Lee was looking for his weights at two in the morning.
The desert had swallowed them. The impact craters from when they fell had been glassed over by Yugito's fire and then buried by the sandstorm that followed, and what should have been two obvious holes in the ground were instead somewhere under a half-mile of churned, scorched, and re-settled dune.
Lee dug by hand. On his knees in the dark, sifting through sand and shattered glass, working outward from where he remembered dropping them, which was difficult because the landscape had been rearranged by a collision between a water dragon and a Tailed Beast Ball.
A patrol found him an hour in.
"Devil-san?" The voice came from the ridge. Three Sand shinobi, night watch, silhouetted against the stars. "What are you doing out here?"
"Looking for my weights!" Lee called back, still digging. "They fell somewhere around here during the fight. They are custom forged chakra metal and I cannot replace them!"
The three looked at each other. The man who had killed the giant cat, who had chased down Cloud's retreating army and taken their jinchuriki off their shoulders, was on his hands and knees in the dark digging through sand for his training equipment.
"Hold on." The lead one slid down the ridge. "We'll help."
"You do not have to-"
"You saved our lives, Devil-san. We can dig through some sand."
The other two followed. Then a second patrol came by twenty minutes later and asked what was going on, and joined. Then a medic who couldn't sleep. Then two genin who had heard the commotion. By the time the moon was overhead, eleven Sand shinobi were spread across the blast zone on their hands and knees, methodically working through the desert in a grid pattern, searching for the weights of a boy who had been their most hated enemy two months ago.
Kanami, one of the genin, found the first one. Her hand hit something impossibly heavy under two feet of sand and she called out, and it took several of them to pull it free. The second one turned up thirty meters away, half-buried in a sheet of cooled glass that had to be broken apart with repeated strikes with a kunai. By the time the sun came up, they found all the weights.
Lee put them all back on and checked every joint, every link, every connection point. They were intact. Chakra metal was built to survive worse than a desert and luckily it looks like a battle against a tailed beast.
"Thank you." Lee bowed to all eleven of them. "Thank you very much. I am sorry for the trouble."
"Quit apologizing and go to sleep, Devil-san." The lead patrol nin waved him off. "You've got a long walk home tomorrow."
Lee bowed again until the patrol lead physically turned him around and pointed him toward camp.
Host: Rock Lee
Age: 15
Rank: Chunin
Skills: Taijutsu A (35,030/1,000,000), Ninjutsu F (0.290/10), Genjutsu F (0.290/10), Shurikenjutsu C (5,150/10,000), Chakra Control B (44,300/100,000), Nunchaku Mastery B (22,090/100,000), Eight Gates B (46,520/100,000), Bojutsu B (0/100,000), Chain Mastery B (0/100,000), Tonfa Mastery C (2,900/10,000), Muscle Mimicry B (0/100,000), Teaching B (13,340/100,000), Leadership C (6,866/10,000), Drunken Fist B (11,500/100,000), Inspire C (1,450/10,000), Water Style C (4,150/10,000), Massage E (2/100)
Unique Skills: Body Supremacy Jutsu, Chakra Enhanced Strength, Strengthened Chakra Network, Regeneration Ability, Increased Chakra Reserves
Equipment: Chakra-Metal Customized Weights, Might Suit, Shinobi Tools, flask of special medicine, Chakra-Metal Tonfas
Temari was sitting up when the messenger from the north came in, which was already a victory, because two days ago sitting up had put her back on her back.
The eastern camp was far stranger. A war camp was celebrating. There were drinks, food, singing, and more.
The rider ducked through the tent flap with a scroll and a face full of sand dust, and Temari didn't recognize her. Just knew that she was one of Tessen's.
"Dispatches from the north for the eastern command." Sari looked at the cot, at the wrapped side, at the war fan leaning against the pole. "Which I'm told is currently you, sitting down."
"Jūza is awake. He can hear reports lying flat, same as I can sitting up." Temari held out her hand for the scroll. "How bad is the north?"
"That's the thing." Sari handed it over. "It isn't."
Temari read while Sari talked, and the scroll said what Sari said, only slower. Stone had started, for the first time in the whole skirmish, giving ground, because the green devil that used to visit their front every third day now lived on it, and there was no second border anymore to pull him away to.
