Gaara lunged toward him.
The tail was the first thing that moved, its tip whipping forward with a speed that was nothing like the testing sweep of moments ago. Lee stepped left. The tail cut through the air where his torso had been and the displacement it left behind was a wall of pressurized air that hit Lee across the side of his face and both forearms hard enough to sting.
A thin line opened along his left cheekbone from the sheer force of the air. Not deep. Not even something that fully registered as pain in the immediate moment, just warmth spreading under the skin and then the faint copper taste at the corner of his mouth. He touched it once with his finger and smiled.
Gaara's arm came from the opposite direction before the tail had fully reset. It was the same elongated reach he had been deploying through the later stages of the fight, sand fingers extended two meters past where a natural arm ended, and it came fast. Lee read it a full second early. He went under it at a dead lean and felt the displaced air scrape across the back of his neck, and came up inside the arm's retraction path with his right heel already rising.
The kick landed at the joint where the sand-arm connected to Gaara's shoulder.
Gaara's arm was knocked upward and wide. His shoulder dipped with it. Lee stepped through the opening and hit him three times in the ribcage with the back of his fist, each one compounding on the previous.
Gaara screamed with a sound that seemed to mix pleasure and pain.
His body bent around the strike. His feet dragged sideways. The tail swung behind him in response to the lurch and it was moving fast enough that Lee had to break off and create distance before its arc came around. He planted his back foot and let the tail pass in front of him close enough that he felt the air against his chest.
That was fine. He had the speed of it now.
The tail was the largest thing in the arena. It was also the most simple. It told him exactly what it was going to do three full seconds before it did it, because Gaara in this state had nothing that could be called technique. Every move was so obvious that Lee kind of missed the early part of this fight. The intelligence of someone who was actually thinking during the fight. All of that was gone.
What was left was a body that wanted Lee to be a blood splatter and a mind that no longer had the smarts to go about in more than one way.
Lee let that instinct do the work.
Gaara realized none of this was working.
He stopped.
Lee stopped with him, three meters away, one arm behind his back and the other held at Gaara.
The arena was loud with the breathing of two people who had been fighting hard. Lee's left cheekbone was already closing up. His forearms had the redness of repeated wind-burn across both outer faces from near-misses. Both his hands were split at the knuckles from sand. This was rather fun.
He looked at Gaara.
Gaara looked back at him.
"The strength of one's hatred," Gaara said, "is the strength of one's will to kill." His voice did not rise. It was flat and complete, the voice of someone reciting a thing they have learned so thoroughly it has become the foundation of who they are. "And the strength of one's will to kill is the strength of vengeance." He exhaled through his nose. His eye moved over Lee. "Your hatred will never match mine. Do you understand me?" A pause. "It means you are supposed to be weaker."
Lee tilted his head.
"Gaara-kun," he said, "I do not hate anyone."
The arena did not change. The dust still hung where Gaara's last strike had put it up.
"At most, the only person I could ever say I hated was myself." He looked up and his eyes were steady. "When I was five years old, I could not run as fast as my classmates. I could not use ninjutsu. I could not use genjutsu. I had no clan, no kekkei genkai, no parents, no talent that anyone with functioning eyes could observe and call by that name. And I hated myself for it." He paused. "For about a week. Until I decided I would rather do something about it."
Gaara's expression did not change.
"You asked me what fuels me, because you know hatred and you understand hatred and you have built everything you are on hatred, and you look at me and that world view does not add up." Lee smiled. "If hatred is what gives a person strength, and I do not hate, then by your understanding of the world I should not be standing here doing this to you." He shrugged. "So here is what I can tell you."
He met that single teal eye and that yellow one directly.
"I wanted to prove everyone wrong. Every person who looked at me and said never. Every instructor who scored my paper and wrote failure. Every sparring match where my opponent walked away without looking back because I was not worth looking back at." His voice was not angry. "Spite, maybe, is a way of looking at it. The particular feeling of having something spoken over you and deciding that the person who spoke it is going to have to watch you make them wrong." A brief pause. "And when I become a splendid shinobi. When I have become one, and I will, Gaara-kun, because I will not stop until I have, my dream will change."
He took a breath.
"I want to become a legendary shinobi. The kind they put in the history books. I want my name to stand beside names like Hashirama Senju and Madara Uchiha." Something lit behind his eyes that had nothing to do with fighting, a burning flame that was entirely his own. "As a shinobi who cannot use ninjutsu or genjutsu."
The silence lasted the length of two breaths.
"Is that not something worth fighting for?" Lee asked. "Is that not worth more than hatred?"
"What nonsense! I fight only for myself," Gaara said.
"I know." Lee's voice was gentle and entirely serious. "I could see that from the beginning. You fight beautifully for yourself, Gaara-kun. You fight as someone who has never had any reason to fight for anyone else." He let that sit for a moment. "I find that very sad. And I respect you enormously for surviving as you are so far."
"I exist to kill! Do not look at me with those pitiful eyes! You of all people cannot pity someone like me! AGHHH!!!" He roared
"You exist, I concur." Lee said. "To kill, I'm not so sure." He lowered his chin and his eyes sharpened. "I'm still alive, aren't I?" He smiled. "Now stop talking and show me more. Show me everything you have. I did not come here to fight half of Gaara-kun."
Gaara roared, his good hand came up, and the sand from the arena floor rose in a wave, and he charged.
On the observation balcony, Naruto's hands were locked so tight around the railing that the metal was starting to leave impressions in his palms. He did not notice.
He was watching the fight, but he was not watching it the way he had been watching it at the start. He had been watching it differently since Kakashi said the word, jinchuriki, and explained what it meant. And since then, something had been building in Naruto's chest that he did not entirely understand.
