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They’re making out on the couch in the living room of the Kazekage compound when it happens.
Gaara’s body is thrumming with built-up tension and energy. It burns inside him like the dry heat of Suna’s worst summer days, the ones that leave him endlessly parched from sunrise to sunset despite drinking his fill of water rations.
Being touched by Lee makes his skin crawl in the best way; there’s a ghostly feeling all up and down his arms, back, and chest. It makes the strawberry blond hairs at the back of his neck stand up straight. He used to only get that wicked, ticklish sensation from the nauseating bloodlust just before a kill, but now it comes from his boyfriend’s restless hands, dancing along the surface of his exposed skin. Lee is always coiled tight and full of boundless energy, but unlike Gaara, he knows what to do with all of it.
Lee’s hands and arms are in constant motion, and the leg that isn’t scrunched up on the couch under the both of them is planted off to the side and bouncing a mile a minute. The vibrations of the cushions rock them all over as they make out. The stimulation comforts Gaara – it’s not a precise rhythm, but the movement is somehow accidentally soothing anyways.
Gaara himself, by contrast, is sitting on his hands. It’s not so much a conscious decision as an ingrained routine, first taught to him at an age younger than he can even remember. When he had been gifted his childhood teddy bear, he’d started waving his hands in excitement, because it had made his mind and body feel good, but Yashamaru had stopped him. You’ll scare people more, he had said. Your hands, your body, they’re connected to the sand, and the sand scares people.
So, he sits on his hands. When he gets a letter from Lee and can barely contain his own personal brand of muted elation, he clasps his hands tightly behind his back so as to not scare his office aides. When he goes to visit Lee in Konoha, he keeps his arms and hands glued to his sides inside his robes to appear as non-threatening to the public as possible. And now they’re at his home, in a building made of sandstone, surrounded by grounds covered in sand that he can feel every individual grain of, and he’s full to bursting with feeling.
Gaara’s shoved his fingertips just underneath his thighs, well-versed in ignoring how his hands want to flap and move and shake. Lee is holding Gaara’s face in warm, calloused hands that scrape against his jaw, the skin unprotected by his regular sand armour. His gourd is across the room, as far away from the two of them as he could place it. Lee deserves to feel comfortable and safe here; maybe one day, this could be a home away from home for him.
But then Lee does something, bites on Gaara’s lip and pulls it towards him, and Gaara’s body shakes. He makes a whining noise that he’s never heard from himself, and Lee pulls back.
Gaara feels embarrassed – maybe it’s better to stay silent? Are noises considered unattractive this early into getting intimate – but then he realizes that Lee’s not looking at him. He’s looking behind Gaara, his head cocked to the left in what seems like curiosity.
“What does it mean when the sand does that?” he asks.
Gaara whips his head around to see at least a third of the sand from his gourd, suspended in the air and happily vibrating. His face is burning, and he’s a little afraid. Oh, no. The sand starts to spike, creating sharper and more angular formations as it reacts to his fresh anxiety.
He tries to explain, but the words don’t want to come out right. They never do for him, and this time is no exception. “I didn’t mean to let it do that, I – ah, sometimes it does that, but it’s not supposed to, and–”
But Lee cuts him off with a tentative, soothing hand at the back of his neck. It smooths the baby hairs that are still standing up back there into a quiet submission. “Gaara, my heart, breathe,” Lee prompts, and Gaara tries to follow along.
“I just thought it was interesting, I promise you don’t have to stop,” Lee says, stilling his own body and projecting an air of calmness.
“I didn’t even know I was doing that. It hasn’t happened in so long, because it scares people, but when I don’t use my hands and I get overwhelmed or happy, the sand tries to compensate,” Gaara continues, still tripping over his own words to try and explain the sand – to explain himself.
“Use your hands?” Lee asks.
“Like your leg. As if, um…” and Gaara takes a chance – no one ever really understood what he meant as a child when his body got excited – and he flaps his hands a bit. The motion feels unfamiliar and a little uncomfortable after all these years, almost like tiptoeing at the edge of a dangerous cliff and tipping over into the abyss.
But Lee catches him, as usual – as always. His face lights up.
“Oh, stimming? Sakura says I do that a lot because of my focus issues,” Lee says, excitedly, casually. Like it’s nothing. Like he hasn’t just turned Gaara’s dullish world on its head.
Gaara’s floored. There’s a name for his hand…oddity?
All he can do is make a strangled-sounding noise in the back of his throat, the flesh rough and dry like sandpaper.
