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“If you’d like, I could offer you a demonstration! Or private courses? We could discuss the particulars over dinner tonight! I believe Ichiraku Ramen has a two-for-one special; I know that’s your favorite.”
Sai leaned back, carefully extracting his hands from Lee’s clutching fingers. His face was like a clean, white mask, empty of everything but a forced smile.
“I think I’m supposed to be flattered,” he said, his lips barely moving. “But I’m not.”
Lee frowned. “I—I mean, certainly you don’t have to accept any of those options! If you have something you’d rather do instead, just let me know and we can make arrangements! The dojo is in a little bit of disrepair, but it would only take a bit of elbow grease to spiff it up. Or we could simply reserve time at the public training grounds?”
Sai blinked, once. It seemed manualized, like something he’d forgotten people were supposed to do.
“I came to you for taijutsu advice. Not to be propositioned.”
“Propositioned?” Lee’s voice pitched high. “No, no, it was nothing like that at all! I would never—”
“It’s okay.” Sai laid a hand on Lee’s flailing forearm. His fingers were clammy. “There’s no need to lie to protect your reputation. I understand your romantic life is a shambles, but one little rejection won’t make it any worse.”
“Rejection?! But I wasn’t even—!”
“It must be hard for you—” Sai tilted his head in an uncanny mimic of sympathy, still smiling. “—looking the way you do, to find anyone even willing to consider you as a romantic prospect. Your physique isn’t terrible, but the rest …” He scanned Lee from toe to tip, his expression unmoving. “Tragic.”
Lee deflated, all the will to fight gone out of him. Of course he was aware of his appearance; he owned a mirror. It just stung, to be reminded of it so plainly. And by someone he didn’t even have romantic designs upon in the first place.
That being said, it was kind of Sai to be so forthright with him. Honesty was important in a friendship. It was the best way to avoid misunderstandings: to speak one’s thoughts and feelings plainly, ideally at the top of one’s voice.
“Thank you, Sai-kun!” Lee bowed at the waist. “While I did not intend to propose a romantic outing with you, I appreciate your candid assessment of my limitations! I will only strive to improve in whatever way I can, so that I may one day be worthy of my most precious person!”
Sai’s lip twitched before he schooled it back into a smile. “I don’t think any amount of striving is going to fix your face. But you keep telling yourself that.”
He patted Lee on the arm once more and walked back to his guard post. His steps were perfectly even, robotic. Despite the motion of his legs, the top half of his body didn’t appear to move at all, as if they were distinct systems that had not come into contact in some time.
“Thank you again, Sai-kun!” Lee called after him with a wave, blinking hard to fight back his tears.
“Why did he say those things to you?”
A hand at the back of Lee’s arm startled him into spinning around.
“Oh, Gaara-kun! Kankuro-kun!” Lee swallowed the hoarseness of his voice, feeling Gaara’s fingers tense on the fabric of his jumpsuit. Gaara’s eyes were narrowed to slits of aquamarine in the bruisey pools of shadow that surrounded them. Kankuro stood behind him, hands in his pockets. “Welcome back!”
In the midst of all the confusion, Lee had quite forgotten his whole purpose for being at Konoha’s gates. A three-Kage meeting had been scheduled between Konoha, Suna, and Kiri, and while Mei had arrived first thing that morning, Gaara, as usual, was late. And Lee had of course been requested to escort the Kazekage around the village, something that had become an expectation for Gaara’s not-infrequent visits. Not that Gaara really required an escort. He hardly needed his own guard, much less the auxiliary guard of a foreign village. And he was in Konoha so often that he knew the village better than some of the people who lived here.
Still, it was a pleasant routine. And despite the lack of high stakes, the emotional turmoil of spending too long in Gaara’s presence was enough to get Lee’s blood pumping just as if he were in a battle. There was something flustering about Gaara, whether it was his dry wit or his pointed glances or his preternatural senses. They’d circled the village together more often than Lee could count, had sparred on the training grounds under the stars a hundred times, had shared countless meals, and still Lee’s heart raced every time Gaara touched him casually upon the arm or shoulder. His pulse hammered with joy whenever he got a summons with Suna’s seal on it.
And all while Lee was faltering, Gaara had been staring hard at the little guard’s shed where Sai had resumed his post and was now leaning casually on his elbows. Clearly aware he was being looked at, he tossed the group a desultory wave.
Gaara’s eyes cut back at Lee. They glittered like diamond honed into a blade.
“Why did he say that to you?” he repeated, ignoring Lee’s greeting entirely.
“Oh, it was nothing worth being concerned about! Just a little misunderstanding. Sai-kun thought I was …”
The words stuck in Lee’s throat. It was embarrassing enough to admit such a thing publicly, worse to admit it to Gaara. His face burned, his skin stirred up into pinpricks by its heat.
“He thought you were … ?” Gaara prodded.
“Asking him, um. Asking him on a date!” The words squeaked past Lee’s voicebox as a mortified yelp.
Gaara drew a sharp breath.
Kankuro snickered. “Wouldn’t have thought he was your type. A pasty, skinny twink like him, really?”
“I truly was not—!”
Gaara raised a hand, and both of their mouths snapped shut. His next words came slow, carefully considered. “And he thought the best response to this was to insult you?”
“Sai-kun has a peculiar sense of humor! And his social skills aren’t always the best.”
“You’re still defending him.” Gaara’s eyes sharpened. “I could have him killed. Easily.”
“Hah! Speaking of peculiar senses of humor …”
Gaara had a rather dark idea of what was funny at times, and occasionally he took it much too far.
“I’m not joking.”
Like that. Lee scowled at him. The gourd of sand at his waist was rattling.
Kankuro eyed it warily, leaning away from his brother. “Yeah, uh, I’m pretty sure he’s not kidding, dude.”
Back at the guard post, Sai was now musing over an open scroll and his ink brush. Lee stepped in front of Gaara to cut off his line of sight, waving his hands.
“This is a complete overreaction!”
Gaara scoffed. “If he’s that much of an idiot, I’d be doing Konoha a favor by ridding you of him.”
“You’re being ridiculous! Besides, I am quite sure that Sai-kun was once in black ops. He’s much more deadly than he looks.”
The corner of Gaara’s lip twitched up into something that could not quite be called a smile. The dust around their feet eddied as his chakra rolled through it. “So am I.”
“Gaara-kun.” Lee laid both his hands on Gaara’s shoulders, furrowing his brow into an expression of firmness. “That’s enough. This isn’t funny anymore.”
Blinking rapidly, Gaara dropped his gaze from where he’d been trying to stare through Lee and looked at the hands resting atop his jacket’s epaulets. His eyes traced, slowly as a touch, up Lee’s wrists to his arms, to his shoulders, and finally to his face. The air around them stilled, and the sand with it.
“He made you cry.”
Lee ducked his head, but Gaara was already moving in closer to him, reaching for his cheek like the tears clustered at his lashline were water the desert couldn’t afford to waste.
“I cry all the time.”
Gaara wiped the tears from his face with a thumb, then stuck the digit in his mouth.
Perhaps it really was just concern for waste of water, then.
“The last time I saw you cry, it was because of a beautiful sunset. Before that, it was because of a poem you read that you said, ‘Captured perfectly the essence of a shinobi’s life.’”
“Well, the sunsets in Suna are very beautiful,” Lee explained.
He hadn’t been looking at the sunset, that evening they stood together on Suna’s walls and watched the desert evening turn to night, but it was better if Gaara didn’t know that. Lee had already had his spirit crushed once today.
“But right now, you’re upset.”
“I’m not upset.”
“You are.”
“Perhaps I’m just emotional because I’m very happy to see you!”
“That’s not why. I can taste it.”
Lee drew back just as Gaara was scraping another tear from his other cheek. “You cannot possibly be serious.”
“The crystal structure of the various types of human tears are different. The Magnet Release senses it the same as any other composition of salt or minerals. Those are tears of sadness, not joy.” Gaara edged back in, closing the gap between them. “Lee, he hurt you.”
Lee clenched his eyes shut to hold back the frustrated tears that were threatening to escape anew. “Can we please just forget about it?”
“What would help you forget it?”
