The Flower Shop [A Gaara Love Story]

47: So Much and Not Enough

When she had finally been cleared to leave the hospital, Gaara had thought she would have at least looked happy about it. He didn't expect her to smile or cry tears of joy, but he had expected something. The doctor had come into her room with a cheerful smile but Momoko just listened to the good news with pursed lips. The sand siblings had already been given the rundown on how to care for her from this point out, and so she had been discharged into their care. He noticed the way her lips twitched downwards when she was told that.

Most nights, Gaara would come home and find her sitting on the balcony and watching the sky, her crutches disregarded as she sat in silence. The wind would pick up her hair, twirl the short strands in the breeze, but she wouldn't flinch. Her head would stay tilted back, and her dull eyes would just stare out into the endless blanket of night. Gaara would set his things down and join her, making sure to keep some distance between the two of them. When he would sit beside her, he could see tears well in her eyes but they never fell. So they stayed like that, silent and somber, and watched the sky.

They didn't speak much anymore. He would wake up to her back facing him and her body curled on the other side of the bed. The meals that were once filled with chatter and laughter were silent. Everything was silent, now. No good mornings or good nights, no welcome homes or goodbyes. Momoko would raise her eyes to meet his every once in a while and those few moments of some kind of contact were just barely enough to hold him over.

He didn't get angry or impatient, he knew what she was going through. Of course he had suffered as well these past few weeks, but it felt like Momoko had lost so much more than he had. The therapist he saw reassured him every week that it would take time for her to heal, that he just needed to stick it out for a while longer until she began to show signs of recovery. For her, Gaara knew he could wait a lifetime. So that's what he did: wait. He waited for a word, for some sort of sign that Momoko was still here at all. Those signs hadn't come yet, and even if they never did, Gaara wasn't going anywhere. He had promised her a long and happy life, and he would never stop trying to give that to her.

Gaara would never stop trying to fix the mistakes he had made.  He should have paid more attention to the report when it first landed on his desk, should have paid more attention to whatever it was that had lurked in the shadows, should have refused to stay at work later that night. There were a million things he should have done differently, a million mistakes that he would spend the rest of his days correcting.

Sometimes the weight of his shortcomings would sit too heavy on his chest and take his breath away. He would have to pause, set his pen aside, and bury his face into his hands. The pain of what they had lost would sometimes come back to him all at once and it nearly crippled him. He had recovered as well as he could from his childhood, from his father's abuse and his village's hatred, but he wasn't sure how to heal from this. How did someone recover from losing a child?

Of course they hadn't known about her- it was a girl, the doctor had later told them- but the moment they did Gaara had felt a love so strong and so unfamiliar to him just a second before feeling an equally foreign pain. They didn't have time to celebrate her, to love her or plan for her, they were robbed of those opportunities. He had never imagined himself a father until Momoko had painted the beautiful picture of their future together and when he had thought about his life after that, he couldn't see it without a family. He had only wanted it for so shortly but the pain had been so real. He had lost his daughter, they had lost their daughter.

What was worse than losing what you almost had was losing what you already have. As much as he was reassured that she would come back to him in time, it felt like he had lost Momoko, too. The light in her eyes was gone, her smiles were nonexistent and the happiness that she had once seemed to glow with had gone dull. The picture of the girl he had first seen in her files, the one that lit up the whole photo with her smile, was not the same person as the Momoko he knew now. She didn't laugh like bells or kiss him breathless. This woman was just a hollow shell of who she had once been, a pale shadow compared to the bright ray of light Gaara had fallen in love with. But that was okay, he would make it okay. No matter how long it took or how hard he had to try, Gaara would not give up on trying to heal her the way she had healed him.