Chapter Text
One hundred and forty-two. One hundred and forty-three. One hundred and forty-four.
At some point, the numbers began to blur together, a continuous string more than a succession of singular points. After one or two hundred, one more didn’t matter all that much. He always found the first ones to be the hardest, and he knew to persevere until he reached that state where he would just go on, carried by the numbers and the motion.
One hundred and forty-five. One hundred and forty-six.
Numbers were an easy thing to control. If he said “I’ll do one hundred and fifty kicks”, there was no ambiguity, no way around it. It was clear, simple. He just had to reach his goal and that was it. Giving up midway wasn’t even an option. If he wanted to stop, he had to reach the right number.
One hundred and forty-seven. One hundred and forty-eight.
There was a noise behind him. Some shuffling, leaves rustling softly. He really hoped it wasn’t some of his classmates who had discovered his training spot yet again to make fun of him. He was getting tired of having to change all the time, and he liked this particular clearing and its abandoned training posts that probably hadn’t seen that much action in decades.
He didn’t lose focus though. Numbers first. He felt deeply unsettled if he had to stop for whatever reason before reaching his mark. He could always resume after an interruption, but it felt off somehow.
One hundred and forty-nine. One hundred and fifty.
Lee lowered his legs and spun around to face the intruders.
Instead of the mocking faces of his classmates though, he only caught glimpses of blond hair picking out from behind a tree. Whoever was there, they were bad at hiding, and even worse at being discreet.
“I told you he’d be there!” a young voice whispered loudly. “Go talk to him!”
“What? Why me? You go talk to him!” a second voice answered, biting tone badly hiding its panic.
“You’re the one who wanted to meet him!”
“I… I didn’t say that! I just said his taijutsu looked cool!”
“Well go tell him that!”
“No! What…”
There was some shuffling, a few exclamations, and two boys tumbled down the ground from behind the tree, half fighting, half trying to untangle their flailing limbs.
“Get off me you idiot!”
“Hey! You’re the idiot!”
“Huh… Hello?”
They both frowned before scrambling to their feet, mumbling accusations at each other.
One was blond, the other had black hair and black eyes. It was funny because they looked nothing alike, except for the matching expression of angry embarrassment on their face. Lee was pretty sure he had seen them around the Academy and the training grounds before, always together. He may have heard their names, but they escaped him now. Lee tended to keep to himself, since not many kids wanted to hang out with him anyway. They had to be younger than him by a year or two.
“Hello, hi. Sorry. My name is Uzumaki Naruto and this is Uchiha Sasuke.”
The blond, Naruto, elbowed his friend in the rib. The other boy frowned but mumbled a reluctant “hello”.
“I’m… Rock Lee,” Lee offered in return, unsure of what he was supposed to do.
“It’s nice to meet you, Lee!” Naruto exclaimed brightly, like it was, indeed, very nice.
“You too.”
The two boys fell silent, rocking on their feet and avoiding eye contact, while Lee wondered how to ask what they were doing there without sounding rude. He was nowhere near done with his training for the day, he wanted to go back to it, but that wouldn’t do to just turn around and resume beating the training post, right?
“Sorry! But if there is nothing…”
“Sasuke wanted to ask you something!”
The dark-haired boy, Sasuke, cast a betrayed look at his blond friend, but the other boy pushed him forward with what he probably thought was an encouraging gesture. Sasuke took a few steps forward, face reddening progressively. He looked angry, fists closed and tensed all over, but when he spoke, all Lee could hear was a boy being shy, and then being mad about it.
Sasuke mumbled something completely unintelligible, that Lee, despite all his good will, couldn’t hope to decipher. Naruto seemed to have better luck, but to also recognize that it wasn’t actually understandable, because he nudged his friend’s ribs again, earning a dark glare that only made him shrug. Sasuke’s frown deepened, but he took a deep breath to try again.
“I saw you training. You’re very good at taijutsu. Can I train with you please.”
The boy would have seemed rude, if he wasn’t blushing and pouting. He was completely serious though, and as he finally worked up the courage to meet Lee’s gaze, Lee saw great determination on his face.
“Really?” he couldn’t help but ask. The name Uchiha was familiar to him – they used to be among the elite clan, and Lee seemed to recall and Uchiha being top of the class below his.
Before Sasuke could answer though, Naruto jumped in, apparently done with forcing his friend to do the talking.
“We were watching you at the Academy the other day! You laid aaaaaall the others flat on their back! You’re fast too! Sasuke loves taijutsu so we followed you at the training ground because he wanted to spy on you, but I told you we could just ask! I don’t like taijutsu that much though…”
“That’s because you’re lazy! And I wasn’t… we weren’t spying. We were just… looking around.”
