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“Whoa, Lotus.” Lee tugged upon his horse’s reins to draw her up short. The mare paused just beyond the reedy banks of the lake and waited patiently as Lee dismounted and removed her leather mask.
“Let’s rest here,” he murmured, patting her flank as she dipped her head to drink. “I have ridden you too hard for too long.”
He removed his helmet and set it in the grass before he knelt at the water’s edge himself, cupping it in his hands and pouring it over his head to abate the heat of the day. The air was stifling, and beneath his armor the trickles of water did little to offer him any succor.
He sighed. Now would be the perfect time for a swim, if only he could muster up the courage.
Instead, he shucked his boots and socks, and, looking around to see that there was no one to observe him in his state of undress—of course, there never was—unlaced and tossed off his armor, hiked up his hakama, and submerged his legs into the water.
As Lotus turned her attention to munching reeds, Lee threw himself on his back to stare up at the cloudless sky. There was precious little shade here. On the borders of Konoha’s lands the foliage grew sparse, the air arid, the soil little more than red clay and sand. This lake was the first water he had stumbled across in quite some time.
He missed his homeland’s forests. But his quest had driven him to ever-farther reaches of the shogunate.
A splash stirred him from his reverie. Just a frog, he thought, or a fish leaping up to catch a fly.
Then it happened again. Louder, closer. The water around Lee’s knees rippled and then peaked into waves as if disturbed by some great weight.
He lurched up.
In the deep was a man’s head, half-submerged.
But that was impossible.
Lee rubbed his eyes. The man persisted. His skin was so pale it was nearly translucent, his wet hair blood-red where it dripped down his forehead, his eyes the green of kelp forests.
Surely isolation had driven Lee mad. Regardless, he called out, “Ho, there!”
The man came closer, until his shoulders emerged from the lake’s surface, swathed in a sodden white kimono. He moved as smoothly in the water as a swimmer born in Kirigakure.
“Aren’t you hot?” he said, in an accent Lee had never heard before. “It’s cooler in the water.”
“I’m plenty cool out here,” Lee replied, though he was sweating so thoroughly he could rival the man in the lake for dampness.
The man laughed, as though at some joke Lee was not privy to. It was a beautiful, tinkling sort of laugh, like the sound of raindrops plinking into a still pool.
Lee smiled awkwardly back, uncertain of the source of the humor.
“I won’t harm you,” said the man. “I’m not like that anymore.”
Lee eyed his weapons—his yari, his tanto, his bow and arrows—all still strapped to Lotus or laid aside. “I was not concerned until you said such a thing.”
The man laughed again, and Lee found himself sitting further forward, sliding his bare thighs into the mud to get closer to that sound.
It was then that he was reminded this could be no more than a heat-induced hallucination. He thrust his hands down into the water and scooped more of it over his head, saturating his kimono through to the skin.
He blinked water and bits of clay out of his eyes to find the man watching him, head tilted curiously.
“Please forgive me for asking,” Lee blurted, “but … are you real?”
The man lifted his hand from the water and turned it back and forth, considering. His fingers were long and thin, trailing iridescent droplets like jewels. “Of course I’m real.”
“But you can’t be.”
“And why is that?”
“Because I’m cursed!”
The water swam in gentle ripples as the man approached the bank, emerging up to his waist. His kimono was of such thin cotton that it was nearly transparent, and it clung to skin nearly as white as the fabric itself.
“A curse?” The man licked his lips. Though they were colorless, his tongue and the inside of his mouth were red. “What sort?”
Lotus gave a nervous whinny, tossing her head. Lee shushed her.
“The cruelest curse there is.” Lee’s fingers twisted in the reeds. “The curse of loneliness. I shall never see nor hear nor speak to another person—nor they, me—for the rest of my life.”
The water’s surface wavered, but the man came no further forward. “And how is it broken?”
“Broken?” Roots tore out under Lee’s fingers.
“All curses must be broken somehow.”
“Not mine.” Lee shook his head. “Or, rather, the conditions for breaking my curse are impossible! I must know the kiss of true love. But how can I, when I cannot come near enough another person for them to even see me?” He leapt suddenly to his feet, his toes squelching in the muck. “And that is why you cannot be real, because you being here means the curse must have broken, but it cannot have been because I have not been kissed!”
The man in the water blinked at him placidly, his eyelashes leaving specks like tears on his cheeks.
