Chapter Text
Rock Lee doesn’t have a soulmate.
Everyone in the village knows it.
At least, everyone in the village who matters.
He’s gotten used to tuning it out, the pitying glances from grown-ups and the whispered conversations that take place in the Academy halls:
”Do you think it’s because he’s so ugly?”
“Maybe they took one look at those bug eyes and ran off.”
“Can you imagine having to look at him every time you dreamed? I’d barf!”
“I mean, even Chouji has a soulmate, and he’s a fatso.”
“Yeah, but he might lose weight when he gets older. There’s no way Lee’s outgrowing those eyebrows.”
“Chouji? Lose weight? I doubt it. Have you seen his dad?”
And they’re right. Lee is the only one in all four years’ worth of Academy classes who doesn’t have a soulmate at all.
For a while, he hoped his soulmate was just younger than him. It’s not an unreasonable thought. In the years before one's soulmate is born, the dreamscape will be empty. It’s just that most people forget those vacant years by the time they’re old enough to talk. But the longer his life goes on, the more nights Lee goes to sleep and opens his eyes in a world where he’s the only person breathing, the more distant an idea it seems.
Eventually, he gives up on the concept entirely.
His dreamscape isn’t just sterile, on-pause like a hospital waiting room. It’s barren. A wasteland. Crags of stone and cracked earth and the constant hush of shifting sand.
Of course, Lee has heard it all. All the ways that soulmates can go wrong.
One's soulmate can die young—before one ever gets to see them, before they ever have a chance to dream—leaving the dreamscape decimated by their absence. It’s supposed to be worse the longer you've known them, though. The holes left then are bottomless pits, such that an early death is almost seen as a blessing.
It’s said that when one soulmate goes, the other is soon to follow.
Then there are those who only know their soulmates by the marks they leave on the dreamscape. Soulmates can miss each other in passing, if they happen to be so unfortunate as to live far enough away. It's possible to go years and never sleep at the same time. But those unlucky few return to their dreams each night to find the landscape subtly altered: a chain of flowers strewn in the grass, the bark picked from a favorite tree. Lee has heard of soulmates who leave messages to each other this way, patterns in river rocks spelling out: COME FIND ME.
Soulmates can change, too; they can shift like tides. It’s said to be particularly common with inter-village relationships. Being someone’s soulmate doesn’t erase one’s loyalty to one’s village, and skirmishes between the Shinobi Nations are simply a fact of life. One soulmate makes a choice that is intolerable to the other, and betrayal soils their soul and erodes that bond.
At times, too, one soulmate is replaced by another, simply because someone else steps into the frame who happens to be a better fit. People are even said to see their soulmates fading from their dreams as they fall out of love.
And of course there are those who choose not to be with their soulmates at all, for reasons of strategy or politics or preference. There are whispered rumors of dream-affairs: a person gets married on the mortal plane, yet sneaks away in their sleep to have dalliances with their true soulmate in the dreamscape, leaving their slumbering partner none the wiser.
Yes, Lee has been told all about the ugly underbelly of soulmates, from people who he assumes mean to offer him some measure of relief.
But Lee’s soulmate isn’t dead. His dreamscape isn’t torn apart by their absence, rocked by the massive crater of their loss. No one disturbs the rocks and dust while Lee lives his waking life. Nor is his soulmate someone intolerable or undesirable.
Lee’s soulmate simply … isn’t.
When Lee sleeps, he dreams himself wandering an unmarked wasteland, walking circles in the scrub brush until he stumbles across his own footprints. He didn’t choose it to be this way. He didn’t choose someone else and thereby sever his soulmate bond, just like he didn’t choose to be incapable of ninjutsu or genjutsu. His lack of a soulmate is simply one more misfortune handed to him by an uncaring universe, and no amount of hard work will allow him to surpass it.
Lee doesn’t speak to his aunt and uncle much these days, but his aunt mentioned one time, when he was very young, that there might have once been someone there.
