The transition period between the Land of Fire and the Land of Wind was noticeable. The grass of Fire thinned to scrub, and the next there was no grass at all, only red rock and a wind that carried grit instead of water, and by the third day the four of them were crossing a flat of sand that ran to the horizon in every direction and shimmered where it touched the sky.
Lee loved it.
The heat lay over him like a second set of weights. Sweat ran and dried and ran again. He grinned at the horizon as though it had challenged him to a race and he fully intended to win.
Izumo ran with a wet cloth over the back of his neck. Kotetsu had given up on dignity an hour ago and let his arms hang down while running.
Shikamaru ran behind Lee, watching the ground, the sky, the lay of the dunes. It was his first mission outside the Land of Fire. He refused to allow any mistakes or losses to happen under his watch this time.
Lee suddenly slowed his speed, letting Shikamaru drift far enough up the slope of a rise to be out of earshot, until the two veterans came even with him, and dropped his voice low enough that the wind took most of it before it could travel.
"I have wanted to thank you both," he said. "And to tell you something, while he cannot hear."
Kotetsu raised an eyebrow. "This sounds serious. Are we in trouble?"
"Are you two fighting?" Izumo asked after.
"No! The opposite." Lee kept his voice down, though the brightness leaked through it anyway. "I named Shikamaru my second in command. Over both of you. And you have more years and more missions than both of us, and neither of you said a word about it, and I did not want you thinking I do not see that."
Izumo shrugged. "Figured you had a reason."
"I do." Lee checked that the distant figure on the rise was still distant. "After the mission to bring back Sasuke-kun, Shikamaru has not been feeling the best. He led it. He made the calls. Most of them were good and people came home who might not have. But the ones that got injured and nearly died, he feels responsible for that, and somewhere in there he felt he should never lead again. That he does not even deserve the vest he wears." Lee's jaw set. "Everyone else looked at that mission and saw a chunin who did their best. He looked at it and saw only the failure. I want to change what he sees. I want to put him a step from the top and let him learn, out in the open, that the village was right about him and he was the one who was wrong." He spread his hands. "That is why it is him and not you. It was never about your experience. It was about what he needs."
The two of them traded a look.
"So let me make sure I have this," Kotetsu said. "You two are doing all the work. And the two of us."
"Get to walk," Izumo finished.
"In the sun," Kotetsu said. "On a nice long stroll. Out of the village. With somebody else doing all the lifting."
"...You make it sound like a bad thing when you say it out loud." Lee said, uncertain.
"It really isn't." Izumo almost smiled. "Lee, we have opened the same gate every morning for longer than you have been a ninja. A change of scenery where the most anyone needs from us is to relax and hit something if it comes to that? That's not something we would be concerned about. This is pretty much a vacation for us."
"Help the kid find his nerve again, sure." Kotetsu put his hands behind his head. "Costs us nothing. Honestly I am a little shocked you thought about your fellow man so much."
Lee beamed. "Thank you! Both of you! I will not forget this!"
"Don't thank us, we got the easy job." Kotetsu tipped his chin toward the rise. "Just don't tell him. He'll get weird about it."
"I would never." Lee said, with the complete sincerity of a man who absolutely would.
"Maybe teach us something that'll help us kill a tailed beast one day to make it up to us?" Izumo laughed.
"Sure! But it won't be easy, I'll warn you now." Lee grinned.
Ahead, Shikamaru had reached the top of the rise and stopped, looking at something on the far side.
"The Hidden Sand Village," he called back, flat. "We're here."
The village did not look like a village until you were nearly on top of it.
The cliffs came up out of the desert like a wall some giant had set down and walked away from, sheer red rock, and the only way through was a single cleft, a crack in the face barely wide enough for a cart, that turned twice before it opened.
Ten men could hold that gap against a hundred. Nothing reached Suna across open ground without first coming through there, one at a time, into whatever was waiting on the other side.
What waited today was four Sand shinobi and a heat that doubled inside the rock.
The names were known before they were asked for. The lead guard's eyes went over Izumo, over Kotetsu, over Shikamaru, then landed on Lee and stopped. The familiar green. The eyebrows. He glared at him.
"You're the Leaf support." It was not a question. "The Kazekage is expecting you. Stay together. Stay in the middle of the road." His voice was anything but friendly and welcoming.
They passed through the cleft and came out into the valley, and Suna opened up below them, round clay buildings the color of the sand they sat on, domed against the heat, packed close along streets that wound for the shade. Under the right sun, in a better year, it might have been a beautiful place.
As the cell came down into the streets, all eyes focused on them. Lee's reputation had spread and it was obvious. By the second street nobody had to be told who Lee was; you could watch it move through the crowd ahead of them, head to head, the green one, the eyebrows, that's him, that's the one, and the awkward feeling could be felt between the four of them.
Lee walked in the middle of the road and admired the view of a hidden village that wasn't his own. After all, this was the first time he'd visited a hidden village outside of Konoha!
However, he did understand that he had killed people from this beautiful village. He knew that. He did not ignore that. That was part of the job of being a shinobi. And this was another aspect that he would have to get comfortable with. Working alongside the people you once fought and killed.
The first thing thrown was a clay cup. It came from a doorway on his left, he caught it before it could reach his shoulder and let it drop softly onto the ground.
"Murderer." A woman's voice cracked as she said it.
Lee's smile dimmed a bit as he drew it back. The cup lay in the road behind him.
Beside him Kotetsu and Izumo no longer had friendly looks on their faces as their hands neared their weapons.
"No," Lee said, very quietly, not looking at either of them. "Leave it."
"Captain-"
"She's probably grieving," Lee said. "A cup isn't anything. Let's keep walking."
They followed their captain's orders despite not liking it.
The second time around it wasn't a cup.
