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In a castle made of shifting sand, there lived a beast.

The castle rose and fell into the earth with the rush and eddy of the breeze, rising in the mountains during a windstorm, then subsiding into the valleys in the wet season. It was in this way that Gaara’s siblings, cursed, were no longer able to find him. And how Gaara, the bestower of their curses and so many others, vanished before the source of his magic was ever traced.

It was a powerful magic that Gaara possessed. Powerful, and uncontrollable.

Only on the night of the full moon did the castle arise in the place it was built: the center of the desert, dug deep into the crater where a star once crashed to earth, surrounded by high stone walls. The castle was an impenetrable, lonely fortress.

Until the night a knock came on the door.

The sky was clear that night, the moon and the stars high and shining overhead, the desert air still and crisp with the last lingering coldness of the rainy season.

The knocking was so thunderous that at first Gaara thought the castle must have moved without his notice, a hailstorm now pounding at its doors. He hurried to the window, swaddled in his tawny fur cloak, and found the desert night untouched.

The door rattled once more.

A loud voice cried out, “Hello? Is anyone there?”

It had been a long, long time since Gaara had heard a human voice.

He hurried down the stairs in a panic, magic swarming thickly in his palms. He didn’t mean to; the magic came on its own in response to any surge of emotion, like the blood that pulsed through his veins when his heartrate rose.

He would curse this person as soon as he saw them, he knew it. Whether he wanted to or not.

As he reached the bottom of the grand staircase, the castle doors parted with just a gesture of his fingertips.

Standing shadowed in the door was not a person at all.

They were tall and broad-shouldered and scowling with a heavy brow. Muscles rippled beneath their thick blue skin, their dark head heavy with horns as jet black as their hair. And when they opened their mouth to speak, sharp tusks jutted from their lower jaw and up over their top lip.

It was an oni.

“Are you the witch?” the oni asked. They did not speak in the rough growl of a true demon, but in the high-pitched voice of a man.

“Have you come to kill me?” Gaara replied. He would have recognized his handiwork anywhere. The magic in his fingertips squirmed and surged in response to the magic crawling the man’s skin. If Gaara tilted his head at just the right angle, he could almost see the curse marks scrawled across that thick blue hide.

But though he knew the signs of his own magic, the demon darkening his doorway was a stranger. Perhaps they had merely brushed shoulders in a crowd, and Gaara had startled. Perhaps he had been sleeping out under the stars on a night when the castle arose in a nearby forest, and had been snared in the lashing magic of one of Gaara’s nightmares.

Gaara’s magic leaked, and repeated curses were only ever deadly. It had happened to his mother, and then his uncle, and then his father—though Gaara felt, privately, that perhaps his father had deserved it. But the innocent did not, and that was why it was best he stayed confined to his castle, constantly on the move, where nobody could find him.

And yet somehow this creature—this man—had.

The demon in the doorway frowned, the broad corners of his fanged mouth drawn down beyond his chin. In the moonlight, Gaara saw the spit shining on those massive teeth and pictured them piercing his throat.

He wouldn’t fight, if it came to that, but his magic would, entirely against his will.

“I know my appearance is frightening,” said the oni, “but I mean you no harm! I heard that a witch lived here.”

His voice was bright and jovial, and in its wake the magic in Gaara’s palms subsided with the falling of his hackles.

“I’m the witch,” said Gaara.

The beast in the doorway laughed. It was not a human laugh. The sound was like trees crashing in the forest and animals crying at the moon, like stone rolling down mountainsides and flocks of birds bursting into terrified flight. It was the noise that a force of nature made.

“You’re awfully small for a witch!” the oni chortled.

Gaara merely narrowed his eyes, drawing his thick furs tighter around him. The demon’s bulk blocked most of the door, but the desert night still nipped at him with sharp teeth.

“My name is Rock Lee,” said the oni. “Though many call me the Blue Beast of Konoha!”

“Gaara,” said Gaara, though many called him a monster. “How did you find this place?”

“I heard a story—well, a rumor, really—that there was a witch who lived in this desert. A powerful sorcerer who might be able to undo my curse. I’ve been wandering around for quite a while, but I never give up once I’ve set my mind to something! And tonight I heard a rumble in the distance … When I saw something rising up from the sand, I ran here as fast as I could.”

The name of Lee’s village was familiar to Gaara; his castle had appeared in the thick forests that surrounded it many times. So many of the villagers had been cursed by his unwieldy magic that it was no surprise that whispers of his presence had followed.

“That was foolish,” said Gaara. “It could have been a sand serpent, and then you would be dead.”

Sand serpents were numerous in the broad, untouched expanse of Suna’s desert, and they could grow to be as large as trees or even buildings. Their bite was instantly fatal, when they deigned to bite. More often, they simply swallowed their prey whole.

“I was willing to take my chances,” replied Lee with a toothy grin. “I’m pretty tough in a fight!”

It was difficult to deny that Lee’s musculature was impressive. He carried it with such ease that Gaara wondered if he had been strong before the curse, if that trait was what his magic had decided to seize upon and distort.

Or perhaps he had just been cursed for a very long time.

The magic wriggled down Gaara’s arms. He clenched his fists.

“Come inside,” he said. “There’s no shelter out there for miles.”

Gaara may have been a monster, but he wasn’t that sort of monster.

He turned to stalk off, but paused when he heard no footsteps behind him.

Lee had crossed the threshold, but now he lingered, one scarred, clawed hand outstretched.

“Um,” he said, “how do I close the … ?”

Gaara snapped his fingers, and the sand sealed shut behind him.

Gaara did not sleep that night.

He did not sleep many nights—in fact, he had not slept the previous three—but this wakefulness was particular. Knowing someone he had cursed was so close, anxious guilt plagued him.

The castle was in theory as infinite as the grains of sand in the desert, and so it had been no trouble for Gaara to install Lee in a room in the farthest reaches of the east wing, as far from Gaara as he could be while still remaining under the sand’s protection.

Then Gaara had climbed the tower, high and spiraling, and barred the door.

There was a small porthole window that looked out into the black night, and in the moon’s pale light Gaara could see the magic seething in the thin skin of his inner wrists, purple pushing away the blue of his veins.