“Uh, Gaara.” Kankuro coughed, loudly and falsely, from behind Gaara’s shoulder. “Not to be insubordinate or anything, but is this really the place to talk about all that?”
Gaara jerked backwards, his eyes flicking in either direction as though he’d only just realized they were still at Konoha’s main gate, standing in the middle of the village’s primary thoroughfare. And while people were giving them a wide and polite berth, Gaara was still the Kazekage. And Lee, well, he’d never done anything but attract stares his whole life.
“Take our things to the hotel,” Gaara ordered, unshouldering his pack and handing it to Kankuro.
Kankuro squawked, “Hey, I’m not your friggin’ bellhop!” but he still took the bag Gaara shoved into his arms.
“Oh, I can carry both of your bags! I’m supposed to show you to the hotel first, anyway!” Lee went to grab for their packs, but Kankuro backed up out of his reach.
“Listen man, I’m not tryin’ to defy chain of command when he’s all prickly like this.”
“Kankuro knows the way to the hotel,” Gaara interjected. “It’s the same one as usual, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes, but as your escort I’m still supposed to accompany you. It’s only polite.”
Gaara gave Kankuro a look, one that seemed to carry far more information than what Lee was able to derive from it. Kankuro’s painted eyebrows raised. His purple lips stretched into a grimace.
“Yeah, yeah, I’m outta here.” Kankuro snapped his fingers, and thin chakra threads barely on the edge of sight spooled out from his fingertips, hoisting his and Gaara’s bags into the air. They followed him, bobbing like friendly ghosts, as he made his way down the village streets in the direction of the entertainment district.
Gaara turned to Lee. “I need to speak with you about something. Where can we talk privately?”
He didn’t seem afraid. His voice was soft and level. Lee judged it unlikely that he’d sent his brother away to protect him from some impending harm.
Lee hummed. “Well, I would have suggested the hotel, but if Kankuro-kun is going to be there … I suppose my apartment?”
“Very well.”
“Do you remember where it is?” Lee nearly offered his arm before he realized how ridiculous that would look. He could picture the bewilderment on Gaara’s face at such a gesture, could feel the cold sting of that rejection vividly, sharp across his face like a slap. He tucked his arm behind his back as though prepared to drop into a fighting stance.
Gaara fell into step beside him. “By heart.”
Lee’s humble little apartment felt even humbler when Gaara stood in its doorway. It was not the first time Gaara had been there, but something about this moment made Lee acutely aware of the space’s inadequacies: the mismatched furniture, the dents in the floors from his weights, the soot stain on the ceiling above the stove where he’d let a pot of water boil too long during his push-up routine. A shambles.
“Sorry it isn’t much,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck so harshly his bandages scratched him.
Gaara slid his shoes off. “Why are you apologizing?”
“It’s just—I mean, you’re the Kazekage! You’re practically royalty! You deserve a much better space to rest after your long travels than … this.”
“Technically I’m actually royalty,” said Gaara, shrugging out of his coat and folding it over his arm. His shirt was well-fitted across his chest and arms, held in place by a series of leather straps to match the one that held his gourd. Lee averted his eyes so as not to be caught staring and cursed his lack of foresight at not having a hook by the door for Gaara to hang his things on. “And I don’t care about the space. It’s the company that matters.”
Lee cringed. “I suppose I should apologize for that, too.”
Without being invited to, Gaara crossed the room and plonked himself down on the futon on a folding frame that passed for Lee’s sofa. He patted the space beside him like he owned it.
“I thought you wanted to forget the cruel things he said to you.”
Lee sat down beside him, making sure to leave a courteous half-foot of distance between them. “Perhaps it’s better if I don’t forget it. I should remain aware of my shortcomings, or else I will become cocky.”
Gaara studied his face for a moment, a crease arising between his bare brows. Then he snorted. “I’ve seen you cocky. It’s only when you deserve to be.”
Lee withered. “I’m not certain that I ever deserve to be cocky.”
Gaara’s feet moved suddenly, coming up off the floor to curl under him. The unbalancing sent him leaning forward further into Lee’s space.
“Of course you do. You’re one of the finest talents the shinobi world has ever seen. You’re among the most powerful jounin in your village. You outpace any other ninja in taijutsu alone.”
“That is only on account of Gai-sensei’s unfortunate accident!” Lee protested.
“No doubt you would have surpassed him regardless. It was only a matter of time.” His words were murmured but intent. His stare was crucifying. “And your skill isn’t your only virtue. You have a force of will unlike any I’ve ever seen. You’ve overcome tremendous odds to become the man you are. And you’ve done it all with unerring optimism and a smile on your face.”
“I’m not always smiling—”
“And even when you’re not, you’re irrepressible.” Gaara laid his hand on Lee’s knee. His fingers tensed, sending little pulses of heat up Lee’s leg. “It looks good on you, confidence.”
Good looks. Confidence. That was the problem, wasn’t it? Lee could hold his own in a battle—of wills or otherwise—he didn't need Gaara to tell him that. But his looks, his personality, were another matter entirely. And no matter how hard he tried to emulate his brilliant teacher, there were some things that even effort couldn’t overcome. Tragic, Sai had said. And in that word, Lee’d heard the echo of so many other slung insults, all the way back to before his academy days: Bug-eyes, fish-face. Hothead, drop out, loser.
His head shrunk back into his neck in a full body cringe. As though if he just retreated hard enough, his jumpsuit might open up and swallow him whole. Hot, shameful tears stung his eyes.
“I think I’m too much for most people.”
“Lee,” said Gaara, and his voice seemed blisteringly loud in the still of the room. “You shine brighter than the sun. Don’t dim that.”
His hand slipped up to cup Lee’s cheek, to turn his face. Lee raised watery eyes to meet him. Gaara swiped the tears from under his eyes and licked them off his fingers, but he didn’t comment on their taste. Perhaps the emotion was self-evident.
“Anyone who can’t see your light doesn’t deserve you. If they wouldn’t gladly be blinded by you, they’re a fool.” Gaara’s harsh averrances dropped to a bare whisper. “I know I would.”
“What?” The word slipped from between Lee’s lips before he could stop it.
Gaara clambered all the way up onto his knees, twisted Lee’s body towards him. His stare was like a thousand tiny kunai, pricking Lee all over and leaving him to bleed on the futon. Both of his hands cupped the sides of Lee’s face.
“I would,” he repeated, like it was an oath, a prayer. “Be blinded by you. Gladly.”
Lee could scarcely breathe. His heart pattered off-kilter, speeding.
“I know that your heart is pointed in a different, undeserving direction—” Gaara spat the words, “—but you need to know this. That there’s at least one person who sees you for exactly who you are.”
“I— Wh—” Lee spluttered. “Have you been taken in by—by some sort of genjutsu? Because I’ll help you release it!”
Lee’s hands came up, clasped. Gaara batted them back down and held them fiercely between their chests.
“I’m not under an illusion. I’ve never seen anything so clearly in my life.” He leaned in, pressing his forehead to Lee’s as fixedly as he clasped their hands together. His mouth spelled out words centimeters from Lee’s own. “You worry that you’re overwhelming. Maybe you are, but I relish it every time you overwhelm me. You’re afraid that you’re unattractive, but I am attracted to you. You worry that you’re undesirable, but I desire you. You fear being unlovable, but I—”
Gaara fell back, suddenly, onto his haunches, blinking like he was coming out of bewitchment. His breath was uneven, rapid. He still held Lee’s hands, but gently now.
“... I didn’t intend to tell you this way.”
“Tell me what?” Lee was not a stupid man; he was a soldier and a capable strategist in the heat of the moment. But in this he could not afford to read between the lines.
Gaara looked up at him, and this time it was his eyes that were tear-filled. They gathered like dew in the corners, turning his gray jinchuuriki marks stark black. Lee was tempted to reach out, to wipe them from Gaara’s face and taste them from his own fingers. If only he had the same ability to determine their origin. Were they tears of shame at finding himself in such straits with such an unworthy shinobi? Frustration at his need to spell these things out to get them through Lee’s thick skull? Despair? Grief?
“That I love you.”
Gaara sucked in air as if the effort of his confession had winded him. He must have taken all the room’s oxygen with it, because there was scarcely any in Lee’s lungs when he formed his next question:
“Do you really mean that?”