"They know Cloud quit the east. Everybody on our side knows. Nobody's told them why, because half of us don't believe why." She paused. "Is it true?" Sari said.
"Which part?"
"Any of it. The cat made of fire. The water dragon out of nowhere. The sky exploding. Him chasing down their whole retreat naked and ripping their jinchuriki right off the men carrying her. Him standing in the sandstorm afterward with his 'youthful' buttcheeks showing, giving our boys a thumbs up." Sari chatted.
"I was on a cot for all of it. But two hundred men saw it, and two hundred men are not that bored to make up false rumors." Temari said.
Sari sat down on the supply crate without being asked.
"My brother died in the invasion… That freak is why. I spent the whole time wanting to put a senbon through his neck, and he saved me and told me I was blooming excellently, and then he crossed a desert in a day and defeated a tailed beast for us, and I don't…" she stopped momentarily. "I'm not going to love him. I want that understood by somebody. I am never going to love him."
"I can't imagine loving the man who killed your brother."
"But the men have started saying Devil like it's a tall tale." Sari shook her head slowly. "Like it's something you salute. I heard a sergeant yesterday tell a genin that the Devil holds the north now, go to sleep. Like he was talking about a mythical guardian."
Temari looked down at the dispatch in her hands.
I was unconscious, she thought. My home was saved, my people were saved, my war was won, and I was asleep for it. Whatever we owed him before, there is no counting it now. There is no paying it.
She set the papers down and reached for the fan, and used it as a crutch to stand, and stood.
"Help me walk the camp," she said. "If the men are going to party for a Devil, their commander is going to be upright when they do it."
Renga had been a shinobi of the Hidden Stone for twenty-six years, and he had never once retreated from ground he could hold, and he was learning late in life that the trick was in the word could.
The plan had been decent. He would say that to his grave. Grind the north slow while Cloud opened the east, make the gutted Sand spend bodies on two fires at once, and wait for the one boy who made any of it hard to wear down to nothing running between them. A simple but effective plan.
Then the east fled.
No warning. No explanation. One week the Cloud were massing along the river country and the next they were gone. And every rumor that crossed the waste after them was worse than the last and less believable. Renga did not believe the rumors. He believed the result. The result was that there was no battle at the eastern border anymore, and the boy who used to grace Renga's front every third day now never left it.
It had taken eleven days to lose what he had spent a season taking.
The green boy came at dawn, at dusk, at noon, out of the waste with no pattern he could find because there was no pattern, there was only a boy who no longer had anywhere else to be. Posts that would have cost the Sand a company of shinobi to retake emptied at the sight of him. Twice Renga formed his men to hold fortified ground, real walls, real overlap, doctrine older than he was, and both times the doctrine lasted until the green dot crested the ridge and then his line was pointless.
Genshi found him on the last morning, on the wall of the last post, watching the waste.
The boy was not a boy anymore, not really. Nineteen going on fifty, the way this skirmish aged people. He had survived the first crater in the valley all those months ago and he had survived everything since, and somewhere in between he had stopped flinching and started watching, which was the whole of a veteran, made in one campaign.
"The men won't hold this one either, Commander," Genshi reported. "Half of them were in the valley. The other half have heard about the valley every night since."
"I know."
"Sir." Genshi hesitated. "Is it true the Cloud sent something at him? Out east? The men say the Cloud sent something big, and it didn't work, and that's why they went home."
Renga looked out at the empty waste where, any hour now, a line of risen sand would begin drawing itself toward his wall.
"What I know is that the two most gutted villages on the map have just won a war against the two strongest. A village with a dead Hokage and a village with a dead Kazekage, a dead jinchuriki, a dead army. Everyone at this table knew exactly why Suna was for the taking. We were right about all of it." His jaw tightened. "And it did not matter, because they had one thing we did not plan for, and one was enough."
He had promised himself, walking backward out of that valley half a year ago, that he would come back knowing exactly what was waiting and bring something built for it. Command had reviewed what was waiting. Command had concluded the Land of Stone did not need to unleash their tailed beasts for a mere Sunagakure.
"Sound the withdrawal. All posts. It's time we go home." Renga decided.