A jinchuriki.
The way Gaara looked was not how Naruto looked when the fox was affecting him. Is his monster different from mine?
He thought about Iruka-sensei. He thought about Kakashi-sensei. He thought about Sakura. He even thought about Sasuke. All those people who he relied on, pulled him from loneliness. Was it possible, he could've turned out like Gaara too? Turning to his monster instead of his friends?
He looked at Gaara. He looked at the gourd and the sand and the murderous way Gaara's eyes had tracked Lee during the entire fight, the way they never looked at anyone else, never swept the stands, never lingered on his siblings or sensei at the railing.
He was alone.
Naruto had been alone too. He knew what it felt like to look at the friendships that other people had with each other and understand, in your bones, that you could never have that. He had never wanted to feel that again. He had never wanted anyone to feel that.
He watched Gaara charge Rock Lee for the tenth or fifteenth time and he thought: When this is over, however it ends…
He kept watching.
Lee hasn't needed to think about what Gaara's next move would be for some time now. He had been letting Gaara dictate the control of the match ever since his transformation. But there was no longer a need to do so. He had everything he needed.
The next time the tail swiped from the right, Lee stepped into it.
He was inside the swing and ducked. Lee's heel came up in the same motion. The kick connected with the underside of Gaara's jaw. Gaara's head snapped back. His feet left the ground. The tail, still in its aborted arc, provided additional upward momentum.
Gaara went up. Lee's hands hit the arena floor at the same instant his feet left it. He launched into the air. The first kick hit Gaara in the ribs and sent him higher. Gaara went further up. Lee kicked again and caught him in the stomach that folded him in half around his foot, and Gaara spat blood. He went higher. The third kick hit him across both shoulders. Gaara went higher still, the tail hanging loose behind him.
He looked up and his hands closed around the thing he needed. The tail. It was still within reach. Its claw dragged through the air below Gaara's peak, heavy and long and full of every grain that had built up across the fight's duration, and Lee took it in both hands and turned.
He spun once. Gaara was really heavy in this form. Lee really had to give it his all. The tail stretched taut from Gaara's body and the arc began to widen. By the second spin Gaara's body was moving with it now, the spin picking up what the initial momentum had built. On the third spin the arc was wide enough now that Gaara was a blur at the far end of a long radius of sand and force.
Lee stopped and let go once he saw the ground.
Gaara crashed into the arena floor.
The crater that formed around the impact point was deep. Cracks ran from the crater's rim in every direction, following the lines of stress in the floor, and dust rose from the whole arena in a fine grey curtain.
Lee was still in the air.
His body was in a downward fall from the ceiling in a straight drop with both his legs stretched out. The distance between him and the crater shrank. The dust was still rising from the initial impact.
He came down while flipping.
"Double Dynamic Entry!"
The drop kick landed in the center of the crater.
The second impact was larger than the first.
The crater that had been deep became deeper, its edges expanding, fresh fractures running out from the new point of impact in a starburst that erased the original pattern beneath it. Stone pieces the size of Lee's fist were thrown clear of the rim and clattered across the arena floor ten, fifteen, twenty meters in every direction. The dust that had been drifting collapsed back down in a ring around the new depression and then rose again, a second curtain of grey, thicker than the first. The walls of the arena took the shockwave and the sound of it bounced back from all four sides and arrived at the observation balcony in a physical pressure that made several people take half a step back from the railing without deciding to.
Lee flipped out of the crater.
He looked within the smoke.
The crater had shaped itself around the combined impact of two crashes, and Gaara was at its lowest point, half-buried in the debris of both. His chest was moving. His eye was open and staring at the stone inches from his face and the thing in it was not fixed on any specific point.
The sand from the cracked gourd rose.
It rose with murderous intention, all of it at once, from the cracked gourd and from the scattered residue across the arena floor and from the fine dust hanging in the air, all of it converging on Gaara's body simultaneously.
It climbed his left arm and gave it the same extended shape his right had taken. It layered across his chest and back, widening his shoulders, adding more mass. His head disappeared beneath it, both sides of his face now, not just the right, and the eyes that emerged from the sand covering were matched, both of them the same yellow color. The monster inside him.
The feet were still visible. The sand had reached the tops of his ankles and was still climbing.
Everything above the ankle was the complete version of what Lee had been fighting earlier.
The gourd was consumed or hidden underneath the sand covering his entire body.
Gaara stood.
He looked at Lee.
Lee looked back at him.
He was smiling.
The genuine, uncomplicated delight of someone who has been given exactly the fight they have been training their whole life to deserve.
Lee rolled his neck. He shook out his hands.
On the observation balcony, Neji had not spoken in some time.
He had been watching the fight with his Byakugan activated ever since he learned what a jinchuriki is. His arms were uncrossed. He had been thinking about a specific question for the last three minutes.
If I were down there, where would I be right now?
He thought about fighting Gaara. Sand had no chakra pathway system. Sand had no tenketsu to close. Sand was not a body he could map and shut down the way Gentle Fist was designed to shut bodies down. The most powerful taijutsu style in Konoha was, at its core, built to fight things that had chakra flowing through them, and the thing on the arena floor was only partially that anymore.
He would not have been losing. He would not allow that conclusion. He would have found something, a different angle, a way to get past the sand to the person underneath it. He would have found it because he did not have the option of not finding it.
But he would not have been here. He would not have been where Lee was: standing in the arena's wreckage, unhurried, with sand burns on his arms and his hair half-loose from his bowl cut and that unconscionable smile on his face, asking the thing across from him to please show him more.
Neji straightened.
He looked at Lee and did not say anything.
He kept watching.