Chapter Text
Gaara had never been concerned with the capacities of his physical body outside of its performance as a shinobi. He could walk, speak, fight, kill, and it did not matter what other things his body could or could not do. No one had ever questioned him on his decision to keep his hair short, to wear full coverage armour and his sand as a second skin, and by the time he was old enough that others his age started to become aware of the traditional differences between male and female, everyone who knew what body he was born with was dead save his immediate family. They, for that matter, did not breathe a word in opposition when Gaara first began appearing in public and the assumption was masculine. He wondered, occasionally, as he got older, if Rasa had deliberately concealed any contradictory information because it would have been seen as weakness in Sunagakure to have something as overwhelmingly powerful and dangerous as a tailed beast sealed into a daughter. Rasa had never called him such, instead calling him “child” on kinder days and “demon” on crueller ones. He did not know if even his siblings knew.
He later learned that his entire medical file had been destroyed on the day of his birth. He never bothered to get a new one created, he was never ill or injured due to his demon and his sand, and being as isolated as he was, no illness would have reached him anyway. Such was the nature of exclusion. It hurt, being alone. His uncle told him of pretty words, love and friendship and bonds. Gaara reached for these things and found himself rebuffed, over and over and over again. He picked himself up and tried again, because his uncle had said these were the things that made life worth living.
But when Yashamaru tore wounds in his spirit, excised his heart with cruel words, and his demon roared for punishment, he killed him. His uncle had lied to him. What Yashamaru had called love? It was a lie. He killed at random, caretakers and enemies, lashing out because what else was there in this life? The beast locked in his body revelled in blood and sand, and so did he. Each death, each pool of blood in the dust, it brought him a well of emotion, the only emotion he had left to feel. He drilled the kanji for love into his forehead, swearing that no one would ever come close enough to hurt him ever again. He would hurt them first, kill them first. What else could loving oneself mean? This feeling, searing hot in his chest, it must be love.
ANBU members tried to kill him on multiple occasions, striking out at random in the dark of night. His sand would crush them to unidentifiable viscera, absorbing their blood and bone to form a stained patchwork of his victims. He began to smell of iron and rot. One time, he ate food only to find it was poisoned. He collapsed, and his demon spit it all out. He barely ate after that. He started hiding from the villagers, seeking refuge in silent, dark places where no one could find him. The library was one such reprieve, the knowledge contained in the thousands of books and scrolls there offering him emotions he did not understand, but they were words that did not mean him harm. He read everything he could lay his hands on, whiling away his lonely night hours imbibing knowledge of every source.
He was ten years old when he learned in that library the specific nature of his anatomy and what that meant for his future as a shinobi of Sunagakure, and why one night, when Gaara stood behind the frame of a door in their darkened hallway, Rasa had told Kankūro that he would be Kazekage whether he wanted to be or not. He had seen both Kankurō and Temari crying that night and did not understand.
He chose that same night to ignore it. Damn the restrictions placed on him for the body under his clothes. He would not ascribe to any law Sunagakure set upon him. Why should he bow to the whims of a village that gave him nothing? What about his anatomy made him weak? No shinobi had ever even touched him. They were the weak ones.
By the time he was eleven, his father had tried and failed to assassinate him a half-dozen times. His siblings were afraid to breathe in his presence. Blood ran in the streets on his whim. He did not care. He refused to care. Caring led to pain and if the fools of the world suffered, it was their fault for being so appallingly human. He was… he must have been far beyond such weakness. If strength was how Sunagakure measured the value of its people, he would be the strongest of them all.
He was twelve years old visiting Konoha for the first time when he realised that not every village was as concerned about what lay under the wrappings of the body when it came to leadership. Their leader was a woman, he’d heard the villagers refer to her as ‘Lady Tsunade’. She was a strong and frightening creature, and everyone respected her in the Hidden Leaf. Gaara wondered for an instant what his life might be like if he had been born here instead.
