Work Text:
I
“Tss.” Lee shook his hand as he pulled it away from the scroll.
“What’s wrong?” Gaara looked up from his desk, where he’d been stamping mission reports after Lee had filled them out.
“Nothing!” Lee chirped. “Just a papercut!”
Before he could return to his work, a circlet of sand had surrounded his wrist and dragged him halfway across the span of the desk.
“Gaara-kun, wh—?”
Gaara’s hand had already replaced the sand grains that were slipping back into his gourd, his grip fierce as he pulled Lee’s finger closer for inspection.
“It’s not bleeding,” Gaara said.
“Of course not! It’s just a papercut!”
Lee had barely gotten the sentence out when Gaara sucked the finger into his mouth.
“Wha—” Lee couldn’t manage to finish the thought. His mouth gaped dumbly as Gaara thoroughly licked his fingertip, then withdrew it and gave him a perfunctory pat on the back of the hand.
Lee’s cheeks burned. Even after Gaara had released him, he remained dangling over the desk’s surface.
“Saliva has antiseptic properties,” Gaara said mildly, lifting his stamp once more.
Lee fell back into his seat with a thud. “Uhm. Thank you?”
II
The pot of curry simmered merrily on the stovetop, filling Lee’s small kitchenette with the smell of toasted spices and thick, filling roux. The large rice cooker was letting off a steady stream of steam beside it, warming the room and fogging up the lone window that let in the evening sunset’s last light.
“You wouldn’t believe the size of the snake we saw, Gaara-kun!” Lee babbled, turning intermittently to where Gaara was sitting at the table behind him, his chin propped in his hands as he watched Lee cook.
“Was it venomous?”
The question was little more than indulgence, Lee knew, but he was happy to be indulged. He was happy to spend any time with Gaara at all—they saw each other so rarely, and no amount of time ever seemed like enough to spend with his dear friend.
“I didn’t stick around to find out!” Lee cried, brandishing his spoon. “I grabbed Neji under one arm and Tenten under the other, and we all jumped away!”
“I can’t imagine either of them were very happy with that,” said Gaara, a twitch of amusement at the corner of his lips. Under the table, his legs began to swing where his feet didn’t quite touch the floor.
Lee ducked his head. “Well, no. They were both rather cross with me. But at least we didn’t get eaten!”
The quirk of Gaara’s lips right now could very nearly be called a grin—or at least as close as Gaara ever came to one. “Lucky for me,” he murmured.
“Lucky for all of us, or I wouldn’t be able to cook you this splendid—!” Something popped and splashed on the burner behind Lee. He spun to find his pot bubbling over. “Oh no!”
Without thinking at all, he grabbed the pot’s handles with both hands and hoisted it onto an extinguished burner, boiling curry sloshing over the sides and onto his hands and wrists.
“Ouch!”
“Lee!” Gaara’s chair skidded across the floor with a screech and toppled with a clatter.
Lee had already rushed to the sink and begun shedding his bandages, muttering a string of very impolite words that in any other circumstances he would be embarrassed to repeat in front of his friend. Gaara practically climbed over his shoulder to cut the cold water on, grabbing Lee’s elbows to shove his hands under the stream.
“You have to be more careful,” he chided. “Why didn’t you use a potholder?”
“I panicked!” Lee said, as Gaara turned his scalded hands to and fro under the cold water. “I didn’t want to burn our special dinner.”
Looking over his shoulder, he could see Gaara’s face had furrowed into an expression of dark concentration. In the corner of his eye, the sand loomed up and cut all the burners off, then whisked away the burnt bits of curry that had fallen close to the flame and were beginning to smoke.
“I’d rather have no dinner at all than you getting hurt,” Gaara muttered. “You should know that.”
He rose up slightly behind Lee, and his chin came to rest on Lee’s shoulder. It had to be the sand hoisting him up, because Gaara would never have been able to manage that height even on tiptoes.
“It’s fortunate Konoha isn’t under water restrictions,” he said, his arms clenching more tightly around Lee’s. “Absent a medi-nin, we’ll need to do this for quite a while.”
“The rice cooker is about to go off—” Lee began to protest.
“I’ll handle it,” Gaara cut him off. “You need to stay here or the burns will worsen.”
“I really don’t think they’re that serious.”
“I won’t risk it. Not with you.”
Lee had plenty of time to ask what Gaara meant by that as they stood with Gaara wrapped around him, the sun dipping below the horizon moving the shadows around them. But even after Gaara deemed his burns sufficiently cooled and they disentangled from one another, Lee couldn’t bring himself to speak a word.
III
“Gaara-kun? Are you all right?”
“Hm?” Gaara grunted, jerking up from where he’d been slumped behind his desk. The bags under his eyes were deeper and darker than usual, his face pale and his hair sticking to his forehead.