The horns went. And for the second time in his life, and the second time in the same war, Renga of the Hidden Stone walked backward off a field because of a single young man in a green jumpsuit, except this time there was no next time in his mouth, because he was twenty-six years a soldier and he knew the difference between a battle you lost and a war that was over.
Lee stood on the northern ridge and watched the last Stone column shrink into the haze, and did not move until it was gone, out of respect and out of sense. Then he let out a breath he felt he had been holding for a season, and turned south, toward Sunagakure, where his squad was waiting.
[Taijutsu Proficiency +720 points!]
[Nunchaku Mastery Proficiency +280 points!]
[Leadership Proficiency +240 points!]
[Inspire Proficiency +150 points!]
[Chakra Control Proficiency +702 points!]
…
The audience hall of the Kazekage's residence was round and cool and carved from the same rock as the village, and Baki had filled it with exactly the people the occasion required and not one more.
The Leaf cell stood in the center. Lee at the front, spine straight, suit a fresh spotless green because he had packed spares. Shikamaru at his shoulder with his hands in his pockets, with tired eyes. Izumo and Kotetsu flanking while looking casual. To the side, Temari, upright and unassisted, the wrapping under her clothes the only sign; and Kankuro beside her with his hood down.
Baki had read every report from both borders. He had sat with the casualty projections his own staff had drawn up in the first week of the war, the ones that assumed no Leaf assistance, and he had sat with the actual lists, and the space between those two stacks of paper was counted in the living. Men who had wives. Women who had children. A generation Suna could not have spared, standing watch on his walls tonight, because of the boy in front of him whom this village had spent a year calling a devil.
Baki was the acting Fifth Kazekage of the Hidden Sand. It had cost them a war and a Kage and a jinchuriki to be reminded that pride was not a rampart.
He came down off the dais, stood in front of Rock Lee, and bowed.
The hall was speechless. Somewhere behind Temari a scribe's brush stopped mid-stroke. A Kage's hat inclined toward a foreign chunin was not merely a gesture; it was a treaty written in a spine, and every Sand shinobi in the room understood they were watching their village pay a debt in the only coin that meant anything to it.
"Sunagakure thanks you," Baki said, still bowed. "All four of you. I have read what these months cost, and what they would have cost without you, and I will not pretend the second number is one my village could have survived. The Sand does not forget its dead. From today, it will also not forget its living, and who it owes them to."
"P-please raise your head, Lord Kazekage!" Lee had gone bright red and his hands were up and waving. "There is no need, truly, we only did what allies-"
Baki straightened himself without shame or embarrassment. Then, lowered again as he whispered to Lee. "The prisoner will travel with you to Konoha. We do not have the means to contain a jinchuriki of her caliber, and frankly, the woman who cut open Temari and severed one of my finest puppeteer's arms is not someone I want sleeping in my village. Your Hokage should know best how to use her."
Lee nodded seriously. He understood the weight of it even if the politics were beyond him. Yugito Nii was his responsibility until she was in Konoha's hands.
Kankuro spoke up next.
"Shikamaru. Izumo. Kotetsu." He clasped each hand in turn, the shadow-user's last and longest. "You fought with me out there. I'm going to be honest, I hated all three of you for the first month." His grin was crooked. "Come back sometime when nobody's invading us. I'll show you what this village looks like when it isn't in the worst circumstances. First round of fun is on the Puppet Master Corps."
"If it means not walking there, I'll consider it," Shikamaru said, and Kankuro laughed, and Izumo and Kotetsu were already asking whether Suna drinks came in different sizes.
Then Temari came forward. She stopped in front of Lee and inclined her head, exactly as far as respect required.
"Thank you for coming to our aid," she said. "All of you. My home stands because you did. I stand because you did." A breath. "Suna will remember it."
"It is our duty as allies to assist one another!" Lee's whole face lit up like a festival, and he snapped her a thumbs up. "Let's hope for an everlasting youthful alliance between Sand and Leaf!"
Temari's eye twitched.
This is our hero, she thought, looking at the thumb, at the teeth, at the eyebrows. This is the man the whole Sunagakure owes its existence to. How embarrassing.
But she did not look away from him, and the thought that followed came slower, and stayed. Her hand found the fan on her back.
