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Kakashi hadn't quite made it to his bed after the last mission. He'd stripped off his armour, managed to stay upright long enough to grab a quick shower -- nothing less pleasant then waking up stuck to bloody sheets -- tended a few minor wounds, and crashed out on the floor, still dressed in his basic ninja blacks.
He woke up with a start when someone rapped on the door and concealed a groan. Sakamoto Ginta... the short blond guy from down the hall. Kakashi knew him vaguely by sight, but had never spoken to him. The only reason he could think of for the ninja to be at his door was either a new mission, or he'd gotten badly lost in the hallway.
Kakashi didn't think he was quite up to taking a new mission, his sharingan still ached from the last one, weeping tears into the cloth of his hitai-ate. The copy-nin pressed the heel of one hand to it, and tucked his head back under his arm. "Fuc' off."
Lovely, just lovely. Kakashi was evidently the kind of asshole genius he was rumored to be. Well, no time for that now. It was almost noon, they had a mission briefing in an hour. If the other ninja was coming off a bender and had a hangover, he'd appreciate the time to get a shower and a hot meal in him before they went down to sit in the basement and look at charts and maps with some Intel nerd.
"Come on, Kakashi. Time to get up. Sun's been up for hours." Ginta pondered the door, wondering how well Kakashi had it trapped. If he had it trapped at all. Well there was an easy way to find that out. He popped up a single shadow clone and set it to trying the knob. Nothing happened, which was a good sign. Didn't open, but it didn't blow up either, so it was locked and sealed, but you could touch the door itself safely.
Lockpicks were a good first step. Ginta handed his lockpick set to the clone, who started to carefully prod the latch.
That triggered something. The clone was zapped out of existence, the lockpicks flew back across the hall, and Ginta had to sidestep to avoid getting a black eye. He caught the tool set and pocketed it, then listened. Sounded like there was movement inside.
Kakashi had managed to settle back into something that was almost a wary doze, body relaxing in increments, when one of the seals on his door flared and lashed at something. His eyes snapped open again and he was on his feet before he was actually fully awake, hand automatically grabbing for a kunai that wasn't there. He stilled, shook his head, and picked up the holster from where he had dropped it on the floor, re-strapping it to his thigh. Then he went to the door, deactivating the remaining seals with an absent flick, and yanked it open.
Yep. The short blond guy from down the hall. Kakashi leaned against the doorway and gave him a thoroughly unimpressed look, "Was 'fuck off' too hard to understand, jackass? Because I'm more then happy to punctuate it with the jutsu of your choice." The threat was not lessened in any way by his slightly rumpled appearance, or the dark smudge under his one visible eye. He looked tired, yes, but he also looked damn dangerous. It was a ninja thing.
"Well, you know any good sex jutsu?" Ginta asked with a wink. "That could work. It'd go thematically with the whole 'fuck' aspect of 'fuck off', too." He grinned and bounced on the balls of his feet, giving Kakashi the once over. He was tall, looked like he'd slept in his clothes, and even though he was at home he had his mask on.
Yep, probably hung over.
"Anyway, you're pronouncing it wrong. It's jackASS, genius."
Some days it just wasn't worth getting out of bed. Or up off the floor depending on how your night had gone. Kakashi let just a bit of his killing intent -- generally cranked up to a level that made people deeply uncomfortable -- slip through his guard. It said much more emphatically what he thought of the bubbly little ninja more then words could. That, and the narrowed eye, gave a fairly good indication of his current mood, which registered somewhere around 'piss off and die in a gutter, on fire for preference'.
"Good to know," he said, with just an edge of ice water in his voice, "Now run along and pester someone else," a beat, "jackass."
He kept the pronunciation the same, but added a whole lot of meaningful glare on top. Then he closed the door.
"I'd love to," Ginta told the closed door. He shivered, just a little. He'd faced down opponents who wanted to kill him, even faced down a few colleagues who did. But none seemed quite so menacing as that ice bastard had been. He should just go. Let Kakashi find out about the mission when they sent someone to fetch him to the briefing. On the other hand, going now would be admitting defeat. Which Ginta simply did not do. Ever.
Well okay, maybe once.
But not here, and not to that asshole.
