| Waiting for Silent Sunrise [Asuma, Ibiki, Kakashi, Ginta] |
[Jan. 28th, 2012|04:12 pm] |
[Takes place immediately following Somewhere a Clock is Ticking]
The medic was about as cheerful as a sack of wet mice, but at least she was good at her job—and she’d divested the landscape of Ibiki, which was no bad thing.
Asuma held his half-lidded trance, humming soft and tuneless in the back of his throat as he pushed heat into Hatake and Ginta, sweat prickling at his temples and down his spine. Ibiki’s fire was bright and healthy, making the shadows dance, another good source of warmth.
“Cracked skull,” Saiyuri muttered to herself, in the same low way she’d said broken orbital socket; broken nose for Ginta. Her glowing hands were still wrapped around Kakashi’s head, doing who-knew-what to whatever piece of damage was lurking under all that blood-matted hair.
“Is his brain bleeding?” Asuma asked quietly, because that was a career-ender right there, if it didn’t snuff Hatake’s life out completely.
She shushed him.
Asuma bit his tongue.
A little snow drifted down outside, hissing as it landed in the fire, but the sky was still clear and star-spangled, lit up silver by a sickle moon. Ginta’s breathing rasped, soft but even. Pakkun crawled into Asuma’s lap, banished from his master with a stern word and a sharp glare. Asuma rumpled his ears with a free hand, sparing a twist of heat for the little dog.
( And waited. ) |
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| Somewhere a Clock Is Ticking [Asuma, Ibiki, Kakashi, Ginta] |
[Dec. 9th, 2011|02:02 am] |
[Takes place May 3, immediately following Tiny Little Fractures and approximately six hours following All Fall Down]
As mission partners went, Morino Ibiki ranked somewhere between creepy and bitchy, but at least he didn’t get seasick. The boat ride from Kuroihama to Hima was long, cold, and mostly boring. Asuma used the time to catch up on sleep in the hold, wedging himself between a netted stack of boxes and a dozen oiled canvas bags filled with sheepskins.
Ibiki stayed up on deck, brooding against the railing.
At least, it had looked like brooding. Maybe he’d been going over his grocery list.
When Asuma dragged himself yawning back to the deck, hours later, and forced a cigarette to light against the wind, the weather was icy. Unseasonably so for freakin’ May, even as far north as Lightning Country.
( He found Ibiki still brooding, but on the opposite side. ) |
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| All Fall Down [Ginta, Kakashi] |
[Nov. 14th, 2011|12:57 am] |
[Takes place May 3, immediately following Off the Edge of the Map]
Half an hour passed before the shivering set in, while Ginta waited for Kakashi to do anything other than breathe. Cold from the floor, cold from shock, cold from unstemmed bleeding. The oppressive darkness turned hazy and gray, reducing Ginta’s world to Kakashi, unmoving but warm in his arms, and the icy dizziness trembling up from within. Baiji whined a worried sound when Ginta swayed, and tucked himself up close, sheltering both ninja against a broad, rough side.
A few chunks of ruined masonry fell, a groan rattled through the rubble, but their false cave held its shape.
Warmth.
The mastiff turned his massive head and licked at the blood on Ginta’s chin with another anxious whine.
From somewhere deep within, resolve reasserted itself. He could sit here and bleed to death, or he could deal. No. There wasn’t a choice. He would deal.
( He eased one arm away from Kakashi and found a second roll of bandage ) |
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| Off the Edge of the Map [Kakashi and Ginta] |
[Feb. 9th, 2011|08:25 pm] |
[Follows immediately afterwards Tiny Little Fractures, on May 3rd.]
It had been more than three hours.
Kakashi blinked awake and found himself wrapped like ivy around Ginta, one arm thrown across a lean chest, forehead pressed hard against an ANBU tattoo. Every breath drew in a throatful of hard-sleeping scent: sweat and lead and charred flowers.
Slowly, Kakashi lifted his head.
Ginta was turned slightly towards him, laid out in an oddly contained sprawl. One leg kicked out, one hand curled loosely around Kakashi’s wrist. Every soft exhale clouded visibly in the cold air.