Naruto raised a skeptical eyebrow while Sasuke reddened even more, indignant.
“I-I’m flattered! But, shouldn’t you find a more experienced teacher?” Lee asked, still very confused about the whole thing. Sure, he was good at taijutsu, better than most kids his age. He had to. If he wanted to amount to anything, he simply didn’t have a choice. But he couldn’t very well train others, could he? He was just… Lee. He wasn’t that great.
Naruto seemed to lose a bit of his cheers and the boys exchanged uncomfortable looks.
“Nah, adults are dumb!” Naruto exclaimed, but his smile looked forced this time. Sasuke took a step, looking like he had found some confidence. Lee watched, bewildered, as the boy bowed, solemn.
“Please let us train with you, sensei.”
And he was dead serious.
It was Lee’s turn to redden, flustered, as Naruto put together a hasty bow to imitate his friends. They stood back and watched him intently, waiting for his answer with batted breath and hope in their eyes. They looked… they looked like this was serious. Like this was important somehow.
It was… It was kind of awesome.
“Al-Alright! If you insist, you can train with me!” he exclaimed with more force than necessary, hands on his hips in what he hoped was a cool pause. Judging by the stars in the boys’ eyes, maybe it was.
“Let’s start right away!” he said, needing only a few seconds to remember where they had interrupted his daily routine. “Two hundred push-ups!”
Their eyes widened at the same time.
“What?”
.
“He’s crazy.”
“No he’s not! He’s the coolest!”
Sasuke didn’t want to dispute that, because Lee was pretty cool. But he was also…
“Crazy!”
“You say that cause you can’t do two hundred push-ups!”
“No kids can do two hundred push-ups! You couldn’t either!” Sasuke exclaimed. Naruto had still held on better than him, and that was infuriating. For someone who was so bad at fighting, he had a lot of brute strength lying around.
“Well Lee can, obviously,” Naruto shot back. Sasuke couldn’t dispute that either. Lee had been able to do two hundred push-ups, and then one hundred sit-ups, and then one hundred squats. His most impressive feat was probably that he had managed to actually tire Naruto out. Sasuke didn’t think it was possible.
By the time they had reached the part of Lee’s routine where he actually did some taijutsu, they were both too worn out to put up much of a fight. The boy hadn’t seemed to mind though, urging them to get on their feet and try anyway.
“That’s because he’s crazy,” Sasuke mumbled, still a bit bitter over the entire situation. Lee had wiped him out in three moves. Sasuke was supposed to be good at this.
“Yeah, crazy strong!”
Naruto grinned, proud of his joke. Sasuke rolled his eyes but failed to hide a smile. Crazy strong, that was the right way to put it. Crazy strong and crazy fast, but mostly, crazy determined. He wasn’t from a known clan, as far as Sasuke understood he didn’t have a master or even a relative to train him. He had gotten there all on his own, by training tirelessly day after day. Sasuke himself trained a lot more than most of the other academy students, but he was still nowhere near Lee’s level. He bit angrily at the meat bun they had bought on their way home, knowing they wouldn’t have it in them to cook.
“Hey, we’ll… we’ll go back, right? To train with him.”
Sasuke looked at Naruto, puzzled, to find him looking back questioningly and a bit worried. Lee had said he would keep training there in that clearing and that they could go back anytime.
“Why do you ask that?”
“I don’t know, you look… you look mad or something.”
Sasuke pondered at it while he munched on his meat buns. He was mad, in a way. Mad that just the year above them there was someone that much stronger than him, when his objective was much higher than that. He wasn’t mad at Lee though. Lee was stronger and that was it.
Sasuke just had to get stronger too. He wouldn’t be outdone.
“We’ll go back,” he said firmly. “…Maybe not every day though,” he was forced to amend, shuddering at the idea of going through Lee’s training every single day. Maybe they could, at some point. When they were ten like him. “I’ll beat him someday,” he added, more to himself than to Naruto.
His friend fell silent, and it’s only once they were back home, drinking tea on the floor of the living room, that he spoke again.
“Say, Sasuke. Why is it that you… that you want to be stronger?”
Naruto wore his every emotion on his face, he couldn’t be subtle to save his life. His moods were easy to read. Right now he was curious, but also a little worried, and Sasuke reflected that he had to know the answer, in a way.
"I have to bring justice to my clan," Sasuke said through gritted teeth. It felt weird to say it aloud for the first time, while it had been on his mind pretty much from the get-go, from the minutes he had woken up orphaned and clanless at the hospital. Maybe even before that, when he had stumbled onto the first victim, when he had realized what had happened. Even before he knew who he would seek justice from.