He pounded on the door. "Listen up, Genius. I'd like nothing better than to let you look like a totally hung over idiot at our mission briefing. But I'm a nice guy, so I thought I'd give you a head's up about it. It's at 1300."
Mission. Go figure. Kakashi sighed silently and slipped a hand under his hitai-ate to rub at his eye. Mission with short-loud, even more fun. Alright, one more mission probably wouldn't finish him. He was a little tapped, but not too badly. Provided it wasn't a suicide run he might even be home again before the week was up.
Kakashi slipped his armour on quickly and efficiently, checked his weapons, tags, basic supplies. Running short on soldier pills, he'd have to re-stock soon. Then he pulled his mask down, pushed his hitai-ate up, and went to the sink to splash some water on his face, trying to wash the gritty tired feeling from his eyes. He was marginally successful. Then he brushed his teeth.
Food might be a good idea at some point, but his stomach felt just a little queasy. Kakashi tugged his mask back up, slipped his hitai-ate back down, strapped on his standard issue ANBU ninjaken, picked up his dog mask and hung it off his hip, and then paused to give everything a last check.
Damn, his plant was dead.
He sighed once again and pulled open the door.
Ginta was still standing in the hallway looking impatient, mission scroll dangling from one hand. Kakashi stole it neatly as he walked by, flicked the seals back on his door with a twist of chakra, and headed for the elevator. "Keep up, jackass."
"You know, I can totally see why there was such a huge lineup of people to take missions with you," Genta said, falling in step beside his taller comrade. "And you obviously don't listen to people when they're talking to you. The briefing's at 1300. It's now..." He consulted a pocket watch. "1208. So unless you're taking me out to lunch, you could have just said you'd meet me there."
He stepped in front of Kakashi, giving him a quiet, appraising look. "Go get yourself some coffee and take one of these." Ginta held out a bottle of a popular hangover remedy. "I'm going to go gear up."
He stepped aside, to head back towards his own apartment. "Oh and one more thing. You're still pronouncing it wrong. It's 'jackASS'." He twitched his hips as he said it. Heh. Made you look, Kakashi.
Kakashi gave the other ANBU a remarkably blank look, and directed an even blanker look at the bottle he'd been handed. Hangover--? He looked up just in time to catch the man do a little shimmy.
...
Gods. This mission was going to be a pain.
"Just because you have an alcohol problem, jackass--" same inflection, "--doesn't mean the rest of us do." Kakashi winged the bottle at the back of Ginta's head and stepped into the elevator. Coffee was a good idea, and perhaps a warm up spar to wake himself up a little. Maybe visit Obito.
Yeah, he needed to visit Obito. It had been hard to find the time lately. He'd do that and jog up to the monument for the work out. Kakashi leaned against the wall of the elevator, opened the scroll and tried not to feel tired. One more mission, then he could take a break.
Ginta caught the bottle and repocketed it. Ungrateful bastard. Well, it was just a mission, right? He hoped Kakashi was a little less morose once he'd woken up properly, or this was going to be a sucktastic mission. Playing bait was always so fucking rewarding. You got your ass handed to you, and then your partner jumped in and got to be all saviour-like. Not like Kakashi needed his head swelled any bigger. Genius-types were always a pain in the ass.
Of course Ginta should know. He'd been called so himself, and it does, after all, take one to know one.
He headed back to his apartment, picked up his kodachi, and sat crosslegged on the floor, with the television playing the day's news while he sharpened his blade.
Huh, interesting. Looked like a Daimyou's daughter had been caught in a compromising position. Photographs and everything. Ginta grinned. He'd helped secure the photographs himself, only a week ago. Funny that the photographer had turned up missing, the news reader said.
Yep. Funny, funny world.
The mission briefing was informative and dull, just like all meetings with Intel were. Well, except for the ones where they wanted to know about why your mission had gone up in flames. Those were excruciating and you usually needed a stiff drink afterwards, if for no other reason than to toast the memory of whomever had died on it.
Kakashi seemed more alert, if no less grumpy. Great. A mission with a sourpuss was always such a joy. Sometimes Ginta really wished he could bring headphones along and listed to music. Alas, the days of missions that were utter cakewalks were long gone. He hadn't had a mission where listening to music was an option since before the Fox.
