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Gaara wakes up in pain.
His body throbs and aches; the left side worse than the right. Every last nerve feels raw and tender. He looks down at his arms: bandaged, and his legs: knobby ankles and long toes below crisp white sheets, tucked into perfect hospital corners. Something feels off, but Gaara is too disoriented to recognize what it is.
The last thing he remembers is Lee sparring with the Yamanaka kunoichi. Gaara had been sitting at the side of the training field, a stack of paperwork on his lap, half-watching and half-savoring the dregs of a Konoha summer day, the last of his vacation before he had to return to Suna. There had been a cry, and then-
Gaara lurches upright, ignoring the stinging in his back and shoulders. He has to find Lee, immediately, and make sure he's all right. He untucks himself from the sheets and goes to stand. The floor meets his feet sooner than expected and he stumbles, grabbing the railing of the bed next to his in order to steady himself.
The sand rushes towards him, but it doesn't catch him, instead hovering uncertainly around his feet. Odd.
He spies his paperwork stacked on the table between the two beds: grass stained and rumpled but otherwise intact. It can't have been too terrible of an emergency, then.
The table seems oddly low, Gaara thinks. He's beyond familiar with Konoha's hospital, as many times as he's sat at Lee's bedside, but the proportions of this room are downright unusual: everything too close to the ground. Even the charts on the wall are lower. Perhaps he's in the children's ward?
The other bed's occupant stirs. A tuft of red hair ruffles and rolls over, until Gaara is face-to-face with ... himself.
Gaara gives a cry of alarm, his voice strangely high and clear. The sand hisses up between the two of them, wavering and lashing in the air, not sure who to strike. Gaara waves his hand to dismiss it, but the sand stays right where it is. It roils like a cornered animal, spikes and darts rising and falling unevenly. Gaara attempts again, concentrates on igniting his chakra pathways specifically, a motion he hasn't had to think about since he was a child.
Nothing happens.
Gaara grits his teeth, staring down the facsimile of himself in the other bed. The false Gaara's mouth drops open in a snore. A pale imitation, Gaara thinks; he has always slept still and silently. He can only imagine what nefarious intent this other person has, in order to copy his appearance so precisely, even with the behavior as sloppy as it is. The motions of the other Gaara remind him more of his partner than of himself, if he’s being honest.
Gaara pales with that thought. He can trouble over the odd behavior of the sand, and the unwillingness of his jutsu, and his doppelganger in a moment. First, he needs to focus on finding Lee.
Just then, the door to the room opens and Haruno Sakura steps through, attired in her hospital whites.
"Lee-san, you're up!" she says.
Gaara whips around to look for him, the sudden motion twinging his neck. The sand whips up in a column, spiraling.
At the same moment, the other Gaara sits up, stretching his arms over his head with a loud sigh.
"Aah," he says in Gaara's voice, "I feel great! That's the best I've slept in years!"
The sand rumbles up the bed to inspect the impostor, churning.
Gaara turns back to Haruno, about to ask her why she housed him with an obviously deranged criminal occupying a double of his body.
"Wait," says the other Gaara, his diction far too formal. "Why am I over there?"
He's pointing straight at Gaara.
Gaara looks down at his body in shock, and discovers that it's not his body at all. His limbs are too long, his knuckles scarred and bandaged, and most damning of all ... he's wearing a green jumpsuit.
"What the hell?" Gaara says.
From the doorway, Haruno stares back and forth between the two of them.
"Kazekage-sama?" she says, tentatively, looking at him. "... Lee-san?" She turns to look at the man sitting in the bed. The man in the bed smiles with Gaara’s face, all his teeth showing, and offers a weak thumbs-up.
Haruno’s face pales.
"Ino!" she yells over her shoulder into the hallway. "What the fuck did you do?"
Yamanaka comes hurtling through the door in an instant, her long hair slingshotting over her shoulder and face.
“What’s wrong?” she says. “Did something happen?”
She looks over at Gaara, standing stock-still, his arms crossed over his chest. Then she stares at the body double in the bed. He’s just rolled onto his back and started doing bicycle kicks.
