Work Text:
The dining table at the Akimichi Head House is massive—big enough for generations’ worth of clan members to break bread around—and round, so that no man sits superior over the others. It’s made of heavy oak, felled from the Nara forests, sturdy enough to hold a banquet’s worth of dishes without bowing, and thick-legged to sustain the banging of heavy fists. The chairs that encircle it have wide seats, armless to accommodate any size or shape of person.
The crowd sitting in those chairs right now—Chouza’s old genin team minus Ebisu, Gai’s students, Chouji and his teammates—seem dwarfed by them, save Chouji. It is a table built for Akimichi after all.
“Your special lady is coming into town soon, isn’t she, Shikamaru?” Chouza asks, passing him a tureen of green beans picked fresh from the field, adding another slice of bread smeared thick with sunflower butter to the stack already on his plate. He’ll only pick at it like a bird, hands nicotine-shaky because Chouza doesn’t allow smoking at his table and stained yellow at the calluses just like his teacher’s and his father’s before him. He’s grown taller than either of them, now, but he’s only stretched up where they both had stretched out. It doesn’t hurt to try to encourage him to eat better. Chouza loves him almost as well as his own son, and his son’s life rests in his shadowed palms besides.
“Yeah.” Shikamaru picks a sliver of almond off a green bean’s skin, holds it up, crunches it in half and drops the rest to the plate. “I’m gonna have to duck out early to meet her at the gate.”
“Well, bring her along here on your way back, why don’t you?” Chouji booms. He sits in no special place of honor at the table, a few spaces along from his father and wedged between Genma on one side and Ino on the other, but he presides over this warm room, this ample bounty, like a prince. Chouza could not be more proud of him. “We’ll still be at it.”
Akimichi dinners last long into the night, until the last streaks of soup are mopped from their bowls and every last grain of rice has been picked clean. Akimichi have famously clear-faced children, superstition says, owing to their practice of never leaving a speck of food behind.
“And her brothers, too,” Chouza adds. “If they’re along with her. There’s more than enough food for everyone.”
Shikamaru sighs. He flips a green bean over its end. “It’s not the food I’m worried about.”
“Ah,” says Rock Lee, raising his head from his bowl of spicy pickled radish. “Temari-san’s brothers are coming to Konoha with her?”
Shikamaru clicks his chopsticks, a little rudely, but easily forgiven in the face of long alliances. “They’re still a three-man squad, even if her brother is the Kazekage. He’s got some meeting with Kakashi.”
“Oh.” Lee’s face goes red like he’s swallowed a sunflower seed sideways. “I wonder why—”
He gulps. Gai thumps his back.
“You okay there, Lee?”
Lee shakes his head. “Just fine, Gai-sensei!” But his voice carries the strangled roughness of a man choking. He swallows a full glass of water and pours himself another.
“There’s no reason to rush through your meal,” Chouza tells him. “It’s not going anywhere.”
There’s a certain keenness in the way Lee and his teammates eat that speaks to a childhood of deprivation, familiar among the war orphans and those left parentless by the Kyuubi attack. Children who grew up in sterile apartments as soon as they were old enough to be loosed from the orphanage’s doors, who were shuffled like unwanted luggage from unwilling relative to unwilling relative. Too young to fend for themselves properly, but considered as good as adults, given a little stipend of grocery money and a survivor’s pension to pay their rent. With no parent to stand over their shoulder, to guide their hands through the chopping of vegetables, the boiling of water or stock, the rolling of dough and the mashing of fruit, they grew up scrawny and hollow-eyed. Hungry for affection as much as anything else.
The Akimichi had taken in a few of them, infants in cribs and fat-faced children whose tongues were still learning their first sentences, tucked them safely away in the corners of large houses and bedrooms meant to grow. But even the generosity of the Akimichi has its bounds.
