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The snow crunched and sparkled beneath Lee’s straw boots, and he shivered. This far into the woods, this far into the winter, and with the sun already setting, it was unlikely he’d find anything worth foraging, but his stomach creaked and grumbled like a living thing, and so he forged on.

The sun dipped low behind a copse of trees, casting long shadows across the snowy hills. Far in the distance, a fox gave a high, warning cry. Lee adjusted his hat back away from his eyes, squinting against snow-blindness. The trees were barren, skeletal in how they stretched up to scrape at the soft bellies of the clouds.

He sighed, tucking his thin, patched coat more tightly around himself. A blister burst on his weaker heel with a sting and splash of cool liquid.

Home, then. And rice again for dinner.

Then came the scream.

It pierced clear across the hills, ringing through the forest like a struck bell. Lee startled and began to limp more quickly towards home. Whatever caused that sound was nothing he wanted to be in the woods with late at night.

The thing—human or creature, Lee could not be sure—screamed again. Longer, louder. Pained.

Cursing himself, Lee spun in his tracks and began heading in the direction of the scream. If it were someone hurt, he would not be able to bear it if he discovered he had left them alone in the cold of the woods through the night.

The scream turned to a wail as he crested the nearest hill, leaning heavily upon his walking stick. His bad leg protested the rough and hurried treatment, strumming up a scream of its own as the muscles tightened like bowstrings and twinged around his bones.

He was close. On the curls of the icy air he smelled copper.

Blood.

He skidded down the next embankment, his walking stick snagging on roots and branches, jerking his shoulder nearly out of his socket. He cried out, and another cry met him in return.

At the base of the hill, shrouded in shadow so that the red had gone dull blue, was a pool of blood. Floating in it like little boats were feathers, their white edges stained as they spun. Uneven strikes of sound battered through the air, and Lee peered beyond the carnage to spy a white crane, its neck twisted in agony, struggling to free its wing from an arrow that had pierced right through it and into a tree.

Lee’s first thought was of the hunter who was no doubt near, and their likely vengeance should he snatch their quarry.

His second thought was of his empty stomach and skin turned to crackling over the fire.

Then the crane wrenched its head around with another piercing, pained cry, and met his eye.

Its eye shone dark in its black face, sharp with an intelligence so keen that Lee felt as struck as though it were he who had been pierced by an arrow’s tip.

The crane gave a low, pathetic croak, thrashing its free wing. The pinned one wagged limply.

Even as Lee crept cautiously forward, looking side-to-side and seeing no other living thing, the bright black of those eyes hazed over with pain, fading fast.

The bird would not survive the night in this state. If not from the hunter then from the foxes screeching and chittering at each other in the distance, who would take it for easy prey.

“Easy,” Lee murmured, in the way he used to speak to the chickens in his yard before he had to sell them off to keep his tiny farm. “Hush, now. I’m here to help.”

He clucked his tongue, and the crane gave a slow, uneasy creak, its dark head sagging on its slender neck. His heart panged at the showing of defeat.

“I’ll be as gentle as I can,” he said, as though the crane could understand him. “But this will hurt.”

The bird held his gaze.

Then, it sank back, allowing him full access to its wounded wing.

“There, there.” Lee unsheathed his knife from his obi and found where the arrow had nocked in the tree. It was embedded deep, only the shaft of the arrow left protruding and stuck through the bird’s wing. At least that would ease its retrieval. He sawed through the wood quickly, until both bird and arrow were free from the tree’s trunk.

The bird came loose into his free hand with a squawk and a rustle of feathers, nearly bowing him over with its weight and size. Its body was warm; its heart battered against his palm as his hand, wary of sharp beak and sharper talons, slick now with the blood that stained both white snow and white feathers red, found the arrow’s shaft.

“Now—” As best he could, he stretched the crane’s wing out. In the growing dim it was difficult to see between the feathers to the pale and pebbled skin beneath, but at last he found the spot. After trimming the arrow’s shaft down as thin as he could on the far side, he seized it in his slippery hand and yanked backwards.

The crane gave a screech of agony. Blood gushed between Lee’s fingers. But when the flutter of feathers had settled, the arrow’s shaft lay in Lee’s open hand.