”But we could never tell if you were lying to us, Lee,” Auntie said. “You were always such a deceitful little wretch. You’d tell us you’d managed to do ninjutsu, too, and then we’d find you out past the quarry blowing leaves into the air with your mouth.”
Lee does wonder if he was telling the truth, or if he was lying the way Auntie always says he does. He wonders if the Academy girls were right, and that his soulmate took one look at him and ran as far and as fast from their dreams as they could.
If there ever was anyone there, he doesn’t remember them.
There’s a week, just before their first chuunin exams, where Lee sleeps hardly a wink.
He should be getting as much rest as he can, preparing his body for its future hardships like Gai-sensei has recommended. But the babble about soulmates from his classmates in the lead-up to the exam has become simply intolerable. So many of them are preparing for the arrival of shinobi from other villages with a mind turned not to battle, but rather to romance. Anxieties over first chances for his comrades to meet their soulmates in the flesh abound.
(There is an unusually large crop of shinobi with soulmates from other villages in Lee’s generation, the elders say. Rumors of a major upheaval to come color their every conversation.)
So Lee sets alarms ‘round the clock, only letting himself doze right up to the edge of dreaming. Then the metallic ring sends him staggering back upright, protesting his alertness.
It doesn’t work.
His body fights him every step of the way, and by the end of the week he’s dreaming the moment his eyes sink closed. He stares at the dark horizon and kicks loose gravel into the distance in his frustration, cursing the loneliness of his nights. The sky above his dreamscape is pitch black and never wavers; no stars spin there, nor clouds, nor moon. He looks up into that vast lacuna and feels that same emptiness echoed in his chest.
Lee isn't lonely when he's awake. In fact, his daylight is dominated by interactions with his team and his teacher. But it’s common practice to put soulmates on a team together—as long as the difference between rank and skill isn’t too stark—and being the odd man out on a three-man squad is still awkward and isolating.
The logic goes that you fight hardest for the one you love, but you can never be permitted to love anyone more than Konoha.
Lee understands his role, which is to keep Neji and Tenten from abandoning a mission in favor of each other. But knowing his place doesn’t help him from feeling left out. Not when he notices how much closer Neji and Tenten have grown. No matter how much they might squabble or how much their values might clash, they still have twice the amount of time to spend together—to train or strategize or do whatever it is that soulmates do in their extra hours—and as their relationship tightens, Lee feels himself slipping behind.
They’re so close they even start to behave like each other. Lee swears that once he saw Tenten try to flip her hair dramatically over her shoulder in the middle of an argument, despite the fact that she’s always, always worn it in high, tight knots.
Neji and Tenten still value him, of course. They’re still his friends, but they’ll never be anything more than that. Beloved comrades, brought together by necessity.
Lee is far from the only person in this position. Every squad with a soulmate pair has their third to act as a dead-man’s switch. Beautiful Haruno Sakura is one such third wheel, although to see the way Team Seven squabbles, you’d never guess that Naruto and Sasuke are soulmates. But even she—beleaguered and long-suffering as she might look when her teammates tackle each other out of Ichiraku Ramen to tussle in the middle of the street—is more fortunate than Lee. Sakura’s soulmate at least exists. It’s simply that she’s on another team, one arranged due to lineage and tradition rather than soulmate bonds.
It's enough to wear down even the most diligent of shinobi. Rock Lee hasn't quit a single thing since Gai-sensei came into his life, but the empty ache he feels at night is almost enough to push him over the edge.
He fights sleep still, sometimes, staying awake long hours at the training field, pushing himself for just that one more round of finger push-ups, one more rep on the chin-up bars. If he exhausts himself, he can avoid that lonely place, where the only companion to his calling voice is the haunted howl of empty wind. He brushes off his teammates’ concern with speeches on surpassing limits, becoming greater than one was the day before. If they suspect he has ulterior motives, they never say so.