It was getting on towards sunset by the time he and Kakashi actually set out on the trail of their missing nin. Intel had said he'd been tracked as far as Ichinohe in Rain Country. So that meant crossing borders into potentially hostile territory. Rain was still a kind of lawless place, with barely normalized relations with the rest of the shinobi world. But they didn't have to worry about that just yet. First they had to cross several hundred kilometers of cold, wintry Fire country. And ascend to the high plateau that marked the border with Rain.
Elevation. In winter. Ginta was glad he'd remembered to stop at the quartermaster's and get one of those little crinkly thermal blankets. Not, he hoped, that they'd be camping out. After all, there were plenty of inns along the way, and the guy they were after was known to have been staying in a series of run-down little lodging houses as he moved cross-country.
Kakashi was one soldier pill less by the time they reached the primary target inn sometime just past 0400. It was the first of a number Intel had informed them about, and the last known place Kawai had surfaced. It was in a remote location, off the beaten track, and far away from any known haunts of missing nin or rogue shinobi. A good place for a man on the run to hide.
They scoped the building out first, beginning with a wide sweep around it, checking for traps, jutsu, and trail markers. Anything to indicate they might be walking into an ambush. An hours' search yielded scarred ground that spoke of old battle sites, but nothing recent enough to raise an alert. Positive start.
Kakashi, at least, was frozen by the time they felt comfortable actually approaching the inn, and a glance at Ginta suggested the man was in similar condition. Short-loud made a passable travelling companion at least, flipping straight into a solid mission mode as soon as they had left Konoha. Kakashi had relaxed slightly, relieved he wasn't going to have to put up with hip wriggles and gods know what else in the course of the mission. The fact that the howling wind made conversation almost impossible helped, it was hard to be flippant with trail sign.
Though by the time they reached the inn Kakashi didn't really give a damn either way. Ginta could have pranced around naked and challenged every shinobi in the district and he still would have wanted to just lie down and sleep.
Not a good head-space for a mission-bound ANBU to be in.
It was the copy-ninja that broke the silence first, when they trudged under the eaves of the building, finally shielded from the wind. "You think they have coffee here?" It was a mutter, muffled by both of his masks and the thick woollen scarf layered over the top. It was also concise, glib, and entirely hopeful. They needed to post a changing guard, one shinobi watching while the other slept, Kakashi would have to stay awake. To see without blurred vision would also be nice, though that might have been the rain.
"Of course they have coffee, genius," Ginta answered, rolling his eyes. He pushed back his mask and hooked the grinning monkey face to his belt, then gave Kakashi a slow look. "We need to ditch the spook gear. Don't want news there's ANBU in town getting back to our guy before we get to him." When Kakashi didn't react right away, Ginta raised his hands in the hare seal and effected a henge over the both of them. Two perfectly ordinary-looking patent medicine peddlers and their cases of wares stood where a pair of shinobi with swords on their backs had stood before.
"Happy? Let's go inside before we freeze our balls off."
"I'm ecstatic," muttered Kakashi, taking his dog mask off and pushing his hitai-ate up for a moment to check the henge. Seemed solid. "This is how I enjoy spending my nights. Frostbite is my very special friend." He lowered the hitai-ate and regarded the door once more. "Let's hope the owner's a light sleeper." He raised a fist and pounded the wood, putting an edge of chakra in to get a nice loud boom.
"Oi! Frozen people out here needing a room!" He modulated his accent, switching from a drawl to a faster clip, something closer to Rain-dialect. "Up and at 'em!"
The innkeeper proved to be a dyspeptic looking man who was, thanks to the nearness of dawn, already awake, preparing for the day to come. He showed the weary travelers to a room, brought them hot tea and rice, and left them to their own devices. Ginta promised him that once he'd recovered a bit, he'd come down with some marvelous liniment for the old man's rheumatism.
After they were alone, Ginta set seals on the doors while Kakashi tossed the room for anything suspicious, then set seals ion the windows as well. Once they were absolutely sure they were unobserved, Ginta dropped the illusion.
"You look like hell," he told Kakashi frankly. "I'll take first watch. I still feel pretty good. Probably go down and see what I can find out once people are up and moving. Maybe someone here saw our guy."