Lee ranted on, “Or perhaps now that you are here it means that the curse can finally be broken, because you can see me and hear me and speak to me, which means perhaps—” He gasped. “I do not mean to imply that—that! I’m sorry. I will leave.”
He gathered his armor hastily back to himself and tried in vain to dry himself with Lotus’ riding blanket.
“You’ll be back,” said the man in the lake.
“Pardon?” Lee begged, one bare foot already in the stirrup, his socks and boots thrown over the pommel.
“This is the only water for ri.” The man moved seamlessly backwards into the deep, submerging his waist, then his chest, then his chin until his last words came as just a burble. “All people have to drink eventually.”
Lee rode on.
“You may call me Gaara,” said the man, his head rising from the river next to which Lee had bedded down.
“What a strange name,” Lee murmured, half in dream. “Mine is Rock Lee.”
“A strange name,” Gaara parroted, a laugh trickling from behind his lips.
“My family does not come from Konoha.” Lee rolled over to nestle into the pillow he’d made of his pack, comforted by the nearness of Lotus and her whuffling noises of sleep.
A wet hand trailed its fingers along Lee’s spine. “Nor does mine.”
“I’m riding myself in circles!” Lee declared, throwing his helmet to the ground in frustration and dismounting onto sand and reeds.
Lotus nickered her agreement.
The only landmark was a nearby tree with its roots dipping invitingly into the water, from which Lee concluded that his travels had taken him around the lake to its far shore.
“Well, at least there’s some shade,” he grumbled, studying the interminable expanse of water before he set about untying his armor and stacking it neatly.
He was slumped in the crook of the tree’s roots, his ankles dangling into the water, sharing a persimmon with Lotus when he heard a mighty splash. Lotus startled and made to bolt, only stopped by Lee’s quick seizing of her bridle.
Heralded by the lazy stretch of arms in backstroke, a head of red hair approached, followed by a chest in soaking white cotton.
“Ah, Gaara-san!” Lee called, straightening.
“Lee-san.” A bubbling laugh emerged from behind pallid lips. “You recall my name.”
“I …” Lee faltered. Lotus tugged at him, and he let her shy away to graze. “... to tell the truth, I think I dreamt it.”
Still floating on his back, Gaara’s eyes twinkled from the sun caught on the lake’s glassy surface. “Strange dreams. I must have dreamt yours, too.”
“Did you swim over here?” Lee asked.
“When I saw you.” Gaara looked at Lee upside-down, his hair pooling around him like bloodspill. “I told you you’d be back.”
Lee held out a persimmon, and Gaara rolled to his stomach to regard it curiously.
“You must live close by,” said Lee.
“Something like that.” Gaara’s hand seized Lee’s wrist with unseemly strength. His skin was clammy, and water dripped down Lee’s forearm to pool in his elbow. With his other hand, Gaara took the persimmon and then backed away, holding it close as though to study it.
“I have not seen any houses in days,” said Lee.
Gaara turned the persimmon, staring into its stem as if it were an eye. “What is this?”
“You’ve never had a persimmon before?” Lee scrambled for his pack to retrieve more. “What a shame! They’re delicious.”
Gaara twisted the fruit this way and that, its skin growing slick from his hands. “You’re meant to eat it?”
“Of course!”
“Why?”
Lee was so taken aback by the question that he couldn’t muster an answer.
Gaara gave another quiet, plinking laugh. He tossed the persimmon back to Lee, who caught it easily.
“Thank you, but I don’t eat …” He seemed to search for a word, rolling it around on his red tongue. “... fruit.”
“Oh!” The wet persimmon slipped from Lee’s fingers, and he was so preoccupied trying to retrieve it from among the muddy roots that he entirely missed Gaara swimming away.
“How goes your quest for true love’s kiss?” Gaara asked, his thin chest in its drenched kimono draped over the roots of the trees on the shadiest bit of bank Lee’d yet to find.
Lee threw his head back until it banged against a tree trunk and grumbled, “Aside from Lotus, the only creatures I’ve seen in the past two weeks are squirrels. And I can barely snare those, much less kiss them.”
Gaara’s teeth showed when he laughed. They were white, and sharp as though they’d been filed. Perhaps that was the way things were done in Suna; the last time Lee’d had his bearings, he was certain he was close to its borders.
“You’ve seen me,” said Gaara.
Lee palmed the back of his head and found his hair smeared in mud from the tree bark. “I’m becoming increasingly convinced you’re a figment of my imagination.”