The bird’s body heaved in his arms, rapid expansions and contractions coupled with breath. Its talons scraped against and rent the too-thin fabric of his trousers. Still, Lee clutched it close. From within the lining of his jacket, he found a clean patch and cut it free into a clumsy length of mint green bandage. There was still a little bit of water left in his leather pouch, and he wet the fabric to daub away any lingering splinters before he stanched the bleeding. All the while, he hummed: a lullaby that was the only thing he had left of his mother:

Yuè er míng, fēng er jìng, shùyè zhē chuānglíng a.
Qūqu er, jiào zhēngzhēng, hǎobǐ nà qín xián shēng a.

The moon was high in the sky by the time his work was done, painting everything silver-white save the black, black blood smeared all across his palms and clothing.

“I don’t know if you will be able to fly in this state.” Lee tied off the bandage. “But I don’t suppose you will allow me to take you home.”

The crane gave him a look of such transparent derision that Lee could only laugh.

“It’s not as though I could nourish you back to health anyway,” he said, “unless you can survive on a diet of rice alone.”

The bird made a low, creaky sound as he lowered it to the ground. On its thin, scaly legs it tottered. Experimentally, it spread both wings.

Breeze cut icy between the boughs of the trees, shaking loose glimmering snow like stars as the crane posed, wings outstretched, head arced upwards.

The moon limned it like shining treasure, and Lee fell back, stunned, at the sight of its grace and beauty. On the top of its head was a crest of bright red, stark now in the moonlight.

With another sharp, knowing look in Lee’s direction, the crane took a few unsteady steps forward, then gained its footing and took wing.

Up into the sky it soared, leaving Lee with nothing more than the echo of its cry between his ears and its blood on his hands.

It was only a few days before a knock came at Lee’s door, and he slid it wide to reveal a man swathed in a black and white cloak, his face hidden behind the tipped-down brim of a straw hat.

“If you are looking to purchase crops, I’m afraid you’ve come a few farms too far east,” said Lee. “I have sold all I had to sell, and there is nothing left.”

The man looked up, and Lee was struck by the sharp intensity of his gaze. His eyes were a strange color, the green of freshly cut mint leaves before they were dried into tea.

“I am seeking a place to stay,” said the man, in a rough, uneven diction, creakily accented. “I can offer my services in return.”

“Services?” Lee asked.

“I am a weaver.” The man nodded behind him to a pack that was strapped to his back, bamboo beams jutting from it.

Lee spread his arms wide, sheepishly exposing the many-times-over patched sleeves of his haori. “Well, I could certainly use a bit of help with that. Please, come in. My name is Rock Lee. Pleased to meet you, …?”

“Gaara.” At Lee’s invitation, the man stepped inside, his hat sliding back to reveal a head of bright red hair.

“You must have traveled a very long way indeed!” Lee exclaimed.

And though Lee looked off into the distance to see from which direction the man had come, he saw no footprints in the snow save the scattered tracks of birds.

That night, the snow fell heavily, packing in around Lee’s tiny, poorly insulated shack.

“At least I still have means to stoke a fire,” Lee said genially, with a nod to indicate the woods all around as he struck a flint and piled kindling upon the now-smoking heap. “My fields might have fallen fallow, but at least the forest never will.”

The man cocked his head, a keen inquisitiveness in his strange green gaze. “You are a farmer?”

“Not a very good one, with this leg.” Lee held out the limb, crooked and gnarled, for inspection by the firelight. “But I do my best to make do. The springs and summers are not so lean, but this winter has been harsh. I can offer you barley tea, a bit of rice, but little more.”

“I appreciate the generosity.”

“I would offer more if I had it!” Lee said, hobbling to get the kettle and fill it with water.

“What you offer is more than enough.”

Lee tutted to himself. “I am afraid there is only one futon as well. I would sleep on the floor, but I have only a single blanket, unless what you happen to be carrying is another?”

“It is just a loom and thread at present,” said Gaara. “I don’t mind sharing.”

“The extra body heat will be welcome,” Lee replied with a smile, passing Gaara a chipped clay cup.

Beneath the blanket, Gaara’s body was thin and bony, his skin pale and pebbled with goosebumps. They had laid his cloak and Lee’s haori atop to stave off the midwinter chill, and Lee had positioned Gaara with his back to the fire so he might be warmer, but it hadn’t seemed to help.