Lee jumps in, continuing his spiel. “It helped a lot with my dys-lex-ia at the academy, too,” he says, sounding the word out, seemingly to make sure he says it correctly, “like if I could move around and physically feel out the words or walk and write, I scored much better on my examinations!”
Gaara’s still not sure what to say. That’s well enough for Lee, and Gaara’s glad to hear that not all of the staff at Konoha’s academy were completely incompetent when it came to treating Lee with the care he deserved, but that’s –
Well, it’s not meant for people like Gaara. Things like Gaara. ‘Stimming’ is scary when he does it. It’s wrong when he does it.
“Do you need to do that? It’s okay,” Lee asks, his voice easing into a gentle tone. It’s odd to hear him speak so quietly, when he always speaks and moves with the force of a great storm.
“I do – not,” Gaara stutters out, “I shouldn’t,” he finishes, mouth shaking, hands up to his wrists shoved back under his thighs.
Lee’s eyebrows come down on his face. It looks like confusion, maybe, or anger, but Gaara’s not sure. “Why not?” Lee asks, running his hands up and down Gaara’s arms.
“It’s not – it is not fine for me, I’ll scare somebody,” Gaara tries to explain. Why doesn’t Lee understand? This is for his sake.
“You won’t scare me,” his boyfriend says, puffing his chest out in pride, but Gaara’s still afraid. He doesn’t know how Lee knows what he needs to hear, because Gaara’s always been told he’s difficult to read. He had once found an old progress report written about him from childhood: He’s a little funny – he doesn’t talk or smile, he doesn’t seem to care much for others –
But Gaara does care. He wants Lee to be safe, to feel safe.
“No, no, no,” Gaara mumbles, his hands clenching into fists underneath his legs, his body resuming the rocking from earlier that Lee had been orchestrating. It feels good, even if Lee isn’t the one making Gaara’s body move now.
“My love, can I please touch your hands?” Lee requests, as politely as ever. His chivalry is endlessly charming, and it always makes Gaara wonder how this man hadn’t already been snatched up by someone by the time they had gotten together.
“Yes,” Gaara says, too loudly, and then cringes – the sound hurts; it’s all wrong. He’s sure that his face barely moves but he can feel his own eyebrow ridges coming down onto his eyelids and his keloid scars on his forehead stretching.
Lee coaxes Gaara’s hands out from under his thighs and holds them together in his own. He rocks in tandem with Gaara’s body, helping him keep up a soothing rhythm.
“The sand looked happy, earlier,” Lee comments, after a minute or two of silence besides the sounds of the couch squeaking and their audible breathing.
Gaara’s not sure any words will come out if he speaks right now, so he opts for a small, mm sound to let his boyfriend know he’s listening.
Lee audibly swallows before continuing. “When the light hit the sand and it was moving, it looked like hundreds of dancing fireflies,” he says, and Gaara makes a questioning noise. He’s not familiar with fireflies.
“They’re bugs in the forest that glow,” Lee explains. Gaara thinks he himself might be glowing. What has he done in his life so far to deserve a man as kind as Lee as his companion?
He feels hyperaware of the sand this time when it starts to ‘dance’ again, and he shuffles his body closer to Lee’s until their fronts meet, and his legs are around Lee’s hips. It’s a monumental amount of contact, even more so when he lays his head in the crook of Lee’s neck, and the sand moves faster and harder than ever before. He whimpers, the sound getting trapped behind his clenched teeth, and jams his face into Lee’s warm skin.
Lee drops their handhold to slowly move his hands around Gaara’s back in a solid-feeling hug. Gaara’s whole body starts to shake, and so does the sand. He feels Lee’s breathing and heartrate pick up.
Gaara forces his voice to work. “Scared?” he whispers, a swirling mix of happiness and terror in his body.
“I used to be, when we were young, but I know you now. And the sand knows me, now,” Lee murmurs back, and Gaara marvels as he peeks his eyes out to see one of Lee’s hands meeting the sand with a gentle, wonder-like touch.
“Happy?” Lee asks him, and Gaara nods into his neck.
“Happy,” Gaara echoes, and his hands clench and unclench in between their bodies, gripping onto the front of Lee’s outfit.
Gaara feels kisses being pressed into his hair and pulls back to hesitantly mouth at Lee’s jaw. It makes his boyfriend groan and grip at his back. Gaara wiggles back into the feeling.
“Ready to kiss again,” Gaara says, demands, and is rewarded by Lee taking his face in his hands once more and giving him a puckered-lip kiss.
He frowns at Lee. “More, please,” he asks.
“My heart has such great manners,” Lee praises, and Gaara flushes with what might be pride.
“You are my heart,” Gaara mumbles, leaning in to kiss more, and mine beats for you.