Chouza regrets it now, watching Lee and Tenten elbow each other for a spoonful of dashi or a dollop of curry rice like Inuzuka dogs scrapping. His own Chouji grew up wanting for nothing. Surely even in the leanness of war, he’d had enough to spare.
“You can’t save ‘em all,” Shikaku told him once over drinks, and Inoichi had nodded along. But Chouza was never so mercenary as his brothers-in-arms, and it still stung at his chest. His soft heart, as his mother called it, when she worried over him and how he might lead the clan, just as Chouza later worried over Chouji, that he’d inherited that same fragile organ. He’d tried to harden it, but never to much avail.
“No one dislikes a benevolent leader,” his grandmother would tell the both of them, parent and child, and kiss them hard on the crowns of their heads and send them out to the orchard to gather apples. And Chouza would obey her, always, even after his father had passed the mantle of clan head to him and he had to stoop down for Gran to reach his face.
He hopes the same will be said for Chouji, that he’ll be regarded as kind instead of cowardly. It’s these fears, these regrets, these lessons in which he’s instructed his son carefully, making sure he’s learned them by rote: the companionship of a warm, extended hand; the families that are made not by blood but over a shared table.
At their own shared table, Ino cocks her head, bright eyes keen. “Why are you so curious about what Temari’s up to, Lee? Don’t you know she’s spoken for?”
“It’s not like that,” grouses Shikamaru, but it doesn’t evade Chouza’s notice how he watches Rock Lee carefully for a response.
Lee’s reaction should be a balm to him. The boy sputters, covers his mouth so he doesn’t spray the table, sputters some more.
“I—I certainly didn’t mean to imply anything like that!” Lee stammers. “It was merely idle curiosity!”
“Is that so?” Ino flutters her eyelashes with her mother’s grace, folds manicured hands to pillow her chin. Her voice is honey-sweet and acid-precise when she adds, “Or is it that there’s someone else you’re asking after?”
She has an interrogator’s knack, even in casual conversation. Every inch her father’s daughter. Chouza’s tried to tell her this before and she’s brushed him off, her back turning to conceal her watering eyes. He’s taken the children under his wing, has tried to teach them what he knows of their clan legacies—Ino and Shikamaru both, too young to be absent a parent, that lineage and its wisdom so abruptly severed—but he knows he can never replace what they’ve lost.
“Lighten up, Ino,” Shikamaru warns as Lee coughs into his napkin.
“It’s bold of you to harass my teammate considering the rumors I’ve been hearing,” adds Tenten, picking at her teeth with a senbon. She’s taken to carrying one in the corner of her mouth just like the man sitting silent next to Chouji, kicked back and watching the proceedings, but she doesn’t have his years of practice, and it still rattles against her incisors sometimes when she speaks. “Isn’t that right, Neji?”
Hyuuga Neji lays his chopsticks across the back of his bowl with a diplomat’s restraint. “I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about.”
It’s a lie, of course. The Hyuuga traffic in gossip and reputation just as much as the Yamanaka.
Tenten glares at him, then wipes her senbon clean and begins to flip it across the back of her knuckles. The Akimichi have a tradition of laying down arms before a meal, but Chouza’s long since given up Genma’s senbon as a lost cause, and there’s no reason not to extend this same leniency to Gai’s student. He’s gotten soft, perhaps, in his dotage, when before he’d ruled his dining room with a lion’s pride.
“Well I heard,” says Tenten, silver-sharp flashing between quick fingers and dark eyes narrowed at Ino, “that you and Sai were getting awful chummy lately.”
Chouji stifles a guffaw, a pleased little, Ooh-hoo!
Chouza’s heard the same, or seen it at least. The ink drawings that Sai sheds like a maple’s leaves in fall, each of a slender, long-haired woman, only half-formed. Discarded, each one, as though it hasn’t properly captured the beauty of its subject. It’s romantic, in the way of young people. Chouza tries not to show his mirth as Ino reels back, affronted as a cat with water on her paws.
