So this is the epilogue... The final chapter of this story!
Chapter 4 and 21 were editted. It's the chapter where Gaara and Temari are stuck in that cave waiting for Kankuro to return. I make Gaara less nice as the OOC had been pointed out and, re-reading it, I really noticed how bad it was. And the Yuudai with Gaara scene, plus the Kazekage's nightmare, have been slightly altered to that everyhting was clearer, including Yuudai's intentions.

I had to re-write some of the scenes in this chapter a few times before being satisfied enough to post it. Sorry for lateness, crazy school year so far. Homework, presentations, starting to think about my SATs that I will start taking next year and stuff (OMG so much vocab). I already picked my subjects and all... I would love to go to the States to study one day. Or to the UK. Don't really want to go back to France. WOAH I still have 2 and half years before graduating, I shouldn't be freaking out now.

To the story! Enjoy!

For a few days, the three siblings were met with harsh, accusative glares whenever they traveled to their usual training spot. Though Gaara was more than used to this, it shocked Temari and Kankuro to realize how terrible it felt to be so unwanted. They had always believed that it would be easy to deal with hate, but it was harder than they had thought. To think that their little brother had to go through this everyday of his life... They started to understand how he lost his sanity.

Thanks to all of their shinobi training, however, they managed to haughtily ignore all of the glares and make it to their training sessions without showing any emotion. To avoid any possible violence on behalf of a furious villager, Baki refused to have his students leave his sight if they were outside the walls of their house. He knew that they could defend themselves, though he wasn't so sure if villagers could handle Gaara's anger. Baki believed in his students, but he didn't want to put anyone's life at risk. The situation was bad enough as it was.
The four shinobi picked up their training where it had left off. Before they got shipwrecked. Before their father had tried to kill all three of them.

Baki was impressed at their drastically improved teamwork. They used to be a fractured team, with members who didn't trust each other and who resented being stuck together. Now, they were probably one of the most powerful squads in Suna.
The siblings weren't surprised when Baki insisted on them perfecting their taijutsu abilities. He was especially tough on Gaara. He hard heard how helpless the jinchuriki could be during storms and, though Suna had an infinitesimal number of rainfalls every year, he wanted the boy to be prepared in case an assassin planned on taking advantage of his possible vulnerable, sandless state. The siblings had gotten much stronger during their absence, but they still had exploitable weaknesses.

"Sunagakure shinobi have to excel in everything! Your ninjutsu is excellent but your genjutsu and taijutsu is only good. Of course, everything can always be improved." said the man, his usual stern look plastered to his face. "The next chuunin exams are in half a year and I want to ask the Kazekage if I could sign you three up for it. So you better be ready!"

Really, Baki just wanted to keep the trio as far away from their father as possible without being too obvious about it. He had started insisting on having his students spend as much time away from the Kazekage tower as possible.
Since they couldn't exactly loiter around the streets of Suna when they weren't in the training grounds or on missions, Baki had started insisting that the siblings stayed in his apartment. He would take that time to debrief missions and teach them battle tactics, using that as an excuse whenever the Kazekage or other jonins would give him a suspicious look.
Once he started running out of reasons to keep the trio out of their house until late at night, Reina had immediately came to Baki's rescue and offered to have the squad stay over at her house quite often, to dine together or to share stories, much to Yuudai's dismay. Though he might have more-or-less trusted the jinchuuriki to not turn on them, it still made him nervous to have Gaara in such close proximity to his sister and himself. Of course, it was much safer to be with him than to be against him. That was why he had decided to accept the boy as an ally instead of an enemy in the first place.
Sometimes, Atsushi and Toshio would join them, since they had lost their closest family members in the shipwreck and sometimes just couldn't handle the lonely nights of solo dinners. Those meals were usually silent and awkward, until Atsushi and Reina started up a conversation and everything would build up from there.

