Author's Note: Nagareboshi 29 challenged me to a GaaLee horror story writing contest.
It went along these lines:
"I CHALLANGE U, SWEET-AND-SIMPLE-SAN! TO MAKE A GAALEE HORROR STORY AND WE WILL SEE WHO GOT THE MOST REVIEW! DO U ACCEPT MY CHALLANGE, MY YOUTHFUL FRIEND? EVEN IM FROM DIFFERENT COUNTRY? OR U JUST SCARED? ANSWER ME!"
So I accepted.
I somehow ended up thinking of Seymour and his little shop of horrors…
~::~
It all began with the disappearance of Lee's husband three weeks ago.
Not too long after, Chouji had gone missing. He'd been unsuspecting, well fed, and happy to visit his close friend.
Lee had sobbed and cried and begged for forgiveness the first few hacks and chops, and then had taken to a liquor bottle to finish the rest.
Now he was a great deal wiser about how to go about his business. Also, he had figured out how to copy his friends' handwriting. It was a great skill to have, what with them all disappearing and the cops' last lead always coming back to Lee and his little pet shop. Minus the pets. They too had been disappearing.
Not that it wasn't strange that, with all their last phone calls being to Lee, a letter was usually found in their apartment saying something along the lines of them going out into the world or throwing themselves into the river or, really, just anything that put them away from the living or the town of Konohagakure.
It didn't help that, if the police got the warrant they were threatening him with, they could swipe the backroom and discover rivets of blood staining the walls and floor where, with the lights off and their UV lights pointing somewhere else, there was nothing.
So far, though, they didn't have that warrant. As 'coincidental' as it was, it still wasn't unusual that people would call Lee to talk to when they had problems. He had a way of unraveling issues without the use of violence, though not without using loud, passionate speeches, that made him dear to his friends.
And he cried rather spectacularly whenever he heard that another one of his dear, youthful companions had disappeared off the face of the earth. Gradually, with every visit, he even descended further into madness and openly questioned his own fate, and that, perhaps, was what made it hard to pinpoint him.
Not because he was faking it, but because it was the honest truth.
For all he knew, he could be next. And that was why he called Ino and asked her to come down, voice thick with fear and something else that wasn't normal, and she agreed without another thought, afraid and on the edge herself.
She came and Lee made sure that the patrolling, unmarked police car in front of his shop, not as subtle as the authorities possibly would have wanted, saw his own panic.
Not that he wasn't really panicking, because he was, but they might as well see it for themselves and make good use of it.
They talked for hours, nearly till midnight, about their friends and how they missed them.
Chouji, Shikamaru, Hinata, Kiba, Shino, Neji, Tenten, Sakura, Sasuke… Most recently, Sai.
It was terrible. Horrible. And Lee caught Ino as she began to sway forward in her seat, her tea cup clattering to the ground.
Lee gently put her aside. He laid her out on the floor, elevated her feet, and then stole a deep breath. Then, with great theatrics, he ran out of the shop, screaming.
"HELP! HELP! SOMEBODY, PLEASE!"
The cops were out of their car before he was even done and one grabbed him by his upper arm as if, by some strange transitive property, he had come to the conclusion that Lee was turning himself in.
He sobbed, not a fake tear in sight, and latched onto the other, less accusing officer. "It – It is Ino! She, she has passed out!"
One officer ran in, the one that was kinder, and Lee's grief became heavier.
He would have rather the meaner officer had gone in.
"What did you do to her, you sick son of a bitch?" hissed the cop, spinning Lee around and holding him against the wall of his shop. His fingers bit into Lee's shoulders and his face was uncomfortably close.
Lee did not like at all the look of this man, and he felt an intense bitterness in his chest that he could not have met this man sooner. Rather him than one of his too trusting friends. Why not him instead of his darling friends?
"I do not know w-what you are talking about!"
"You know what I mean, don't play dumb with me, boy." The cop took out his gun and jabbed it into Lee's taut belly, skewing a surprised wheeze from him. "I'm going to catch you on this, mark my words, and I'm going to throw you into the deepest pit of jail with the sodomites and they'll go to town on your depraved ass."