“I don’t know what you’re laughing at, Chouji,” she snaps with her wicked tongue. “Who is it again that you’ve been sending letters to since our last mission in Cloud?”
Now this, Chouza has not heard. Chouji’s feelings have always been outsized, but he keeps them close to his chest. Of course, his and Shikamaru’s relationship has been common knowledge for years, along with or to the side of the sour kunoichi Shikamaru’s courting publicly, but Chouza only knows this because it started when Chouji was too young to think to hide it. His son’s face now is so red that the color swallows up his clan markings. He looks, wide-eyed at Chouza, and then frantic to Shikamaru as if he might offer him succor.
Shikamaru puts his hands up to wash them of the matter.
“Now listen, all of you,” Gai’s voice cuts through the bickering, resonant even in this hall with its tapestry-draped walls. “The youthful passions of a man’s heart are his own private affair!”
“Mmm,” Genma hums, unable as always to resist needling his boisterous teammate. “Does that mean you didn’t want me telling people you finally shacked up with Kakashi? Because in that case … oops.”
Gai sits up straight with a harrumph that he learned from Chouza himself, and fixes his attention away from all the young men and women at the table, whose faces are upturned, eager for more of this salacious news.
“I’ve forgotten my manners,” he announces, ignoring the whispers Tenten is cupping behind her hand into Neji’s ears. “I failed to thank you for your generous hospitality, Chouza-sensei.”
It’s a weak attempt at a diversion, but Gai is embarrassed by so few things, and even now Chouza suspects his reticence to enter the discussion has more to do with the peculiarities of his life’s partner than his own insecurity. Chouza still remembers the teenager in his orange scarf who stood outside the empty Hatake compound with wilted flowers in his hand, who came more than once to ask for advice on how to sneak extra calories into a meal, who learned stealth only so he could hide in the bushes near the memorial stone and keep watch for swords in unsteady hands and whispers of blood sacrifice that could be shouted away with an offered challenge.
“Please,” says Chouza. “Your students are basically my grand-students.”
Lee beams at this. “Thank you, sensei’s sensei!”
Tenten rolls her eyes. Neji is too polite to, but Chouza has known many Hyuuga for a very long time, and Neji is the most expressive of them he’s ever met. He can read the resistance like a semaphore on his unflinching face.
“Kakashi and his students send their regards as well,” Gai adds. “But my rival was preoccupied with very important village business.”
They had all been invited, and Kurenai and her daughter and team as well. Mirai is more-or-less Chouza’s grand-niece, and there’s been a dearth of Akimichi babies recently, one generation too old and the other too young. He always feels fond when she rockets around their legs, squealing, Shikamaru or Kiba or Shino reluctantly in tow with their arms outstretched to catch her should she stumble. But the rest all had their other engagements. A shinobi’s table is never quite full, and even with invitations extended in every direction it’s only inevitable that some will be indisposed, on missions or otherwise.
“That’s strange,” drawls Shikamaru, “because he was playing paper football for dog biscuits with Pakkun when I left the office.”
Gai’s in the middle of passing Lee a fresh napkin when he hears this. He startles and flusters, and the napkin goes floating to the ground like a soft-winged bird, downed.
“I’ll get you another,” says Chouza quickly, before Gai can strain himself reaching for the ground. His hip pains him almost as much as his lower leg, and while Akimichi build their tables wide and high, fitting his outstretched, casted limb beneath it without jarring it was enough of a challenge at the meal’s onset.
“Please, let me!” Rock Lee cries, bounding to his feet.
“No.” Chouza’s boom stills him, and his outstretched hand across the table sends him crumpling back in his seat.
Chouza’s strength is his voice as much as his body. He used to hope he’d imbue this in his students, before he settled on transferring it only to Gai. They’re the most alike, the two of them. Those Gates of his burn a shinobi away just as vividly as an Akimichi’s wings.