Gaara nodded, a fractional tilt of his chin. “I planned to use more elegant words. I brought the book of poetry you liked. The flowery language doesn’t come naturally to me.”
It was impossible. Unthinkable. Even having been led down the garden path to this inevitable conclusion, Lee reeled.
Gaara was perfect. Incomparable. He had looks so striking that Sunan women swooned in the streets when he passed, and the eligible daughters of diplomats jockeyed for his favor. He was immensely powerful; he could move the entire desert with just a thought. He was the only living possessor of the Magnet Release. He had grown from a jinchuuriki ruled by his Tailed Beast into the man who united the Five Great Shinobi nations and wielded their power as his own. He was the Kazekage, for goodness’ sake.
And more than any of that … he was Lee’s friend. They laughed together, ate together. They shared stories and silences. They sparred, and he no more feared Lee’s gates than Lee feared his sand. He requested Lee, specifically, every single time he was in the village. People thought Gaara harsh and cold, but there were times that he looked at Lee with such tender kindness that Lee’s heart nearly broke. He lit up Lee’s life and his heart like a match to a lantern’s wick.
There had to be some mistake. Lee searched for it in his eyes.
“I know that you can’t return my feelings.” Gaara dropped Lee’s hands and moved his grasp absently towards the white linen of his shirt, where his fingers clenched around a leather strap on the left side of his chest. “I hope that this won’t affect our friendship, but I understand if it does. I just couldn’t watch you feel like that and have you not know.”
He lowered his feet to the floor. His body uncurled onto wobbly legs, stumbling like a fawn.
“I’ll go,” he murmured. “You need your space. Don’t worry about walking me back. I’ll request a new escort from the Hokage in the morning.”
“Gaara-kun, wait!” Lee lurched to his feet, grabbing for the hem of that fitted shirt. He was faster than Gaara, always had been. It was easy to draw him up short.
Gaara’s expression when he turned to look at what had seized him was irate. The sand rustled.
“At least grant me the dignity of leaving on my own terms.”
It hardly sounded like him, the verbs crisp with stiff formality but his voice ragged.
“Please don’t go.”
“Lee.” His hand found Lee’s and began trying to prise the fingers from his clothing. It was largely ineffectual. The look on his face was pure agony. “I can’t stay.”
“Just for a minute.”
Gaara shut his eyes and grit his teeth. “Give me one night to lick my wounds. I’ll come back. I promise. I won’t let this affect us.”
“I have something to tell you, too!”
Gaara’s eyes opened. They were starry with tears, fractured like spring ice trod upon by a heavy boot.
“What.”
“Earlier, I wasn’t asking Sai-kun on a date.”
Gaara’s eyes narrowed. “Then why did he react like you had?”
“I tried to tell him—and you!—it was all a huge miscommunication! He had asked me about a training technique, and I became too enthusiastic—overwhelming, as you said—and he—” Lee cut himself off with a flustered wave of his hands. “It doesn’t matter. He thought I’d implied something I hadn’t, but I would never ask Sai-kun for something like that anyway, because … I …” His words slowed to a crawl.
Gaara waited, silent. He did not prompt Lee to speak further.
“... because … I … already have someone who holds my affections. A most precious person. And that person—”
Gaara winced. “I can’t listen to this tonight. Find me tomorrow. We can talk about it th—”
“I'm not finished!” Lee’s shout echoed off the walls. The air rang.
Gaara clenched his hands to fists, but he stood there like a man awaiting his execution, staring bravely straight ahead.
“I was going to say—” Lee stepped forward, dropping his voice in apology. He reached for Gaara’s hand, but it was like lead, stiff beneath Lee’s fingers. “—that person is right here. In this room.”
Gaara’s eyes darted as if some other shinobi might fade out from the woodwork.
“It’s you, Gaara-kun. You’re my most precious person.”
Gaara’s eyes went massive. They snapped from the middle distance over Lee’s shoulder to his face. The tears in them had turned them vibrant, blazing. His odd, green pupils flashed. His lips thinned.
He looked furious.
It was not the reaction Lee’d hoped for upon confessing his mutual affections.
“Why didn’t you tell me soon—Don’t answer that,” Gaara snapped. “I shouldn’t have waited for you to make the first move. I’m not so socially maladroit that I didn’t recognize that there was—something more than friendship starting to emerge between us. But I hesitated; I worried I was reading my own hopes into your actions. And I thought with your forthrightness, If I was patient … But of course you didn’t say anything. You barely think you’re worth the air you breathe, and you keep me on a pedestal.” He said the last of this more to himself than to Lee, shaking his head.
Then his fists loosened. He laced his fingers with Lee’s.
“I’m going to kiss you now.”
Lee wasn’t about to object.
Gaara used his hands like a tether to pull him down. There wasn’t a spectacular difference in height between them, but the distance Lee’s face had to cross to meet Gaara’s felt immense.
Then they were nose-to-nose.
Lee could feel Gaara’s breath on his lips. He could taste Gaara’s exhalations in his mouth. They were breathing the same air, a continuous, symbiotic loop.
And suddenly there was no air to breathe at all.
The pressure of Gaara’s lips was startling at first, harsh. His fingers shook between Lee’s knuckles and Lee realized, blinking, that they’d both forgotten to close their eyes. Everything was hard edges and urgency for a moment. A kiss like a fistfight.
But then it softened. Gaara drew back just long enough for the tiniest gasp of air and returned with a kiss that was almost hesitant, delicate. Their mouths brushed featherlight. His lips were soft, Lee realized, not wind-chapped or sand-scarred like he’d thought they might be.
Like waves against a shore, Gaara withdrew and surged back in with kiss after gentle, crushing kiss. Retreat, return. Retreat, return. Retreat, return.
A noise escaped, somewhere between the two of them. A soft ah of voiced breath.
And Gaara pulled back once more … and pushed.
He was strong, for all his wiriness, and Lee was taken off guard. A few steps, body moving against body, and Lee’s calves were up against the edge of a wooden frame.
The one nice thing about the futon was that there was no arm to stumble over when Gaara nudged him down.
Lee sat. Gaara did too, half on top of him.
“Have you done this before?” Gaara asked, and Lee could feel every word of it rumbling through his chest and slipping through his lips.
“No, never.”
“You’re good at it.” A tiny, thoughtful hum. “I shouldn’t be surprised. You’re a physical genius.”
Lee’s face burned as Gaara pressed a tender little kiss to the corner of his mouth and then moved.
Lee had expected mouths on mouths. That was the only thing he’d thought kissing ever consisted of. But this was so much more. Gaara’s lips barely stayed against Lee’s for more than a handful of seconds before they trailed off to other, more shivery skin. He dragged his lips across Lee’s cheeks, his nose, his eyelids, down to the corner of his jaw and up to the soft spot of his temple. His hands moved along with them: touching Lee’s shoulders, his biceps, his chest and his ribs. It was as though he wanted to map Lee’s entire being, this entire experience, by feel.
It was exquisite. Overwhelming.
Lee almost wanted to swear, something that had never happened before outside of the haze of the Drunken Fist. But this was a bit like a state of inebriation, wasn’t it? Everything was fuzzy and warm-edged. His body felt not quite his own. His pulse pounded, adrenaline surging through him.
He wasn’t angry; that was the only difference.
He was delighted.
“D—damn,” he breathed, and Gaara pulled back to stare at him. Lee tucked his chin into his chest. “Sorry.”
Gaara’s hands had fallen still, no longer grasping aimlessly at any part of Lee they could reach. His body was a tense arch.
“Tell me something that only you and I would know,” he whispered.
What?
Lee’s mind was scattered. The fabric of Gaara’s trousers was thin under his thumbs, his hips sharp angles beneath it. One of Gaara’s knees was digging into his thigh. His shirt had gapped open the tiniest bit at the collar, and in that aperture, Lee could see tantalizing hints of bare skin before they gave way to shadow.
It was this series of distractions that he blamed when he blurted out, “After we fought Kimimaro, you vomited in the bushes. I lied and told you I hadn’t heard you, but I had.”
“All right.” With a stiff nod, Gaara returned to nosing along Lee’s jawbone.
“I apologize for my dishonesty. I just didn’t want to embarrass you!”
