Archive of Our Own

It’s dark outside. Pitch black, the time of night when Suna’s citizens are most active during the hot season.

But Gaara isn’t in Suna tonight, and the world outside Lee’s apartment window is quiet.

Chakra signatures make lazy patterns in the streets below. If anyone higher ranked than a chuunin is patrolling, Gaara can’t sense it. In between the trees that back up to Lee’s building, owls coo and frogs sing courtship songs.

The world is asleep, except for the two of them.

They’ve just finished arguing.

They argue often. Fight is maybe the better word for it.

It’s hard to say which of them is more stubborn than the other.

What is certain, however, is that Lee always gets heated and loud, his face flushed and his fists clenched, while Gaara goes cold and deadly quiet, tucked in on himself like a creature hiding in its shell, not the slightest intonation in his words.

What’s even more certain is that every time, after the fight, they come together like a meteor crashing into the surface of a planet, leaving a steaming crater in its wake.

It was one of their louder fights that led Gaara to be pinned against Lee’s wall in the dead of night. Lee’s hands are rough up and under his shirt, shoving Gaara high enough that his toes scrabble to touch the ground. Lee’s bigger than he is, dominant in his physicality. Gaara slides down the plaster, rough fabric leaving chafe marks on the uncalloused parts of his back.

He’s forgotten what they were arguing about, now. His behavior, probably. That’s often what sets Lee off, though what really ignites him is Gaara’s staid refusal to change. The fact that he shoots back with tight-mouthed 'no's when he’s challenged, that no amount of Lee’s coaxing and cajoling will make him ‘see reason’.

Gaara may still be learning how to be a person, but he’s gotten this far in life without Lee’s peculiar code of ethics to guide him. And if something doesn’t make sense to him, he simply won’t do it.

Whatever the quibble was over, it was of little consequence. Because it didn’t take long before Lee gritted out, “Why don’t you ever listen!” and then hurled Gaara into the wall and bit his way into his mouth.

And now they’re like this. Pressed up against each other in the perfect dark, Lee blindly mapping the length of Gaara’s throat with his teeth. He grabs Gaara by the ass, hoists him like he’s weightless, until Gaara can’t move for the pressure of Lee’s body, armor cracking away and sand falling off him in loud, messy clumps.

Gaara clutches Lee to him, flexes his legs around him, greedy, unwilling to let him go. It’s not that he wants to trap Lee, not exactly (would let him go if he asked)—but he wants to contain him, to press against him, skin-to-skin, closer than the sand armor, closer than any hurt.

Lee’s mouth sucks bruises to the underside of Gaara’s chin and the Ultimate Defense doesn’t move to defend him, doesn’t form spikes or claws or shove him away. It lays passive and docile on the ground between their feet. It lets Lee hurt him, mark him.

Mine, says a twisted voice in the back of Gaara’s mind that sounds far too much like his own. You’re mine.

“Gaara,” Lee breathes into his throat, blood-hot. “Gaara.”

His hands grip hard, leave runs in the seat of Gaara’s trousers. A button pings off Gaara’s jacket and disappears into the dark when Lee scratches up his stomach to twist one nipple between bandaged fingers.

Gaara doesn’t have the raw strength to rip Lee’s clothing to shreds, but he has his own methods of revenge. Sand curls up Lee’s back, finds the collar of his jumpsuit. Lee doesn’t even flinch when it tears a line right down his spine, leaving nylon hanging loose and useless. He just growls something delighted into Gaara’s mouth and wriggles until the garment is cast to the floor, taking Gaara’s outfit with it.

“Hah,” he huffs when they’re both bare. “Such strategy!”

He should be scared of you, scared that you can do that.

You’re a monster. A creature. A demon.

Why isn’t he scared?

Gaara can smell fear—all jinchuuriki can—but Lee has never once been afraid of him. Not even the first time they fought, when Gaara actively strove to kill him, to crush his dream. He isn’t sure that Lee is capable of being afraid of what he should be.

That scares him more than anything.

Lee must have grabbed something from his flak vest before he discarded it, because his fingers are warm and slick when they travel up the spread of Gaara’s ass. He balances Gaara so easily on one arm while the other works its way inside him. His biceps flex; his hips twitch. He’s fast enough to punch a hole through Gaara’s chest before the sand could break the door down, strong enough to fight it off while he chewed his name into Gaara’s heart.