The house’s beams creaked with a sudden gust of wind, and Lee huddled closer to the stranger with a shiver. Despite the layers heaped atop them, it was too cold for him to find proper sleep, and his feet knocked restlessly against Gaara’s.

After some minutes of his fidgeting, there was a shift beneath the covers. A hand with long, thin fingers brushed up his back, the touch as soft as feather-down. Gaara nestled closer, his face tucked into the crook where Lee’s neck met his shoulders, his hair tufting beneath Lee’s ear. He pressed his lips to Lee’s skin and hummed:

Yuè er míng, fēng er jìng, shùyè zhē chuānglíng a.
Qūqu er, jiào zhēngzhēng, hǎobǐ nà qín xián shēng a.

Lee stilled.

“You’re not from—?” He cut himself off, curling closer into Gaara, unable to keep the softest of smiles off his face. “It’s been a very long time since I’ve heard that song.”

Gaara’s fingers found the back of his hair and stroked it, and Lee fell quickly into sleep.

“The first order of business will be to make you some proper blankets,” Gaara announced over their breakfast of weak tea. “And the second will be food.”

“I have no money with which to pay you back,” Lee protested. “The harvests were poor this year.”

Gaara held up a stilling hand. “You owe me nothing. But I will need privacy in which to work.”

Lee grimaced. “There’s only the storeroom.”

It was a dark, dreary thing, set far back from the house proper and scarcely insulated.

“This will do,” Gaara announced, setting his pack down upon the dirt floor and beginning to unwrap it, revealing the skeleton of a backstrap loom.

“But surely the light is too poor!” Lee objected. “And you’ll be far too cold to work in here. Your fingers will get stiff!”

“It’s no matter,” said Gaara, studiously ignoring him as he laid out various rods and straps and a bone-white shuttle. “Now go. I will return to you when I am done.”

Lee hesitated, but Gaara’s tone was a firm command that brooked no argument. When he opened the door to leave, bringing eddies of snow down over his toes and into the shadows, Gaara said:

“Lee.”

“Yes?”

“I need you to promise me one thing.”

Lee turned back, staring at the pale and slender curve of Gaara’s spine, his head ducked down and faced entirely away from him. In the gray and watery light, his neck seemed longer than it had before, the bones thin and brittle and prominent.

“Anything,” he swore, his heart having fits behind his breastbone.

“You must never come in here while I am working. No matter what you think, no matter what you hear, you must never so much as peek through a crack in the door. Do you understand?”

“I—” Lee faltered. “Why?”

Gaara looked over his shoulder, and his eye flashed deadly through the little room. Lee noticed, for the first time, that his nails had been filed down into serrated little points, sharp as claws.

“Do you,” Gaara repeated, his voice raw and throaty, “understand?”

Lee stumbled back. He nodded. “I understand.”

“Good.”

And then, with a whistle of wind so sharp it could have been a bird’s call, Lee was impelled backwards through the door, which slammed shut before his face.

At midday, Gaara staggered back into the little shack. His shoulder hit the doorframe harshly, and he groaned.

Lee jolted up from the weak broth of wild onions he’d been cooking.

“Gaara? Are you all right?”

Gaara’s legs wobbled, knock-kneed, as he stumbled forward and thrust a bundle of fabric in Lee’s direction.

“The blanket,” he creaked, all guttural and throaty. “It’s done.”

“That’s impossible,” Lee began to say, but when the cloth fell into his hands and he stretched it out, it was thick as bast and smooth as silk, beautifully patterned in geometric rinzu weave of black and white, large enough to comfortably cover two grown men.

Gaara was already crumpled to the floor by the small hearth, elbows on his bony knees and his face in his hands so that his shock of red hair covered his eyes entirely. He stayed this way even as Lee bade him to eat, only sipping weakly at the offered broth when it was practically pushed under his nose.

“Now, food,” he said, heaving himself back to his feet as soon as the meal was done.

“Are you sure you shouldn’t rest?” Lee asked, jumping up beside him and steadying him when he wobbled. “You look dead on your feet!”

Gaara flapped a hand that did little to push Lee away. “I will be back shortly. Don’t follow me.”