Without moving, Kakashi slid his gaze over to the tent flaps. Pakkun was curled up there, close to their feet, ears cocked towards the outside world. His eyes were closed. Outside the tent, dawn had given way to early morning, bright and grey and cold.
( It had been six hours at least, probably closer to eight, and Kakashi had spent it asleep in the arms of the wrong man. ) |
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| Off the Reservation [Ginta, Arakaki, Kakashi] |
[Jan. 1st, 2011|09:54 am] |
[Takes place May 3, approximately a month following All My Regrets Are Nothing New, three weeks weeks following This Time It's Different and two weeks following Hair of the Dog.]
Ginta was concerned. In fact, more than concerned. In fact, if you considered the pace at which he was limping down the hall, he was downright alarmed. He'd been home in his own apartment for three weeks, and in all that time he'd seen no sign whatsoever of Ryouma or Kakashi. Which, well, that was their business and he was staying out of it from now on, but they were his friends, dammit, whether or not either one of them thought so. So he'd been keeping an eye out for them, and not just because he knew Kakashi was still recovering and Ryouma was playing a dangerous game with chakra pill abuse.
The thing was, both apartment doors stayed locked, and both men were listed as "on mission." And not with one another. But there was at least a little flicker in Kakashi's status: he'd be "on mission" and then "in debriefing" and then "available" for half a day, before "on mission" went back up by his name on the status board. Ryouma was just continuously on mission, but the date he was expected back had been changed, Ginta was sure, a couple of times, before it was obliterated with a heavy black censor bar and replaced with "classified."
When he analyzed the other missions and who was assigned to them, though, it painted a disturbing picture. Because in amongst the various assignments that composed ANBU's mission load, there was a flavor of urgency, and a suspicious pattern of team make-up, with non-ANBU Inuzuka and Aburame trackers assigned on teams with field medics and heavy muscle, over and over, in little four and five day bursts. It looked like — disturbingly like — a search and rescue operation. And Ryouma was the only agent on that board who was neither deep cover Intel nor S-ranked jounin whose return date was classified.
It was when, on a bright early May morning, Ginta checked and found Ryouma's status itself had been changed from "on mission" to "classified", that he'd really started to worry. Then he'd gone digging. He had time on his hands, with nothing to do but work on regaining his strength and stamina now that the cast was finally off his leg, and there was only so much training he could do in a day before it started to hurt enough he wanted to reach for a bottle of pills. So he had both the time and a lot of connections — in Intel, in the mission assignment office, in documents and forgeries, in mission support services — that he used to put together a nightmare puzzle.
Ryouma was missing, had been missing since the fifteenth of April, and there was no sign of him.
( Ginta went with a sick heart to do what he should have done three weeks ago ) |
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| Speak My Language [Ginta & Hiro] |
[Aug. 15th, 2010|04:31 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | ginta, hiro | ] |
| [ | Current Mood |
| |  discontent | ] |
Takes place April 12, one week following Hiro and Ginta's last meeting in The Little Things Give You Away, six days following Ginta's confrontation with his grandmother and Never What I Expected, and three days following his intervention with Ryouma in This Time Is Different
It had taken a few days following that last surgery, but Ginta had finally been allowed home, with crutches and a heavy cast, and an arsenal of pill bottles that came with detailed instructions about what and how much he should eat (and not eat) with them, which pills could or couldn't be taken within three hours of which other pills, and as complicated a schedule for meals, medications, exercise, and rest as any mission plan.
At a quarter to eleven in the morning, after a few rounds of pushups and some experimental chakra-mediated handstands, he was busy resting.
( In theory. ) |
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| Hair of the Dog [Kuromaru, Ginta] |
[May. 3rd, 2010|10:03 am] |
[Takes place one week after Tsume and Asuma get out of the hospital inFeuds and Families, which followed the pirate thread, and six days after Ginta was in This Time Is Different, with Ryouma.]