If he slept, it would drain right out of his fingers and into the nearest living thing. There was not much left that Gaara had not cursed into oblivion. So in this barren desert, the nearest living creature was the oni whose thundering snores Gaara could hear even now, echoing up the tower to rattle the floor.

If Gaara were a lucky man, he could have used his magic to keep himself awake. But Gaara’s magic was only good for one thing: curses.

So he was constrained to cups of thick, dark coffee and brittle willpower, his fingers clenched in a death grip: one around the mug’s handle, and the other on his knee to dig his nails in if he felt himself start to doze. When the nodding of his head became too precarious, he took to his feet and marched down the tower stairs and back up them again, tapping his fingers against the rough grain of the sandy walls. The rhythm soothed him, and at times he could almost believe that the texture pushed the magic away, made his body comfortable and still.

Eventually, the sun rose. The castle subsumed into one pink-crested dune.

“You made breakfast,” said Gaara.

“Yes! It was the least I could do to pay back your hospitality.”

There was a truly prodigious spread laid out across the counters, the larders emptied and more food than Gaara would have eaten in a week simmering away in carafes and cauldrons that had been untouched for years, last unearthed when the castle hosted company.

Gaara was not sure how Lee had found his way to the kitchen, through the winding labyrinth of the castle’s sandy halls. He also was not sure where Lee’d found the ruffled apron he wore over his mossy green loincloth. It looked like something his sister might have been gifted once, though Temari would have never been caught dead wearing something so prissy.

“There’s coffee brewing for you, too.” The flat bridge of Lee’s nose wrinkled as he sniffed the air. “I thought I smelled you drinking it last night.”

Perhaps he’d located the kitchen by smell alone.

“Do you sleep up in that tower?” Lee asked. “The one with the narrow stairs?”

“Sometimes.” Gaara accepted a clean mug from Lee’s taloned fist, and then got to work setting the table. “You should never go up there. It could be deadly.”

“Oh,” said Lee, his eyes gone wide. “Is there some sort of cursed artifact up there or something?”

“Or something,” Gaara agreed, laying out spoons and linens.

“Well, all right.” Lee hummed as if deep in thought. “I wouldn’t want to impose on your privacy regardless.”

When they were sitting across from one another at the round little table—a small bowl of rice and salted tongue in front of Gaara and a mixing bowl-sized portion in front of Lee—Lee looked up at him with a smile.

“So, when do we start?”

“What.”

“You know, the … er, the un-cursing? Curse reversing?”

Gaara avoided his gaze, choosing to stare instead at the movement of the oni’s thick eyebrows. They raised first, eagerly. Then furrowed. Finally, they fell.

“Am I not supposed to ask?” Lee hazarded. “I know magic can be rather picky …”

“No,” said Gaara. “I can’t fix it.”

“But … you’re the witch! You must be tremendously powerful, to control this whole castle. Surely you can—”

“My magic doesn’t work like that.” Gaara stood, pushing back from the table with a screech of his chair. Already he could feel the shame of it writhing through his veins, down into his hands. “It can only do one thing. And that isn’t undoing curses.”

He pressed his palms to the table, and the dishes went flying into the sink with a crash. Already his power was getting the better of him. If he didn’t leave now, he risked turning Lee even more monstrous. Or worse.

“But—!” Lee cried, as Gaara fled the room.

The chair he’d pushed aside flipped over without him even lifting a hand, the pots and pans rattling in their racks. The patter of his own stocking feet and wheezing breaths chased him up the hall.

“I suppose I will wash the dishes then,” Lee muttered, just before the kitchen door slammed shut with a resounding crack.

“Should I leave?” Lee asked. “If you aren’t able to undo the curse, I mean.”

The evening had come upon them before Gaara knew it, and through the high, round windows he could see the surrounding scenery of the castle’s newest domicile. A jagged karst jutted from a mist-speckled forest, hollow towers of stone that looked like the homes gods might once have lived in. The setting sun’s beams caught in their precipices, its rays scattered into a patina of gold that drenched the landscape.

Gaara ran his fingers across the rough grain of the windowsill, warmed by the sun and by the fire Lee had stoked in the hearth of the largest parlor. He clutched the heaviness of his cloak around his shoulders, letting the scrape and the weight ground him.

“Do you even know how to get home from here?”

“What do you—?” Lee’s gaze followed his to the open window. “Oh! Where did the desert go?”

“The castle moves on its own every night,” Gaara explained. “Right now we’re somewhere north of the Land of Wind, near Amegakure.”

Gaara was no fan of the Village Hidden in the Rain. The constant showers made the castle walls damp and slow-moving, stinking of rehydrated death.

Lee’s mouth turned down around his jutting tusks.

“Then, when will we be back near Konoha?”

“I have no way of knowing,” said Gaara. “The castle’s movements are as unpredictable as a dune’s in a sandstorm. The only thing I can be sure of is that it returns to the middle of the desert on every full moon.”

“So I’m stuck here for a month?” Lee asked.

“Unless we crop up somewhere you recognize before then.”

Lee’s bulky shoulders slumped, his lips pursed. His leather-soled feet drummed the floor.

“Well,” he said finally, rising to his feet and stretching so that his claws nearly scraped the ceiling. “Do you have any work you need done around the castle? Idle hands only lead to trouble.”

Suspicion made Gaara’s magic scuttle under his skin.

“I’m sure I can think of something,” he replied slowly.

“Wonderful!” Lee smiled once more, all teeth. “A long wait is made more bearable by good company! That’s what my uncle always says.”

In the following week, Gaara learned more about Lee’s uncle than he did Lee himself.

“Uncle says that a clean home makes for a clear mind,” Lee recited, scrubbing the soot from the highest torch brackets—the ones Gaara couldn’t reach without a stepladder, and rarely bothered to—and relighting them.

“A heavy load is best borne by two, Uncle says,” Lee told Gaara, grabbing the opposite side of a full cauldron and hoisting it easily over his head with one flexing arm.

“Uncle says sunlight is the best nourishment,” said Lee, depositing an armful of leafy greens on Gaara’s kitchen table with a toothy smile, dirt streaked on his cheek from the field he’d taken them from, “but this is the next best thing.”

