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The first time Gaara’s sand protects anyone other than himself, he is twelve years old. He’s leaping through the trees on the border of Konoha, nursing his bruised pride and the aftereffects of a nasty concussion. Temari and Kankuro flank him on either side, and Baki is somewhere off ahead of them in the near distance. None of them have spoken for several kilometers; this isn’t unusual for their squad, but for the first time, it feels strange. Then, Temari skids over the surface of a damp tree branch, her ankle turning under her and her foot twisting out at an odd angle. Gaara watches, impassive, as she loses traction on the branch and begins to fall. Before he can think to do anything, the sand careens out of his gourd and grabs her. Temari lets out a stifled shriek the second the sand touches her skin, reeling to look at him, eyes wide and terrified. For a second, neither of them move, staring at one another with mutually alarmed expressions.There’s the crack of Kankuro’s foot colliding with the bark of a tree trunk as he comes to a halt.Temari looks down and sees the sand cradling her in a gritty hammock just feet from the forest floor. Her eyes raise back up to meet Gaara’s warily.“Thank you,” she says, her voice trembling with uncertainty.It wasn’t me, Gaara wants to say, but doesn’t. He nods, stiffly, and files the scene somewhere at the bottom of the pile of all the new information he’s still processing. Mother’s spirit has also discovered empathy, he assumes.The second time the sand reaches out on someone else’s behalf, Gaara is in the kitchen. It has been a tentative two weeks since Gaara gathered his things from the dark outbuilding on the Kazekage manor’s grounds - where he had first lived with Yashamaru, and later with nothing but his own dark thoughts and monstrous impulses - and moved into the house proper. The adjustment to living with his siblings has been difficult, each circling the others like apex predators feeling out the edges of each other’s territories. Kankuro and Temari have a preexisting, uneasy alliance that Gaara is not privy to - a collection of jokes, phrases, memories that he doesn’t yet know how to ask to have explained to him. Sometimes one of them will say something, and the other will laugh, and they’ll both look at him at once, as if suddenly aware of his presence. He freezes, his heart reaching for something it doesn’t yet know if it wants. They still have not grown used to waking in the night for a glass of water and finding him standing wide-awake in the corridor, staring unseeing at things they cannot and do not want to see. Gaara does not begrudge them this.There are moments, too, when Gaara’s heart breaks the surface of an unfamiliar and painful warmth. The day that he mentioned he didn’t know how to wash a load of laundry, and Kankuro had called him “pipsqueak”, but then shown him how with gentle care. The day that Temari reached out as if to ruffle his hair, but withdrew her hand at the rustling of sand within the gourd. The first day they all sat down, the three of them, at the square kitchen table and ate a meal together, something Gaara was peripherally aware that families were supposed to do, but that he had never experienced. And then there are moments like this one, when he’s just taken the kettle off the stove for tea. Kankuro enters the room, his step light, cautious in a way that Gaara knows it’s not when he doesn’t think Gaara is around (Gaara is always around, watching them). Kankuro leans back, painted mouth open as if to speak, and his hand moves in slow-motion towards the burner. Gaara has no time to raise his hands into a seal, but the sand moves for him. A wave of it surges from his gourd unbidden and snatches Kankuro’s hand away from the hot surface.Kankuro jerks his arm back and screams, full-throated. Temari comes running into the room, fan at the ready.Gaara stands rooted to the ground, still holding the teapot in one hand. The sand rushes back into its gourd. “The stove’s hot,” he says, but what he wants to say is, That wasn’t me, either.