Author's Note: Oh, yes. HMR is back, with her first fanfiction in almost a year. Boom, shacka lacka lacka... Yeah. Enjoy, loyal Green Beast Angst fans.
"My Deliverer" is property of Rich Mullins; Isn't it great how I twist Christian songs into my horrific angst all the time?
The day before he's forced to stop caring, Rock Lee has a conversation with his mother as she leans over his bedside. It's the foggy, gray hours of the early morning, and the house is all but dead with the sounds of secrets and almost-silent spirits, but he stopped sleeping through the night just before his fourth birthday. He feigns drowsiness as she bustles about his bedside, straightening books and toys he'll soon be forced to discard, but he sits bolt up when the smallest shift of sandals tells him that she's about to turn back down the hall. He doesn't want her to go, but this won't be the first time that Lee learns that he never gets what he wants.
"Mommy.. Where are you goi-"
"Ssh." And her eyes are so dead , flaring with crinkling laugh-lines that don't come from laughter. "We've got to pray, baby. Momma needs prayers, right now. Will you pray with me, baby?"
He's still got the naivety to believe in justice, eternal or otherwise, so Lee bows his head until his sleep-mussed bangs brush his tightly-folded hands; Maybe if he squeezes his eyes shut hard enough, he'll still be asleep, and Mama will wake him up in a few minutes reminding him that he has to get up, he has to get up, or he'll be late for his first day at the Academy. He's so sure he's going to make her proud today, if only the sick curdle of his stomach will stop telling him that she's getting out of this house of four walls made of lies- And leaving him behind.
"Dear Jesus-" she whispers, looking out the fog-misted window and knowing all too well that the sun has never truly risen; Konoha is a place of night, a place filled with demons and memories, with empty eye sockets, twisted fingers, and moaning voices that scream over the meadows and eat children's innocence.
"Dear Jesus-" he mimics, clenching his eyes tighter. Harder, harder, he's got to believe- Jesus, please don't take her away…
"Save us."
"Save us."
"Amen."
"Amen."
"Good boy."
Her hug is as hollow and eerie as the cries of the wind through bare Winter trees; It almost feels fictitious and deceptive, but little Lee throws himself into her arms and holds on, trying fruitlessly to keep her from drifting away. She already has, and he knows it, her mind pressed between the pages of a ragged 'family' Bible, where ink and hopeless words are smudged together by her tears.
"You've got to believe, baby-" she rasps, covering the top of his black head with her palm. "You've got to believe." she says, cupping her skeletal fingers around his chin and tilting a tear-swollen face to meet her lifeless gaze.
"Just like the song?"
"Just like the song", and he's still young enough to believe in promises coming true; She walks out into the year's last snow flurry, barefoot and dressed in the moldy patches of her wedding dress, to wander the limits of Konoha until the cold does her in. His world watercolors to the sound of the screen door opening and staying open for the last time, and her fevered voice crooning his favorite lullaby in a way that oozes with sickeningly sweetness:
"My deliverer is coming, my deliverer is standing by…"
As he hunkers under the covers, trying to retain her warmth, Lee prays that 'his Deliverer' will be with his mother, that day.
Maybe his failure at the Academy that day is punishment for the same wrongs that have damned him to the house of his birth, the one that always seems so airtight with silence. When he comes home that day, snapping his fingers and wondering why the chakra won't come, Hagane Kotetsu slips off his sandals at the front door, and lays his mother's half-frozen corpse on the couch, wrapped in a mothball-scented quilt.
She lays there for four weeks, and every morning the smell of mothballs is rendered a little more insignificant by the stench of decay. Lee stops going into the kitchen, because he has to walk past the living room to do so, and so every day his confused mental sputterings of 'why' are masked by his shrieking, empty stomach. He drops a pound. Than five. Than ten. The maggots feast, though, disposing of The Rotting in a smacking chorus that sometimes, when it's dark and the sound fills the empty house, Lee is sure will drive him as crazy as his mother. It doesn't seem to bother his father, though; He was never around before, but his wife's death, or something else, has brought him back through the screen door that Lee never closes. The other reason that Lee doesn't go into the kitchen is because he doesn't want to see his father streaked with blackened skin and maggots, straddling the withered corpse and doing a sick caricature of making up for all the nights he spent away from her. Combined with the maggots, his father's moans have made him go outside and sleep in the backyard's single tree more than a few times.
