chair and staring blindly at the kitchen door, away from Gaara.
"Kichiro and Aki had already slept in two different homes when I'd arrived, and their father hadn't even been gone four days. He just looked...Chiro, I mean. He doesn't know, of course. He knows his mother is dead and his father's not coming back, but he doesn't know the details. But the way he looked at me, at them- the rest of the family..."
He glanced briefly at Gaara. "I'm sorry, I should have asked you first. But I didn't know how quickly a message could reach you- and I didn't want Chiro and Aki spending a minute longer with those people. Not with all that going on. I left as soon as I could. We arrived here earlier today."
Today- last week- how long to sign those papers, meet with his clan, and take that decision- Gaara finally did the math and connected the result with the odd way Lee had moved earlier, as if dangerously exhausted.
"Lee."
"Sorry, sorry, I know, I ran too fast."
"Carrying two children?"
"It was okay, Shizune prescribed some medicine, something to help them sleep at night for awhile. Kichiro's been having nightmares. I put them in these big carry-all baskets, and they slept most of the way-"
"I was thinking about the strain to your body," Gaara ground out.
"...I couldn't take too long. They're both so young. I couldn't take three days."
"How fast did you go?"
"Not unreasonably fast," Lee said mulishly, which meant that Gaara would never learn how quickly his lover had made this trip.
Faced with Gaara's unblinking stare, Lee twitched with something like his usual self and held out a triumphant finger.
"It was a worthy challenge! Consider it extreme training! A trial of Youth and Endurance! Gai-sensei once ran-"
Gaara's glare could have sliced a joint of meat into cold cuts. Lee quickly gave up on that line of argument.
"Anyway," he said firmly, sitting back down with the air of one moving on, "I put them to bed, then realized I'd run out of diapers. I wasn't able to take that many with me, the ANBU are still going over their house. I might have to go back to Konoha in a few weeks to settle the estate. We'll see. As for the kids, don't worry, they're only here for today. Well, I thought I could keep them here till Sunday, but now that you're back, I'll go tomorrow morning and find a place in town I can rent for us, just until things settle down in Konoha and people forget-"
Gaara's teacup clicked loudly as he set it down on the table.
"You are going nowhere. You are staying here."
Lee looked at him, visibly distressed. "But Gaara, I can't- where would they go?"
"They're staying here too, if you've decided to shelter them."
"I can't impose two kids on you in your own home!"
In the cone of light cast by the kitchen lamp above the table, the motes of dust suddenly swirled in a disrupted pattern. Gaara could feel the chakra crawling along his skin, overflowing from the part of his soul that was more wounded now than when the boy had called him a bloodthirsty demon to his face.
"This is our home. This is your home too."
The words had come out in a soft, cold tone that harkened back to old, dangerous times; Gaara's usual reaction to a pain he hadn't expected. Lee blinked, but then he gave Gaara a steady look that soothed away the ache as much as Lee's touch had earlier.
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that. You know that." He was obviously drained, both physically and emotionally, or he would have protested a whole lot louder and longer, but Gaara could still hear the love and sincerity in his voice, and the darkness within receded a few steps. "But the kids can't possibly stay here. It would be a terrible imposition on you. You don't know how much- how much trouble children that age are. They make life very complicated. They're noisy, they require a lot of care- you have huge responsibilities, and you work from home a lot. You're very busy. You really don't need this."
"No. But I need you."
Lee looked at him for a long moment. Gaara stared right back. The dark things inside were still riled, but he was forcing them back under control for Lee's sake. Gaara had little to no empathy for normal people ordinarily, but Lee was different; he was Gaara's lover, and his friend. Gaara knew him in ways he didn't know other people, and he knew this side of Lee all too well, he'd struggled with it before.
Lee was a force of nature, strong and determined to fight his own fights. He set himself impossible challenges, righteous goals, he went full-out to get what he wanted with his own strength, and he'd lay down his life for the sake of a friend. But when it came to letting those friends help him in turn...even Gaara. Especially Gaara. The closer you were to Lee, the less he wanted to ask for, as if it were normal that he give his all and never expect much in return. As if he had to earn everything Gaara wished to give him.