“Not to worry,” Gai interrupts, as Chouza’s hauling himself to standing. “Akino will handle it.”
Chouza has nearly forgotten the dog is there, lounging as he’s been by the wheels of Gai’s chair, silent and polite. He doesn’t beg for table scraps like an Inuzuka or his dog. Chouza assumed—though he should know now never to assume with Gai—that the dog was there as some sort of link to the Hokage. An alarm bell of sorts.
“Akino,” says Gai, “will you pick that up for me, please?”
It’s nothing like the command a shinobi gives a ninken in the field. There’s something very reciprocal about it. Gai has a contract with Ningame and his family of tortoises, not with these dogs, and Akino attends to him not as a dog attends to its master, but like a friend to another friend.
“You got it, Boss’s boss,” says Akino, picking up the napkin in his teeth and dropping it in Gai’s hand.
Ino’s expression is delighted. Chouza can already hear her spreading the gossip over the counter at her family’s shop.
The dog’s head drops back below the edge of the table. Out of sight, out of mind.
Never one to let a table be surrounded by silence unless it’s the silence of happily chewing mouths, Chouza picks up a nearly untouched basket of kiritanpo from the center of the table and passes it around, followed by a platter of takoyaki and a plate of inari. Everyone helps themselves, and Chouza settles back into his seat, relaxed and content to watch them eat and chat.
“The food is really delicious,” Tenten gushes between slurps of noodles. “I wish I could cook like this.”
“Hamai made everything you’re really enjoying,” Chouza demurs.
This is the way of the Akimichi: all labor in the fields as one, and then once they retire to the house, the men preside over the ovens while the women take to the stoves. Chouza is lucky to have married so well—though Hamai wasn’t born Akimichi, she’s an excellent cook. Chouza can bake circles around most anyone, but when it comes to proper cooking—a touch of this, a pinch of that, all instinct and love—he has always been a bit heavy-handed with the spice (though neither Gai nor Lee ever complains).
“Chouji!” Tenten kicks him under the table and he howls. “You didn’t tell me your mom was home!”
“Why would I think you’d care?”
“Because—!” She makes a gesture like she’s balling something up and swallowing it, all exaggerated grimaces.
“Oh, right. That.” Chouji winces. “Dad, Tenten wants to learn the soldier pill recipe.”
“I’ve been thinking, if you can pack excess energy into a food pill, there’s no reason you couldn’t store other things in it, right?” The girl’s eyes are bright and fierce as she leans over the table, senbon jiggling in the corner of her mouth. “Poisons are the obvious first thought, but if you could break them down to the most basic level and add a seal to put them back together, couldn’t you store something more complex? Think about hiding a weapon—or, or an exploding tag! Captors almost never take a shinobi’s soldier pills when they disarm them, so if you were caught you could easily ask for your food to keep your energy up, and then—!”
“I think we all get the point,” says Shikamaru, though he’s probably the only one who’s actually kept up with her rapid-fire explanation.
“Hmph.” Tenten turns from him with crossed arms and locks her attention on Chouza now. Her smile is dangerous. She would make a good candidate for T&I if she weren’t such a free spirit. “I know that your family makes the best, most complex food pills there are. There’s absolutely no more ideal vehicle for what I want to try.”
“Oh?” Chouza levels her in a gaze that has cowed war councils. What does she know of the Akimichi’s soldier pills?
“She’s been talking about it ever since that mission a couple months ago,” Chouji explains. “I let her have one bite—one!—off my rations, and she just started going on and on …”
“And hasn’t stopped,” says Neji, quietly. “Trust me, we know.”
Lee nods in agreement.
“Well,” says Chouza slowly, “that recipe is a family secret.”
Tenten’s eyes go huge. “Oh, Grand-sensei Chouza, please!”
She looks like a baby panda like that. All soft round features, spare the weapon in her mouth and the daggers passing for hair pins in her buns. Dangerous.
