Missing (second part)
The second part of Missing
*
Getting over the border isn't hard. The large city on the estuary is militarized and pays for Cloud Shinobi patrols, but the inhabitants rely principally on town guards, and the latter are not a problem. This however...Gaara leans against the roof's rail guard and stares across the plaza at the large, forbidding prison. It's...large. It has thick walls. Gaara's mind turns around it like a mouse around a trap. It won't be easy, but he has to get in there. He has to find Lee.
"Oh my god."
Gaara glances around. Temari is standing ten feet away, hand over her mouth, eyes wide.
"Gaara?" She sounds like she's not sure.
Gaara nods and turns back to his study of the prison.
Temari makes an anxious noise in her throat. She runs to the edge of the roof and waves furiously. "Up here! He's up here!"
Naruto's first words are, "Hey buddy- bloody hell, you look like shit!"
Kankuro, by contrast, says nothing when he climbs up onto the flat roof. Gaara can feel his brother studying his profile as the puppeteer joins him at the parapet. Kankuro leans an elbow against the rail guard, looks at the prison and says: "So that's where we go next, huh?"
On Gaara's other side, Temari glares at him. "Kankuro, do not encourage him!"
"You rather he run off on his own again? He's walked hundreds of miles to get here, you think he'll stop now?"
"But it's not- Gaara, listen to me." Temari takes him by the shoulders and gently turns him towards her. Her face is worn, dark marks beneath her eyes. Gaara studies them without comprehension and then tries to turn his head to look at the prison again, but Temari gently catches his chin and makes him face her.
He doesn't fully listen to all the talking that follows. Apparently, that Stone nin warned Suna he was coming here, and told them why. Temari is convinced the body they found is Lee's. Kankuro's sure as well, but says they need to let Gaara find out for himself. Naruto finally points out that 'letting' Gaara do anything has so far proved pretty pointless 'as he goes and does it anyway'. That concludes whatever debate is washing around Gaara, who's just decided that the best way into the prison is to go in through the front door, and anyone who tries to stop him can be caught and squeezed with Sand until they tell him where Lee is.
It turns out that mayhem is unnecessary. Temari runs on ahead and does a lot of very quick explaining to the prison guards and the Cloud Shinobi on duty. She mentions titles and good relations and diplomacy, and they are taken into the jail under escort. They walk through long ill-lit corridors, heavily guarded. Most of the prison is underground, where the dank smell and humidity from the river is almost overpowering. Unkempt prisoners watch them pass from cells, yards or sometimes just cages. Naruto makes a sound in his throat, half sad, half angry, at the sight.
They end up in the office of someone who introduces himself at length. He's the prison warden, Gaara gathers.
"Where's Lee?" he asks, interrupting the man's overlong greetings.
The man stares at him. Temari comes forward and explains, in a patient voice, what Gaara wants to know.
The warden nods. "Oh, that one. I was the prison's first lieutenant at the time of his incarceration last month. The old warden retired a little over a week ago, and I was promoted to the post. I remember seeing your prisoner a couple of times."
"Good," says Temari, in a voice that indicates she is being very patient, and will continue to be so until she kills somebody. "Can you please tell us what you know of this man and what he looked like so we can all go home?"
"I didn't get much of a look at him; he wasn't in my section. He refused to give us his name, organization and rank, which isn't uncommon. In this case, though, he simply might not have been able to. He wasn't quite right in the head. I think he'd taken a bad blow during his capture, or possibly before."
"Did he say anything?" Kankuro asks.
"Not much. Maybe ten words all told. Ten comprehensible words, that is; he'd been injured in the throat, it made him hard to understand. But despite this, he sure talked a lot, repeating the same thing over and over again at the top of his voice. Drove us all crazy. As I said, he wasn't right in the head. I was afraid one of the other prisoners might stick a shiv into him just to shut him up, but somehow it never happened. In fact, they kept trying to feed him and take care of him, as much as they could. He wasn't very old...He kept talking about how he had to get home, back to his duties, his village and his girlfriend."
