Lee did not really understand what that was about between the two instructors. But he understood there was an emergency. Of course there were things more important than some dumb student getting...
Anyway, it must have been serious. Onizuka-sensei was surrounded by intense light as his muscles bulged out and his shirt ripped off of his torso. His face was expressionless, but Lee could feel anger from him greater than he thought anybody could be mad. The two teachers moved so quickly, they vanished from view.
Well, Lee didn't die like he had been wishing after the first hour, and Sakaki-chan hadn't seen him like this yet, so he had to try to keep it that way.
With the door open, there was plenty of room for him to wriggle out of his bonds. He crept as stealthily as he could to the guys' locker room. He was seen by just a couple of other students, and he just ran the last hundred feet as they laughed, flashes brightening the corridor. He wasn't that worried about a camera, it would just be a blur. Fight for it and that would only give them more chances for pictures, and thinking of how Sakaki often stayed around after classes for extracurricular stuff, she might appear anywhere at any moment, and if she saw him like this, he would take his...
Damn it, all he had on him was a pen. Anyway, if she saw him, he'd take his pen and jam it through his neck til all the blood went out of the carotid arteries.
He ripped the clothes off, and washed his face. Hard. Damned stuff didn't want to come out. Eventually, as he gazed in the mirror, he supposed it was enough. His eyes and skin were red from the scrubbing, but his lips were pale, and his lids weren't painted green anymore.
Extra change of clothes. It was missing.
Okay, that was too much. But he did know which locker belonged to one of the assholes. He took his hidden toolkit out of his locker, drew out a couple of tiny probes, and picked the lock.
Lee took the other boy's too-large clothes and pulled them on. Jeans that pooled over his feet, a sweatshirt he disappeared into.
He heard others gathering outside the locker room door, banging on it. He must have locked it without noticing.
At that moment, Lee just felt tired. Just the first day, and he felt worn down to nothing.
He opened the window, took the twenty foot drop without too much trouble, rolling with the impact. His shoulder and back ached from the bruises caused by the impact being spread out across his body by the roll, but he was used to doing stunts like this without chakra. Of course, his classmates would not have even been bruised. Some of them would not have even gotten dust on their clothes.
Just kept walking.
Everything felt dim. Usually, he didn't feel this crappy until at least halfway through the school year.
Looking up, he saw that the sun had almost fully set in the distance. At the edge of the sky, there was still the faintness of orange and rose. The street lights had come on. Even without the rows of lights along the streets though, Konoha would have stayed bright deep into the night.
There were plenty of shops with neon lights, brightly lit signs, display cases with spotlights showcasing all sorts of things.
People went by on horseback or riding carts pulled by horses or oxen in the middle of a broad street of flat white paving stones - limestone, imported from coastal quarries. Closer to the sides, people pumped their legs on bicycles. And everywhere, people were walking.
He smelled food from the restaurants, dung from the animals, smoke from the small number of petrol-powered trucks pulling the huge cargo containers that delivered products from the factories on the east side of Konoha out along the main roads to the train stations where rebuilt steam-driven trains delivered Konoha's best to the rest of the continent, or returning, bearing raw materials like ore, raw cotton, sheared wool, logs of wood... From the drains and grates along the edges of the street rose the hint of sewage drifting along beneath the city, masked by the many fruit trees and flowering bushes planted at even spaces along the sidewalks. There was the smell of all those people too. Sweaty people, dirty people, tired people, clean girls in perfume out for a night of fun, the nervous boys on their way to meet them. It was a powerful smell, the smell of a city.
"Lee-san! Is that you? Hey, want to check out the latest imports?"
Back in front of one of the many stores that had some tie to his family.
"No thanks, Mr. Yamada. I was just taking a walk."
"Well, you tell your father that things are going real well! These new games are selling like crazy. Does he like cigars? I should give him a gift..."
"No, no, Mr. Yamada. You don't have to give anything. The best gift would be you keeping accurate accounting and running your business well - nothing satisfies my father like seeing his investments bear fruit."
Mr. Yamada just grinned hugely. It was a friendly, open grin and it softened the hard look given to his face by a square jaw that was too big, and a thick neck like a bull's he'd gotten from some hobby he had.
"Maybe so. Hey, out kind of late, aren't you? Guess they work you hard at the Academy."
"Y-yeah. Anyway, be seeing you, Mr. Yamada."
