Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

“Okay, pair off.”

The three most dreaded words in any high schooler’s vocabulary. The only thing that could make it worse would be if …

“Choose wisely,” Mr. Hatake adds pointedly. “Whoever you pick today is going to be your lab partner for the rest of the year.”

… if that happened.

Gaara’s sunk. It’s his third week at his new school, and so far the only person he knows is the kid who got assigned to do his tour.

Speaking of Naruto, he’s already making loud overtures to a surly-looking, dark haired boy. Kankuro would say the guy looks like he has a bug up his butt, but that doesn’t even begin to cover it. His expression is more like a rhinoceros beetle climbed up his ass and dug its pincers in. Gaara feels a glimmer of hope when his entomologically rectally impacted opponent seems to be seeking a different partner, but as soon as—

“Sasukeeee!”

—Sasuke, apparently, if Naruto’s bellowing the boy’s actual name and not a cruel nickname—as soon as Sasuke realizes the only other person in the room interested in partnering up with him is a girl with a bubblegum-pink-to-lavender ombre, he bullies Naruto over behind a lab bench like it was his idea in the first place.

Mr. Hatake peeks up from his lesson plan with poorly concealed relish as the dramatics unfold. The girl with the neon hair turns with a huff, pouting. Her eye is caught by a boy with a frankly offensively grade-school haircut, who waves at her so shyly that he must think he’s stepped off the pages of the romantic sideplot of some dreadful Austen novel. Pink-hair’s face goes just as green as the guy’s tracksuit, and she looks frantic until another girl—this one with a swishing, platinum-blonde ponytail—sweeps past, grabbing her elbow and sallying her into the confines of a bench at the back of the classroom.

That’s when Gaara looks around the room and discovers that everyone has paired off but him.

Him and Mr. Fifth Grade Graduation Portrait, who’s waving him over with such gusto his arm might just pop right out of its socket.

Fuck his life.

The distance from his desk to Bowlcut’s lab bench feels like the green mile. Gaara clutches his water bottle like it’s a talisman, as though it’ll somehow protect him from the impending social disaster.

“You must be Gaara!” Bowlcut enthuses, and once Gaara’s close enough to see him properly he mentally corrects the name to Eyebrows. No wonder he wears his bangs so long; the damn things dominate his face.

It takes Gaara a long time to remember to nod. Longer to realize that the megawatt smile on Eyebrows’ face is fading slightly.

Eyebrows laughs a little awkwardly and says, “Well, my name is Rock Lee. But everyone just calls me Lee.”

Gaara endeavors to forget this factoid as soon as possible.

“Lee,” says Mr. Hatake’s sharp voice, indelibly imprinting the name onto Gaara’s mind.

“Sir!”

“Don’t call me sir.” Mr. Hatake rubs his eyes. Or at least the one that’s visible under his mop of hair. One look at him has Gaara resolving never to become a teacher. He doesn’t even look that old, but a couple years of wrangling high schoolers handling fire and acids has clearly made him prematurely gray, and his eyebags—bag—could rival Gaara’s own. “And roll your sleeves up.”

Lee stiffens. “Uhm. Yes, sir.”

The sleeves of his tracksuit get shuffled to his elbows. He’s wearing underarmour beneath it, the white fabric skintight.

“All your sleeves. If I have to send a student to the ER because a Bunsen burner melted their practical athletic wear to their skin …”

Mr. Hatake doesn’t finish the threat. Gaara wouldn’t have heard it even if he had, because Lee ducks his head and slides his second layer of sleeves up his arms. His heavily scarred arms. And even that description doesn’t properly do it justice. His skin is a map of bulging brown keloids and pink weals and silvery stripes. The skin is twisted-looking, practically melted. Up by the elbow, his left arm has an almost fish-scale pattern to it, like a second lattice of skin was laid over the original.

Gaara’s first thought is, Was he in a nuclear reactor meltdown?

History class must be messing with his head.

Lee folds down behind the lab bench, hiding his arms from view. Gaara’s gaze snaps to meet his. He can feel how wide his eyes must be, whites showing all around.

“Don’t worry,” Lee says, with another of those half-smiles and uncomfortable laughs. “They don’t hurt. It happened a long time ago.”

Gaara can’t do anything but blink.