Behind Gaara, Naruto sighs abruptly and mutters 'damn it'. Kankuro tells him he was an idiot to get his hopes up. Temari turns and gives Gaara a heavy look. Gaara looks back at her, waiting for her to continue and ask the important question, the only question. Temari seems to be able to communicate better than he can right now and get answers, but she's not asking the right question.
Temari breathes in slowly and turns back to the warden. "Girlfriend?"
"Yes, some girl he'd left behind. One day on watch, I went into his cell and told him to shut up already; he was never going back to Stone. He said he didn't want to go back there anyway, because they'd been chasing him. Said it just like that, like he was talking about the weather. The previous warden had looked into the matter, and told us the guy was a missing nin."
"You saw him up close, so what did he look like?"
The warden shrugs. "Not much when I saw him, miss. He'd been lost in the jungle for a long time before the patrol caught him. He'd been injured and his head was in pieces, he was in pretty poor shape. The warden - I mean, the previous warden tried to help him; transferred him to a better cell, despite regulations on keeping Shinobi locked up tight, but still, the prisoner faded fast. This isn't exactly a hospital."
Temari is silent for a moment. She's staring at a little calendar on the warden's desk, with 'For My Daddy' written in colored crayon across the top. "I see. What happened to the body?"
The warden looks away, fiddles with his moustache for a few seconds, and then joins his hands together in a professional way. "It's a bit delicate. Is there any reason you want to retrieve it?"
Temari stares at him. "What do you mean, ‘delicate'? What did you do with it? How complicated a question is that?"
"Ah. Well, if you really must know, you'll have to ask the old warden. The remains weren't sent to our crematorium. I think he's been buried in a cemetery near the warden's home, out in the country around town."
There is consternation amongst those present. Kankuro says: "I don't know how you guys run things, but ain't that against procedure?"
"I'm afraid so. I can assure you it wouldn't happen under my watch," the new warden says primly. "But you see, that's why our old warden suddenly retired like that; he wasn't due for another few years, after his long and distinguished services, but...I believe it was all getting to him. And...I don't want to get my predecessor into trouble, but if there's any doubts about the book-keeping of this jail while I was first lieutenant-"
"We don't want trouble either. We don't care about your internal affairs." Temari's voice is a snap. "Just tell us what happened."
"What happened is that the old warden lost a son a few years back and has never been the same since. He was getting a bit too lenient towards the prisoners, especially the young ones- and around here, the young ones tend to be Shinobi, and highly dangerous. That couldn't go on. The old warden took a particular liking to this boy. I don't know why, the prisoner was a Stone nin and a traitor. Maybe because, what with the crack on the head, the boy had no clue as to where he was, and he was just...well, you had to be there, but he was oddly cheerful in a strange way. Even as he was dying. To tell you the truth, I think the old warden took him away and put him out of his misery. The boy was getting weaker, and even though he never sounded down at all, it was pretty pitiful to hear him near the end. You could barely make out what he was saying, just on and on about how he had to get home to his friends, his teacher and his girlfriend, his 'love' as he called her. Guera, her name was, or Gara or-...um...what?"
The silence that follows is lethal. Luckily, Lee is no longer in this place, he's elsewhere by now. Still missing.
*
The old man opens the door of the sprawling country home, takes one look at the people on his doorstep and says: "You'll be Gaara."
Before Gaara can answer, Naruto barges in front of him. "Oh damn, mister, please tell me he's here?! And okay?!"
"Did you kill him?" Temari asks at Gaara's shoulder, her voice smooth and clean. There is something dark in her eyes as she watches the old man's reaction.
The elderly ex-warden looks them over, makes sure there is nobody else around, then puts his hands on his hips and tilts his balding head at Temari. "No, young lady. No, I did not. I'm tired of killing, tired of locking people up, tired of it all. He was dying; a traitor nobody wanted. His family would be happy to hear he was dead, no doubt. I knew nobody would care if he disappeared. Except...I thought, if this 'Gaara' he keeps going on about is in love with the boy the way the boy is in love with him, then one day he'll show up on my doorstep."