Lee rushed across the office to his side, unwrapping his bandages and pressing the back of his bare hand to Gaara’s forehead before he could think better of it.
His skin was positively clammy, reflecting a sheen of cool sweat. But beneath that, his blood blazed hot.
“You’re burning up.”
“It’s summer,” said Gaara, but his words were badly slurred. How had anyone even let him come to the office in this state?
Of course, the opposite side of that question was: who could have stopped him from coming to the office in this state?
“You have a fever,” Lee said insistently, reaching for the clip on his vest that carried his canteen whenever he was in Suna. If he was going to wear full sleeves and legwarmers in the middle of the desert, he needed to at least be practical about hydration. “Here, drink this.”
Gaara didn’t resist when Lee pressed the cool metal to his lips, which was sign enough that he was feeling truly miserable. He opened his mouth and let Lee guide the water into it, though some splashed from the corners onto the papers that Lee could now see were covered in an unreadable, unintelligible scrawl. The fact that he didn’t protest the waste made Lee even more concerned.
“I’m taking you home,” Lee said, pushing the sweating hair back from Gaara’s forehead and undoing the buttons of his jacket at the collar. Gaara’s pale throat was studded with goosebumps. His Adam’s apple jogged unevenly. “You’re in no condition to work.”
“I can’t,” Gaara said weakly. “The trade declarations need to be signed today.”
“Have Kankuro do it.” Lee wrapped Gaara’s arm around his shoulder before he stood, and Gaara went limply along with him. “I doubt you can even hold your seal straight right now.”
It was times like these that Lee wished he had the power to create clones, at the very least so he could send one running for a medic and another to alert Gaara’s family. As it was, the best he could do was holler, “Shijima-san!”
She came skidding into the room at a hare’s pace, the door slamming open in her wake.
“Oh by the starry sands,” she swore under her breath. “I told him to go home! No one should be working when they’re sick like this.”
Gaara’s head lolled on Lee’s shoulder, damp hair brushing Lee’s throat. His breath had the stale stink of illness on it as he exhaled.
“I don’t get sick,” he groaned.
“Well, you certainly did this time,” Shijima huffed, cocking her hip and crossing her arms.
“I trust that you can arrange to have a medi-nin sent to his residence?” Lee asked. “Who treats him usually?”
“I don’t get sick,” Gaara repeated, muffled now by the bit of Lee’s flak vest he’d buried his face in. “Or injured.”
“Uhm, whoever usually treats Kankuro-kun, then?”
Shijima made a noise halfway between a scoff and a cackle. “You don’t want the bustiest medic. You want the most competent one. I’ll send Temari-san’s physician.”
“Thank you.” Gaara had begun to slump downwards, and Lee hefted him with a little oof, being careful not to jostle him too much. “And informing Kankuro-kun? And the Council, and anyone else who needs to know, I suppose … ?”
“No one needs to know,” Gaara mumbled. “I’ll work from home.”
“You certainly will not!” Lee retorted hotly.
Shijima flapped her hand. “Don’t worry about the logistics. Just get him home—quickly and safely—and into bed. I’ll handle the rest.”
“Thank you, Shijima-san!” Lee cried, and, sweeping Gaara into a bridal carry, leapt from the highest window in the Kazekage Office Tower and onto an adjoining roof.
He had never moved so quickly without opening a Gate before, and he only refrained from doing that because he didn’t want the excess heat to make Gaara’s fever worse. He was certain that he knocked off no small amount of roof insulation in his hasty scramble, and vowed to himself that he would come back and personally repair each one by the time the week was out.
Assuming Gaara didn’t need his assistance, of course. Although, he could likely do both if he worked overtime! Unless Gaara needed round-the-clock care, in which case of course Lee would be at his beck and call every moment of every day until he was feeling better, and—
The roof of the Kazekage Manor loomed in front of him quicker than he expected. Lee slammed to a halt so close to the wards that the blue vibration of activated chakra hazed a hairsbreadth from his toes.
“Gaara-kun?” he murmured. With no free hands, all he could do was shift Gaara clumsily in his arms and try to nudge his face with his nose. “I need you to deactivate the wards.”
Gaara squinted one eye hazily open. “Um.” He reached out, and his hand flopped at the wrist. In the gourd at his waist, the sand gave a disgruntled gurgle.
Oh no. Even if Lee had permissions to deactivate the wards, he had no chakra control with which to do so. And with Gaara in this state, it was just as likely he’d get them both killed as it was that he’d be completely ineffective in doing anything.
“Is the Kazekage in danger, sir?” said a voice from behind Lee’s shoulder.
An ANBU materialized from the shadows surrounding the compound and stepped forward.
“He’s running a fever, and I don’t think he can control his chakra very well. We need to get inside!” Lee blurted. “Shijima-san already called him a doctor, but he needs to cool off as soon as possible!”