“Sunlight only burns me,” Gaara replied churlishly, turning over a leaf and plucking off a black-shelled beetle to crunch between his teeth. “This uncle of yours, he’s fond of his sayings, isn’t he?”

Lee nodded, fanged mouth stretched wide and beaming. “Uncle Gai is a veritable fountain of wisdom! He taught me everything I know! If I see him again …”

Lee trailed off. His body seemed somehow to become very small as he hunched in on himself.

“When I see him again …” he repeated. “When I—”

He sniffed noisily. Suddenly, fat drops of water were splattering the kitchen table.

“We’ll be back in the desert in just three weeks,” said Gaara with some awkwardness. He felt abruptly fidgety, uncertain how to offer comfort. “Konoha’s only a three-day journey from there.”

“It’s not that.” Lee took off the too-small gardening hat he’d commandeered from Gaara’s wardrobe and mopped his eyes with its floppy brim. “It’s … more complicated than it seems. My appearance is, um, rather frightening to the villagers and … Uncle Gai wants to protect me.” The hat crumpled in one blue fist. “He shouldn’t have to protect me.”

“Oh …” It had been a long time since Gaara had seen the effects of his curses so profoundly, when he was usually gone by sunrise. He still had not slept, and his nerves were starting to fray. “Surely you can protect yourself?”

Lee slammed one massive fist into the table so hard that Gaara’s magic escaped his hands and withered the pile of greens between them.

“You’re right!” Then Lee was on his feet, at his full, intimidating height. “I can protect myself. Even if I never manage to undo this curse, there’s no reason I should trouble Uncle Gai with it! I just need to find a way to forge my own path. Then I can take care of the both of us.”

Gaara nodded, though he did not truly understand what Lee was talking about. He ran his fingers down the wood grain of the table, pretending it was sand to slow his thundering heart. The magic retreated back up his veins to the safety of his core.

Lee’s clawed hands spread the hat back out on the table, trying to unwrinkle it into a state of repair. He looked up and out into the distance, then back down at Gaara.

“You have given me much to think about!” He smiled, crookedly, around his jutting tusks. “You really are a very clever witch.”

Gaara swallowed hard, pinned by the intensity of that grin. “Um. Thank you.”

“No, thank you!” Lee clapped the wrinkled hat back on his head. It clung, tilting, to one of his horns. “Now, what would you have me do next? I find I think best when I’m occupied.”

Gaara was at a loss; the castle had never been so clean as it had been since Lee arrived. And he could not think of anything he would rather have Lee do than stand in his kitchen, smiling at him like that and encouraging him to eat his greens. But even he was not so inept as to think he could say something like that.

He should not have been taking advantage of Lee’s kindness this way, knowing what he’d done to him. What he wasn’t able to do for him. But Lee seemed to truly relish in the grime of rough work, and Gaara supposed it was better than having him lounge around the castle, bored, or rummaging through magical ephemera that could injure him.

“Could you … fill the basin and carry it to the washroom?” he asked, his hands suddenly crawling with a feeling that was not a curse at all. His skin itched. “I should probably bathe.”

Gaara toed the washroom door open with a creak.

“Nearly ready!” chimed Lee. “You always seem so cold, so I just wanted to heat the water a bit more—”

Through the porthole windows, Gaara could see the snow-capped peaks of the Land of Lightning, clouded with eddies of blown frost. But the washroom itself was humid, foggy from the steam that billowed from the overfull basin. Lee was crouched in front of a raging fire, the bare expanse of his marked back stretched and flexing while his hands stoked the wood.

“Take your time,” Gaara said, shrugging off his cloak and hanging it on the hook near the door. He slithered out of his shirt and untied the waistband of his trousers. “There’s not enough space in the tub for two, but you can wash after me.”

Lee stilled, hands to the fire, back still turned.

“I wasn’t thinking of that!” he yelped. “I wouldn’t dare impose on your hospitality. I can just bathe in the stream; the water there is perfectly clean.”

“That water’s freezing, Lee.”

“My skin is very thick. I don’t get cold nearly as easily as a human …”

On that thick skin, there was a scar. It arced near the base of Lee’s now rod-straight spine, larger and deeper than the rest. By the mottled firelight, it looked so dark it was nearly black.

Compelled by some unnamed force, Gaara crossed the room and ran his finger down it.

“What is this from?”

“Oh!” Lee stiffened, a shiver rippling down his skin as he turned. “Oh, I didn’t realize you were … Oh.”

His face went a strange, purple color—almost exactly the shade of Gaara’s magic. It should have sickened him, but instead he found himself wanting to see more of it.

The scar wrapped its way around Lee’s side, and Gaara kept his finger there, tracing the valley of it all the way to the top of Lee’s hip.

“Um,” said Lee, gulping, eyes steadily averted.

“What happened?” Gaara asked again, insistent.

“Well—” Lee’s mouth worked busily. “I told you, Konoha’s inhabitants … They don’t want a demon roaming their village. They were scared I would harm them, and so …”

“They chased you out,” Gaara guessed.

“Yes.” Lee ducked his head, dark hair falling over his heavy brow. “That one was from a spear, I think.” He held his arms out and turned them, showing silver streaks on his inner forearms. “Torches.” He tilted his head to show pockmarks at the base of his throat. “Arrows.”

Lee hunched there, body all in shadow. With his thick hide and his fanged mouth, his horned head and his clawed hands, he should never have been so defenseless. And yet Gaara could sense, as much as he could feel his own magic seething in Lee’s skin, that this weaponed body had never drawn blood.

“Why didn’t you fight back?” he murmured. The skin of Lee’s old wound was textured and leathery, and he ran his finger up and down it like it was the castle’s sandy walls.

“I don’t wish to hurt anyone.” Lee’s big hands twitched, his gaze still turned away from Gaara’s bare skin as if to watch the fire. “I’m much, er, stronger than the average human. I need to be very careful not to … ”

“So you let them hurt you instead?”

Lee’s head hung low between his shoulders. “I ran.”

“No wonder your uncle wanted to protect you. You wouldn’t raise a hand in your own defense, so he had to—”

“He wasn’t supposed to!” Lee roared.