Chouza pretends to deliberate for a moment, but he’s just as tender-hearted as his son. He doesn’t bend to flattery nor to bribery, but it’s not difficult to tug on his heartstrings, however hidden behind his barrel chest and iron stomach they might be. There was never a chance he would do anything but relent.
“Ah well,” he says, “anything for my grand-student.”
“Yes!” Tenten punches the air and nearly upends an entire bowl of spinach. It’s only Lee’s quick movement that keeps leaves from showering the table.
Hamai comes bustling in just in time, a massive pot of chankonabe in her arms, her hair damp with sweat and mostly swept back behind a kerchief. She’s glistening and radiant. She sets the dish on the table and leans down to kiss Chouza on the thick tufts of his hair, a gesture more sound than touch.
“What’s this about soldier pills?” she asks, putting her hands on her hips. Her ears have always been keen. When Chouji was a boy she could hear him and his friends getting into trouble from five blocks away, even with a pot of boiling oil on the stove.
“Gai’s student wants to learn the secret recipe for soldier pills,” Chouza tells her.
Hamai arches one finely plucked eyebrow.
“You’re allowing this?”
Her eyeliner’s smeared down under her eyes from the kitchen’s heat, and at Chouza’s gesture she stoops down so he can wipe it for her with his thumb. Her expression doesn’t change.
“Chouza?”
Chouza may be the head of the clan in name, but it’s known to every Akimichi that whoever commands the family’s stomachs holds the true reins of the house, and Hamai rules over the Head House kitchen like the queen she wasn’t born to be but became anyway. He’s a fine enough war horse, but she’s an even better wrangler.
“She’s a smart girl, heart of my heart,” he assures her. “Lots of new ideas.”
“We’ll see how much I like new ideas.” But she smiles, then, perfectly painted red around her bright white teeth, and makes a beckoning motion. “Come on, now. Hurry up.”
Tenten scrambles to her feet. “Really? Thank you so much!”
“Don’t let her talk your ear off,” Chouza tells his wife.
“Oh, you don’t have to worry about that. In my kitchen, no one speaks louder than me.” This is true. Hamai gestures more brusquely. “Don’t dawdle. You can help me fold dumpling wrappers, and then we’ll talk.”
Tenten’s expression screws up. Her eyes dart desperately to her teammates. “Come on, Neji,” she hisses. “You know you’re going to be the one doing the actual cooking. I burn everything.”
He unfolds elegantly into standing.
“Yes, dear,” he says, and follows her.
Ino rubs her hands together like she’s been offered a feast of an entirely different kind. “Do you think we were supposed to hear that?” she asks, leaning conspiratorially in towards Shikamaru.
“They haven’t been secretive about it.” He pats his vest absently for his pack of cigarettes until a look from Chouza makes him drop his hands. “If you didn’t already know, you probably just weren’t paying attention.”
“Like you know anything about—!” Ino begins.
Gai cuts her off with an: “Ah! My adorable students are so grown up now.” He stretches, theatrical, and mops his brow. “Why, it brings a tear to my eye.”
Genma tries and fails to muffle a groan.
“If you have an opinion, Genma, speak it!”
Genma pulls out his senbon and mimes sewing his lips shut.
“If you had a team of your own,” Gai barrels on, “you would feel the same way I do. In fact, I’ve never understood why you didn’t!”
“Because I’m not a jounin, Gai.” He sighs like the words are being pulled out of him on fishhooks.
“But you could have been!” Gai pounds the table, another gesture that’s all Akimichi. “You simply lack motivation!”
“Yeah, you know, I’m okay with that.” Genma slouches back in his seat.
Gai fumes.
“Oh, speaking of motivation—” Genma turns to Shikamaru. “—what time were you supposed to go get your girlfriend?”
Shikamaru turns behind him to the massive clock on the wall, half again as high as Chouza is tall. His upper lip raises in what should be a sneer but reads as clear panic.