He nearly died at the hands of a strange boy with a shiny bowl cut and jaw-droppingly powerful taijutsu in the chūnin exams, fists hot like flames pounding his body bruise-y blue underneath his cracked sand armour, and he repaid the favour by shattering his combatant’s left side. The boy’s teacher interfered before Gaara could kill him. The boy stood up to fight back, barely conscious, completely broken. His teacher hugged him, begged him to stand down, you’ve done enough! People cried. He felt a strange, uncomfortable roiling heat in his gut and did not know what to do about it. He tried to kill the boy again, now unconscious and broken in a hospital bed, if only to staunch this strange feeling. Why did the sight of that hug make him so angry? His mode of existence was meant to make him unmatched, untouchable, so how had he been hurt? Was it because Sunagakure was right, and the body he owned was weak? No. Powerful shinobi had fallen to him many times before. It must be a fluke. The boy had to die.
He could not do it. It did not work.
Then Sasuke Uchiha shot lightning through his shoulder, and he bled, and the horror of the injury, and his weakness, the sickening failure of himself as he was, cracked something intangible within. He fought, first Sasuke, then his loud and annoying blonde friend, the one who had reacted to his declarations in the hospital not with disgust or derision, but a strange sympathetic disquietude. Naruto. Naruto Uzumaki, a jinchūriki like him.
Naruto defeated him with deed and word, shattering, with a sickening finality, the slowly thinning veneer protecting him from his own misconceptions. He learned the strange feeling was guilt and when he thought of everything he had done, it made him feel like he was burning alive. His demon howled, demanding him sink back into the fog of bloodlust. He refused. But what was he, if he did not live for death, but did not possess what Naruto claimed was the purpose of life (friendship and love)? Was there an answer, for a warped, confused, bloodied demon vessel like him?
His father died. Good riddance, his siblings whispered where there was no one around to hear them speak. With him, Gaara thought, was the last person who knew anything about his body. A far as the world was concerned, Gaara was the second son of the Fourth, the Jinchūriki of Sunagakure, and a walking time bomb. He fought to undo that final fact every day, clawing his way back into sanity and understanding. Naruto had said they rescued me from my loneliness, they accepted me for who I am. Friendship, human bonds, the meaning of the kanji carved into his forehead, they fought his grasp, but hour by painful, confusing hour he unlearned the years of isolation and rage chained into his bones.
He spoke to his siblings, to Naruto. He wrote letters. He asked questions. Most people shrank from him, but he found those who did not. Naruto, who had escaped his stigma through an astonishing capacity for friendship and optimism, was the first to show him acceptance. Unexpectedly, Rock Lee, the final victim of his years of insanity, and the most altruistic person he’d ever encountered, was the second.
He was twelve and a half when his sand first moved to protect another person. His team was asked to help the Hidden Leaf and he found himself the staunch defender of the boy with the strange red-skinned jutsu he’d nearly crushed to death twice. When he’d been thrown back by a monster with a tail made of bones who could pull out his spine at will, Lee, damaged as he was, threw himself in harm’s way to protect him. Fought back with a body still broken by Gaara’s hands, even though he did not deserve protection after his crimes, even though Lee himself was bleeding, red leaking through his bandages and staining his jumpsuit at the base of his spine. His sand acted, blocking Kimimaro’s tail, catching Lee when he fell, dragging him into the sky to avoid the forest of bones punching up from the earth. Lee called him amazing. Gaara wasn’t sure he’d ever been given a compliment before. He wasn’t sure what it meant.
And when Lee could hardly stand, and Gaara tentatively offered his support, Lee freely threw his damaged, bloody arm over Gaara’s shoulders, completely willing, unafraid. It was the most human contact he’d ever had. Lee was warm and heavy and smelled like salt and blood and antiseptic and he didn’t stop talking and the time it took to walk him back to Konohagakure was the most human Gaara had ever felt. Lee called him friend. He thought about it every day for months.
Was this a bond? He wrote to Lee. Lee wrote back of course it is a bond and friendship is a fundamental part of life and way too many other sentences including the words springtime and youth and Gaara thought that perhaps he’d forgotten how to read trying to puzzle out the words. But he wrote back, again and again and again. And Lee replied, every single time.