“Thanks, kiddo,” Kankuro says, voice uneasy.Gaara is thirteen when the sand first gives cover to someone outside his immediate family. On a field of sand, he watches the boy he once tried to kill throw himself in front of a monster - ossified, draconian - for his sake, while he lays reassembling the cracked geode of his sand armor on the ground. Gaara sees the enemy’s tail rise up, whip-fast, and the sand leaps up to protect Rock Lee in turn. Lee is slow now, so much slower than Gaara remembers; he once would have been faster than the tail and the sand. This is Gaara’s fault, and his heart creaks with the unsteady pressure he’s come to recognize as guilt. Even though the tail breaks through, sends Lee flying across the battlefield, the sand cushions his landing.There’s a long moment of sustained eye contact where neither of them blink. Thank you, Lee mouths, his eyebrows drawn and concerned. His face is still bleeding, parallel cuts across each cheekbone. The sight of blood on him makes something inside Gaara want to scream. Gaara can see where Lee’s left arm trembles to hold him up. Lee doesn’t have much left in him, a pale shadow of his former glory. It wasn’t me, Gaara wants to say, but the man in front of him is pulling his spinal cord out of his body, so Gaara turns away.The next time it happens, Gaara is fifteen and on the training field with his siblings. The idea of training, the idea that through concerted effort and teaching he could grow stronger, would once have caused Gaara to laugh. Not the true laughter that he knows now, that comes when Kankuro cracks a particularly bawdy joke, or when Temari utters a wry insult from the corner of her mouth, but something manic, unhinged. The kind of laughter that came from the suffering of others, from seeing a terrified face and knowing that this secured his own existence. The raw, unbridled joy of living for himself and nobody else. An existence of pain, delirious with bloodlust and self-satisfaction. At one time, he would have laughed.Today, he does not laugh, but instead concentrates his chakra into his palms and presses them to the earth. Baki nods stoically behind him, a grunt of approval coming from his lips that makes Gaara feel the faintest tingling of a smile. The idea of a teacher, too, was once foreign to him - something he associated with loud-voiced meddlers in forest green suits - but now it’s something of a comfort. The idea that there is someone older, wiser than him. Willing to guide him, gently correct him where he falters, and praise him where he achieves his aims.Under his hands, the ground trembles and rises up. “Nice one!” Kankuro cries from the other side of the field, deploying Black Ant and launching a dozen poison darts towards the central training post.At the same moment, Temari unleashes a massive gust of air from her fan, a perfect crosswind. Sand blows across Gaara’s eyes, and he squints.One of Black Ant’s poison darts sails wide. By the time Gaara’s vision clears, it is centimeters from Baki’s unflinching face.The sand flies up and forms a shield in front of his teacher. The dart shatters and falls to the ground. The sand where it landed blackens and turns to ash.Baki turns to stare at Gaara with poorly subdued wonder. He tilts his chin at Gaara in thanks.It wasn’t me, Gaara wants to say. Instead, he tilts his chin in return.A few months after the war, Gaara takes on a mission to eradicate a former Akatsuki hideout. He’d prefer to stay in Suna, and focus on the rebuilding, but intelligence indicates there’s some sort of electromagnetic barrier guarding the area. As the only current wielder of the Magnet Release, Gaara agrees to go. Since the dissolution of the Allied Shinobi Forces, there has been an increased focus on intervillage cooperation and alliances. Nobody is yet truly comfortable letting single-village squads engage in any activity that has the potential to affect all five nations. At the same time, no village has the forces remaining to maintain full four-man squads.So, Gaara is assigned a partner.That partner happens to be Rock Lee.If Gaara is being honest with himself, he hasn’t thought about Rock Lee in a concerted way in some time. He saw him, briefly, on the battlefield - kneeling over the body of his fallen teammate, emerging from the effects of the Infinite Tsukuyomi - but he had little time to ponder over his bond with the boy he once tried to kill, then later tried to save. Lee, however, greets Gaara like an old friend. He embraces him, uses his familiar name, does not dip his head in deference. It makes Gaara smile, though he doubts Lee sees it. They’re only about half a kilometer from the alleged location of the hideout when Lee sprawls into a tripwire. Immediately, a barrage of shuriken and kunai fly out from the surrounding trees. The sand comes up in an arc to shield Gaara from the weapons; Lee drops to the ground to dodge. As he flattens himself into the underbrush, he must hit some kind of trigger on the forest floor. A panel of spikes flip up out of the dirt.Before Gaara can reach for him, the sand has already seized Lee’s right ankle and yanked him into the air.Lee hangs there, undignified and sputtering for a moment. Gaara stares at him with wide eyes, stock still. “Gaara, please let me down,” Lee says, from upside-down. “You’re hurting me.”Gaara flicks his wrist and the sand gently reorients Lee on the ground.“Thank you for saving me,” Lee says, dusting himself off, “but I could have handled that myself.”