“Holy shit,” she breathes.
Before he can think to object, Gaara’s being dragged away towards another room by surprisingly strong gloved hands. The sand lets out a roar behind him. Sakura’s eyes grow wide as the sand rises up like a hand, loses shape, then crashes back onto the floor. The tile cracks.
“Mother,” Gaara says in Lee’s voice. “It’s me.”
The sand hisses and creaks. It writhes up the sides of the hospital bed, then hurtles back to wend around Gaara’s ankles, torn.
“Please calm down,” Gaara urges.
The sand spreads through the room, coating everything in a layer of grit. The beds start to shake. An IV pole crashes to the floor.
On instinct, Gaara lunges at the other bed and grabs the gourd from his body’s hip, staring down at his own startled face.
“I’m sorry,” he mutters.
He cracks the gourd in half. It comes apart in his hands as easily as an eggshell, his own strength surprising him. He deposits one half back on the bed and cradles the other between his hands.
The sand lets out a low moan, trembles, and stills. It splits into two identical portions, one hovering protectively over the body in the bed, the other curling its way up Gaara’s arms to nestle around the fractured gourd in his hands.
“Why don’t we just examine the two of you together,” Sakura suggests weakly.
In the several hours of examination that follow, two things become clear: one, that Gaara and Lee have fallen victim to a Mind-Body Transfer jutsu gone horribly wrong, and two, that nobody seems to know how to reverse it.
“The good news,” Sakura says, snapping her gloves off her hands with a flourish, “is that you’re medically fascinating.”
Gaara levels her with a deadpan stare.
“I’m quite certain that’s only good news to you,” he says.
Sakura shrinks back.
“Aah, Lee-san, do something about him. It’s so weird to have someone in your body talk to me like that,” she whines.
Gaara turns to Lee, who’s nodding and grinning encouragingly, the expression uncanny on Gaara’s normally staid face.
“Try this,” Lee coaxes. “Thank you very much, Sakura-chan.”
“Thank you…” Gaara starts.
Lee gestures for him to go on.
“... very much, Sakura- “
“-chan!” Lee smiles.
“-chan,” Gaara finishes lamely.
Sakura wrinkles her upper lip.
“Ugh, no,” she pouts. “Actually that’s worse somehow.”
She leans back in her chair and crosses her ankle over her knee.
“Listen, why don’t the two of you go get some rest?” she says. “I don’t think we’re going to make any more progress on this tonight. And obviously I can’t send you back to Suna like this.”
Ino rises from her chair in the back of the room, where she’s been poring over a large book.
“I’m gonna have to consult some other clan members,” she says, flipping her hair over her shoulder. “Sorry again.”
“You’ll keep this confidential,” Gaara reminds the both of them.
“Of course,” they chorus.
“Let’s go back to your apartment, then,” Gaara says to Lee.
“Technically it’s your apartment now, isn’t it?” Lee jokes.
Gaara does not see the humor in it.
After fashioning a makeshift carrying case for his half of the gourd, Gaara makes his way down Konoha’s darkened streets with Lee beside him. There is nothing quite so unsettling as standing next to your own body; Gaara feels like he’s astral projecting. He’s also never noticed quite how tall Lee is, before today. Each step feels like it carries him a mile. And he hasn’t forgotten the pain, either; every muscle in his body burns and aches with it, each movement eliciting an involuntary wince.
He has little time to dwell on the curiosity, however. Soon enough they are back at Lee’s apartment, and they have a phone call to make.
“I don’t know about this,” Lee says, shifting uncomfortably in his wooden chair, the helixed cord of his phone draped across his kitchen table. “I don’t think I can speak to your sister so … personally.”
“It will be fine,” Gaara assures him. “I’ll tell you exactly what to say. All you have to do is repeat after me.”
“Repeat after you, okay." Lee dials the number with trembling fingers and waits, knuckles white on the phone, while it rings.
“Hello?” Temari’s voice crackles down the line.
Gaara leans in closer to hear her, his face pressed against the other side of the earpiece.
