| [Dec. 27th, 2013|06:31 am] |
A little tension lightened, sliding off Kakashi’s shoulders. He’d had almost a week of self-reflection between the boat ride home and his captain-enforced downtime, though a lot of that mental energy had been spent worrying about Minato, but he’d still raked over the coals of the mission. They’d made mistakes, there were things he would have done differently, but overall it hadn’t been nearly the disaster it could have been.
Apparently Minato thought so, too.
“Next time you should just give us the S-rank,” Kakashi said, teasing. “At least we’d get the intel up front.”
Minato snorted softly. “Watch what you ask for. It may be an S-rank, after all. After that performance..." He spread his arms out along the tub edge and dropped his head back, staring at the ceiling. Beads of water dripped from the ruffled spikes of his hair, sliding down over his collarbones. “I took five shinobi—four ANBU and an Intel agent—to kill the lord of Taishin Province, and lost or injured all but one of them. He knew we'd come for him; he'd hired guards from Iwa already…”
Figured that Iwa had gotten involved. Any chance they had to stab Konoha.
“I hope we'll have some element of surprise when we strike the others,” Minato continued, “but I can't afford to send out two ANBU teams for each target without stripping Konoha of its defenses. If Team Six can hold its own against a demon, I'd hope you can survive whatever a traitor can hire against you.”
Kakashi thought of the blood-specks on Minato’s skin spiralled around the memory of a Ransengan. A fight that had tired him and taken four agents was a hell of a battle.
“Anything you can do,” Kakashi said, letting the rest of the sentence hang. I can do better.
Minato smiled wearily at the ceiling. “I hope you can.”
“Hey,” said Kakashi, and stretched out a leg to kick Minato on the ankle. Minato flinched, making the bath-water ripple, and finally looked down from whatever invisible nightmare-chessboard he was trying to track. “I haven’t died on you yet. And you made it back home in one piece with a saved city behind you.” And three dead bodies, but everything had a cost. “You can breathe for a minute.”
Minato looked both amused, and like it had taken him effort to get there. “Hey, motivational speaker is my job. You trying to muscle me into retirement already?”
“I have a six year plan,” Kakashi said comfortably, and settled lower until the water came up to his chin.
Minato laughed softly, which brightened his eyes and deepened the lines around them. “You were born with a plan.”
“Someone needed to be,” Kakashi agreed. And then, quieter, he added, “I’m sorry about your team.”
Minato’s smile faded. “They knew what end they’d likely come to. And Hajime may run again—I made sure Rin took him….” Kakashi was sure he knew that name, but he couldn’t place it. Minato scrubbed a wet hand over his face. “One in five ANBU teams don’t survive their first year intact, Kakashi. Don’t let yours be one of them.”
Well, everyone had survived their first mission. That was already a better track record than his first jounin mission. |
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