Whirlwind
by Lady Zip
Shikamaru
supposed she’d be mad with him when she woke up, but he didn’t much care.
Whatever horrible conclusion she could come to about her missing daughter
would be resolved as soon as she realized he was there and since she didn’t
have her fan with her, he would escape injury.
Gaara
had warned him at some point that mothers didn’t like to have their children
taken away while they were sleeping, but it wasn’t as if he was spiriting
the baby girl away in the dead of night. He’d moved her all of five feet.
He just wanted to hold her…
Temari had hardly shifted when he slipped a hand between the infant’s head and her crooked elbow. Lifting the rest of the tiny body from her arms had been easy. She now lay curled on her side, her face the exhausted picture of contentment framed by mussed blonde hair.
He smiled softly, letting his eyes rove the curve of her shoulder for probably the thousandth time – following the faint scar above her breast and the inked helix of vines that slipped over her collarbone and down her spine to the rose settled at the small of her back. He knew every small mark, had gazed at her sleeping enough to tell when she dreamed and when she rested. He shifted the light weight of their firstborn in his arms and smiled down at her too, pondering how long it might take him to learn to tell things like this about her.
Temari had lived up to her whirlwind reputation from the moment she’d first kissed him – standing in his kitchen, covered in flour from various misadventures of trying to teach her to cook takoyaki. Handprints in white on the front of his shirt, seeing her break that first nervous smile when they parted… Somehow his arms were around her waist, forehead pressed to hers, and he hadn’t wanted to let go.
He remembered well wondering how long their tumultuous connection would last, watching her sitting at his kitchen table in those flour dusted clothes, poking at a bowl of salad, and allowing himself for the first time to surrender to the little hands yanking on his heartstrings for the girl.
And seeing her asleep beside him for not the first time, more than a year later, it occurred to him that this couldn’t be something stupid or fleeting. She was pushy, she was noisy, she was irritating, her family was insane… and he wanted every piece of it, simply because it was her. All she had to do was give him that sleepy morning smile of hers and he was lost. He couldn’t pass her in a room without touching her, even to graze their fingers together for a moment. She had long ago stopped being a nuisance when she would follow him to lie on the hill and watch the sky roll past. He grew uncomfortable with the emptiness in what had become ‘her half’ of his bed every time she would go home to the Sand to visit Kankuro.
In the end, there was just nothing for it but to marry her and put himself out of his misery.
And damned if their daughter wasn’t her spitting image. Even infantile features couldn’t disguise the resemblance. The sleepy confusion of the tiny green eyes blinking up at him made him smile without trying. Her hair might grow darker as she got older, he supposed, but the current downy curls were a delicate corn silk blonde.
He’d never rid his mind of the image in a million years, either. In all the time he had known and lived with Temari he could have counted only a handful of times that he had seen her cry. Even then it had never been much – an absent tear before she just got pissed about whatever problem was troubling her and then grabbed up her fan and marched out gung-ho to kill whatever needed to be killed to get things settled.
But
the night before he’d watched her weep openly for what might have been the
first time since her childhood, cradling the wailing newborn against her chest,
stroking the tiny fingers and flailing feet with a reverence he’d never imagined
she could display. She had pleaded with him to let her name the baby after
her mother, as if she had expected him to be capable of arguing with her…
Everything
had quieted considerably in the last hour as the consistent stream of well
wishers had trickled out. Gaara, surprisingly had stayed the latest, as if
wanting to make sure that no one else was about to bother his exhausted sister.
He’d kissed Temari on the forehead, smiled the faintest of smiles at his niece
and left with merely a raised hand to Shikamaru. He couldn’t say he minded.
For all his silence Gaara had given him the least trouble of any of Temari’s
family. Part of him was sure that his creepy brother-in-law had somehow twisted
their uncle’s arm in his favour…
He stroked a hand over the downy smoothness of his daughter’s head for the umpteenth time, watching her fluttering eyes close in sleep again. Well, perhaps if she looked like her mother, she’d act a little more like him. It seemed like a fair trade. She was a pretty quiet baby so far. Maybe he could teach her to cloud watch, and play Go and Shogi. And she would visit him when he was old and challenge him as she grew stronger and he weaker with age… But that was a long way off…
For now, he could hold her and be content with that. Her mother would only be upset for a moment, he was sure.