He was thirteen when a lone student at the Academy chose him. Tiny, fragile Matsuri, afraid of her own weapons, trembling under his impassive stare. Gaara had learned enough at that point from Naruto, from Lee, from his siblings, to be able to reach out with words, to use what he knew for something bigger than himself. Matsuri looked at him the way Lee looked at his equally green and enthusiastic squad leader. Someone who admired him instead of fearing him—a bond new and different from friend. Teacher. Leader. It made him feel needed. It gave him a purpose.
He wrote to Lee about her. Lee wrote back, and his words were so incandescently happy that Gaara took an entire night in the desert contemplating what would make Lee, who was not teaching, who was not feeling needed by Gaara’s student, so happy about it. He gave up, wrote the question, and Lee wrote in his fine, slanted print it is called empathy. Gaara could not comprehend the word.
Then she was taken, and in his quest to rescue her, he found Lee once again, tall and vibrant with a body as strong as his namesake, as he had been before Gaara had nearly killed him, flinging himself between Gaara and danger with Naruto whooping his way onto the battlefield behind him. Friends. Lee smiled at him with blinding teeth and shiny, inky eyes, and Gaara learned he could draw power from depths he never knew he had. He fought back his beast, fought back against Matsuri’s kidnapper, fought beyond his own limits, and when his bleary eyes blinked open, he found himself warm slung against Lee’s back, the gourd that fuelled Sunagakure’s nightmares tied to Naruto, Matsuri safe and alive and smiling in idolatry at him. His purpose restored, but… was that all of it? Was all this only for him to feel needed?
Lee smelled of salt and rain and herbal balm, and his arms were sturdy under Gaara’s chakra drained body. His hair blew in the wind, getting in Gaara’s eyes when he tried to look up. He kept his head down in the crook of Lee’s neck the entire trip back to Konohagakure. It felt safe, here. The hospital in Konohagakure kept all of them there overnight for observation, and Lee snuck out of his bed to sit on the floor next to Gaara’s, whispering for hours before Lee stumbled, bleary eyed, back into his own bed. Gaara watched him sleep, his face smooth and peaceful in the moonlight. There was something about Lee, his presence, his personality, the way he was never afraid in Gaara’s presence, that made Gaara feel as though he could finally touch humanity.
He was fourteen when he realised that Kankurō and Temari had cried for separate reasons that night with their father long years ago. Kankurō had cried in fear. Temari had cried in fury. Gaara had not been included in the discussion.
Empathy. He told his siblings, finally understanding what Lee had meant all those months ago, that he would take up the mantle of office. Kankurō had cried again, this time in relief. Temari had given him a strange look when she thought his back was turned, but she supported him all the same.
He was fifteen when he became Sabaku no Gaara, Godaime Kazekage of Sunagakure.
He was also fifteen when he realised that his body, for all that it was more like Temari than Kankurō in many ways, was not doing the things the books said it would as an adolescent. He remained short and lithe and androgynous (as he had learned his shape was called, in the many books he’d read). He did not bleed.
He considered this a blessing. Less to conceal. If his siblings had children, they could inherit the lineage of leadership. In the meantime, he considered it his duty to pull Sunagakure into the future. No other village remained so deeply locked in archaic tradition, and while tradition had allowed the desert city to survive in isolation for centuries, some traditions were meant to be destroyed. The stigma on the body he hid must be destroyed, if it was the last thing he ever did. If not for him, then for Temari, who cried because the world knew the body she owned, and under the antiquated laws of Sunagakure, it meant she could never lead her people.
He was sixteen when he died.
