Title: 'Twixt the Turtle and His Queen

Author: Reinamy

Pairing: Rock Lee/fem!Naruto

Warnings: PG-13 for language. AU-ish (not entirely canon compliant).

Summary: Uzumaki Naruto never did have the most conventional taste in, well, anything.

Disclaimer: I don't own Naruto. This is non-profitable fan work. Title was taken from the poem The Phoenix and the Turtle by William Shakespeare.

Author's Note: Can you imagine these two together? They'd take the world by storm (if only because they'd drive everyone to insanity with their combined crazy). But I digress. Anyway, I'm testing the waters of the Naruto fandom with another fic. Let's see how it goes, ne? The story will follow a snapshot-like format and will probably be around to 4-5 (short) chapters. Updates will be erratic. Happy reading!

phase i. and so the queen took notice.

I.

The first thing Uzumaki Naruto thought when she saw him was 'wow, he's cool'.

That was before she registered his weird moss-colored jumpsuit, the enormous caterpillar eyebrows, and his headache inducing speech patterns (not to mention volume, and that was really saying something coming from Naruto of all people).

Her opinion of him took a rather large hit when he took one look at her teammate, Sakura, and declared himself in love. Not that she didn't understand it—hell, even Naruto had once harbored a crush on the kunoichi and she didn't even like girls like that, not really—but it smarted a bit anyway. People—namely boys—tended to always overlook her in favor of Sakura. Naruto knew she wasn't all that pretty, or girly, and that she didn't take care of her appearance the way girls ought to. She knew that her mannerisms were far from feminine, that she was about as graceful as a three-legged horse, and that looking at her, most wouldn't even think she was a girl. She knew this. And honestly, she mostly didn't care.

So what if she cursed too much, refused to grow her hair out, and wouldn't know what to do with make-up even if someone slapped her in the face with an instruction manual? And maybe she couldn't arrange flowers or cook edible food (ramen exempted) to save her life. So freaking what? She was strong, and fast, and absolutely deadly with sharp objects. She could knock out grown men with her fists alone and could stand up from a beating that would leave most people dead.

Naruto would take being kickass over being beautiful any day.

And if there was a tiny part of her—a small, nearly inaudible voice in the back of her head that liked to claim otherwise, well. She could ignore it. There was more to life, more to being a girl, than fawning over boys and wearing pretty clothes. There had to be.

II.

The boy, she later found out, was named Rock Lee. Naruto thought his parents must have been on some illegal substance when they named him.

Naruto and her team were—rather literally—in the middle of the second trial of the Chuunin exams, smack center in the aptly named Forest of Death, and so beyond worse for wear that the term didn't do them an iota of justice.

Naruto knew that they would have been in a helluva lot more trouble if Rock Lee, in all his blindingly green glory, hadn't stepped in to fend off the Oto-nin, and that was the only reason why she hadn't interrupted his relentless monologue about youth and Sakura and spring and Sakura and flames and Sakura…well, you got her point.

Naruto felt relieved when Lee's teammates finally dragged him away, and not just because she legitimately feared that the pitch of his voice would cause irreparable damage to her eardrums (that, and attract attention that they really, truly, definitely did not need). If Naruto had to listen to him talk about how perfect and beautiful and charming Sakura was for one second longer she reckoned she might have done something rash. Like stabbed him in the thigh with a kunai. And even Naruto, as socially awkward as she was, knew that wasn't the proper way to thank someone for saving your life.

Naruto rubbed a hand over her face and made her way back to her battle-worn teammates.

Sakura had returned to fawning over Sasuke, who in turn had returned to being an arrogant, stand-offish asshole. She couldn't even pretend to feel surprised. Instead of slapping them over the head like she desperately wanted to she fell back into her role as the unofficial team motivator and wheedled, teased, and goaded them all into moving. As mind-blowingly amazing as a few hours of rest sounded none of them could afford to stay in the forest another night. That snake-freak had done something worrying to Sasuke, Sakura still looked marginally traumatized, and Naruto…well, she really did not want to think about the new, and admittedly painful, seal on her stomach.

When they finally made it to the tower, she somehow managed to keep it together long enough to scout out a secluded area before giving in to the urge to cry.

Naruto wasn't much of a crier, and she was proud to say that she never had been. But the sheer relief she felt in that moment, like having a dislocated joint shoved back into place, was overwhelming. When the reality of what her team had been though, what they would continue to go through, had finally settled in, well…Naruto could hold back the tears no more than she could control the direction of a storm.