“Ahh, Coach Gai always says I should make up a good story about them.” Lee shifts from foot to foot behind the bench, not lifting his arms. “How about: You should see the other guy?”

His smile’s crooked, but he has very straight teeth.

Gaara gawks. Eventually, he forces out an, “Okay.”

By that point, Mr. Hatake has already started laying out the assignment, and Gaara’s not even sure that Lee hears him. As the teacher explains the various safety precautions, all Gaara’s envisioning is the ways someone could end up like Lee.

“Don’t touch the metal,” says Mr. Hatake, and Gaara’s picturing Lee upending a tray full of pizza rolls fresh from the oven on his outstretched arms.

“Don’t put your arm over the open flame,” he adds, and Gaara envisions him at a beach party bonfire, trying to leap over the flames on a dare tumbling hands-first into the blaze.

“And for god’s sake watch out for the sharp part of the scale,” Mr. Hatake concludes, and Gaara imagines a gradeschool Lee tearing down the hallway with a bin full of safety scissors and suffering a terrible accident.

What the hell happened to him?

“Uhm, Gaara?” Lee asks, plaintive. “Did you hear me?”

“What.”

“I said, did you want to take notes or man the burner?”

“I’ll do the burner,” says Gaara, snatching a pair of tongs from Lee’s hand. Worries aside, at least the fire will keep his hands warm.

“Oh, good,” Lee breathes, sounding relieved, before he paints that smile back on and beams, “Sounds like a plan!”

Magnizium oxite, Lee writes at the top of the page with painstaking slowness, and Gaara regrets his decision immediately. Lee holds his pencil like a toddler, his whole fist around the barrel. His handwriting is big and wobbly, and he presses so hard that Gaara’s worried the paper is going to tear.

Well, there’s no time to change roles. Gaara will just have to accept the mediocre grade or make the argument that his lab partner’s a complete fucking idiot and he can’t be held responsible for that. He cringes away from where Lee’s written the word hipothisis like the correct spelling isn’t printed in five places all over the damn paper and grasps the tongs.

He lowers the tiny chunk of magnesium into the flame, and when it flares, Lee gives a theatrical little, “Ooh!”

Gaara's not so dramatic, but the spark and flash intrigues him.

“So,” Lee says conversationally as Gaara is eyeballing the scale, “what class do you have after this?”

“3.56 ounces,” Gaara grunts, then adds, “English. Ebisu. You?”

“Oh, I have English, too!”

Gaara narrows his eyes. The school isn’t that big, and neither is his English class. “No you don’t.”

Lee frowns. His massive eyebrows cover nearly half his eyelids and make him look like a Groucho Marx costume gone wrong, despite his lab goggles. “Yes I do! With Ms. Yuuhi.”

Gaara lowers the magnesium into the flame again. Even after the rest of the class seems to have lost interest in the brightness, it still catches Gaara’s eye. The flame turns blue-white around the metal, spectacular.

“Yuuhi teaches eleventh grade.” And with the way Lee’s just spelled moll, there’s absolutely no way he skipped a level.

“Yes?” Lee looks up from the paper, that scowl of concentration still on his face. “I’m in 11th grade?”

“Chemistry is part of the 10th grade curriculum.”

Lee’s cheeks turn just as pink as the gnarled scar on his wrist bone. “W-well, not! Not everyone passes this class on their first try!” he splutters. “Lab reports are very difficult to get right and it’s nothing to be ashamed of!”

“So you flunked.”

Lee’s mouth purses, his lower lip rolling between his teeth. “... Yes.”

There’s a giggle somewhere in the back of the classroom. Lee’s head snaps around while Gaara merely glances up. It’s those two girls—the pink one and the blonde one. The blonde hasn’t even had the courtesy to cover her mouth with her hand as she laughs, and she’s gesturing obviously at them. The pink-haired one, to her credit, is chewing a cuticle overtop her smirk.

“Oh, that was Sakura …” Lee mumbles. His hands vanish behind the lab bench, and when he brings them back up, his sleeves—both pairs—are rolled back down nearly to his fingers.

Gaara has no interest in prying. He plops the burnt magnesium back on the scale. “3.54 ounces,” he reads out.

“Right!” Lee scrambles for the pencil, bearing it back down to the paper with white knuckles.

As Gaara’s lowering the magnesium back into the flame for its next course, there’s a crack.

