Chapter Text
My dearest Gaara,
I pray to the First that this letter finds you well. Despite the several months of no response, I remain ever hopeful that one day I shall receive word from you and we may take up a correspondence. For you I would wait several As I have written many times before, you are a treasured part of my life and my most precious person even through your silences. Though you send no answers, you also do not send rebuffs and that gives me reason to hope! I will not give up, dearest!
Life in Konoha has been vibrant and challenging since my last letter. Temari is doing very well here and her strengths as an ambassador for Sunagakure have exceeded all expectations. She is stoic and reserved like you, but I believe I will strike up a friendship with her yet! I tell her I write to you and she says she does not do the same, but I do not think that can be true. I know how much your siblings mean to you so I know you must keep communication with her even if it is brief. I dare not ask, I would hate to be impudent, but I do wish she and I could perhaps bond over a shared affection for you. I am happy to report she does not seem lonely or overly homesick; she and Nara Shikamaru appear to have grown quite close! A budding romance perhaps? I recall in your dream
Neji has earned the ranking of jounin and we are all very proud of him! With Tenten becoming a chunin last year, I must admit I am feeling a bit unimpressive. Everything from when we were children feels as if it left me irreparably damaged and I I worry my team will advance in their ninja ways and leave me behind one day, but that is only the ultimate enemy speaking! Doubt! Deep down I know I shall achieve my dreams of becoming a splendid ninja and I need only remain focused and determined! The springtime of my youth is only just beginning after all! Gai-sensei continues to inspire me with his boundless energy and unwavering belief in youthful determination. My training with him remains exhausting, but exhilarating! I know my efforts will bear fruit in time.
Speaking of bearing fruit, I have taken up a new hobby—gardening! To be truthful, my time in your greenhouses inspired me. Do you remember my succulent? I miss it dearly. I have cultivated a small garden in my apartment and have managed to grow a healthy collection of desert plants there. My hope is soon I will have another succulent to tend to. For now the cacti remind me fondly of you. They are hardy and resilient, thriving even in the face of neglect -though I would never neglect you them intentionally! Every time I see their spiny silhouettes against the sunlight, I think of the deserts of Suna and the stark beauty and the strength it represents. It makes me feel closer to you.
Would you like to come see the garden some time? If you are not too busy of course, I understand the life of a Kage must be most demanding. The thought of you leading your village, protecting it with the strength and compassion I know you possess, fills my heart with joy, but I would hate for you to become overwhelmed. I imagine that is what drives Lady Tsunade to drink! I know you are too controlled to fall on such vices though, so I hope you have something to help relieve your stress. Perhaps sparring with Kankuro, or a garden all your own. Either way, I hope you know I cheer for you from afar!
My dearest Gaara, the world keeps moving, and yet there are moments when I find myself lingering on memories of you. Not with sadness or anger, but with gratitude. You taught me so much when we were so young. Not just about strength and endurance, but about the courage it takes to change and grow. Our time together in your dreams remains one of the most important chapters of my life, and I carry it with me wherever I go. I only wish I could reminisce upon the experience with you by my side.
I am so lonely
The days seem so empty
Your eyes haunt me
I miss you like the deserts miss the rain.
It has been a long two years, my friend, but I have remembered to find joy in the little things—the way the cherry blossoms bloom in spring, the laughter of my friends, and yes, even the stubborn resilience of my cacti. These moments remind me that life is beautiful, even when it’s not exactly as one had hoped. And so, I will continue to write, to reach out, and to believe in the time we shared.
Please write back
Sincerely
Love
With all my affections,
Rock Lee
Gaara reread the letter for the third time in as many minutes and marveled at the way his pulse accelerated and decelerated with the tone and mood of the Leaf nin’s writings. Rock Lee wasn’t even in the room and yet his glowing exuberance shown through his letter and Gaara of the Desert found himself reaching a free hand idly over his chest, feeling beneath layers of cloth and sand and skin and muscle for the rhythmic thump-thump, thump-thump of his heart. It felt strong and healthy yet strained and tight as he read over the words again, his turquoise eyes blinking quick and infrequent like a lizard so he would not have to look away. The lines that had been scratched out with hasty rethought drew his gaze like a moth to flame.