Maybe he is the liar his aunt says he is.
But he still prefers when his sleep is dreamless.
“You know, Shizune-san doesn’t have a soulmate,” Tenten comments one day over sticks of dango.
Her palms shimmer with clear little scales, and she stinks like an abandoned fishery. She’s been having the most trouble with medi-nin skills out of all the kunoichi in Tsunade’s training program, and Neji’s been stunning fish in the river all week for her to practice with. The end of his long ponytail is soggy and reed-tangled as he tosses it over his shoulder and orders a second stick the moment he’s finished his first.
“Because they died?” Lee guesses. It’s the most common explanation. He’s rather exhausted of hearing about other people’s soulmate tragedies. It’s like people think that, by telling him, it will ease the pain of his own gaping absence. A sort of exercise in, See how much worse your life could have been? that Lee understands is meant to imbue him with gratefulness, but instead only makes him bitter.
Tenten smacks her lips. “Nope, just never had one. Gai-sensei, you went to school with her, right? Isn’t it true?”
Gai-sensei furrows his heavy brows, staring into the middle distance with a, “Hmm.”
Lee waits for his response with bated breath, every muscle of his body tense like he’s dangling on a lure line.
“You know, I think you may be right!” Gai-sensei says, after an age of Lee wriggling on Tenten’s thrown hook. “I’d nearly forgotten, but it was quite the talk of the Academy back when we attended.”
Lee is suddenly terrified. His throat works like there's a hook strung through it, jerking him onto shore. His stomach churns like shark-infested waters reacting to thrown bait. He’s never met anyone with the same curse as him before, just as he’s never met another shinobi who can do neither ninjutsu nor genjutsu.
“Why doesn’t anyone talk about it now?” Lee asks. His eyes follow a gaggle of their former classmates as they make their way up the street past the dango cart. Their eyes are sharp on Lee even now, and their hands cupped around their mouths make it clear they’re talking about him and his teammates.
Lee puffs his chest and stands up as ramrod straight as his crutch will allow, sturdy on dry land, focusing his attention towards his teacher. None of them made it to the third round of the chuunin exams, and none of them have a jounin instructor as splendid and caring as Gai-sensei to look up to. Lee has much that should make them envious, but still his attention hangs off his teacher’s next words.
“Probably because she has Lady Tsunade now,” Neji remarks. He’s gathered his two empty sticks neatly between his fingers, licked completely clean of dough.
That makes perfect sense to Lee. Shizune and Tsunade are a nigh-inseparable pair, and where you find one, you’re sure to find the other. The tragedy of the untimely death of Tsunade’s soulmate is as legendary as her bad luck. It fits, in Lee’s mind, that two broken women should come together in that way, like extra puzzle pieces jammed into an ill-matched frame.
“Gross!” Tenten sticks her tongue out. “Shizune-san is Tsunade-sama’s niece!”
“Well how was I supposed to know that?” Neji puts his hands up in mock defense. “You never tell me anything about your training.”
“Tsunade-sama and Dan were never married,” Gai-sensei says. His eyes are still slightly unfocused, his words slow in his reminiscence.
“But they were as good as!” Tenten exclaims. The dango skewer in her hand flails so frantically that Lee clenches his eyes shut for fear of getting one jabbed out. “And Shizune-san was her apprentice. It’d be like dating your … your sensei or something!”
All three genin shudder.
“It’s nothing like that,” Gai-sensei reassures them. “Shizune simply admires the woman.”
“Anyway, before we got off track, I was just saying—”
Lee chances one eye squinted open only to find Tenten jabbing her skewer right towards his cornea.
“—Lee, you should go talk to her! She might have some advice for you!”
And though Lee agrees readily, hand to his forehead in a salute and making promises, when it comes time for the group to disperse, he turns not towards the Hokage Tower, but back towards his own home.
He can’t say why he does it.
Maybe he’s shy. Maybe he’s uncertain. Maybe he’s a coward, when he already has so much else to fear.
