In which Haru is the only person in Konoha to put two and two together and begins to realize just how powerful he could be, Minato has a brief crisis of jealousy, and Kakashi proves himself to be surprisingly wise

Haru had known that eventually either Lee or Minato would remember he existed. You could say, in fact, that he'd been waiting for it.

Not exactly with bated breath, but with that low-level churn of anxiety in his stomach as he remembered all the other times that Lee or Minato had ever been confronted by any kind of obstacle.

Haru faced obstacles on an everyday basis. Everything related to being a shinobi was an endless struggle that took patience, perseverance, and a whole lot of hard work to confront. He was used to quietly facing adversity, doubt, and his own lack of ability day by day and slowly chipping himself away into something competent.

Haru had been forced from an early age to be patient.

Lee, on the other hand, had practically been forced from an early age to be brash and swift to the point of thoughtlessness on confronting any problem she ran into.

Clones don't work out, just make them suicidal. Orochimaru-sama being a creep, just give him an entire laboratory filled with said suicidal clones (because that can't go wrong). The chunin exams are hard, just destroy the entire structure of the exams. No idea what to say to foreign civilians in a magic castle, just concoct and drink a mysterious luck potion.

Lee probably didn't know it, or only had a vague idea of it, but she had a really bad pattern when it came to this kind of thing.

Screwing up a mission, leading to the third war, losing any chance of promotion, being placed on probation, and earning the hatred of the entire village in one event…

Well, let's just say Haru had no idea what she'd do to this one except he was a little surprised that Lee hadn't done something already.

That had actually nagged at him their first day back. He didn't know why he hadn't thought it before, maybe because they were all in England and it had seemed so far away, but the fact that Lee hadn't done anything yet was not only weird but disturbing.

Not just weird, but entirely out of character.

The Lee he knew would have gleefully thrown caution to the wind, reverted time or else cast some continent wide genjutsu, and stopped her mission or else the war altogether. Or maybe she'd create a clone as a fall man, use a genjutsu, and become Li El: Superman's red-headed cousin and orphan Konoha shinobi who happens to look just like Eru Lee. Or maybe she'd just walk out the village gates, obliterate Kiri, Kumo, and Iwa until nothing remained, resurrect and rebuild the lost village of Uzushio, and then come back to Konoha and say that she had both started and ended the third war and they were very welcome. Or maybe it'd be something so horrifying and unwieldly that Haru couldn't even predict it.

Point being, none of that had happened.

Not while they were in England and not even in the past day and a half since they'd been back.

The war was still on, Kiri, Kumo, and Iwa were still standing and gathering their own forces as they prepared for war against Konoha and Suna who did the same. She was still on probation, off the mission's roster until further notice and still hated by ninety percent of the village.

So, either Lee for once in her life had chosen to accept the terrible consequences of her actions and decisions with dignity (condemning Konoha to a third war in the process) or…

He didn't know, he didn't even know how she'd failed that mission. Oh sure, Lee had only a chunin's experience with command. She'd led some C and B-ranked missions here and there (Haru had the misfortune of being on some of them) but that was just it, he'd seen her in action.

He believe that she'd bring her team home, no man left behind was very important to her, but having been on some of her missions he knew that she'd pull off the impossible to see that happen and complete the damn mission.

What could have possibly happened that Lee had had absolutely no choice but to retreat with all her abilities at her fingertips? Whoever she was fighting had to have made all her teleportation, her shields of chakra, her illusions, her use of any element available, and all the batshit overpowered bullshit she gleefully dabbled in every day useless.

Except, if someone like that was out there, then why hadn't that been mentioned? Exact details were sparse, but everyone's general consensus was that it was entirely Lee's fault and not that there was someone or some group out there with enough power to force her to run. Nobody seemed concerned about running into these people again.

And Lee herself had never mentioned what she was up against. Not plant zombies, not renegade clones with the sharingan, not cultists, not jinchuuriki, nothing at all.

Haru was starting to wonder if it had even happened in the first place.

Either Lee had faced someone she couldn't beat, hadn't told anyone exactly what she was up against and made no move to eliminate them, and had chosen to face the consequences of the failed mission with a quiet and entirely misguided sense of dignity or else…

Or else she wasn't doing anything because she'd already done something and that she somehow felt instigating a third war and receiving universal blame was the best option.

Which meant either Haru was crazy for thinking Lee would do something like that or was crazy for having so many conspiracy theories about her in the first place.