Kuromaru stood on the streets of Konoha, holding his new hands out in the streetlamp just to see them turn a pale gold. As a canine, he had limited color vision, but in his human form everything was brighter. Things tasted different, too. He knew. He'd tested a lot of foods in both forms.
The night air felt funny on his skin, clad in mesh rather than fur. He knew he should probably put on a coat, but it was a nice feeling. Different. Different was fun, sometimes.
Putting his lips together so he could whistle, he practiced as he headed down the street, sliding through clusters of people out after dark, watching as they made a path for him.
Tsume hadn't wanted to come with him tonight, but that was okay. She'd at least turned him human, so he could play in all the restaurants without getting in trouble. ( And he'd remembered his dogtags, so he had ID. ) |
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| Never What I Expected [Chihiro, Ginta] |
[Feb. 8th, 2010|01:29 pm] |
Takes place April 6th, immediately following Meant to Live
Chihiro gave her grandson three hours. Three hours to talk to Sakumo's son, calm himself down, and get over his unspeakable rudeness. She used her three hours for a social call on an old friend, who agreed completely with Chihiro that Ginta had been far out of line, but he was Gousuke's grandson, what could you do? At least he was recovering. But after all the worry he'd put Chihiro through...
The matter of Ginta's choice of friends also came up, though not, thank heavens, his deviance. Still, Sakumo's son all grown up, imagine that. How far had that particular apple landed from the tree?
She went by her kimono maker's shop, and looked through the bolts of summer silk that had just arrived, choosing a sedate blue with a subtle pattern of koi at the bottom for herself. In memory of Gousuke, of course. For her daughter she picked something a little more vibrant, grass green with darting purple dragonflies. Yukari would like it, and it would make a nice gift. And she would give last summer's mauve kimono with the geometric pattern to her maid Suki. Suki had liked that one, she remembered, especially with the dark green obi. So the dark green obi with it. Yes.
By the time she had finished, she judged that Ginta had had more than enough time to visit with Sakumo's son, especially so soon after surgery. He should be resting not confronting his... What was Kakashi? An ex-lover, or at the very least a boy that Ginta had been pining over. Her lips twisted at the thought as if she tasted something sour.
( It was time, she told herself, that Ginta stopped this nonsense. ) |
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| This Time Is Different [Ryouma, Ginta] |
[Jan. 31st, 2010|12:29 am] |
[[Takes place the morning of April 9, four days after All My Regets Are Nothing New, three days after Meant To Live, and a day and a half after Let's Not Speak of This Again.]]
The soldier pills Ryouma had taken on the long run home hadn't quite worn off when Katsuko left him in front of the hospital doors, but the corners of his vision were beginning to haze with a purple blur. He pushed his mask back and palmed another soldier pill stealthily, behind the potted plant in the foyer. The purple haze didn't go away, but the dying buzz in his veins quickened again. He smiled sunnily at the receptionist. "Morning! Got a medic free?"
The receptionist didn't smile back. Her eyes skidded from his bandaged shoulder to the glossy wetness on his hip and upper arm where the cuts had broken open and bled again, and back to the livid bruises purpling his bared arms. Her lips firmed when she met his eyes. Probably bloodshot, he guessed. At least his nose wasn't bleeding yet. Well, that was what medics were for.
Of course the medic, when he arrived, wasn't happy about it. Eight soldier pills in twenty-four hours was a hell of a stupid move, and the medic wasted no time saying so. Ryouma, who'd heard the same lecture half a dozen times before, smiled and nodded and fell half-asleep on the table. He woke with a yelp when the medic seared a budding infection out of his hip and again when the bandages peeled off his oozing shoulder. But the man's hands were steady and cool as he sank healing chakra deep into the burnt wreck Masahiko's lightning jutsu had left, and Ryouma was used to lectures.
( The IVs of saline and clotting factor helped a little; the new bottle of pain-killers helped a lot more. ) |
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| Meant to Live [Kakashi & Ginta] |
[Jan. 22nd, 2010|02:36 am] |
Takes place April 6, the day after All My Regrets Are Nothing New and The Little Things Give You Away.