“Hi Temari,” he whispers to Lee.
“Hel- Hi Temari,” Lee says, and grimaces.
“Gaara?” her voice rings tinny. “Is that you?”
“I’m going to be home later than expected, something has come up,” Gaara whispers.
Lee repeats him, though his voice falters at the end of the sentence, wavers on the conjugation of the verb.
“Are you okay?” Temari asks. “You sound weird. Are you sick?”
Gaara draws back in alarm.
Tell her I’m fine and that you have to go, he mouths at Lee.
“Ga- uh, I am fine. Please do not worry! I have to go now. Goodbye, be well!” Lee says, and tosses the phone away from him, eyes wide and panicked.
Gaara catches the receiver on instinct, his hand snapping out faster than he can think. He gently sets it back in its cradle.
“Well,” he says. “That went about as terribly as I expected.”
Lee sinks his face into his hands.
“I’m so sorry,” he says. “I’m no good at pretending to be you.”
“Hopefully we don’t have to worry about it too much longer,” Gaara replies, and makes to stand up from the table. As he does, his lower back seizes and he cringes, grabbing it. The gourd in its makeshift pouch rattles, lashing out at nothing. What can it do, when the enemy is his own body?
Lee leans toward him immediately, brows drawn low in concern. It’s jarring, still, seeing such animated expressions on his own face.
“What is it?” Lee asks.
“Ah,” Gaara adjusts, minutely, easing the pressure on his back. A sparking pain, like an electric current, takes its place, radiating down his shoulder and terminating somewhere around his left forearm. He clenches his eyes shut. “Ever since I woke up, I’ve been having these terrible muscle aches everywhere.”
Lee’s mouth drops open into a tiny oh. He looks at the floor.
“That’s … normal for my body, unfortunately,” he says.
Gaara’s eyes grow wide. He clenches his jaw, then winces at the radiating ache even that motion sends pulsing down the side of his throat. Lee feels this every day? He can’t even imagine the immense toll that must take on him, not just physically, but emotionally. Since the removal of Shukaku, Gaara has become accustomed to a relatively pain-free life. The sand still protects him, and even when it cannot, he rarely experiences worse than the occasional scrape or bruise. He remembers the feeling of his ribs cracking under Lee’s foot at the chunin exams, a punctured and hastily healed lung, a fractured jaw knitted back together. Even with those injuries, he’d had the extraordinary jinchuuriki healing factor to rely on, and the pain, while intense and shocking, had been brief. But this - this is ceaseless. Every new motion stirs up a new ache. His left arm and leg throb, burn, nerves shearing against every muscle. If Lee’s body feels like this all the time, it’s a miracle he can walk, much less run and fight with his level of skill and power.
“How- “ Gaara stammers. “I didn’t- I’m so sorry,” he hisses.
“It’s really not so bad, once you get used to it,” Lee says with a weak smile. “And it’s way better than it used to be. Before and after my surgery - oh, man, now that was rough.”
“But your arm and leg,” Gaara says, gesturing to indicate the affected limbs. “I thought Lady Tsunade healed you?”
“Ahh.” Lee rubs the back of his neck. “She did, but … well, you know, nerves get sensitized to certain stimuli. So even once the muscles and the bones were healed, the nerves still react like they aren’t. And it’s not as though I haven’t been injured since then.”
Gaara can do little more than gape.
“Please don’t trouble yourself over it,” Lee says, standing. “I’m sorry you have to experience it right now, but I can show you a few techniques that might help? You’re probably making it worse for yourself since you don’t know how to move right.”
Gaara just nods.
“Okay,” Lee says, coming to stand behind him. “First - wow, you are really short, I never noticed - “
Gaara can’t resist the impulse to roll his eyes. Lee sets his hands on his shoulders.
“First, keep your weight mostly on your right side.” He pushes down on Gaara’s right shoulder and Gaara leans away from the pressure. He feels lopsided, but there is an immediate sense of relief. “Good! Now try walking like that.”
Gaara takes a few tentative steps. The motion is awkward, and there’s still pain, but it’s a bit more bearable.
