Chapter 9
Because the world is cruel, Gaara wakes up only about two hours after dawn to Shukaku yelling in his… metaphorical ear, he supposes. He sits up, rubbing his eyes and feeling like the sockets have been stuffed with cotton. The voices behind him take a moment to resolve themselves into words, and then he realizes it’s Jiraiya explaining seals to Roushi.
“—ot actually that complex, I’d bet your masked man hasn’t studied sealing with a master. He did put a hell of a lot of different kinds on there, though. Layering was smart, since it’ll take us longer to undo them, but he wouldn’t need to, to extract the bijuu. So the third seal is a Four Winds Seal, you can tell by the way it’s pinned together…”
Gaara looks around to see Jiraiya, Roushi, and Haruno Sakura hunched over Han’s unconscious body. Naruto and his other teammate Uchiha Haromo are dozing against a tree, drooling on each other’s shoulders. No doubt when they wake up they’ll be horrified. The thought makes Gaara smile.
“Ah, you’re awake,” says Roushi. “You should be glad you got to sleep through most of this explanation. It makes no sense at all if you haven’t spent thirty years studying sealing.”
“You ungrateful brat,” mutters Jiraiya. The Four Winds Seal breaks with a flash of yellow light.
“I’m forty-five,” says Roushi.
“I was already a legend on the day you were born!”
“How many more seals are there?” Gaara asks, not wanting them to start another argument.
Jiraiya scratches his nose. “Ehh, looks like another two. Don’t be so impatient, young man.” It’s only another ten minutes before Jiraiya releases the last seal, but Han doesn’t wake up. This time it’s Roushi who answers the unspoken question.
“Son says his chakra was drained, not just sealed, and he’s still injured. We’ll have to transfuse some. Ready, Son?” He puts his hands over Han’s chakra well. With his limited sensor ability, Gaara watches a huge amount of chakra flow into Han—and he sees when Kokuou wakes up, her white chakra rising to meet Son Gokuu’s.
“That’s enough,” she says from Han’s mouth. “I’ll heal him. Thank you.”
Jiraiya is already undoing the seals on Utakata, much faster now that he knows what they are. Gaara volunteers to give him a chakra transfusion, and to his surprise Utakata wakes up almost immediately. He barely seems injured at all. His golden eyes open slowly, darting around like he’s trying to figure out where he is. “…Gaara?” He grips Gaara’s wrist weakly, looking uneasy, and tries to sit up.
“We found where Akatsuki imprisoned you and brought you here so Jiraiya could unseal you,” Gaara tells him.
“I knew I was going to die,” says Utakata, glaring at Gaara’s chest. “Saiken knew it too. And now we wake up here. It seems like an illusion.”
Gaara supposes he has good reason to assume pleasant surprises aren’t real. “It’s not,” he says. “We’re still in danger if the masked man finds us again, although he’d be foolish to try to fight all five of us.”
“Five?” Utakata looks around to where Roushi is quietly talking with Kokuou, and then to where Naruto is asleep on Haromo’s shoulder. “Having this many jinchuuriki in the same place is dangerous.”
“Don’t thank me or anything,” mutters Jiraiya. He gets to his feet and says more loudly, “Well, now that I’ve helped you—you owe me the biggest favor of the century, by the way—we’d better get going. I think it’s about time we returned to Konoha. NARUTO, HAROMO, WAKE UP.”
Haromo jumps a foot in the air and activates her sharingan before she seems to recognize Jiraiya. “Pervert-sensei, you just about gave me a heart attack!” Then she notices that Naruto is still asleep, slumped with his face in the dirt. “Hey, Naruto, you lazy asshole, wake up!”
Naruto sits up, muttering, “I was awake the whole time.” Then he opens his eyes, sees the other jinchuuriki, and grins. “Woah! Are you all who I think you are? This is amazing!” He rushes over to Utakata and sticks out his hand. “Hi, I’m Naruto!”
Utakata eyes his hand and leans away from it slightly. “Utakata. You wouldn’t want to keep your master waiting.”
Naruto’s face falls. “You don’t have to be such a jerk about it, ya know. Well, maybe you’re having a bad day. You’re definitely having a bad day. I’ll see you later in the mindspace, yeah?” He grins, waves, and goes to get his pack. Haromo and Sakura follow, and Jiraiya soon leads them away, southward. A few minutes later Han wakes and thanks Roushi for reviving him. An awkward silence falls.
Gaara is the one to break it. “Utakata-san, you said it’s dangerous for so many jinchuuriki to be together. Why?” He has to know why they can’t be a family in the same way the Uchiha are.
Utakata stares at him like he’s stupid. “We’re weapons, Gaara. The easier it is to find us, the more people will come looking.”
“Out of proportion to how much stronger we are together?” Gaara wonders. It’s not really a quantifiable ratio, but it’s still something to think about.
“None of us is exactly stellar at teamwork,” says Utakata. His narrow eyes are directed at the space between Roushi and Han, rather than at Gaara.
“No-one is born with the ability to work on a team,” Roushi says.
“If you don’t want to be on a team it’s fine,” says Gaara, “but don’t pretend it’s because you’re afraid of bounty hunters.” He knows what Utakata is really afraid of, and he can sympathize. He has wounds too, but unlike Utakata he’s been taught how to heal them. However, Utakata won’t appreciate having his heart laid bare before two people he barely knows, so Gaara asks him, “Can I talk to you in private?”
Utakata gets up stiffly and walks north. Gaara follows until he can no longer see Han and Roushi. “What is this really about, Gaara?”
Gaara looks down. All his uncertainty is coming back. He remembers vividly the many times he offered his friendship to children in Suna, and got only horrified stares in return. Just because someone knows his pain doesn’t mean they’re willing to spend time in his company. He’s lucky enough that he has the Taki Uchiha.
But Utakata has no-one, and that’s what makes Gaara look him in the eye and say, “Don’t you ever get lonely? You’ve been a missing-nin for a very long time, and—”
“I was born lonely, and I grew up lonely. It doesn’t matter.”
“Does it matter if I’m lonely?” asks Gaara. He’s going too far. The last thing Utakata will ever admit is caring for someone else. “I—I mean, I’m not asking to work together out of pity. I… thought that we might all have had enough of loneliness, since we were born to it.”
Utakata is silent for a long time. When Gaara glances up, his face looks softer, tired. “Fine. I am keeping you away because I don’t want to deal with humans. I’m bad at it and it’s a lot of work that will eventually bite me in the back.”
“You think I’m human?” asks Gaara, surprised. Utakata closes his eyes and frowns. He almost looks like he’s going to cry.
He sighs slowly through his nose. “Yeah. Yes. What they’ve done to you doesn’t change that. The way they’ve treated you…”
“I just never felt like I had much in common with humans,” says Gaara softly.
“Dammit, kid, why do you have to make me feel like I need to protect you?” Utakata won’t look at him. “Do you know how hard I’ve worked not to care for anyone? It’s like looking at myself when I was sixteen, right after my master tied me down and tried to kill me, when I still had hope that the world wasn’t as bad as it seemed.”
Gaara reaches for his hand, and Utakata lets him take it. “We’ll be stronger together,” says Gaara. “In all ways.” He understands what it means that Utakata finally told him why he left Kiri, even if he tried to say it casually.
Utakata is silent for half a minute, looking down at their hands. He looks half angry and half sad. “Yeah, yeah, you’re damn persuasive. Now please, let’s stop talking about our feelings and just go back to Han and Roushi.”