After all, the days until his surgery are ticking down on the calendar on the wall.
No one bats an eye when Lee is the only member of the payback team who agrees to Gaara’s offer of a meal after the success of their rescue mission in Suna. Neji has business in the aviary that Lee suspects has much more to do with sending an All’s Well letter to his soulmate back home than with anything strictly mission-related, and even Naruto is too caught up with chasing rumors of Sasuke on the border of Wind Country to bother with accepting the thanks.
So Lee finds himself sitting across from Gaara in one of Suna’s small restaurants, a steaming stone tureen on the tabletop between them, while the other patrons give their table a wide berth.
Suna has been a pleasant respite from the whisper campaign that seems to dog Lee’s heels wherever he goes, but it appears as though Gaara suffers something similar. There’s a certain kinship there, and it tugs at Lee’s heart like a prisoner pulls at the bars of his cell.
“Half of them are still scared of me,” Gaara explains, gazing out into the quiet dining room. The scratch on his cheek still hasn’t quite stopped bleeding. Spare wet sand from his fallen armor still shifts beneath the wraps of Lee’s bandages as he moves his hands to grab his spoon.
“What do they have to be afraid of?” Lee asks. “You promised to protect them, didn’t you?”
Gaara gives him an unreadable look, and still the patrons whisper, as if there isn’t a genin student safe at home tonight owing only to Gaara’s protection.
“I’m sorry,” Lee says, finally, eyes on the way Gaara’s knuckles show white on his silverware. He’s not wearing his armor right now, and the skin beneath it looks paper-thin, blue-green veins making rivers on the backs of his hands. “I didn’t mean to speak out of turn.”
“You apologize too much,” Gaara replies. “I should be the one apologizing to you.”
“For what?”
Gaara doesn’t respond.
Nor does anyone seem to care when Suna requests Team Gai’s aid more and more often. Everyone’s too wrapped up in their own soulmates to notice when Lee splits his recovery time after the second chuunin exams between Gaara’s home and the hospital. And when Lee enters into a long-running correspondence with the Kazekage, nobody seems to notice a thing amiss.
Lee thinks Gai-sensei might at least suspect, when he sees Lee distracted from his training to search the skies for an expected hawk, or when he rushes home after a mission to check the mail, but if he does, he says nothing. He just furrows his brow and purses his lips and says, “Hmm,” in that tone of his that could mean anything from disapproval to acceptance.
Lee doubts that Gai-sensei could understand this feeling anyway, this uncurling, desperate longing that calls from Lee’s soul to the empty page, the sting of dejection every single time he closes his eyes to rest and finds his dreamscape just as barren as he left it. Gai-sensei knows almost everything, but he doesn’t know this, not the way he understands self-rules and nindo and taijutsu.
After all, Gai-sensei has known his soulmate since he was tiny, even if he had to fight tooth and nail for his acceptance.
Lee is sure, deep in his heart of hearts, that Gaara must have a soulmate. How could someone so handsome, so kind, so utterly soft possibly not?
He’s aware that he might be the only person who thinks of Gaara in such a light. There may be no one else (no one other than Gaara’s soulmate, he reminds himself stridently) who sees the gentle curve of the corner of Gaara’s lips in a half-smile or the bare creases in the corner of his dark-ringed eyes when he’s been working too hard for too long. There may not be any other person who hears Gaara’s soft chuckle at a bad joke and aches for the sound of a young man’s laughter rather than a demon’s cackle. It may be the case that no one other than Lee has seen Gaara’s face lit from above by the hanging bulbs in his greenhouse, where that golden glow makes the edges of him fade, like he himself might be a dream in living flesh.
Gai-sensei still shivers at the sight of Gaara’s teeth, even when he’s only baring them to grin. Neji clings rigidly to formalities in his presence, and Tenten hardly spares him the time of day. She’s always looking from Lee’s left leg to Gaara’s gourd, as if she could undo the severed nerves there simply by glaring.