“I could help you!” Lee cried, as Gaara made his way towards the door, shrugging his cloak over his shoulders and shoving his hat back onto his head.

“No, you couldn’t.” At the door he paused, and in his eyes was that same warning force when he told Lee, “Don’t look for me. Don’t follow me. No matter what.”

The door slammed with a rattle in its tracks, and all Lee could do was sit in his little house and wait fretfully.

The evening wore on, the sunlight growing long and cold through the rice paper panes. The snow fell heavy and soundless, insulating the world until the whole house felt wrapped in its cobwebs, dusty and silent. Once or twice, Lee thought to peer out the door to see if he could trace Gaara’s footsteps to wherever he’d gone, but every time his hands twitched in impulse he fought them back down, remembering the fervid light in Gaara’s eyes.

When it had grown dark enough that Lee was forced to light the lanterns to stave off the looming, purple shadows, a rap came on the door.

He hurried to his feet. A long, thin shadow loomed on the far side of the door, its neck impossibly long and crooked, its outstretched hands spindly-fingered and gnarled.

Lee’s breath caught.

But when he opened the door, all that stood on the other side was Gaara, slumped and careworn against the door frame, his thin fingers trembling on the brim of his upturned hat.

The hat, once brought inside, revealed itself to be full of carp.

Lee did not think Gaara had used a rod or hook to catch them. Not because he had not taken one with him—though he hadn’t. Because the fish had been torn to pieces, their guts leaking fluid into the hat’s straw weave as tails still twitched and gills throbbed open and closed like beating hearts.

One mud-splattered eye, wide, fixed on Lee’s.

He turned his face away.

Well, there was no sense refusing food, no matter what state it was in. Lee took the offering with a murmured, “Thank you,” as Gaara slid down the wall to rest on the floor like something shot, all crumpled down.

The room soon filled with the steam and scent of cooking, and it seemed no time at all before their bellies were full and their eyes were heavy, dimming firelight bidding them to sleep.

“Let’s go,” Lee whispered, when Gaara’s head drifted to rest heavy upon his shoulder, lifting him and helping him undress.

The blanket settled over them with a hush. Warmth flooded Lee’s skin. Despite the tight and delicate weave, the fabric was soft as a chick’s feathers, and it moved with him as though it were itself alive, some great beast’s pelt still animate.

“That’s better,” Gaara sighed, tucking his head into the crook of Lee’s neck.

“Do you sell these?” Lee murmured over the fire’s crackle. “You could make a fortune.”

Gaara’s head leaned back, and when he caught Lee’s gaze the night had made his eyes so dark they were nearly black, keen and curious. “Would it help?”

“Would what help?”

“If I did.”

In those words was an implication that Lee was not quite ready to pick apart, a permanence that he hadn’t known he’d invited when he’d opened his door onto a snowstorm and let this strange man into his home, into his life.

Words stuck in his throat, caught by the fine, narrow planes of Gaara’s face, the sharp angles of his bones by firelight. He glowed here—in Lee’s bed, in Lee’s arms—otherworldly with his intrigue and his promises.

“With your speed, with the quality of your work … you could make yourself a very rich man.”

Gaara leaned in close, never breaking eye contact, until the point of his nose grazed Lee’s.

“I could make us very rich men,” he corrected.

Within the week there was a stack of silks by Lee’s door so fine he worried someone might chance by and accuse him of theft.

“Will you take them to the market soon?” he asked Gaara, who was eating the day’s fish raw and with his fingers, his head lolling on his thin neck.

“Market?” Gaara murmured deliriously.

“To sell.”

Gaara blinked once, twice. A bone cracked brittle between his teeth, and he did not bother to spit it out.

“You do it,” he said.

Lee came home that night with his pockets fat with ryo and his arms heavy with squash and venison.

“We will have a feast tonight!” he declared, pushing the door wide.

In their bed, beneath that down-soft blanket, lay Gaara, the rickety cage of his bare chest and arms exposed.

He smiled. Then he opened the covers and invited Lee in.

In that warm, quiet space, nestled up tightly together, it seemed nothing less than natural to allow Gaara’s hands to slip between the layers of Lee’s kosode to find his skin, to pull him in tight enough that their breath intermingled and their lips had no choice but to meet.