“Justice,” Naruto said thoughtfully into his cup. Sasuke expected him to ask more questions, but he knew when to let things go, sometimes.
It wasn’t that surprising anyway, was it? Of course Sasuke needed to get stronger. He was the last member of the Uchiha clan, and he had a duty to his clan and family.
It’s true he hadn’t thought about it that much, these past few months. But it was still there, always, lurking in a corner of his mind. Sasuke knew what he had to do, and he would do anything in order to achieve it.
He shook his head, unwilling to fall into those dark thoughts right now, and focused on Naruto instead.
“What about you? Why do you want to get stronger?”
Naruto spoke into his cup again.
“I need to, if I want to be made Hokage.”
He had been saying that more and more. Not “I’ll be the next Hokage” but “I’ll be made the next Hokage”. He had also started to pay more attention in class. Sasuke didn’t think Naruto would put so much weight on his words, that what he had said would have so much influence on his behavior.
Naruto listened to him. It was… pleasing.
“And if I want to stay by your side.”
That last bit, mumbled hastily, had Sasuke look away, split between annoyance and a sudden warmth soothing his earlier anguish. Naruto was looking away too, cheeks pink and badly faked indifference.
“We need to train,” Sasuke concluded, because really, there was no way around it. Naruto nodded vigorously, and they went to bed.
Sasuke had yet to sleep in his own room.
.
Once upon a time, Lee was excited to enter the Academy.
He was excited to finally discover something beyond the orphanage, to make new friends and have a life of his own, and to take the first steps into becoming a powerful shinobi. A lot of kids tried out the first few years of the Academy, civilians and ninjas alike, because it didn’t require any specific skills, at first. It was general study and basic training, and for a while, Lee had enjoyed it immensely.
And then, they started ninjutsu practice.
Lee had always been determined, headstrong. He was already training more than necessary at the time, because he wanted to shape his body and mind as soon as possible, not to waste any time to start working on his goals. He threw himself into ninjutsu and genjutsu training, harder and harder when it appeared that things that came naturally to most of his classmates eluded him.
It was at that point that a lot of kids dropped out of the Academy. It was the first selection, the first weeding out. Those who had no talent for chakra manipulation were pushed out the door.
But there was no way, no way Lee was letting that happen to him.
He would become a ninja. He would join the rank of the fighters of the village, no matter what it took. The sentence dropped, after he took some tests with the Academy teachers – he would never be able to perform either ninjutsu nor genjutsu.
Never, ever. It was simply impossible for him.
To them, the consequence was clear – he just had to let it go. He couldn’t become a ninja.
But there was no way. No way he would go back to the orphanage, head hanging low, to hear the head nurse tell him he should have listened to her and stick to the gutter like the other kids did. No way he would give his classmates and teachers the satisfaction of giving up, of going away. Lee didn’t care what they thought about him – he wanted to become a ninja, and a ninja he would become.
And without ninjutsu or genjutsu, he could only focus on taijutsu.
They kept telling him he should give up, but they couldn’t expel him either, because he was a good, dedicated student, and he was good at taijutsu. Not at first, but slowly, month after month and training after training, he became good enough that he could beat all the other kids in their class in hand-to-hand sparing, and even good enough that he could beat most of them when they did use chakra.
The Academy stopped being nice and fun, he became the bottom of every joke, the subject of every mockery, but it didn’t matter. He wouldn’t stay there forever. Once he graduated, he would be a shinobi for real, and no one would be able to take that away from him.
Lee kept training. Kept striving to be the best at the only thing he could master.
Kept watching Hyuuga Neji’s back, miles away from him, who was excellent at everything, including staring down at Lee. But Lee would catch up to him someday. In months, years, decades maybe, he would beat him, and then no one would ever be able to say he wasn’t a real shinobi.
For now though, they were still plenty of people to say it. And it had been a long time since he had really cared about his classmates mean words, but this time he did. He did care, because Naruto and Sasuke had approached him right there in the middle of the Academy’s courtyard, where all his classmates could see.
“So, can we train with you today? We can right?” Naruto shouted excitedly. Lee stuttered an answer, dread dropping at the bottom of his stomach as he caught Katsu raising a mocking eyebrow.
He and his friends came over to them, just as Lee had feared. Classes were over for the day. Usually Lee left the Academy as soon as possible specifically to avoid that kind of situation.
“You want to train with that guy?” Katsu asked, voice laced with contempt, pointing a thumb at Lee’s chest.
“He’s our taijutsu master,” Sasuke answered evenly, a slight frown on his face at being addressed like that. Lee spluttered at the blunt affirmation – they wouldn’t drop the master no matter how much he asked (he didn’t really want them to).