“How’s Bowl Cut doing?” Kankuro asked from near the main door to his office. His gruff voice split the tranquility he had been encased in from the letter, and Gaara looked up at him irately, sand slithering across his feet. His brother’s arms were crossed over his broad chest and beneath his face paint he was frowning.
“Fine,” the redhead noted, voice dry. Slowly, reluctantly, he rolled the letter from Lee up once more and moved to place it in a bottom, unused drawer of his desk. With all the others. “He’s growing a garden.”
“First, spare us,” the puppet master grumbled, pushing off the wall where he’d been leaning. He was cast in shadow, the sun had gone down some time ago and only a few lanterns were lit in the room. The darkness made him look larger and more foreboding than he actually was. “Will you just write him back already? The guy’s been sending scrolls for two and a half damn years!”
“You know why I can’t do that,” Gaara dismissed, his brow pinching slightly when he realized the drawer he’d pulled open was full.
Full was perhaps an understatement; it was near to bursting. Filled to the brim and over with everything Rock Lee had sent him over the last two and a half years. Not just scrolls, but drawings, photographs, pages carefully torn from books, and for some reason the announcement that had been sent to all the villages when he himself had been named as Kazekage of Sunagakure. That last bit had come with a note scrawled on the back; Incase no one saved a copy for you- I have my own!
It was disconcerting to see Lee’s affections literally spilling over and the young Kage glanced up at his brother who had lumbered over to perch on the edge of his desk. Gaara was not familiar with the experience of being self conscious, but he felt a queer tickle along his spine as the other shinobi examined his hidden treasure trove of unrequited attention. Kankuro looked unimpressed with the drawer, his dark eyes rolling exaggeratedly when he saw Gaara’s predicament. He advised, “If you’re not going to respond then you should throw those away like a normal person.”
The sand shinobi’s eyes flashed dangerously and he could sense the older teen backing off, no longer hovering judgmentally over his little brother’s shoulder. The thought of throwing away Lee’s correspondence was nearly as destabilizing as the thought of actually answering him back. While Gaara had absolutely no intention of ever writing back to the boy from his chunin exams, he couldn’t imagine parting with the scraps of paper he’d secreted away all this time. In many ways, the contents of the drawer were the only proof the jinchuriki had that anything he’d experienced with Rock Lee had been, at least partially, real. He couldn’t hold on to a dream or a touch or a word, but he could hold on to these.
Waking up in a Suna hospital after being trapped in an elaborate illusion of his own crafting for months had been an experience the red head did not think he would ever be able to put into words. He had been staring at a rapidly deteriorating Suna and Lee one moment, his insides feeling like they were collapsing along with the fantasy, and then gasping awake to find his brother and sister and several members of their council hovering all around him the next. He’d felt different; fuller. Even while unconscious he’d grown taller and his voice had dropped. He’d gone through puberty in his sleep and Kankuro would later joke it was the best thing that could have ever happened to him.
He’d allowed Grandmother Chiyo only the time it took him to dress to explain what had happened before he was off, rushing with Kankuro and Temari in hot pursuit towards Konohagakure. His siblings, still stunned by his sudden reanimation, had tried to fill him in on things he had missed while indisposed, but the fourteen year old (his birthday had also passed in his sleep) had only been concerned with running down Rock Lee. and. He’d sent his brother and sister to deal with the other genin that had been released to retrieve Sasuke Uchiha while he cut through the forest to find his former opponent. A desperate determination he’d never felt before had him periodically using transportation jutsu to jump him closer and closer until he’d crossed what should have been the distance of several days travel in a matter of hours, appearing right when the Leaf ninja needed him most.