Gaara fell back, hard onto the thin linen of his underthings, his palms scraping the sandy floor to catch himself.

Lee’s dark eyes went wide.

“Oh, goodness. I’m so—” He clambered up to his knees, crawled halfway across the floor and grabbed both of Gaara’s wrists to pull him upright. “I’m so sorry! This is exactly what I mean, it’s better if I—Oh, those are going to scab. Wait right there, I’ll get something to clean them out—”

“It’s fine.” The writhing purple of magic was threatening at Gaara’s fingers, so he tore his hands away. “I’ll rinse them in the bath.”

“Right.”

Lee stood, and Gaara realized once more just how small he was beside Lee’s towering form. He fisted his stinging hands at his sides, gritting his teeth at the magic that threatened to escape him.

“You should go,” he said, only because he couldn’t himself leave to subdue his magic, not just in his underthings in the frigidity of this tundra. And if one of them didn’t exit the room now, Gaara couldn’t guarantee that he could keep Lee safe. With every pound of his racing heart against his ribcage, the magic snuck further and further down his arms.

“Of course,” said Lee, his voice wet and choked.

At the door, he turned his head. Firelight flickered on his cheeks, turning the tears there to wet flames of their own.

“I really am terribly sorry,” he said. “People only ever get hurt because of me. That’s the real curse of this body.”

“Steady there!”

Lee’s cry was so loud that Gaara jumped, the books in his hands hovering midair before tumbling to the ground. He barely refrained from jettisoning a curse across the room and straight into Lee’s bare chest.

“Lee,” he breathed, flexing his fingers and willing the writhing curses to subside. “Don’t scare me like that. I nearly cursed you.”

“I apologize,” Lee said, nonetheless hurrying across the library to stand at the base of the rickety ladder Gaara was perched upon. “I was worried you might fall.”

“I almost did.” Gaara clutched one of the shelves for purchase and began searching the rung below him with the toe of his slipper.

“You could have asked me for help.” Lee’s voice was all earnestness, much too close for how high up on the ladder Gaara was. “I would have gladly lifted you. Here, let me—”

And then large, taloned hands were around Gaara’s waist, nearly engulfing him. Lee hoisted him into the air as easily as he’d toted the overfull washbasin up the tower’s rickety staircase. Gaara flailed, but Lee only held him more closely, lowering him gently until he was cradled against Lee’s broad chest.

Gaara inhaled, shaky. Lee’s skin smelled like pine forest and cursework. His grip, while strong, was surprisingly tender.

Gaara’s knees knocked when Lee set him on the ground. He grabbed for Lee’s forearms to steady himself.

“Are you all right?” Lee’s voice had gone slightly high-pitched. “You’re shaking.”

“I’m fine. I just need to sit down.” Fatigue weighed on him, warring with the racing of his heart to make him tremble. He freed Lee from his grasp and made his way to the library’s tanned leather couch to collapse in its seat.

“I don’t know why the villagers were so afraid of you,” Gaara muttered, while Lee stooped to gather the dropped books. “If they could see you doing things like this …”

“There are a lot of old tales about oni,” said Lee, setting the books on a table within Gaara’s reach. He looked around the room—at the little armchairs with their fancy, embroidered cushions and the spindly wooden footstools—and then sat, painstakingly, on the couch right next to Gaara. “And I have hurt people, before.”

Their knees were touching through the thick fur of Gaara’s cloak. He adjusted the fall of it around him to feel Lee’s skin better. It was rough, scratchy like the castle’s walls. He rubbed his leg against it, shivering.

“No you haven’t,” he said. “If you had, I would be able to sense the blood on you.”

They were on the border of Wind Country today, and the library was high enough in the castle that Gaara could see the jagged hillocks and overhangs of Ishigakure through the open window, faded red stone that gave way to sand in the valleys where its people lived, protected by the mountain passes.

Lee turned away, his eyes fixed on the grey skies above. He did not move his leg; it settled like a lead weight against Gaara’s.

“It’s not that simple,” he said finally. “My uncle … It’s not that I injured him, but he was badly wounded because of me. When I couldn’t calm the villagers, I fled to his house first. They had torches, and I suppose they thought they could smoke me out, and …”

“So it was the villagers who hurt him,” Gaara asserted. “Not you.”

“It was the roof beams that hurt him,” said Lee, gravely. “He’ll never … he won’t walk again. And if I had just been able to talk the villagers down—”

There was a tearing noise. Gaara looked over Lee’s lap and found the couch’s seat had torn beneath his claws, stuffing spilling out like sheep freed from their paddock.

“I’m so sor—” Lee began, those dark eyes gone huge once more.

“Stop.” Gaara grabbed Lee’s defensively raised hand and lowered it back to his lap. “People judge others by their appearances. You can’t control that.”

Lee’s hand beneath Gaara’s tensed into a fist on his broad thigh. He was silent for a long moment, and then he said, “I suppose you would know, hmm? People must underestimate you an awful lot because you’re so small and lovely.” He bumped Gaara’s shoulder companionably with an elbow. “I know I did.”

The words made something seize in Gaara’s chest, iron bands where the muscle between his ribs should have been. Lovely. If only Lee knew what he really was, what he had really done. Magic began to trickle, purple and self-loathing, down his arms.

“I’m a hundred times more deadly than you are,” he said, pulling his cloak close around him.

Lee muffled an earthquake of a laugh. “I don’t know about a hundred,” he said. His voice was warm with mirth. “If you were really dangerous, you’ve had plenty of opportunity to hurt me before now. Why, you don’t even have any scars—”

Gaara was looking away, and so he didn’t see Lee’s large hand rising up before the backs of his knuckles brushed his cheek, tucking the hair behind his ear.

Magic surged with a sickening lurch down past his elbows, through his forearms and into his wrists. He was trying to hold it at bay, but his mind—his willpower—was so tired, his every last impulse hanging on a nerve’s edge. He balked gracelessly to his feet, barely holding himself upright on the arm of the couch.

“If you’re going to blame anyone,” he spat, “then your uncle’s injuries are the fault of the person who cursed you.”

“Gaara?”

