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Lee crouched behind a tree, taking in the scene before him. He could clearly make out Naruto and his opponent as they fought, and could see that Naruto was outmatched. Behind them, a smoking barrel stood. Lee wasn’t sure what it was for, but he kept one eye on it while he observed the fighting between his teammate and the other man.
A large part of him was yelling for him to jump in and help Naruto, but his back was still twinging from his surgery, and he knew he likely only had one chance to make a difference in the fight. As soon as his surprise was gone, from the skill of the opponent, it was likely that he would simply join Naruto in being outmatched. He had to make his move count. He couldn’t afford to make any mistakes.
Naruto was still yelling at the man, attracting his attention as they fought. Naruto crouched down, and Lee narrowed his eyes. What was he going to do now? Could Lee come in and support whatever jutsu Naruto was going to use?
Suddenly, a thousand, thousand Naruto’s appeared on the battlefield. Lee’s eyes bugged out as he tried to take in the sheer amount of clones that Naruto had been able to produce. Gai-sensei had told him of Naruto’s clones, how they were kage bunshin instead of normal bunshin. Each clone was real, which Gai-sensei had demonstrated by making two, real, solid copies of himself. He had told Lee that he couldn’t make more than two, and that he couldn’t keep them up for long. Seeing the amount of clones Naruto had made… Lee couldn’t begin to understand the amount of chakra that it must have taken to create them. Even he knew that chakra like that wasn’t normal. How had Naruto done it?
Later, when all was said and done, and Kimimaro was defeated (he said defeated, but really, even he and Gaara together had been no match for him. Lee didn’t like to think about what might have happened if Kimimaro’s disease hadn’t taken its toll right there on the battlefield. The memory of it all just serves to drive him on harder when he’s training. Could he have held his own now? Would he have been injured or killed if Gaara hadn’t shown up now? Was he better now?), Lee sat on top of the Hokage Monument and meditated. He liked to sit up on the Shodai Hokage. The amount of work that must have been put into the founding and maintaining of the village in its early years must have been astronomical.
Gai-sensei had been talking him through how reflecting on battles could improve concentration and split second thinking, so he had decided to take a break from his physical training to focus on his mental training. While it wouldn’t affect his chakra like another ninja, it would help him in battle situations anyway.
Lee picked the fight with Kimimaro, because he still felt like he’d been quite useless in that fight. Starting at the beginning, he remembered running towards the clearing, and then finding Naruto and Kimimaro fighting it out. He frowned, then opened his eyes to stare out at across the village as he recalled the odd chakra that Naruto had summoned, the staggeringly immense number of clones he had created. It had slipped his mind in the aftermath of the fight, everything that had gone down with Gaara and then finding out that everyone was in hospital all but blocking it out. Lee would almost say that he had seen the chakra that Naruto had called up, but… that was ridiculous, right? No one could have that amount of chakra.
His plan to think over the fight truly derailed now, Lee sat still and thought. Contrary to what people might think, he sorted out what he was thinking best when he was sitting still.
Naruto had never been quite normal. Lee had been in the year above him, and they hadn’t shared any classes, and even then Lee had known that there was something odd about Naruto. He didn’t have any family (which wasn’t that uncommon in a ninja village), he didn’t really have a parental guardian, he was a trouble maker in the Academy, he didn’t fit in. Lee knew that he had been dead last – when he’d heard that Naruto had been accepted into a team he’d been slightly surprised, before putting it down to the hard work Naruto had been doing when he wasn’t at the Academy.
Lee had studied chakra immensely – it had been when he was still in the denial phase of grief. He probably knew about as much as Neji did, although he didn’t try to flout his knowledge. Just felt satisfied that he could understand the technical terms the Hyuuga used. He’d delved into the library, annoyed ninja so they would tell him about chakra, snuck into family residences when no one was there to see if they had any private scrolls that he could find something in. The answer had been very overwhelming – Lee had no chance of ever using chakra in his life.
He’d forgotten most of what he had read, thinking that it wouldn’t relate to him at all. It had only been in the recent few months that he had been reflecting on battles and wanting to know how things could have proceeded better. And because he didn’t often know about the types of chakra that his enemies used, off to the library he went. He was nearly there as often as Hinata, Sakura and Ino were now that they were all studying to be med-nin.
He shook his head slightly. Focus! That was the point of this exercise. What type of chakra could Naruto have used?
