Work Text:
Shit, shit, shit!
Gaara backed his red sports car out of the garage, shifted gears, and with only a cursory glance at the road, peeled out. Anyone unlucky enough to be travelling the private road that led to his home deserved to get hit. Smoke wafted from the wheel wells of the vehicle as it came to a screeching slowdown at the end of the road, only to make a screeching, rubber-burning right turn onto the main road.
Barely thirty minutes before, Gaara was stepping out of the shower, still dripping-wet and clutching a towel around his waist with a fist. A dinging noise from his phone alerted him of an incoming text message. He strode into his bedroom to retrieve the device from the nightstand. With his free hand he unlocked the phone and opened the texting app to find a text from his older brother.
Guess what? The baby's coming. Get your ass to the hospital
Gaara responded without hesitation, his thumb moving deftly across the on-screen keyboard:
On my way
An excited Gaara sprang into action then, putting blue jeans and a long-sleeved green tee shirt on his lean frame. His wristwatch, gold necklace and leather driving mocs completed the outfit. He grabbed his wallet, jamming it into a back pocket before exiting his bedroom.
Now he was zipping down the road in his Ferrari and daring the traffic signals to stop him. The private hospital where his sister was having her baby wasn’t exactly across the street. He was glad morning rush hour was over.
Gaara was all but flying through an intersection while trying to understand the GPS in his car when he saw the flashing lights.
Fuck.
His first instinct was to put his foot down on the accelerator. There was no way in hell anything under the hood of the Ford Fusion behind him would be able to keep up, and he had more than enough bucks to pay his way out of the consequences. But Gaara resisted the instinct, opting to pull over instead. His sister wouldn’t approve, and he did not care to be on the business end of the resulting rant. Maybe the cop was one he knew, he reasoned to himself; he’d had enough run-ins with them to know most of them.
Sighing deeply, Gaara shut off the engine. The Fusion parked behind him with the flashing lights on. He busied himself fishing his driver’s license out of the wallet in his back pocket. When he looked up again, he did a double-take into the rear-view mirror.
The approaching policeman was definitely not one he’d met before.
Gaara lowered the driver side window and waited, looking straight ahead.
The officer walked up to the window and bent forward. “May I see your license and registration?” he asked in an authoritative tone.
At the sound of the voice Gaara turned his head, only to meet eyes so blue he nearly gasped.
The two men watched each other for a long moment before the officer repeated himself. “License and registration”, he emphasized.
Gaara handed the license in his hand through the window to the officer without looking away. “Registration?” the officer repeated.
God dammit. Gaara broke eye contact with surprising reluctance to rifle through his car’s console for the oft-requested registration. What was he doing? He did NOT have time to be making eyes at some cop!
He turned back and handed the registration through the window to the officer, who inspected it carefully.
Gaara took a moment to examine the man, who was now standing upright comparing the driver’s licence to the registration document. N. Uzumaki, his name tag read. He was lean and fit, typical for the local law enforcement. But that’s where it ended. None of them had eyes that blue, or lashes that long and blond, or -- or a set of matching scars on each cheek that looked like whiskers.
It just figured that Gaara would meet a fox -- complete with facial accoutrements -- on the way to seeing his brand-new niece or nephew.
“Do you know why I pulled you over?” Officer Uzumaki asked.
In typical fashion, Gaara shook his head.
“I clocked your vehicle exceeding the speed limit by over fifteen miles as you approached the intersection.”
“I’m sorry, officer”, Gaara offered. “I have a family emergency.” It was the truth.
“Well, that may be”, the officer responded, “but I’m going to have to give you a citation. Just wait here.”
“Officer, wait”, Gaara entreated as the cop turned away. “If we could skip this part, I’d really consider it a favor.” Gaara couldn’t think of anything else to add, so he asked, “what do you say?”
The blond officer turned back and leaned down, locking eyes with Gaara once more. “Mr. Sabaku”, he responded, “does this usually work for you?”
Damn those eyes of his. “Not usually, no”, he confessed.
“Then what is it about me that makes you think this time will be any different?”
Gaara had no answer for the officer’s oddly-phrased question. He didn’t know the guy from Adam. Gaara was just trying to get to the hospital, to get to his family. Unless… Gaara was being flirted with . Shit. The last time a cop flirted with Gaara, things went bad very quickly. Gaara didn’t need that drama. Not now.
He opted for calculated risk. “You seem like an understanding person.”
