In which team seven, plus retired hokage, finally manage to find Tsunade, Jiraiya brings Tsunade sort of up to speed with current events but mainly ends up talking about plant zombies, and Lee and Minato talk about what it means to be a god of death.


"Holy shit."

Tsunade would consider her a well-versed alcoholic and since Dan's death she could argue that there were few who could outmatch her when it came to levels of intoxication. Drowning the bitter grief over Nawaki, Dan, and even Konoha itself was easier than wallowing in it. Even if it did mean that Shizune, who by all rights was still young enough that Tsunade should be looking after her and not the other way around, had to enter bars at three in the morning and drag Tsunade away from the gambling and the sake.

The point was that Tsunade was very familiar with being drunk but somehow hadn't realized when she'd crossed the line from tipsy into hallucinating black out terrifying drunk, a stage she couldn't remember ever having been in before.

It was also a stage Shizune usually didn't let her reach, in fact it was about time for Dan's niece to make an appearance and drag Tsunade's ass back to the inn room, and the fact that this was happening meant the girl was late and Tsunade should probably be concerned.

The fact was though that she really couldn't think of any other reasonable explanation of why a sweaty, frazzled, looking Jiraiya, three grimy and one blood soaked ninja brats, and her supposed to be very dead sweaty, frazzled, and just generally irritable granduncle Tobirama were standing in the entryway to the inn's bar looking like they'd just passed through Ame during the war.

Jiraiya, the pervert sage, the dead nidaime hokage, and three genin all walk into a bar…

It was like the beginning to the worst joke she'd ever heard (one that Dan probably would have liked…)

So when she caught sight of them she just stared, open mouthed, for far longer than a ninja of her caliber had any right to.

And if it had been any other situation, if it wasn't three in the morning, she wasn't already well on her way to drunk, and confronted with her very dead and young looking granduncle the second hokage she probably would have taken one glance at Jiraiya and climbed out the window.

Because in any other situation she would know that Jiraiya's reappearance in her life could only mean one thing.

But Jiraiya caught sight of her, something like relief appearing in his dark eyes, and then he was booking his way over to her and it was already too late. Before she could say anything he took her bottle of sake and poured himself a shot and drank it down whole, "Tsunade, thank God, you wouldn't believe the kind of day we've had."

"Is now the time to be drinking?" And god, the man sounded just like granduncle Tobirama had, terse and continually irritated with everything around him (and he'd died before he'd really gotten to know Tsunade's genin team but she couldn't help but think that he would have despised Jiraiya and would have glared at him just the way this man was now glaring at the back of Jiraiya's head.)

Jiraiya ignored the nidaime and continued rambling at her while she just watched in silence, "Actually, you might believe the kind of day we've had, because I forgot to complement you on your bountiful breasts and stunning good looks. Which, when have I ever forgotten to do that, eh princess? We're going to need you to take first watch and also…"

Behind Jiraiya one of the brats, the dark haired one, fell flat on his face and started twitching on the floor looking as if he'd just succumb to physical exhaustion.

"If you could take a look at the kids and try to get them into working order it would be greatly appreciated."

Before she could say yes, no, or tell Jiraiya to go to hell because she wasn't a ninja anymore her supposed to be dead granduncle stepped forward and slapped her across the face, the kind that stung and you never quite saw coming, "Afterwards you and I are going to have a very long talk."

And although Tsunade didn't know it at the time this was going to be the rest of her life.


In spite of Jiraiya's words, he and Tsunade ended up taking that first watch.

The truth was that he and Tobirama probably could have pulled through if they'd had to, splitting watch between them, but at the same time if their leafy friends made a reappearance then Jiraiya didn't know if he was in any condition to fend them off, alert the nidaime, and rally the kids.

There had been a chance Tsunade would bolt if they'd approached her and then stayed the night but by the time they'd reached the village Jiraiya had been exhausted enough to put his faith in her.

She wouldn't run away from a fight this close, the village maybe, but not a fight where her teammate's neck was on the line right in front of her.

But instead of Tsunade alone on the roof of the inn it was the two of them, each staring off in a different direction, while he was taking the time to fill her in on everything that happened since she'd left and they'd arrived on her doorstep.