Lee gritted his teeth together. "If that is the worst you have," he whispered raggedly, "then you have nothing."
"Son of a –" The cop wrapped a hand around his mouth and dragged him into the space between his pet shop and the next door café. It was a small alleyway, narrow but deep, and there was only one way out.
What happened next, anyone would have been able to see it coming.
The cop threw him down and beat him. Hard. There were kicks and punches and, at one point, a brick bashed into Lee's ribs. But Lee never screamed. He released small sounds of pain – gasps and wheezes and short, sharp cries, but that was all the police got out of him, and he glared up at the officer through it all.
"I know you're behind all of this," panted the cop when he finally threw the crumbling, blood spattered brick aside. Lee gurgled on his own life fluid in reply. "You think you're so smart, but you're not."
He turned onto his side, possibly the eleventh most painful thing he had ever done. Then he remembered the nice cop and the pets that had been in his shop and corrected himself.
It was the twenty-third most painful thing he had ever done.
He coughed up as much blood as he could, felt more blood well up to replace it, and then finally dragged in a breath of air that smelled of decay and copper. It was the greatest thing breath he had ever drawn in.
"You think you are smart," he choked out. Lee somehow managed to turn his head and look at the man through his one eye, the other having been smashed into his skull. Possibly out of it. His glare must have been just as potent as it had been in the beginning, though, because the cop took a step back.
Lee smiled, his former sparkly white grin replaced with gaps and bleeding gums. "Where is y-your partner?" he asked lowly.
The terror was palpable and the cop stared at him with wide eyes. "You're out here… There's no way… What are you insinuating, boy?"
"You can shoot me now," he gurgled, "but this will not s-stop. It was kind of y-you to try, thou-" he threw up his stomach contents – his earlier energy drink and lunch. He hadn't had it in him for awhile to eat dinner. It was too close to the time where he would have to do other things.
In it was mixed blood. So much blood…
And then, like a true idiotic hero, the cop cursed, spun on his heel, and ran right into the shop, screaming his partner's name.
It would have been smarter to call for backup.
Lee managed to, after a few more minutes, after silence engulfed the late night, crawl to his hands and knees and stumble back to his shop.
The bell above the door was mute as he pushed it open, and he looked up curiously to find out why.
An eyeball had replaced the bell's knocker, and it squished sickeningly as Lee let the door slide close.
He coughed up more blood and limped towards the backroom. He could distinctly hear the gnashing and grinding of a large mouth chewing…
Still on the floor, unharmed and deep in a drug-induced sleep, was Ino, and his shoulders went limp with relief for that small mercy.
He would have to move her, sooner or later. That was, if he didn't die first. It would be terrible for her to wake up with body parts strewn all about her.
The sound of chewing stopped and he looked up from Ino to where, next to an open trap door in the floor, was a horrendous creature with globs of scaly fat rounded into a torso and a spiky tail that arched halfway across the small room.
It was studying Lee with golden eyes and its bloody snout sneered while its large, pointed ears tweaked and twitched.
"You look like shit," it growled.
"Thank you." He grabbed onto the wall with his unbroken arm just as one of his legs gave out on him. "I feel like shit."
It dropped the head it had cracked open and moved its huge, grubby feet towards him.
Lee grimaced and shied away as it came within inches of him. "W-what?"
It smirked. Rows of sharp teeth reflected Lee's expression back at him in mirrors of glinting white and stained crimson. "You wanna reward for all your hard work?"
He swallowed thickly. "N-no…"
The thing laughed and it smelled like carrion as saliva and stray bits of meat sprayed Lee's swollen face. "Wouldn't want the hubby to see you like this, huh?"
He closed his one good eye and turned his head towards the wall. He didn't want it to see him cry, but his shoulders shook and it laughed again anyway.
"Tell you what – you look too spoiled to eat. So I'll be your hubby for tonight."
Lee's heart stopped. "Wait, what do you m-"
He didn't die that night, but some things were worth than death, and he wouldn't have minded if the reaper had taken him into its arms of oblivion and sent him into the depths of unconsciousness.
He wouldn't have minded had it eaten him alive.