Gaara slithered down off the roots, and when he emerged closer to Lee, his cheeks were puffed out. Lee barely had a moment to look at him questioningly before Gaara spat a fountain of water directly in his face.
“Gaara-san!” Lee spluttered.
Gaara’s red tongue traced his lips. “Would a figment do that?”
“So, what is it you do?” Lee asked, to distract himself from how Gaara drifted on his back, his chest thrust up so the water pearled on his skin. “Surely it’s not your vocation to swim around all day, pestering passing samurai.”
“Do I pester you?” asked Gaara, his arms spread out, his wide sleeves billowing like wings.
“Well, a little.” Lee grinned at him. “But I’m happy for the company.”
Gaara gave him an unreadable look. “Only because it’s been so long since you’ve seen other people.”
“Even if I had all the friends in the world, I’d enjoy our time together,” Lee protested.
Gaara circled silently in the water for a long while, staring at the sky. “Perhaps I’m on a quest for love.”
Lee sat upright from the seat he’d made among the reeds. “Are you?”
“... No,” Gaara said sulkily.
His head dipped down beneath the lake’s surface. All Lee could see was the cloud of his clothing.
“So what is it you do do?” Lee called, hoping Gaara could still hear him underwater.
Gaara’s face emerged with a splash near where Lee’s toes kicked.
Lee’s heart stammered.
“I hunt,” said Gaara, close enough to touch.
“Oh?” Lee wished Gaara would climb onto the bank with him, to cool Lee down with his clammy skin and be warmed by Lee’s in turn. “Do you hunt by bow? I’ve been told I’m a capable archer; we could hunt together some day!”
“No,” said Gaara, showing his filed teeth. “We wouldn’t pursue the same prey.”
Lee guffawed. “You don’t need to say it so seriously!”
Gaara looked at him sharply. “Hush.”
“What?” Lee said, still giggling.
A cold hand seized him around the ankle, nails digging into his skin. “Hush. You must never do that, do you understand?”
“Do what?” Lee asked, bemused. “Laugh?”
Gaara’s grasp tightened on his ankle until it was bruising. His kelp-green stare was intense, unbreakable. His red tongue traced his bloodless lips.
“... Why not?” Lee whispered.
“Because there are creatures whose sole purpose is to lure men who’ve found the happiness they never had, and to drag those men down into the water to make them theirs forever.”
Lee’s brow furrowed. His breath shallowed. He tried, slowly, to tug his foot from Gaara’s grip and found himself held fast.
Then Gaara shook himself. His fist loosened. His eyes lost some of their fixedness. “You should leave,” he said. “There’s a river twenty ri away, but its water is sour. Don’t come back until you’re desperate.”
Desperation came much sooner than expected. After two weeks of heaving up vile water after every scanty meal, Lee let Lotus ferry him, scarcely conscious, to the edge of the lake. He collapsed out of the saddle and crawled on his belly to drink from its shallows without even removing his helmet.
When he heard a telltale splash, he didn’t even turn his head until cold fingers touched his cheeks.
“You’re half-dead,” Gaara murmured, gentling metal and leather from around Lee’s face. Clammy skin brushed dark spots into his clothing every place they untied tassels and lacing, leaving trails of damp across rows of lamellar. A flat-bridged nose nudged the underside of his jaw, and cold breath hissed between sharp teeth to say, “Dehydrated. And heatstruck. Quickly, into the water with you.”
Thin, strong arms grasped Lee around the chest and began to haul him down the bank. There was a slithering hush through the reeds. Lotus reared and whinnied.
“No,” Lee protested, swinging out with struggling arms for any purchase he could find and grasping at shallow-rooted plants that came loose in his fist. “Not in the water.”
“You must cool down,” Gaara insisted, dragging Lee despite how his thrashing heels dug into the mud.
“No!”
“Here, then.” Gaara lay Lee down where the shallows lapped at the periphery of his limbs. “So I can tend to you.”
Palmfuls of water were cupped into Lee’s gaping mouth, then more doused over his bared chest, his empty stomach, his naked legs. In the distance, Lotus stamped and snorted.
“Gaara-san,” Lee said, blinking up at a haze of white, “your kimono’s fastened backwards.”
“No, it isn’t.”
There was a black shadow in the corner of Lee’s sight, and he wondered idly whether that meant Gaara, too, wore hakama, even to swim. He grabbed for them absently and the fabric slipped under his fingers like rippling silk over steel.
Gaara’s hand bore Lee’s back until it was deep in the sucking mud.