Kankuro makes a sharp 'whoa' gesture with his hand. "Is this really Lee we're talking about?"
"Yes. Though it wasn't until last week I managed to get his name out of him. He's been nailed with some pretty nasty genjutsu, stabbed, lost enough blood to kill an ordinary man, suffered from weeks of exposure, and then the jail." The retired warden makes a 'follow me' gesture and takes them down a hallway to a brightly lit kitchen where a woman his age is shucking peas. She looks up when they come in, and there's something like pain in her eyes, and resignation.
"We spent a week nursing him back to health, and there were times we thought he wouldn't make it," the old warden says. His voice is firm, almost gruff, but he looks a little lost and he pats his wife on the shoulder absently. "Physically, he's better now, but the rest...we need a medi-nin to fix the mental damage, but we can't get one to come here and see to him; I'd end up in my own jail and the boy'd be executed. Now that he's in a friendly place and well fed and cared for, he's recovering a little. He eventually remembered his name, and we got more details from him, such as the fact this person he keeps raving about is a man, not a girl as we all supposed. But he can't remember his last name, or his family, his friends or his home in Iwa. He's also a bit fixated about getting to either Suna or Konoha; keeps changing his mind as to which he's heading for. I was trying to talk him into staying here; I don't think those places take on missing-nin, whereas he could join with our town's guard force, if he gets better and people forget-"
Gaara finally speaks. "Where is Lee?"
The man waves a wrinkled hand towards the open door leading to a porch and a garden. "Out back. I have to warn you, he wasn't all that lucid this morning; this isn't one of his good days. But I think he'll want to see you anyway. He's damn weak, but when the wife and I keep him indoors, he gets a bit excitable and tries to break out. And damn near succeeds, too, however beaten up he is. So we let him out during the day. He always says thank you, very polite, and wishes us well, and then he heads off into the forest to get to wherever he thinks he's going today. Except he ends up walking in circles and he doesn't get far, he's still too weak. My wife's old dog follows him around. She's a good girl; if something happened to him, she'd come get us. We usually find him a few hundred feet from our garden in the woods when evening falls, and bring him back and feed him."
The old man's voice is fading in the distance. Gaara strides through wheatgrass, past a vegetable patch, towards a rickety fence and an old gate leading out into the woods.
He walks. His eyes tell him there is no path, yet his feet tread one anyway. It's led him from Suna to Konoha and back, zigzagging over hundreds of miles, diving through a jungle...It's led him beyond murky prison halls, across country to a rambling old house, through a pleasant garden and woods, to this sunlit clearing. For the past few minutes, Lee's voice has been guiding him.
"You better eat if you're going to. I have to go soon, I'm late. Come on, eat this and then you should go home. You can't come with me, sorry. You're a great dog, but my love doesn't get along with animals very well."
Lee is sitting on a tree root, trying to entice an elderly dog into eating a piece of sandwich. The dog appears to be dozing and totally oblivious to his attempts. Lee is pale, haggard and emaciated; the limbs sticking out of the cotton shirt and pants have lost some muscle, and there is something off in the way he looks at the dog, as if he's having a hard time concentrating. The mutt doesn't pay him any attention, but she sniffs the air and is suddenly wide awake, staring at Gaara on the other side of the clearing. Then she whimpers and runs off.
Lee looks up. He studies Gaara for a few seconds, and then gives him a cheerful grin that puts creases in his thin, weatherworn cheeks.
"Gaara." His voice is weak and torn. There's a thick bandage wrapped around his throat. "Finally, I made it. I knew that if I continued on towards home without stopping or looking left or right, I'd find you again."
Gaara feels something twisting and knotting in his gut. He's drawn inexorably over the last few feet of the path. He can hear footfalls follow his, but they sound as distant as surf on a faraway ocean.
Lee blinks up at him. He seems to have a little difficulty focusing, and his hand, still holding the sandwich out to the dog, is shaking. But the grin is still the same, always the same. "Did you miss me?"