(All while Tobirama got to babysit, since it didn't seem he was ready to have a civil conversation with his grandniece, and Jiraiya wasn't in the mood to, in Lee's words, 'good cop bad cop' her into coming back to Konoha.

Hopefully with sleep he'd be a bit more reasonable.

But it was highly unlikely.)

"I don't know where to start." Jiraiya began, practically feeling Tsunade bristling at his back, like he was an idiot for not having his thoughts in perfect order after having spent the night running through the woods with plant zombies on his ass.

On second thought, that was a good way to start, "We're on the lookout for zombie plants."

"For what?"

"Plant zombies, it's Lee-chan's term. They're made of this weird white plant substance and look kind of like people but… You'll know them when you see them." And he really wished he had a better word for them but Lee's terms always had a habit of sticking and the plant zombies were no exception.

"And you have to see them, because you can't sense them by chakra, at least we couldn't and you know how your granduncle is with sensing." Not that Jiraiya had really tried, he'd need to go into sage mode for that, but he was guessing if the nidaime was having trouble picking up their zombie friends on his radar then Jiraiya wasn't going to have much luck either. It was what had screwed them over in the camp, that assumption that they would see anything coming.

"Which is why we're sitting here like idiots staring off in three different directions." Tsunade finished for him, quick on the uptake as usual.

"They can also use mokuton, so heads up for that." Jiraiya added again before clarifying, "A really shitty version of mokuton but they also make up for that by regenerating. So you have to try blowing them up all at once if you want to get rid of them."

For a moment Tsunade was silent, taking this all in, and then asked, "Anything else?"

"About the plant ninja, not really… Oro seems to be doing well enough in his state of the art laboratory, I think he's happy, he certainly looks like he's having fun." That was an understatement, since Lee's invention of her clone technique, he'd had test subjects galore for all of his increasingly nasty poisons, offensive fuinjutsu, and genetic experiments. He'd probably never been happier in that respect.

"Weren't you going to fill me in on why my granduncle's with the living?" Tsunade asked, and wasn't it weird how Jiraiya had almost forgotten that there were people who didn't know that Tobirama and Hashirama were back from the dead? Like it was his new normal or something.

Maybe being Lee's sensei had just desensitized him, the way it had long since desensitized Minato, stuff like that just didn't get to him anymore. That was actually mildly terrifying, now that he thought about it.

"S-rank secret, I'm afraid. Sensei isn't pulling punches with this one." Jiraiya said with a shrug, and she'd know well enough not to argue, and that she'd only find out the real reason once she was inside the hokage tower meeting with sensei.

(Of course, it was really an S-ranked secret of an S-ranked secret, the first being that Orochimaru had resurrected them using edo tensei and if you made it past that you got to learn that really it was Eru Lee doing whatever Eru Lee did for ramen.

But he just wasn't even going to go there considering now wasn't the time or the place to fill Tsunade in on the madness that was his genin kunoichi.)

And there was his bait, his real bait, that her family was popping up like daisies and there was some secret technique that maybe could bring Dan or Nawaki back. And knowing Tsunade, no matter how far she wanted to run from Konoha she couldn't turn her back on a chance like that.

And he wondered if Lee would do it, bring Nawaki and Dan back, if Tsunade asked her. She'd done it before but she'd only done it once before and so far no one had approached her (in part because they thought it was Orochimaru who had done all the work if they had any explanation at all beyond S-rank secret).

Lee was sometimes painfully casual and oblivious to the implications of her actions, actually that was most of the time, but she wasn't stupid and for all her unawareness there were times when she seemed to know exactly where her actions would take her.

He could see her saying yes but he could also quite clearly see her saying no.

Because that was a slippery slope they'd all avoided embarking on so far.

Which just got him thinking back to his most problematic tadpole, "Hey, Tsunade, when you were checking out the kids did you notice anything off about Lee-chan?"

"Which one was that?"

"The red-headed girl, looks kind of like an Uzumaki." Although really at the hair color the similarities between Lee and Kushina or Mito ended, if anything Lee looked more like a bastard Uchiha than she did an Uzumaki.

"Her name is Lee? What kind of a parent names their daughter Lee?"

Jiraiya had often wondered the same thing but had never really gotten around to asking Lee that. She probably didn't know herself, being an orphan, and having grown up in the orphanage himself Jiraiya knew there were questions you just didn't ask.