Lee’s free hand, just as muddy as the one Gaara was restraining, slapped up and traced the right-over-left crossing of Gaara’s cold, wet chest. He pressed his palm there and waited for a heartbeat, before Gaara sallied that hand, too, back down to the earth.
“C’n I stay here, for a while?” Lee asked, squinting up into eyes so deeply green they could be seaweed tangling his ankles and feeling just as drawn in. “If I promise not to laugh? ‘M tired of looking f’r love.”
Gaara’s lips folded in, thin, showing the points of his teeth. Then he laid an icy hand across Lee’s eyes and eased them closed. “You can stay as long as you like.”
“Why do you not get in the water,” Gaara asked, circling at the edges of the tree cover so that the sun dappled his skin gold and blue, “even when it’s so terribly hot?”
Lee kicked his feet. The ripples rebounded off Gaara’s harsh cheekbones. “How could I, when you told me such tales? I don’t understand why you’re not more frightened yourself, as often as you laugh!”
“I only warned you recently,” Gaara’s slick mouth drawled, offering no excuses, “but this has been a longstanding pattern.”
Lee hesitated. “... The bank is plenty shaded.”
Gaara rolled to look at him, squinting the one eye that was not underwater. Through a mouth half-full of water, he said, “You didn’t get in even when it was barren.”
“I don’t swim,” Lee admitted.
That lone eye narrowed further. Lee wondered how Gaara had not yet found it fit to spit out the lake water surely pooling in his mouth. “You have a swimmer’s physique. You grew up in Konoha. Of course you swim.”
“I don’t like to swim,” Lee clarified.
Gaara drew himself upright, bobbing in the current his movements had created. A little crease formed between his brows, which until this moment Lee had never noticed were entirely bare, just promontories of sharp bone and blue-white skin.
“Why not?”
Lee winced. He yanked his feet from the water at the memory of bony fingers twining at his ankles, cold and slimy as weeds, inevitable as the current.
“Because the last time I swam, I nearly drowned.”
Gaara’s mouth hovered open, bloodless lips parted and all red inside.
“There’s a river in Konoha,” Lee went on, hearing its rushing in his ears. “It’s very deep, and very wide. It’s where we bathe, where we draw water. In the summer, all the children swim there.”
The lake was glass-still. The cloudless sky reflected in it.
“And I did, too,” said Lee. “I was a clumsy child and not good at much, but when it came to swimming, I was better than most. And one day, a little girl dropped her doll in the water.”
Her mother had purchased it in the city. Its heavy head with its horsehair wig and rouged lips was crafted from fine porcelain, and that was the way it sank, headfirst, like a diver.
The little girl had thrashed and wailed, lunging for the rushing water while her father held her back. Lee remembered, still, the tears on her scrunched-up cheeks, how her face looked painted with the same shining lacquer as the doll’s.
No one moved. They turned to one another and tutted, What a shame. What a careless child.
“I went after it.” Watched by a single beast with three dozen eyes, Lee—clumsy, foreign, gangly Rock Lee—had stripped down to his fundoshi and dove into the water face-down like the doll. “I was all the way at the bottom when I got my hand around it. The current is strongest down there. But—”
It wasn’t the current that had grabbed him. The current didn’t have claws. The current hadn’t prised his fingers one-by-one from the silk robes of the little girl’s plaything. The current hadn’t twisted and shaken Lee’s body like it was nothing more than a doll itself.
“They told me later that I got tangled in the reeds.”
Reeds with roots so deep that even a young man’s frenzied kicking couldn’t wrench him free. Reeds that laced around his ankles and between his toes and left long, thin bruises on his swollen feet.
Gaara’s eyes captured Lee’s, unblinking. “You didn’t believe them.”
Lee shook his head. “I know what I felt.”
“And what did you feel?”
“Hands.” Lee’s toes curled under himself. “I felt hands, pulling me down.”
Overhead, the sky was still. No birds sang in the trees. Even Lotus’ snorts were soft and subdued.
Suddenly Gaara asked, “What were you like, when you were younger?”
This gave Lee pause. His lips worked as he tried to contain a laugh. “Why, I suppose I was just like I am now, only smaller!”
Gaara’s head cocked like he was listening to something beneath the lake’s glossy patina. “Even your hair?”
“Oh!” Lee sat upright and patted self-consciously at his chonmage, rather grown out from his time questing. “I suppose that was different. I wore it quite long. In a—”
“—braid,” Gaara concluded with him.