Lee falls off the root as Gaara slams him against his chest, against the hole where the pain is rushing in. Gaara clutches what he was missing and screams and screams as the agony and relief pulse through him like a heartbeat.
*
Lee's big eyes fluttered open and he frowned at the ceiling.
"Huuuuh..." His look of confusion faded as he glanced around and his eyes fastened on Gaara. Gaara watched him intently. This was the second time Lee had awoken since the procedure, but he'd been nowhere near clear-headed previously.
Lee lifted his head in stages, as if this took an inordinate amount of effort, and his hand shook as he rubbed his eyes. He squinted at Gaara, who leaned back and drew the light curtain fully over the window, blocking out the worst of the bright morning sunshine.
"Gaara...? I kept walking and walking, but I couldn't get back home. I couldn't find you. It was like a nightmare."
He stared at Gaara, finally letting his head fall back on the pillow. His gaze was focused and lucid, Gaara judged.
"...Gaara? I'm...not dreaming now, am I?"
"Nope." Naruto stepped over the threshold, carrying two cups of coffee. He carelessly plunked one of them down on the medical instrument table near Gaara and grinned down at Lee. "Welcome back, Fuzzy-brow. Don't worry, you'll be fine, even if you don't feel like it right now. You've just been through a two-day operation, that's why you feel like shit. They fixed your head a little. And your throat. And the rest of you too while they were at it. Looked like you'd been chewed up by a large dog."
"Where am I?"
"Suna. We took you here direct from Lightning Country; Gaara insisted on getting home right away. Don't you remember the trip? You were awake. Sort of."
Lee looked at him, then at Gaara, visibly confused. He studied the Kazekage's face with increasing concern. "I...I don't remember...I have flashes- but some of it cannot possibly have happened. Gaara...?"
Naruto shook his head and took a sip of coffee. "Gaara can't talk right now, buddy. But I'm sure he'll be okay. Eventually."
"...Can't talk...?"
Gaara wished he could remove the worry from Lee's eyes; his current inability to speak did not warrant it. He wasn't injured, and despite his physical condition - which his doctor described as 'strained' - he wasn't in danger of losing control of the demon inside. All his words seemed to have disappeared, drawn out by the repeated question - where is Lee? - and since the answer to that question was right there before his eyes, it was now moot. Nobody, not even his physician, suggested Gaara leave Lee's bedside, or do anything other than sit there and look at him. So Gaara had no more questions, no more words, no more need, for now.
Lee painfully hoisted himself onto his elbows and looked from Gaara to Naruto, who was making weird signs out of what he probably thought was Gaara's line of sight.
"Don't worry too much, Fuzzy-brow. He's just not...You see, Gaara was looking for you all this time. We all thought you were dead; none of us can figure out how he knew otherwise, but he just wouldn't quit. He got kinda...you can guess what he got like, but he'll be okay now. You just get better and talk to him and stuff."
The effort to move had cost Lee too much energy; his eyes were unfocused again as he squinted at Naruto. "...Talk...? What should I say?"
Gaara almost smiled, though he didn't because of the way the facial muscles involved felt rusty, almost paralyzed. Time had started to move around him normally again, giving him back a past beyond Lee's disappearance, a future beyond his recovery and every splintered moment in between. Gaara had asked that same question well over a month ago, he remembered now.
"Say? Geez, man, I dunno, you figure it out; he's your guy. I'm gonna go tell the others you have your marbles back."
Lee slumped back on the bed. He stared at the ceiling thoughtfully for a few seconds, then he turned towards Gaara again and smiled in a way that helped a lot. "I'm sorry I worried you so much. I'm still a bit tired; I need to rest some more. Gaara...please watch over me while I sleep?"
Gaara nodded and held his hand while Lee's eyes closed again.
End
I swear, this is the last time I write in the present tense. But as I said, I wanted to play around with the style, and it was really fun. I love driving my characters crazy ^_^ Please drop me a line on how it reads, and if there were bits that you didn't understand, and I might fine-tune it. I've been working on this for nearly two weeks and I've gotten to the point I can't work on it any more without a remove.