He heard Lee standing behind him, but he was already stumbling through the room, plunging through piles of books and upending the side table with the clumsy drag of one exhausted foot. The coffee cup he’d set aside shattered with a tinkle of bone china. His hands were crawling now with veins of purple magic, writhing on his fingertips like maggots. His face was hot with shame. The shelves rattled in their moorings, throw pillows rent to shreds as he passed.

How much longer could he really keep Lee safe within his castle walls? How much longer could he rein in his emotions, when they only seemed to grow wilder and more unfamiliar by the day? How much longer until he slipped, and finally cursed Lee fatally?

With the way his hands were shaking, it seemed he had no time left at all.

But there was the window, just ahead of him.

Lee cried, “Wait—!”

And Gaara threw himself through it.

The castle’s battlements rose to meet him with a hiss, sand sloughing from walls and doorways to ease his descent. He skidded on his stomach, his cloak turned to wings of fur behind him, his awful hands stretched forward, as far away as he could push them.

His journey ended with no more elegance than it had started. He struck the ground at pace, and beyond the castle’s walls the sand did not cushion him. He tumbled, foot over head over foot again, until he came to a panting, heaving stop.

But they were near enough to Wind Country still, and that meant the desert’s tunnels were beneath him.

He plunged both hands—more curse than skin, now—into the earth, groping, searching deeper until—There.

His fingers fastened like claws around scales and muscle and he pulled upwards with all his might.

A sand serpent came cracking through the sandy soil, its jaw wide and fanged, its tail curling around Gaara’s forearm as if to choke.

Gaara shut his eyes and channeled every last bit of magic in his hands into the beast’s body.

He felt it thrashing, writhing in his grip. Heard its shriek that faded into whines and then eventually to silence.

When he opened his eyes, there was nothing in his naked palms but smoke.

And when he turned, Lee’s slack-jawed face hung from the open window overhead.

From the soggy swamps of the Land of Whirlpools, Lee brought back a basket of eels.

“Did you catch these all yourself?” Gaara asked, as Lee tipped them onto the table for Gaara’s filleting knife. Their slippery bodies narrowly missed the open top of the rough hewn, Lee-sized coffee mug they’d picked up in Ishi, and which Gaara had quickly commandeered for his own.

“A fisherwoman gave them to me in exchange for patching her boat!”

The motions of skinning, gutting, and deboning were natural to Gaara, so he didn’t look up from their rhythm when he asked, “She wasn’t afraid?”

For a moment, there was nothing but the quiet clatter of Lee depositing coals beneath the stovetop, the swish and sizzle of a struck flint.

“I suppose she was more afraid of capsizing than she was of me,” Lee said thoughtfully.

“Or the people of Konoha are uniquely prejudiced against the cursed,” Gaara replied, sweeping fragile little bones into a bucket for disposal.

He looked up from his last filet to find Lee standing across the table, his broad hands clenched on a chairback, his heavy brow drawn down. The chair screeched as Lee pulled it back and sat, heavily, on its too-small seat.

“Do you think the person who cursed me meant to do it?” he asked.

Gaara looked away from the heaviness of his eye contact, dipping the point of his knife into flesh to pick at some imperfection that didn’t exist, flicking it away.

“How would I know?” he lied.

“Well, you’re a witch,” said Lee. “And after what you did to that snake … that was a curse, wasn’t it?”

“So?” Gaara’s eyes sat steadily on the pile of flesh between them, unctuous and glistening. His magic bit between his shoulderblades, subdued by its recent eruption but only just.

“It didn’t look like you could control it. It looked painful.” Lee’s voice had dropped, soft and gentle, hesitant. “More and more, I’ve been thinking … I can feel the curse inside me, but sometimes it doesn’t feel like malice. It feels like … fear.”

“Fear can be just as destructive as evil,” Gaara said. “Your villagers taught you that.”

One taloned hand pushed aside the heap of eels, reaching across the table but never seeming to make it to its destination. It stopped, lingering, on the rocky handle of the mug.

“I can only feel badly for whoever did this to me,” said Lee.

“You shouldn’t.” The magic was starting to rise again, squirming across Gaara’s shoulderblades like rotting wings, sluicing down his arms like the juice of the offal starting to stain the table. “Hateful people curse others.”

“Hateful?” Lee asked. “Or … hurt? If it hurt them as much as that curse hurt you … I can’t … I mean, this curse hasn’t even been all bad, has it?” A laugh broke out from him, bright and staccato, like kindling crackling in the fire. “I got to meet you, after all!”

“You shouldn’t think so lightly of curses,” Gaara said darkly.

Before Lee could reply, there was a spattering sound, a hiss, a puff of steam.

Gaara said, “The cauldron’s boiling over.”

“Oh!” Lee stood. “I should get these simmering, then!”

Dinner that night was quiet.

The castle was on the crumbling banks of Otogakure when Gaara lost control.

He had barely made it through the day, blinking back sleep every time his head nodded over his books. Lee had urged him to go to bed early, and though Gaara had assented under duress, he had planned to do nothing in his tower but pace and drink coffee.

His hand was cupped around the warm bowl of Lee’s oversized mug when sleep dragged him under.

It was a fitful, restless thing. He was at once watching the dreamscape and desperately clawing the reaches of his own mind for the brink of wakefulness, like a man trapped in a sinkhole of his own making.

In the dream, his mother was wrapped in bedsheets and he cursed her until the sheets were the blood red of rich tapestry. In the dream, his uncle tried to reach for him and he cursed every last one of his fingers until they blackened and fell off. He cursed his father into a pile of gold dust that blew away on the wind. He cursed his sister into a paper doll and cut her to ribbons with scissors. He cursed his brother’s puppet body until it shattered into splinters.

He grabbed Lee to his chest, kissed him and then cursed him. He gazed into a looking glass and saw the bones of his own face bubbling, writhing and distorting with curse marks, his eyes gone black and his skin turned purple-red and leathery. His head grew horns. The broad, blue-skinned body in his hands turned serpentine and then to smoke. Lee laughed, and it sounded like the whine of a dying snake.

“Gaara!”

The tower door slammed open like the report of a firecracker, snapping Gaara back to the land of the living.

His arms, his hands, even the puddles of his spilled coffee were crawling with magic.