"See you, kid. You pass by Nagano's down the street - he's trying out a new recipe for the patties in his burgers and would like your opinion. Oh, he's also picked out some great tuna from the market today! He'll want you to take some of the best cuts home for your old man."
Mr. Yamada bowed to him and, a little embarrassed, Lee returned the gesture.
Maybe Neji was right. Maybe he ought to quit. There was plenty he could do. Outside of the shadow world of ninja, he belonged to a powerful, respected family. He was already good at math and spent the summers helping his father's accountants with tax computations and forms. During the winter holidays, he went the rounds with his father, checking on the inventory of their warehouses across Fire Nation. He couldn't do a substitution or make a clone, but he could spot it when an employee was trying to fudge the numbers to skim off the top, and had a good instinct for picking out the winners amongst the dozens who approached his father for a loan to start up a business.
Hell. The Hyuuga Clan actually owed his family quite a bit of money. They never did take enough missions outside of Konoha because of their paranoia over someone getting at their eyes, so that huge compound of theirs, which required tremendous resourcs to maintain, only still looked good because Lee's father regularly advanced the Hyuuga quite a lot for ninja security for their business interests around the continent.
He had a lot to think about. But first, some fish from Mr. Nagano's restaurant, because Lee's father really liked a specific degree of marbling and texture that Mr. Nagano excelled at picking out.
He sighed, hoping that Onizuka-sensei would forget about visiting him at the house later. He didn't want to be around for his father talking things over with the guy.
Mr. Nagano didn't just give him about a dozen pounds of expensive, perfectly chosen, perfectly cut tuna, he also gave Lee a ride home in his delivery van. It smelled like fish, but Lee appreciated the gesture. He was tired, really tired.
Somehow, Lee managed to skip out on dinner with his father, and just hide in his room. Anyway, his father was used to his moods.
He could lose himself in games, or in stories about lost places, or make a model sailing ship.
He just lay in bed quietly, looking at the ceiling.
Knocking on his door. A crack of light leaking in.
"Yes?"
"Hey, kid. Leftovers in the fridge. I have to take off early in the morning tomorrow to negotiate next year's deal with the dockworkers' union in Tea Country. Maybe a week, okay? Just ask Haruko if you need anything."
"Okay. Umm. Father?"
"What?"
"You really okay with me being a ninja instead of taking on the businesses?"
"Hey. Lots of time left, you know? I'm a pretty healthy old dog! They're also not mutually exclusive goals. The company almost runs itself now, it would leave you plenty of time to do the ninja thing. And you'd have to retire from being a ninja eventually, and when you did, the company would be there for you. Anyway, you know... I wanted to be a ninja too, when I was a kid. I understand."
"Okay."
"So, see you, okay? You know how to take care of yourself."
"Okay. See you in a week."
Darkness and thinking.
The hours slid by. Sometimes he was awake, sometimes he dreamed, sometimes it was just darkness.
At dawn, Haruko knocked on his door.
"Young sir? Your breakfast is ready."
"I'm not feeling well, Haruko-san. Please just bring it to my door. I... won't be going to class. At least for a few days."
Maybe not ever, anymore.
He took the tray, munched half-heartedly on tasteless toast and butter, fish and rice and pickled vegetables. Slid the tray out of his door, lay back down and pulled the covers up over himself, up to his nose.
With only his eyes peering over the edge of the cotton sheets, he imagined it was like he was invisible. He turned on his side and curled up into a ball, a small sphere of closed space.
White ceiling except for the dark oak beam crossing the center of it. Lamps, standing and bedside and desk. Electric fan, spinning and blowing. The bookshelves packed with books, for math, for history, for business, for ninja stuff. Scrolls on his walls with bits of ninja wisdom condensed into pithy aphorisms. Hardwood floor, no tatami, because he liked the shine of the wood.
He had a TV in his room and games, gifts from his father when he made it through the first few years of ninja academy.
The doors to his walk-in closet were open. He could see his clothes, civilian stuff for goofing off, fancy civilian stuff for when he wore his 'son of a businessman' hat, tougher things for ninja-ing. Shoe rack: casual sandals, exercise shoes, brown dress shoes, black dress shoes, hiking boots, ninja sandals, split-toe ninja boots. And his armory: gleaming rows of blades in racks, shuriken on hooks, weighted combat chains coiled up tightly, the sword a cousin got for him that he wouldn't be tall enough to use for another six years maybe, first aid kit, spare climbing claws, sickle and chain, and his spare traps kit with springs and pliers and coils of wire and line and scissors and oil and slender metal probes. The boxes filled with his old interests: old toys, old comic books, magazines, model kits.