“Shit.”
“That may be the type of language your mother lets you use at her table,” Chouza says warningly, “but you know it isn’t tolerated at mine.”
Shikamaru winces. “She doesn’t. Sorry, Uncle Chouza.” He bows. “I really do have to go. Temari’s gonna be pi—really angry.”
“Go on, go on.” Chouza shoos him out the door. “And hurry back with her!”
“Troublesome …” Shikamaru mutters, but he nods his assent before he smooths one of Chouji’s stray curls and leaves.
Conversation flows easily in the more intimate setting of the remaining small group, though Ino keeps making cryptic remarks at Lee and he keeps blushing and dropping food every time she does. They’ve mostly cleared away the main courses and moved onto desserts when Shikamaru comes slouching back in through the door, trailed by the smell of tobacco smoke and three Sunan shinobi.
The Kazekage’s sister is holding Shikamaru’s hand, blushing furiously up to the roots of her frazzled hair, but she huffs when she sees Ino staring at her and turns her nose up. Behind her comes the puppeteer in traditional facepaint and blacks, his hands stuffed disaffectedly into his pockets. His expression is obscure behind his paint until he sees the table, and then his surprise is palpable.
“Dude, you didn’t say the spread was gonna be like this.” He gives a low whistle. “We woulda walked faster!”
And behind them at last, a figure so small he’s nearly swallowed by their shadows, comes the Kazekage himself.
Chouza rises to his feet to greet him. He realizes then that he’s never seen the Kazekage up close, certainly never out of his robes of office. Even the most noble of the noble clans of Konoha have scarce reason to parlay with foreign Kage.
The boy—for he looks like nothing more than a boy—is so brittle-thin he looks almost ill. If Chouza worries over Ino, he would be sick over this child. He looks nothing like his siblings, desert-hardened and storm-weathered. And yet he carries himself with such self-possession that you’d almost forget the round cheeks and unlined brow of his face.
“Welcome!” Chouza thunders. “It’s an honor to have you!”
The Kazekage dips his head, stiff, and murmurs some words of obligation and gratitude.
It’s impressive, to see someone so young with such command over a village as large and prosperous as Suna. And excellent command it must be, because Suna was neither grand nor powerful at all before his reign. Impressive … and harrowing. Such burdens are too much for the shoulders of the young, and the fault of previous generations for shirking their responsibilities.
The Kazekage barely glances at the food, even as his sister and brother sprawl into seats on either side of Shikamaru and begin demanding the names and ingredients of all the different sweets spread before them. His gaze is completely impassive until he spies one certain shinobi.
Then he’s on the other side of the table quick as a gust of breeze.
“Lee,” says the Kazekage, one frail hand on the back of Lee’s chair.
Lee turns and offers a wide smile. “Gaara-kun. I didn’t realize you were coming.”
And this is interesting. Lee is obsequious to a fault. He calls even Kakashi ‘Kakashi-sama’, despite having known him since before he even put on training weights, and despite the fact that the Hokage openly despises the formality. And yet he greets the Kazekage—the ruler of a foreign nation—like an Academy friend.
There’s a history there, of course—nights Gai spent sleepless pacing Chouza’s kitchen, debating with himself openly and loudly about the surgery Lee might undergo with Hamai bringing him cups of tea that failed to calm him—but nothing Chouza would have thought would lead to friendship. Camaraderie, certainly—war and alliances make strange bedfellows of all shinobi—but not this. Not the way that the Kazekage sits on the vacant edge of Lee’s chair without asking, or the way Lee knowingly pushes all his remaining fish to the edge of the plate for Gaara to eat.
“You’ve been eating well,” the Kazekage murmurs. His voice is a rasp that belies his years. It’s quiet, but Chouza’s ears are nearly as keen as his wife’s.
The statement probably doesn’t mean the same thing as it does to an Akimichi. But it might.
