Title: Stepping Stones
Fandom: Naruto
Pairing: Lee/Gaara, assorted (suffers from Nearly Everyone Is Gay syndrome)
Rating: R
Notes: For qbic1, who is awesome and patient and won me via Sweet Charity. This thing has been beta poison, so extra special thanks to hello_scorpling for doing a plot/characterization beta of this. Sorry that this isn't further betaed, but seriously. LIKE POISON. Thanks to everyone who tried. I am just glad to get this out of my wip folder. It's, uh, only a hundred or so off 11,000 words. I was originally thinking one to five thousand. Ahahaha, so wrong.

Originally this started as just Lee/Gaara with the intention of showing what many people in the village thought, but it ended up sprawling out with so many different viewpoints into a bunch of smaller stories set chronologically and centered around the story of Suna and Konoha moving from being tense, temporary allies to having built strong ties of friendship and a permanent alliance, as well as working out some of the problems I can see inherent in a relationship between Gaara and Lee. I may try re-writing this someday without so many weird self-imposed rules (like only repeating Lee and Gaara's povs, no major character death, etc). But not for a very long time.


( The first time Lee noticed Gaara watching him, he ignored it. He only caught a glimpse of moving sand from the corner of his vision and he continued the kata smoothly, letting it draw him in, losing himself in the flow from form to form. )