In Gaara's estimate, having Lee love him, live with him and put up with Gaara's eccentricities, which went from the mildly strange to the dangerous, should earn Lee anything he wanted. But still Lee hated to ask him for anything or ‘impose on him'. In part because he'd rather brashly tackle problems by himself and defeat them in a glorious challenge. But at the far back of this attitude seemed to lurk some kind of fear; perhaps that if he couldn't stand on his own, Gaara might decide he was a burden and not worthy of him. Gaara suspected, without being able to put his suspicions into words, that this attitude was linked to Lee's upbringing. He hated this scar from Lee's past with all the passion his strange nature could conjure, though he didn't know what to do about it.
They'd had this sort of argument before, and it ran through the silence between them without having to be put into words, thankfully, until it came to its logical conclusion.
"Thanks," Lee whispered, reaching blindly for Gaara's hand. Gaara returned the touch with a firm, reproving squeeze of Lee's fingers. Thanks were not needed. Thanks were for favors, and this wasn't one. This was necessary. So be it.
A ghost of a tired and rueful grin lit Lee's face. "To tell you the truth, I wasn't looking forward to living apart from you, even if I had been planning on seeing you a lot...But don't worry about a thing!" That was said with a bit more of his usual energy, and what Gaara had learned thoroughly by now was the ‘Good Guy Thumbs Up Promise Pose'. "I'll take care of it all! They won't go near your study, and I'll make sure they don't make too much noise, and- and- I'll take care of it all! You won't have to do anything."
Gaara nodded in agreement. That would be for the best. He had no human instincts to help him deal with a child, and Chiro was afraid of him anyway. The less they interacted, the better for both.
"You should go get some rest," he told Lee, picking up the teacups and his bowl.
"Yeah, I probably should," Lee admitted, which meant he'd really pushed himself hard, Gaara noted with an internal growl of exasperation. "How about you?"
Gaara paused in the act of dumping the dishes in the sink. Good question. Which raised another.
"Why did you tell the boy we were roommates?"
Lee blinked, and blinked again, and then went a bit pink. "Well, what else was I going to tell him- no, Gaara," he said sharply as Gaara opened his mouth, "you don't tell children that age that we're- stuff like that. It's not right. They're too young to understand."
Gaara agreed that the baby was probably too young to understand, but the older one should be able to process the information if you kept it simple. Gaara wondered if this was Lee being, well, Lee, or if this was one of those more general customs and obfuscations humans adopted, particularly where sex was concerned, that made little sense when you looked at them rationally. One thing was certain: the child Chiro had better not ask for Gaara's version of this, because the Kazekage didn't have time for that sort of nonsense and would tell him the truth, and too bad if the kid couldn't take it. Chances were good that it wouldn't kill him.
The chances were even better that Chiro would run a mile rather than talk to Gaara at all, so the situation would undoubtedly never arise. Since Lee was the children's titular guardian, Gaara would not debate the issue, and thus that made them roommates while the children were here.
"Roommates, despite the terminology, do not actually share a room in a house where several are available," Gaara pointed out.
Lee looked like he'd just swallowed a lemon. Apparently he hadn't thought that far ahead yet.
"I could use a couple hours of sleep tonight," Gaara added, running a trickle of water into the sink. "I didn't rest well in the capital. I should be able to do it in my study if the children are quiet enough."
"Sorry..."
That earned him a Look. Lee looked like he was about to apologize again for having apologized until he must have remembered just how annoyed that made Gaara and turned it into a cough instead.
"It's only for tonight," Lee declared. "Then tomorrow I'll set up one of the empty rooms for me and the kids. I think we have a spare futon somewhere-"
"Tomorrow, we'll set up a room for the children, and you will stay in our room. There's no need for me to monopolize the bedroom if I only sleep an hour or two a night. The study will serve well enough for that, and the further away from strangers I am, the better for all concerned."
Lee opened his mouth, but his objections disappeared behind a large yawn. He sighed, walked over to Gaara, kissed him and said: "We'll talk about it tomorrow."
Gaara decided not to argue. It had been a long night for both of them.
TBC...
Next week should be the epilogue for DR, if I can get it out, otherwise that will be bumped back another week and it will be the third part of Kindred.