| [Jul. 25th, 2013|06:04 am] |
Raidou tossed the dishes in the sink, gingerly disposed of Genma’s death egg experiment in the trash, and abandoned the washing up to grab a third beer. He’d earned it. He dropped back down at the kitchen table, and eyed the stack of waiting files.
Where to start?
Genma’s was the thinnest. Raidou fanned it out like a deck of cards, separating medical charts from aptitude tests and mission notes from Intel’s psychological conclusions. The service career was pretty standard—genin at ten, chuunin at thirteen, special-jounin at seventeen, ANBU at nineteen. He’d started field-medic training at fifteen.
The mission notes were the usual grab-bag of disasters and triumphs, with the occasional spectacular injury. Nothing permanently crippling.
Intel’s report was mostly favorable. In their opinion, Genma was steady, well-balanced, generally focused, and a little lazy. There were no notable triggers listed, and no traumas that weren’t shared by every ninja who’d grown up in a war.
He was allergic to spinach.
The only oddity was a single page report that had been heavily savaged by censors. Thick black bars obscured most of the text. Raidou was only able to discern a date—five years ago—and a few meaningless words: discovery, Konoha, building, two katakana that might have been half of a name, A-n.
Well, that was mysterious.
Why bother even leaving the report in the file if they were just going to make it unreadable? The stamped code in the corner presumably linked to a legible version stored in Intel’s archives, but Raidou doubted he’d be allowed to read it.
He shelved the problem, tidied the file away, and moved onto Ryouma.
It didn’t surprise him to find that everything, even down to Ryouma’s service record, was a mess. Father vanished at five, mother slain at seven. He’d joined the academy late, only to be yanked out long before he could graduate. It took Raidou several minutes to track down why, before he found the custodial release form granting permission for Ryouma’s grandfather to take his orphaned grandson out of the village. There was an attached form: compensation payment.
Three years later, Ryouma joined the academy again. There was no record of anything between, or what had happened to the grandfather.
Graduation at thirteen, much older than most. Chuunin at fourteen, special jounin at sixteen—promoted on the field for his jutsu, if Raidou was reading between the lines correctly. Jounin at nineteen. And he’d turned twenty this month, two weeks ago.
ANBU was a hell of a birthday gift.
There were a lot of notes on Ryouma’s jutsu, which Raidou read with equal parts fascination and conviction that he never, ever wanted to be on the wrong side of one. Apparently there were three, and each was more violent and messy than the last. This one targeted organs...
The missions were exactly what he’d expected—very little stealth, a lot of straight-up death. Ryouma was a hammer, not a scalpel, and Konoha used him as such. The injury rap sheet was long and painfully detailed.
Intel’s observations were a party.
“Wow, Tousaki,” Raidou said softly, reading down the list of conflicting opinions. It looked like two psych agents had gotten in a fight on the page, crossing each other out and scrawling corrections in increasingly aggressive kanji. He got as far as hyper-narcissism and are you blind, you screaming moron, it’s clearly traumatic masochism, and tossed the whole section aside. He’d form his own opinions.
There was one bright spot. A short, neatly printed letter of recommendation from Ryouma’s jounin-sensei, which ended simply, ‘Tousaki has potential and the drive to live up to it’.
Raidou shuffled the file back together, re-organizing it, and put the letter on top.
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