Lee was standing in the tower doorway, his chest heaving.

“I told you never to come up here!” Gaara snapped, clenching his fists desperately like he could drag the curses back into his body. But it was too late. Curse marks were already crawling the sandy floor, making their way to the only other living thing in the room.

“You were screaming in your sleep. You sounded like you were in pain. I had to make sure you were all right.”

Gaara’s skin seethed. An indefinable feeling welled up in him. Was it fear? Shame? Hurt? Something more, something worse? It hardly mattered; in its wake came the curse, simmering and wriggling and poisoning. His body was wracked by shudders, his veins bubbling with cursed purple.

“Go,” he gritted out, his fingers scraping bloody on the floor, pulling with every ounce of magic in his body to slow the curse’s progress.

“But—”

“Leave!”

“If you’re in some sort of danger, I’m not going to leave you alo—”

“Now!”

And then Lee did the unthinkable.

He stepped right into that surging river of raw magic, wading through it like it was nothing more than a winter stream. He stooped down, wrapped his arms around Gaara, and squeezed.

The whole world went purple.

The light was painful when Gaara opened his eyes again, and he squinted against its brightness.

There was something filling his vision, something bulky and cursed purple, or— No. He blinked again. Not purple at all. Blue.

It was Lee. His frowning, worried face mere centimeters from Gaara’s.

What had he done?

He tried to throw himself from Lee’s arms, but it was like his body wasn’t listening to his mind’s commands. His limbs could only twitch sluggishly. He was aware, inasmuch as he was aware of anything, that his body was sprawled across Lee’s lap. He could feel Lee’s breath, cool on the clammy skin of his feverish brow.

“What did I do to you?” His mouth moved slow, his words slurred.

Lee chewed his lower lip between his tusks. “Nothing, I don’t think.”

“How?”

“I think all the magic went into … well, look around and see.”

Gaara turned his resisting head.

The room—the walls, the floor, the ceiling, even the sandy little plinth Gaara called a bed—had turned iridescent, shimmery with rainbows of refracted light.

The castle had turned to glass.

“I don’t understand. How?”

“Well, I’m the wrong person to ask, but …” A warm, broad palm cupped Gaara’s cheek. “I think you were trying to protect me.”

“That’s not how my magic works,” Gaara protested. The words felt as weak in his throat as they sounded to his ears. “It doesn’t make beautiful things or protect people or … any of that. It only ever curses.”

“Are you sure?” Lee’s gaze darted all over Gaara’s face.

“Yes. Everyone I’ve ever cared for has been cursed by me. I’ve never been able to control it. I cursed my parents and my uncle to death. I cursed my siblings and made it so they could never find me again. I even …” Gaara would not—could not—meet those dark eyes. He stared at the shining glass until hot tears stung him. “I even cursed you. Before I ever met you, I had already ruined your life.”

“I know,” Lee said, very quietly. “But—”

“What do you mean, you know?” Gaara still could barely move, but he could at least turn his head into Lee’s body to clench his eyes shut. Lee’s skin was warm and rough like sandstone, but Gaara did not give in to the impulse to rub his cheek against it. “I never told you anything.” The words came muffled from Lee’s broad chest. “I’ve been lying to your face for weeks.”

“I think I suspected from the moment I saw you reach for that snake,” Lee said. His hand was still a steady pressure on Gaara’s face, more grounding than even the weight of his cloak. “Or maybe even before then. Maybe that’s why I came looking for you in the first place. But once I stepped into your magic, I knew for sure. It was like something in me just … resonated. I could feel all your pain, all your fears.”

Water hit the side of Gaara’s face, and when he squinted out of the corner of his eye, he realized Lee was crying. Not big, heaving sobs like he’d seen before. Just the slow, steady trickle of fat droplets down the flat bridge of his nose.

“I don’t think you can only work curses, Gaara,” Lee said. “I think you can do so much more.”

“Based on a one-off fluke?” A sudden burst of energy surged through Gaara and he heaved himself up, still sitting in Lee’s lap, still clinging to his shoulders, his chest stuttering with the sudden exertion. “You have to leave. If you stay here, it’s just a matter of time before I lose control for real and curse you again. And repeated curses kill. I’ll kill you.”

“I don’t think you will.” Lee’s clawed thumb gently pushed Gaara’s hair behind his ear, and though Gaara could feel the terror of a curse rising up in him, his body was too drained to do anything with it. “And I don’t think this was a fluke, either. I’ve seen you do more with your magic. You just don’t realize you’re doing it. It’s certainly not been me rattling the pots and pans whenever you’re upset. Or floating books down from the library shelves. Even the castle—as soon as I got here it was like the magic in my body knew it had reached its source. Its home.”

Gaara’s chest constricted. The curse wavering towards his veins shriveled and died at the base of his spine. In every resonance of the glass palace around him, he could feel the truth of Lee’s words.

“You said you wanted to keep your brother and sister away …” Lee began. “... Couldn’t it be how you protected them? If even you don’t know where the castle moves next, you can’t help them find their way back to you.”

Gaara remembered the day the castle formed. How cursed energy had crawled from his hands towards Temari’s flat, blank face, towards Kankuro’s stiff joints. How the sand of the desert had risen up like a fortress between them, walled Gaara off and swallowed him whole.

At the time he’d thought it a blessing from the gods. Or a benediction from his dead mother, who Yashamaru said had sworn to protect her children even from each other.

Now he recognized it for what it was. His own will, his own protective instinct resisting harming his siblings further.

Lee’s fingers stroked the hair back from Gaara’s forehead, drawing his attention back to the present.

“Oh,” said Lee, still softly. “You do have a scar after all.”

Gaara ducked his head away.

“My curse mark,” he clarified. “The way my father sealed my magic after I killed my mother. His way of trying to protect the family from me.”

Lee pressed one clawed finger to it, traced its shape.

“The magic feels very strong here,” he said. “And … twisted. I don’t know how to describe it.” He drew his hand back as if burned, hissing and sucking his finger into his mouth.

“See? I’m hurting you.”

Gaara tried to pull away, but Lee held him firm.

“I’m fine.”