"She's an orphan, but anyway, did you notice anything… Health wise, I mean."

"No, she was probably the best off of the three of them. Why, did you expect something?"

Frankly, yes, he had expected quite a big something and not finding it was making him… uneasy.

One thing Jiraiya had noticed was that their plant assailants didn't bleed, or at least their blood wasn't red, instead it was a strange yellow white pus that was so beyond gross that Jiraiya had had a hard time looking at the stuff afterwards.

Lee, after her little dip in the river, had been covered in blood. Enough blood that it hadn't washed out when she'd fallen in and was noticeable even on the dark blue fabric of her shirt. But when she'd stumbled up to them there'd been no wound, no sign of anything bleeding, aside from being a bit dazed she'd been perfectly fine.

Just covered in enough blood that it looked like she'd suffered either a nasty blow to the head or a fatal wound to the chest.

But then he wasn't a medic nin so maybe his instincts weren't the best for this sort of thing.

"No, I guess not." He said with a sigh, letting it go and putting a mental note on the issue to bring it up once everyone was back in Konoha, if Lee was fine she was fine and that's all she needed to be for the mission.

Later he could ask her what the hell had happened when she'd decided to wander off and play ninja hero in the woods.

"Just so you know, Jiraiya, even though I'm helping you keep watch there's no way in hell that I'm going back to Konoha in the morning."

And later he could think about how to convince her without having to watch the nidaime and her duke it out first. At the moment he was just thinking about how Tsunade was sounding a bit too confident, putting it out there like that, and that undercurrent of temptation and desperate need was hiding beneath that confident bravado.

Maybe had it been ten years later, or even five, she'd be more set in her ways but as it was this was new territory for all of them and things had already changed more than they could imagine.

It was a new world they were in; they just didn't know it yet.

"Just letting you know."

She could let Jiraiya know all she wanted, Jiraiya wasn't the issue, no she had bigger things to be worrying about.

"Try telling that to the nidaime."

And as if saying his title was enough from below in the inn they could almost both feel that spike in killing intent as Senju Tobirama continued to let his anger fester.

The morning was probably going to be more interesting than anyone had intended.


"Minato."

It was the kind of sleep that felt like a lead weight on your eyelids, where you had to claw your way out of it, like you were crawling out of a deep well towards a distant pinprick of light and your dreams still clung to you like shadows.

Only, he couldn't tell what he was dreaming, there were too many loose and shifting images, and it had that sort of dream logic where you knew everything you needed to and couldn't recognize where the holes were.

Like the idea of himself, an older version of himself, telling a black cloaked someone (only not a someone but a something), that something wasn't good enough. In the depths of the dream he knew exactly what he was talking about but as he climbed towards awareness that drifted away until all that was left was this confusing idea of a fox until that too slipped from him.

"Minato."

Slowly, painfully, his eyes opened and he blinked until Lee came into focus.

She was inches from him, under the covers of his bed, close enough that he could make out blue freckles in her eyes which he'd always thought were almost wholly green. Her hair, now unbraided, was spread out around her head like a halo, some of the red curls brushing his fingertips.

"Lee?" He asked, and in the question was the other of what was she doing in his bed, when she had one of her own in the room.

She didn't answer that though, or say anything, instead she kept staring an expression her face that she rarely wore. It was probably one of the most natural ones she had, where nothing was painted or plastered on for the sake of others, instead it was bare, intense, and frighteningly serious.

As the silence went on he felt himself slipping back into sleep, taking those eyes with him, returning to the strange half-remembered world of demon foxes and fuinjutsu.

Before he could though, "Minato."

"Hm? Lee, what is it?" With great effort he opened his eyes again and willed himself to be awake, at least long enough to tell Lee that if it wasn't important enough to say then it was more important that they all got some sleep before heading back.

"If I wasn't what we thought I was, if I was something else instead, would you mind?"

Minato opened his eyes further, trying to process the question, but not quite managing because he didn't know what they had thought she was. Minato had never really thought about it, Lee was just Lee, what other answer could there be?

"I don't know if I thought you were anything… So, no, I guess I wouldn't mind." And he paused, hesitated over his next question of, are you alright? Because she wasn't, he knew it, and so there was no point in asking something they both already knew the answer to.