Kakashi would have argued, but the bed was right there and he was fairly certain he could make it without hitting the floor first. He still directed a look at Ginta that suggested the man should seriously look into that ditch option, preferably with added fire. Then he flipped him off for a bit of added emphasis, glanced over the seals once more and fell onto the bed without removing a stitch of clothing.
"Wake me up... in six," he managed." An' don't do... anything... dumb, jackass," The copy-nin slipped straight into an exhausted sleep, too tired to dream.
It was nearly four in the afternoon before Ginta came back from his prowling and woke Kakashi. He let himself in the room, sat down crosslegged next to the bed, and looked the sleeping ninja in the face. He almost looked relaxed when he was asleep, and he hadn't seemed to move enough to even slightly disturb the covers. Poor guy must have been just whipped. But now the day was wearing on and Ginta was starting to feel the siren song of a nap calling. "Hey, genius boy, wake up," he whispered, and blew a stream of air at Kakashi's face, ruffling his hair.
Kakashi flinched, yanked out of black nothingness to warm breath on his face. He pulled back and struck out automatically, hitting nothing. Then he opened an eye. Ginta. Right. Go figure. The copy-nin regarded the blond ANBU seated in front of him with a certain amount of puzzlement for a moment, swiftly colouring to annoyance as a glance at his internal clock suggested it had been much longer then six hours. He pushed himself up and yawned, dragging a hand through his -- considerably messier -- hair. "You lose your watch, jackass?"
He felt better for the long sleep though, little aches and pains faded somewhat. He felt better still when he twisted, popping his spine with a series of juicy sounding cracks. Kakashi shivered once and turned his attention back to Ginta, noting the tired cast of the man's face. Idiot. Should've woken him up earlier. "Find anything out at least?"
"We lucked out. Our guy Kawai? He's here. In room 512. Innkeeper said he got sick or something and has been holed up here a couple of days." Ginta grinned, very pleased with himself. "I totally told him we knew he was sick, and that's why we were looking for him. Because he'd left our master without finishing his course of treatment, but we were here to set him to rights." He laughed delightedly and pulled out a thick gold coin, which he tossed in the air and caught over and over.
"And? Check this out!" He tossed the coin to Kakashi. "I sold five people, including the innkeeper, enough to let us totally live out this mission in style. Sold 'em burn cream, those useless little orange vitamin pills, and in one case a tube of lube." Ginta cackled like a loon, then yawned.
"Anyway, now I'm wiped. You ready to stand watch now you've had your beauty sleep? I figure we can do this hit in the morning, be back in Konoha in time to go out dancing on Saturday."
Kakashi caught the coin with a neat flip of his wrist and turned it over thoughtfully. "You realise," he said slowly, "If you get burned on this mission, I am going to laugh and laugh and laugh." Still, it was nice to have a bonus. "Plan sounds good if you scratch the dancing," he added, standing with another stretch and crackle of bones. Oof, stiff. One of the flaws of lying relatively motionless for several hours.
And he wanted a bath, dammit. Second night of sleeping in the same clothes that had now been through two missions just didn't add up to a good smell.
It would have to wait. Kakashi called up his own henge, matching it to the one Genta had made previously, picked up his sword and headed for the door. "Sleep sweet, jackass" he called dryly, as he left.
Kakashi was unsurprised to return to their room in the early hours of the morning and find Ginta still asleep. The man slept like a child, curled up with his hands balled next to his face. Quick, light breaths. Kakashi debated dropping a water jutsu on his head for a moment, but settled for tapping him once on the shoulder instead. He woke with a jerk and a flinch, much as Kakashi had.
"Nothing new," mumbled the copy-nin, and flopped down on the bed without waiting for him to vacate it. "Give me a couple hours, m'kay? Be all ready to watch your back then."
These double missions were a bitch.
Ginta got up, showered and dressed. He liked these missions where there was indoor plumbing. It was really, really nice. Checked the target, who was still abed at 0700. That was true to form, according to the intel they had. He waited for the man to emerge at 0800 and head down to breakfast, and set a clone to watch. At 0810 Ginta was back in the room with Kakashi, holding two cups of coffee and a paper bag full of fresh danishes.
"Here, coffee. Food," he said and dug out one of the pastries for himself, then tossed the sack to Kakashi. He bit into the danish and held it in his mouth while he offered one of the two paper cups of coffee to his partner. When Kakashi relieved him of his burden, he took the pastry back in hand, chewed thoughtfully, then sipped coffee and pulled out a watch.