“I don’t care. We were teenagers.” Gaara exhaled, and it gusted all down Lee's throat. He shuddered. “When you mentioned a genjutsu, I started to worry. But it’s you.”
“Of course it’s me!” Lee squawked. His knees flailed, and Gaara grunted in alarm when the motion jostled him. “Who else would it be?”
“You’re … different, like this.”
Lee cocked his head, brow furrowing, but Gaara couldn’t see his expression from his position burrowing slowly up behind Lee’s ear any better than Lee could see his.
“It’s still you,” Gaara added. “Just different.”
“I shouldn’t have used crude language,” Lee said, as Gaara’s breath turned damp against his earlobe and the temptation to swear struggled against his lips again. “I apologize.”
Gaara made a soft sound. “It's definitely you. You apologize too much.”
“Sor—” Lee began, and stopped himself.
Gaara smiled, wry, and Lee wondered then if the reason why others thought Gaara so cold was because he only smiled like that at Lee.
“It wouldn’t be you if you didn’t.” Then, “Can I keep going?”
“Please do,” Lee begged, his head sagging against the futon’s back to expose his throat.
Gaara folded the high collar of his vest aside and licked. His mouth was hot, wide open. He repeated the motion and followed it with a faint scrape of teeth.
Lee writhed, and Gaara slung a leg over him, pushing his shoulders up against the cushion as though to pin him down. His knees bracketed Lee’s hips, and Lee suddenly became very distracted from the heat of his mouth by the knowledge that he could feel the surprisingly ample curves of Gaara’s ass in his lap.
He had to touch. His hands moved without his command, instinctive, and found Gaara’s narrow waist, the small of his back, further down. Easy pressure brought them close, and Gaara groaned into the sensitive join of Lee’s neck and shoulder. His hands tried and failed to encircle Lee’s upper arms, and when he abandoned that, he simply left them there, squeezing, as he nipped the rest of Lee’s throat into goosebumps and bruises.
“Your arms,” Gaara bit against his neck, and Lee hadn’t the faintest idea what he meant by that.
His teeth were sharp little things, canines finely pointed like needles and even the flats of the rest of them harsh against Lee’s tender skin. Lee raised his head long enough to fit Gaara’s mouth against his once more, and once their lips were open against each other’s, he slipped his tongue inside to test it against those teeth. It was like licking the point of a kunai, almost enough to draw blood.
Gaara’s mouth opened fully, and he moaned. The sound vibrated right down Lee’s throat and nestled, burning, somewhere too deep to think about. Only Lee could do nothing but think about it, with Gaara moving somehow closer in his lap, heaving, rocking, with the cadence of their lips.
They were plummeting quickly. Towards either a harsh landing on solid ground or a splash into deep waters, Lee wasn’t sure.
“Lee,” said Gaara, the words breathed desperate into Lee’s mouth, broken off and punctuated by kisses, “can I? Can we?”
He didn’t need to finish the question. One hand had moved to the zip of Lee’s vest, the noise of the zipper’s teeth separating lost in the clamor of their shifting and panting. Lee had thought that getting free of some layers would cool him, but his blood only simmered hotter, the temperature dialed up another degree by every notch lower Gaara’s fingers dragged that sliver of metal. Gaara had pulled back to watch the expanse of green fabric exposed by his work, his pupils wide and fixed.
Lee was undone by him.
“Yes, please, yes,” he begged.
Gaara gasped as though he hadn’t expected the reply.
“You’ll have to tell me to stop,” he breathed. “I’m not good at reading others’ emotions. I second-guess myself.”
“I will,” Lee swore. “And you, too. Tell me if I do something you don’t like.”
“There’s nothing you could do to me that I wouldn’t like.”
Lee snorted into Gaara’s throat. The skin there reverberated. “I’m certain that’s not true.”
“I wouldn’t lie, not to you.” Gaara nosed against Lee’s hair, wriggled his body until their limbs were one big tangle. “Try it.”
There was nothing to do but laugh. Lee moved their faces into alignment, fitting the crooked arch of his nose alongside the wide, flat bulb of Gaara’s. Their lips brushed when he spoke. “Let’s start with this for now.”
His jumpsuit stretched at the neck and, once his vest and legwarmers and hitai-ate were done away with, it was easy enough to wiggle out of. Gaara’s clothing was a much greater challenge. The straps of his harness alone were intricate, but his shirt, too, was done up with delicate little glass buttons, and his trousers had Rouleau loops on either side of the waistband holding them closed. Lee’s fingers felt huge and clumsy on the tiny fasteners until Gaara’s hands slipped beneath his to undo them all, quick and smooth as a spring breeze. The gourd was set very delicately behind the couch as they sank back down onto the flat of it, as if it might see something it shouldn’t.
And then all of a sudden, there was almost nothing between them. The air of the room went muggy; the thin foam and creaky wooden slats of the futon became all that more obvious. Lee shifted, and the scratchy fabric beneath his thighs tugged at his leg hair.
“Oh,” said Gaara, seated straddling Lee’s thighs. His chest was pale and birdboned, muscled but only leanly. His nipples were hard, pink peaks. There was a mottled ink splotch of a scar above one of them, a speckling of red hair on his belly. Above his underwear crested hipbones at jagged angles. Below that, a spot of damp turned the white fabric nearly sheer.
He was hard.
Lee was staring.
He jerked his eyes back upward to find Gaara’s mouth half-open, ragged little pants vacating it. His hands were tense on Lee’s shoulders, his eyes darting across Lee’s chest and stomach.
Suddenly, Lee wanted to shrink inward. Compared to Gaara, he was unacceptably hairy. His skin was unevenly tanned and deeply scarred. A blunt weapon of a body, little else. It was only the strange expression on Gaara’s face that prevented him from fleeing back into his clothes. “Is something the matter?”
Gaara shook his head as if to clear it. “No,” he said, still looking down. “No. I just never thought … you’re so much more than I imagined.”
Too much.
Lee gulped, his mind leaping from shame to cling to something else. “You imagined this?”
Gaara finally glanced up to meet his eyes. His pupils were huge. His hips rocked absently, brushing his hardness against Lee’s crotch. “Didn’t you?”
A blush spread over Lee like hot water poured on a frosted window. He shivered, imagining Gaara imagining him. Would his expression just drift off, hiding somewhere behind his eyes the way it did when he was lost in thought? Or would it go stony with focus, intense and striking as it did when something stood in the way of what he wanted? Would he look like he did now, flushed, disheveled? Or would he look entirely different, wearing some expression Lee had never seen before?
“I did,” Gaara continued in the face of Lee’s gaping mouth. “All the time.” His hands moved, spreading out across Lee’s shoulders and tracing down his arms like they had before, only now they were skin-to-skin. “I expected you to be alluring. I had an idea of what you might look like with your clothes off just from studying you. But I underestimated you.” His fingers traced the thin skin of Lee’s inner wrists, unfolded his fingers to stroke the lines of his palms. “I often do.”
“Oh?” was all that Lee could ask, dumbly, picturing Gaara thinking of this all the time. Arousal swirled through his veins like oil on water, shimmering, curling in tight little patterns. Spiking into sharp points at the thought of Gaara dressed only in his bare skin, hands on himself, on his rosy nipples, or down his briefs and cupped around that as-yet-unexposed bulge, stroking, rubbing. Or fully clothed and hidden behind the broad span of his desk, erection concealed by loose robes while he kneaded at it between paperwork. Sinking down behind the trestle tables of his greenhouse to bite his wrist, one hand jammed down the front of his slacks. Wasting the water of one of Suna’s restricted showers or draped in the sheets of his rarely-used bed, thinking of them. Thinking of Lee.
Lee’s dick twitched. He was most of the way hard already, and all they’d done was kiss and partially disrobe.
Gaara nodded once, fervent. “I’m always thinking you’ll be less than you are. I should have learned by now.”
He leaned in, eyes slitting closed, hands tracing Lee’s stomach blindly and then sinking lower.
“You make me stupid.”
Lee opened his mouth to protest, but Gaara kissed it back shut.
“I don’t mind. What good is genius if I don’t have you?”
“You can have me,” Lee said on an exhale, as Gaara’s cool fingertips teased the elastic of his briefs. “You already have me.”