Seeing Rock Lee again in person had nearly stolen the spirit right back out of Gaara’s body.
The boy had changed since the exams, taller and broader, but weaker and slower. His recovery from what the Sand shinobi had done to him was clearly not over and the future Kazekage had felt bile building in his throat as he’d stepped into the fight, determined to protect the broken teen. The words they exchanged were quick and stilted and then there wasn’t time for talking because the bone breaker had required every shred of Gaara’s focus to take down. He’d still nearly gotten stabbed in the back for all his efforts and he wouldn’t have even had the energy to defend himself if Lee hadn’t thrown his body in harm’s way for him. His back pressing flush against Gaara’s was the closet to a hug he had ever gotten.
After, when they were alone, Gaara had felt ready to claw out of his skin with some foreign emotion he’d never experienced. It wasn’t the pain he’d felt fighting Uchiha, or the earth shattering confusion of realizing it had all been a dream, it was something else. It was like he had stepped out into a storm only he could see in feel; only his hair and clothes getting torn about by the winds of it. The air between him and Lee had felt thick and heavy and Gaara couldn’t breathe properly through it, short puffs audible through his nose where he crouched beside the taller teen. When big brown eyes turned to him, the younger boy had felt his chest tighten and wanted to roar in dismay and terror because - what was this?
“Dearest,” Rock Lee had called him, “ Do you remember?”
Telling the only person who had ever looked at him as more than a monster that he’d fallen in love with a fantasy had cracked and shattered something deep, deep down in Gaara that he hadn’t even realized was there. It felt like being forced awake all over again. Lee’s cries and pleads had scraped against the edges of his brain like a kunai against bone and the jinchuriki’s chest had ached. He’d never cared about hurting others before, emotionally or physically, but crushing Rock Lee’s dreams for the second time felt like a sin he would never be forgiven for. Dragging the Leaf nin back to his village, the other boy’s wails scaring the birds, Gaara had worried he may actually drop down dead, his heart thundering unnaturally loud in his ears, erratic and relentless and so, so painful.
When they’d finally made it to Konoha, Lee had fallen into the arms of the weapons specialist, sobbing openly as the kunoichi only glared over his shiny head of hair at Gaara. The jinchuriki had lingered for a time, trying to commit the feeling of his chakra curving around the boy he had imagined as his husband to memory before flickering away. He felt himself like a dream, there in Rock Lee’s mind one moment and fading into obscurity the next. Kankuro and Temari had handled their own fights far quicker than he had and hadn’t had a boy’s heart to break on their way home and so were already in Suna waiting for their little brother. He hadn’t fallen into their arms, hadn’t screamed his anguish to the sands, but he had told them absolutely everything that he’d experienced and then promptly bottled it all up.
He’d kept it bottled for two and a half years and now his drawer was over flowing and his chest still ached.
It always ached.
“I need a chest to keep these in,” he noted absently, blinking back to the present, Lee’s latest letter still gripped in his fist. Kankuro frowned at him. The redhead clarified, “Like the green one Temari has in her room.”
“That’s her tansu,” the older teen explained, his expression hard to decipher behind the face paint, but his tone irked, “It’s for her kimono, not love letters from a guy you could just go see and speak to yourself.”
“You know why I can’t do that,” Gaara repeated ardently, forcing the drawer closed before standing. His Kage robes dragged the floor and hung too large off his slender shoulders; they’d been his father’s
“Why? Because you might actually be happy for once?”
The young Kazekgae ignored his brother, moving around his desk; there were other drawers. He began poking about his shelves and cabinets in the near dark to find an empty space where mail from Lee could start being allocated to. He had hardly changed anything from the time Rasa had run Sunagakure, but some things had been relocated or discarded. Gaara hadn’t wanted the odd trinkets and trophies from his father’s missions, many apparently having been plucked from the corpses of his enemies. He also didn’t want dusty old drafts of laws meant to keep Sand stuck in the past, refusing progress or diversion from the way things had always been. Gaara tried to make the office feel like his own without disrespecting the leaders who had come before his father, but clearing Rasa’s effects meant he knew he had extra space for Lee’s letters somewhere.