“And you’ll do the same thing with your hands. So, if you need to lift something, put more of the weight on the right side. Like so:” Lee picks a kitchen chair and passes it to Gaara. “We need to work on your weight training,” he notes.
“Later,” Gaara says. “Let’s get through this first.” He holds the chair with both hands and immediately a bolt of pain lances up his left arm.
“Shift it!” Lee says.
Gaara rebalances, so the chair’s weight is mostly on his right hand. His left arm still aches, but at least he can hold the object steadily.
“Great!” Lee says. “Oh, I have a few stretches that can help, too. I normally do these a few times a day.”
Lee walks Gaara to his tiny living room, pushing the low table out of the way with a grunt. Seeing his own body do any sort of physical labor without the assistance of the sand is bizarre.
“Seriously, your weight training,” Lee says.
Gaara ignores him.
Lee straightens up with a clap, the gesture uncharacteristic in Gaara’s form.
“Okay, so the easiest one is this - you’re just going to want to reach your arms out behind you, and then clasp your hands to-” Lee starts to demonstrate the motion and then stops. The hands of Gaara’s body jut out awkwardly behind him, hovering about an inch apart. He strains, but can’t quite make his hands touch.
“Say, Gaara?” Lee says cautiously. “Have you been doing your Tai Chi like we talked about?”
“Yes,” Gaara lies.
Lee frowns. “Huh,” he says. “We might need to double your regimen. Remind me to talk to Gai-sensei about it once we’re back to normal.”
Gaara curses internally. Time for a distraction.
“Did you mean like this?” Gaara asks, reaching behind himself easily, his hands joining in the middle.
Lee drops his arms. “Yes, just like that! Then lean forward and push like you’re pushing the air away behind you.”
Gaara does as he’s told. The soft strain of it against his aching muscles feels wonderful. He could do this for hours.
“Good, now hold it for ten aaand, release!” Lee says.
Gaara leans further into the stretch. It just feels so good.
“No, no, Gaara!” Lee grabs him by the back of the jumpsuit and pulls him upright. “You can’t overwork it or you’ll hurt yourself more. Count to ten, then relax, then another ten. If you just push and push you’ll end up straining yourself.”
Gaara raises a thick eyebrow.
“I know that sounds ironic, coming from me, but I mean it!” Lee says, one finger jutting into the air. “Oh, and I have one more thing. Come with me to the bathroom?”
Gaara follows Lee dutifully. Lee is already bent over, digging for something under the sink. He emerges clutching an unlabeled pot of some sort of salve.
“This!” he announces, unscrewing the lid. A familiar scent fills the bathroom, the same smell Gaara associates with Lee’s bandages after training: camphor and oil and spice.
“It’s a proprietary blend of herbs and medications; Lady Tsunade makes it for me. I know it sounds kind of odd, but I promise it really works!”
“You don’t need to sell it to me, Lee,” Gaara intones. He sticks one hand out impatiently. “Give it here.”
Lee hesitates.
“Um, it’s probably better if I show you how to use it,” he says. “There’s kind of a … technique to it.”
He leads Gaara to the bedroom. Gaara sits on the edge of Lee’s bed. His feet lie flat on the floor, another curiosity when before they had dangled centimeters above it.
Lee clambers onto the bed to kneel next to him. With utmost care, he strips Gaara out of the top of the jumpsuit and unwinds his bandages onto the floor.
“It’s going to sting at first,” he warns, “but then I promise it will help.”
The first touch of the salve to Gaara’s left shoulder burns like a brand. He hisses through his teeth, flinching away.
“Bear with me,” Lee says, his fingers rubbing gentle circles into Gaara’s shoulder. He digs a knuckle into the knot of a muscle and Gaara yelps. The sand rises up from both their half-gourds and snaps at Lee’s hand, but just as quickly falls away, reluctant to hurt him either.
“This is torture,” Gaara whimpers. If the pain before was bad, this sensation is thousands of times worse. The salve seems to work its way into every pore, prickling dots of excruciating heat drilling deep into his body.