Gaara might let him do it.

The gourd is outside, but anywhere Gaara goes is never entirely clean of sand, and what remains of his armor and the dirt on Lee’s floor moves without his command, now. Swirling, eddying. Shapes in the dust. Curls like longing, reaching fingers. Drifts of it across Lee’s fluttering eyelids, as though to brush his eyes shut in sleep.

Lee makes him lose control and it’s dangerous, so dangerous. There’s barely a line between his desire to clutch something to his chest and his desire to squeeze the life from it.

Monster. Demon.

But Lee doesn’t seem to register the risk, keeps touching Gaara until he goes insensate, heedless of the sand writing warnings in the air.

“It’s so beautiful, how you do that,” Lee whispers.

Lee says these things about him, sometimes, kind things: compliments his personality or his actions, his hair or his eyes or his body. Gaara’s body has never been anything other than a vessel for a nebulous hurt, a disconnected framework for the ragged edges of his consciousness. But Lee, Lee lights him afire and Gaara burns with it, feels in ways he didn’t know were possible, nerve endings long-neglected lit up in sequence like strung lanterns to a struck match.

Lee kisses him on the chest, just over where his heart should be. It’s exquisite—the pleasure on the surface and the pain inside. The desire, grasping, wishing that Lee’s lips would sink through his skin, bite into his flesh, consume him. Eat out every last scrap of good he sees in Gaara and walk away sated.

Gaara arches, bucks. Lee’s fingers play his insides like an instrument.

His arms are wrapped around Lee’s neck and he squeezes, knowing that if Lee were even a fraction weaker than he is that the pressure would cut off the blood flow to his brain, would eventually kill him. But Lee just smiles, a flash of white in the dark, and nudges Gaara a little higher to sink him down on his cock.

Not scared.

Gaara gasps. Lee is big. He’s full.

Gaara has always found himself hollow. He’s long envied the way that Lee fills every inch of his own body, at home in his own skin. Knows that the only way he can come close to mimicking that sheer humanity is with Lee inside him, the two of them connected like a single organism, one inside the other inside the other inside the other.

He thrusts his tongue into Lee’s mouth. Grabs his hair hard enough to tear it from the roots. Bites his lips until they bleed and swallows the coppery taste.

You inside me inside me inside you.

Lee thrusts into him with force, and Gaara clings to him like an artery from a heart, pulsing every time Lee pulses, beating as he beats.

His cock ruts Lee’s stomach, hard and dripping and only just now noticed because all his thoughts have been consumed with Mine and Yours and You and Me.

Lee hasn’t forgotten, though, and without disrupting his rhythm, he wraps a calloused hand around Gaara—Where have his bandages gone? Gaara didn’t catch him flicking them off—and tugs at him in time with the blistering tempo.

It doesn’t take long for that innominate feeling to well up in Gaara, the one that coils inside his belly like a second corrupted seal, that has his mind racing with the thoughts of ripping Lee open, climbing inside him and falling asleep in a cradle of warm flesh and venous blood, that has him fearing the places his mind goes when Lee makes him mindless.

He gutters out a sound. It might be Lee’s name. He doesn’t know; he’s gone deaf.

You inside me inside me inside you. Mine. Yours. Yours. Mine. Not scared. Not scared. Not scarednotscarednotscared.

“Ahh!” Lee clutches him fiercely when he comes, his hand fast and sure on Gaara until Gaara’s spasming on his cock, spurting hot and filthy up the strong muscles of Lee’s stomach, tensing eagerly as though he can keep every last drop of Lee inside him.

He slumps, not just boneless but muscleless, skinless, nerveless. Nothing but an ephemeral soul drifting outside a body, watching idly as Lee lifts him and carries him to bed.

On soft green sheets, Lee cleans him up. Wipes the semen from his thighs and the blood from his lips, and Gaara can’t get his mouth to protest, No. Leave it. Leave me with something of you, so that I carry you with me always. Because I’m nothing, not human, not living if I can’t have you …

“Shh,” Lee hushes him, unfolding a grasping fist with the gentlest care, lying down and curling up around him and resting a hand over Gaara’s thundering heart. “Rest now. I’m not going anywhere.”

The sand blankets both of them.

And before Gaara can voice his objection, he’s asleep.

Gaara wakes hard and startled, all jerking myoclonus before he registers the soft stroke of Lee’s hand on his face.