Lastly, the little picture of him and his parents together, standing atop a mountain. The last vacation they had together before she left them for some jounin.
Lee considered whether this room held all the phases of his short life, and decided, no. There were all the places he'd gone with his father, all the offices where he'd tinkered with the accounting or checked the records or suggested optimizations for the book-keeping.
His life stretched all the way out to all the countries around them.
If he went the other way, if he went to one of the civilian schools, there would be so much more time. Time to find more friends, to goof off, watch movies, get caught up in the new shows being produced for the new Fire Country TV broadcast channel, to think about the future: finding and fixing more of the lost technology from before the days of fire that wiped the maps clean.
His family had made its fortune in figuring out how to get the trains running again. The continent had become suddenly smaller. Before, only ninja could get from place to place with any speed. Now anybody could. And it just kept getting bigger and bigger. First the steam engines, then they had to buy steel companies to get enough steel for the rails, then coal-fired electric generators to power the foundries, and then the money just kept pouring in and his father thought, why not return some of it to Konoha? Invest here, invest there - there were markets that previously took a month to get to that they could now reach in a few days.
To think all this reclamation and progress could have been wiped out if the Kyuubi had advanced even a few miles closer to Konoha... It would have run right over his father's warehouse where their family had been studying steam engines and internal combustion engines and trains and the old maps of railroads. All that would have never happened.
And they owed it to two people. One ninja, the Yondaime, and one civilian... the Demon Explosion, Onizuka Eikichi. Iruka-sensei hadn't mentioned it, but the relationship was pretty obvious. He even looked like the pictures of the Demon Explosion in the history books, the grainy pictures taken by a civilian with an antique camera, of a huge, blond man standing fearlessly in front of the monstrous fox, and in the distance, the silhouette of Yondaime standing atop a giant toad.
He could be strong without being a ninja, he could do great things without being a ninja, find happiness and meaning without ever having to go through another meaningless session of meditation trying to connect with his chakra.
Lee sighed.
It really came down to chakra. He could feel it. He could mix body and spirit and feel the resulting energy... but he couldn't do anything with it. Talking to Chiyo-chan, the most analytical of his classmates, the rest of them could feel the changes in the flow of chakra when they formed the mudras, the hand-seals that affected the currents in the inner coils and were used in sequence to tie the flows of chakra into techniques... When Lee did the elegant-looking hand gestures, there was no effect on his inner coils.
Practice did not help. Meditation hadn't helped. And every ninja medic they had hired said there was nothing wrong with his inner coils... he simply could not manipulate them with hand-seals.
He had always felt, well, he could be great with the tools, he could still be stealthy, and Oni-Baku had shown that even non-ninja could be powerful fighters. But it was just so much harder for him.
For the other students... Even Chiyo-chan, who was so little she barely had any stamina to convert, could boost her strength with chakra well enough to leap ten feet into the air. Lee couldn't do that no matter how much he exercised. Chakra to help throw blades faster than the eye could see, chakra to sense others around them, chakra for the techniques that allowed others to breathe fire or to shape the wind or to call on the water or to shake the earth.
Everything was harder for Lee. Physically, he was in the best shape amongst the class, nearly a match for Sakaki's conditioning, but as soon as chakra came into it, he could not match the speed or strength even the weakest of the others could put out.
After years of trying, he had finally made some progress that summer. He still could not manipulate the flow of chakra with mudras, but he had started to be able to shift it around in his body the way the others could. He had held out the hope that with this, he could at least match the others in taijutsu... and make it enough.
But it had taken so long, and it would take longer yet before he could focus the flow well enough to get more than a slight boost.
Those assholes showed him that the day before, that was for sure. Even the skinniest one could focus chakra faster than he could, could boost his strength and hold Lee's arms still by himself...
Lee squeezed his fists tight.
How much practice would it take? For the other kids, learning how to manipulate the flow with hand-seals sped up learning how to manipulate the flow without the handseals. They'd had years longer to get it. Even if his form was better and his muscles were stronger, as soon as those other kids focused chakra, they'd get almost fifty percent stronger while he maybe only got twenty percent stronger...
He could hear Neji telling him, just quit. He wasn't meant for this, that's all there was to it.
Maybe Neji was right.
Lee got up and turned on his TV and put a disc into his new game machine and lost himself in the lights on the screen and the sounds as he made his way through another life, a life where was the hero and the world around him was just something to solve or fight or get through.