Gaara slumped in his arms. He wanted to believe it. He wanted to believe so much. He wanted to be capable of protection, of affection, of creating kind and beautiful things.

“Are you sure …” Lee faltered. “I don’t mean to besmirch your father’s memory, but are you sure he told you the truth? Could it actually be the case that the curses come from here? From the mark he put on you?”

“I …” Breath wheezed in Gaara’s lungs. Through the window, he could hear waves crashing on the rocky coast, how the sound made the castle’s walls hum. “I don’t know that it matters.”

He sat upright, of his own accord now. There was something new in his veins. A swell of warmth, of light. It felt like determination. It felt like … love.

“What matters is whether I can learn to undo all my curses.”

He spent the following week in the library. He paged through dusty tomes and skin-bound spellbooks whose spines cracked, probably last examined when his mother was still alive.

He rubbed his fingers on the smooth glass walls, studied the colors of it, the seaglass blues and bottle browns and crystalline whites. He found the places where it buckled and divoted, examined how it shifted under his touch, slow, like it was molten. And when that smoothness got too strange, he ran his fingers down the sandpaper roughness of Lee’s skin.

He dozed, off and on, his first true sleep in far too long, sometimes under his tawny cloak but more often under the grounding weight of Lee’s arms around him.

And he practiced. He practiced with lilies and lotuses and lettuce leaves, turning them withered black and then green again. He practiced with scarab beetles, uncurling their gilded legs so they scuttled again, turning their jeweled backs into wings that once more took to the sky. And with eels, turning their skins right-side-out and their bones from jelly back to cartilage. And finally, when he felt sure he had the knack of it, a sand serpent, shocked when its smoke reconstituted to thrashing muscle and snapping, venomous fangs in his hands.

At last he set his books down and closed them, dust motes puffing into the rainbows cast by the castle’s walls.

He took a thin, deep breath, looked up at Lee and said, “I think I’m ready. On the full moon, when we’re in the desert and my power is at its strongest … I can do this.”

And Lee smiled at him with his jutting fangs and replied, “Tomorrow night it is.”

The moon was high and full and it shone through the castle’s glass walls like the fletching of arrows, feathery and indistinct.

“Lee,” Gaara said, walking through the grand hall, dragging his fingers on the wall so the light smeared in their wake, “if this doesn’t work, I want you to know—”

A hand touched his back, warm even through the thick layers of his cloak.

“I know.”

At the door he turned and, with all the sincerity he could muster, looking straight at the place where Lee’s horns descended into the blue skin above his eyes, he said, “Thank you.”

Lee smiled, toothy and luminous. “Of course.”

The sand had already grown cold in the night air, and Gaara crouched down to lay his hands upon it. The choppy seas of his nervousness were overlaid by a cloud cover of surety. He had studied, and he had practiced, and he had done this already. Just never on so great a scale.

But he could do it. He had no choice. Too many people were counting on him. Lee, his siblings, perhaps hundreds of others across the lands he and his castle had traveled.

He could feel his magic in the core of him, rising up like a tide, pulled towards the full moon.

And tonight, instead of fighting it, he let himself be buoyed by that wave.

“Are you ready?” Lee whispered.

“I think so.”

One clawed finger brushed aside the hair on his forehead, and Gaara thought, in the nonsensical way that thoughts come when you are focused on something else, that this might be the last time he felt this touch, in this way. That the next time he felt Lee’s touch, it might be from a human hand.

The thought sunk leaden in his stomach.

The sand turned black from shadow as Lee bent over him. Lips, barely concealing teeth, brushed the mark on his forehead. Taloned hands rested heavy on his shoulders.

Gaara’s arms began to race with purple energy. His skin twitched and wriggled, his fingers pressed flat to the earth. He took one long, shuddery breath.

Then he let go.

It was like a great emptying. Energy flowed out of him like water, not as though poured from a spout but like from a basin that had been upended completely. It was within him and then, all at once, it was outside him, racing over the desert.

Purple marks slithered from his spread palms, twisting around one another, distorting, tangling and untangling as they skated over the sand. The wind that had once pushed his hair back from his forehead began to tug at him instead. Plants long turned to hollow chunks of stone and sand turned to brown wood and then to green leaves and then shrunk back down to seeds. The moon sank by inches in the sky as the world turned itself back.

There was, as it turned out, only one way to undo curses. You had to undo time itself.

Gaara’s vision started to black at the edges. Lee’s hands fell away from his shoulders.

It might only have been a trick of the light, but as his magic, moonlit, crested the farthest dune, it looked nearly red.

Gaara came to face-down on the ground. He sat up, retching and coughing, and scraped wet sand out of his mouth, hurling it aside.

“Lee?” he asked, in a voice as cracked and dried as salt beds.

The whistle of the wind through the regrown cacti was his only response.

Gaara heaved himself to his feet. Light, bright and terrible, shone from between the foggy glass panes of the castle’s walls.

The land had come back to life—birds croaked low and hungry from their nests in the scraggy trees; on the horizon, a jackrabbit stretched its legs and began to hop—but the castle had not changed at all.

Then, had the spell worked?

Gaara threw open the door with a shriek of glass-on-glass.

“Lee?” he called, down the long, shining entrance hallway.

“Lee?” he shouted at the books in the amber light of the library.

“Lee?” he asked, anxiously, his voice gone high in the bottle green of the kitchen.

“Lee?” he whispered, defeated, into the hearth that warmed the empty room in the lower east wing.

But all that met him was his own lonely echo, repeating back to him: Lee? Lee? Lee?

Of course, it only made sense. If Lee’s curse had been successfully broken, of course he would have left as soon as he was able. He had a village to return to, a beloved uncle, a whole life that had nothing to do with a cursed and lonesome sorceror who could barely control his own magic.

Gaara pressed his face into his hands and pulled back to find his fingers wet. Blood had stained them red where it had dripped from his torn-open curse mark. His palms were the rusty pink of pressure and sand-burn. He felt his forehead once more and found a bump—My fall must have been harder than it felt, he thought, until he groped over to the other side and found the lump’s twin.

He was growing horns.

Something banged in the distance. It was coming from the castle door, rattling in its frame as someone hammered on it.

Gaara rushed to it.

