| [Jan. 23rd, 2011|09:58 pm] |
When the door to Arakaki's office slammed open, both occupants' heads snapped up. The director's hand held a black-bladed tanto that Ibiki hadn't seen him draw, and Ibiki's own hands were crooked into the first sign for a defensive jutsu. The agent that came through the door, red-faced and scruffy, paused to give the director a cool look.
"Overdramatic much?" he asked.
Arakaki put his weapon down. "Incautious much, Agent Sarutobi? And please do not smoke in my office."
Ibiki gave the new man a quiet, appraising look. Sarutobi Asuma didn't really look all that much like his father, but the voice.... If you stripped out the eerily calm strength that usually underlay the Hokage's speech and traded it for this raw-but-controlled aggression...
It looked like Asuma had just come from a week in the field if you judged by the state of his beard, but his armour was, on closer inspection, clean and relatively new.
Asuma blew a long stream of smoke through his nose. "What, like you have cancer to worry about?" His eyes ticked from Arakaki's face to Ibiki's. "You must be my T&I guy. Let's go, creepazoid."
Ibiki raised one eyebrow at the greeting, and smiled serenely when Arakaki sent a thin stream of water jetting across the room to douse Asuma's cigarette.
"Morino Ibiki," he said, offering no bow. "And it's Intel, actually. T&I is a subspecialty. Would you like to stop in the men's room and dry your face before we go?"
Asuma snorted, swiped a hand across his face, and flicked his cigarette butt onto Arakaki's desk. "Sure you don't want to wipe the brown off your nose first?"
Ibiki's expression didn't waver. Inwardly, though, he rolled his eyes. Really? Did his mission partner for this highly complex, delicate, politically-sensitive mission have to be a blue-blood with a chip on his shoulder?
"Get the hell out of my office, Agents," Arakaki said tightly. He used a pair of pencils like chopsticks to pluck the offending cigarette from his desk. "You've got your instructions."
Ibiki saluted, figertips to bare shoulder, touching the ANBU mark. "Assuming you got the same briefing I did, " he said to Asuma, "we should leave by the east gate." He didn't wait for an answer before he translocated away. |
|