His nails were sharp, still, filed down for weaving, and when they skimmed Lee’s ribs they left behind little trails of scratching heat.

Lee hissed, shifting into Gaara’s heat as his obi was untied and his kosode pushed down off his shoulders. Gaara’s motions were graceless, artless compared to the beauty with which he wove, as though the motions of unclothing another man were foreign to him. Lee took him by the hand and led him, showing him where to find his pleasure.

Soon enough, Gaara found the rhythm, working at Lee’s body like he was nothing more than skeins of silk, tugging at the warp and weft of him as though it were Lee attached to the backstrap of his loom, his tension controlled by every twitch of Gaara’s muscles.

They did not speak, though Gaara crooned and chittered and nipped at Lee’s throat.

When Gaara’s fingers grazed the thick scar tissue of his hip, he paused.

He looked up into Lee’s eyes, head cocked, curious, then lifted the blanket to peer beneath.

“You don’t need to look at them,” Lee said, pushing his hand aside. “They’re unsightly.”

Gaara frowned, then took Lee’s shoving hand and guided it to his shoulder, where there was a deep puncture filled with fresh, angry scarring. He traced Lee’s fingers around it and shuddered.

“Do you find me unsightly?” he whispered.

Lee shook his head, mute and entranced, circling that pink, raised skin with both fingers and eyes.

“I think you are the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.”

Gaara’s keen, bright eyes flashed. He smiled, and sighed, and rolled back for Lee to climb atop him.

“Lady Hinata would like a kimono to wear for the Snow Lantern Festival,” Lee told him, polishing off the last of the roasted pumpkin that Gaara had shown little interest in. “But she would like it in indigo.”

“That’s not possible,” Gaara replied.

Lee drained his soup bowl of broth. “We can afford whatever dye you would like, now. Indigo would be no great expense.”

“I said it isn’t possible.”

“Surely with your talents you can do something more than black and white! Even if it’s just ikat dyeing. And imagine, if she’s satisfied, the number of orders we’ll receive!”

Gaara frowned down into his bowl, rolling his last uneaten acorn around it.

“I’ll think of something.”

When he returned from his weaving the following day, he presented Lee with a bolt of cloth studded with embroidered red camellias.

Lee bit back a gasp at its beauty.

But that night, in bed, Gaara shivered more than usual, and Lee’s hands seemed unable to warm him.

“She loved it!” Lee exclaimed, the moment Gaara returned from the storehouse. “All of the women in the village are raving about your lucky red designs. We have nearly a month’s worth of orders!”

Gaara’s face went pale and wan. He swallowed heavily before he nodded.

“Your hair is thinning,” Lee told Gaara fondly, stroking the crest of his skull while they were curled back-to-front, scarcely moved from the last position in which they’d been.

“It is not,” Gaara replied in a churlish mutter, ducking his chin to his chest.

But Lee combed his fingers through his hair and held it out over his shoulder for him to see: a few strands of bright red, tangled between his fingers.

“It’s nothing to fear,” said Lee. “It’s just a consequence of age.”

Gaara wrapped Lee’s arms more tightly around himself and said nothing, staring into the fire.

For the next month, Gaara made nothing but red-spattered designs, first carnations, then hydrangeas, then kuroyuri. His weaving had always tired him, but now it seemed to drain him of life entirely. Though he’d never spoken much, now his eyes drifted during conversation, dulled of their bright intelligence and the dusky green of dried tea leaves. He picked listlessly at his food, even his favorite mudflat crabs.

And the bolder his designs became, the more he withdrew from Lee. He turned his face away from kisses in the dark. His sharp-filed nails bit into the back of Lee’s hands when they tried to wander.

His skin grew so very cold, pebbled with goosebumps even with the covers tucked in around him.

“Perhaps we need a second blanket,” Lee murmured, stroking Gaara’s cheek and trying not to notice how he flinched.

The blanket Gaara brought him the next day was decorated with bright red spider-lilies.

“Is that better?” Lee asked him, the two of them now curled up beneath double layers of heavy cloth.

Gaara’s lips thinned. He shook his head.

“What is it? What’s wrong?”

Gaara said nothing.