Kakashi woke at 6AM when a nurse put her hand on his shoulder. He didn't attack her, or flinch, or do anything much beyond crack his jaw in a yawn and bury his face deeper in the pillow. He'd been in Konoha's hospital enough times--and long enough this time--for the smell to crawl inside his skull and program his reflexes accordingly.
"Sorry, Hatake-san," the nurse whispered. "I just need to check your vitals and get some blood."
"Mmm," Kakashi agreed. He shrugged one arm free of the sheet and laid it out for her, eye still closed. He was still wearing Ryouma's hoodie; something he realized only when she had to push the sleeve up past his elbow to get the needle in.
( Maybe that explained why he'd dreamed of Ryouma. ) |
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| The Little Things Give You Away [Ginta, Hiro] |
[Oct. 20th, 2009|10:05 am] |
[Takes place the evening of April 5, the same day as Welcome to My Morning, three days after Just Enough Rope]
By sundown Ginta was awake and really wished he wasn't. He'd woken in his own bed shortly after noon, gotten an update from the nurses -- Kakashi was fine, sleeping, but no longer in a coma -- and crashed back out again. Ryouma was still in there with Kakashi. Keeping an eye on him. Keeping the door closed. And as much as Ginta'd told himself a hundred times in the last few days alone, that he was letting it go...
He couldn't let it go.
Couldn't let go of the way Kakashi had clung to him that morning. Or the way he'd been caught painfully in the middle when Ryouma had returned to the room. Kakashi had wanted proof Ginta was alive--he'd gotten that. And then Kakashi'd wanted proof he himself was alive, and the only one he wanted that proof from was Ryouma.
Grandmother hadn't been by and wasn't expected until tomorrow. Ginta's mother was absent as well, busy with her own life. Now that Ginta was out of danger there was no further need to sit by his bedside. And he was, he told himself, just as glad she was staying away. It was harder to endure an hour of his mother's sighs and glances at her watch and weak attempts at conversation, than it was to sit in silence, reading the film magazine she'd left behind, and try not to notice the closed door across the hall.
( That's what he told himself. ) |
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| Welcome to My Morning [Ginta, Ryouma, Kakashi] |
[Aug. 29th, 2009|02:08 pm] |
[Takes place late morning on April 5th, almost a week after All We Know is Distance.]
A week in the hospital was enough to drive even the calmest man to extreme measures. Or at least that was Ginta's thinking. When they finally allowed him up from his bed, five days in, he immediately started making boredom contingency plans. Many of them, in fact most of them, involved finagling himself into a wheelchair and over to Kakashi's room with a deck of cards and a couple of cans of apple juice, to help Ryouma keep watch.
Shiratori had debriefed him and sworn that the docs said Kakashi was mending. The nurses and even his own doctor had said the same thing. Ryouma had gotten the same story, evidently. Chakra exhaustion and a soldier pill overdose were serious conditions, but they were known quantities. Kakashi would be in an uncomplicated coma for several days, and then he'd wake up. It had happened before, it would probably happen again. And it was happening now.
Patience, they said. Ironic that patient and patience were such similar words. Even his grandmother could get nothing more from the doctors. And, she'd told Ginta, she believed them. Of course Ginta believed them, too, at an intellectual level. Kakashi's vitals were stable, and his chakra readings were improving daily. Believing didn't make the wait any easier.
( On the seventh day home, the fifth of April, at a little after ten in the morning, Ginta talked his nurse into helping him get set up in the wheelchair again. ) |
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| All We Know Is Distance [Ryouma and Ginta] |
[Jun. 15th, 2009|10:37 pm] |
The message was waiting when Ryouma came home, pleasantly tired and only slightly splattered with drying black slime and blood that wasn't his. He shoved back his ram-faced mask and leaned hipshot against the mission desk, grinning cheerfully down at Reiko. "Guess who didn't even get scratched this time, eh? You can put 'COMPLETE VICTORY' in that little box up at the top. It was glorious. They didn't even--"
"Ryouma-kun," Reiko said very quietly, "you need to go to the hospital."
