Normally, a Kage only took missions that were S-ranked, considered too dangerous even for most of the elite to handle, demanding the strongest warrior a village could put forward. But at his current level of skill, not entirely stabilized after everything that Akatsuki had done to him, it would have been foolhardy in the extreme for Gaara to have taken such a mission, if there had been one needing to be filled at the time.

Fortunately, there was no need to make the decision; no S-rank was currently available, and after some consideration, Gaara decided even to pass up an A-rank in favor of an easier, B-ranked mission. He and Kankurou would undertake it together; while it would not be difficult, and Gaara could almost certainly complete it on his own, Kankurou needed to test Aoeki in battle as well, and the rapport that had slowly been growing between the two of them over the past three years made it preferable to have company.

The mission itself was simple: eliminate a local crime boss in one of the countries bordering Wind. The man was known to have shinobi guards, but was himself a businessman, not a warrior, and with the guards taken out, would present little threat. Naturally, Gaara’s advisors and aides had been rather put out at the thought of the Kazekage taking such a mission, but they had served him long enough to know that when his mind was made up, it would take more than protests of unorthodoxy and inappropriateness to alter the course he had chosen. So, confused at why the so-powerful Kazekage chose a chuunin-level mission, they nevertheless bowed their heads and made the appropriate arrangements so that the daily matters of paperwork and mission assignments would be attended to in the absence of the Kazekage and his brother.

The journey was slightly more than a day; Gaara and Kankurou chatted softly as they raced along the desert. Once, Gaara would have used his abilities to ease their passage, hardening the sand under their feet to a slightly less than stonelike consistency so that they could move faster; now, such a display of power was beyond reasonable for him, would in and of itself exhaust his human store of chakra. Gaara’s power was no longer near godlike.

But even without that display of stamina to ease their passage, Gaara and Kankurou were desert-born, desert-bred shinobi; they knew how to travel swiftly and easily through the sand, and they did so, talking of simple matters as they went. Paperwork, an obnoxious businessman who sought to increase his water-use permit in order to import expensive plants from the lush Fire Country, a new training technique, the new batch of academy students who would soon be taking the exam. Kankurou had loudly and repeatedly stated his preference to a slow death from fire ants over ever being assigned a genin team, and while he was yet too young to take on students – at seventeen, he had at least another eight or nine years before he was up for that particular honor – he wanted to make sure that his brother understood his feelings on the matter well in advance. Gaara, well aware of Kankurou’s distaste for children, assured him in the flat, nearly uninflected tone that only Kankurou understood as teasing that he would make sure that Kankurou got the brattiest, most obstreperous children Suna could offer, and at the soonest opportunity. In return, he was informed in highly colorful language that if that ever came to pass, he would spend the rest of his natural life needing poison tasters for every meal, and they’d better have good life insurance.

Three years ago, such brotherly teasing would have been impossible. Kankurou would not have dared to even jokingly threaten Gaara’s life, and Gaara would have reacted to such teasing as though it were an honest threat against his life. Now…

…Now he could take it for the joke it was, understanding the little quirk at the corner of those purple-painted lips and the sparkle in Kankurou’s eyes as being indicators that the words were nothing more than harmless play, and he could respond in kind, letting Kankurou know that every meal he ever ate would be filled with grit, sand mites would find his pillow a veritable palace, and he and his genin team of holy terrors would be given only the most malodorous of D-rank missions for life.

In response to which, Kankurou pointed out rather truthfully that his pillows were Gaara’s as well, and that he’d be happy to share the sand mites with his brother. This point, Gaara chose not to refute; he could have threatened to move out and find his own bed with delightfully mite-free pillows, but somehow, that threat was one he would not make; it was too close to not joking, something that was too easily within the realm of possibility, and the truth was, he felt secure sleeping with Kankurou. After fifteen years of endless waking and only a few short weeks, less than two months, of sleeping at night, the simple act of descending into unconsciousness for seven or eight hours a night bothered him, and his dreams – with brighter-than-life vividness, as though to make up for the years they had been unable to torment him – disturbed and unsettled him. Waking up with a strong arm draped over his waist and a solid chest to lean against comforted him, and knowing that he was not alone as he slept – that Kankurou, long since adapted to a shinobi sleep pattern of easy and quick wakefulness, was there with him – made him feel safe. Gaara could not sleep lightly; when he descended into Morpheus’ realm, he remained deeply asleep until his rest was completed, and it was difficult to rouse him before then. When he closed his eyes each night, he did so entrusting his safety to Kankurou, and the simple, brotherly act of sharing a bed took on a deep dimension of meaning.