He wasn't sure which he preferred; both were awful.

Eventually, after staying up all night wondering just what the hell had actually happened, if any of this hadn't actually happened, he'd decided there was nothing for it but to wait for either Lee or Minato to come to him.

One or both of them would eventually and propose some crazy theory about how they were going to get out of this latest mess or explain how it wasn't a mess at all.

Lee ended up on his doorstep first.

Except, instead of Minato tagging along with her, she'd picked up a new side kick. Well, not exactly a new one, Haru had seen Hatake Kakashi enough before, but he looked shockingly willing this time around.

And Haru could see his face, that was new, as he couldn't remember ever having seen the kid without some kind of face mask.

"Has Minato dropped in, by any chance?" Lee asked with a strained grin that was trying to be pleasant.

Haru just stared.

"I'll take that as a no," Lee continued. She pressed her hands together, clearly sorting whatever she wanted to say in her head, and finally said, "Well, when he does drop by, because he will at some point today, he's probably going to threaten you under pain of death to join this protest thing objecting to my probation."

Haru just kept staring.

"I'm here to threaten you, also under pain of death, to not show up to that protest thing that will probably get you thrown in jail and ruin your career," Lee finished with that far too pleasant smile that brooked absolutely no contradiction.

And all Haru could say was, "Goddammit."

"Huh?" Lee asked.

He sighed and tried to think what if anything he could even say to summarize what she'd just proven to him.

He sighed again, louder, and said slowly, "That mission, Lee, it didn't happen, did it?"

Lee looked, left, looked right, then looked down at Hatake Kakashi in alarm as he stared wide-eyed and horrified up at her as if he'd just realized it for himself. Haru would feel pity for the kid, but he was willingly walking around with Lee, he deserved what he got.

Lee then pushed them all inside Haru's apartment and slammed the door behind them, "Who told you?!"

"Nobody told me," Haru said, "Nobody had to tell me. If you're not blowing up villages or invading something with clones to stop this then it's obvious you've already done something."

"It's obvious that I took a mission and I—"

"No, you didn't," Haru insisted, firmer now in his conviction, "Look, you being on that kind of mission made no sense in the first place. You weren't anywhere close to the elemental nations at the time, were barely contactable, have never been in ANBU let alone be a captain. Why would you be on that mission?"

Lee gave him a funny look then, not the panic of a few seconds earlier, but something calculating and assessing, "You're not supposed to be able to do that."

"What?" he said dully.

"You're not the smartest person in this village," Lee said, and Haru would be hurt by that if he didn't full-heartedly agree, "It can't be only you that would figure it out if it was this easy."

She jerked a hand towards her pint-sized companion, "And unlike him, you weren't at the epicenter, and even he only seems to remember the vaguest gist of it."

She stared at him intently for a few moments. As always, it was nerve wracking being trapped under her gaze. He felt not so much like a bug under Orochimaru's microscope but instead like a small ant that had somehow captured the attention of someone with a very large boot.

Finally, she said, "It's those damn eyes, isn't it?"

"Huh?" Haru asked ineloquently but Lee looked very pleased with herself for figuring it out.

"Your swirly eyes, they didn't break the genjutsu completely, but must have given you enough of an edge to begin to reason through it," Lee blinked slowly then said, "Shit, those things are powerful."

Haru had no idea how to take that, "Thank you?"

"You realize that, with a war on now, if anyone figures out you have those things you are doomed," Lee noted slowly, as if she was just now coming to this conclusion herself.

"What?"

"Nothing says, 'please murder me and steal my body parts', or 'please kidnap me and force me to have children', like those eyes. Especially if the other villages figure out exactly what they can do," Lee said pointing to his strange dark eyes that he'd never quite gotten used to, "It's why the Uchiha and Hyuga are so… Well, the way they are."

He shifted, felt the need to push nonexistent sunglasses further up his nose, even though he hadn't worn those constantly in ages and asked, "You think I don't know that?"

Except, she did have more of a point than he'd ever let her know. Even though Jiraiya had let them know in blunt terms exactly what those eyes meant for him, even though he'd gone through such pains to hide them, and even though they'd gotten him an apprenticeship when nothing else ever would he'd almost forgotten about them.

Once he learned to turn them off, aside from desperate attempts to learn how to use them without killing himself under Tobirama-sensei, they didn't factor much into his life. He never used them on missions, barely used them outside of missions, and for the most part nobody even knew he had them and if they did then it was just a curious and powerful remnant of the Uzumaki clan.