“Well, we call it a queue. How did you—?”
“I have to go,” Gaara announced abruptly. He spun in the water as easily as if he were standing on land and began to swim away. Behind him flickered a black shadow.
“Gaara-san, wait!” Lee scrambled to his feet.
Gaara paused, but did not turn. A thin, scaled tendril broke the surface in his wake.
“Are there water snakes in Suna?” Lee asked.
Gaara’s head turned very slowly. Then he said:
“Some.”
“Be careful, then!” Lee exhorted him. “I thought I saw one’s tail behind you just now.”
“It’s not me I’d worry about,” said Gaara, and then his head submerged.
Lee sat on the bank the rest of the afternoon, but he did not touch the water again.
“The doll that you lost,” called Gaara from the middle of the lake, “did it look like this?”
Lee startled from his doze, tossing aside the saddle blanket he’d been using as a pillow. “It wasn’t my doll,” he shouted back. “I was just trying to …”
And then he blinked the sleep from his eyes and leaned forward in astonishment.
The doll’s hair now was thin, in places fallen out to leave black speckles on its scalp, in other places green with algae. The fine silk robe it wore had faded from lucky red to mottled pink. The gloss of its finely carved face had cracked, the paint on its lips worn away. But it was unmistakable.
Unmistakable and impossible.
Though Gaara, himself, was also impossible. A mirage that hovered otherworldly over the lake’s surface, his hair dripping tendrils of silver down his face like treasure.
Lee didn’t even take the time to gain his feet. Instead he just crawled his way to the water’s edge. “How did you find that?”
“I’ve had it for a very long time,” said Gaara. “Someone dropped it in the water for me.”
“She did not—!”
“A boy tried to take it from me, but I fought him for it, and I won.” Gaara’s voice canted, childlike. “But I’m not like that anymore.”
That isn’t what happened, Lee tried to say, but his words cracked like dry earth under a horse’s hooves and fell back down his throat.
“You can have it back,” said Gaara, and extended his arm.
But he was too far away for Lee to reach.
Lee walked forward, just a few tentative steps into the water, until his hakama swung sodden around his ankles and his bare feet slipped in slick mud. He braced his arms out to steady himself.
“Come into the water,” said Gaara, “and you may have it. And anything else you want from me.”
Blood thrummed in Lee’s core. His eyes were fixed not on the offered doll, but on the jut of Gaara’s thin wrist behind it, the slender arm that vanished up that soaking sleeve.
He took another few fumbling steps. His heels lost traction and he stumbled, hands splashing down to catch himself. His fingers came up dripping muddy sand, the sleeves of his kimono hanging heavy and wet.
Gaara laughed like raindrops striking the lake’s surface.
“Why not come here?” Lee shot back. “Why must I come out there?”
The doll in Gaara’s hand lowered slightly.
“Why do you not come out of the water?” Lee cried.
“Because,” said Gaara. “You’re watching.”
“But you can! You did!”
“As you can swim. As you did swim.”
Lee stomped his foot, and the motion sent him flailing once more into the shallows.
This time, Gaara did not laugh. Instead the water around him began to roil, bubbling like some great beast was thrashing below the surface.
“You’re being childish!” Lee hollered at him. “Stop your games and just bring it here.”
Gaara’s eyes were sunken deep in their sockets, shadowed by the bare ridge of his brow. The gray-white skin stretched tight over his face looked like nothing but naked bone. The water licked up his waist and splashed over his arms.
“I’m not a child,” said Gaara. “Not any longer.”
And then he dipped below the waves.
Left floating on the surface was the doll. It bobbed for just a moment amidst the raging current before it, too, sank down. In the wake, the water settled.
Beneath its surface curved a serpent’s tail. It was massive. Black as night and slick as oil and right where Gaara had gone under and not reemerged.
As Lee watched, the tail lashed out. Caught in its twining grasp was the body of the doll, its head now caved in on one side.
Lee’s heart climbed his throat. Gaara had yet to come back up for air.
The serpent’s tail continued its dance, twining left and right, brandishing the doll like a rider’s banner.
There were women on the coast, Lee told himself, pearl divers, who could stay underwater for minutes on end from the sustenance of a single breath.
But Gaara was no pearl diver. And as the time ticked by, the snake’s tail slipped further from sight.
Taking no time to strip his sodden clothes, Lee dove head-first into the lake.