Scraps of plastic and pencil lead go cartwheeling past Gaara’s face. He reels back and drops the magnesium straight into the burner’s top just as the bits of pencil are pursued across the bench by an arm in a green tracksuit.

Lee’s arm flies right through the burst of white flame.

There’s a cry, a flail, a rancid smell. Smoke curls up from Lee’s arm, half-concealing a tiny flicker of yellow on the arm of his hideous tracksuit. He’s got big bug eyes to begin with, but as he watches the little flame spread, they go massive.

“Oh shit,” Gaara hisses. His hands move frantically, doing absolutely fuck-all.

“Uh!” Lee yelps. “Um, oh! Oh no!” He starts waving his arm, which only serves to make the flame grow.

“Don’t do that,” Gaara snaps at him. “Stop, drop, and roll!”

“Roll where? There’s no space!”

Fuck, if only they had some water …

Wait.

Gaara grabs his water bottle from the end of the bench. It’s a good thing Temari’s been hassling him about dehydration recently and that he sucks at keeping up with her recommendations, because there’s nearly a liter of water still in it. He twists it open with his teeth, tosses the lid aside, and promptly upends it all over Lee’s arms.

There’s a tremendous splash. The whole class’s heads spin around like a parliament of owls.

“What happened?” Mr. Hatake demands, at their bench in a quarter-instant.

Lee’s hands are jammed behind his back, steadily dripping. His teeth are gritted. He shakes his head minutely, his eyes wide on Gaara’s.

Gaara's annoyed by the guy, but he looks terrified. And Gaara can’t exactly afford to get in any more trouble, either. Not this soon into a new school.

“Dropped the magnesium,” Gaara lies, practiced. “Sorry.”

“Lee’s crying,” Mr. Hatake points out.

Indeed, there are wet streams sneaking past the imperfectly fastened edges of Lee’s goggles.

“There’s no shame in the honest expression of emotion!” Lee blurts, voice as wet as his sleeves. “The myth that men don’t cry is nothing more than a sexist fiction!”

Someone barks a laugh.

Mr. Hatake drags down the top of his allergy mask to expose his nose and sniffs.

“It smells like burnt kid over here.”

He stares them down for so long that even Gaara starts to sweat.

“Lee—” Mr. Hatake says warningly.

“Oh for goodness’ sake!” Lee thrusts up his arm. There’s a blackened patch on his tracksuit, a hole burnt right through it. A red welt is forming on his already scarred forearm. “It really hurts!”

“Sink,” Mr. Hatake commands. “Now.”

Once Lee’s got his jacket off and his other sleeve rolled up, cold water gushing down his arm, Mr. Hatake turns to the goggling rest of the class.

“Okay, lab accidents 101. Naruto, call down to the nurse’s office.”

“No problem!”

“Ino, go turn off the rest of the burners.”

“Got it.” The girl with the blonde ponytail turns to sway her way through the classroom, bending a little excessively over each gas hookup. She looks ridiculous as far as Gaara’s concerned, but for whatever reason it seems to work on the rest of his male classmates. Half of them are openly staring at the seat of her jeans.

Gaara’s attention is far more focused on Lee.

The white shirt he’s been wearing beneath his tracksuit clings to him like a second skin. He’s surprisingly broad beneath all the baggy flutter, muscles in his back and upper arms bunching where he’s bent over the sink.

“And how long do we do this for?” Mr. Hatake is asking the room.

“Keep a burn under cool running water for at least 10 minutes,” Sakura recites like she’s reading it out of a textbook.

“Very good. And then?”

“Lotion, bandage, painkillers.”

“Excellent.”

The class crowds around close, gaping openly at the spectacle, all of them murmuring exclamations or cracking jokes. Gaara lets himself be jostled back and away from them. The melted polyester of Lee’s jacket reeks where it’s been strewn to the floor. Grabbing it before someone’s shuffling Chucks tread on it inadvertently, Gaara ties it around his waist for safekeeping. The last thing they need is someone else slipping on it and gashing their head open on the linoleum. And besides, Lee will probably want to cover up again later.

“And now,” Mr. Hatake announces, once he’s wrapped a tidy bit of gauze around Lee’s arm and secured it, “Lee, Gaara, come to my desk.”

“Sir?” Lee warbles. His cheeks are tear-streaked.