What he really wanted to know was would she be okay, but he didn't know how to ask that, or if she would even have an answer.

"I met my father." She said, simply, and to someone else this might be a perfectly reasonable sentence.

But Minato had known before anyone else that Lee's parents were very dead, or she had always thought they were. And if they weren't dead then they would have been in England, where Lee was from, and not in the middle of the Land of Fire.

"I also found out why ninjutsu's so easy for me, how I could complete the edo tensei, or why I have so much chakra." She paused then, leaning closer, a hand reaching out to grip him so that he couldn't move or look away, "My father, Minato, isn't James Potter, it's the Shinigami."

And she left it for Minato to put it together, not only that Lee wasn't human, was a demigod, but that Lee had met with the Shinigami. Lee had met with the Shinigami when no one was looking and had walked away from it.

Lee had said earlier that she had already died.

"He said he's the Shinigami of a different dimension, some other world, and that I'm the Shinigami of this one." Which would explain why she had been able to revive the first two hokages but raised a thousand more questions with it.

"Wait you… died and he said that he was your father?" All the while trying to picture what the Shinigami looked like, because the legends had never been clear, and they really were just legends. You didn't summon gods into the world these days, not since the era of the Sage of the Six Paths, had gods walked so casually among mortals.

She shook her head, "He has my eyes, and we share a lot of the same face, and he was waiting for me when I died and said I could come back here if I needed to… He also… He seemed like what a father would be like."

For a moment they just stared at each other, each trying to come to terms with the fact that not only had Lee died and returned from the dead, but that she was also apparently the god of death, and that there was some other god of death who loitered in the pure world that looked enough like Lee to pass for her father.

And there was that fear again, momentarily, of her slipping away because Lee had died and he hadn't even been there to see it. Lee had died and was apparently a god and had come back and he wouldn't have known if she wasn't telling him.

"Minato?" She asked, and he looked up and caught a flicker in her expression, something uncertain and afraid that was reflected on his own face.

She was just as frightened as he was.

"I'm, I'm okay, it's just a lot to take in… Do you feel any different?"

"Not really." She said with a shrug, "Besides, I've always been the Shinigami, we just didn't know it."

He hadn't thought of that, that this wasn't Lee changing into anything knew, it was just a different word for what to call her, "Oh, right. Shouldn't you have known something like that, wouldn't somebody else have known?"

She shrugged again, almost casually, and offhandedly remarked, "The Dursleys and I never really got into the origins of Eru Lee beyond car crash and drunkard parents. So I don't know how I would have known."

That wasn't quite what he meant. He had thought that being something like the Shinigami wasn't something you were told but something you just knew. Lee didn't seem to think of it quite like that, but then, maybe she was right. If there was only one Uchiha left, whose parents had died when he was born, and nobody had ever seen someone with a sharingan before then he might not know he had it.

Not until it activated.

So he didn't know if she should have known, if he should have known, or if somebody should have known.

Only it still felt like something you couldn't simply find out.

"Are you okay with that, I mean everything?"

For a moment she paused, considering the question, and then nodded, "I never felt all that human anyway."

And he'd never known that either, that the difference between Lee and everyone else was great enough that she'd felt an instinctive divide, she'd never told him before.

"Do you think I should tell Jiraiya?"

He hadn't realized she wasn't going to, or that she hadn't already, but then Lee always did come to him first (and was it bad that this was relieving)?

"Well, it's kind of important, so you probably should." Minato said, because it felt like one of those large things that the hokage should probably know about, and probably should have known about a long time ago.

"I don't really like dying all that much though, it was fairly painful, and I just have this nagging suspicion that Orochimaru would get to hack up my corpse on a daily basis."

That wasn't wrong, as much as Minato wanted to protest it, because as it was he questioned Orochimaru's methods and he'd never tried to kill the real Lee before, just her clones. And if he was guaranteed that Lee could come back from the dead (something Lee herself hadn't even guaranteed) then there would be nothing to stop him.

"Right, maybe they don't have to know." Or, more accurately, maybe Orochimaru didn't have to know.

"Well, I don't want to lie about it either." Lee said, her brow furrowing, and her solemn look being replaced by one of uncertainty. And that was true because he didn't want to lie to Jiraiya or the hokage either for

"No, no, I mean, don't lie about it just… don't bring it up."