Because Lee smiles at him, but there’s a certain quality to it. A softness. A reflection of the way Chouji looks at Shikamaru, or how Shikamaru looks at Temari, or even the way the Hokage looks at Gai, though he tries to hide it.
Chouza’s an old hand at infatuation. Akimichi hearts burn with too much ardor for just one person.
“Have you?” Lee murmurs back, pushing towards Gaara the last dregs of his soup bowl, a stray sheet of nori, a few edamame left in their shells.
But even Kage should follow the rules of the dining table. Chouza clears his throat and gestures with his chin to the empty chair beside Lee. Gaara takes it, but it’s Lee who looks across the table guiltily. Gaara appears unperturbed. Despite having moved he’s still perching on the end of the wide seat, as though to be too far away from Lee is somehow unacceptable to him.
It’s noisy chaos around Shikamaru and his other guests, but it remains the silence in Lee’s quarter that holds Chouza’s attention. Chouji sets fresh plates and bowls in front of all the new arrivals, and while Temari and Kankuro load their dishes with slices of blueberry pie and peach cobbler, pillowy mochi and overstuffed red bean cakes, thick slices of melon and juicy segments of orange, the Kazekage puts his hand up at each passed tray. His chopsticks sneak over to pick at the remnants of Lee’s meal, but that’s all.
Chouza’s been to a few state dinners in his time, and Gaara’s been Kazekage long enough for Chouza to have seen him here and there. At those events he always seemed confident—reserved, perhaps, aloof, but comfortable within the formal setting. Here, though, in the casualness of this loud and crowded room, he comes across as … rather awkward.
“Um, Gaara-kun,” Lee leans over and says in a stage whisper, which is the only kind of whisper he’s capable of producing, “I know you don’t care for sweets, but if you don’t eat anything, you’ll offend our hosts.”
The Kazekage gestures silently at the cleared edges of Lee’s dinnerplate.
“You know that doesn’t count,” Lee retorts, as though it’s he who has the Mind Transfer jutsu and not Ino, who’s pretending to talk to Chouji but really keeps eyeing the pair of them.
Still Gaara says nothing.
“Here.” Lee grabs a bowl of strawberries from the middle of the table and scoops a few into Gaara’s dish. “You like fruit, right?”
“I like figs,” Gaara replies, nearly drowned out by a peal of Gai’s laughter. “And dates.”
“These are better than figs or dates, I promise. Chouji’s family grows the best berries in Konoha!”
Gaara looks dubious, but he picks up a strawberry by its green tufts. He squints at it like it’s an enemy shinobi he’d like to dispatch.
He takes a bite. His eyes go wide. Now, Chouza sees the resemblance between the Kazekage and his siblings. Their expressions of shock are just alike.
It makes him wonder what they’ve been eating, in that crater in the desert they call a village. Suna’s moneyed now, but the last Kazekage—their father, would’ve had to have been, Suna’s leadership is nigh-monarchical—died quite some time ago, and the village was in some amount of unrest until Gaara took on the hat and mantle. That’s a lot of lean years to make up for. And Chouza’s never known an orchard that could grow in nothing but sand.
“This is delicious,” Gaara says. As soon as he’s eaten the berry down to the white flesh and its very stem, he sets the leaves on Lee’s plate and grabs another.
In bare instants, the whole bowl is empty.
Chouza chuckles. That’s as good a compliment as any length of Gai’s gushing speeches.
The Kazekage’s eyes flick up to another serving dish. Blueberries, this time.
“Help yourself,” Chouza tells him. “We’ve got another dozen bushes full where those came from.”
Gaara nods stiffly. “Thank you.”
It’s not long before his plate is heaped high with peels and pits, seeds and stems. Juice from a peach drips down his chin, and he ignores Lee’s proffered napkin to swipe it up with his thumb and lick it off.
Another rudeness, but Chouza is known for his indulgences here and there. The Akimichi neither waste nor want for food.