The ANBU’s expression was unreadable inside their veil, but their voice was wary when they spoke: “The Kazekage? A fever?”
“It’s me, Fifteen,” Gaara drawled. He followed with some statement in Sunan that Lee couldn’t have remembered if he tried. Not that he was very focused on what Gaara was saying in the moment; his main priority was getting him out of the hot sun and somewhere he could lie comfortably until medical assistance arrived.
The ANBU—Fifteen—straightened. “Yes, sir!” they said, before flicking their hands into a series of forms.
The wards around the house glowed like the purple outlines of chains. With a chime, they broke and fell down into the earth.
Lee rushed forward, calling a hasty, “Thank you, Fifteen-san!” over his shoulder.
Once inside the front door, he sprinted down the main hallway to the steps and abruptly realized he had no idea just where Gaara’s bedroom even was. The house was both massive and labyrinthine, and every passage that stretched out from the main entry looked very much the same, differing only in the pattern of the ornate rugs that ran along the floors.
“Gaara-kun?” Lee said tentatively, nosing at his face again to get his attention. “I need you to help me find your room.”
Gaara grimaced and shifted, curling against Lee’s chest. “Lee,” he rasped out.
“Yes, Gaara-kun, I’m here! Help me find your room, please.”
“Mm. I don’t feel so well. I don’t want our first time to be—”
“Gaara-kun, please, you’re talking nonsense! Just tell me where your room is.”
“Huh?”
It was no use. Gaara was delirious. Lee had no choice but to just start trying doors until he found one with a bed in it. He took the stairs two at a time and practically kicked open a linen closet, a bathroom, and an office before he finally stumbled across a bedroom.
It certainly wasn’t Gaara’s, that was for sure. It was decorated in lush purples, tapestries hanging around a four-poster bed. There were ornamental fans on three of the four falls, and the fourth sported a series of scrolls of famous kunoichi through history. But it was a flat surface, and it would have to do.
Lee leaned over the bed, endeavoring to set Gaara down gently.
Weak hands clutched for the front of his flak vest.
“Lee?” Gaara mumbled.
“Yes, yes. I’m right here. Just let me get you comfortable.”
Gaara fumbled as though he intended to bring Lee down with him. The gourd hissed at his hip. “Don’t leave me.”
“I’m not,” Lee swore, prising Gaara’s fingers away. It took so little effort that it was disconcerting. “I won’t. I promise. I’m here to help you.”
Once he finally hit the mattress, Gaara curled up like a little shrimp on his side, his face scrunched up into such a weary expression of discomfort that Lee’s heart physically panged. He was soaked in sweat; it had ringed his collar and underarms dark red.
“Let’s get your jacket off,” Lee said quietly, and didn’t wait for a reply before he began undoing the rows of gold buttons. He had to roll Gaara back and forth to fully free him from the garment, and the tan shirt he wore beneath was so saturated that it was practically see-through.
“I think this has to come off, too,” said Lee. “Please, forgive me for the indiscretion.”
It was undeniably, uncomfortably intimate to unbuckle the harness that held Gaara’s gourd. Lee set it hesitantly on the bedspread, wary of placing it too far away. With that done, he still had Gaara’s belt to contend with, and he tried to keep his hands as decorous and careful as he could as he loosened it, then undid the top button of Gaara’s pants to free his shirt’s hem.
“I am sorry for taking such liberties,” he said, endeavoring not to pay any attention to the little white line of the waistband of Gaara’s briefs that was visible with his pants partway undone. He focused solely on tugging his shirt up, gentling Gaara’s arms through its holes one at a time, and then pulling it up over his head, leaving his hair in an even worse state than before.
Lee had never seen Gaara bare-chested before. He suspected the number of people who ever had numbered in the single digits, and even fewer among the living. He was lean and rawboned, with deep hollows at his collarbones where sweat had pooled. His chest rose and fell shallowly with his breaths.
“It would probably be best to get some of this sweat off of you.” Anything to get him out of this room before he was tempted to look at something he had not been invited to look at. “Let me go get some damp cloths.”
Gaara’s hand slapped out and grabbed him by the wrist. “Wait,” said his gravelly voice, sounding halfway under. “Don’t go.”
“I’ll be right back.” Lee delicately freed his wrist and folded Gaara’s hand around itself. “I swear it.”
Fortunately Lee’s mad dash through the house’s upper hallway had revealed both a source of towels and of water. He grabbed a handful from the stood-open linen closet and then darted into the bathroom to soak them as thoroughly as he was able without diminishing the house’s water rations too severely. Though, on further thought, perhaps the Kazekage residence didn’t operate under the same water restrictions as Suna’s civilians?
It was irrelevant. He was dawdling. Steeling himself in the bathroom mirror, he drew himself up, his jumpsuit stained dark from the sopping towels in his arms.