“Don’t call me sir.” Mr. Hatake hands them each a yellow slip of paper. He rubs his eyes, muttering to himself, “God, I knew I should’ve taken that accounting job at the community college.”

Disciplinary Warning, Gaara’s reads. He doesn’t have to look over at Lee’s to know it says the same; he can see the guy’s knees shaking out of the corner of his eye.

“Lee, nurse’s office first. Gaara, you can go straight to the principal.”

“Yes, sir,” Lee gulps, swallowing tears. “I apologize for my clumsiness, sir.”

Gaara doesn’t bother saying anything. He just grabs their mangled lab report off the bench and stuffs it into his backpack, slinging it over his shoulder.

“Oooooh, someone’s in trouuuuble …” One of their classmates’ voices follows them from the room.

“Gaara?” Lee’s soggy voice bounces off the lockers in the empty hallway. “The main office is this way.”

“I know,” says Gaara, headed in the opposite direction.

“Then … where are you going?”

“I’m leaving.”

“You can’t just leave!”

There’s the squeak of sneakers on the tile, the scuffle of footsteps, and then Gaara is being drawn up short by a hand around the strap of his backpack.

He shoulders out of it. It thuds to the floor.

“Cripes, this thing weighs a ton—!” Lee exclaims, scrambling. “Wait!”

He grabs Gaara’s shoulder proper this time. His grip is surprisingly strong.

“You’re going to get in trouble!”

“I’m already in trouble.” Gaara waves the scrap of yellow paper dismissively.

“You’re going to get in more trouble!”

“So?”

“So?! So—so come on before we both get suspended!”

Lee drags him backwards. They run into Gaara’s backpack and Lee grabs that too, throwing it over the shoulder of the arm that he’s not using to bully Gaara down the hall.

Gaara’s legs wheel, skidding until his feet come up under him and he can wrench himself around. Lee’s grasp is tight enough to bruise and Gaara is not about to let himself get thrown around by some lughead jock who doesn’t even know how to spell the word ‘oxidized’ and thinks he can jerk Gaara around like he’s his father.

He crouches low, plants his feet, and lunges at Lee’s middle.

He gets his arms locked around him right as Lee’s step falters. One of them trips. They both go flying into the lockers. One pops open, books raining down.

“What are you doing?!” Lee shouts as Gaara dives for his backpack.

“Get the fuck off of me!” Gaara snarls, elbowing around him, heedless of the fact that it’s actually him straddling Lee’s waist, Lee attempting to squirm away from him.

“What are you, crazy?” Lee tries to hold his arms down, squeezing. “Cut it out!”

Blood rushes in his ears.

“Yeah.” Gaara rears his head back— “I’m crazy.” —and smashes it down, right into Lee’s straight, white teeth.

“What the—?!” Lee burbles. There’s blood on his lips now, a black gap where one of his perfect teeth used to be. Gaara’s head stings, and it’s only when his vision starts going red that he realizes he’s bleeding, too.

Lee bucks up. Gaara goes flying. His ass hits the tile with a crack and a burst of agony. Lee’s on him in a second, blood spattering Gaara’s face.

“What is wrong with you?” he shouts, shoving Gaara’s shoulders to the floor. He twists up his lips and spits out his tooth. It spins across the floor to join the strewn contents of their backpacks and the open lockers.

“Everything,” Gaara spits back, wrangling one of his legs up to kick Lee in the stomach.

He’s got his heel planted, ready to shove, when Lee’s fist comes flying out of nowhere and crunches solidly into his eyesocket.

“Fuck!” Gaara screams, head ringing, vision starry. “I’ll fucking kill you!”

A classroom door slams open.

“Fiiiiight!” someone yells.

All along the hallway, more doors hit the wall.

“Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!”

Someone much bigger, much stronger grabs Gaara from behind, hauling his arms up behind him. He thrashes, still trying to get at Lee.

“Let go of me!”

Lee’s kneeling on the floor, blood smeared everywhere, face ashen, shaking out his knuckles. There’s a teacher’s hand on his shoulder.

He looks up at Gaara, and loathing beats like a heart behind his eyes.

“Gaara,” Temari says the moment he hits the door. “You lit a kid on fire?”

Using his torn backpack as a battering ram, he tries to blow right past her.