“Lee?” he asked, throwing the door wide.

“Who the hell is Lee?”

Gaara would have recognized that voice anywhere. Did recognize it.

Standing on the castle’s doorstep were Temari and Kankuro, utterly changed. Temari’s face was no longer parchment white, two-dimensional and expressionless. Now she scowled haughtily, her eyebrows drawn, wrinkles on her forehead where once there had just been the flat expanse of paper.

“Gaara?” she said.

And there was Kankuro, peeking over her shoulder, his face still painted but beneath it wonderfully human, his hands moving with joints of flesh and blood to elbow Temari aside and look at him.

“What on earth happened to you?”

“Temari, Kankuro …” Gaara dropped to his knees. “I’m sorry for cursing you. But I think I managed to undo them all, and I’ll never—”

More knees hit the sand. Arms swept around Gaara—warm, human, squeezing arms—and held him fiercely.

“We never cared about the curses,” Temari said, muffled into his hair. “We only ever worried about you.”

An awkward hand dropped down to pat him between the horns.

“Uh,” said Kankuro, “are we gonna talk about the fact that you’re an oni, now?”

With his siblings’ arrival, it was as if the castle had truly come back to life. Kankuro’s laughter echoed in the hallways; the sharp rap of Temari’s nails cracked along the shelves of the library.

“Love what you’ve done with the place,” Kankuro said, droll but genuine.

Gaara was grateful. Despite his own slow transmogrification, he was so thankful to have them back that his new claws and tusks hardly bothered him. At least he hadn’t grown; he was still small enough that his cloak fit, and his fresh black claws scraped the castle walls better than his human fingers had ever scratched at any sand.

Temari had theories about why this had happened to him: absorption of cursed energies during the reversal, a draining of the curse-magic that allowed another type to crop up in its wake. Or simply a reversion to his natural state.

“Father always said you were born a demon,” Temari said once, over a dinner with far more greens than Gaara would ever have accepted before. “I just assumed he was being metaphorical.”

Strangest of all was that the castle no longer moved. Its glass walls still bubbled and shifted in Gaara’s wake, in response to his emotions or desires, but the building itself was grounded in the center of the desert now, growing warm under the sun’s rays by day and cooling to an icy chill in the night.

On the coldest of those nights, Gaara still retreated to his tower. He wrapped himself in his cloak and cupped his hands around mugs of hot coffee and pretended the warmth he felt was from something else. On those nights, he dreamed fitfully of hot, strong arms around him, the texture of sun-heated sandstone.

A month on, the full moon came, and with it, the rainy season.

A barrage of droplets pelted the castle walls, making the structure ring like bells. Thunder cracked the sky and shook the walls, and lightning turned every room into a kaleidoscope of color.

Gaara nearly missed the knocking on the door for the din. Then he thought it a trick of his ears, some sad desperation bringing the curse of hallucination on him.

Eventually, Kankuro lolled over the arm of the chair he’d sprawled on and said, “Is anyone gonna answer that?”

It was Gaara, of course, who heaved himself to his feet and made his way trepidatiously down the main hall. Magic crackled red behind his breastbone but he willed himself not to hope. It could just as easily be a merchant hawking her wares. Or a once-cursed creature come to exact its revenge.

Lightning struck the desert as he opened the door, turning the world black and white and blinding.

And when Gaara blinked away the stars from his eyes, he saw a blue oni filling the doorway, a sand serpent slung across his shoulders like an offering, a bag of coffee beans beneath one muscled arm.

“Lee,” Gaara breathed.

Lee smiled, all tusks and fangs and water streaming down his handsome face.

“Gaara,” he said. “Just as lovely as ever.”

“You recognize me?”

“My heart would know you in any body.” Lee leaned across the threshold and tugged the collar of Gaara’s cloak, cheeky. “Plus, you’ve worn this every single day since I met you.”

“Come in,” Gaara said, grabbing Lee with one clawed hand and dragging him inside. “Dry off.”

In the kitchen, Lee swaddled in a bedsheet like it was a towel and propped up in a chair by the hearth, Gaara couldn’t stop himself from touching Lee’s face. His hide was still rough and sandpapery, scarred and deep blue. His horns still nearly touched the ceiling when he stood; his black claws threatened to gouge the wood of the chair’s arms.

“But …” Gaara said weakly, “I undid the curse. And you’re still … How?”

Lee shrugged. “I’ve never had that much of a mind for magic. I thought it might be because I was touching you when the spell went off. But seeing that the castle hasn’t changed either … maybe it’s just like I told you.”

“What did you tell me?”

“That I don’t feel especially cursed any longer.”

Gaara couldn’t bear it. Red tendrils of magic spread through his veins like the beating of a heart. He dragged himself away, busied himself with the rote motions of grinding the beans Lee had brought into coffee.

“And your uncle?” he asked, over the cranking of the grinder. “Why aren’t you home with him?”

“I was!” Lee’s taloned feet wriggled as they warmed by the roaring fire. “I woke up in my own bed in Konoha. But Uncle Gai has an old friend who moved in to help him. He’s doing very well. He doesn’t hold a grudge, but he also … he didn’t really need me any longer.”

“And you thought I did?”

Lee looked up at him, his face spattered with golden flecks of the fire’s warm light. “Was I right?”

“Yes.”

Gaara threw himself across the kitchen before he even completed the thought, unsure whether it was force of will or his own magic that carried his feet off the ground. Lee stood, the chair clattering to the ground, and caught him easily.

And Gaara kissed him. Senseless and desperate and messy, unbothered by the two sets of fangs they now had to contend with. He wrapped his arms around Lee’s thick neck and his legs around his bulky waist. Magic crackled through him like a forest fire and the kiss grew heated with it.

There was a sound from the door, a stifled noise of a throat clearing.

“So,” said Kankuro, Temari looking over his shoulder with her eyes keenly narrowed. “I’m guessing this is that Lee you mentioned.”

“Um, hullo!” said Lee, cheerful despite the tension. “I may be staying with you all for a while.”

“Forever,” Gaara corrected, and, heedless of his siblings’ watching eyes, turned to kiss Lee again.

In the castle made of shining glass, there lived two beasts.