A knock came on the door. That must have been the medic.
Heart still pounding, Lee called, “Yes, come in!”
It was only as he heard the door open that he realized he could easily have just invited an enemy into the Kazekage’s home.
Well, it was too late to fix it now. If someone came up the steps with ill intent towards Gaara, he would simply fight them off.
“Kazekage-sama?” called a woman’s voice from downstairs.
“He’s up here!” Lee replied, hastening back to the bedroom. He had, after all, promised Gaara he wouldn’t leave his side. “Fourth door on the left!”
“Lee?” Gaara cracked open one eye as Lee returned.
“I’m here,” he replied, brandishing the towels. “I brought something to help you cool down.”
“Oh.” Gaara’s eyes fluttered shut again, his face wan but inexplicably peaceful. “That’s good.”
Lee was halfway to the bed when in the hallway, someone cleared their throat. He spun, towel extended, to find a woman in a white medi-nin uniform looking at him with a derisive expression.
“Thank you, Lee-san,” she said. “I’ll take it from here.” Then she bustled him out the door and shut it perfunctorily in his face.
For a long time, Lee found himself just standing there with his arms full of dripping towels, staring at its unmoving bulk, wishing there was more he could have done.
IV
The base of the training post was covered in thick bark. While its top and middle had been stripped and worn down by generations’ of shinobi’s feet and fists, the place where the once-tree trunk entered the earth was in as natural a state as it had been the day it was felled from the surrounding forest.
Lee’s forehead was raw from where he’d fallen face-down against it, arms and legs giving out so simultaneously that no amount of effort had stopped his face striking the wood in his collapse. He tasted blood on the back of his tongue. His nose crunched when he wrinkled it—likely broken. Again.
He tried to raise an arm to prop himself up. The muscles of his shoulder twitched weakly and declined to cooperate. An effort on the opposite, weaker side of his body was even more ineffective. There was no response to his brain’s command other than the searing pain of overworked nerves tingling fire from his bicep down. Even an attempted groan wouldn’t make its way to his lips.
It was clear he’d be here for some time, at least until the punishment of the Gates worked its way from his system.
He did not know how long he lay there before the rain began to fall. It was heralded by a split second of thunder before the sky cracked wide and all its innards fell down. In an instant, Lee’s vest was soaked through, though the summer rain was too warm to offer much relief to his burning skin. At least the roll of the thunder offered a pleasant counterpoint to the slowing pound of blood in his ears. A flash of lightning briefly illuminated the area beneath his face, revealing blood stains on the pale wood.
Twitching his fingers, he found he could at least feel the rain on their bare tips. It stung where it soaked into the open wounds on his knuckles. Not much longer, then.
Then, from behind, came a sound that was both like and unlike rain, all at once. A strange, sturdy pattering.
“Who did this to you?” Gaara’s familiar rasp was a balm to Lee’s ears. Mud squelched as Gaara came to crouch beside him.
Lee could not yet turn his head. He tried to cut his eyes in Gaara’s direction and found his outline hazy, the harsh rain springing off his skin as mist. He could not turn far enough to see his face, but he made out the shadow of Gaara’s hand just before it pushed his hair behind one ear. Gaara hissed; whatever wound he’d exposed must have been a bad one.
“I’ll kill them,” Gaara muttered, in a voice so low that Lee suspected he wasn’t meant to hear it.
Lee’s lips kissed the dirt when he finally worked up the energy to speak. “Kill me, then.”
Gaara’s hand stilled on his ear, then drew back. His fingertips were red. “You did this to yourself?”
Lee couldn’t move his neck far enough to nod; all he could do was grimace his confirmation. Feeling was starting to come back to his feet. He wiggled his toes and winced when an arc of hot pain shot up his bad leg.
”Why?”
He would have had to lay there a very long time to give a full answer to that question. The why of his punishing training, his self-rules, his endless failures was the structure that scaffolded his whole life. There were notebooks on his bookshelf full of this philosophy, and even if he sat Gaara down and had him read every last one he couldn’t be sure that he’d truly understand. Gaara was an incomparable genius. Rarely had he known the sting of inadequacy, the knowledge that even enough effort to kill a man might not be enough to overcome it.
Certainly it would have been beyond him why Neji grinding Lee’s face into the dirt once more necessitated such compensatory self-directed brutality.
“To become a splendid shinobi,” Lee grated out.
Gaara sighed. “My sand is as good as useless in this rain. Will you be all right until it stops, or do you need a medic?”
“No medic.” Sakura was close to slapping him in restraints as it was. It was best not to tempt her.
“I have no skill with healing jutsu.”
Lee started to laugh but found his broken nose hurt too much to continue. “Neither do I. I’ll be fine.”
He just needed time. A little rest, but no more than necessary. Food, water. Antiseptic and a strong stomach to reset his nose in the bathroom mirror. An ice cold shower to reinvigorate his limbs.