No, Gaara would not abandon his brother’s bed anytime in the foreseeable future, and he felt a quiet resistance to even joking about it. Unskilled at analyzing his own emotions, he did not feel the need to seek out more than the top layer of reasoning: he would not joke about finding his own bed because he didn’t want to do so. That was all.

They camped for the night in the scrubby grasslands that marked the edge of the Wind Country’s vast desert, and even without their normal comfortable bed, they still slept curled together, Kankurou’s nose just brushing the nape of Gaara’s neck as the stars looked down on them. The night in the grassland was warmer than in the deep desert; the air, richer with moisture, held more of the day’s heat trapped within, and when they woke, dew coated everything around them.

Now, they traveled for little more than another hour before the village housing their target came in sight. It was deceptively small and sleepy, not the sort of place one might expect for a crime boss to hold headquarters, but then again, that was precisely how the man had evaded elimination for so long. Significant research had been required to track him to his lair, and now death was come for him.

Under henge, they slipped into the village, appearing to be nothing more than a pair of scruffy mutts, lean and hungry with dusty coats, trotting down the main thoroughfare – such as it was – and occasionally stopping to sniff around at anything that might offer a meal to a pair of hungry strays. One of the most important aspects of using henge successfully was to imitate the mannerisms that corresponded to the chosen appearance. While a couple housewives chased the off with brooms, no one suspected them to be anything but what they seemed.

Those housewives, however, were most emphatically not the innocent farm women they appeared; most of their men worked for Umida in one fashion or another, supporting the crime network that had spread across the small country and was beginning to penetrate into Earth and Wind. Gaara looked at them as accomplices, potentially guilty of supporting and aiding the man who would not live to see sundown. Without the head, the snake would die; he hoped the entire village would not need elimination. Bodyguards and boss, and that would be that.

The building that in a normal village would function as a sort of town hall, a meeting place for the villagers, a place for festivals, weddings, funerals, and all the celebrations of life in between, looked no different from any other on the surface, but inside, the two could sense the movements of shinobi-trained individuals, the highly developed chakra patterns easy to sense. However, that they were easy to sense told them much about their opponents; they were trained enough to use and develop their chakra, but not enough to then hide it; the two mangy mutts scratching themselves outside the hall would not appear to be anything else but to an intensely perceptive shinobi, or one such as the Hyuuga of Konoha, able to see through disguise. These men – presumably the shinobi bodyguards listed in the intelligence report – would not be so able.

Kankurou, appearing as a larger, shaggy black dog, sniffed around the doorway in a perfectly canine fashion; the disguised puppeteer glanced over his shoulder to Gaara and nodded once. A chakra technique sealed the door against spying, and as soon as they went through, whoever had sealed the door would know of it.

Assuming, that was, if they used the door.

It was no longer a throwaway gesture for Gaara, but it would provide them easy access; the sand slowly began to abrade away at the walls, the two of them choosing a spot that was hidden by a decorative bush on the outside, and revealed by tapping to be behind some heavy piece of furniture on the inside. As soon as the opening was big enough to admit the two dogs whose forms they currently wore, Kankurou’s chakra threads carefully shifted the heavy piece of furniture – a cabinet, they discovered – far enough forward that they could slip in.

They found themselves in an office, listening to a man – Umida – upbraiding a subordinate for a sloppy job. The unfortunate one begged to be spared, to be given the chance to rectify his error, but his trembling pleas were cut off by the hiss of a drawn blade, and then a wet, meaty sound.

The smell of blood filled the air, and Umida casually said, “Clean that up.” The unseen killer – a bodyguard-cum-enforcer, Gaara presumed – began to do so, and Umida sat back at his desk, closing his eyes and sighing. “Incompetence,” they heard him mutter. “It wastes more money than bribes.”

His bodyguard’s incompetence in noticing the motion of the cabinet reinforced his words; Kankurou dropped the henge, braced himself, and leaped from behind the desk, flinging three kunai with deadly accuracy as he rolled.

The first was all that was truly necessary; it took Umida in the side of the head, and then the second and third buried themselves between his ribs on his left side. Then, quickly, Aoeki leaped from his wrappings and lunged at the bodyguard.