“You’re going to be just fine, hang in there,” Lee coaxes him. He smooths the palm of his hand down Gaara’s bicep, fingers stroking around the raised edge of one ropy scar.
Slowly, like candle wax cooling on one’s hand, the burn begins to fade away. Cool relief soaks through the skin and into Gaara’s stiff muscles. He sighs.
“See?” Lee says. “I told you.” He works his fingers into Gaara’s forearm next, firm pressure on the worst of the scarred tissue, light touch on the few unmarked areas of skin.
Gaara’s head lolls on his neck, shoulders finally releasing some of the built-up tension of the day, as Lee meticulously works his way down to his wrist, fingers making quick work of the space between each carpal and metacarpal. Gaara’s eyes slip closed as Lee tugs on each of his fingers, letting the joints pop.
“Say, Gaara,” Lee says lowly. “Do you think, since I’m in your body, that I’d be able to perform a ninjutsu?”
Gaara cracks open one eye.
“I don’t see why not,” he says. “My body’s chakra pathways are undamaged, unlike yours.”
Lee hums.
“It would be kind of cool, wouldn’t it?” he says. “To be able to try it once?”
Gaara looks up into Lee’s bright green eyes, his hopeful expression.
“Do you want me to teach you?” he asks.
Lee breaks into a blinding grin, all sharp canines and wrinkled cheeks.
“I would love that,” he says. “Oh, but, do you want me to do your leg first?” He gestures down at Gaara’s still-covered left leg.
Gaara flexes the muscle. It aches, but not nearly as bad as the arm had.
“I think I’m fine for now,” he says. “Let’s go out on the balcony so we don’t break anything.”
“Thank you!” Lee cries, and darts in to press a kiss to the side of Gaara’s face. He startles back. “Oh, that feels super weird. It’s like kissing myself.”
Gaara chuckles and makes his way to the door, mindful to keep his weight on his right foot.
They sit across from each other on Lee’s narrow balcony, the lights of Konoha dimming beneath them. Gaara racks his mind for the best place to start. Controlling his chakra has always come as naturally to him as breathing. Even when he was at his most discontrolled, commanding the flow and halt of his chakra had been utterly within his purview. And Gaara is no natural teacher. He is unsure how to best explain the concept to someone who has never molded chakra before, someone who has never even dwelled inside a body that had the capacity to shape it.
He purses his lips. The sand in their gourds rattles and Gaara feels a spark of inspiration.
He grabs a handful of sand from a nearby potted cactus (an anniversary gift from the previous year) and presses it into Lee’s hands.
“This is a simple jutsu I first learned when I was a child,” he begins to explain. He can still remember Yashamaru showing him this technique to help calm himself after a tantrum. The bitterness of the memory is allayed by the light in Lee’s eyes, his expression one of open and childlike wonderment. Gaara wonders, briefly, if this radical innocence is how he had once looked.
“Look at the sand,” he coaches, cupping his hands around Lee’s, “and picture it becoming a sphere.”
Lee stares at the sand hard and nods, focused and intense.
“Now, feel the flow of your chakra through your body.”
Lee wrinkles his nose, brow furrowing.
“This should sort of be like opening a gate, I imagine, but instead of sending the chakra to your muscles, I want you to focus on sending it just through the palms of your hands.”
Lee bites his lip. There’s a burst of light, and the sand explodes. Granules rain down, sprinkling the both of them with sediment.
Lee barks a laugh, his eyes wide and awed.
“Gaara!” he cries. “I did it! That was my first ever ninjutsu!”
Gaara can’t help but give Lee a fond smile in return.
“That was a good first try,” he says. “Now, let’s practice your control.”
They pass much of the evening that way, until Lee is able to successfully render an uneven ovoid figure from the sand. It’s not the perfect sphere that Gaara was able to evince at a mere 5 years old, but it’s something. Lee has a delighted grin on his face even as he begins to yawn.
“It’s getting late,” Gaara says. “We should try to get some rest.”
“Mmm,” Lee agrees, still fiddling with bits of sand in the air.
Gaara walks to the balcony door and pulls it open with a screech of metal on metal.