Gaara, who had initially been nervous and a little irritated to be forced to eat in front of people he didn't know that well (very few people had actually seen him do anything vaguely human), started to relax and the tension started to seep out of his shoulders. He eventually learned to listen to the conversations around him, learning more about others than he ever had in his twelve years of life. It was strangely fascinating and a little thrilling for him to be allowed to be there. Sure, he didn't participate but he wasn't excluded either.
And that felt good.

Every time the Kazekage walked through his house, he found it eerily empty. A few times, he thought that maybe he was crazy, that his children had never came back and that he had only imagined their return. Maybe it had all been another one of his heart-wrenching dreams, his conscience torturing him.
However, every night when he left his office, he would walk past his children's rooms and find their doors locked shut, indicating that they were indeed there, permanently shutting him out of their world.
Obviously. The way that he had treated them during their whole lives despicable. He had initially tried to be a Kazekage and a single father at the same time, but he had quickly given up on that impossible dream when Suna's economy continued to crumble, constantly forcing him into long, frustrating meetings with the Wind Lords and the council. And of course, the older Gaara got, the more vicious he had become towards the boy. The way that he had treated him was disgusting and unforgivable. The redhead could never forgive him. He wouldn't forgive him, if he had been in the boy's place.

Though Kazekage doubted his sanity, the man definitely wasn't stupid. His suspicion grew every time Baki insisted on having his students study war formations and such in his own place. That suspicion turned into utter horror when they started spending more time with the dreaded duo. Reina and Yuudai.
If he had been unsure in the beginning, this left no more place for doubt. Baki, Temari, Kankuro and Gaara...
They knew. They knew everything about the shipwreck. Every tiny, dirty detail of his horrible plan to murder them. He couldn't confirm it, but he felt that he was probably correct.
Reina had been right. He should have eliminated them the second they found out that their brother had been killed, to avoid vengeance. They had never been extremely loyal to him, except for eldest, Jiro. That man was a devoted little pawn of the Kazekage's. The other two had always been a problem. However, they were loyal to family and to the village's well-being, and the Kazekage had always believed that to be good enough. Now, he could see his mistake.
They had betrayed him, revealing his secret to Baki, his children and to other people that he didn't know about. Now he found himself searching his once faithful soldier's eyes with paranoia, searching for people who knew. The people who could take him down.

"Baki." nodded Reina, slipping onto the chair opposite the man.
"Reina." acknowledged the jonin.
Baki called a waiter so that they could order drinks and lunch. Once the man left, they could converse to pass time.
"I'm still paranoid about this." admitted Baki, looking over his shoulder and glancing at all the faces in the restaurant, trying to see if any of them were glaring at him.

The woman laughed, but then abruptly stopped and gave the man a serious look.
"You actually have a point. If he catches us, you'll be dead and I will have to suffer countless lectures." she pointed out.
"We could always..." Baki thought for a second. "... say that this was only a business lunch?"
Reina sent the man a crooked smirk.
"You sure have a strange definition of business, Baki-san."
"You know what I mean." huffed Baki with a stern look on his face.

Reina smiled.
"Oh... He's here."
Baki jolted in his seat.
"Who? Yuudai-san?" gasped the jonin, frantically looking around the room.
The woman in front of him started chuckling.
"The waiter."

Baki sighed in relief.
"Oh." he cleared his throat. "Let's eat then."
"Baki. Relax." smiled Reina. "He's not going to pop out of nowhere and cut your head off. Not in public, anyways."
"Good point." Baki let a smile slip onto his face as well.

"Do your students know?" she asked, stabbing a piece of meat with her chopstick before placing it in her mouth.
"Oh. I presume so. I told them that this was about mission reports but Kankuro started doing this... strange move with his eyebrows and sent me this strange smile. Temari kept smirking like a fox and Gaara rolled his eyes when he thought I wasn't looking." chuckled Baki.
"They are more perceptible than my brother... Oh. That doesn't make sense. Well, I think that Yuudai probably knows. He just doesn't want to face it."

This made the man sitting in front of her tense up again, before he sighed.
"Can we just... tell Yuudai about our relationship? I mean... you're his older sister, right? He should respect your decision. Maybe he might even be happy for us? He seems like a nice guy, he should be completely fine with his sister dating someone." pushed Baki.
To his surprise, Reina started laughing. She patted him on the arm.
"Very cute, Baki."