“At least let me re-bandage your hands,” said Gaara, settling down to sit cross-legged in the muck.
Lee wanted to protest, but he had no strength to yank his hand away as Gaara pulled it into his lap and retrieved the field kit from his thigh pouch.
Gaara’s fingers were soft and uncalloused. In the rain, he wore no sand armor, and his skin was smooth and wet and warm.
They’d never touched this way, skin to skin. Lee cursed himself; he was in no state to even feel it properly, how Gaara gently untied and unwound the bandages from his better hand. He was deft with it, quick as he unwrapped each individual finger, then spiraled the bandage off Lee’s arm to rest in a dirty pile in the mud.
He kissed his teeth at the sight of the state of Lee’s knuckles.
“You haven’t been caring adequately for your injuries,” he said. “Did you do those sutures yourself?”
“Mmhmm,” was all Lee could supply.
Gaara clicked his tongue, then unfolded an antiseptic pad and set about diligently cleaning between and around each stitch.
“These need to be redone,” he told Lee. “Some of them have split.”
“I’ll take care of it at home.”
“You are not a medi-nin.”
“Any taijutsu specialist worth his salt knows how to care for a few minor field injuries.”
“In the field,” Gaara emphasized, “when there isn’t access to adequate medical resources. If we were in Suna, I would have you ordered to the clinic and—”
His grip tightened, and Lee grunted in pain.
“Forgive me.” His hand gentled. He dabbed at Lee’s wounds with even greater tenderness than before.
“There’s nothing to forgive,” Lee said. The rain was starting to lighten now, the thunder receding into the distance with the lightning in tow. “Thank you for taking care of me.”
“Of course.” The wounds sufficiently clean, Gaara padded them with gauze, then retrieved a clean roll of bandages from his pouch and began to wind them around Lee’s fingers.
He was awkward at it, clearly unpracticed, but his hands were so achingly careful that Lee nearly wanted to cry. Not from the pain, though that was still sharp and profound, but from something deeper. Something burrowed in his chest that he was scared to unearth.
“What sort of—” Gaara cut off abruptly, shaking his head as he finished tying off the wraps in Lee’s palm. “—friend would I be if I didn’t help you in this state?”
“Most of my friends are so used to seeing me like this that they don’t bother,” Lee said, a wry twist to his lips.
Gaara scoffed. “Then they aren’t your friends at all.”
“Don’t say that!”
Gaara stood and began to circle the training post, and something in Lee wanted to object even louder until he came to a stop on the other side of Lee’s body, settling back in the mud and taking Lee’s other hand.
“You’re in no condition to prevent me from saying anything.” Gaara rolled Lee’s wrist over with a low hum. “There’s more blood here.”
“That’s my weaker side,” Lee admitted.
There was a long silence where Lee could hear nothing but rain and Gaara’s unsteady breathing.
“Right. Where I—” He turned Lee’s hand palm-side up again, and his fingers were shaking this time as he probed for the bandages’ knot. “I’m so—”
“Don’t apologize again. Please.” Effortfully, Lee turned his head, biting his lip so as not to cry out when his broken nose grazed the dirt. All for the sake of being able to watch Gaara, who had ducked his head down into his shoulders, his eyes firmly shut.
His lips trembled as if words were battering against the insides of them, but he said nothing. Finally, he wrenched his eyes back open and turned his attention back to Lee’s hand. With excruciating slowness, he began to unwrap the blood-stained white cotton.
Centimeter by centimeter, the ugly silver scars of Lee’s warped skin were revealed. His gnarled knuckles, freely bleeding rivulets of watery red down hollows where necrotic muscle had been carved away. The thick pad of his palm, where multiple grafts hadn’t quite taken, and no amount of creams or stretching had been able to restore its full flexibility. The crooked jut of his wrist, which had been set but then rebroken twice more. The fish scale pattern of his forearm, the stippled marks where sand had drilled deep, the long purple scar along his ulna.
Gaara’s eyes went terribly wide. His breath shallowed.
If Lee could have pulled away, he would have. As it was, his fingers just gave a pathetic twitch in Gaara’s cupped hands.
Gaara’s thumb smoothed over his fingers, straightening and fanning them out so he could clean the worst of the blood from Lee’s skin. The rain had done little more than spread it around, and it was slow work before he could finally attend to the wounds proper.
Lee tried to keep quiet, to keep his eyes on Gaara and his expression neutral, but he couldn’t prevent another cringe when the antiseptic pad prodded the edge of a deep laceration.
“Sorry,” Gaara said instinctively, pulling it back.
“It’s fine. You’re helping me.” It was far from the worst pain Lee had ever endured. Compared to the agony slowly working its way out of the rest of his body from the rigors of the training he’d just put himself through, it was negligible.