*
Getting over the border isn't hard. The large city on the estuary is militarized and pays for Cloud Shinobi patrols, but the inhabitants rely principally on town guards, and the latter are not a problem. This however...Gaara leans against the roof's rail guard and stares across the plaza at the large, forbidding prison. It's...large. It has thick walls. Gaara's mind turns around it like a mouse around a trap. It won't be easy, but he has to get in there. He has to find Lee.
"Oh my god."
Gaara glances around. Temari is standing ten feet away, hand over her mouth, eyes wide.
"Gaara?" She sounds like she's not sure.
Gaara nods and turns back to his study of the prison.
Temari makes an anxious noise in her throat. She runs to the edge of the roof and waves furiously. "Up here! He's up here!"
Naruto's first words are, "Hey buddy- bloody hell, you look like shit!"
Kankuro, by contrast, says nothing when he climbs up onto the flat roof. Gaara can feel his brother studying his profile as the puppeteer joins him at the parapet. Kankuro leans an elbow against the rail guard, looks at the prison and says: "So that's where we go next, huh?"
On Gaara's other side, Temari glares at him. "Kankuro, do not encourage him!"
"You rather he run off on his own again? He's walked hundreds of miles to get here, you think he'll stop now?"
"But it's not- Gaara, listen to me." Temari takes him by the shoulders and gently turns him towards her. Her face is worn, dark marks beneath her eyes. Gaara studies them without comprehension and then tries to turn his head to look at the prison again, but Temari gently catches his chin and makes him face her.
He doesn't fully listen to all the talking that follows. Apparently, that Stone nin warned Suna he was coming here, and told them why. Temari is convinced the body they found is Lee's. Kankuro's sure as well, but says they need to let Gaara find out for himself. Naruto finally points out that 'letting' Gaara do anything has so far proved pretty pointless 'as he goes and does it anyway'. That concludes whatever debate is washing around Gaara, who's just decided that the best way into the prison is to go in through the front door, and anyone who tries to stop him can be caught and squeezed with Sand until they tell him where Lee is.
It turns out that mayhem is unnecessary. Temari runs on ahead and does a lot of very quick explaining to the prison guards and the Cloud Shinobi on duty. She mentions titles and good relations and diplomacy, and they are taken into the jail under escort. They walk through long ill-lit corridors, heavily guarded. Most of the prison is underground, where the dank smell and humidity from the river is almost overpowering. Unkempt prisoners watch them pass from cells, yards or sometimes just cages. Naruto makes a sound in his throat, half sad, half angry, at the sight.
They end up in the office of someone who introduces himself at length. He's the prison warden, Gaara gathers.
"Where's Lee?" he asks, interrupting the man's overlong greetings.
The man stares at him. Temari comes forward and explains, in a patient voice, what Gaara wants to know.
The warden nods. "Oh, that one. I was the prison's first lieutenant at the time of his incarceration last month. The old warden retired a little over a week ago, and I was promoted to the post. I remember seeing your prisoner a couple of times."
"Good," says Temari, in a voice that indicates she is being very patient, and will continue to be so until she kills somebody. "Can you please tell us what you know of this man and what he looked like so we can all go home?"
"I didn't get much of a look at him; he wasn't in my section. He refused to give us his name, organization and rank, which isn't uncommon. In this case, though, he simply might not have been able to. He wasn't quite right in the head. I think he'd taken a bad blow during his capture, or possibly before."
"Did he say anything?" Kankuro asks.
"Not much. Maybe ten words all told. Ten comprehensible words, that is; he'd been injured in the throat, it made him hard to understand. But despite this, he sure talked a lot, repeating the same thing over and over again at the top of his voice. Drove us all crazy. As I said, he wasn't right in the head. I was afraid one of the other prisoners might stick a shiv into him just to shut him up, but somehow it never happened. In fact, they kept trying to feed him and take care of him, as much as they could. He wasn't very old...He kept talking about how he had to get home, back to his duties, his village and his girlfriend."