And even though he doesn't know what his father is doing, maybe it's that sickening exposure to the futon's springs creaking through unreciprocated sex that draws Lee to Mizuki; He can't believe how nice the Chuunin is to him, and Lee starts to believe that his Deliverer really does exist- But instead of being the faceless savior he grew up waiting for, he's a silver-haired, smirking sensei at the Academy. Mizuki buys him Pocky, and simpers the teachers to raise his grades, despite the fact that Lee's skills are rotting away, like his mother. He offers to walk Lee home every day, but no, the boy politely declines: He doesn't want Mizuki to see where he came from, lest he leave Lee all alone in that house, just like everybody else.
It's this fear that first blunts the inexperienced shock, and makes doing what Mizuki says seem easy and not really a big deal right than. But when Lee goes home, every glint in the darkness is his menacing, pleasure-glazed eyes, and Lee turns the scalding sink-water on full blast, washing bleeding spider-web cracks across his hands in an attempt to get the smell of cum off his fingers. He's scared to tell the man 'no', scared to be left alone in the dark listening to the futon and the maggots and his father, scared that he's going to die and rot in his bed, because nobody will know or care that he's gone. He's scared to listen to Mizuki, because it feels weird and the bleakness inside of him widens with every trip they take around the back of the schoolyard, but when he tells Lee to touch him, his chalky little praying-hands always do.
Pulling his pant's zipper up one long day, he promises that he'll help Lee graduate, as long as Lee helps him; Mizuki kisses him full on the mouth about a week later, and ties a little red hiate-ate around Lee's forehead: Red for special students, special like Lee; Special like Mizuki says he is and he should feel, but doesn't.
Lee never sees him after that day: Only a persona of his evil desire in nightmare images, just the way he still sees his mother, black bones draped in yellowed lace and gnarled fingers knit in eternal prayer. And for years, Lee begged forgiveness for what he'd done, even if he wasn't sure exactly what he did, or that anyone up there was listening to him at all.
When Lee starts to be able to see things, he picks up praying and smoking his father's cigarettes for a while. He drops onto the couch, no longer caring and no longer smelling the inky shadow left on the faded cushions after his mother completely decomposed; Over the crinkle of the cigarette box's plastic wrapping, he murmurs strings of prayers that he finally realizes curl uselessly into the ceiling and dissipate, like the smoke he blows from his nose.
He prays that Gai-sensei won't be weird, weird like Mizuki, and thanks God that at first he almost doesn't notice Lee; He prays that Tenten will get a little crush on him, and that Anko would come home to Iruka-sensei. He pleadingly drones, eyes heavenward, for the city walls to be as strong as they really look; For Kurenai and the baby, and for Asuma's soul. He prays that his hiate-ate will scratch and pit so that he really feels like a ninja, and that he'll stop feeling Mizuki's invisible hands between his legs waking him up from the unending strand of incubuses that fill the small, dark, unholy hours of the night.
And when that stops working, and he stops choking on the scalding taste of cancer filling his lungs, Lee prays for different things: For Gai-sensei to notice him, help him, for his crush on Tenten to just stop, because he can't stand her overlooking him all the time; That Iruka-sensei will die, just like Anko did; That Konoha's walls will fall and let all of the ghosts out, and that his hiate-ate will keep floating down the river he threw it into, miraculously taking his terrors and woes too numerous to count with it.
When none of these prayers get answered, Lee closes his eyes, and sings until the birds burst from the trees outside of the house in a mass exodus, and his father would look over at him if he wasn't eating paint chips in the corner of the dry-rotted living room.
"My deliver is coming… My deliverer is, standing byyy…" But the song is all broken up with sobs about as hopeless as the cigarettes, and he knows that his mother can't hear him. Or anybody else.
Gai has lots of secrets, secrets that he tries to cover up with baseless happiness and smiles as empty as the eyes of an ANBU mask. Lee starts to like him, and even knowing what happens when you start to like somebody who's older than you, starts smiling for his sensei. He never does that for anybody else.