“I do?” Gaara sounded a little awed, but then the end of his question settled into his chest with a soft hum. “Mmm. That’s good.”
His hand made it past the boundary of Lee’s underwear. The flex of his wrist pulled the elastic taut, and his hand closed around Lee’s shaft.
Lee reacted to his touch like it was a Lightning Style. His hips bucked, raising Gaara with them.
Shoving his underpants aside, Gaara murmured a curse in Sunan that Lee had only heard once prior, during the war. It was an oath, he thought, to one of Suna’s gods, the ones that had been displaced by the arrival of shinobi and their own deities in the deserts of Wind. Something at once heretical and reverent.
Gaara had tried to explain it to him on the dust-thick battlefield, picking shreds of papery bark from their hair and skin. Lee hadn’t really been listening, half-trapped still in the confusing dissatisfaction of his dream, his nose full of the smell of burnt skin and chakra.
Looking at Gaara’s expression now, staring down at his hand on him, he thought he understood. How you could worship something while defying all convention.
“I’m going to suck your dick,” Gaara announced.
“Huh?”
“Is that all right?” He was already sliding down Lee’s body, dragging his briefs with him.
“Uhm,” said Lee, as his erection sprung free from his underwear and slapped his leg. “Please, feel free.”
You make me stupid. It was just as true in reverse.
Gaara looked up from between Lee’s legs, which he’d spread for Gaara to settle between. His smile quirked, his eyes narrow and mischievous.
“You’re so polite.” He twisted his wrist in a way that pulled Lee’s foreskin down and made every muscle in his body tense. “I want to hear you swear again.”
“I’m trying very hard not to!”
“Stop trying,” said Gaara, and licked the head of his cock.
“Oh, damnit.”
Lee’s body bowed.
“Mmm,” Gaara murmured, kissing his way down the shaft, hand no longer stroking so much as just positioning Lee’s dick for the exploration of his mouth. And his free hand—oh—had ventured to Lee’s thigh, where it had found the brutal remnants of open fractures and fourteen reconstructive surgeries and was petting the scar tissue, tracing it like the lines on a map.
As Lee’s legs fell fully open, Gaara’s wandering hands found his inner thigh and slipped upwards to dance across the scars that Lee didn’t even like to think about except in perfunctory washing. It was normal, even expected, for a shinobi to have scars on his limbs. Nearly as many nin sported scars on their faces, their chests, their backs. But Lee had wounds everywhere, his weapon of a body damaged uncountable times. An artery in his groin had been severed by a sword slash and clumsily battlefield-stitched back together, leaving chakra burns and ropy scar tissue from his left hip all the way down and around. When his knee folded up and out, he knew that Gaara could see the twisted, deformed tissue of his buttock, where they’d harvested skin for his extensive grafts. And the remainder of that sensitive skin was punctuated by sand scars from none other than the man who was now touching them so tenderly.
But Gaara wasn’t disgusted, wasn’t repulsed. He looked up at Lee and there was nothing in his eyes that said, Tragic. His expression was lust all over, heavy-lidded as he licked Lee from base to tip like he was a treat to savor.
And with these private spaces bared to his most precious person, Lee felt—if not quite comfortable—completely safe. Gaara wanted him. Loved him. Lee was shivery all over with it.
Gaara’s lips closed around the head of his cock and sucked.
Lee’s head hit the futon cushion so hard that a wooden slat reverberated.
“Ohh,” he breathed.
“Hmm,” Gaara hummed back, and those vibrations had Lee calling out again.
It was a wordless sound. How could he name something that he hadn’t known existed before this moment?
After a few luxuriously slow sucks, Gaara’s hand stilled on Lee’s thigh and clenched there. He bore it to the couch with slight pressure as he shifted himself. Lee chanced a look and found Gaara’s brow furrowed in steely concentration, kunai-point-focused as he edged his mouth further down around Lee’s dick.
“Is everything all—?” Lee tried to ask.
Gaara held up a silencing hand. His chakra did something strange that Lee couldn’t parse, other than to notice that Gaara’s muscles untensed in the energy’s wake.
He soon lost track of even that thought as Gaara widened his jaw, adjusted Lee’s dick, and sank down on him to the root.
”Shi—” Lee’s mouth snapped closed. Some things were too crude even for a moment when another man had your cock down his throat. No matter how divine it felt, all heat and wet pressure and suction.
Gaara’s throat spasmed with a little choking noise. Lee grabbed his hair and yanked him backwards immediately. Gaara bristled, tears trailing from the corners of his eyes.
Lee didn’t need to taste them to know they weren’t from sadness. Gaara looked too grumpy for it to be that.
“That didn’t work as well as I hoped,” he said, voice hoarse.
“What did you do?” Lee asked nervously.
“A technique to relax the muscles. It’s supposed to aid in sleep. It was never very effective for me. And I haven’t practiced it in some time.”
“Does that mean you’re going to fall asleep now?” Lee would crawl off to the bathroom and finish himself off in there if he had to, but he hoped the answer was no.
“And miss this?” Gaara’s hand was back on Lee’s dick and had resumed stroking, the path of his hand slick with spit and the precum leaking heavily from Lee’s slit. His hand reached Lee’s base and ventured downward to roll his balls in his palm. “You make me stupid, not brainless.”
Lee would’ve laughed if not for the fact Gaara lunged back towards his dick in that moment, only to be brought up short by Lee’s hand still fisted in his hair. At the moment he hit the end of his short leash, he whined. His eyes sunk closed, his mouth open. Beatific.
Fascinating.
Lee gave another experimental tug.
Gaara shuddered.
“Do you like that?” Lee murmured, tightening his grip.
Gaara squirmed in his hold. “I love it.”
Lee let him forward another inch, just far enough for Gaara to lap at his dick, then jerked him back.
“You’re the only one strong enough to stop me from doing anything,” Gaara panted. “I’ve always liked that.” He tried to tug himself from Lee’s grasp in demonstration; Lee held him fast.
It was terribly convenient, the position Gaara had put himself in willingly. Using his hair like reins, Lee steered him gently to where he wanted him, up from waist height to hover over Lee’s body entirely, bringing his face down for a kiss. Gaara’s tongue tasted like salt and bitterness, and Lee realized with a frisson of desire that what he was tasting was himself in Gaara’s mouth.
“You don’t want me to finish the blowjob?” Gaara asked when he came up for air. He said it casually despite his breathlessness, not seeming the least perturbed by the filthy words coming from his mouth.
Lee, for his part, was briefly blindsided by them, captivated by the round vowel shapes on Gaara’s pink, wet, friction-swollen lips. And even once he could parse the syntax, the semantics, he was still staggered.
“I do—” He did. “—but you haven’t even gotten completely undressed. I don’t want it to end so soon!”
Gaara’s eyelids sunk. He licked his lips.
“If you wanted me naked, you could have done it yourself.”
Lee untangled his hand from Gaara’s hair so quickly that Gaara’s head nearly clocked against his own. But his hands were already moving, sliding down Gaara’s ribs, his sides with a whuff of friction from Lee’s calluses, coming to rest just above his hips. Gaara ground against him once, a sound guttering from them both at the feeling of that last thin, damp sliver of fabric between them.
“Can I?” Lee asked, fingers hovering. He felt awkward, clumsy with his big, rough hands so close to Gaara’s fragile bones.
“I already said you could.”
“Right.”
Lee peeled back the white fabric from where it stuck to hot skin. Gaara hissed when the air touched him.
Lee looked down. And froze.
Gaara was so beautiful. He was cut, which was a little strange—most men in Konoha weren’t—but regardless in every way exquisite. His cock curved up towards his stomach, the same pink at the head as his pert nipples and puffy lips, a perfect handful. His skin was shiny from the precum that had soaked his underwear. Red hair just a shade darker than the hair on his head wound in untidy curls at the base of his shaft. His balls were already tight against his body as he kicked his underpants off his ankle and reseated himself across Lee’s thighs, maybe from the cold of the damp that had plastered the fabric to them. Maybe because he was already that close to coming.
Lee found himself feeling again oafish and ungainly in Gaara’s presence. Outsized. Too much.
Gaara rasped a laugh. “I should have known you’d be my better in this regard, too.”
“What?”