"He's at breakfast now. He'll go for his morning dump in another fifteen minutes or so. I've got a clone posing as a toilet attendant to let us know when that happens. I figure we can catch him in his room when he goes back after that. He'll be off his guard and easy to pin down without too many witnesses."
Kakashi nodded and turned his back to eat quickly, feeling more human with some coffee and warm food inside of him. He'd slept a little longer then he'd intended, missing his opportunity to grab a shower again. He settled for stepping into the bathroom and giving himself a quick splash with warm-ish water from the sink. It ranked better then the facilities he'd had on a number of past missions, so he didn't complain.
He walked out of the bathroom dragging his wet hair back. "You have a plan?"
Presumably the standard bait trap; distraction and misdirection. This mission was going surprisingly well so far, Kakashi felt a faint prickle of tension curl in his stomach. It was a feeling he always associated with 'too good to be true'. It put him on his guard.
"You're the genius, right? I'm just the bait." Ginta grinned and slurped his coffee with obvious relish. There was something downright civilized about getting to have breakfast before an assassination. "I figured we'd lie in wait in his room. I'll put up a genjutsu that shifts the location of windows and doors once he's in. It's subtle, but you can see through shit like that with your Sharingan, right? So it won't hurt you." He assumed Kakashi would have to have the Sharingan exposed in order to copy the jutsu. Prior work with a few Uchiha had taught him that no matter how impressive his genjutsu were, they could with varying degrees of effort, see right through them.
"Anyway," he continued. "Then me and a few clone buddies will make to draw him out. Some kind of thing. You think we need a pretext, or can I just be a badass ninja who wants a piece of him?"
You're the bait," Kakashi echoed with a concealed flicker grin, waking up to the prospect of finally getting a little action. "Bait him however you like. Just make sure he shows his jutsu." He ran a final check over his gear, testing weapons, armour, the seals on each of his scrolls. You never knew what you might need, and it was always the one thing you forgot to check that would let you down. He was quick but thorough.
"And yeah, your genjutsu shouldn't be a problem." As long as he kept on his toes, it was easy to get thrown if you didn't watch out. Fortunately, Kakashi had excellent clarity of vision, even if it was a little rose-tinted.
He smiled and let it show, adrenaline starting to course through his system, heart rate jacking up. Tired or not, this job was a kick.
Ginta grinned back. It was awesome seeing Kakashi finally coming to life and showing a little fire. He looked downright excited about the prospect of getting in there and doing their work. Some ninja were like that, really only came alive when the adrenaline was running high. Ginta wasn't exactly immune to the effect himself. And you really couldn't get promoted as far as jounin, let alone join ANBU, without being something of an adrenaline junkie.
He checked his own weapons and armor, tightening straps here, adjusting the catch on his kodachi so it would come easily to hand, counting senbon and shuriken in the holster strapped to his left thigh. Inventorying bandages and medical supplies in his pouch. Just in case. When he was satisfied everything was where it was supposed to be, he picked up the monkey mask and hid his face.
"So for mechanics," he asked Kakashi, getting ready to move to the door, "do you need to see him make the handseals and everything, or just the execution of the jutsu?"
Mask was always the last thing. Kakashi unhooked the dog mask from his hip and regarded it for a moment, brushing a thumb over the broad blue slashes of paint. The expression was fierce and alert, and, for the first time on this mission, Kakashi's own expression matched it, visible eye bright and focused. "I can figure it out from just the execution, but it'd take me a while." Weeks. "If I can get the seals that makes everything a whole lot easier."
He lifted the mask to his face and paused before hooking a thumb under the edge of his hitai-ate and pushing it up. The world swirled into monochrome, chakra painted as blue as his mask. Kakashi looked at Ginta with both eyes for the first time and gave the man a truly scary smile. Then he slid the hound on, something like the edge of a growl threading through his voice. "But don't get yourself killed setting him up for seals, okay, jackass?"
Something shifted in his posture, a new set to his shoulders, a new tension in his muscles. Sharingan Kakashi's hand wrapped around the hilt of his ninjaken as he stood, ready to finish the hunt.
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