Not that she even tried.

She'd damned well earned it.

III.

Naruto gained an entirely new level of respect for the weird Kanoha-nin during his absolutely epic fight with Sabaku no Gaara in the preliminaries. She hadn't thought any match could live up to the intensity (and brutality) of the one she'd just witnessed between the Hyuuga cousins, but she'd quickly been proven wrong. Rock Lee was a literal blur down in the arena and Naruto, even with her Kyuubi-enhanced senses, could barely keep track of him.

Her jaw dropped with everyone else when Lee released his deceptively unremarkable weights and began to move even faster. Naruto didn't understand how anyone could possibly move like that. If Rock Lee had been like a cheetah before, agile and blindingly swift, he was a shooting star now, moving at a speed that surpassed human boundaries and breached the realm of the supernatural. Her eyes stung just trying to keep up and she'd long since given up on blinking.

When the fight slowed to a crawl and the two began to circle each other, not unlike wild animals fighting over territory, she glanced at her sensei and asked if Rock Lee's inhuman speed might've been some weird kekkei genkai.

Kakashi laughed and assured her that his speed could only be attributed to hard work. She'd looked at him disbelievingly and he'd added, eyes smiling in that way of his, that Lee's equally weird looking jounin sensei was even faster.

For a short, awkward moment Naruto found herself wishing she'd been assigned a sensei like him. She liked Kakashi well enough and all—despite his chronic lateness, his perverted reading habits, and his blatant favoritism for the only other sharingan user on their team—but she had to wonder if maybe they all would have been a lot stronger by now if they hadn't wasted so much time waiting and searching for their wayward sensei instead of actually training.

She was pulled from those traitorous thoughts when the match suddenly gained momentum.

Rock Lee, for all his inhuman strength and speed, was clearly struggling. For every hard-earned inch he gained on Gaara, the Suna-nin would knock him several more back with ease. More, he was visibly losing his footing and bearing each time.

As the match progressed things only continued to get worse. The civilian spectators probably hadn't noticed it but the shinobi did, and Gaara certainly had. The Suna-nin had become relentless in his attacks, never tiring or faltering, and Lee was clearly beginning to weaken. He lost something with every minute that passed; a touch of strength, a second of speed, an inch of accuracy, an instant of reaction, and most glaringly, the unwavering certainty of his own victory.

Naruto was biting her lip so hard she could feel blood swell from where her incisors punctured the bruised skin. Her hands had already lost feeling, clenched as they were around the metal railing, the knuckles white. She'd long ago lost control of her thundering heartbeat, like a storm inside her chest and the crash of waves against her ears. It was torture to watch, to stay quiet, to keep still. She wanted nothing more than to stand up and shout brash reassurances at the boy but instinct screamed at her that doing so would break his tightly coiled concentration and she didn't need to be a genius to know that he couldn't afford even a nanosecond of inattentiveness.

He'd lose.

Kami-sama, she thought. Even Hinata's round against Neji, as exciting and terrible as it was, hadn't been so nerve-wrecking or intense. And she didn't even know the guy, not really. She might have wondered about the extent of her reaction if she hadn't been so riveted by the match. As it was, she could do little else but inwardly scream at the green-clad boy with the freaky eyebrows to hurry the hell up and kick the other guy's ass.

He wasn't going to be able to hold out for much longer.

Later, when they asked her why she'd done something so foolish, so reckless, her answer had been, "Because someone had to."

It wasn't a lie, but it wasn't the truth, either. No, her reason hadn't been as noble or simple as that. Honestly, she didn't even remember moving. There'd been no deliberation, planning, or decision making on her part. Nothing as premeditated as that. Just—one moment she'd been looking down at the arena, thinking, this is it, this is the moment he's going to die, and the next thing she knew she was standing in-between the boy she wanted to save and the person who wanted to kill him, perhaps a second or two slower than the boy's own sensei, surrounded by dust and sand and the permeating stench of spilled blood.

Kakashi and Sakura scolded her for being reckless. Tenten and Gai-sensei thanked her for helping. Sasuke and Neji ridiculed for being soft.

She didn't care, though. Not about any of it.

She hadn't done it for them.

She'd done it for that funny-looking boy with the too-loud voice, and the too-weird clothes, and the too-bright personality.

Not that it mattered, in the end.

She had still been too damn slow to save him.

to be cont'd.

A/N: So there's chapter one. There will be actual Naruto/Lee interaction in the next installment. Thanks for reading, and please take a moment to drop a review. Ciao.