posted on livejournal May 15, 2005
archived March 16, 2007
Fandom: Naruto
Title: The Ones You Make
Author: datenshiblue, a.k.a. bonne
Spoilers: not really
Warnings: none
Rating: G
Disclaimer: Characters, world not mine, Masashi Kishimoto's. I'm certain he would never do this with them. ^^;
The Ones You Make
~Sandsib Vignette~
Children who became shinobi at a young age didn't have many celebratory rituals. The sons and daughter of a Kazekage had access to most material things they might have wanted, but there hadn't ever been gift giving, except surreptitiously, away from their father's eyes, like a guilty secret.
Kankurou swore it was Temari who had started the birthday thing, though the truth was, he had done it first. One year, for no reason he felt like naming, he'd bought a set of hair ties and put them in a box and placed it under her pillow when she wasn't looking.
The next year Temari found a kit of imported theatrical paints that had been shipped in by mistake and was languishing in a corner of a shop case. They contained colors the Wind Country cosmeticians had all but forgotten about that made the local products look as bleached by sun and sand as everything in Suna seemed to be.
It took a lot if ingenuity to hide the paints inside one of Kankurou's puppets. The look on his face when he came out of his room later was worth it though.
If Gaara was ever aware of these annual aberrations, he never indicated such. But then Gaara was living in his own hell, and he noticed many more things than he was ever assumed to.
The ritual never got any more elaborate. Oh, for a while when they were still young enough to enjoy it, the hiding places progressed in originality. But the year they came back from an A Rank mission, successful but exhausted, a bit the worse for wear, drained by the violence and extravagant loss of human life, Temari had barely the energy to slip a book of plays under Kankurou's door and that was the end of the escalation if not of the private custom.
~ * ~
There was another ritual, a more public one, associated with the Kazekage's offspring and anniversaries of birth. Where he came up with the idea no one, not even Temari could guess, but after he'd come home from his apprenticeship with the puppeteers, Kankurou started performing a puppet show, using marionettes that were simple performers and not weapons, for the children of Suna - those brave enough to venture close enough to the steps of the Kazekage's Palace to see the small portable stage set up on the afternoon of the eldest son's natal day. Once word got around, children came. The Kazekage might have been frowning as he looked out his office window, but he said nothing and his son said nothing and it happened again every year thereafter.
It was another birthday custom the youngest sibling appeared indifferent to, as he was indifferent to most aspects of the life that went on around him. Years later, the next Kazekage showed familiarity with it, and apparently an expectation that the annual event should continue, when the steps of the Palace were cleaned and polished the day before and simple refreshments were placed outside for the young visitors.
But by that time, Kankurou knew that his younger brother had been more aware than they had ever realized. He knew because of a single moment, a single incident, never forgotten if never entirely understood.
It had happened the year after the attempted invasion of Konoha. The year everything changed. A birthday had come, Temari had left a small unbreakable mirror wrapped in a fine silk scarf beside Kankurou's cabinet of tools. The puppet show had gone quite well that year, record attendance in fact. As always Kankurou saw his sister's blond head in the crowd, towards the back. And also, as usual, did not see the red hair of his other sibling.
But later he would wonder what vantage point he must have missed.
Walking from the Palace to the theatre that was in its earliest stages of construction, he noticed the movement of sand devils behind the structure and wandered over to see if they were kicked up by someone who had no business in the area.
He stopped far enough away not to be detected and simply stared.
Gaara was... well practicing, Kankurou supposed. Training his already uncanny control of the sand, one might speculate. But there was no mistaking the subject of the exercise as sand formed into blurry but recognizable shapes that bowed to each other and danced, and interacted according to a silent script.
It was the afternoon's puppet show, practically to a beat.
~ owari ~