His arms were not used to swimming, his lungs not used to holding breath. But his body was strong and his heart was racing. Under the water he went, squinting through floating loam and drifting sand, searching for a hint of red, a flash of white.
He saw nothing but blue.
He swam deeper, digging through the water like his limbs were spades, his cheeks puffed out and lips tight so the little air left in him would not escape. Scant light traipsed through the curtains of the surface, but he turned himself downwards, towards the darkness. His eyes tried to wince shut against the smack of cold water against them, but he forced them wide.
Still, he did not see Gaara.
His lungs burned like fire lashing his chest. His vision started to darken around the edges. His arms wobbled; his legs could barely kick.
And then, just in the corner of sight: the wavering of white fabric.
He turned, arms stretching forward.
Then he was struck across the stomach by something thick and heavy and black.
The last of his air escaped him in a gush of bubbles. He inhaled the sharp, cold bite of the lake.
And through the water, he began to fall.
Until something grabbed his ankle.
Fear gripped him. He tried to thrash himself free, but his legs were weak from lack of breath and the fingers—for they were fingers, undoubtedly—held him unbreakably.
Memories and warnings and tales of terror raced through his mind, but above them all sang the sweet song of regret.
He had not saved Gaara.
Lee shut his eyes and prepared for the fate he’d escaped once before: to be pulled down into his grave, where his body would rest among the weeds and the rocks forevermore.
At least it would rest next to Gaara’s.
But then he felt himself being towed upwards. The water grew warmer; light struck his face. Was this what dying felt like? Just an incontrovertible force drawing the body up towards the sun?
With a splash, he was thrown mercilessly onto hard, dry land.
As spots swum before his eyes and he struggled against senselessness, he saw two things: a vast, black serpent writhing above his head; and a pair of weary, wary green eyes.
Then something cold and wet closed down around his lips, and he was gone.
When he awoke, he vomited.
Frigid hands rolled him onto his side, and he vomited again. It spilled out of him, more water than anything, dampening the reeds at the lakeside, smearing them slick.
He coughed. Lotus whinnied.
“You’re alive,” rasped a familiar voice.
“Gaara-san?”
“Lee.” Gaara rolled him onto his back, and Lee saw his face in shadow, haloed by the sun. His hair was turned to strands of damp gold by it. Water dripped off him to cool Lee’s fevered face. “We’re beyond honorifics now, yes?”
“Gaara,” Lee breathed, touching reverently the high ridges of his cheekbones, the sallow skin of his throat, the space where his backwards kimono gapped to reveal a chest of little more than ribs. His fingers traced down skeletal limbs and knobbled fingers, hollow stomach and—
Scales.
In the grass, something lashed. Lee turned his head to see that below the hem of Gaara’s kimono trailed a serpent’s tail, bedecked in scales of shimmering obsidian.
“I’ve heard stories about you,” Lee croaked, tasting algae. “Or … creatures like you.”
Gaara exhaled across his face. A breath that wasn’t really a breath, but instead the lapping of waves, the smell of sand and rot and bloat. His eyes were the green of the water six meters down, where the light failed to penetrate. His teeth were sharp as little rocks that cut unwary feet stumbling up the beach.
“You’re dead, aren’t you?”
Gaara laughed like teardrops striking porcelain. "Yes."
"You drowned."
"Yes."
"And you want to drown me."
"Wanted to,” Gaara hissed. “Don't. Anymore."
“No.” Lee shook his head. Water sloshed in his ears. “You saved me.”
There were sounds in the distance. The crackle of cooking fires. The stomp and snort of livestock. The rattling wheels of a cart on cobblestone. The frames of rice paper doors slamming shut and the clattering of geta.
“You … kissed me.”
Konoha was just at the edge of the trees, where it had been all along.
“You’ll leave,” said Gaara, pushing hair back from Lee’s forehead, sleeves dripping teartracks onto Lee’s cheeks. “Now that you’ve found people again.”
Lee struggled up to brace himself on wobbly elbows. “No.” He coughed again and looked up into eyes that were not human, and yet which loved him. “I think … in the village there’s a carpenter.”
Gaara’s cold, bony hands withdrew and Lee lunged forward with a lurch in his stomach to catch them.
“I’ll ask him to build me a house, right here on the banks of the lake.” Their fingers clutched and tangled, one pair warm, the other cold as the grave. “So I might stay by your side forever.”
Gaara’s sharp teeth flashed. His red mouth laughed.
And Lee, helpless with love, laughed right along with him.