Chapter Five: Reflections

Warnings: None.

I-I

Requested by:
momoiro-usagi

Pairing / Theme:
Lee-centricism

Genre:
General

Prompt:
Mirror

I-I

Lee was aware that his appearance wasn't something girls his age deemed to lie within the realm of the 'attractive'. Whenever he caught a glimpse of himself upon the surface of the training ground's lake, or while passing by a store's glass window on his two hundred and thirty-seventh running lap around the village, he was reminded that he wasn't what the majority of people would have considered 'handsome'. Regarding himself as such was his way of letting the world know he didn't pay much mind to what others thought was right to believe. In his opinion, true beauty had nothing to do with what a person looked like. Taking an appropriate level of pride within each and every one of your attributes and loving yourself for who you were was what made a person attractive; looks had little, if anything, to do with it.

Of course, Haruno Sakura was a kunoichi who was blessed with both.

(If only he could help her see which of the two was more important...)

During training, Neji would find the faults within himself and within his life, obsessing over the state of excellence until he deciphered a way for his shortcomings to be corrected. Tenten, who was always so focused on hitting her own target, hadn't widened her range enough to realize her own imperfections.

Lee used to be self-conscious about his own talents as well. He couldn't control Chakra the way his classmates could, and he once believed this fact made him inferior as a Shinobi. Because of this, he struggled and trained twice as hard to reach a state of ordinariness; being different wasn't an ideal which was supposed to be embraced by a future soldier of Konoha's army.

Fire and water. Good and evil. Yin and Yang. Sensei Gai always made sure to teach his students that every flaw in nature was balanced with a positive; all you had to do was find them, and you would have discovered your advantage.

Lee, unlike his teammates, had taken the time to search.

To overlook the presence of flaws beyond his control and discover the positive of his own advantages.

Lee grew to appreciate everything he was, and everything he was not. Anyone who knew him knew that he made sure to live free from self-doubt, for he knew life was much too short to waste time questioning yourself. He found the positives within his skills. He found the negatives within his opponent's. He combined this information to become a keen, strong, and insightful young man, and one hell of a Shinobi to boot.

He was one of the few, if not the only Rookie Genin, who knew exactly how he was going to lead his life.

And with that knowledge, Lee held enough self-respect and confidence within himself to easily be considered the most handsome boy in all of Konoha.