He thought through all the options he had before admitting to himself that he wasn’t sure. As he did in those situations, he headed to the library, taking the shorter route by climbing down the Hokage monument (he had to get some training in.)
~
There wasn’t anything at the library.
Lee couldn’t say that he was surprised. He’d already looked through most of the books on chakra there, so unless he got access to the restricted archives, then he didn’t have any other ideas. It probably didn’t help that he wasn’t sure what he was looking for – ‘visible chakra’ didn’t really cut it.
Although, he hadn’t come across any mentions of visible chakra either, so maybe he was onto something.
Lee made his way across the village to where he knew Gai-sensei would be training. Often they went their separate ways after their morning training sessions, but Gai liked to hone his own skills for a while after they separated each day against different people – most of the time, Kakashi-sensei.
Sure enough, he found the two of them fighting it out. Lee hovered near the entrance of the training ground, not wanting to either distract or get in the way of the two jounin. It was times like this that he could really appreciate how far ahead of him his mentor was, and how much he had to train in order to even get near that level. Kakashi-sensei was somewhere there as well, but as he kept throwing around mud walls and lightning, Lee just didn’t have the same respect for him as he did Gai-sensei. Sure, he was grateful that Kakashi-sensei was on their side, but Gai-sensei would always be the best in Lee’s books.
However, he could tell that the two of them weren’t really fighting, because Kakashi-sensei didn’t have his hitai-ate up, and Gai-sensei looked like he had all of the Gates closed. Just a warm down, maybe.
Finally, the two jounin came to rest at the centre of the training ground. They were far enough away that Lee couldn’t hear what they were saying, but Kakashi still turned to him and raised a hand before leaping off in a blur. Gai-sensei wiped a hand across his brow and started walking towards him.
“Good afternoon Gai-sensei!” Lee called out. “What a magnificent spar! Both you and Kakashi-sensei were testing the Powers of your Youth!”
“Hai, Lee!” Gai called out in return, grinning widely. “We surely did! Tell me, were you as successful as we? Did your meditation prove useful today? Did you learn something?”
“I actually wanted to ask you a question about that,” Lee said. Gai blinked, but nodded sagely.
“Ah, yes. The Young always seek to learn, and it is the Duty of the older generation to teach. Let us walk, and you can tell me about your problem, and I will see if I can rectify it.”
As they walked towards the village, Lee told Gai of his train of thoughts, his visit to the library and his subsequent inability to find out anything about Naruto’s visible chakra.
“I thought that it would probably be useful,” Lee continued, aware that in his peripheral Gai-sensei’s face was becoming more and more serious. “If Naruto can wield that type of ninjutsu, then likely others can as well. It would be good to be prepared if I ever came across someone who had that ability and I had to fight.”
Gai stopped. They were on the very outskirts of the main village, just as the training grounds began to give way to houses and small shops. There wasn’t much foot traffic, so Lee stopped as well and turned to face his mentor.
“Lee,” he said seriously. “I’m going to get you a pass into the restricted area of the library, then I want you to research this more, alright? But you can’t tell anyone about it. Understand?”
Lee puffed his chest up. “Yes, Gai-sensei! Thank you for trusting me with this!”
“Of course,” Gai said. Was his smile slightly forced? A part of Lee was worried, but he didn’t let himself show it.
When the scroll with the permit arrived, Lee took it to the library and hesitantly gave it to the ninja up the back who guarded the restricted archives. The ninja looked over it for a few seconds before waving Lee through. The young ninja walked into this new area alight with interest with everything he could find.
The restricted area of the library was similar to the public area in how it was laid out. Shelves upon shelves had scrolls and books on them, piled high, some dusty, some not. There were a fair amount of other ninja both wandering around looking at the shelves, and sitting down studying scrolls. Lee saw Sakura sitting at a table, scrolls stacked high around her, her hand moving as she took notes from the mouldy looking scroll she was reading from. The information here wasn’t for public consumption because it held ninja related texts that had some type of secret that the Leaf wasn’t willing to just hand to anyone who walked in the door, but it wasn’t actually secret – that was for the underground archives.
But first of all, the reason he was here. Naruto. The shelves weren’t organised very well, and it took him a while before he found a few books that looked promising. He took them to a corner and started reading, rubbing his nose to resist the urge to sneeze at the dust coming off some of the scrolls.
When Lee closed the cover on a book about jinchuuriki, he found that he wasn’t even all that surprised.
Really, it did make sense.