He blinked down at her. "Shuuhei isn't colicky anymore, is he? I know it's awful hard stayin' up all night with a crying baby, but I didn't think you could go deaf. None of this blood's mine, all right?"
( Reiko pulled a sticky-note off his file folder and held it out. ) |
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| Lullaby for a Stormy Night [Ginta] |
[Jun. 12th, 2009|12:00 am] |
[Takes place approximately 4:00 AM on March 30th, immediately after Death and All His Friends]
The Sakamoto estate was quiet and dark. A nightingale sang in the garden, unheeded by all but the household cats. Suki, the head maid, was the one to answer the knock at the door, the one to usher the grey-uniformed man into the receiving room. The one to rouse Sakamoto Chihiro.
"I'm so sorry to wake you, Chihiro-sama," she whispered. She held a lantern for her mistress, who opened her eyes and sat stiffly up, clutching a rich, peach-colored silk duvet to her chest. "There is a man. Shiratori-san, from ANBU..." Suki looked away. "I've given him tea, mistress, and told him I would wake you."
"Shiratori-san," Chihiro echoed. It had been a long time since she'd been wakened in the darkest hours by this man. Not since Gousuke had been alive, and then the man had always been here to summon her husband, not her.
( There was only one possible reason he was here now. ) |
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| Death and All His Friends |
[Jun. 9th, 2009|04:26 pm] |
[Set immediately after Fall to the Ground]
They had almost fifteen minutes' warning that there were two critically injured shinobi on the way in. Fifteen minutes, plus the ninja's registration numbers, so there was already blood typed and crossed and ready to hand. O-pos for one, B-pos for the other, eight units of each, almost enough to replace every red cell in their bodies. They had time to send for a chakra specialist, because the medics radioed in that one of the casualties had been poisoned with chakra pills. Technically an overdose, not a poisoning. And technically not even an overdose, so much as overuse. Massive overuse, combined with some kind of brutally draining jutsu.
They had time to bring in crash carts and chakra monitors. Time to order up pre-made seals for chakra support, sterilization of wounds, tissue repair. Time to set up the trauma room to receive two criticals, to assemble doctors and nurses and technicians. Time, even, for a grim faced agent from ANBU's mission control to arrive and set himself up in the corner of the room with recording devices.
Fifteen minutes after the call came in from the north gate, non-critical patients had been moved to side corridors, the man having a heart attack sent to ICU, the kid with asthma shunted off to pediatrics. There was a quiet anticipation, a nervousness underscored by the hum of fluorescent lights.
( Sixteen minutes after the call came in, the silence broke in carefully choreographed chaos. ) |
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| Fall to the Ground [Ginta & Kakashi] |
[Jun. 7th, 2009|09:55 pm] |
[set roughly six hours following Hide from the Sound]
Sunlight slanted in through the window, golden and warm. Hot, in fact. Ginta floundered awake, drenched in sweat and so hot he could feel the air in every breath try to catch fire in his chest. For a moment he was back in that burning factory, with orange flames licking at his skin and chemical smoke searing his lungs. He choked and coughed, tensing up with a gasp, and finally broke the surface of consciousness.
Hot. Searingly hot. Burns pulled on his shoulders, and his right leg was a maddening blaze of crushed bone. But it was the left that had his attention now, a pounding inferno that kept time with his pulse, racing in waves from the deep furrow an arrow had dug. He reached gingerly under the blankets to brush the edge of a damp bandage, and felt bile surge in his throat before he quite realized it was pain that caused it.
His own breath rasped in his ears, purple-black blotted his vision. When it cleared, he lay still for several long minutes, trying to gather the strength to move. Hot. So hot. If only there were a breeze, but the air was stagnant, as if it were midsummer. He remembered missions to Suna, baking in the oven-like desert air. His tongue felt thick and dry in his mouth, and his hands swollen and clumsy. Every joint and muscle sapped by the heat.