His crush on Tenten dies for a while when he first sees pretty Ino Yamanaka, and rises from the grave when Ino goes into hers at the age of 11. He prays for her soul at the funeral, but only because everybody else is doing it; She wouldn't have wanted him at the ceremony anyway, so he slips over a rooftop before they close the casket and the sky opens to cry the tears that he can't. Life is melancholy and constant, like the mellow, ageless song of spirits that you feel more than hear; Neji's taunting that only had to be repeated a few times before Lee began to believe it, the gauzy asphyxiation of the typhoon season, Tenten being as faceless as she is nameless. They bury Iruka that year, and Naruto is so far gone that nobody even notices when he follows Jiraiya out of the city gates, not to turn back or smile for five long years. Asuma's baby lies on it's side, sputtering and gurgling and rolling it's eyes in different directions at the same time, and Tsunade says that he's something called 'retarded'. Lee thinks the baby is funny, in a sick kind of way, and waves two fingers in front of it's face in play even if it's not smart enough to know that he's there; He even pokes it in the diaper once, just to see if it'll try and scream, like he did. When it doesn't, because it's not aware of anything both because it's a baby and it's brain is messed up, Lee wishes he were retarded, too. The baby dies one day, and Kurenai kisses it's blue forehead before Kakashi places it in a little white casket. When all the Jounin help Kurenai shuffle away, Lee stands over the fresh earth covering his first 'friend' and sings the Deliverer song into the wind. Than he kicks the tombstone, lights a cigarette, and chases his song until his legs feel broken.
He never catches it.
For whatever reason Gai starts to return Lee's admiration, they both find something they desperately needed: Gai drops by Lee's house, always stopping at the tree in the front yard, and they have little picnics on the sidewalk, talking all about training and taijutsu and a little about Lee's mother. Lee won't let him come in the house, even when he's sure that Gai could only bless it (and Lee) by oozing optimism into the black miasma of grief that seems always ready to choke him when he steps inside. Nobody can know where Lee's come from, or they'll just give him that look, the one that tells him he doesn't belong, that he sees on every single face; He can't say it aloud, because than it will all become true- He bites his lips to keep what wants to come out from doing so, but after a while, Lee remembers that he has no Deliverer; He tells Gai-sensei everything- about Neji, about his mother, about his doubts, his fears, but not about Mizuki. Gai sits, legs crossed and fists stacked beneath his chin, nodding like a shrink. The effect of the hour-long bombast makes Lee feel like a deflated pillow, but strangely empty of some of the darkness inside of him; He smiles for the first time in a long time, really smiles, and it's like receiving an old friend back into his arms.
When he's done, breathing hard and sipping cold water that makes his lungs burn worse than the nicotine, Gai ruffles his hair, pokes him in the nose, and promises to teach him a new jutsu tomorrow, smart boy. You have such cute eyes, Lee- Such cute eyes. And don't you worry about anything; I'm going to make you into the great ninja. As long as you have the Springtime of Youth in you, you are the subordinate of nothing. You're hot-blooded, dedicated, and can do whatever you want to. I'll back you up all the way, Precious Pupil.
Lee wants to be just like Gai.
It's over that year, over boxes of take-out curry and forbidden techniques, push-ups and chin-ups and crunches and so many white bandages, that Lee begins to heal. When he looks in the mirror, he's always seen an empty woman's face, edged with the torn, itchy veil that held his mother's hair back on the last day she ever held him. It's a Bloody Mary kind of image, one that makes him scream when he turns around really fast and sees it, so he decides to change it; When he finishes cutting his hair, he doesn't see his mother's face in the glass anymore, and that's okay. There's only a little Gai-sensei looking back at him, Gai-sensei who wipes away the tears he just can't cry, and sets the upside-world to rights. Gai-sensei, who will make everything okay again, and hug Lee whenever he wants, and make him feel shamed that he ever thought that his savior would never come. His Deliverer had arrived, and Lee snuck to the Jounin's side and hugged his leg until Gai massaged the top of his shiny head with the heel of his hand on that last evening.
