| [Feb. 8th, 2010|09:51 pm] |
Kakashi had been on ANBU's furthest training field since an hour before dawn, finding his way back to something like routine.
He was prepared today; a black bag filled with a change of clothes, several bottles of water, and four pre-made meals with Akimichi's Masuru's colour-coded powders already mixed in, sat beneath a tree. After only four days, those powders were already making a difference. Or maybe it was just the strict regimen of actual, wholesome food five times a day that was beginning to put flesh back on his bones. His shirts were starting to fit again; his pants didn't hang quite so dramatically off his hipbones. And when he'd run through the first tentative warm-up exercise, several hours back, he'd found himself moving with an ease that almost mimicked his old grace. Confidence followed in short order. A renewed faith that his body would do what he demanded of it.
Soon, he realized, as he slid seamlessly between kata. I'll be mission-ready soon.
It was a comforting thought.
Provided it was a solo mission, anyway. A return-to-basics assignment, with no complications. No teammates. Or rescues. Or any kind of healing, at least until Genma could be persuaded to go back on his rejection.
A grim smile framed Kakashi's lips as he ducked, somersaulted, and peppered a target with a handful of kunai. Trading insults with Genma couldn't lead to any kind of friendship entanglement--or anything even more complicated.
Not like Ginta. Or Ryouma.
For the moment, Kakashi shelved all thoughts of Ginta. They'd reached some sort of... something in their last conversation-turned-hug-turned-exhausted-sleep. A truce, or an impasse, or perhaps just a backwards kind of understanding. Something mutual, at least, even if it had only been a mutual acknowledgement of just how badly brain-damaged they both were.
Four days after that quiet hospital room, that desperate double-hug, Kakashi still hadn't worked out what he wanted to do about his newly-dubbed friend.
Ryouma was a different story. Kakashi knew exactly what he was going to do to Ryouma, as soon at the man dragged himself home (alive, alive, alive) from whatever half-baked mission he'd charged off on in the middle of the night. And it didn't begin with a friendly greeting.
He was halfway through this thought--and noticing that his aim was getting decidedly off--when the wind shifted, changed, and new scents swirled on the midday breeze. Sweat, sleepy thunder, sun-warmed skin; a charbroiled mix of smoke, old jutsu, and the faintest sour thread of rotten flesh. A dozen other things besides that Kakashi would have been able to recognize blindfolded in the dark, and an undertone of something else entirely.
Ryouma.
Ryouma home.
Kakashi translocated halfway between one step and the next, moving like a whiplash to the nearest living chakra source in the right direction, and almost got his head taken off by a vicious bare-handed punch. He stopped the blow with the flat of his hand, knocking it aside, and realized he had the wrong person.
A woman, for starters, judging by her scent rather than mostly absent curves. Four inches shorter than him, sweat-soaked, and staring wide-eyed -- staring for a moment, anyway, before her expression faded to laconic. She slid slowly out of a defensive crouch, eyebrows lifting.
Sorry, Kakashi opened his mouth to drawl, already gathering painful chakra for another translocation, when his teeth abruptly snapped together. He inhaled again. His visible eye narrowed and sharpened on the too-big t-shirt draping down from lean shoulders, far past narrow hips.
"That's Ryouma's," he said, flat and nothing like a question. "Why're you wearing it?" |
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