Lee was wiling enough to see sense -- as Sasuke remembered, underneath the bowl cut and the exuberance there was a well-trained shinobi, just as underneath Gai's ... Gai there was a man that Sasuke had noticed even Kakashi respected. The rustle of movement reminded Sasuke that he'd neglected his own food, and the reminder of what it meant to be a disciplined shinobi forced him to drop onto the grass and feel for his own lunch bag, pulling out the sandwich with little care for which it was.

From his nurse's vantage point, this doubtless looked like a proper picnic between friends. Sasuke might have snorted at the thought had Lee not continued into an explanation of what exactly the war was --

An explanation that had Sasuke's hands stalled halfway to his mouth, lunch completely forgotten.

"Kabuto?" The first name that left his mouth was utterly disbelieving. Kabuto of all people had become the arch-nemesis of -- of all the shinobi villages? What the hell had become of Orochimaru -- had he been killed already? (Had Sasuke killed him, or ...) "... Uchiha Madara?"

The name was one Sasuke knew, from childhood family history to information tenuously ferreted out under Orochimaru's decaying nose, but what meaning did it have in this context? Why would Lee bother to clarify that he wasn't -- "If he's not Uchiha Madara, then who is he? Why is he allied with Kabuto?"

There was still a hint of confusion on Kabuto's name -- Sasuke had known the medic-nin could be a threat, but never one significant enough to take a place as co-leader of a shinobi horde worrisome enough that the shinobi villages had actually allied. How much was Sasuke missing?