He heard the puppet master walk up behind him, their chakra signatures snapping and snarling at each other. He brother started, “Gaara-”
“I’m not speaking about this again.”
“You’ve never spoken about it at all!”
“Don’t be dramatic, Kankuro,” the redhead tossed over his shoulder, casually waving his hand so that a short staircase of sand formed in front of him. Traipsing up it, he was finally able to find a lone, dusty shelf that had yet to be overrun with missives and edicts from his council. He gingerly placed the scroll from Lee there. It looked lonely, but he knew it would not be for long. “I told you and Temari all about it.”
“Once, Gaara,” his big brother pressed, arms crossed again as the smaller shinobi came back down the stairs, sand scattering behind him. “Over two years ago and then never again. It’s not healthy, man, you went through some seriously fucked up shit!”
“It wasn’t that ‘seriously fucked up’,” the younger teen insisted, keeping his tone distant and withholding as he made his way back to his desk. Kankuro followed him with a frown, aura stubborn and petulant, but not thrown by his Kage’s use of profanity at all. “I imagined a life with Lee while my spirit was untethered from my body and he was eventually drawn into it. We spent several months in a dreamscape that promptly fell apart when I awoke and now he believes he harbors some lingering feelings for me, but he is wrong.”
“Do you hear yourself?” the puppet master seethed, “Lee isn’t the only one with lingering feelings, bro, we all know it.”
Gaara blinked at his brother and one of the strongest jounin in his ranks. He tilted his head in a way he recalled Lee saying made him look like a gecko and narrowed his eyes warningly but to no effect. Since waking up from Grandmother Chiyo’s trance, Gaara of the Sand had made great effort to establish a kinder, healthier relationship with his siblings, but the years since had shown him that sometimes meant one or both of them pushing him on matters he had decided were closed. In those moments, he’d regularly struggled not to fall back into the old norm of simply intimidating them into doing what he wanted, but sometimes he missed the distance his Ultimate Defense had cultivated for him.
“For being your brother and sister I do not recall you being terribly kind to them,” Lee had said. He had been right.
“Kankuro,” he breathed slowly, temper a burgeoning flame waiting to spark into an insatiable inferno. Beneath thin but solid layers of sand and skin Shukaku coiled, stirred by his irritation. “What would be the point of responding to Lee? He’s a low ranking shinobi from a foreign village with no leave to travel outside of missions and our alliance with Leaf is tenuous at best. What should I tell him I am jealous of the rain that falls upon his skin since it is closer than my fingers ever will be?”
Kankuro’s eyes grew comically wind, brows shooting up into his hairline. The youngest sand sibling continued, “Why should I torture us both by admitting I would gladly become the wind that ripples through his hair or clothes, or his shadow so I could always be close to him?”
“Gaara-”
“Why should I tell him that I spend my sleepless nights thinking of him and who he may be allowing to keep him company?” the Kazekage hissed, hardly hearing the interruption but feeling the way his sand armor cracked and shifted around him, trying and failing to reform around his overly large emotions. He breathed deeply, trying to center himself. “I turned him away, Kankuro. I told him he loved a ghost so he could have a life and now all I want is to be part of that life? What sense would it make to tell him that now? After all this time?”
“So that you can be,” the older teen pressed, reaching out thoughtlessly before quickly yanking his hand back before he actually touched his baby brother. Gaara scowled. “You can be part of Rock Lee’s life if you just talk to him.”
“It’s too late for that,” Gaara grouched, leaning back in his seat. He could feel a headache forming behind his kanji and it soured his mood even further. “I can’t be the man he wants me to be; the man he dreamed about.”