"The Kazekage still pretends that he doesn't notice us..." sighed Temari.
"Who cares?" growled Gaara, anger bubbling up in him whenever someone mentioned the man who tried to kill them.
"Well... It's just..." Temari gulp and lanced her fingers together, not knowing how to explain what she felt.
"He might be a jackass but... He's still the man who gave us life. We're his children. What he did was sick and wrong. It hurts to think that we're really that meaningless to him." finished Kankuro for her.

He took the silence as agreement, until Gaara spoke up to his complete shock.
"Maybe... he was really just trying to protect the village." he said blankly, his eyes scanning across the boring blank wall at the other end of the living room.
"What? Gaara? No matter why he did it, he couldn't possibly excuse trying to kill his own children!" snapped Temari.
"He had no good excuse to assassinate you two." agreed Gaara. "But I am a danger. Don't you remember that time on the island, when I lost control and nearly killed you two?"
"Y-Yes but that was Shukaku! It wasn't your fault! We upset you, and that made you lose control-..." Kankuro was cut off by his brother.
"Stop. I have accepted that I was responsible for losing control. I will try to make sure that it never happens again, especially not around you two. But, what if, back then, you two couldn't stop me? What would you have done if I were ready to kill one of you? Would you have eliminated me for the other person's safety?"

Both his siblings thought about it, knowing that their brother probably had had this inner dilemma for quite some time.
"I don't know." answered Temari honestly, staring up at the ceiling of the room. Kankuro shrugged, indicating that he didn't have an answer for now either.
"Maybe that's what the Kakzekage felt like. He had to chose between the village and I. And he chose the village. Of course he did. Why would he chose me?" whispered Gaara, glaring out the window at nothing. "Why would anyone chose me?"

"Please don't tell me that you're the only one of us who actually forgives that man?" growled Kankuro, his eyes narrowing.
"No. I can't forgive it. But... I can understand it." replied the redhead. "I... I let the demon consume me."

"Don't be so hard on yourself. What you did back then really was horrible, but it initially wasn't your fault. You became that way because people treated you badly. And now, you've risen out of your pit of darkness to become the guy you are today. You're a pretty amazing person, little brother." grinned Kankuro, pride swelling in both his and Temari's chest they realized the truth of the puppet-nin's words.

Gaara snapped his eyes towards his brother and gave him a long look.

He had never heard someone say such things to him before. He was touched.
"Thank you." he breathed.

Their moment was interrupted when their father walked into the room. The room was filled with poisonous silence as a million unspoken words were thrown at the man.
The Kazekage briefly scanned his eyes over the forms of his children then left as quickly as he could, leaving the trio confused but satisfied.

When they were together, they were no longer vulnerable. Now that they were united, nobody could ever bring them down.
That was how much the island had changed them. That was what they could achieved it they worked together. Nobody could ever take that away from them.
They were stuck together forever, no matter how annoying, frustrating or damaged they were.
That's what it means to be family.

*Sniffles* End.

First long multi-chaptered fic completed! Obviously, the ending is quite open because of the fact that there is going to be a sequel... Right now!
I posted the new story under the name And Now We're Stuck Together. It focuses mainly of the Kazekage and Gaara... That's all I'm gonna say. If you're interested, go and read it! If not, a million kisses to you and thanks for reading ANISHWY! It was a long, bumpy ride but it was a fun one!
I could never have done it without all you guys and your support (ahem threats).
Plus, BakiRei happens. Woohoo, Baki is no longer a forever-alone-single-creep. Yuudai, Reina, Toshio and Atsushi will be in the sequel, though they won't appear as much.
*Hugs* I hope you enjoyed this story! See you everyone! Thanks to all my reviewers and faves and followers and readers!
Love, cookies with sand (wut?),
XOXO ~~~ HimekoUchia (*cries* I'm gonna miss writing this)