There was just something about the sweetness with which Gaara was caring for him that made him feel like a soft-furred creature turned belly-up, all his vulnerabilities on display.
At long last, Gaara finished cleaning the wounds and began to wrap them, too. The rain had slowed to a mere drizzle, and by the time he was done, it was nothing more than the memory of mist in the air.
He tied the final knot. Then, in a motion so slow that Lee couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a figment of his rain-soaked imagination, Gaara drew Lee’s knuckles to his lips … and kissed them.
They locked eyes, neither of them daring to draw breath.
Gaara turned quickly away.
“Can you sit?” he asked gruffly.
Lee could only nod, tongue numb.
With a hand on his shoulder, Gaara helped him roll onto his back, then guided him upright. Even that minor exertion left him panting, the muscles of his abdomen cramping. He hissed between his teeth.
“Easy.” Gaara rubbed slow circles on his back. “Easy.”
Lee did his best to let himself hang limp. As the Gates’ leaky chakra seeped out of him, his muscles slowly proceeded to knit their tears back together.
“I can move now,” he said. “You can go.”
Gaara made a derisive sound. “I’m not leaving until you can walk out of here under your own power or until my sand is dry enough to carry you.”
“I can probably—” Lee lurched forward, and Gaara slammed an arm out to stop him.
”Don’t. If you overexert yourself, you’ll only delay your recovery.”
Lee gave an aggrieved sigh. “You don’t need to baby me.”
“The bare minimum of medical care isn’t babying. Besides, someone has to. Otherwise you’d kill yourself.”
There was no real argument that could be raised against that. Lee let Gaara wrap an arm around his shoulder, tilting them both backwards until he was propped half on the training post, half on Gaara’s chest.
An idle thought spun in his mind that he wished he weren’t in too much pain to enjoy it.
V
Lee had scarcely run so fast in his life. Fingers entangled, he and Gaara dashed from the battlefield, Lee’s legs propelling him forward while Gaara barely kept up on a disk of sand behind.
The retreat had not been a tactical one, just sheer desperation to evade a suicide jutsu detonated by their enemy. There’d been a whole squad of them, ronin the lot, vicious to a fault and each with a seal strapped to their chests that exploded the moment their hearts stopped beating. No two had been alike: first water, then earth, then fire, then lightning.
The last had been blades. More than Lee had seen in even Tenten’s arsenal, pursuing them from the battlefield with some sort of targeting sensor that Lee suspected was reacting to their chakra signatures.
They’d lost sight of the barrage of weapons now, but that didn’t mean they weren’t still being followed. Lee had no idea how long the effect of the jutsu lasted. The flames from their third felled opponent still hadn’t extinguished by the time they fled the battlefield.
As they crossed the great plains that bordered Grass Country, Gaara began to slow. Sand leaked like a half-open tap from the platform holding him aloft.
“Come on!” Lee tugged at him.
Gaara squeezed Lee’s fingers and steeled his gaze.
There was a hillock just ahead, little more than a jut from the flat fields of grass, but as they approached, it seemed to Lee that it might be large enough to conceal two adult men. Gaara flagging behind him, he dragged the two of them in its direction.
“There!” he called. “Just a little bit farther!”
Gaara hissed through his teeth. More sand scattered in his wake. His grip on Lee’s hand became punishing.
There was a small, rocky face on the hillside, a dark gap opening into it. Praying it wasn’t inhabited by some feral Grass Country beast, Lee hurried the two of them inside.
Tucked behind a shield of stone, he dropped Gaara’s hand and grasped his knees, panting.
The sand dissolved from around Gaara’s feet. He took a step, wobbled, and lurched forward with a groan.
For the first time, Lee took a full, assessing look at him. There was a dark stain on the front of one leg of his trousers, gleaming wet black in the shadows.
“You’re wounded,” Lee breathed.
Gaara grit his teeth and nodded. “One of the spears. It pierced the sand armor before I could harden it.”
“We have to get those off you. Let me see.” With no ceremony, Lee grabbed the rip in Gaara’s pants and tore the pantleg nearly in two, exposing his thigh.
Lee had long since come to terms with his less-than-friendly feelings for his friend. In any other circumstance, he knew he would have been scandalized if not titillated to have Gaara’s whole leg bare in front of him. As it was, his stomach rolled over in a combination of nausea and terror.
Even in the shade, the blood was arterial bright, pulsing in steady spurts from a deep gash in Gaara’s thigh. Lee was no medic, but he was aware that meant they had not much time at all before Gaara bled out entirely.
Gaara must have recognized the same, because he looked up from his leg to Lee’s face, eyes wide.
“Shit.”
At least he was still cogent enough to recognize the peril he was in. That was a good sign.
Lee grabbed immediately for his hip pouch with its hemostatic dressings to find nothing but shredded nylon, his medical pouch fallen victim to the weapons’ barrage.