“Shh,” Lee soothes him, echoes of last night. “It’s just me, love.”

Love.

Gaara’s heart goes soft as marrow, burns hot and drips out the back of his ribs to stain Lee’s sheets.

There isn’t a good word for what they are now: boyfriends, partners, lovers. Sometimes Lee calls Gaara his most precious person, but even that doesn’t feel quite right. There are many precious people in Gaara’s life, though precious for different reasons.

The kind of precious Lee is isn’t something Gaara can define. There’s a sinew-deep feeling to it, warm like bubbles of blood from a corpse’s lips. Tender like cactus pups emerging from damp sand.

Mine. Yours. Not scared.

He thinks of it as the color green. The same shade that paints his pupils when he realizes Lee has gotten dressed in his civvies sometime in the night, his matching shorts and shirt; the same color as the steaming mug Lee presses into his palms and the pot of the gifted echeveria on Lee’s windowsill.

“It’s time for you to go to work,” Lee says, voice soft and tinged with something like regret.

Gaara huffs and turns his face away from the thrown-wide curtains and the incessantly chirping birds outside. “They expect me to be late.”

“You’re already late,” Lee chides him, “but now you’re going to be later than Kakashi-sensei, and that’s just unacceptable. You stopped me waking you up four times!”

Lee’s opinion of what rates as unacceptable is far from Gaara’s own. He hasn’t torn the village apart in a storm of sand or killed their Hokage in cold blood and dragged his body through the streets. A little lateness is a minor offense.

But he can tell Lee’s growing irate, so he murmurs, “I only sleep well when you’re nearby.”

It’s the truth, if tactically delivered. Lee’s big dark eyes widen, soften.

Yours. Yours. Yours.

“You won’t get away with sweet-talking me,” says Lee, finally, clearly trying very hard to sound stern and failing utterly. “Kankuro is waiting downstairs, and he’s not happy about it.”

Gaara casts his attention down into the street and locates a familiar—and grouchy—chakra signature.

It only makes him want to stay in Lee’s bed longer.

He sits up, the sheets falling low on his hips, and sips the weak and scalding hot liquid that Konohans wrongly call tea. Lee looks at him, purses his lips, and settles beside him with a sigh, sinking back against the rumpled pillows and the headboard.

“I suppose you’re staying awhile.”

Gaara drains his mug in a few sips. He traces a deep scar on Lee’s left elbow that’s always bothered him, deep in thought.

“You’re not responsible for that one,” Lee tells him, like he can read his mind.

It doesn’t really matter. What’s one scar more or less when Gaara can see the evidence of himself written all over Lee’s body? In his short sleeves and with the hems of his bottoms rucked up, the damage is visible in gnarled rivers and valleys, silver and brown tangled on Lee’s skin.

It reminds him of a web. Of the cracks that formed in his armor when Lee first struck him. Of the unseen strands that bind them together, reduplicative. The traces of Lee’s blood, his bones, still in his sand.

Mine. Yours.

“Are you taking your teacher to his physio today?” he asks Lee, gauging how long he can get away with lingering.

”No,” says Lee, his mouth twisting and a shadow crossing his eyes. “Kakashi-sensei has taken responsibilty for that now.”

They’ve talked about it, had too many painfully honest conversations about Lee’s terror at the prospect of losing his teacher so soon after his teammate. At the time, Gaara hadn’t known how to say, I’m scared of losing you like that, too. Scared of you burning so bright you go out. You’d do it in a second, to protect someone you loved. To protect me.

Lee doesn’t fear Gaara, but he fears nothing more than being useless.

And Gaara fears that he’d do anything to prove his worth. That there isn’t anything he can say to stop him.

This, too, has been the subject of many arguments.

Kankuro’s chakra flares from the street below, an impatient reminder.

Gaara either casts the thought of fear from his mind or lets it consume him, because he rolls over and kisses Lee on the mouth.

Unlike last night, it isn’t violent. Lee’s lips part soundlessly to let Gaara in. Comfort and affection turn heated in an instant, the rumpled sheet cast aside until Gaara’s naked in Lee’s lap, shoving at the waistband of his shorts.

“Again?” Lee mumbles into their kiss, lifting his hips to let Gaara push his shorts down and grind against his hardening cock.

“Please,” Gaara whispers back, and he feels Lee melt beneath him, slack and willing, warm and green.