An hour before dawn was when the change happened, as it happened every night, and, for the first time in three weeks, Lee wasn't there to see it occur.
He heard his husband call his name from their bedroom – their desecrated, filthy bedroom, and Lee stayed where he was in the bathtub with murky brown water lapping at his carved ribs. It took him another moment to realize this and he dutifully pulled the plug out of the drain.
The water gargled away and left him behind.
"Lee?" Gaara stumbled in, naked and with a flaming bite mark on the junction of his shoulder and neck. Swollen blue veins bled black into it.
In the three weeks Gaara had had that wound, it had never gotten better. Only worse. The thick blue veins had crawled steadily across his chest and back and were getting closer, dangerously close, to his heart.
Lee stared blankly at him. Blinked as Gaara took in the sight of him, his bruises and broken bones, the cuts and gashes, the parts of him that weren't there and the things that shouldn't have been.
He looked at Lee's severely bitten lips and the claw marks, deep and narrow like daggers, on his hips. The rashes on the insides of his thighs from where something rough had grabbed him and spread him. One of his nipples was missing while the other was disproportionally engorged.
That wasn't even including the damage done by the cop, but Gaara wouldn't know that. He wouldn't remember a thing that had happened that night, like he hadn't remembered a thing from the past three weeks, but he was always there for the aftermath. He was there to wake up, smeared in blood and other bodily extremities, swaddled close to corpses in the darkness of the shop's cellar.
He was there to see the terror written out in the body language of the animals in the shop until they too vanished.
He was there when Lee was scrubbing away the evidence and he was there now, a hand pressed over his mouth as he convulsed and dry heaved.
This was, perhaps, the most horrified Lee had ever seen him, and he couldn't bring himself to care.
He was past caring.
He was, maybe in the most basic of ways, already dead.
"No more, Lee…" Gaara begged, and Lee couldn't even care about that.
Gaara, who had always been so calm and gentle in their love life and in the lives of their friends, and yet so fierce and strategic when it came to their business and their protection, dropped to his knees in a fit of sobs. Defeated.
Lee blinked again, mind void, and turned to look dully at the stained tub.
"No more," Gaara said again. So broken.
Not the strong, intelligent man Lee had married and loved for so long, willingly killed and butchered for, lived for, but a stranger.
There was fifteen minutes left till dawn before Gaara was able to stand. Fifteen minutes left to go and his pastel blue eyes, eyes that had long ago captivated Lee and had always had a passionate effect on him, were already turning gold. He was breathing hard, one arm wrapped around his churning belly and the other supporting him as he fought himself to go… somewhere.
Lee stared after him. Had he been who he used to be three weeks ago, he would have admired his husband's backside.
Now, all he noticed was that his tailbone was growing. It wagged and the skin covering it broke with a pained hiss from Gaara. Spikes covered in a clear fluid emerged and shook themselves.
Then there was noise. Furniture crashing, drawers being pulled free of their places and thrown across the room, glass breaking, chaos reigning.
Five minutes to dawn, and the noise came a pause. Something weighed in the air, a heady discovery. Victory.
Lee was turning blue from the cold and loss of bodily fluids. His one eye followed Gaara without recognition back into the bathroom and Gaara crawled to his side on all fours like a beast.
Clutched in one hand covered in scaly skin and with black claws pushing round nails out of their beds, was a pistol.
"I'm going to end this, Lee." He pulled himself up by the side of the tub and put his forehead against Lee's. His breath smelled of carrion and his lips were sticky as he kissed Lee desperately. "No more. We're done."
He cocked the gun and put the barrel end against Lee's temple. Lee didn't react.
There wasn't enough left of him to react. He only watched; but then Gaara closed his eye and left him with nothing but the harsh, wheezing breath of his husband and the feeling of lips on his, searching, probing, and finding nothing.
"I won't leave you alone for long," Gaara whispered. Two minutes left till dawn. His voice was harsher, less sane, and, when he kissed Lee again, his lips were coarse with the jagged clack of fangs behind them. "I…"
The pop of the discharge came after the bullet.
Love you.
One minute left till dawn and a shrill, barking laugh was cut off by a second BANG.