The next time my village is bleeding, it will not have to wait for another village's hero to cross a desert. That's the debt I can actually pay. Not to him. To the next war.
"An everlasting alliance," she said out loud. "Sure. Let's hope."
…
They left the next morning, and Sunagakure ambushed them at the gate.
Lee saw the crowd from three streets away and assumed something bad. Then he saw the banners.
They were green. Dozens of them, hung from the balconies and strung across the street to the gate, green cloth painted with the Leaf's spiral and the Sand's gourd side by side, and one enormous one over the gate itself that someone had painted with more enthusiasm than skill: a stick figure in green delivering a kick to a stick figure of a very surprised cat.
The street was packed. Shinobi off duty and shinobi visibly on duty who had decided the duty could watch a parade. Shopkeepers. Old men. Children on shoulders, a whole row of them with their eyebrows painted thick and black. And when the four Leaf shinobi came into view the crowd roared. A roar full of joy. "DEVIL!"
"DEVIL!"
"DEVIL!"
Lee stopped walking.
"Captain?" Kotetsu said.
Lee did not answer. He was staring at the banners, at the children with their painted eyebrows, at a Sand jonin who had been saved by him holding his daughter up so she could see, and his enormous eyes were filled with tears.
They hated me, he thought. I came through that gate and this whole village hated me, and I told myself that was all right, that they did not have to love me, that all I came to do was assist our allies. The first tear went down his face and he did not stop it.
"Oh man, don't you get tired of crying all the time?" Shikamaru sighed.
Lee cried happy tears at the sight.
He cried the whole length of the street, walking, waving, tears streaming down a face split by the widest smile the Land of Wind had ever imported, and the crowd loved it, Suna had spent a year learning that this was simply what their monster did, and every visible tear pulled a louder cheer. A grandmother pressed a wrapped parcel of dried dates into his hands. The children with the painted eyebrows punched and kicked toward him. Lee waved back so hard his arm blurred and the front row screamed with delight.
Shikamaru walked beside him holding his hand in his face. He's crying. My captain is crying in front of an entire foreign village and they're cheering him for it. A girl near the gate shouted something at him about shadow man, and several people cheered him too, and Shikamaru turned slightly red and hid his face a bit more.
Izumo and Kotetsu had no such reservations. They were waving with both arms. Kotetsu blew a kiss at a knot of Sand kunoichi who blushed, and he elbowed Izumo and said, "We are never leaving. I want you to know I've decided. Tell the Hokage we'll man Sunagakure's gates."
At the gate itself, Temari and Kankuro stood as the official farewell, and past them the open desert waited, and Lee turned around one last time to face the street.
The crowd quieted, expectant.
Lee took a breath that pulled from his sandals.
"THANK YOU FOR TAKING CARE OF US, SUNAGAKURE!" He gave a perfect 90 degree bow. "PLEASE EAT WELL, TRAIN HARD, AND BURN BRIGHTLY WITH THE POWER OF YOUTH! WE WILL MEET AGAIN!"
The roar that answered him shook sand off the gate.
And then the five of them went out into the waste for home. Four Leaf shinobi walking abreast, and over Lee's shoulder, bound in rope and chakra suppression paper, was Yugito Nii, conscious now, silent, her eyes fixed ahead with the flat resignation of a prisoner who had taken stock of her situation and found no angle worth trying. Not with the boy who had beaten her and her tailed beast holding her, occasionally glancing over to make sure she wasn't attempting to escape.
In the office of the Third Tsuchikage, the withdrawal orders sat signed on the desk, and Onoki of Both Scales read the final border report one more time and then set it down and rubbed his back, because his back had opinions about all of this too.
"Tell it to me straight. Without the crap Renga's clerks put on it." he told the jonin standing across the desk.
"Plainly, Lord Tsuchikage: we spent a season and eleven hundred men, we did not eliminate one of our competitors, and the deciding cause is one Konoha chunin. Fifteen years old. No ninjutsu, no genjutsu." The jonin paused. "Renga's assessment is that no force we are prepared to commit to that border can take ground the boy is standing on."
"And the Cloud?"
"Gone home, Lord Tsuchikage. All of it. No explanation we can confirm. The rumors are," the jonin chose his words, "colorful."