“It wasn’t me,” Gaara says, for the first time, as if compelled. “It was the sand.”Lee looks puzzled for a moment. Then, unexpectedly, he bends at the waist and addresses the Gaara’s gourd with a bow. “Thank you very much, Sand-kun,” he says, formally. Gaara’s hand hesitates over the aperture of the gourd. He opens his mouth, uncertain where to begin. Lee straightens up with a smile. His teeth glint in the sunshine spilling through the tree branches. They start to walk again. Gaara fumbles a number of words, half-formed sentences, and awkward utterances in his mouth. He fiddles with the sash that secures the gourd to his back. “The sand contains my mother’s spirit,” he says, eyes on the treeline. It is something he assumed was common knowledge, after her effigy had loomed over the battlefield.“Oh!” says Lee, brightly. He has both hands firmly fastened to the straps of his rucksack, his posture upright, scanning the area for further traps and faults. “I’m not much for superstition, but that’s … really sweet.”Gaara doesn’t reply.It’s another year before Gaara sees Rock Lee again. In the intervening year, the sand has protected a group of Academy students from a collapsed roof. It has caught his assistant when she tripped into his desk. It has stopped Kankuro from pricking his fingers with poisoned needles more times than he can count. And once, when Temari came home in tears after a fight with Shikamaru, the sand slammed the door in his startled face when he came to apologize. He’s walking back from dinner with Naruto in the busy streets of Konoha, the road swathed in lantern light and peppered with the laughing voices of children and their parents. There’s a smell of salt in the air. Naruto is coming to the conclusion of a long story that, like many of his stories, ends with him getting his ass kicked and then befriending the person who kicked his ass. Naruto almost collides with someone in the middle of the road. The sand comes up and pushes them apart. “Gaara, what the hell-!” Naruto starts to say. That wasn’t me. Gaara wonders for a bewildered moment why the sand has never protected Naruto before now. Perhaps his mother’s spirit is aware that Naruto is like him; that he holds a demon inside him and cannot be meaningfully injured by physical insults. Of course, the sand protected him even when he possessed the jinchuuriki healing factor. He doesn’t have much time to wonder further. A loud voice disrupts him.“Gaara-kun! Naruto-kun! Hi!” The sand retreats into the gourd at his hip and as it falls away, the grinning face of Rock Lee emerges. His dark eyes glow in the lantern light. His hair is smooth and shiny as spilled ink. He nods at the gourd.“And hello to you, Mrs. Gaara’s mom. Thank you for stopping me from breaking Naruto-kun’s nose.”Naruto barks a laugh.“Aw, c’mon! Nobody believes that old wives’ tale anymore! That’s just some crazy shit Gaara came up with when we were kids and he was all demented!” Naruto brays. “Everyone knows it’s just Gaara piloting the sand nowadays!” Gaara glares at Naruto for a moment. He turns back to look at Lee. Lee’s smile softens when he meets Gaara’s eyes.“Naruto-kun,” he says softly, “can I borrow Gaara-kun for a moment?”Naruto looks back and forth between them for a moment. A grin breaks over his face.“Take all the time you need!” he says.They end up on the bank of the river, sitting side-by-side, each propped up by his own hands. Lee reaches over and covers Gaara’s hand with his. The contact is surprising, but not unwelcome. The sand rattles in the gourd, but doesn’t emerge. Even when Lee shifts, and pinches Gaara’s fingers with his, accidentally, the sand stays right where it is. “I wanted to talk to you,” Lee says. His voice is creased, careworn, softer than the brushing of the reeds against the riverbank. “Then talk,” Gaara says.They talk. Lee says more than he planned to; Gaara says less than he wants to. Somehow, they make it work. Later, when he’s in Lee’s lap, biting Lee’s lip hard enough to draw blood, the sand doesn’t react at all. Gaara breaks the kiss with a gasp like a drowning man emerging from water.Days later, Gaara is back in his kitchen in Suna. The late day light falls through the window like autumn leaves. Everything is sandstone and dandelion gold. A high-collared jacket covers the marks on his neck. He keeps pressing his fingers to them, indulgently. He hopes they’ll linger just a few days longer.Temari is at the kitchen counter, chopping vegetables for dinner.Someone outside shouts, and her knife falters. The sand shoots from Gaara’s gourd and knocks the knife into the sink. “Thanks, mom,” Temari says, her mouth around the nick on her thumb. Gaara opens his mouth.It was me, Gaara wants to say. It’s been me. It’s always been me.Temari grins at him, the faintest smear of blood on her front tooth.Gaara rests his hand on his gourd and smiles back.