Lee pet down his sides, his back, rubbing his calloused hands over the places he knew Gaara liked best to be touched.

Gaara winced.

Lee pulled his hands away.

They came up from under the blankets wet. Red. Dripping.

“Gaara?”

He tossed the blankets aside. Beneath, Gaara’s bare side was a mess of stippled, bleeding rash, leaking purulent fluid that dripped across his stomach and stained the futon beneath.

“Gaara!” Lee leapt to his feet and began searching for his clothing. “We have to get you to a doctor!”

“No.” Gaara’s voice was flat, emotionless. It brooked no argument.

“Then Lady Tsunade. I know it’s late, but she’ll help, I’m sure of it. She wears one of your obi almost every day!”

Gaara’s eyes had hazed over, dulling the green until it was nearly gray. He rolled over on his bloodied side, leaving streaks of red across the futon cover.

“I just need to sleep,” he said.

“Gaara, please.”

But Gaara pulled the blankets up over his face, and Lee could do nothing but sit at the bedside and watch him ‘til morning, humming:

Yuè er míng, fēng er jìng, shùyè zhē chuānglíng a.
Qūqu er, jiào zhēngzhēng, hǎobǐ nà qín xián shēng a.

“Where are you going?”

The dawn light was barely blue through the rice paper. The fire was nothing but cracked coal and embers.

Gaara stumbled into his cloak. “I have weaving to do.”

“But you’re sick!”

Gaara prised Lee’s fingers off his wrist, the serrated edges of his nails scraping Lee’s skin.

“I said. I have. To weave.”

“Please, you need rest!”

He shouldered Lee aside with a fierce strength belied by his frail body, throwing him nearly to the floor.

With a gust of wind and a curl of frost, the door slammed shut behind him.

All morning, Lee fretted. He paced a hole nearly through the floor of their little house, wringing his hands. Neither cooking nor cleaning nor tendin to the few winter crops took his mind from his worries. The storehouse’s shadow loomed long and black like blood at night. If he strained his ears, he swore he could hear Gaara’s voice, calling to him in pain.

He’d been so weak when he’d crawled out of bed. What if he’d fallen in there? What if he’d become unconscious?

Gaara had said never to watch him at his weaving, but surely whatever trade secrets he meant to conceal were good as moot now. Lee still knew so little of weaving that he could not have shared a proprietary technique if he wanted to. Besides, they trusted each other, didn’t they?

They loved each other.

Didn’t they?

When the midday sun was blinding Lee’s eyes, the storehouse’s shadow shrunk close around it like a shroud, Lee could take no more. He threw down his tools and marched across the fields, following the trail where Gaara’s footsteps had surely just been covered up by fresh snowfall.

As he grew closer, he began to hear noises. The rhythmic clack of the heddle. The clatter of the shuttle.

And another noise, low and whining beneath.

Sounds of pain.

No. Agony.

Lee’s mind was blank with panic, but still Gaara’s words rang in his ears: You must never come in here while I am working. No matter what you think, no matter what you hear.

Copper tinged the back of his tongue, carried by the frigid air.

Just a glance, he thought. Just a peek. Just to make sure that Gaara was all right.

There was a gap where the chinking had fallen out between two mud bricks. Through it, that pained cry came louder, shriller.

Lee pressed his eye to it.

Inside, the room was dim. Dust fell from the ceiling and spiraled in the scant gray sunbeams that pierced the room.

The first thing Lee saw was the loom: the heddles jerking up and down, the sword stood on its side to pull the string taut, thread yanked through the warp by the shuttle.

When the shuttle flew out one side of the fabric, a hand grabbed it.

Long-fingered.

Thin-fingered.

White-fingered.

Like no human hand at all.

Lee’s heart paddled like the oars of a man in a sinking ship against his breastbone.

A shadow moved in front of the loom, a figure with the backstrap around its waist.

Its neck was long and thin, its body a solid bulk, all white and black in the shadows. Its legs stretched out into the foot pedals like winter’s bare and crooked tree branches.

The creature in the room was not the man Lee loved.

As he watched, it turned its head, curling it down impossibly to reach the small of its back. There was an agonized, muffled cry. When it sat upright, Lee could see that the silhouette of its mouth was viciously pointed.