She sidesteps him easily and plants her feet in front of him. One sharp-nailed finger lifts the knob of his chin. There’s a thin, cruel twist to her mouth. The expression reminds Gaara so much of Father that he wants to scream.

“Gaara,” she repeats, voice louder now. “They said you were fighting. Again. And then you ran out of the school.”

Of course, Temari is nothing like Father. Unlike Gaara, she didn’t inherit his iron heart. Temari has a soft, human heart—their mother’s heart.

Gaara never met her—their mother—but he still feels like he knows her, from photographs and Temari’s stories. There’s only seven years’ worth of them. Fewer if you count the ones lost to a child’s memory.

“You weren’t answering your phone. The only reason I didn’t call the police is because then they might take you.” There’s something sharp and terrified behind Temari’s teeth, a cornered animal with claws. “Do you want to go live with Baki? Because that’s the best-case scenario if the court decides I’m an unfit guardian!”

Gaara stares at the heavy, varnished walnut of Father’s table, his iron heart leaden in his chest.

“Is that what you want?” Temari’s voice echoes even with the muffling of the red flocked wallpaper. “You don’t want to live here anymore? You’d rather end up in foster care like that kid whose tooth you knocked out?”

“I didn’t realize he was in foster care,” Gaara says to the table. The pulse of pain behind his swollen eye beats in time with the frustrated tensing of Temari’s fingers.

“That’s not the point! The point is—The point is—” She chokes back something wet.

She’s crying.

He made her cry.

She sinks down into a chair, hiding her face behind her hand like it might prevent Gaara from seeing her break down. “Just. Go to your room. I’ll call you when dinner gets here.”

On his way out of the room, he stumbles. Pencils scatter down from the shredded pocket of his overstuffed bag.

“Leave that here,” she says, waving without raising her head. “Kankuro’ll patch it up.”

He’s halfway to the stairs when she calls, “Gaara.”

“What.”

Laden with the exhaustion of someone twice her age, she sighs, “I just wish you would look at me.”

He can’t. His iron heart weighs his eyes down.

“You know I can’t accept this.” Ms. Anko lays her hand across the sheet of paper on her desk.

Gaara shifts, backpack strap digging into his shoulder. “You said I had to write him an apology letter.”

“You wrote, Sorry I broke your face.” She flips the paper over. The back side is blank. “You didn’t even sign it.”

“I said sorry.” He tries to stare her down. This isn’t his first time standing under scrutiny in a guidance counselor’s office, and it definitely won’t be his last.

She stares right back at him, one eyebrow raised. Cold-blooded as a snake.

Finally, she sighs. “Listen. I’ll give you his letter to you. See what a proper apology letter looks like; think it over. But you’re staying in suspension until you write something genuine.”

She holds out an envelope. On the front in heavy block print is written, Gara.

Gaara’s fingers are cold when he takes the envelope. He shuts the guidance office door behind him, its Hang In There kitten poster mocking him. There are a few minutes left until the bell, so he stalks down to the bathroom.

Once he’s in the far stall with his feet on the toilet paper roll, he tears open the envelope with his thumbnail. It’s stuffed thick, several sheets of paper crisply folded within. He unfolds the stack with a skeptical eye.

The letter is typed in large print Comic Sans. The sort of thing a preschool teacher would think was cutting edge.

Dear Gara, the letter begins, I want to extent my sincere apologies for the awful way I treated you last week. I let my emotions and my fear of getting in trouble get the bets of me, and I acted rashly. I should of never put my hands on you. That is the way a coward behaves.

Gaara squints. He keeps reading, the whole letter, all four double-sided pages of it. When he reaches Sincerely, Rock Lee, he reshuffles the leaves and starts all over again.

There’s no way in hell Lee wrote this. Ms. Anko must be stupider than she looks to let the idiot off the hook for it.

Gaara pulls his Zippo out of his pocket. Hovering closely over the toilet bowl so the smoke gets trapped by the seat and his body, he lights the corner of the letter. The heat of the lighter’s tiny flame is the only thing that keeps him warm most days, his cold hands and colder heart.

The beautiful thing about burning paper is the way it crumbles. Its edges get eaten away by organic nibbles of red light, shedding ashen scales into the water like a snake’s skin.

The bell rings. Gaara steps on the toilet handle and watches Lee’s so-called apology get flushed away.