There was nothing else for it. With a quick glance around to assess his options, he threw aside his vest and tore off the cleanest part of his jumpsuit: the top. Packing the fabric into a tight wad, he shot Gaara an apologetic look.
“I am so sorry, but this is going to hurt.”
“I’ve already got a gaping hole in my leg, how bad could it—fuck!” Gaara doubled over as Lee applied as much pressure as he could with both hands to the gushing wound. His head collided with Lee’s bare shoulder with a thwack. “Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuckfuckfuck—”
“I’m so, so sorry.” Lee’s heart pounded off-tempo, wracked with pain to the same beat of Gaara’s words. Hoping Gaara could hear him over the litany of curses, he added, “Do you have a tourniquet?”
“It’s with the medic,” Gaara hissed out.
The medic they had last seen on the battlefield.
“We’ll have to make one. I can’t let up pressure, so I’ll need you to untie my bandages.”
Gaara uncurled long enough to give Lee a look of confusion. His breathing had gone rapid and shallow as Lee’s hands grew wet from the blood seeping through his jumpsuit top.
“We’ll use them to stop your bleeding. There’s a knot on the inside of my elbow. You should be able to untie it from there.”
Gaara fumbled down Lee’s bicep, his sand armor scraping the bare skin until he reached the cusp of the bandage.
“Here?” he said, sounding light and airy, fingers trembling.
Lee looked at his face. Gaara’s eyelids fluttered. His lips were pale and slack.
Lee was losing him to shock.
“Gaara!” he raised his voice to a shout. “Focus. Undo the knots.”
Gaara blinked slowly. “Undo the knots,” he sighed out. “Right.”
It was lucky that Lee’s bandages unwound almost without effort the moment the knot was loose, coming to pool around his wrist. But they could be undone no further, not without him lifting his hand off Gaara’s wound, removing the pressure that was the only thing staving off an even more rapid loss of blood.
“You’ll have to cut them,” he ordered Gaara, trying with more effort than he’d ever exerted on the Gates to keep a level head, to keep the panic from his voice.
Gaara lifted his hand. Sand leapt to it, clung, and fell back down. “I don’t—have enough control to—”
“Use your teeth.”
Grimacing, Gaara twisted down until his teeth were bared against Lee’s wrist. It was fortunate that he hadn’t lost the physical features of his Tailed Beast when Shukaku was extracted from him. His canines were still razor sharp. They tore, blundering, until the linen shredded free.
Gaara fell back with a sigh, holding the bandage aloft like some kind of triumph.
“You still need to tie it,” Lee reminded him, voice gone high in his urgency. “Do you remember your field training?”
Gaara nodded, but his eyes were glazed over, hardly focusing. Lee wanted more than anything just to lay him back and do it for him, but he couldn’t move his hands without risking restarting the bleeding. And at this point, his hands were so saturated with Gaara’s blood that he wasn’t even certain whether the bleeding had stopped—or even slowed—at all.
“Wrap it around your thigh,” he directed, “high up, above the wound but not at your groin. Tie it off as tight as you can.”
Gaara followed his instructions, but only clumsily. His hands slipped on the fabric, shaking hard now. He tied off an awkward knot and tugged at it with all his strength, but that wasn’t much to speak of. Not any longer.
Lee was left with the desperate choice: take the pressure off Gaara’s wound long enough to tie off the tourniquet properly, or stay right where he was, knowing it wasn’t enough.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured. “This is going to hurt again.”
As quickly as he could manage, he lifted his hands and pressed his knee hard into Gaara’s wound, freeing his hands so he could wrap the bandages as tightly as possible, cutting off the bloodflow to the lower reaches of Gaara’s leg.
Gaara screamed.
What worried Lee more, though, was that the sand hardly stirred from its loose scatter on the ground.
“I’m so, so sorry. You’ll be okay,” Lee murmured, more to himself than to Gaara. “I’ll take care of you. You have to be okay.”
They needed a medic—a proper one—desperately. The best way to summon one would be a targeted chakra flare, but Lee didn’t have enough control for such a thing, and Gaara was far too weak. Even a minor exertion of chakra could tip him from hypovolemic shock into coma—or worse.
At least with the tourniquet tightened and his knee holding pressure in place, Lee was able to fumble through his cast-aside vest for a flare stick.
“Lee, no,” Gaara mumbled, watching Lee unwind the fuse and retrieve a flint. “Our position. The enemy—”
“If it comes to that—” Lee struck the flint, and it blazed bright enough to show the blue pallor edging Gaara’s lips, the clammy sweat on his face. “—I will protect you.”
“You can’t,” Gaara protested. “We barely escaped with our lives.”
Lee lit the wick. The flare hissed to life in his hand, spitting sparks.
“I would gladly give mine,” he said, “if it meant saving yours.”
