| [Sep. 14th, 2013|01:36 am] |
Silence drifted back, and the clones wandered away, trading commentary on their favorite moments. Katsuko was in for a morning treat when they disintegrated and dropped their memories back into her head. Raidou took himself and Kakashi through a full set of stretches, working from aching fingertips down to punished feet—his booted, Kakashi’s bare. There was a deep ache in his right thigh, and his forearms were going to be interesting colors in the morning, but otherwise the damage was pretty minimal. No worse than any other spar.
And he felt tired.
He thought, maybe, that Kakashi did too.
“C’mon,” Raidou said, and took them back to camp.
The fire had burned down lower, bunkered to a steady set of glowing coals. He bolstered it with a few more heavy hunks of wood from Katsuko’s hoard. Next to it, closest to the warmth, Ryouma was a loose sprawl on his back, one arm tucked beneath his head, the other flung out on the grass. His face was oddly still in sleep, mouth firmly closed, a faint line drawn between his eyebrows. As Raidou looked, Ryouma rolled away from them, turning his back.
Katsuko was a tightly curled ball beneath her blanket, tucked comfortably into her bedroll. Her face was barely visible; only the rumpled spikes of her hair stuck out of the blankets, stirred by the night breeze. She murmured a quiet piece of nonsense. Don’t take the orange shoes, sensei...
Genma was a mix of both. He’d wrapped himself in a blanket and not bothered with a bedroll, like Ryouma, but he slept much neater, resting easily on his side in an approximation of the recovery position, with his face turned towards the fire. His expression was relaxed, and—
Not actually asleep.
“I am not getting up to heal you,” he said, without opening his eyes. “I hope you both sleep on poison ivy.”
Kakashi glanced at Raidou, and Raidou just knew he was going to say something like ‘but that would need more healing’. Raidou sliced a hand across his own throat in the ‘don’t you dare’ gesture. Kakashi rolled his open eye. The other, scar-crossed one was closed and hidden behind a fall of silvery hair; Kakashi seemed to have the ability to keep it shut without obvious effort.
Raidou had yet to see the Sharingan.
“We’re fine, Shiranui,” he murmured. “Go back to sleep.”
Genma made a quietly disgruntled noise of doubt, and tucked his face against his arm. Raidou and Kakashi washed up in the stream, or at least made an effort to get less muddy, and settled down. Kakashi picked a spot on the other side of the fire, opposite from Ryouma, quasi-near Katsuko, surprisingly central to the group. He lay on his back, threw his arm over his face, and from what Raidou could tell, passed out in seconds.
Which made four.
Raidou settled on the opposite side of the group from Genma, making them both outer-point sentinels guarding the three younger squadmates. Katsuko’s clones patrolled in long, steady sweeps, little sunspots of chakra on the edges of Raidou’s senses. The four sparks of ANBU-tattoo chakra glinted in his inner vision, faint beacons of reassurance. All accounted for.
The wind stirred, cooling his skin where he’d missed droplets of stream-water.
He bundled down into his bedroll, sword close to hand, and let it all go until the morning. |
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