"But what if it comes up? What if I not-die again after being stabbed?"

"Then I guess you tell everyone." Minato said before adding, "But that doesn't mean you have to tell everyone now."

"Right, after all, it's not like anything's different, not like anything's changed." Lee said and then continued in a more confident tone, "So there's no reason that everything shouldn't stay exactly the same."

And they just stared at each other, neither of them really believing those words, but neither of them willing to say anything against them either. Just lying there, facing each other in the dark, and thinking about how already things were very different than they had been before.

"On the upside this means that the plant zombie assassins are completely wasting their time and I can stop worrying about being skewered by flowers."


"I'll bet you five ryo that Tsunade-shishou and I aren't coming with you."

It was morning, the sun was shining, the grass was green, the plant zombies appeared to have retreated from whence they came, and Tobirama, Jiraiya, and Tsunade were in a Mexican Standoff.

Of course, that wasn't the word shinobi used for the situation, Lee wasn't quite sure of the exact term for it but she knew that there was one. Some perfect phrase to describe three shinobi, eyes flickering towards each other, each waiting for the other to start speeding through hand seals.

And off to the side Lee, Minato, Dead Last, and Tsunade's apprentice were all watching the confrontation that was about to take place in the middle of the road.

It had almost taken place in the inn, except Tsunade had tried to escape near sunrise by grabbing her respective child and making a run for it, but it seemed like Jiraiya and the nidaime had been ready for this because she'd barely made it out of the village when they'd caught up with her.

"Tsunade, I think it's time for us to be reasonable." Jiraiya started, his eyes flickering towards the nidaime who did not look like he was about to be reasonable, and Tsunade who also didn't look like she was going to be reasonable.

"Reasonable? Jiraiya, don't be an idiot. I'm long past the point of being reasonable!"

Meanwhile, on the side of the road, Haru stared at the girl with wide eyes, "Is this really something you should be betting on? This is serious, this is about bringing the sannin back together."

Which made it sound like they were bringing the band back together which probably wasn't the idea Haru had been going for. Lee still was a little fuzzy on the whole 'legendary three' concept when it really turned out it was the legendary two. She still felt that Jiraiya and Orochimaru should petition for it to be the dynamic duo instead.

And with that thought it really was like everything was normal, like nothing at all had changed, and like Lee was still the same old Lee she'd always been. No one here knew that she'd gone from vaguely impersonating Jesus to really impersonating Jesus.

It was a little alarming.

There they were, listening to Jiraiya screaming back to Tsunade about being self-pitying and Tsunade screaming back about being a useless and cursed shinobi, and the nidaime screaming back that she was acting worse than the goddamn melodramatic Uchihas and that it didn't matter if she was useless and everyone was dead because you still couldn't abandon the village.

(It really was starting to look less like a Mexican standoff and more like an episode of the Jerry Springer show, all they needed were the chairs to throw at each other's heads while they screamed about familial problems and they could be on daytime television.)

She decided to think about bets and Tsuande instead, "I have no interest in such materialistic things. Make a better offer."

The girl's eyebrows raised, as if she hadn't really expected any of them to take her up on her bet, "What do you want?"

Well, she already had ramen from Orochimaru, there wasn't much else worth asking for now that she thought about it. She turned to look to Minato, wordlessly requesting his opinion.

"What do you have to offer?" Minato asked and what little hope Haru appeared to possess flickered away and he got that slightly terrified resigned look that he always had when Lee and Minato were putting a plan into action.

"I don't really know… I could teach you about poisons, I suppose."

"That sounds mildly useful." Lee commented, her eyes flickering to Minato's, and judging by his expression he thought it was a good deal as well.

"We accept." Minato summarized, "Is there anything you'd like from us, if we lose?"

"Well, if you lose I don't know if I'll see you again." The girl pointed out, which was probably true, if Tsunade had her way which Lee very much doubted would happen.

Plus, now she was invested, deadly poisons were on the line and Lee and Minato couldn't let an opportunity like that go to waste. Lee might be inexplicably and or vaguely explicably immortal but Minato, as far as she knew, was very human and if he died then that was it.

Of course, she could always bring him back, the way she'd brought back Tobirama and Hashirama but she didn't want to think like that. There was something about the idea of bringing people back so casually, bringing anyone and everyone back, that made her hesitate.