Clutched in that fleshy beak were white feathers, dripping liquid down onto the fabric in fat splatters.

The creature lurched sideways as the heddles rose and fell, and a beam of light cast across the tableau.

The dye in the fabric was blood. Blood that was now trickling freely down the creature’s back where the feathers had been torn away, puddling on the floor.

Lee gasped.

The creature’s neck turned. Its eye snapped to the hole in the chinking.

It was dark in those black feathers, beneath that now-sparse red crest.

Its gaze was keen and intelligent.

And achingly familiar.

“Lee?” The voice came half-squawked, half-spoken as the creature lurched to its feet, the loom rocking in its moorings. Threads snapped. Wood cracked.

Lee stumbled backward, clutching his heart, trying hard not to breathe.

But it was too late. The door swung wide and crashing through it out into the snow came …

A crane.

Its feathers had been plucked nearly clean. Blood dripped down its pale and pebbled skin, leaving red stains like burst berries in the snow as it stalked on its talons towards Lee. Its dark eyes blazed with bright and furious anger.

“Gaara?” Lee breathed. “I’m so sorry. Are you—?”

“You lied,” came the garbled voice from the crane’s blood-stained beak.

“I was worried!” Lee protested.

“Why?” the crane croaked. “I repaid my debt. I did everything you asked. I brought you riches, fortune. I gave myself to you, body and soul. I fell in love with you. Why could you not keep this single vow?”

“You were ill! I only—I only wanted to take care of you! Just as anyone would do if the one they loved were poorly!”

The crane tossed its head with a crack-crack-crack of its neck bones. “You do not love me,” it scoffed.

“I do!”

“You cannot love me. Not as I am. Not as you are.”

“Yes, I can!” Lee shouted. “Please, just give me a chance to make it up to you! You’ll never have to weave again. I don’t care about fortune, about riches, as long as we can be together.”

The crane turned its head and lifted its beak. A cool breeze tumbled through the forest and spilled across the fields, casting the snow aloft so that Lee had to squint to see through the haze.

“We cannot.” The crane stretched its wings, its few remaining feathers ruffling as it leaned into the wind. “I’m sorry.”

“Please!” Lee screamed into the air. “I’ll do anything!”

But the crane had already taken flight, leaving behind nothing but a single, bloodied feather in the snow.

Lee fell into their shared futon that night with a sob.

He clutched the feather against his cheek. If he closed his eyes tight enough, he could almost convince himself that its touch was the stroke of Gaara’s finger across his skin, light as breeze.

His thoughts were incoherent. Nothing but a mix of emotion and ache, the word love and the word please.

Tears rolled over the bridge of his nose and mixed with the blood left on the feather’s barbs.

Lee awoke in the night to a cracking sound and a sharp pain in his neck.

He tried to lift his head and found it heavy and ungainly. As he strained to move it, his throat seemed to stretch away from it, his shoulders shifting down with a grate of bones.

Something strained against the inside of his skin, sharp and scratching, like he was being scrubbed with rough stone from the inside out. He looked down and found his elbows buckling backwards as white fibers burst from his pores like sprouting seedlings. His spread fingers paled and flattened with an agonizing crunch.

He thrashed himself free of the blankets and fell hard on the floor, his bulging bare knees banging into the wood. He felt as though he was being sucked dry as his skin went taut against his bones, fat and muscle sapped away. Desperately, he scrambled through the door and managed to burst through it just as his toes curled and crackled, the skin shrunk back, and his nails lengthened into talons.

He wanted to cry out, but all that escaped his throat was a rough and grating trill, warbling desperate across the snow and into the distant forest. His teeth popped from their sockets and vanished like thrown pearls as his gums receded and his mouth sharpened outward.

He flapped his ungainly wings, stumbling forward, leaving crooked tracks behind him in the knee-deep powder.

Then from above him came a sound. A call, loud and shrill and true, in the tune of a familiar song.

He looked up, and there in the sky above him was a crane on wing.

And now some say on cold winter nights, if you listen closely to the crane calls, you can make out the tune of a lullabye:

Yuè er míng, fēng er jìng, shùyè zhē chuānglíng a.
Qūqu er, jiào zhēngzhēng, hǎobǐ nà qín xián shēng a.