It was strange, his last thought as Shukaku was ripped, screaming, from his soul was not of Sunagakure, or Temari or Kankurō, but of Lee. His friend who wrote letters every week without fail, who always asked to spar with him when he came to Konohagakure, who punched through his impenetrable Sand Barrier every time with a smile on his face despite the vicious scarring Gaara knew lay under those bandages in the same way he knew what lay under the wrapping he wore under his mesh armoured shirt. Who came to his aid in action and on paper, teaching him the value and meaning of feeling. Who did not shrink back, but slung the arm Gaara had nearly ruined around him freely as though Gaara were a regular shinobi, not a demon vessel who was still only learning what it meant to be a person, what it meant to carry bonds in your heart.
Would Lee miss him?
Gaara would.
He was sixteen when he was reborn to discover that his years of fighting his own traumas, bandaging his wounds, and reaching out with his empty hands had borne not just fruit, but a forest. Years of planting seeds, watered with sweat and blood, and now there were hundreds, thousands of voices calling back to him. He cried, for the first time since he was a small and lonely child swallowed up by the desert. Naruto had slapped him on the back with a bright and caustic laugh and told him to man up! But Lee had held his hand. Lee had cried with him. He had said later, in the dark of the night on the cliffs over Suna, look at how far you have come, in that strangely formal way of his, tender words for his ears alone. Gaara had experienced a strange stutter in his chest, an odd flash of heat in his lungs when he looked up into Lee’s eyes, darker even than the bottom of the sea, focused on him with an intensity the drowned him. Faint light illuminated the smooth lines of his jaw, the soft curve of his lips, so very unlike his usual blinding beam, hypnotic under the desert moon. He shivered, though the night was balmy warm. No one had ever caused that before. He did not know what it meant. Or maybe, he did, and he was too afraid to tell himself the truth.
Then the Shinobi world went to war against itself, and he lost time and comrades and focus and willpower battling for the very existence of ninja culture.
He found, and fought, his reanimated father, who called him a blasphemy. You will never be the true Wind Shadow, he howled across the abyss; jinchūriki or not, you will always be the monster I made! Behind him, Temari cursed their father’s name, screamed to him do not listen and you are the best of us now but her words swam to him slowly, waterlogged sand scraping across the dirt. He discovered his childhood had been built on lies. It shook him to his foundations. The pillars he’d built, the progress he’d made, subsumed in gold dust. Who could he believe in if the structures that formed his life had been constructed by lies? Was there anything real in his existence? Was there any purpose to his agonies?
Given a quiet moment to process, he realised: His mother, Temari, Kankurō. Matsuri. Naruto. Lee. Many more. Much of the trajectory of his existence had brought the threads of their lives to tangle with his own. He hurt, he suffered, but in his anguish had bloomed the seeds of what now formed much of his strength. He made his own purpose, now. There were people who cared for him.
He was seventeen when he discovered, at the tail-end of the Fourth Great Shinobi War, watching Maito Gai burn himself alive, sacrifice himself to battle for Lee’s sake and watching his friend insist he was fine as he cried, as his skin boiled red and his eyes glowed, as his chakra surged to levels Gaara could never reach with a howl of Sixth Gate of Joy!! and wanting nothing more than to reach out to lessen his anguish, to hold his hand and give him comfort even as they fought Madara together, that he had forged a soul capable of caring just as much in return.
Lee caught him amidst the fierce blowback of Maito Gai’s final attack, throwing his body between Gaara and the bedrock, and the heat of his skin crystallised the sand armour into shattering glass shards. Instead of his defence removing the heat, the threat to his body, his gourd dissolved, catching them both in a showering tumble of grit and slivers of glass. Lee’s body vibrated underneath his own, tears evaporating off his face under the heat of the sixth gate, and Gaara allowed the armour to shatter and his skin to singe, because Lee needed someone to ground him as his world fell apart. Lee had done so very much for him. He could give him this. He wanted to give him this.
When Naruto, shining and yellow and quite possibly a living god, saved Maito Gai and ordered them to stand down and take care of him, Gaara felt nothing but relief. Lee was safe. His heart was intact. But his body still shook, and his eyes would not remain in the moment, and Gaara knew he was reliving the trauma of the night over and over and over again. He whispered, quiet but sharp against the dull thunderdrum of battle spread out in the miles around them, Neji is dead.