Gaara’s still loose from the night before, and Lee’s cock slides into him easy when he guides it there. He rocks, slow and sleep-tinged still, eyes shut tight against the daylight with the scent of Lee’s skin beneath his nose.

He wonders how he lives without this when he’s in Suna. How he doesn’t just crumble to dust without Lee to remind him how to be human. How he ever tears himself away from Lee’s side when he wants them to melt together like burn victims, skin grafted to scarred skin.

Where does the good in him go, without Lee to find it?

Does it even exist without him?

Monster. Creature. Unloved. Unworthy.

“Ah, Gaara, love, that’s perfect,” Lee moans as Gaara rolls his hips down, achingly slow.

You’ll hurt him. You’ve already hurt him.

“Don’t stop.” Lee clutches him close, an embrace that leaves no air between them. “That feels wonderful, oh …”

Gaara’s cock slips against Lee’s stomach, sensitive and bumping along Lee’s clenched abdominals.

He can’t deserve this, this heady, green feeling. He’s done so much wrong in his life; he’s barely started making amends. Blood stains don’t wash out easily.

“Oh, mmm.” Lee runs his hands down Gaara’s back, stoking fire along the skin the wall made raw last night. His knees bend to tilt Gaara forward, his cock sinking deeper.

Gaara can’t catch his breath. Can’t find any air without Lee to breathe it between his lips. They’re just rocking together now, tangled like an insect caught in a cactus’ feather-fine spikes. Gaara fills up with green. It surges up his throat, bubbles behind his eyeballs.

“Oh, love.” Lee pulls back and Gaara dives forward to catch him.

Mine. Mine. Mine.

“Don’t cry.”

In their mesh of limbs, somehow those strong hands still manage to find Gaara’s cheeks, to stroke away the salt-damp mess that he hadn’t meant to spill. He’ll survive the pain, the tenderness. As long as they’re not separated, he’ll continue living.

Lee is the human heart inside him.

Inside me. Inside me. Inside me. Inside me.

It crests all too soon, Gaara overwhelmed with love and yours and green and green and green.

He doesn’t even need Lee to touch him. A few clever strokes of Lee’s cock over that sensitive spot inside him, a rippling of Lee’s muscles, and he’s tossed headfirst into a storm that drowns out all of his senses except for that all-consuming green.

Lee follows him right into it, bucking into Gaara hard enough that he knows he’ll be sore sitting in Konoha’s wooden chairs all day, bruised with a reminder of the body that he’s placed his heart inside.

Lee rolls onto his back, gasping. Gaara goes with him, slithering slick sweaty skin.

“Are those happy tears?” Lee asks, rolling to face him, thumbs drawing stripes beneath Gaara’s eyes.

Lee could blind him like this. Gaara’s sex-drained and defenseless and Lee’s fingers are so, so close. They could plunge into his sockets and the last thing he’d see would be Lee’s face glowing warm in morning light.

He wouldn’t mind it.

“You look happy,” says Lee, when Gaara doesn’t respond.

“Do I?”

No one’s ever told him that. He’s never deserved that. He’s so often closed off, scrunched up, unloved and unworthy and monstrous. Hidden away inside a shell of stubbornness and sand, unwilling to let even Lee’s light reach him, no matter how bright it shines.

“Mm-hmm.” Lee grins, and at that moment Gaara’s glad he still has his sight, because without it he wouldn’t be able to absorb the beauty that’s Lee’s smile holding back a hiccupped giggle. “It happens to me all the time. Sometimes your feelings are just so big you can’t hold them in anymore. You’re so happy that it has to go somewhere, and … well, I guess it comes out of your eyes!”

Is that what it is? What mine and yours and not scared and green all mean?

Down on the street, Kankuro’s jammed his pinkies into his mouth to whistle, long and shrill. With a twist of his wrist, Gaara sends some sand through the crack in the windowpane to blow into his face.

He’ll have to get up soon. He’ll have to leave this bed and its warmth and find clothes that Lee hasn’t torn up and go sit in droning meetings until his eardrums want to burst. But until then …

“Sorry, I made it sound kind of gross,” Lee adds, clicking his tongue. “It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“I’m not ashamed.” Gaara lets Lee pat his cheeks dry. “I’m …”

I’m yours. I’m human. I’m so full of green that it hurts.

“I’m happy.”