The kitchen door slams open again, and Tenten and Neji come spilling back into the dining room, Hamai’s warm laughter at their backs. Tenten’s sleeve is singed, but her eyes are sparkling-bright. Neji’s the harried-looking one of the two of them. He has flour spattered on the gray apron of his uniform.
Tenten makes for her seat, then freezes. It’s occupied now, of course.
“Oh,” she says. “When Shikamaru said—I didn’t think you were really—”
Neji hushes her and bows his greetings to the three Suna siblings. Temari offers him a sharp grin, Kankuro a cheery wave and a sputter of crumbs that might have been meant as a greeting.
“Hyuuga Neji,” says the Kazekage. He nods. “Tenten. It’s been a while.”
Tenten’s senbon has slipped from her teeth. It dangles vacantly in the corner of her lip.
“Come sit down!” Lee cries, pushing his chair back to make room for them. There are always more seats to be had around the Akimichi table, but instead of asking for another chair, Lee scoots over and nudges Gaara back to share his. “You don’t want to miss dessert. It’s all so tasty!”
“I see that.” Tenten eyes the heap of compost scrap on the Kazekage’s plate.
Neji’s lips are a thin white line. He walks stiffly to his seat on the other side of Lee and Gaara’s now-joint place setting, and perches himself in it with the precision of someone who does not want to be there. “Tenten,” he says. “Don’t make me be the only one doing this.”
“It’s weirder in person,” she mutters to herself.
“I don’t mean to make either of you uncomfortable,” says Gaara. He stands, and it’s not much effort for his narrow slip of a body to sidle out from between the chairs to stand behind Lee’s.
Lee shoots sharp looks in either teammate’s direction. “We talked about this!”
“You talked,” says Neji. “Quite a lot, as I recall.”
Lee makes a face, lips folded in, cheeks puffed out, like he wants to say something and it’s taking all the effort in his body not to shout it. A vein’s throbbing at his temple like Gai’s when he opens the First Gate.
“Be gentle with them,” Gai cuts in abruptly. “The blossom of the springtime of young love is fragile and easily crushed!”
Gaara’s head whips to look at him, startled. There’s a clatter as Temari drops her chopsticks.
“So, does that mean this is official?” Ino’s eyes swallow the whole scene with relish. She’s practically licking her chops. “I was right?”
“Ino …” Shikamaru groans.
“I told you, Shikamaru—” Temari’s snap is as vicious as a bone breaking. “—I told you, if she was gonna run her big mouth—”
“Temari—” says the Kazekage warningly.
“Who’re you calling big mouth, shrew-face?”
“May we be excused, please?” Lee blurts, rocketing to his feet with a clatter of cutlery.
Before he’s given permission, he’s grabbed the Kazekage by the hand and dragged him out the door.
Chouza almost thinks to send after them, as the heavy wood slams behind them and the dining room dissolves once more into pandemonium. But then Hamai walks back in, drapes her arms over his shoulders and rests her chin on his head. She’s warm from the stove’s heat and smells like steamed buns. He leans back so she can kiss his forehead. He’d make space for her on his chair if only it were possible, but this closeness is almost as good.
“Do you ever miss being young?” he asks her, passing her a peach from the basket in front of him. They’re her favorites, always have been.
She looks out over the table: the bickering of Ino and Temari, the grumbling of Shikamaru, Chouji’s attempts at distracting them back to the food, Neji and Tenten’s pitched debate, Gai’s flowery poetry and effusive gestures sending chopsticks to the floor, Akino retrieving them, even Genma’s indifferent chewing.
She takes a bite from the fruit big enough to suck the pit out and drops it on his plate. Her head cocks, like she’s listening to something through the dining room door. One tidily groomed eyebrow arches up.
“Sometimes,” she says, “but not right now.”
Chouza doesn’t ask her what it is she’s heard. Gai is right, after all. The passions of a man’s heart are his own affair.