He heard it before he saw it. The man came out of the gap between two buildings on Lee's right, coming in low and fast, and this was no grieving mother with a cup. He was a shinobi, a kunai turned backward in his fist and wind chakra pared the blade's edge down to something that would part bone and muscle, and every piece of him was aimed at the side of Lee's neck.
The crowd flinched back. Somewhere a voice shouted, too late to mean anything.
Lee stood still, the smile completely gone from his face.
The blade reached the place his neck had been and stopped instantly.
Lee's hand closed over the wrist of the tearful man. The wind mere inches away from reaching the side of his neck. The young man struggled with all his might to push it forward. But Lee's grip was like a vice. It wasn't crushing his hand like it could have, it simply prevented him from moving at all.
"DIE! YOU KILLED MY FATHER AND YOU DESERVE TO BE BURIED JUST LIKE HIM!" He screamed.
"I understand where you're coming from," Lee said softly. "I do. You lost someone..." He eased the pressure off the arm. "Words I will take. Call me whatever you need to call me, all of you, the whole way to your Kazekage's door, and I will not lift a finger." He let go, stood, stepped back, and left the man shaking with his kunai in front of him. "But I can not and will not accept attempts on my life."
The attacker seemingly poised forward to strike again before being tackled and restrained by multiple Sand-nin. The one in charge apologized to the leaf support. "This is unforgivable and I can only apologize for this." The jonin prepared to decapitate the screaming and struggling young man.
Lee was there before the blade finished falling, his palm catching it mid-swing. The blade came slashing down only to be stopped by Lee's muscles. The jonin's eyes widened as he attempted to pull back the blade in horror.
"It's fine. You don't have to kill him. I think there's been enough deaths for both of our villages, don't you think?" Lee kindly smiled at his attacker and then the jonin.
Lee allowed the jonin to pull back his sword as he made his way back over to his team. "I can't bring back the dead, but I can try to help make up for what is happening now. Just give me one chance, okay?" Lee asked him.
He turned and walked back to the center of the road.
Lee fell back in among his men, and they closed around him and kept walking, because he had said walk. Nobody argued the call.
None of them had stood down, though. Kotetsu's hand had come off his weapon and not gone far. Izumo had drifted a half step wide, setting the mouth of the nearest alley at their backs, and his eyes had not left the rooftops since the cup. Shikamaru walked with his eyes darting left and right ready to activate his clan's jutsu much faster this time.
Lee had chosen, twice now, to hurt no one. His men were quietly making ready to hurt everyone, the moment he changed his mind.
The Kazekage's building was the tallest thing in the valley and the roundest, a dome of clay with the character for wind set over the door, and inside it was blessedly, impossibly cool.
The man behind the desk wore the robes and the hat. He was hard-faced, a cloth wrap over the lower half of his head. Baki. Acting Fifth Kazekage, holding a position he did not consider himself worthy of. He stood as they came in, which surprised Shikamaru.
Two others stood against the wall, neither of them sitting either. A young woman with four ponytails and a war fan as tall as she was strapped across her back, arms crossed, face giving away nothing. And a young man beside her in the hood and face paint, leaning on the clay. Chunin, both, by the vests. Shikamaru recognized the faces from the exams. Kankuro and Temari.
"Word reached me before you did," Baki said. "A ninja of mine put a blade to the neck of an ally this village asked for. On the road, in the open, where everyone could see it done." His jaw worked once. "He will be dealt with. That should not have happened. I apologize for it."
"He should have been killed." Temari said.
Everyone looked at her.
"I mean it." She sounded frustrated. "We sent for this. We swallowed every last thing it costs us to send for it, and we sent anyway, because the only other choice is the village stops existing. And the one time we cannot afford a single mistake, some fool with a grudge and no sense decides his feelings are worth more than all of it. He could have lost us the only help we are ever going to get. Over an assassination that would've never succeeded." She uncrossed her arms and recrossed them the other way. "I guess he can consider himself lucky, Leaf is so forgiving for some…"
Beside her Kankuro nodded, glancing at Lee.
Baki crossed to a map pinned on the wall and set two fingers against the north of it.
"Here's what's going on." He did not ask whether they did. "Stone. Here, the border between the Land of Stone and the Land of Wind. They take a border post, we take it back at three times the cost, they take the next one. They are bleeding us a man at a time, and they have men to spare and we do not." His hand moved east. "And here. The Land of Rivers the eastern border. Cloud, reaching. Feeling along the eastern line and drawing back before we can close on them. They have come further west than Cloud has any business coming, and I do not yet know what they think is out here worth attacking." His hand dropped to his side. "Two fronts. Half the shinobi I would need to hold one of them. That's what's going on, Konoha. It is why you are here, and I will not insult any of us by pretending I am glad about the shape of the help. Only that it came."
Lee stepped forward, and Shikamaru braced, because there was never any telling what Lee would say.
"Then tell us where to stand," Lee said. "We did not come to be thanked, Kazekage-sama. We came to help our allies. Point us at the front that is worst and we will go to that one first."
Baki looked at him a long moment. Whatever he had braced himself to receive from the Green Savage Devil, it was plainly not that.
"...The north," he said at last. "You leave at dawn."
They were given two rooms in the cool of the lower floor and a meal nobody in the building looked happy to carry in. Lee ate like a man who had never eaten before, talking with his mouth full about the heat and the cliffs and what a person could really make of himself training in a country like this. Then he went on to teaching Izumo and Kotetsu about the intricacies of the Eight Inner Gates in a low voice.
Shikamaru sat by the narrow window with the last of the light and listened as well. He didn't plan on learning a terrifying and painful jutsu like that. But if one day he decided he needed to or to face someone who knows it, it wouldn't hurt to know what would be the best way to handle them.