Only Gaara and Kankurou had dangerously miscalculated. There was not one bodyguard; there were five. One had stepped forward, bent over the corpse of a man bleeding out on the floor; the others stood against the far wall, eyes wide in shock but quickly recovering and readying an attack.

Kankurou set Aoeki leaping forward, the puppet lashing at the nearest guard, but with the simplistic puppet, he would not be able to take down all five alone. With Karasu – no question. That superior puppet had the weaponry to take on multiple opponents with ease. But Aoeki’s limbs did not separate, and so long as the guards stayed outside the puppet’s reach, there would be little armament that could touch them.

Kankurou had endeavored not to alter the puppet, preferring to focus his energies on the just-begun Shishi, his own design, but there had been one modification he had not been able to resist making. Like Karasu, Aoeki was now equipped with the ability to fire poison gas capsules, in order to have at least some long-range offense.

But again, luck was not with them. Behind the bodyguards were a series of fans, which moved cool air from the doorway into the office; poison gas would be blown back toward Kankurou and Gaara.

Gaara had followed Kankurou out from behind the cabinet, and the sand immediately lashed out at the guards – but slower, and in less quantity, than in the past. One guard died quickly, the sand forming a garrote and choking the life from him, but the others dodged out of the way and sent a hail of weapons toward the pair.

This needed to end quickly, before one of the guards could get to the door and escape. Kankurou knew the last thing they needed was for word of Gaara’s presence to get out. He detached a single chakra thread from Aoeki and flung it toward the door, pulling it shut and holding it. Then, with his free hand, a quick flick of fingers to his brother, Suna shinobi hand-code. Hold your breath. To say it aloud would be to warn their enemies, who were currently concentrating on evading the sand, with a disturbing level of success. Kankurou himself took in a deep breath, pressed his lips together, then fired the poison capsules toward their enemies. The capsules exploded against the far wall, filling the air with a dark cloud of poison particles.

Immediately, two of the remaining guards began to cough and choke. But the last survivor, quicker than his fellows, leaped toward Kankurou and Gaara’s end of the room, his face set in a mask of concentration. The fans began to send the poison back toward them, and Kankurou and Gaara whirled to deal with the last, both of them holding their breath.

But Gaara’s new difficulties were once again made evident. Concentrating on catching the frighteningly fast man, he forgot once again about defense; a kunai flashed out, and he dodged a little too late, the blade scoring a cut on his arm.

Reflexively, he gasped, and then his eyes went wide as he realized what he had done.

The sudden surge of adrenaline – fear-shock-desperation flooding his system like a drug – made Kankurou react with sudden fury, Aoeki spinning onto the offensive and blade-arms burying themselves through the man’s forehead and chest in that one bare moment of stillness. And then he flung the door open, catching his brother up in his arms and, taking a deep breath, rushed through the dissipating cloud of poison, desperate to get Gaara to fresh air. The puppet remained behind, forgotten.

Out in the fresh air, Kankurou laid Gaara down on the grass behind some ornamental shrubbery, digging frantically through his pack for the correct antidote. He refused to carry any poison for which there was one – or rather, Temari refused to let him, after he’d nearly killed himself working on Karasu several years ago – and he blessed that habit now, as he finally found the red-labeled bottle.

“Open your mouth.” Gaara’s limbs were beginning to shake, hinting at convulsions to come. Kankurou poured over half the bottle into his mouth at once, and Gaara obediently sealed his lips shut around the precious liquid. “Swallow,” the puppeteer told him, but Gaara shook his head a little, his throat moving as he clearly tried and couldn’t. “Swallow!” It was a pained cry, and Kankurou began to stroke Gaara’s throat, trying to encourage it.

Finally, painfully, as the dark-rimmed eyes were beginning to roll, Gaara swallowed, and Kankurou sighed in relief. The concentration of the poison in the air had not been strong where they were, and the amount of antidote he’d given Gaara should cover it. But as the adrenaline rush faded, emotion flooded in to replace it – guilt and horror. He’d nearly killed Gaara. He, not anyone else, not an enemy, had very nearly ended that precious life that had been given back to them. How could he have? Why had he been so foolish as to use poison in that enclosed space? Kankurou struggled against the tide of anguish as he carefully lifted Gaara in his arms and made for home, knowing that the antidote – very nearly a poison itself – would weaken the redhead severely for another day or so to come.

“Gaara,” he whispered softly, his arms tightening. “I’m sorry.”