It’s been years and still the villagers whisper when Gaara passes, although there’s less fear there now and more awe, more reverence. Gaara never pays it any mind, but it makes Lee’s hackles rise in a way his childhood teasing has long since ceased to. Even when it’s simply giggly kunoichi, some of them no doubt soulmate-less or unhappy with the hand that fate has dealt them, ogling Gaara with their wide eyes and long, batting lashes, something fiercely protective surges inside of Lee.
“I don’t sleep,” Gaara tells Lee once, during one of their now-routine post-mission dinners.
They’re sharing a bowl of curried goat so spicy it makes both their eyes run. Through the glimmering haze of his watering eyes, Lee searches Gaara’s squinting, tear-flecked face and has the briefest, most desperate moment of fluttering hope.
He quashes it almost as soon as it surges up within him.
Gaara has never given him any indication that he might feel even a fraction of what Lee does. He’s never mentioned soulmates or romance or dating at all. In fact, they seem to evade the subject entirely, stepping neatly around it like they’re sparring among training posts. One feints, the other dodges, one step invites the next, and they never so much as touch upon the topic.
Gaara may not know his soulmate, may have been held from them by the crossbars that keep the demon’s chakra barely subdued inside him, but Lee is sure they must exist. There must be someone who waits every dreaming night for Gaara’s arrival, aware of his presence on the periphery of their dreams but never quite able to reach him as he siphons chakra off the seal over his heart to keep himself dreamless.
Lee tamps down on his jealousy and hands Gaara a napkin across the table, watches as he dabs his running eyes and nose.
If their fingers brush on the edges of the cloth, Lee pretends he doesn't notice. That skin isn’t his to touch; those uncalloused fingers aren’t his to hold.
Because Gaara already has a soulmate. And it certainly isn't Lee.
“Lee-kun, is everything all right?” Shizune turns from the bookshelf in her office, setting down a heavy tome with a thud. Her eyes scan him up and down, a clinical assessment of his posture and demeanor. “Are you having any pain? Aftereffects of the surgery? Lady Tsunade is at the bar, but I can go—”
“It’s not that,” Lee says, hating the waver of his voice. “Um, I wanted to speak with you actually.”
She stoops to pick Tonton from the ground, gathering the squealing little pig into her arms. Her eyes are very dark when she looks at him again.
“I see.” She nods at her desk, a low-slung table with pillows on either side, more a traditional writing desk than the modern office accoutrement that furnishes most of the tower. “Please, have a seat.”
Lee settles in across from her in perfect seiza, hands on his knees.
“I have a feeling I know what this is about,” she says, always cautious in her words except when speaking to Lady Tsunade. “But go ahead and tell me why you’re here.”
“I wanted to ask you about soulmates.”
Her eyes glint when she raises them from the table, and her fingers fidget with the clasp of Tonton’s collar before they fall still. “I thought you might.”
“What … is it like for you?” His voice cracks on the last word, and he cringes at his childishness. “When you go to sleep?”
“Hmm.” Her piercing eyes flutter shut as she thinks. “I’d say it’s … peaceful.”
“Peaceful?”
“Yes.” She nods, the motion firm and sure. “It’s just me and my meadow, the sunshine and the grass and my little rock by the river.”
“You have a meadow?” Lee pictures his dreamscape, its lonesome scree of loose stone and distant palisades looming like giants, the dried-out husks of scrub grass and the dust that gathers footprints like scars. He can’t imagine ever finding the serenity he sees on Shizune’s face there.
“I didn’t always.” She shrugs, and the gesture looks strange on her. For a moment Lee sees her as she must have been as a young woman, shouldering the assaults of a society that isn’t built for people like them. “For a long time it was just ... empty. Lonely. Is that how it is for you?”
The notes of a familiar, ghostly wind echo in his ears. “Yes.”
He’s trying very hard not to cry.