“Lee? What master can you be, Lee? That guy can’t even do ninjutsu!” Katsu’s friend exclaimed loud enough for everyone to hear. Lee fought not to drop his head down. He didn’t want to show how they could affect him, but he could feel his eyes watering all the same.
It was nice, hanging out with Sasuke and Naruto. It was hectic and off-putting as they disrupted his routine over and over, but it wasn’t bad. They were eager and excitable – both of them, albeit in very different ways – and they were truly impressed with him.
Because Lee was damn good at taijutsu. There was no denying it. But for his classmates, it didn’t matter. He could have been the best taijutsu master in the whole world, it still wouldn’t have been enough in their eyes. Because he couldn’t do ninjutsu, and so whatever he did, he wasn’t good enough, he would never be.
Lee stared at a point far away, avoiding to look at the two boys he had thought maybe he would become friend with, wondering if they would join in on the joke, if they would be mad that he had deceived them. It had just never come up. They had never asked anything more than taijutsu lessons, and Lee had been too happy to hide his shameful secret from them.
Movement caught his gaze though, and he focused back on the scene to look at Sasuke taking one step toward Katsu.
He stared at him dead in the eye and spelled out with exaggerated care, like he was addressing a particularly slow child, “he’s our tai-ju-tsu master.” And then he added for extra precision, “taijutsu, as in not ninjutsu.”
The others kids were so caught off guard, for a moment they just stood mouth open and eyes wide, looking at Sasuke’s emotionless face while Naruto snickered behind his back. Lee couldn’t tell if Sasuke was being genuinely helpful, or being a total brat – he had found himself wondering more than once, because the boy played innocent very well.
Katsu had no such interrogations though. His expression turned stormy at being insulted like this, and he lunged forward, fist out and ready for a punch.
Before anyone could react though, Sasuke ducked swiftly and swept the boy’s legs from under him. Without a care for his adversary, he then bolted right back up and spun around to stare at Lee with wide, unblinking eyes.
“It’s the move you taught us last time!” Naruto staged whispered with zero discretion. Sasuke was still staring at Lee, expectant. Sasuke was of very few words, and what Lee had first thought to be aloofness or even disdain – Sasuke reminded him of Neji in many ways – was actually just plain shyness and reserve. He wasn’t a talker, but Naruto talked more than enough for the two of them, and understood his friend beyond words. As a result, he often played translator, seemingly always knowing what it was Sasuke wanted to say but couldn’t articulate.
After a few seconds of confusion, Lee finally got it.
“Oh! You’re right! Very well done, Sasuke!”
It was subtle, barely noticeable. But Sasuke’s cheeks did redden slightly, and he gave the smallest nod as his face softened in an almost smile, pride shining through.
“It’s a move Lee taught us last time,” Naruto repeated helpfully to Katsu trying to get back to his feet. He looked enraged, but before things could go any further, Iruka sensei’s angry voice ringing through the courtyard had all the kids still present scurrying away in various direction.
“So, Lee! Can we train with you today?” Naruto asked again as if nothing had happened. Lee nodded dumbly, and they took the direction of the clearing.
Lee waited anxiously for the subject to be broached again, but it never came. Naruto was chatting happily about what they had made for lunch that day while Sasuke was engaged into some deep internal reflections that had his face all scrunched up. Lee couldn’t just let it go though. He wasn’t one to back up, even from a hard situation.
“It’s true, you know. I can’t use ninjutsu.”
“Naruto can’t either,” Sasuke answered without missing a beat.
“Hey! I can! I’m just not very good at it!”
“You’re rubbish at it! So technically, you can’t.”
“You’re so mean!”
Another thing that contrasted Sasuke’s apparent rudeness and cold demeanor – he was rarely insulting for real. And if he was…
"Sorry. We'll figure it out, I swear," he mumbled under his breath, serious as always. Naruto's frown disappeared – he was never upset for long. He nodded with determination before focusing back on Lee.
“I have to get good at most things if I want to be made Hokage,” he explained, like that explained anything at all.
Lee decided that it didn’t matter either way. They didn’t care. They didn’t care that he was only a half shinobi, that there were a lot of things he could never teach them.
And if they didn’t care, neither would he. And he would teach them what he could.
“Okay guys. Race you to the clearing!” he exclaimed before bolting, followed quickly by Naruto who shouted in excitement, and a much more grumbling Sasuke who started running nonetheless, unable to leave the challenge unanswered.
Lee arrived first and by a wild margin. The two boys were out of breath but they both stood straight in front of him with a “ready to train, sensei!” in sync that they did to embarrass him. It worked.
“Let’s go then!”
Lee had just made some friends.