Gaara looked meaningfully from his cock to Lee’s, resting sloppy against his scarred thigh.
“You’re bigger. Much bigger.”
Lee’s skin went blistering hot with a flummoxing mixture of arousal and embarrassment. Gaara had looked at him and found him favorable in contrast? It was too much. He wanted to hide as much as he wanted to preen.
The compromise between the two was apparently bewildered bashfulness.
“Ah! You shouldn’t make comparisons like that!” he stammered out. “It’s not the size of a man’s sword, but the skill with which he wields it that makes the measure of him!”
Gaara leaned down over him, and their cocks slid together so perfectly filthy-slick that they both gasped.
"Which poetry book did you find that in?”
“I'm merely speaking the wisdom of my heart!”
“Enough wisdom,” Gaara huffed, rutting against him with agonizing slowness. "Touch me, poet."
Lee didn’t need to be told twice. He reached down between them and took Gaara in hand to stroke him slowly. There was just enough space to move his fingers on his shaft while his thumb circled the head, rubbing at the sensitive bit of skin just beneath.
He’d been right; he was a perfect handful.
“Hhahh.” Gaara made a sound like he’d had the wind knocked from him. “You’re good at this. You really haven’t done this before?”
“Certainly not!” Lee blustered, flush with unearned praise. “I mean … not with anyone but myself.”
Gaara’s hips jerked as Lee dragged the back of his thumbnail against his frenulum. “This is how you like it?”
“Um.” Lee’s hand moved smoothly despite the way his head and heart stammered. “I suppose?”
“A natural genius.” Gaara rocked into his hand; his dick spilling so eagerly over Lee’s fingers that Lee almost worried he had come. Only the continued urgent thrust of Gaara’s hips assuaged his fear. “I hope you’re as good at teaching as you are at doing.”
“I—”
Gaara’s eyes fixed on Lee’s. His hand wound down between them to cup Lee’s cock in turn. “Tell me how to do this to you. The way you like.”
“It’s—it’s difficult to explain. I …”
Their wrists knocked against one another’s, spoiling both their rhythms. Gaara made a displeased little sound as Lee’s hand came off him entirely, jockeying for space.
“Maybe it’s better if I show you.” He took Gaara’s hand and pulled it off his dick with regret, though it was only long enough to reposition their cocks alongside each other’s, Gaara’s hand around them both. Then Lee enclosed his hand around the lot and guided Gaara to stroke.
”Fuck.” Gaara rarely swore in Shinobi Common. It was the strongest curse Lee’d ever heard from his lips.
Lee was tempted to echo him. The heat of Gaara’s cock against his was incredible, the wet sound of the both of them stroked together too indecent for words. And speaking of natural genius, Gaara was a quick study himself. His hand moved perfectly in time with Lee’s guidance. Just the feeling of Gaara’s thin fingers beneath his overwhelmed Lee with heat. A strangely tactile confirmation that they were not just doing this; they were doing it together.
Their perfect synergy freed Lee’s other hand to venture across Gaara’s body. From the strained column of his neck to the wiry muscles of his thighs to the sparse, rough hair of his flexing stomach. And then up to the tempting peaks of his nipples, which Lee couldn’t help but pinch gently, experimental.
Gaara’s entire body rolled with it, shoulders down to his hips.
“Keep doing that,” he pleaded.
“I have no intention of stopping,” Lee replied, tweaking his nipples again, watching the pink of a blush spread across Gaara’s chest and up to his normally impassive face. It was a little like polishing a strike, minute adjustments ultimately perfected to exponential reward. Gaara’s flush graduated from pink to red, a miniature sunset under Lee’s attention, and Lee could do nothing but bask in the rays of his ravishment. Wringing these desperate noises from Gaara was more satisfying a success than any achievement of his life. Even reaching the Seventh Gate had not felt so monumental.
“Ngh,” Gaara grunted after a minute or two, expression strained. “I’m about to—I’m about to come.”
“Oh!” Lee startled, flattered. “Oh, oh my, okay. All right.”
“No, Lee.” Gaara shut his eyes tight and groaned, the slowing of his hand forcing Lee’s to slow in turn. He didn’t seem to be able to stop the motion of his hips, though, still rutting them together. “I want to fuck you.”
Lee’s hand dropped from them entirely. “You do?”
Gaara frowned at him. “Unless you’d rather fuck me?”
And that conjured up an alluring little series of images: Gaara on his back beneath him, his legs spread wide, pinned under Lee entirely, utterly at his mercy. Or on his knees before him, letting Lee worship the entire bare expanse of his body, his to touch and taste while all Gaara could do was hold himself up. Or pinned up against the living room wall, legs around Lee’s waist, leaving scratches in the paint where he clawed at it desperately. Would he be just as rosy-pink where Lee pushed inside him as he was everywhere else?
“No, no.” Lee waved his hands like that would clear his imaginings from the air. His fingers were shiny with sweat and more prurient fluids, wafting behind them the heady scent of sex. “I’m just. Surprised. That you would want to do something so … so …” Words failed. “... with me.”
Gaara’s mouth settled into a flat line. “I would have thought the fact that I just sucked your dick and nearly came in your hand would make that obvious.”
“But it’s … the most profound expression of romantic love.” Lee’s voice went painfully quiet. “To share your body so intimately with your most precious person.”
“Exactly.”
“And you’re sure you want to?”
Gaara sighed. “Yes.” He ran his fingers through Lee’s hair, pushing the bangs back from his forehead. Lee didn’t even mind how filthy they were; it was all just them anyway. Gaara pressed his forehead to Lee’s, eye contact unwavering. “More than anything.”
Lee went molten with relief. “Me, too.”
There was a long moment of sustained mutual attention, just one body atop another, two chests heaving in time.
Then Gaara started to move again, crawling back down Lee’s body. Narrow shoulders spread his thighs, and cool hands pushed his legs up until his knees were high, hips tilted. Gaara’s eyes lidded. He looked hungry, and Lee felt exposed.
“Do you have anything nearby?” Gaara asked suddenly. His breath was warm, ghosting all over Lee’s bare skin.
“Like what?” Lee asked, distracted. He was half-flustered, half-delighted by Gaara’s attention, his willingness to get so close to the most shameful parts of him with a look of such desire.
“Lubricant.”
“Oh—I … I wasn’t planning—because I’ve never—and I didn’t expect …”
Gaara just waited patiently for the stuttering to slow. His hands drew little whorls of static on the scars of Lee’s thighs.
“There’s … lotion? In my vest pocket.”
“It will have to do.”
And Lee was suddenly bereft for a moment as Gaara dove for the floor, rooting through the tangle of their clothes with a jingling of snaps until he reemerged, victorious, brandishing the little tube like it was a mission scroll.
“You can procure proper supplies tomorrow,” Gaara mumbled, twisting the cap off with his teeth, his free hand back on Lee with immediacy, stroking him to near-painful hardness and then moving lower.
“Tomorrow?” Lee gasped, as Gaara’s fingers traced the seam of his balls and followed it back to his perineum, trailing frissons of fire.
“I’m in the village for five days.”
“You’d want to do this again?”
Gaara shot him a look, and the only further response Lee received was the wet squelch of lotion being squeezed from its tube, followed by the slick slipping of lubed fingers against one another. The sound was obscene. Lee shuddered.
And then Gaara’s fingers were on him again, and his whole body froze. They were still a little cool from the lotion, though not terribly so, and Lee was controlled enough to stop himself from flinching away from the chill.
More important than the temperature, anyway, was the look on Gaara’s face. His expression was reverent, wide eyes piercing as he followed the progress of his fingers across Lee’s skin. Lee was no stranger to being gawked at, but the intensity of Gaara’s stare was beyond anything he’d ever experienced. He was pinioned by it.
“You are …” Gaara breathed heavily, his fingers moving with torturous slowness. “You’re …”
Gaara always spoke with intention. He held his words close to his chest, concealed like a weapon, and never wielded them unless he intended to follow through on his threat. It was strange, to hear them founder in his mouth.
“Lee.”
Then the first finger breached Lee’s body, and it became very difficult for him to concentrate on Gaara’s words at all.