Gaara was not close to Neji, he appreciated the shinobi for his efforts in saving Gaara during the second chūnin exams, but seeing Lee’s face, blank in his devastation, breathing if Gai-sensei were to die too, I do not know how I would live anymore, Gaara realised that empathy was both a blessing and a curse. It was Gaara to reach out across the distance, to brush his seared fingers across Lee’s battered, steaming hands, and Lee reached back, dark eyes focusing on him, here in the moment, a faint smile gleaming white out of the tear-streaked dust on his face, palm upturned to grasp…and the world bled red, and everything was gone.
And when he was trapped in the Infinite Tsukuyomi, living a dream of a life in which he was truly happy, he found Naruto there, of course, the childhood friend he never had, but it was Lee around every new corner, in every golden moment, his uproarious laugh the soundtrack to his subconscious joy and the colour green far too prevalent in this version of Sunagakure, and when he tumbled from the chakra tree and the first thing he laid eyes on was Lee, when this time Lee reached first across the space between them and grasped his shaking hands, when they huddled together on the barren rock of their ravaged world and Lee’s night-sky eyes never moved from his own, he knew he was in love.
Later, when the bodies were burned under silk shrouds, when the funerals passed into bitter memory and flowers bloomed from the places where tears had once watered the land, nothing else left but to try and fill in the parts of the world shattered by the silence left behind, Gaara kissed him. Lee kissed him back. Gaara returned to Sunagakure, fled out into the desert, and cratered a ruin trying to process this feeling, this bond that felt now so much brighter bigger safer scarier than friend. It threatened to melt him, Icarus flying too close to the sun. He touched the kanji on his forehead, whispered the name on his lips into the silence.
A month later, he found Lee knelt on the stone of the same cliff where he’d once curled one battered arm around a newly revived Gaara and told him I am so proud of you, whispering terrified a halted confession to the stone at his feet. Gaara had fallen into his arms, ordered him to say it all over again (I love you), again (for me, it has always been you), again (I would be yours forever if you would have me) and that was the beginning of everything. It had to be a secret, Sunagakure would not take kindly to a foreigner in the arms of their leader, but Lee swore up and down that he would pay any price if it meant to be with him, and if Gaara believed in anything in this world, he believed in Lee.
He was eighteen when he marched into Lee’s Jounin flat in Konohagakure without permission and drew sound and chakra seals across every wall, Lee following him around, acquiescent if a bit bewildered. He was eighteen when he first spoke the truth of his body to another of his own volition, halting and staggered and petrified, afraid that Lee would call him a liar, would reject the dichotomy of his presentation and Lee had held his hand, there on the floor of his apartment, and said I love you, and I am grateful you trust me enough to tell me this. Gaara had cried, and then Lee had cried, and when their tears dried and Lee was pressed inside of him, the skin Gaara had scarred years ago bare and damaged and beautiful and alive against his own for the first time, he said nothing but you are everything to me, and Gaara knew for the rest of his natural life that if this was love, it was enough.
He was nineteen when Lee came to Sunagakure for a four-month shinobi trade program, serving as a runner and unaffiliated mediator for trade negotiations between Sunagakure and Iwagakure, and it was the best four months he’d ever known. Gaara had constructed a hideout amongst the cliffs of his village long ago in the event of an emergency (or, when the council became too much and Gaara needed to disappear) and he was finally able to use it, if only for many an illicit rendezvous with his lover. Lee sparred joyously with him every day, curled against him every night he was there and whispered his love into Gaara’s skin, and when his time was up and Konohagakure ordered him home, Gaara begged him to stay. Lee had cried into his shoulders, told him you know I would if I could, and Gaara kissed his tears away and promised he would be in Konohagakure soon. Lee had smiled, then, because Lee always found the positives in everything, and Gaara fell in love all over again.
Gaara was nineteen, almost twenty, about to embark on a number of diplomatic emergency meetings in response to the hushed stirrings of war on the horizon, when he found himself ill for the first time in his life, and it changed him forever.