Lee had been under Gai's wing for eight months. Had felt whole for eight months, when he saw the legwarmers. They were bright, gaudy orange, just like Gai's, sitting dejected and lonely at the bottom of the thrift store Reject Bin Lee got all of his clothes from; Unlike the rest of the tub's contents, they didn't have a hole, rip, or patch in them. They were perfect- Just like Gai-sensei. Lee shoveled every bit of money he had onto the countertop, even counting pennies from the little paper bag of savings he carried in his pants pockets for them, and pulled them on as the woman printed him up a receipt. He ran home so fast that he nearly threw up when he locked himself inside of his room, but his rising joy masked the bile biting his esophagus; Within seconds, Lee had stripped off his clothes, for once not fearing that invisible eyes were taking in the sight of his naked, bony body with evil intentions in mind, and dragged on the jumpsuit that he was too afraid that he would dirty to usually wear. When he bounded in front of the cracked, full-length mirror on his wall, his young mouth opened in a silent little 'O' of amazement, and everything stopped dead in it's tracks.
He looked just like Gai. True, he had no Chuunin vest, and his eyes were a little too wide; His smile was crooked, and he wasn't as tall or strong as Gai-sensei, and he wasn't good enough to be Gai-sensei's Prized Pupil, but- He looked just like him. A little Gai, all proud of himself and alive in the Springtime of Youth, not dead and wallowing in the permanent Winter that gave you a chill when you walked through the living room.
It was the first time Lee had looked at himself in the mirror and liked what he saw.
He was out the door just as fast as he was in, tearing down the familiar sidewalks with joy and his skintight jumpsuit making him feel as though he were just soaring; He was so proud to be wearing those mismatching raiments, so proud to be Gai-sensei's student, so proud to be one step closer and so, so damned proud to have found his savior that he ran all those blocks there, ignoring the lofty glances that usually made him feel like shit on the bottom of a shoe. He was too joyful to flip them birds, and too eager to show Gai for him to swallow the song:
"My deliverer is coming!" he whooped, arms outstretched and face raised to the massive stone monument that towered, ever-present sentinels, over Konoha. He was singing, now, singing for all the people who needed a deliverer: Neji and Momma, Mizuki, Father, Kurenai's Baby-
"Heee will never break his promise! He has written it upon the skies! I, will never doubt his promise-
Though I doubt my heart, I doubt my eyyeeess-
MY DELIVERER IS COMING! MY DELIVERER IS STANDING BYYY!" he sounds half-crazed, crazed like her, but he just doesn't care, as he laughs to the skies, tasting sun and wind and rain and happiness again-
"MY DELIVERER IS COMING! MY DELIVERER IS STANDING BYYY!!"
("Shh." she whispers against his fever-warmed forehead, ignoring the sweaty strands of bangs clinging to her lips as a sane mother kisses her child. "Myyy deliverer is coming… My deliverer is standing byyy… You'll be just fine, little one. Myyy deliverer is coming…")
His feet slapped the concrete hard enough to make tears of pain bleed into the ones of joy leaking from his eyes. Tearing his eyes from a sky crazy-bright with promise and hope, Lee grinned so hard that it felt like his face was going to crack in half, and slammed his fist against the front door of Gai's apartment.
He waited a minute. Two minutes.
Ten. An hour.
All night. Until it started to rain all over his little Gai costume, and he lost track of time itself. He huddled under the wind-bowed awning of a nearby bakery, whisking his palms over his thin arms and sputtering as he tried to breathe in the steady curtain of water soaking his bangs to his forehead; Wondering where Gai-sensei was, when he was coming back, if Kurenai's baby had been this cold when they covered him with dirt, where a cigarette was when he needed one-
And the recurring messenger for the Grimm Reaper, Kotetsu appeared behind him on the second day of waiting and praying, and just cupped a hand over Lee's shoulder.