Behind Gaara, Naruto sighs abruptly and mutters 'damn it'. Kankuro tells him he was an idiot to get his hopes up. Temari turns and gives Gaara a heavy look. Gaara looks back at her, waiting for her to continue and ask the important question, the only question. Temari seems to be able to communicate better than he can right now and get answers, but she's not asking the right question.
Temari breathes in slowly and turns back to the warden. "Girlfriend?"
"Yes, some girl he'd left behind. One day on watch, I went into his cell and told him to shut up already; he was never going back to Stone. He said he didn't want to go back there anyway, because they'd been chasing him. Said it just like that, like he was talking about the weather. The previous warden had looked into the matter, and told us the guy was a missing nin."
"You saw him up close, so what did he look like?"
The warden shrugs. "Not much when I saw him, miss. He'd been lost in the jungle for a long time before the patrol caught him. He'd been injured and his head was in pieces, he was in pretty poor shape. The warden - I mean, the previous warden tried to help him; transferred him to a better cell, despite regulations on keeping Shinobi locked up tight, but still, the prisoner faded fast. This isn't exactly a hospital."
Temari is silent for a moment. She's staring at a little calendar on the warden's desk, with 'For My Daddy' written in colored crayon across the top. "I see. What happened to the body?"
The warden looks away, fiddles with his moustache for a few seconds, and then joins his hands together in a professional way. "It's a bit delicate. Is there any reason you want to retrieve it?"
Temari stares at him. "What do you mean, ‘delicate'? What did you do with it? How complicated a question is that?"
"Ah. Well, if you really must know, you'll have to ask the old warden. The remains weren't sent to our crematorium. I think he's been buried in a cemetery near the warden's home, out in the country around town."
There is consternation amongst those present. Kankuro says: "I don't know how you guys run things, but ain't that against procedure?"
"I'm afraid so. I can assure you it wouldn't happen under my watch," the new warden says primly. "But you see, that's why our old warden suddenly retired like that; he wasn't due for another few years, after his long and distinguished services, but...I believe it was all getting to him. And...I don't want to get my predecessor into trouble, but if there's any doubts about the book-keeping of this jail while I was first lieutenant-"
"We don't want trouble either. We don't care about your internal affairs." Temari's voice is a snap. "Just tell us what happened."
"What happened is that the old warden lost a son a few years back and has never been the same since. He was getting a bit too lenient towards the prisoners, especially the young ones- and around here, the young ones tend to be Shinobi, and highly dangerous. That couldn't go on. The old warden took a particular liking to this boy. I don't know why, the prisoner was a Stone nin and a traitor. Maybe because, what with the crack on the head, the boy had no clue as to where he was, and he was just...well, you had to be there, but he was oddly cheerful in a strange way. Even as he was dying. To tell you the truth, I think the old warden took him away and put him out of his misery. The boy was getting weaker, and even though he never sounded down at all, it was pretty pitiful to hear him near the end. You could barely make out what he was saying, just on and on about how he had to get home to his friends, his teacher and his girlfriend, his 'love' as he called her. Guera, her name was, or Gara or-...um...what?"
The silence that follows is lethal. Luckily, Lee is no longer in this place, he's elsewhere by now. Still missing.
*
The old man opens the door of the sprawling country home, takes one look at the people on his doorstep and says: "You'll be Gaara."
Before Gaara can answer, Naruto barges in front of him. "Oh damn, mister, please tell me he's here?! And okay?!"
"Did you kill him?" Temari asks at Gaara's shoulder, her voice smooth and clean. There is something dark in her eyes as she watches the old man's reaction.
The elderly ex-warden looks them over, makes sure there is nobody else around, then puts his hands on his hips and tilts his balding head at Temari. "No, young lady. No, I did not. I'm tired of killing, tired of locking people up, tired of it all. He was dying; a traitor nobody wanted. His family would be happy to hear he was dead, no doubt. I knew nobody would care if he disappeared. Except...I thought, if this 'Gaara' he keeps going on about is in love with the boy the way the boy is in love with him, then one day he'll show up on my doorstep."