“But you weren’t a dream, Gaara,” Kankuro reasoned, tone and face sad but insistent as he watched the young Kazekage shift about uncomfortably. Gaara was gripping absently at his chest, thin fingers tap-tap-tapping his sand armor in an vexatious rhythm that grated on them both. “That was really you in there and he fell for you , not a dream.”
Gaara huffed, his free hand rubbing roughly down his face. Sand scraped sand, dust falling onto his robes, and the teenager sighed. He was exhausted. He was always exhausted. But he couldn’t sleep and because he couldn’t sleep he couldn’t dream and because he couldn’t dream he couldn’t be with Lee.
Lee.
“I miss him.”
The words, often thought, but never voiced, hung in the air between them and Gaara watched with tired interest as his brother’s face twitched and jerked through a range of emotions the younger boy could never hope to grow familiar with. Even after spending months of his adolescence with the most emotional person he had ever met, true human connection slipped through his fingers like water and left him wanting. The jinchuriki rested his head on his fist as Kankuro at last sighed, broad shoulders heaving up and down exaggeratedly. He looked all around the office; to the no longer empty shelf on the wall, to the drawer shut tight over two and a half years of emotions. He smiled wanly at his little brother.
“Well,” he acquiesced, “At least you know the feeling’s mutual.” This time when he reached out, he didn’t pull back and clapped a hand down on Gaara’s shoulder, jostling him about gently. It felt awkward for both of them. “You’ll figure it out, little brother.”
“Thank you.”
“Kazekage-sama!” Both sand siblings turned to the door as a senior jounin rushed into the office. He looked frantic which was very unusual as well as unbecoming for a Sand shinobi and Gaara stood quickly along with his brother. “There are missing-nin approaching the gates and we have reason to believe one has already breached the village!”
“Damn!” Kankuro cursed, rushing to the corner where he had unloaded his weapons and puppets when he first entered the office hours before. Gaara moved to shrug out of his Kage robes, eyes still on the jounin as he prepared for battle. The sand hissed and shifted inside the gourd, lively with anticipation and bloodlust.
“Where’s Baki?”
“He and his team are defending the gates, Kazekage-sama.”
“And the nin who breached?”
“Unknown.”
“I’ll find him,” Kankuro growled, pulling his hat low over his head, puppet already slung over his shoulder. Gaara glanced at him, pulling on his usual red coat before reaching out to haul his gourd onto his back. The weight compressed his spine and cramped his shoulders like an overbearing hug; it made him feel as close to whole as he’d ever been.
“No, you and your team go help Baki hold the line,” he ordered, falling seamlessly into the role of Kazekage as he secured straps along his shoulders and chest. “I’ll be able to cover more ground faster to find him.”
“You sure?”
“Yes,” the younger teen assured, face drawn into the blank mask he had perfected over years of solitude. He waved the jounin on ahead of them, sweeping out of his office with his big brother at his side. Lower level nin and staff of the building skittered out of their way, the Beast of Suna and the puppet master forming a wall of chakra so oppressive, the lanterns flickers when they passed. Temari was away on an ambassador mission in Konoha to organize the next chunin exams, and Gaara found himself wishing for his sister’s sharp mind as he tried to guess what these foreign shinobi could want. “I can handle this. Go to Baki.”
“Yes, Kazekage-sama,” Kankuro grunted, bowing his head briefly and preparing to run off and gather his team. As his hulking form hurried away, Gaara felt a nervous tingle along the back of his neck and called out to his brother.
“Kankuro!” His voice was sharp, strained, the puppet master turned to him with serious eyes. “No prisoners.”
“You either,” the older teen responded, nodding once more before heading off down a different hall. Gaara watched him go, the curious feeling still plaguing him even as he tried to center himself. All thoughts of Kankuro and Temari and Lee were pushed forcibly from his mind as he closed his eyes and touched a finger to his forehead.
In a rush of sand and chakra he was gone.