Without a war on there hadn't been as much of a threat or the slow realization that he would have to become as careful and paranoid as every clan with a dojutsu.

They both fell silent, waiting for the other to say something, anything.

He could ask why they were going to war, why Lee had either made or let this happen, and if she could do that much why couldn't she undo it. He didn't, God only knew why, but he didn't.

Instead, she said, "Right, so, you don't tell anybody, you don't come to the protest, and you sit here and prepare for your chunin exams like a good shinobi and I don't have to beat you half to death."

Haru, Dead Last Extraordinaire, said the only thing he could, "Right."

Minato knew by the look on Haru's face that Lee had beaten him on this one. Not exactly surprising as Minato had spent a bit more time with the hokages than he should have. Well, strike that, it'd been very useful as they'd essentially taken over all planning for him with an unbridled enthusiasm.

Where Minato had just had a vague idea and planned to ask around, they now had a date, a location, demands for the shinobi council, plans in case of arrest by the Uchiha police force or ANBU, and more.

All Minato had to worry about now was inviting everyone to the cause and passing off their names to the shodaime and nidaime and letting them take care of the rest.

"Lee's been by?" Minato asked.

Haru gave a short, almost pained, laugh, "Yeah, Minato, Lee has been by already."

He looked shaken, a bit unsteady, as if his entire world had just been flipped on its head. Minato stared for a moment, wondering… Had Lee told him? No, no she would never but… But that wasn't the face of someone who'd just been threatened by Lee into not participating in Minato's schemes.

She'd told Minato almost immediately, or, he thought she did, and he believed her. He'd never thought that she'd tell anyone else, let alone the boy she insisted on calling Dead Last. Something… Something about the thought that she would come here and tell him, tell him when she had no reason to, was distinctly unpleasant.

"Oh, for God's sake, what did I do to you?" Haru asked despairingly.

Minato snapped out of his thoughts, realized he must have been glowering or at least giving off some amount of killing intent, "Sorry, got lost in my thoughts for a moment."

"I noticed that," Haru said slowly, warily, making sure to keep Minato in his line of sight.

Minato could just do what he came here to do, he still had to meet with the infamous Ino-Shika-Cho trio, but he found himself just smiling and asking, "Haru, can I step in for a moment?"

Haru gave a shuddering, defeated sigh, and stepped past to allow Minato into his apartment. Minato had never been inside here, Haru had only moved out of his family's house fairly recently, but it suited him. It was a little bare bones, with mass produced civilian artwork hanging on the walls in a few places, but somehow Minato knew that it was Haru's apartment.

Probably because, as Lee would note, it was a perfectly average looking place for a boy who had himself once looked and been perfectly average.

Had that opinion changed without Minato noticing?

Minato decided to get to the point, "She told you?"

"She told me—" Haru started, then paused, "You mean about your protest thing? Yeah, she said if I go then she's going to murder or else hospitalize me."

Minato wasn't surprised, of course she'd be that blunt with Haru, but he shook his head, "No, she told you about the genjutsu, didn't she?"

Haru for a moment looked confused, then let out another brittle laugh, "So, I really am the only one who could figure it out. Great, that's just—I always wanted to be a powerful shinobi, you know. I thought that blood limits might be nice."

He shook his head again and admitted, "No, Minato, you can relax. She didn't have to tell me, I guessed."

"Guessed?"

Haru pointed to his eyes with a smile, "Apparently these actually are useful for something."

Oh. Minato, felt himself relax, like a howling wind had just been released from inside of him. Oh, that was so much better than… Well, Minato knew he was being ridiculous, for all that he was upset at Lee, for all that they were… perhaps fighting, it'd be a cold day in hell before she got that close to Dead Last.

Haru, by the look on his face, seemed to know exactly what Minato was thinking and had absolutely no desire to comment on it. Luckily, Minato felt the same.

Well.

This was a bit awkward.

"Right," Minato said slowly, "So here's the thing, you will show up for the protest because while Lee might think she'll beat you up I can and will talk her out of it. If you don't show up, I will put you into the hospital, and Lee will never talk me out of it."

A bit violent, perhaps, but it saved time and was a bit of an empty threat besides. Haru would choose not to be an idiot, that, alone, he had always been talented at.

Before Haru could accept or decline Minato just politely smiled and stepped back out the door to go find the rest of his old academy crew.