Kankuro makes a sharp 'whoa' gesture with his hand. "Is this really Lee we're talking about?"
"Yes. Though it wasn't until last week I managed to get his name out of him. He's been nailed with some pretty nasty genjutsu, stabbed, lost enough blood to kill an ordinary man, suffered from weeks of exposure, and then the jail." The retired warden makes a 'follow me' gesture and takes them down a hallway to a brightly lit kitchen where a woman his age is shucking peas. She looks up when they come in, and there's something like pain in her eyes, and resignation.
"We spent a week nursing him back to health, and there were times we thought he wouldn't make it," the old warden says. His voice is firm, almost gruff, but he looks a little lost and he pats his wife on the shoulder absently. "Physically, he's better now, but the rest...we need a medi-nin to fix the mental damage, but we can't get one to come here and see to him; I'd end up in my own jail and the boy'd be executed. Now that he's in a friendly place and well fed and cared for, he's recovering a little. He eventually remembered his name, and we got more details from him, such as the fact this person he keeps raving about is a man, not a girl as we all supposed. But he can't remember his last name, or his family, his friends or his home in Iwa. He's also a bit fixated about getting to either Suna or Konoha; keeps changing his mind as to which he's heading for. I was trying to talk him into staying here; I don't think those places take on missing-nin, whereas he could join with our town's guard force, if he gets better and people forget-"
Gaara finally speaks. "Where is Lee?"
The man waves a wrinkled hand towards the open door leading to a porch and a garden. "Out back. I have to warn you, he wasn't all that lucid this morning; this isn't one of his good days. But I think he'll want to see you anyway. He's damn weak, but when the wife and I keep him indoors, he gets a bit excitable and tries to break out. And damn near succeeds, too, however beaten up he is. So we let him out during the day. He always says thank you, very polite, and wishes us well, and then he heads off into the forest to get to wherever he thinks he's going today. Except he ends up walking in circles and he doesn't get far, he's still too weak. My wife's old dog follows him around. She's a good girl; if something happened to him, she'd come get us. We usually find him a few hundred feet from our garden in the woods when evening falls, and bring him back and feed him."
The old man's voice is fading in the distance. Gaara strides through wheatgrass, past a vegetable patch, towards a rickety fence and an old gate leading out into the woods.
He walks. His eyes tell him there is no path, yet his feet tread one anyway. It's led him from Suna to Konoha and back, zigzagging over hundreds of miles, diving through a jungle...It's led him beyond murky prison halls, across country to a rambling old house, through a pleasant garden and woods, to this sunlit clearing. For the past few minutes, Lee's voice has been guiding him.
"You better eat if you're going to. I have to go soon, I'm late. Come on, eat this and then you should go home. You can't come with me, sorry. You're a great dog, but my love doesn't get along with animals very well."
Lee is sitting on a tree root, trying to entice an elderly dog into eating a piece of sandwich. The dog appears to be dozing and totally oblivious to his attempts. Lee is pale, haggard and emaciated; the limbs sticking out of the cotton shirt and pants have lost some muscle, and there is something off in the way he looks at the dog, as if he's having a hard time concentrating. The mutt doesn't pay him any attention, but she sniffs the air and is suddenly wide awake, staring at Gaara on the other side of the clearing. Then she whimpers and runs off.
Lee looks up. He studies Gaara for a few seconds, and then gives him a cheerful grin that puts creases in his thin, weatherworn cheeks.
"Gaara." His voice is weak and torn. There's a thick bandage wrapped around his throat. "Finally, I made it. I knew that if I continued on towards home without stopping or looking left or right, I'd find you again."
Gaara feels something twisting and knotting in his gut. He's drawn inexorably over the last few feet of the path. He can hear footfalls follow his, but they sound as distant as surf on a faraway ocean.
Lee blinks up at him. He seems to have a little difficulty focusing, and his hand, still holding the sandwich out to the dog, is shaking. But the grin is still the same, always the same. "Did you miss me?"