Lee emits a low cry, clapping his hands over his ears.
“What’s wrong?” Gaara says in alarm, moving to Lee immediately and pulling his hands down.
Lee shakes him off, jiggling his shoulders as he brushes past Gaara and back into the apartment.
“It’s nothing, just- “ he sighs. “I didn’t realize you were so sensitive.”
Gaara follows him, closing the door behind them with a slam.
Lee jumps.
“Ah!” he says. “Like that, that’s what I mean. It’s like your body can’t stop feeling. I can feel every hair on the back of my neck, every thread in your clothes, every grain of sand on my skin!” Lee shifts his body in discomfort. “And that light, did you know that lightbulb makes a buzzing sound?” Lee points to the lamp over his kitchen table. “Because I didn’t before today!”
“I’m sorry,” Gaara says. “I was so preoccupied with my own pain, I didn’t realize you were in discomfort.” He reaches out, to cup Lee’s neck and draw it towards himself, but stops. Perhaps it would be too much.
“It’s kind of overwhelming,” Lee confesses. “Is it like this for you all the time?”
Gaara pauses to consider. He has always experienced the hypervigilance, the heightened arousal, the feeling of always teetering on a knife’s edge, waiting for the other shoe to drop. As a child growing up and dodging assassination attempts, it seemed natural to be constantly on the lookout for the next attack. And, of course, his sand shield had protected him from most outside stimuli until he was nearly a teenager. Even as he grew older, as a shinobi, and then as Kazekage, he needed to be wary of coup attempts and the devious machinations of opposing forces. In that sense, the hyperacusis feels comfortable to him, familiar even when it’s unwelcome.
“I suppose it is,” he says, at length.
“It’s exhausting,” Lee admits.
“You get used to it,” Gaara says with a wry smile. “Isn’t that what you said?”
They fall weary into opposite sides of Lee’s bed. Gaara finds his normal pillow far too plush, the indentation in the mattress a bit too small. He shifts so Lee can embrace him from behind, their natural position, and finds Lee breathing heavy on the back of his neck.
“Do you want to try being the big spoon?” Lee asks through a mouthful of thick hair.
Gaara nods, and they flip over, but Gaara finds he feels insecure with his back exposed to the unfamiliar room.
“This isn’t working,” he gripes.
Eventually, they roll to face away from one another, back-to-back. Gaara can feel the jaggedness of his body’s vertebrae digging into his own muscled spine. Lee keeps turning his pillow over, kicking the blankets off and then pulling them back up.
“Why is it so itchy?” he whines.
Sleep does not come easily.
Gaara wakes up stiff and sore. He stretches his back in the way that Lee showed him yesterday; it cracks satisfactorily, but the ache in his limbs remains.
Lee rolls over to face him. It’s still startling to see his own face looking back at him from the other side of the bed.
“How did you sleep?” Lee asks, his voice rough.
“Terribly,” Gaara admits. “I couldn’t get comfortable and I kept waking up with muscle cramps. And you?”
“The same,” Lee says. “Did you hear all that whispering? It kept me up half the night.”
“Ah,” Gaara says thoughtfully. “That would be Shukaku’s chakra. I didn’t think to warn you.”
“I was kind of worried he was going to show up and try to talk to me or something,” Lee blurts. “The whispers were scary enough on their own.”
“He doesn’t come anymore unless I call him,” Gaara says. “Our connection is more … tenuous, now.”
Lee hums, flopping over onto his back.
“I had nightmares,” he says, staring at the ceiling. “Horrible ones. There was so much blood. I’ve never seen anything like it. Is that Shukaku’s doing, too?”
Gaara rubs at a knot in his shoulder, weighing how best to reply.
“No,” he says finally. “That’s just … me. I didn’t think that would carry over.”
Lee shuts his eyes, then blinks them back open. His gaze is distant.
“How do you sleep at all?” he asks.
“I could ask you the same thing.”
Lee chuckles.
“Did you dream?” Lee asks.
“Not at all,” Gaara says.
“I never do,” Lee admits.
