Naruto: God of Shinobi

Chapter 44: Drunken Master

The sand shell stood in the center of the floor. Perfect. Unbreakable.

Lee stood ten meters away and shook.

Not from cold. Not from fear. The Primary Lotus had emptied him the way wringing empties a cloth, and what was left was this: the shape of a person, standing by will alone, the muscles refusing to answer and the will refusing to hear it. His arms hung at his sides. His legs trembled with each breath. There was blood on his knuckles from the punching, dried now, and more blood on his feet where the repeated impacts had worked through the bandaging.

He tried to raise his fist. It would not lift.

He tried to take a step forward. His leg would not move.

"You cannot fight anymore." Gaara's voice came from inside the shell, muffled and calm. "Your body is finished. Give up."

"No."

Lee forced his leg to move. It moved. He took one step, then another, each one an argument with his own body, and he crossed the distance between himself and the shell and raised his fist and punched the sand.

The sand did not move.

He punched it again.

Again.

Again.

Each punch was weaker than the last. The sand gave nothing back. His knuckles split further and the blood came fresh and he did not stop, could not stop, because stopping was the one thing his body had never learned how to do.

On the balcony, Tenten's hands had moved from the railing to her mouth.

"He can barely stand," she said. "Why is he still going?"

Neji watched Lee's face. Not his fists. Not the sand. His face.

"Because he doesn't know how to stop," Neji said.

Guy stood at the railing with his hands clenched around the metal until his knuckles ached. He wanted to jump down. He wanted to stop the match, pull Lee off the floor, carry him somewhere safe. Everything in him was pulling toward the stairs.

He did not move. This was Lee's fight. Lee had chosen it. You did not take that from someone.

Lee's fist connected with the sand one more time. His arm dropped. He stood in front of the shell, swaying, barely upright, his whole body at the ragged edge of what a body could endure.

He did not fall.

On the far side of the balcony, Naruto watched.

His arms were crossed. His face was blank. He had been watching Lee for the entire match with the still, assessing attention he gave to things that interested him, and what he saw now was this: a person who was going to lose in a way that would cost him something he would not get back.

He did not want that.

He reached into his jacket.

The scroll was small, tightly wound, the sealing markings precise along its outer edge. He had prepared it before the exams. He had studied the theory in the restricted archive, practiced the hand signs until they were muscle memory, and he had never actually used it. There was a first time for everything.

Sakura looked over at him. "Naruto? What are you doing?"

He did not answer.

The scroll unrolled in his hands. The circle. The characters around the edge. The seal in the center, dense and careful.

His hands came together. The signs were slow and deliberate, each one exact.

He pressed his palm flat against the center of the seal.

The smoke came thick and white, billowing around him, and when it cleared a ceramic jug was sitting on the railing. Sealed. Heavy. The smell of sake rising faintly from around the stopper.

Naruto picked it up. He looked down at the floor below.

"Lee."

Lee turned. His face was pale and his eyes were glassy and he was barely tracking, but he turned.

Naruto threw the jug.

Lee caught it on reflex, both hands closing around the ceramic before his mind had processed what it was. He looked at it. His brow furrowed.

"Drink it," Naruto said.

Lee did not ask why. He looked at Naruto for one moment with the clear, tired eyes of someone who has nothing left to lose and everything left to prove, and then he broke the seal and lifted the jug to his lips and drank.

The sake burned going down.

Lee lowered the jug. His face had gone red. His eyes had gone unfocused in a way that was different from the exhaustion, looser, wider, the pupils soft.

He swayed.

A long pause settled over the hall.

Gaara's sand shell cracked open. He stepped out. He looked at Lee the way he looked at everything, with the flat attention of a person cataloguing a fact.

"You are drunk," Gaara said.

Lee smiled. It was not the smile from before the match, the wide earnest thing. It was loose. Tilted. Something about it was wrong in a way that was hard to name.

"Maybe," Lee said.

He moved.

Not the way he had moved before. Before, his speed had been a straight line, a point traveling from one place to another in the shortest possible time, something the sand could calculate even if it could not keep up. Now he stumbled left. Staggered right. Dropped to one knee and then was somehow already upright and somewhere else entirely, his body tracing paths that had no logic to them because there was no logic behind them. He was not planning. He was not predicting. He was just moving, reacting, the sake stripping away every layer of intention and leaving only motion.

The sand tried to block. It could not find the angle. Lee's trajectory had no trajectory.

His fist connected with Gaara's face. The sand armor cracked.

Gaara staggered.

Lee's leg came up and connected with his ribs and Gaara flew sideways, and Gaara's sand came back and grabbed Lee by the torso and threw him hard across the floor. He hit the wall. He slid down it.

He laughed.

It was a strange sound in that hall. Too light for everything around it.

"You're slow," Lee said. His voice was thick and easy.

Gaara's eyes narrowed, just slightly.

Lee attacked again.

The sand grabbed him. Threw him. He got up. The sand grabbed him again, wrapped around his arm this time, and it twisted, and the sound was a sharp wet crack that echoed off the stone walls.

Lee screamed. Raw. Animal. The kind of sound that lives below language.

He kicked Gaara in the face with his free leg.

Gaara's head snapped back. Sand fragments sprayed from his nose across the floor in a wide arc.

The sand found Lee's other arm. It twisted. The bone cracked. Lee screamed again, the sound tearing out of him, and then he headbutted Gaara across the bridge of the nose with everything he had left.

Gaara staggered backward. His face was unrecognizable under the sand fragments. He had not been this damaged in the three years of his existence that he could remember.

He looked at Lee.

Lee was standing with both arms broken and hanging wrong at his sides, his legs shaking, his eyes red-rimmed and unfocused, his face split in too many places to count.

"You will not stop," Gaara said.

"No." The word came out thick. Certain. "I will not."

Lee moved again. Not fast. Not precise. Just moving, always moving, the sake carrying him past the point where a body was supposed to be able to go.

The sand grabbed him and threw him.

He got up.

The sand grabbed him and threw him harder.

He got up.

His legs were buckling under him in ways that suggested things beyond muscle failure. His arms were useless. His body was a thing that had been used past its intended limit and was now operating on something that had no clinical name.

He stood up.

Up on the balcony, Guy had stopped watching. His hands were white around the railing and his eyes were wet and his face was the face of a man who had made himself endure something that was costing him in ways he would not finish counting for a long time.

"That is enough," he said. Quiet. Not for the crowd. For Lee. "Lee. That is enough."

Lee did not hear him. Or he heard him and it meant nothing. Or it meant something and he could not stop anyway.

He was still moving.

---

Next Time: The Cost of a Drea - He is Precious to Me

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