The Jinchuuriki Alliance || REWRITE ||

CHUUNIN EXAMS: INTERLUDE

I DO NOT OWN NARUTO

I meant to upload this yesterday, but then Wattpad crashed and I completely freaked out because I thought I lost everything... went to bed... came back in the morning and had to republish everything. 

But it's all good now (hopefully) hehe~

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Naruko and Gaara were currently in one of the empty training grounds, sitting in companionable silence. The preliminary matches, which had only taken place because of the abnormal number of Genin who passed the second phase, had wasted a majority of the day. At the end of it all, the finalists were then told they had a month to train before the final phase.

Currently, Fuu was training with her team — something Gaara was desperately avoiding. Naruko had simply decided to join him for some well-deserved down-time. Besides, she could tell Gaara was still very much hung up on how he had almost accidentally killed Lee.

The jinchuuriki had given Kakashi "her blessing" to go train Sasuke instead of her, reasoning that it wasn't as if Kakashi could teach her anything else. Sasuke would no doubt benefit from having a teacher who had the Sharingan and had the same affinity as he did — Lightning.

"Ne, Gaara, can I ask you something?" Naruko asked as she absent-mindedly re-sketched a seal of her own design. The redheaded boy hummed in acknowledgement of her question. "Why do you pretend you don't care?"

Gaara paused, his sand grains freezing along with him. "What?"

Naruko glanced up from her sketchpad. "I'm talking about with Temari and Kankuro... your real siblings. When you're with us — Fuu and myself, that is — you act like you. But when you're with them, you're someone else. I mean, sure you've always been stubborn as hell, moody and a little unpredictable; one day you'll snarl at me for getting too close, and the next day you'd hug me for the same thing. You'll be ridiculously set on something and then change your mind just because you felt like it. But this is different... you act like you don't care at all. Why?"

Gaara set down his half-formed sculpture. "I..."

The blonde shifted over so that she was no longer leaning against him, but sitting across from him in a cross-legged position. "You know that whatever you say, I'll never judge you, right? And this will always stay between us unless you wish otherwise."

Her brother nodded meekly. "I don't... I don't really know," he admitted. She was looking at him with that look, and that meant she wanted more of an answer than that. "It's hard. I don't know how to be... a brother... to them."

Naruko tilted her head. "You do a wonderful job of being a brother to me," she offered.

"That's different," Gaara shook his head. "With you two, everything is easy. I don't have to be... I don't have to be someone I'm not. There's no expectations for me to live up to. With Fuu, Yagura, Utakata, Bee, okaa-san... people who are like you and me, I'm free. Free to be who I am."

"Gaara, you're always free to be who you are."

She was looking at him so earnestly. She believed it. So why couldn't he?

The redhead sighed through his nose. "It's more complicated than that," he said quietly. "If they don't like me now, at least I know they don't like someone who's not me. But if I show them who I am every day, the person I am when I'm around you, what if they don't like it? I'm... afraid they won't like me, even then," he confessed.