InsaneJournal

Who: Eliot and Lee
When: Christmas Day, in the afternoon
Where: Near the South Lagoon
Rating: Probably low
Warnings: Violence, if light
Summary: Lee is doing some target practice when Eliot happens by; sparring ensues.
Status: Closed/Complete

It was always going to be weird, he imagined: getting gifts from their captors. But the weirdness seemed to be taken to a whole new level by the gifts under the Christmas trees in the lobby. Lee had not been able to guess what he might have had, hidden in a box that size, but he had not been able to open it until Christmas morning. And once he had, he had simply stared at it, for the longest time. He supposed, now, that he should not have been surprised. After all, this place had seen fit to give him the tonfa that Gai-sensei had bought for him, and the straw dummy could not have been any harder to bring here than those.

He could not be absolutely sure, of course, since he had not been paying too close attention at the time, but now, he was almost certain this was the same straw dummy that Tenten had been using for target practice that day. The day when he had told her and Neji what Gai-sensei had said about having rookie genin at the Chūnin Exams the first time they had taken the test. All of them looked more or less alike, he supposed, but this one had had a long brown hair stuck to one of the legs. A brown hair long enough, and the right shade of brown, to belong to Neji. Lee was not quite sentimental enough to wrap the hair up and save it, but still, he had taken it as a sort of definitive proof. Neji did not often sit underneath the target while Tenten threw weapons at it, after all, even if with her perfect aim, he had nothing to fear.

Lee had no illusions that he would ever get to be as good as Tenten with thrown weapons, but now that he had a dummy for practice, he might as well use it. Here, he had nothing but time to fill, and filling it with training was always his first impulse. Because here, he also did not have Tsunade-sama to chide him if he overdid it. Not that he always listened to their Lady Hokage ... when he had run off to fight that Sound ninja the morning after his surgery, so that Naruto-kun could go after Sasuke-kun, being a prime example. But even she could probably find no fault with his kunai and shuriken throwing practice. Well, if he had been throwing them the normal way, perhaps. The fact that he was throwing them after doing a cartwheel toward the target, with the kunai stuck to the soles of his sandals with his chakra, would probably have raised her eyebrows.

But Tsunade-sama was not here to get onto him, so he could do what he liked.

Foot, foot, hand, hand. Releasing the chakra at the right time, followed with throwing from both hands in turn as he came back upright. He was starting to get the timing down now, after a few tries, even if his aim still needed a bit of work. With his feet, anyway. Both the shuriken had hit in the fatal zone over the 'heart' of the dummy, but the kunai were still high, and to the left. Right over the breastbone. He needed to release the chakra a split second later, it seemed, to lower their trajectory. And cartwheel a little straighter, too. With a nod, he extracted them all from the target and moved back to where he had started, to try again. And, after sticking his fingers through the holes in each shuriken, he laid the kunai down on the ground and stepped on top of both, focusing his chakra to the soles of his feet, before starting on another cartwheel.