And if there was a little too much of a skip in his step thanks to Haru's reassurance about Lee, well, he could keep that to himself.

(Minato – 6, Lee – 0)

Lee should be meeting with someone else.

The Uchiha, Minato was sure to talk to them, also probably those boys in the academy he used to hang out with so often. Trouble was that Lee didn't exactly want to visit the Uchiha and she could barely remember the names of Minato's (and technically her) old pals.

There was Lazy Nara, of course, and then the other two? The blonde Yamanaka and the fat one, the Akimichi.

Regardless, Lee wasn't meeting with anyone, instead she was sitting down on training ground three's small little red bridge with Kakashi trying to think of absolutely nothing.

Failing that, she vented to her silent companion, "One, a whole day, and I've only managed to convince one person."

Kakashi said nothing, instead just dangled his feet over the water, looking calmly out over the wintry river and rubbing his hands together for warmth.

"And the one person I've convinced didn't even—"

She cut herself off, somehow, saying it out loud felt blasphemous. Even acknowledging that Haru had gotten one piece of the puzzle, guessed something was amiss, even without knowing what that something was felt dangerous. Like everything was that close to shattering.

With the third war, the first third war in Suna, it had been different. She'd taken the collective memory of an earth-shattering event no one had seen coming. No one had questioned it's absence or that the chunin exams had gone on like expected.

Maybe Uchiha Mikoto had sensed something but she'd either brushed it off or wisely kept her mouth shut.

This time though Haru was right, it didn't make sense, and people like him and probably the Uchiha with the full blown sharingan would be able to at least guess something was wrong if they put enough thought into it.

Lee hadn't considered that.

She hadn't considered a lot of shit.

She hadn't considered what it'd do to Kakashi, or rather, what it apparently wouldn't undo. She hadn't considered that maybe other people had the ability to at least glimpse the giant lie she'd handed them. She hadn't considered what it'd do to Minato to put him through that with everyone else. She hadn't considered that Konoha wouldn't leave her to rot the same way it had left Sakumo to rot. She hadn't really considered just doing away with the war to begin with.

Well, she had, for a moment but she'd…

She hadn't wanted to touch that. Because if she went that far then why did Uzushio have to fall? Why did the second and first war have to begin? Why did the clan wars? And if Lee undid that then what became of people like Senju Hashirama and the legacy of peace that he'd fought and died for?

Lee had looked back through the history of the elemental nations and quaked at the wave of bloodshed and violence that had threatened to consume her.

So, she just hadn't done that, had forced her gaze forward, and moved on doing what she could.

She let her head drop against the railing, "This has been a very long day."

"It's going to be longer," Kakashi, unhelpful brat that he was, noted.

He was right though; it was going to be longer.

She looked over at him. He looked less nervous than this morning, less forced, and maybe more at peace with himself. He met her eyes, as always they were a bit too serious for someone as young as him, but they seemed older than they had a few days ago.

"How much have you put together?" Lee asked curiously.

"Hm," He hummed, letting the syllable hang in the air as he collected his thoughts, "Something terrible happened. I was involved, you were to some lesser degree, and—Whatever it was, you taking the ANBU mission and the third war starting covered it up."

That seemed to be as far as he could get on his own. That was the power of Lee's genjutsu she supposed, it deflected attention away from the source, stopped all but those with an extremely powerful dojutsu from putting those final pieces together.

Kakashi, who knew far more than most and far cleverer than most, couldn't reach that final conclusion that Hatake Sakumo had been on that mission instead of Lee.

For maybe the first time, Lee found herself realizing how innately powerful she was. That, just like that, she could stop even very clever people reaching what should have been a very obvious conclusion.

Still, it was for the best, Sakumo's role in all of this would go to her and Minato's graves.

She just wished that he chose to funnel his anger into something a little less destructive. Whatever happened to good old training sessions to prepare for the jonin exams? Surely that was a better use of his time and energy than this doomed to fail protest thing.

She sighed again, "What's wrong with me? Am I saying something entirely unreasonable?"

What was so different about Eru Lee and Hatake Sakumo to spark this kind of a reaction out of anyone? More, when did Konoha ever do this for any single shinobi? Sure, people had friends, but they also had an eye on their own career and advancement. More, friends were friends but wars started were unforgiveable.

Lee shouldn't have to convince people to mind their own goddamned business or have a little self-preservation.

Lee pointed at Kakashi, "You're example number one! Out of anyone in this village I shouldn't have to convince you to sod off!"

