.....ok

it starts out small, with a how has your day been, temari asks what the elders had to say about their future political plans during the meeting and in return he asks about dinner and how their days went. it goes on for a little while before they settle down to a thoughtful silence and kankuro breaks it by talking about how he fought sasori during the war, something they haven’t brought up ever since, and told them what he had said to kankuro. gaara and temari listen to him talk and gradually the room starts to get tense because he can feel temari’s attention shift to him by the way she glances at him, failing to be discreet about it because it’s the same tension he felt sometimes when he would dismiss temari after she’d brief him when she came back from a mission and would linger in the room a little longer, her mouth opening and closing as she tried to find the words and gaara would always wait patiently (he was simply curious at first because she wasn’t one to be at loss for words and maybe after this happened a couple of more times he should have asked her about for it, but gaara knew whatever it was that temari was struggling to bring herself to ask him about was important and decided that he would wait as long as she needed him to. besides, it was the least he could do for her after everything she’s done for him). he recognized those looks because it’s the same ones she’d give him over breakfast, the tension between them subdued but definitely still there, when kankuro refused to get out of bed and temari comes back to the table putting more food on gaara’s plate determined not to leave a crumb behind for kankuro because “if he isn’t going to get up and eat breakfast with us he’s not going to get any, period.”(gaara really disliked this as he had trouble finishing his serving let alone kankuro’s as well. he wished his older brother would just get up when temari asked and then go back to sleep so he wouldn’t have to deal with this. he brought it up to kankuro once to which he replied that sleeping in didn’t work that way, and that he would never really understand. gaara felt that kankuro meant this in an offensive way but he had a point, he really didn’t) so gaara both expected and did not expect for temari to finally say