She would, without question, but she'd rather it not come to that.

(In the standoff the nidaime began to gather chakra and every nearby puddle began to shudder slightly and Tsunade herself also began gathering her chakra, bringing a thumb to her lips and biting it, preparing to summon giant slugs and at the sight of her doing this Jiraiya did the same only to summon giant frogs instead.

If they had any luck it would turn into Godzilla versus Mothera in the middle of the street.)

"If you could have anything what would it be?" Minato asked, keeping a wary eye on the three adults in the middle of the road.

"A pig." The girl said after some consideration, looking mildly embarrassed, but saying it with confidence.

"A pig?"

"I've always wanted a pet pig."

Lee could do a pig, she gave Minato a subtle nod, not that she would need to because it was in their best interest to win this little bet. And with that Lee stood, dusting off her clothes, and ignoring the battle that was just beginning to unfold.

"Where are you going to get a pig?" Haru asked, his eyes narrowing, probably knowing very well where she and Minato were going to get a pig.

"Are you questioning our methods, Dead Last? For shame, we're supposed to be a united front on missions." Jiraiya had been very explicit about team work during their training as well as their mission's briefing.

"Don't give me that, you know what I'm talking about!" Dead Last exclaimed, actually looking mildly angry, before asking, "And what are you doing?"

"Winning us our bet."

"Can't you leave that to sensei? He was her teammate, remember, and the nidaime her granduncle."

Lee spared Jiraiya and Tobirama a glance, "They're taking too long. And anyways, I'm kind of getting tired of this whole C-rank thing."

It had been fun while it lasted, and it wasn't lethal, but it was more than past time to head back to Konoha and get back to regular training instead.

And more, she needed time and space to think, to think about the man she'd met in the pure world, and the color of his eyes.

Learning how to poison people was just an added bonus.


In retrospect it quickly spiraled out of control but then Tobirama had been nursing this wound ever since he had been revived and by the time they finally reached his grandniece it was much too late to stop it.

He remembered her as a little girl, Hashirama had always been closer to her, they had shared a love of gambling (and losing each and every one of their bets) but she and Nawaki had been the closest things to grandchildren that he'd had.

Grief was a terrible thing, he understood that, he had lost all but one of his brothers to war with the Uchiha. He understood the rage and the helplessness, trapped in an endless war, staring over Itama's grave and thinking how he had been the youngest of all of them so why was he dead? He understood why Tsunade had turned herself into this hollow frightened shell of a human being.

But she did not understand him and his brother and that was what he couldn't forgive.

She didn't know, couldn't seem to comprehend, what Konoha had done for her. That it had ended the clan wars, where clan heads would have five or more sons if only because they were almost guaranteed that four of them would not see their tenth birthday, that she and her brother weren't pushed ahead in the ranks before their time, that they were trained and could rely on other clans to support them, rely on the Uchiha even to support them.

It was not world peace but Tobirama had never truly believed in world peace, that was Hashirama's dream, what he did believe in was dedication and loyalty to that dream.

And she called hokage a fool's dream, not even thinking that it had been her grandfather's original foolish dream first, and that everything she knew and believed in had been built off of that fool's dream.

It'd quickly turned into a rather brutal spar.

He'd been so angry at that point he'd stopped paying attention to exactly what she was saying, catching only that there was no point in her returning, that she didn't want to return, and that even the revival of her own grandfather and granduncle weren't enough to convince her.

He only clearly remembered that at one point he had said that her story was not so different from Uchiha Madara's, who had left believing Konoha to be a failure, and had returned with the Kyuubi to destroy them all. The same man who had been responsible for the death of her grandfather and the Mito's status as the jinchuuriki.

The only difference was that she had scurried and hid while Madara had enough conviction to confront them.

And then, before Tsunade could throw another overpowered punch or Jiraiya could summon another oversized toad, Tobirama found himself unable to move, as if he had been caught by a Nara. Staring ahead he could see Tsunade caught as well, paused in an awkward position with one arm forward and one leg back.

"Alright, so, if there's one thing I've learned from all those academy lectures I didn't pay attention to it was that we should all talk through our problems as a team and that violence is never the answer… Unless you're killing enemy ninja, then violence is always the answer."