There’s no shame in the pure-hearted expression of emotion, of course, but this hardly seems the place for it. And Lee is tired, so tired of feeling sorry for himself. Shizune walks around with her chin held high, seeming just as satisfied with her dreaming life as she is with her waking one. He can’t know her heart, not truly, but he can see that confidence in her eyes. He wants desperately to touch just a sliver of that grace.
“How did you do it?” Lee bites his lip. “The meadow, I mean. How did you make it change?”
“It’s hard to explain.” She purses her lips, deep in thought. “One day I just … decided to stop waiting around. I thought, so what if I don’t have a soulmate? I can become my own soulmate. After that—” She’s playing with Tonton’s ears now, but it’s an idle gesture, a comfortable one. “—It was almost like crafting the illusion for a genjutsu. Little by little, blade of grass by blade of grass.”
“I don’t have any talent for genjutsu,” Lee reminds her.
“Right, of course.” She wrinkles her nose, and Tonton in her lap mimics the gesture. “In that case, think of it like … painting a picture. You lay down the base colors, and then you add the finer details. It’s all in your head, after all, so you’re the one who can change it. At least—” And here she pauses, and the look on her face is so distant Lee wonders if she’ll ever return. “—that’s what I did. I built my dream into something just for me. Something I’d enjoy.”
Lee doesn’t mention that he’s never had a knack for the visual arts, either. Instead he thanks her profusely and flees her office like exploding tags are glued to his heels.
He ends up at Training Ground Six, the one with the giant rock and the best view of the sky. It’s not quite night, but the sun is setting, and the autumn woods around Konoha are stained marigold yellow and apricot orange, the sky kissed pink like the inside of seashells. He’s always been able to think best here, ever since Gai-sensei first introduced him to his nindo in this very place, out under the glimmer of the stars.
Lee wears himself down with a thousand left-side kicks; conditioning his bad leg always takes it out of him, and while he does so, he thinks.
Lee is not a boy given to rumination typically, but with the sun falling low and the air going chill, accompanied by the rustle of brisk breeze through dry leaves and the comforting sound of flesh impacting wood, his mind has gone clear. There was a kernel of hope, down below the surface of Shizune’s words, gleaming like a pearl in the mouth of an oyster, if only he could dive deep and pry it out.
Becoming his own soulmate.
It feels like … a possible future. A less hopeless one. But maybe not quite the one he wants. Lee is still a romantic at heart, and he can’t picture himself being happy with a life quite like Shizune’s. He values his teacher, idolizes him—maybe too much, he can admit to himself over the ring of the crickets emerging from their wooded homes—but he doesn’t want to live in Gai-sensei’s shadow forever, the way Shizune does in Lady Tsunade’s.
Lee still craves companionship, something more than friends and comrades and idols. Something more than lingering touches over exchanged dinnerware and long letters read and re-read until their creases wear away the ink. Even if he can’t have Gaara, because Gaara belongs to someone else, he still wants—
But there was something else Shizune said, something that struck to the very core of him.
I built my dream into something else.
And that … that sounds like something Lee can do.
He may not ever have a soulmate, but that’s no reason for him to be miserable every time he closes his eyes. Why should he consign himself to suffer in his own mind? And maybe, maybe if he pours as much of his sweat and his tears into this new goal as he does into his training, he can build something there that someone else might want. An internal scaffold that they may never see, but which he can lean upon to reach them.
That night, when Lee slips heavily into sleep, he finds himself once more among the dusty scrub and the jagged stone. Lee is no illusionist, and try as he might, he sees no means to transform the dried grass and chaparral into something lush and green. But he comes to this place equipped as he always has been: with hard work and his own two hands.
He bends down and seizes a stone from the earth, and he finds it heavy but mobile. He hefts it in his hand, appreciates the weight of it and how it strains his muscles. Then he sets it down and grabs another. And another.
And soon enough, he’s gathered up all the loose stone, and he begins to build …