They move through their day slowly, orbiting one another in an awkward ellipse. Temari calls around lunchtime, and Gaara mistakenly answers the phone, then has to pretend that he’s Lee. He can hear the suspicion in her tone and regrets that he can do little to alleviate it.
Late in the afternoon, they’re summoned back to the hospital.
Haruno seats them in matching chairs, side-by-side, and Yamanaka stands before them.
“Okay,” Yamanaka announces, “we’re pretty sure that we’ve figured out how to get you two back to normal. If all goes well, you should experience another period of brief unconsciousness and then wake back up in your own bodies again.”
“And if it doesn’t go well?” Lee asks haltingly.
Yamanaka frowns, silent.
“Well,” Haruno says over the empty air, “either you’ll stay like you are now … or something else might happen. There’s a small risk that both of you could get stuck in one body, or that only part of your mind transfers back… “
Lee pales.
“... but, I’m pretty sure that won’t happen. Ino’s been practicing on a lot of frogs since yesterday.”
Yamanaka nods, her nose in the air. She presses her fingertips together, forming the hand seal of the Mind-Body Transfer jutsu.
“Wait!” Gaara blurts, compelled by some unseen impulse. “What if we just … stayed like this?”
Lee turns to stare at him, mouth agape.
“What?” Haruno asks, her voice faltering.
“You can’t be serious,” Lee says.
“Lee, you live in so much pain,” Gaara says. He reaches out to grab Lee’s hand, odd to feel it smaller than his own. “How can I give this back to you, knowing what it’s like?”
Green eyes well up with tears.
“It’s not so easy in your body, either,” Lee says.
“But it’s nothing like this. Every moment is an agony. I can’t let you live like that.” Gaara’s voice wobbles. He clenches his eyes shut - damn Lee’s overactive tear ducts.
“Gaara, it’s my body. It’s my pain. It’s not yours to choose to give or take away,” Lee says. “It’s painful, yes, but it’s pain that I’ve earned. My pain is mine, just like yours is yours.”
“I- “ Gaara starts.
“This is all very romantic,” Yamanaka interjects, “but please be practical. You really think the Suna Council would just let bowlcut here show up and start running the place? That body of his can’t even do a ninjutsu, not to mention the political implications… “
“That’s so rude,” Haruno scolds her. “Can’t you see they were having a moment?”
Gaara turns to glare at the both of them. Coming from Lee’s typically cheerful face, he finds its effect is much reduced.
“But Ino’s right,” Haruno concludes. “Also, your sand would probably wreck the place.”
The sand in its twin gourds hisses its agreement.
“So that’s settled,” Yamanaka says, flicking her fingers back into position. “Nighty-night, you two.”
Gaara awakes to lights that are far too bright and sheets that scratch his skin. He looks down at his hands: pale and unscathed, and his feet: short and angular, tucked into abrasive hospital sheets.
A cable of sand slithers up his bed, carrying both halves of his gourd. He picks it up and brings the two halves together. Chakra flows easily through his fingertips; the sand wraps itself around the fracture and seals it back together. The sand traipses its way back into the gourd’s aperture, rattling merrily.
Gaara sets the gourd on the side table, the movements of his limbs easy and free. He turns over to look at the bed next to him.
Big dark eyes blink back at him from under heavy brows.
“Welcome back,” Lee says, in his own voice.
“How are you feeling?” Gaara asks him. The sound of his own voice in his own head rings pleasant and familiar.
Lee sits up and stretches, cracking his neck.
“Achey,” he says, “but I’m fine. I actually kind of missed it, you know?”
Gaara rolls his eyes, but he knows what he means. There’s a comfort in the buzz of the fluorescent lights over head, the shocks that rattle through his system when someone wheels a noisy gurney past their door.
“So,” Lee says, “what do you say we stop by Gai-sensei’s on your way out of town? To brush up on your Tai Chi routines?”
Gaara whispers a curse.
“I had hoped you would have forgotten about that,” he says.
Lee laughs, the sound bright and pure and clear and unmistakably his.
“Not a chance!”