Eru Lee stepped in between them all with a cheery grin on her face, the kind that only belonged on small sheltered civilian children, or his demented older brother. Now that he thought about it many of Eru's mannerisms reminded him of Hashirama. Thankfully his brother had been spending most of his time with Mito and not corrupting Eru Lee any further; he'd have to make sure it stayed that way.

"Since all of this seems to be revolving around Tsunade we'll start with you. Why don't you want to come back to the village, Tsunade-sama?" Lee turned to Tsunade expectantly, as if they were all fully capable of having a civil conversation at the moment.

"Why don't I… Didn't you hear anything I've been saying?!" And he could tell, even though she wasn't saying it, that Tsunade was beyond disturbed that this genin had managed to paralyze three of the best ninja Konoha had ever seen without any visible effort.

One day, he couldn't help but think, that girl would become a terrifying shinobi and perhaps could even take the title of God of Shinobi for herself.

She didn't seem to realize this though, or was so used to her own potential that she marked it as unimportant, and instead remained hopelessly casual and overpowered.

"Well, to be honest I wasn't really listening, and you weren't being very clear. Try five sentences or less." Lee said, and for a moment Tsunade just stared at her like she was the biggest idiot she'd ever seen, and then through gritted teeth Tsunade summarized what she'd spent the last ten minutes ranting about.

"I am useless as a medic-nin if I can't stand the sight of blood. My brother is dead, Dan is dead and I am the one responsible. I gave them my grandfather's necklace and both of them died the next day, I am cursed! Do you need any other reason?"

For a moment Lee said nothing, rocked back and forth on her heels, surveying Tsunade and said, "Well, considering we were paid to come get you they must want you, even if you can't be a medic-nin anymore. Plus, if you don't come back Jiraiya and Orochimaru are going to have to change their name from sannin to something much less impressive sounding."

"Are you serious?"

"Very serious, sannin just sounds very impressive, and it'd be hard to go from that to anything else." Lee said and then concluded, "So for that reason alone you have to come back."

"I think they'll live." Tsunade said before sighing, her rage dripping from her and leaving something hollow in its place, "Besides, it's not that easy."

Tobirama felt the anger slipping from him too then, because they had already won, and staying angry and bitter would solve nothing and seemed pointless in the face of this broken young woman.

She would come back and it would have to be enough.

He and Hashirama would help her see that it was more than enough.

"I don't see why it's not that easy, it is C-ranked after all." Lee said, blinking in actual confusion, before adding, "Besides, you aren't the only Senju anymore, and if you don't come back then Tobirama is probably going to drag your ass back and none of us want that."

"It doesn't change the fact that I'm cursed."

"No, I suppose it doesn't…" Lee trailed off, looking at Hashirama's necklace, one that Tobirama had marked earlier but put no real thought into, "I hear you like to gamble."

"So?"

"So, how about I bet that if you give me that necklace I won't die tomorrow and you have to come back to Konoha?" And there it was, that grin she sometimes wore, as if Lee knew that she had already won.

"What? Are you insane?" Tsunade couldn't look down at the necklace, still trapped by Lee's jutsu, but her eyes grew wide, "I just said everyone who has ever worn it besides me has died! And you want to go trying it on?"

"Too late! Bet made!" Lee darted forward, plucking the necklace from Tsuande and beaming, "Now you have to come back with us to Konoha! If only to make sure I don't unfortunately die in some horrible training accident."

Then, before any of them had any time to stop it, the world lurched and the grown fell away and somehow the girl had used her teleportation jutsu to bring them all to Konoha's gates and the stunned chunin guard.

"Eru Lee, genin number 23605, reporting in from C-ranked mission with team seven, retired hokage, and the crazy necklace lady!"


Author's Note: And so they finally got the band back together. Next chapter will most likely feature the reintroduction of Hashirama, Orochimaru's continued experimentation, Lee dying in some horrible training accident, and more. Maybe, I reserve the right to change my mind.

Also, for those interested, there's a side fic about Lee and co.'s brief foray into the exotic land of England called "English Vacation". Feel free to check it out.

Thank you to readers and reviewers, you inspire me to continue this ridiculous spin off to a ridiculous AU Harry Potter fan fic. Reviews are always greatly appreciated.

Disclaimer: I don't own Harry Potter or Naruto