Lee falls off the root as Gaara slams him against his chest, against the hole where the pain is rushing in. Gaara clutches what he was missing and screams and screams as the agony and relief pulse through him like a heartbeat.
*
Lee's big eyes fluttered open and he frowned at the ceiling.
"Huuuuh..." His look of confusion faded as he glanced around and his eyes fastened on Gaara. Gaara watched him intently. This was the second time Lee had awoken since the procedure, but he'd been nowhere near clear-headed previously.
Lee lifted his head in stages, as if this took an inordinate amount of effort, and his hand shook as he rubbed his eyes. He squinted at Gaara, who leaned back and drew the light curtain fully over the window, blocking out the worst of the bright morning sunshine.
"Gaara...? I kept walking and walking, but I couldn't get back home. I couldn't find you. It was like a nightmare."
He stared at Gaara, finally letting his head fall back on the pillow. His gaze was focused and lucid, Gaara judged.
"...Gaara? I'm...not dreaming now, am I?"
"Nope." Naruto stepped over the threshold, carrying two cups of coffee. He carelessly plunked one of them down on the medical instrument table near Gaara and grinned down at Lee. "Welcome back, Fuzzy-brow. Don't worry, you'll be fine, even if you don't feel like it right now. You've just been through a two-day operation, that's why you feel like shit. They fixed your head a little. And your throat. And the rest of you too while they were at it. Looked like you'd been chewed up by a large dog."
"Where am I?"
"Suna. We took you here direct from Lightning Country; Gaara insisted on getting home right away. Don't you remember the trip? You were awake. Sort of."
Lee looked at him, then at Gaara, visibly confused. He studied the Kazekage's face with increasing concern. "I...I don't remember...I have flashes- but some of it cannot possibly have happened. Gaara...?"
Naruto shook his head and took a sip of coffee. "Gaara can't talk right now, buddy. But I'm sure he'll be okay. Eventually."
"...Can't talk...?"
Gaara wished he could remove the worry from Lee's eyes; his current inability to speak did not warrant it. He wasn't injured, and despite his physical condition - which his doctor described as 'strained' - he wasn't in danger of losing control of the demon inside. All his words seemed to have disappeared, drawn out by the repeated question - where is Lee? - and since the answer to that question was right there before his eyes, it was now moot. Nobody, not even his physician, suggested Gaara leave Lee's bedside, or do anything other than sit there and look at him. So Gaara had no more questions, no more words, no more need, for now.
Lee painfully hoisted himself onto his elbows and looked from Gaara to Naruto, who was making weird signs out of what he probably thought was Gaara's line of sight.
"Don't worry too much, Fuzzy-brow. He's just not...You see, Gaara was looking for you all this time. We all thought you were dead; none of us can figure out how he knew otherwise, but he just wouldn't quit. He got kinda...you can guess what he got like, but he'll be okay now. You just get better and talk to him and stuff."
The effort to move had cost Lee too much energy; his eyes were unfocused again as he squinted at Naruto. "...Talk...? What should I say?"
Gaara almost smiled, though he didn't because of the way the facial muscles involved felt rusty, almost paralyzed. Time had started to move around him normally again, giving him back a past beyond Lee's disappearance, a future beyond his recovery and every splintered moment in between. Gaara had asked that same question well over a month ago, he remembered now.
"Say? Geez, man, I dunno, you figure it out; he's your guy. I'm gonna go tell the others you have your marbles back."
Lee slumped back on the bed. He stared at the ceiling thoughtfully for a few seconds, then he turned towards Gaara again and smiled in a way that helped a lot. "I'm sorry I worried you so much. I'm still a bit tired; I need to rest some more. Gaara...please watch over me while I sleep?"
Gaara nodded and held his hand while Lee's eyes closed again.
End
I swear, this is the last time I write in the present tense. But as I said, I wanted to play around with the style, and it was really fun. I love driving my characters crazy ^_^ Please drop me a line on how it reads, and if there were bits that you didn't understand, and I might fine-tune it. I've been working on this for nearly two weeks and I've gotten to the point I can't work on it any more without a remove.