Onoki grunted and looked out the window at his mountains.
Iwa had planned a cheap war against a dying village and gotten an expensive lesson instead, and a man his age did not throw more men at a lesson he had already paid for. He didn't truly care about the Sand. Getting rid of a weakened foe was just another cherry on the cake.
But the boy.
The Leaf grows one of these every generation, Onoki thought, and his back twinged as if in agreement, remembering. We told ourselves the Yellow Flash was a once-in-a-century freak, and we fed him a war a battalion at a time, and I signed those orders too. He had been younger then, and the lesson had cost ten times what this one had. One man who decides a battle by standing on it. We have seen this animal before. The mistake is always the same mistake: believing the number one is small.
"Enter him in the book," Onoki said. "Rock Lee of the Hidden Leaf. S-rank. Engagement guidance: No less than a thousand shinobi, and not on ground of his choosing, which, tell the clerks to write this down exactly, appears to be all ground." He pulled the next paper toward himself. "Close the Wind campaign. We wait."
"Yes, Lord Tsuchikage."
"And find out what happened to the Cloud," Onoki added, without looking up. "Whole armies do not go home from a winning war because of nothing. Whatever they saw out there, I want to know what it was before it is standing on one of my borders."
They had replaced the Raikage's desk while Yugito was away. He broke the new one before the report was half done.
It was not rage at her. C had made the account, because C had been there, and C's voice had stayed level the whole way through. The initial confrontation, lost at every range. The transformation. The weights like falling meteors, the glass, the Eight Inner Gates, the punch that put the Two-Tails' full form into the sky. The dragon of water and wind, and the Tailed Beast Ball, and the second sun over the desert.
The desk broke at the second sun. A flat crack of the palm, the split, the sag. Neither attendant moved. C did not pause.
Then C told him the rest, and the room changed.
"After the blast, Yugito reverted to human form. She was unconscious. Our forces initiated an immediate retreat and were carrying her from the field." C's voice remained level but his eyes did not. "The boy pursued and took her."
The silence in the room was a living thing.
"He took her…?" A repeated.
"He carried her back to the Sand camp on his shoulder." C swallowed. "She is currently in enemy custody. We believe she is being transported to Konohagakure."
A did not break anything and this wasn't because there wasn't anything more to break either.
"They have my jinchuriki." A said.
"Yes, Lord Raikage."
A turned from the window. "And now the Hidden Leaf and the Hidden Sand have one of the Cloud's greatest military assets in their possession, and they are going to come to me with terms."
"That is the likely scenario, Lord Raikage."
"They will tell me that Yugito is alive and well-treated. They will tell me they are reasonable people who want peace. And then they will tell me what it will cost to get her back." A's voice was quiet but boiling. "And I will sit across from them and negotiate, because I have no choice, because the alternative is a full-scale war against two Great Villages for one prisoner, and even I am not fool enough to start that fight without preparation."
He sat down at the broken desk.
"The book. Rock Lee of the Hidden Leaf goes to S-rank, effective today."
One of the attendants looked up. "Lord Raikage, S-rank, he's fifteen, the classification board will-"
"The classification board will not argue with me if they have any sense in their skulls!" A told him. "S-rank is not an honor we award. It is an instruction. It tells every shinobi of the Cloud who opens that book: do not engage. Not alone, not in squads, not with preparation short of taking on a Kage or a perfect jinchuriki."
He pulled a blank scroll toward him and began writing.
"Diplomatic channels to Konohagakure. Priority. Formal request for the status and condition of our shinobi Yugito Nii." He wrote without looking up. "Polite. Professional. We are reasonable people who want peace." The brush strokes were precise and hard enough to score the paper. "And prepare to send trusted messengers to the Tsuchikage and the Mizukage. Personally selected. No written records. What they carry, they carry in their heads."
C watched the Raikage write and understood that the man at the desk was doing two things at once. The right hand wrote a diplomatic letter. The left hand was already reaching for something else. With the boiling fury of a man who had been forced to a position of weakness and intended to bring the whole house down on the people who put him there.
"Understood, Lord Raikage."
"Then get it done and done fast." A finished the scroll, set the brush down, and pulled the day's next war toward himself.