There wasn’t any discomfort. Gaara’s fingers were thin, and he moved them with absolute care, so slow that the caution was almost worse than pain. It was the intimacy of the act, more than the physicality, that had Lee wound into knots.
Gaara was touching him inside. And seemed happy to do it. Was watching Lee so intently that his jaw had slackened a little. His tongue snuck out to wet his lips. He crept closer and closer, until he was overtop Lee’s body, nearly touching him all over. His forearm brushed Lee’s cock with his gentle motions, stirring it back to interest.
Lee’s body didn’t know what to do with the attention. He wanted to shrink from it, to hide away his secrets from Gaara’s gaze lest they all be exposed. And at the same time he knew that if he curled in on himself the way he wanted to, he would disrupt the path of Gaara’s hands, would force him to stop. He didn’t want that. He couldn’t bear to think of it.
He was trapped in stasis. Utterly at Gaara’s mercy.
What better place was there to be?
His eyes sank closed, and he let himself be suspended in warmth, moving only with Gaara’s motions, aware only of Gaara’s touch.
Once Gaara’s first finger had sought and located a smooth path in and out of Lee’s body, he slid a second in alongside it. Lee sighed into it, spreading his legs wider to accommodate the stretch.
”Exquisite,” Gaara breathed.
“What?” Lee asked him, airy, absent.
“You’re exquisite.”
Somehow it hadn’t occurred to Lee that Gaara might be talking about him. But once he opened his eyes, he realized Gaara was looking nowhere else. His gaze hadn’t moved except to trail further down Lee’s body and back up to his face.
The eye contact was like a kunai to the throat. It swallowed Lee’s breath with a burble of hot blood.
“You can’t mean that.”
“I mean it.”
Gaara’s fingers slid out, in again. Curled this time, pressing up against Lee’s walls. They skated over a place that made Lee groan.
“There?”
“... Wuh?”
And Gaara did it again. And again. And again, until Lee was insensate with it, bordering on overstimulated. Throughout, his eyes stayed locked on Lee’s, staring like he could see right through his skin and deep into his inner workings, right down to where his heart beat without rhythm, to where his bones fizzed with lightning. To where Gaara’s fingers moved inside him.
Gaara pulled back and twisted in with a third finger. Lee hissed at the stretch. Something hot and wet dripped onto his stomach. Glancing down, he could see Gaara was so hard his cock had gone bright red. It leaked profusely, spattering Lee’s stomach. The air smelled like sweat and musk.
Gaara had gone long past the point of preparing Lee. Now he was simply fingering him into oblivion.
“Gaara-kun, please.”
Gaara rocked his fingers out and then upwards, pushing hard against that spot inside Lee that had him starving for air.
“Don’t.” Gaara’s teeth were gritted, the word a single strained syllable. “Don’t you dare call me anything but—”
“Gaara!”
Gaara wrenched his fingers free and leaned in to press their foreheads together. His hair was matted to his skin with sweat. Rivulets of it ran in silvery trails from his ears down his cheeks.
“Please, let me.”
It was obvious enough what he meant. The head of his dick kissed along Lee’s inner thigh. His body was a bunched coil of taut muscle, ready to spring. His eyes burned.
Lee fell to pieces.
“Oh, I don’t know if I … if you keep looking at me like that, I don’t know if I’ll be able to …”
“Up.” Gaara tugged, and Lee scrambled to obey, half-falling off the futon in the effort to get his feet under him. Small, damp hands twisted him at the hips. “Your legs are longer than mine.” Cold toes pushed at Lee’s ankles. “Wider. There.”
Lee stood, legs spread, bent over the futon with his hands braced upon its rickety back. Gaara circled behind him, dragging a hand up the inside of Lee’s thigh, along the muscle corded there. Lee whimpered, tensing.
“Comfortable?”
Lee could hold far more punishing poses for hours. He said as much, full-chested.
“Good.” Gaara leaned in, draping himself over Lee, lining himself up along Lee’s spine. His erection prodded at the cleft of his ass. “You’re gorgeous like this.”
He ran his hands up Lee’s sides, splayed fingers across his ribs. A second pass had him palming at Lee’s stomach, kneading at the flesh of his chest. His touch was attentive, persistent. All the while he kept whispering little endearments, pressing himself closer to Lee, aligning them fully.
Lee whined. “If you talk to me like that—”
“I don’t want you to forget it’s me.”
“I couldn’t possibly!”
Gaara spread Lee with one hand, adjusted himself, and pushed in.
And there came that strange surge of chakra again, rolling through Gaara’s body and now into Lee’s like an intangible object.
“What are you doing?”
“You’re tight. If I don’t calm myself down I’m going to come inside you before we even get started.”
Oh.
“Did it help?”
“Ngh. Not really.” Gaara pressed a kiss not quite at the top of Lee’s spine. "You’re so much."
"Too much?" Lee wanted to shrink, but he could do nothing. He had to hold his position because Gaara was leaning on him, making Lee support his entire weight. Lee couldn’t let him fall.
"Enough."
Lee might fall himself. Might tumble into the void of his astonishment with nothing at all to catch him. His knees felt suddenly weak.
Gaara’s hips twitched. “Can I—?”
”Please.”
Gaara drew back. Thrust in. Kept moving.
And then there was no more embarrassment. No more shame, no more temptation to hide himself or make himself smaller than he was. Gaara was around him, within him, consuming him, and had judged him enough.
Enough.
Lee’s head spun. Pleasure scintillated up and down his spine, beneath the skin that Gaara’s wiry chest stuck to. He could feel the flex of Gaara’s abdomen, the impact of his hips. One hand had slipped down and rubbed insistently at the nasty scar that marred Lee’s groin like it was a grounding point.
And Lee hadn’t lied. There was no way he could think this was someone else, no way he could forget it was Gaara doing this to him. Every slow, carefully contained motion of his body spoke Gaara. Every desperate grasp of his fingers that belied his cool composure sang that this could be no one else. The slight hurried roughness, the chill of his sweat-drenched skin, the faltering, awkward unsurety of a man who was still learning other people undercut with the confidence of someone who had rarely been told no. And kissing him, constantly kissing him, all across his back and shoulders.
They had sparred a thousand times. Lee knew Gaara’s body every inch. He could read all his tells. Even better, now that Gaara was inside him. Now that they moved as a single unit. There was an inextricable sense of connection. Closer than any grapple, more intimate than any spar.
Lee spread his legs wider. The muscles of his thighs burned. Gaara arced down, and the head of his cock grazed that spot inside Lee that had him tensing, gasping.
“Damnit.” It slipped from between Lee’s lips before he could catch it, and Gaara wrapped tighter around him and purred.
“Say it again,” he hissed to Lee’s ear. His teeth found a tendon and nibbled at it.
“I can’t—ooh—I can’t just do it on command!”
Gaara grasped Lee’s shaft, stroking it in time with his thrusts. His thumb pressed exactly to the spot Lee had shown him. His pace was perfection, the twist of his wrist just right.
“Oh, damn damn damn damn damndamndamn.”
Gaara made a sound that would have been a chuckle if it weren’t so throaty. “Can’t you?”
Lee reached behind himself, found Gaara’s head, his hair, and grabbed at it.
Gaara cried out. His hips jogged fast and urgent into Lee, barely even rhythmic anymore, completely mindless. Seeking pleasure and nothing else. His hands formed twin claws on Lee’s chest and stomach. They bit in sharp, followed by the scrape of Gaara’s razor teeth on Lee’s shoulder, and that combination of pain-turned-pleasure, love-turned-desperation, that echo of the agony that only came with victory made Lee sob.
“Gaara—shit—Gaara, please!”
Gaara didn’t speak. He just gave a pitchy groan, half-staggering against Lee’s body. All his muscles went taut. His hips rutted against Lee’s ass without pulling out, like he couldn’t bear to not be inside him.
Then, with a guttural cry, he froze. His fingers grasped Lee’s skin like a lifeline.
Lee felt Gaara pulse. Something hot spilled inside him.
For a long time, Gaara did nothing but shudder, breathing shallow.
Slowly, Lee became aware of the ache in the small of his back from arching it, the way his arms trembled on the futon’s back. He should not have been so exerted; they had not been going that long. But his heart was hammering away like he was on his hundredth lap around the village, so hard he thought that if he looked down he might see it pounding through the skin of his chest.