He refused to believe it at first- or more accurately, couldn't. Standing as Shizune straightened his funeral jacket and gazed sorrowfully down at the unresponsive child, it seemed that all of Konoha's Jounin, people who'd silently looked up to Maito Gai just the way he had, swirled like a river of sable-clad mourners on a snowy television screen. He heard them tapping rosaries, regretting, murmuring "He was such a good man- Konoha has lost one of it's finest" and "That poor little boy, there- Was he his son?" all around him, but it simply didn't register; Lee was still standing in front of Gai's stoop, wearing leg warmers and a smile that went to hell a little more with every hollow knock on that door that went unanswered; He wasn't at his sensei's funeral, too lost in himself to notice that they'd thrown away his new leg warmers because they were mildewed by stagnant puddle of rainwater that had accumulated at his little sandals during his days of waiting. It was a disembodied kind of feeling, like laying in the grass and staring at the autumn sky as white-hot pain screamed through his body; Like getting mesmerized by the gray smoke puffing from his nose, like when he froze and Mizuki had to drag his tiny little hands into the familiar motions, like sprawling across her lap, fingering the tassels of her wedding veil and just knowing that it was all a matter of time when his mother would leave and not come back, because she'd never really been there at all.
It was familiar, but the most alien sensation he'd ever felt.
But he didn't cry; He hadn't been able to cry for years, since the forty-fourth or the four-hundreth time he dreamed about his mother disappearing in a rustling of old lace and whispers out the back door, or the fourteenth or maybe the fortieth time Mizuki made him bite a hankerchief to keep from screaming. Gai-sensei would have been proud of him; He always was. Had been. Never would be again, because he was dead, fucking dead, another fucking ghost that would claw it's way out of the ground and follow him back to that house to sit upon the stain on the couch and join in on the chorus of Kurenai's baby and Iruka, Mizuki's moans, echoes of Neji's fatalistic taunts, Mama's fever-songs, Tenten's utter silence.
When he got home, Lee walked out the back door and went into the tool shed; He came back in, closed the door for the first and last time, and walked past the stain on the couch, past his father as he trembled with knees to his chest and eyes empty as he muttered strings of words to the invisible demons all around him. Lee walked into his room, turned around, and nailed his bedroom door shut. With a little hammer, he pounded nails through the frame of the door and into the frame of the wall, reaching up as high as he could. He couldn't reach very high because he'd never been tall, not tall like Gai-sensei, but he got the job done. That's what Mizuki used to say: He got the job done.
With the ghosts on one side trapped with him and the ones on the other side trying to claw their way in, Lee laid down on his bed, lit a cigarette, and thought that the world was just fucking funny.
His mother's stink still perforates the entire house, his father is still there but not there, his fingers are still alive with the leprosy of feeling Mizuki, Kurenai's baby is still retarded and he can still hear the deafening refrain of the dead's regrets, but the world is funny. It's funny like waiting, waiting your entire life for a rescuer that's about as real as his hope of this all being a nightmare he'll wake up from; Funny like the rest of the village thinks he is, the pitiful wanna-bee kid from the wrong side of the tracks, because they're not standing in front of front doors that will never open and singing lullabies that are, in the end, just something to lull you into a false sense of security so that sleep is possible.
He hasn't slept in four days.
But he'll make up for that now, he knows; He pulled his legs to the front of his good shirt, promising that he'd sleep now, sleep forever, just like bodies do under the ground when their souls escape. Lee wondered where his soul would go for a minute, wondered if it would waft into nothingness against the ceiling, like the cigarette smoke, or float down the hallway to haunt his father for a while. He thought for a minute or hour, he couldn't tell, before he had to give in to his secret doubt and start screaming with sobs that nobody would hear. Just like nobody had heard him praying all of this time, nobody ever heard Lee.
Heee will never break his promise… Though I doubt my heart, I doubt my eyyeees…
And it took all of this to break Lee; While the fingers of spirits scrabbled at the frame of the door and the cigarette smoldered into a little stub and burned his fingers, Lee finally realized that eleven years of life had only been eleven years of death, and gave in to the hopelessness that had driven his mother out that door and set the pace for the rest of his existence.
"Heee will never break his promise…"
Sniff. Sob. Touch it Lee, touch it, it'll feel good- You've got to believe baby, you've got to believe- My precious pupil, you have such cute eyes-
".. Though the stars should break faith with.. The.. Sky…"
And wouldn't you know it- The (one) time he really needed him, his Deliverer wasn't standing by.
A/N: ... Uh, hai. Please review, but be kind. It's been almost a year since I've written a serious fanfiction... Jaa nee, and sorry, everybody.