( Kakashi was there next to him still, asleep, or maybe dead. ) |
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| Hide from the Sound [Ginta & Kakashi] |
[Jun. 5th, 2009|12:36 am] |
[Immediately follows Can't See the Light]
The safe house creaked and swayed with the wind. Or maybe the sensation of movement was just a leftover from an overtaxed vestibular system, from pain meds and exhaustion. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered. Ginta rasped orders at Kakashi's clone--orders it probably didn't need--it would have seen to Kakashi anyway. It carefully carried Kakashi to a second camp bed, stripped him down, stitched and bandaged his bloodied hip, spread sweet-smelling balm across Kakashi's burned shoulders, and bandaged them too.
It was the same balm it had used on Ginta, from the same stash of medical supplies. It made their high-placed hideaway smell like summer grass, new tatami mats, a soft breeze.
"Lights," Ginta whispered, as the last of the twilight faded. The clone, whether on its own initiative or in response to Ginta's command, found a pair of oil lamps. It lit them both, setting one next to Ginta's bed, carrying the other back to Kakashi's prone form. After a moment it turned up the wick, casting strong shadows. Ginta glanced at the window and hoped the security seals concealing them were reactivated. It was how they were designed, he remembered, a sort of dead-man's switch--it took chakra to reveal a safe house, and only then if you knew the revealing jutsu. With no chakra applied, the native state was concealment.
( In the stronger light he could see more injuries. ) |
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| Can't See the Light. [Kakashi & Ginta] |
[Jun. 3rd, 2009|11:42 pm] |
[Set 27th March, six days after the Nightclub arc, four days after Dude, that was YOU?, and two days after Blind-sided.]
In the very early morning, two days after tangling with Kuromaru in the showers, Kakashi was yanked out of bed by yet another misguided soul who wanted to commit involuntary suicide. Growling, still dressed in the sweat-soaked training blacks he'd fallen asleep in, surrounded by half a pack of equally worn out dogs, he slammed the door open and contrived to laminate the harassed-looking Intel agent's eyeballs to the back of his skull with a look. "It's six AM."
The man broke eye-contact, found himself in the crosshairs of several intent canine stares, and studiously fixed his gaze on the ceiling. "Yes," he agreed, in the tone of a man not prepared to make that his problem. "It's also raining."
"What do you want?"
( A black-bordered folder presented itself for Kakashi's inspection. ) |
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| World's Oldest Painkiller [Tsume, Ginta, Kuromaru] |
[May. 17th, 2009|09:16 pm] |
[Backdated. Takes place March 22, ten minutes after Wild Dog in a Nest of Vipers, the evening before Carry Me Home (and the Tsume threads that followed), and two days before Dude, That Was YOU?]
"I told them to open the door so I could rip off their faces, but they wouldn't," Kuromaru growled. His growl rose into a snarl as they passed through the sublevel corridors, past more Intel agents. As far as he was concerned, they were probably all in on it, and therefore equally worthy of his anger.
"Well, hang onto that ripping of faces. When Botan gets out of here--"
"I'm going to rip off his face so much."
Tsume nodded grimly, shoving into the stairwell and hammering up. "Me, too. Bite off his other pinky."
Kuromaru's tail wagged enthusiastically. "I can't believe they just locked me in a cell. Why didn't they interrogate me? I'd have told them."
Tsume didn't point out that they were probably more worried about his ripping their faces off. The second floor came and went.
"And then, if they didn't believe me or made you smell upset, I'd have ripped their faces off."
( Tsume slammed through the third floor doorway. ) |
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| Dude, That Was YOU? [Hiro and Ginta] |
[May. 14th, 2009|09:09 pm] |
[Takes place Monday, March 24, approximately five and a half years after Rescue Me, five days after Ask Me Another, and Don't Want to Fight This War]
The cryptography lecture was, it turned out, reasonably useful. Although the speaker--some woman from Intel who wore no makeup, little wire-rimmed glasses, and her hair in a tidy bun that just screamed nerd--wasn't really that great at fielding questions. As long as she stayed on topic and on her slides she was fine, but as soon as someone interrupted her she got flustered, lost her place, and then her temper.
( After the first two times, Ginta asked questions just to see it happen. ) |
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