He tossed the flare out of the cave’s entrance just before Gaara grappled his bare shoulders forward and hauled him into a sloppy kiss.
“Gaara?” Lee yelped.
“Lee, please.” Gaara’s words smeared into his mouth. “Just let me—”
And then Gaara’s head slumped forward, unconscious on Lee’s shoulder.
& I
There was blood. So, so much blood. It splashed up beneath Lee’s spread fingers like fountains, submerged his wrists, then his elbows until he was drowning in it, gasping for breath.
A hand shook him, and he was pulled upwards.
He heaved in air.
“Lee,” Gaara whispered. “Wake up. It’s just a dream.”
“I’m awake.” His gaze, still hazy, settled on the figure wrapped around him in their bed, the red hair gone blue-purple in the dark, the eyes luminous like a creature spotted in the forest, face shining. The chest pressed against his, rising and falling with every breath. The thin arms gripping him. The stump of an above-knee amputation tangled between his legs.
Alive.
Breathing.
“Was it a nightmare?” Gaara asked, head tilted.
Lee nodded, gathering Gaara closer to him, feeling along his spine, his shoulders. Pressing a palm to the back of his ribs to feel them expand and contract as he breathed.
“The usual one?”
“Mm.”
“I’m sorry.”
Lee let his head sink down to bury in Gaara’s untidy curls, inhaling the scent of him: oudh and earth and spice from their shared dinner. All the warm vibrancy of him, the solidity.
“Don’t be.”
A thought occurred to him then, feeling Gaara’s face pressed to his shoulder in the dark, dampness starting to seep through his sleep shirt.
“Why are you awake?” he prodded gently.
Gaara made an indefinite sound against the fabric. He sniffed.
“You had a nightmare, too,” Lee surmised.
Gaara nodded tightly, and as he clung more ardently to Lee’s shoulderblades, Lee could tell he was trembling.
“Shh,” Lee soothed, rubbing circles on his back the way Gaara had once done to him so many years ago. “I’ve got you. You’re safe. We’re both safe.”
Gaara’s breath left him, shaky. He nosed his way to Lee’s chest, his eyes squinted shut.
They lay there in the dark for a long while, Lee squeezing Gaara as effortfully as was practical and Gaara squeezing back not nearly as tightly but with just as much meaning.
“I can feel your heartbeat,” Gaara murmured finally into the black nothingness between them. “What are you thinking about?”
Lee tangled the toes of his bad leg with Gaara’s remaining ones, their ankles knocking.
“Our first kiss.”
“Oh.”
Lee felt the curve of a smile against his breastbone.
He knew they were thinking of two different moments. Gaara didn’t remember the time he’d kissed Lee in the cave, when he’d left blood on Lee’s bare chest so that when the medi-nin finally found them there were two red smears down his pectorals in the shape of a heart with clutching fingers.
As far as Gaara knew, their first kiss had happened in a hospital, after days of Lee pacing outside Gaara’s room begging entry to anyone who would listen, his chakra agitating patients up and down the wards. When he’d finally been let in, he’d thrown himself across the bed and kissed Gaara so fiercely and thoroughly that three ANBU had tried to restrain him.
“I was so worried about you,” Gaara whispered, pressing his forehead to Lee’s sternum.
“What?” Lee’s hands stilled in their slow circles along Gaara’s spine. “Why? You called your guard off before anything could happen.”
“Not then.” Gaara rocked his head, rotating unsteady pressure into Lee’s skin. “The day on the training field. When you collapsed.”
Lee had a flicker of a memory. Something his half-conscious mind had been sure he’d imagined. Gaara’s lips, soft and gentle, grazing the back of his knuckles.
“That really happened?” he murmured wonderingly.
Gaara pulled back to stare at him. “Of course it did. I wondered why you hadn’t kissed me since, but then the next time I saw you we were under attack, and … Well. You know how that ended.”
“With you kissing me,” Lee breathed.
“With you kissing me, you mean.”
“No.” Lee brushed aside the sleep-mussed hair from Gaara’s forehead, his fingers tracing the shape of his scar. “You kissed me first. Before you passed out.”
“Did I?” Gaara’s lips quirked. “I must not have wanted to miss my chance, in case I’d died there.”
“But you didn’t.” The thought made Lee sick, even still: how close he’d come to losing Gaara. His fingertips painted out the strokes of the kanji on Gaara’s face again and again, as though imbuing them with prayer. “You haven’t.”
“Nor have you.” Gaara leaned into his touch with a rumble low in his throat, a sleepy rasp that was nearly a purr. “Despite your best efforts.”
Lee wrapped Gaara in his arms and legs, pulling him close. Urgently, he whispered into his throat, “I’m not going anywhere. You’re stuck with me.”
Gaara snuggled in tighter. “I’m glad to be.”