And Gaara still hadn’t spoken. Lee started to worry.
“Gaara, are you all right?”
“Fuck, Lee, fuck.”
Gaara wrested himself free, spun Lee and shoved him down with shocking vehemence, dropping to his knees between Lee’s legs with a clatter that sounded painful. He grabbed Lee’s hand, splayed its fingers, and planted it firmly on the back of his head.
“Use my mouth,” he commanded.
Gaara had rarely been told no. In this instance, Lee had no intention of breaking that pattern.
He clenched his fingers. Gaara squirmed, sweat-soaked and wrung out. His mouth dropped open, pink lips and tongue on display. His eyes met Lee’s, shining.
Why hadn’t Lee wanted Gaara to look at him like that? He’d quite forgotten.
He let the weight of his hand guide Gaara downwards, let Gaara swallow him nearly whole. He dragged Gaara backwards, slow, and Gaara’s throat vibrated with a noise that couldn’t escape past the intrusion in his mouth.
Lee was absolutely wracked with the pleasure of it all. Gaara’s mouth made sweet, wet, filthy sounds on him, and after a stretch his hand joined in too, spit slicking the way for it to stroke the parts of Lee’s cock his mouth couldn’t reach. Lee didn’t push him to take it all—didn’t need to. The look of ecstasy on Gaara’s face, the hot, wet tightness of his hollowed cheeks, it already had him dangerously close.
His eyes burned; he’d stopped blinking. He didn’t want to miss a moment of it.
He tugged a bit harder on an upstroke. Gaara positively moaned.
It was too much.
For the first time in Lee’s life, too much was a good thing.
Lee’s hips flexed without his permission as he came hard in Gaara’s mouth. Some of it escaped past the edges of Gaara’s lips, and Gaara swiped it off his chin, sucking it off his thumb with such obvious relish that Lee’s spent dick nearly twitched in interest again.
With an unsteady movement, Gaara lurched to half-standing and dropped himself back down in Lee’s lap.
He was no more than a breath away, his eyes searching Lee’s.
“Stunning,” he whispered.
Lee binked hard, rapidly.
“You’re crying.”
“I am?”
But Gaara was already closing the gap between them, licking the tears straight from Lee’s face. Even his breath smelled like Lee as he punctuated each lap with a kiss.
“I’m not upset, I promise,” Lee mumbled. He gathered Gaara closer, both of them dewy with sweat.
“I know.” Gaara kissed his cheek again. “Those are tears of pleasure.”
They collapsed together, skin sticky, hands grimy. And for once, Lee didn't worry about what anyone might think of him.
Lee awoke perhaps an hour later in a pool of golden sunlight with a crick in his neck. The futon's frame protested when he stretched, and something poked at him.
Gaara was sitting next to him, all curled up with his toes under Lee's legs. There was a small, familiar book on his lap. His reading glasses perched on his nose, casting rainbows on the pages spread open between his fingers. They were the only thing he was wearing.
"What are you reading?" Lee asked him, cracking his joints.
With a soft smile, silently, Gaara turned the book for Lee to read. Poetry. And though Lee couldn't understand the flowing lines of Sunan verse, there was a helpful translation into Shinobi Common on the opposite face.
What is the difference between you and the sky?
The difference, my love,
Is that when you laugh,
I forget about the sky
Lee's face screwed up. A tender emotion pressed its fingers behind his eyes and made them water.
"This is the poem I meant to show you," said Gaara, his voice softer than the wind that rustled outside, than the ambient noise from the busy street below. Lee had to strain to hear it.
"Gaara, I—"
"Don't." Gaara twisted until he was upright and lay himself across Lee's body. Every tear that slipped free, he kissed away. "You're happy."
"I am." The words came in a soggy burble.
"So am I."
Gaara lowered his face for a kiss. It turned from soft to heated on a sigh, growing longer and deeper until it threatened to become something else entirely. Lee tipped his head back to breathe, and it was only as Gaara was nipping at his throat that he noticed the low angle of the sun. The hour had grown late.
"Oh no, your meeting!" He hurtled upright, nearly unseating Gaara straight onto the floor. It was only quick reflexes that tossed him back onto the futon as Lee gained his feet. "Aren't you late?"
"They're used to me being late," Gaara replied, stretching languorously.
"Why didn't you wake me up?"
"I didn't want to," said Gaara, as if that were answer enough in itself. After a moment of Lee's goggling, he added, "You looked peaceful."
"We need to go right now!" Lee cried, grabbing Gaara's arm, already dashing for the door like he intended to blow right through it.
Gaara dug his heels in before his body could leave the cushion. When Lee spun around, Gaara looked between the two of them derisively, unimpressed.
Lee's brain caught up. He recognized then their mutual nudity, the disheveled state of their hair, the sticky mess between his legs and the dried cum on Gaara’s lower lip.
"We need to go as soon as we've cleaned up!" he amended shrilly.
Gaara unfurled off the couch with the laziness of a cat. He cast a glance towards Lee’s bathroom.
"Konoha isn't under water restrictions, is it?"
"You make it hard as shit to do my job sometimes, you know that?" Kankuro griped, dogging their steps from the hotel where they'd collected him, as though if he got ahead of them they might sneak off behind his back and delay things further. "There's fashionably late and then there's whatever the hell this is."
Judging by the way Gaara was eyeing Lee, Kankuro’s worries may not have been that farfetched.
"I owe you an apology!" Lee blurted. "It was my fault, really!"
Gaara grabbed the back of his vest and hauled him up out of his frantic bow before he could stumble headfirst over the roof tiles.
"You don't owe him anything."
"I dunno, man, I kinda feel like he does!" Kankuro crowed, leaping over a cornice. "You know how much shit I'm gonna have to eat from the Mizukage's second?"
"I thought you said you weren't arguing with me today,” Gaara snipped.
"Well you're in a hell of a lot better mood than earlier! Yikes, by the way," he added, eyeing the love bite on Lee's neck that he hadn't been able to tug his collar high enough to hide. "Rebounded hard, huh?"
"It wasn't a rebound," Gaara muttered as they reached the door of the Hokage Tower.
"I think I know a rebound when I see one!" Kankuro hissed back. He waved in chagrin to the chuunin at the reception desk. "I'd never pick up any chicks otherwise."
Kankuro turned to ascend the steps, Gaara glowering at him. But once Kankuro was mostly out of sight, the glare softened, and Gaara tugged at Lee's suit to arrest him.
"I would have, you know," he mouthed to Lee's ear, dragging him into a vestibule at the base of the staircase.
"What?" The heat of his lips was distracting.
“Been your rebound. I was prepared to put my emotions aside, if it meant I got to be with you even once." The whisper had turned into a kiss in the breath between sentences, Gaara's lips around the lobe of Lee's ear. "If I could have only been a warm body for you, I would have.”
"I would never!" Lee did his best to stifle his affront, but his voice still echoed off the chamber's stone walls.
"I didn't think it was likely," Gaara said agreeably, "but if that was all of you I could have ever had, I would have taken it in an instant."
Lee tried to hush himself despite the way his blood thrummed. Gaara really wanted him so badly? It was heady, still. "Don't say that."
"It's true."
"It won't ever have to be true!"
The vestibule was decorated with two brass busts of the village founders on stone plinths, and Gaara urged Lee between them until they were concealed from the view of the entrance. He pulled Lee's face to his by the ears and kissed him quickly, thoroughly. Then he straightened, wiped his mouth on the back of his hand, and brushed both Lee's bowlcut and his own robes back into order.
"My meetings should be concluded by 7," he reminded Lee, sending him off with a pat somewhere a little too intimate for public places. "Don't be late."
"You don't have to worry about that with me!" Lee laughed. He slipped back into the stairwell, where he nearly collided with Kankuro looking thunderous.
"I know." Gaara’s smile was smug and serene as he finally began to climb the steps, clearly and deliberately ignoring Kankuro’s muttered curses.
Lee stole one final look at him before he darted back into the milling village streets. He'd been given orders, and the chemist was just a few blocks away.
Gaara was in the village for five whole days, after all. And Lee, with a confidence that bordered on cockiness, believed they'd have the need for as many proper supplies as he could afford.