"I told you," Kakashi said patiently, "I owe you big."

"Oh, you only think you owe me big," Lee dismissed, "Besides, I didn't do it for you."

Then she paused, reconsidered that statement, and amended, "I only sort of partly did it for you."

Sakumo killing himself, leaving his body for his son to walk in on, Lee had objected heavily to that and had promised to take care of Kakashi and intended to stand by that promise. So while she'd done it for Sakumo, done it for her too, she'd also done it for Kakashi.

"Like I said," Kakashi said with a shrug, "I owe you big."

"Owing me and following me around all day to watch as I fail at persuading people to be reasonable is not the same thing," Lee groused.

"But it is entertaining," Kakashi said, "And our relationship has to start somewhere."

"We had a relationship," Lee corrected him dully, "It was great."

Lee found Kakashi to be an annoying, uppity, socially dense brat with some clear ego issues and Kakashi found her to be incompetent, obnoxiously talented, and couldn't wait to get her out of his life.

They'd had a real thing going, Lee never thought she'd miss it so much.

"Also, helping you by helping Minato instead is the right thing to do," Kakshi reached into his sweater and pulled out a very familiar shinobi handbook, "My rule book told me so, we should always help people help themselves by not helping them at all."

Lee was very tempted to rip that book out of his hands and throw it into the river where it clearly belonged. Extremely tempted, she had to grip the railing of the bridge to stop herself, remind herself that she'd once given him that thing and quoted it over and over again for a reason.

"Alright," Lee grudgingly admitted, "Maybe that's why you're doing this, and why you suddenly decided to have a personality transplant, but what about everybody else?"

Kakashi kicked his legs back and forth, "Well, to start with, everyone knows you shouldn't have been on that mission in the first place."

"That's not—"

"I think it makes a difference," Kakashi said, "True, you made the choice to fail, but you also have little experience and getting into that situation in the first place and panicking and pulling out could just be a product of that. It doesn't make you a bad shinobi, just not fit to be an ANBU captain right this second."

Lee felt like that was the most she'd ever heard Kakashi speak in a single setting. That was practically a monologue, a well-reasoned and surprisingly well-argued monologue, from a little boy who a few months ago had told her he couldn't wait for her to get out of his life.

"That and you have very close ties to very powerful shinobi who have your back and you have Namikaze going out and bringing them all together. If it was just one or two, or if none of them talked to each other, then sure, no one would probably do anything. Well, one or two might, but not like this."

"So, clearly, this is all Minato's fault," Lee summarized.

Well, that wasn't shocking. She knew there was a reason she never made him angry. An angry Minato was a very clever, very vengeful, and very terrifying thing to behold.

"I suppose," Kakashi mused before adding, "I really think it's your fault. You keep thinking it's about you while reminding everyone that it's not."

"Of course, it's about me," Lee noted, "That's the trouble, this whole damn thing is—"

"No, it's about the will of fire," Kakashi said sagely.

Lee waited for him to expand on that, kept waiting, and then finally said, "Kashi, I don't know if you remember in your current warped state, but the will of fire is bullshit."

The will of fire was the lame response Lee gave to Jiraiya when she had no idea what she wanted. It was the tantalizing dream that could maybe, on a clear day, be glimpsed sparkling off in the distance. Maybe Lee had seen it sometimes, maybe she saw it in Kakashi, in Minato, but that didn't mean it wasn't an empty word.

Kakashi just grinned back at her. This time it wasn't forced, wasn't strained at the edges as he tried to make it bigger and broader, trying to mimic something or someone Lee couldn't quite place.

Instead it reached his eyes as he said, "That's the trouble Lee, you made me realize that it wasn't."

Lee stared at him for a moment then said, "I hope you know that I want to punch you in the face."

"Now you know how I've felt for nearly all of my life."

At that Lee, with a flick of chakra, threw Kakashi over the bridge and into the river. She didn't need to go to the Uchiha compound or track down old academy comrades. She didn't need to reach out to know exactly how those conversations would go and what they'd end up deciding.

For one reason or another she just knew they'd join up with Minato.

No, there was only one place left for Lee to go, straight to the source.

Lee was going to have to visit the hokage himself.

Author's Note: Next chapter, unless I'm far more verbose than I intend to be, should be the protest. And won't that be fun? Ah the plot slowly but surely moves along

Thanks to readers and reviewers. Reviews are much appreciated.

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto or Harry Potter