Officer Uzumaki stared silently at Gaara, the shifting of his blue eyes indicating a silent assessment of the redhead. Their eyes met once more before a bright smile split the blond’s face. “Well you’re in luck”, he declared. “I am an understanding person.” Officer Uzumaki stood up then. “Go see to your family. But watch your speed. You don’t need another family emergency today.” The officer handed Gaara’s documents back through the window.
Gaara couldn’t believe his luck. “Thank you”, he said as he accepted the documents and stowed them in the console, missing the officer’s nod of acknowledgment. The blond stepped away from the vehicle then, tapping it twice on the hood. Gaara took his cue, started the engine and drove off.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Gaara was inside the hospital half an hour later. A pretty nurse directed him to a private family waiting room, where he encountered his brother and his sister’s father-in-law.
“How’s she doing?” Gaara asked as he entered the room. He sat down on one of the plush couches as the door closed behind him.
“Grouchy”, his brother Kankurou answered without looking up from his phone. “It’s been two hours and she’s already referring to it as ‘the beast’.”
“She’ll call it worse before it grows up and gets a job”, Shikaku Nara supplied in his raspy voice.
Gaara stole a glance at his brother-in-law’s father, who sat with his long legs crossed and reading an actual newspaper. Gaara thought the man, who was about to become a grandfather, looked a little weird without a smoking cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. “Shikamaru in there with her?” he asked.
“Not right now”, Shikaku answered. “Yoshino’s in there with her and the doctor.”
“Say, what took you so long? You come here by horse and buggy?” Kankurou asked.
Gaara sighed and nestled further into the comfortable couch. “The GPS in my Ferrari is hard to understand sometimes. Plus there was this cop.”
“Again?” Kankurou asked.
“What do you mean, ‘again’? Red sports cars are cop magnets.”
“Why didn’t you drive the black one?”
“The key to the red one was closer.” Gaara reached for a magazine with images of sports cars on the cover. “How long have you been here?” he asked, flipping the magazine open.
“About twenty minutes.”
Just then the door to the room opened and Shikamaru entered, walked over to the couch and sat down next to his father. “Hey guys”, he greeted in a weary voice.
“Shouldn’t you be in the other room with my sister?” Kankurou asked, his eyes trained on his sister’s husband.
Shikamaru scowled at the older of his brothers-in-law. “You go in there. That room is an estrogen death trap. Two women trying to comfort a third one in labor while wishing hell on me. I’m taking a break.”
“I warned you”, Shikaku mumbled.
“You signed up for this”, Kankurou reminded him.
“How far along is she?” Gaara asked.
“Four centimeters.”
Kankurou sighed. “Our mom stalled out at five with Gaara. They ended up having to do an emergency C-section. We could be here a while.”
“Tell us something we don’t know.” Shikamaru lowered his head, pinching the bridge of his nose. “I need a smoke.”
“Not if you enjoy having balls”, Kankurou sing-songed.
“Son, if any of those women catch a whiff of cigarette smoke on anyone in this room, Dr. Terumi will castrate all of us. You want that on your conscience?” Shikamaru’s father asked.
“I was just saying, geez” , Shikamaru announced, looking around the room. “You guys are almost as bad as they are.”
Shikaku made a noise of contention. “Nothing and no one’s as bad as that gaggle in labor and delivery.”
“That's for sure”, Kankurou finished.
Shikamaru sighed, then reached for his phone. Shikaku turned the page of his newspaper. Gaara still clutched the magazine, not actually reading it. He’d been observing the interaction between the men in the room. It seemed to Gaara that everyone was anxious in their own way about the baby. Temari, the eldest of the wealthy Sabaku children, was about to become the first of them to start a family of her own. Gaara didn’t know what to make of Shikamaru’s seeming tolerance of impending fatherhood, only that it had been consistent since they’d all learned of Temari’s pregnancy. Ditto for Kankurou, who seemed focused on how everyone’s lives would be burdened; Temari’s new role as mother meant that certain family obligations would need to fall on him, a fact that he’d lamented more than once over the months. Grandpa-to-be Shikaku seemed more the long-suffering husband of an overzealous grandma-to-be than anything, and could also often be heard counseling his son during Shikamaru’s bouts of rebellion. But despite it all, Shikamaru and his father adjusted their smoking habits, and even built and furnished playrooms, complete with storage, in both Shikamaru’s and Shikaku’s houses for the little one. Kankurou, under Temari’s tutelage, had taken up the mantle regarding legal and historical family customs. And Gaara himself was restoring a vintage sports car for the child to drive when the time came.
Gaara was especially excited about becoming an uncle. His family didn’t know it, but despite a less-than-nurturing upbringing, he dreamt of having a family of his own. Being an uncle meant having an opportunity to learn to nurture something that wasn’t a car or a computer program -- things that had earned him accolades in his life. And Gaara was eager to learn. He hoped to one day find a partner who felt the way he did about having a family, and imagined holding their child in his arms while nestled in the embrace of someone he loved, who loved them both.
Unforgettable blue eyes and whisker-like scars invaded Gaara’s memory, causing him to smile. Though he rarely indulged himself that way, Gaara imagined the cop nestled with him on his couch as he watched their child sleep in the crook of his arm.
“Shikamaru! Get in here!”
The intercom clicked on and belted out the directive, starting everyone in the room. Shikamaru sprang into action, setting his smartphone on the coffee table. “Game time”, he exclaimed as he left the room.
Gaara shared a look with his older brother, who smiled. “Ready to become an uncle, eh?” Kankurou asked.
Without a word, Gaara returned to flipping the pages of the magazine. Kankurou probably thought he’d been smiling about their sister. He was content to leave it at that.
~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
Six hours, twenty-two minutes, and one non-alcoholic, tobacco-free take-out lunch later, Mr. and Mrs. Shikamaru Nara announced the birth of their son, a boisterous baby they called Shikadai.
When it was time for visitors, Shikaku, Kankurou and Gaara entered the room to find Yoshino holding the child and babbling nonsense to it while Temari watched from the bed, smiling lazily.
The doctor was quietly working at a desk in one corner of the room. Shikamaru was slumped in a chair in another, darker corner of the room, looking defeated.
As a smirking Shikaku made his way toward his son, Kankurou and Gaara both approached the bed. “Hey, sis, how ya feelin’?”
“Not that great, actually”, Temari answered. “Turns out there’s a reason doctors recommend cesarean if a woman’s mother had a history of difficult deliveries.”
“You’ll be okay, though, right?” Gaara asked.
His sister nodded. “You bet your ass I’ll be okay. I’m not letting anything take me away from that little guy.”
Everyone watched as Yoshino walked to the corner and handed the baby to her husband, who then introduced himself. It went that way until everyone in the room had properly introduced themselves to little Shikadai.
After Gaara’s introduction, the doctor ushered everyone out of the room so that Temari and Shikadai could get their rest.
After assuring his brother and brother-in-law he would return the next day, a tired Gaara left. He walked the short distance from the door of the hospital to his car to find someone leaning on the driver’s side.
Gaara stopped in his tracks, staring silently.
“Mr. Sabaku”, Officer Uzumaki greeted as he stood and faced the car’s owner. He wore blue jeans and an orange t-shirt, and no hat, revealing a glowing head of bright blond hair.
Gaara asked the obvious question. “What are you doing here?”
“Well”, the officer began, “you told me you were having a family emergency. I came to offer my support.”
Gaara couldn’t decide if it were more appropriate to be offended or flattered. One the one hand, he’d been stalked by the police. On the other hand, it was by the fox with those unforgettable eyes.
“That’s kind of you, really, but everyone’s okay.” Without considering it first, Gaara added, “You’ve already done a favor for me.”
Officer Uzumaki smiled. “There’s plenty more where that came from, if you ask me nicely.” He stepped forward, closer to where Gaara stood. “The way you did”, he added.
Gaara wasn’t sure what to say. The officer was certainly being forward. “I’m an uncle now”, was what came out.
“That’s great! Congratulations!” the officer responded. “It must be exciting. Wow! Congratulations!”
Gaara grinned at the blond’s babbling. It was cute. But he was still blocking the door to the car. “Listen, I uh, need to leave, so…”
“Oh!” the officer stepped aside and made a sweeping gesture with his hand indicating that Gaara was free to pass. Gaara pressed the fob in his hand to unlock the door.
He walked past the blond and opened the door, then turned. “Officer--”
“Naruto. It’s Naruto”, the officer corrected.
“Naruto”, Gaara repeated. The officer grinned. “I’m headed to Gelel to get something to eat, in case you were planning to follow me again.”
Naruto’s grin turned into a bashful smile. “I could join you in Gelel. I’d love to hear about the new addition to your family. I mean, if that’s okay.”
Gaara slid into the driver’s seat, closed the door, started the ignition, and lowered the driver’s side window. “Try to keep up”, Gaara advised through the window.
“I’ll do my best”, Naruto promised as the car pulled out of the parking space.
Gaara viewed the car behind him in the rear-view mirror, and grinned. First a new nephew, and now a first date. This was turning out to be a very special day.