Fallen Leaves

[	Tags	\|	haruichi	]
[	Current Location	\|	The Blue Orchid, Konoha	]
[	Current Mood	\|	restless	]

[takes place in early March]

Night was coming on fast, and Haruichi only wished it could move faster. Ripples of leaden cloud masked the moon and starlight as they had hidden the sunset, heavy with water not yet frozen to snow. Winter was turning to spring and the weather's unhappiness at the transition was well illustrated by the ominous bent of the atmosphere, something Haruichi couldn't help but notice as he skimmed across rooftops on his way to the last place he wanted to spend his Monday night.

Perhaps that was being cruel to the Blue Orchid, the place did have fantastic wonton soup. The problem wasn't the setting, it was the meeting. ( In particular, the company. )

Ordinary Miracles [closed to Haruichi & Hoshi]

[Sep. 22nd, 2008|01:33 am]

[

Tags

haruichi

]

It had been a long day. A day worth seeing the back of, in Haruichi's world-weary opinion, which was why he had been entertaining the fantasy of walking in the door and falling asleep as soon as he was out of his uniform since about two p.m. A mundane thing to wish for, but something told him he'd be just as well off wishing for some mythological phenomenon to present itself for his inspection (along with authenticating docuentation): neither was likely to happen, and he needed the sleep more.

Stepping slowly up the stairs, eyes half-closed and head aching quietly, Haruichi noticed the sun drowning in deep purple clouds through the dirty windows lining the stairwell of his apartment building. Night was coming, and Haruichi recalled then that his day had begun at one in the morning with a training accident which he'd only been able to save from becoming a traumatic amputation by a handful of seconds. The day, much like the dozen days before it, hadn't improved from there, and ten patients later ( all Haruichi wanted to do was go to sleep and forget he'd ever been a medic or an ANBU. )

Nothing to Hold [closed to Ryouma, Tsume, Kakashi, Haruichi]

[Jul. 9th, 2008|05:01 pm]

fallen_ryouma

[

Tags

haruichi, kakashi, mission, ryouma, tsume

]

[[Fifth installment of the Mission of DOOM. Follows Dark of the Morning]]

Two and a half hours after Kakashi blew sparkling dust into Ryouma's wounds, the painkillers started to wear off.

It began as a dull throb in his chest, where he'd slumped forward over Baiji's surging shoulders. The huge mastiff ran tirelessly, holding his position in an wedge-like formation of dogs and ninja. To his right, brindled Kaori carried both Tsume and Kuromaru, with one of Kakashi's clones running at her heels and a fourth lugging the unconscious Shiki over its shoulder. Two smaller dogs flanked the mastiffs, and Kakashi himself, lean and swift as a greyhound, ran at the head of the arrow to lead the way. One of his clones perched behind Ryouma, steadying him with both hands on his back. Warm chakra tickled Ryouma's shoulders and the backs of his thighs, as both Baiji and the kage bunshin worked to keep him on. They'd done a fine job of it so far. Even when Baiji hurtled a narrow canyon in a single chakra-propelled leap, Ryouma hadn't slipped.

But when the mastiff jumped over a fallen tree, and the clone's toe jogged the back of Ryouma's left calf, the tired ache blazed into real pain. A little blood spotted Baiji's fur. Ryouma swore, paled, and grabbed at Baiji's studded leather color with half his left hand. The clone's hands slipped lower, grasping his waist, trying to steady him. Ryouma's attempt at biting back a whimper ended abruptly when his broken teeth regained feeling.

"Don' touch me," he told the clone, slurring words with a tongue that hadn't quite yet shed the drug and remembered its acid-burned pain. "'ll throw up."

Baiji's stride lengthened. Bent nearly double, silently and savagely cursing the painkiller that brought relief instantly and returned agony almost as fast, Ryouma managed to glance over the dog's shoulder and catch a glimpse of the couple riding Kaori. Kuromaru lay slumped in human form, but no longer still. For the first time since losing his eye, he'd slipped back to consciousness to discover exactly what Ryouma's jutsu had taken from him.

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A Healthy Start [closed to Hayate and Haruichi]

[Jun. 9th, 2008|04:46 pm]

fallen_gekkou

[	Tags	\|	haruichi, hayate	]
[	Current Mood	\|	curious	]

Hayate was not really exploring. Well, he was. But "exploring" sounded a bit...childish. Like prowling through abandoned houses with flashlights. Instead he was prowling around ANBU headquarters, minus the flashlight. He grinned to himself at the mental image.

Hayate had just moved into the headquarters yesterday. Curious rookie that he was, exploring was the first use of his time he could think of. So he was exploring, childish as it sounded. His mental map of the ANBU headquarters was getting filled out, which was always a nice thing. Hayate--like all ninja--liked having a good idea of his surroundings, just in case.

So far, Hayate had been around the first floor twice. He paused and peered into the open door of what he guessed was the rec room. It was empty now--it hadn't been when he'd first walked by. He slipped in, and looked around curiously.

The room was a little shabby, with a few bookshelves, a pool table, several couches of questionable colour, and a TV set that looked like it had seen better days. The air had the scent of dust and stale cigarette smoke. Hayate wrinkled his nose in distaste. He wandered around, poking at the bookshelves. The titles ranged from really bad romances to a few scholarly texts.

The smell of stale cigarette smoke was strongest by the couches. Hayate cleared his throat, trying to ease the annoying itch, but it was no good. He ducked his head and covered his mouth with a hand, trying to muffle the coughing fit: dry, hollow, and centered deep in his chest, the coughs were often loud.

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Purgatory is a Hospital Bed. [Closed to Kakashi & Haruichi]

[May. 16th, 2008|08:50 pm]

fallen_kakashi

[	Tags	\|	haruichi, kakashi	]
[	Current Mood	\|	tired	]

Backdated. Follows directly after Come Hell or High Water

When Kakashi woke up, it wasn't the dark sloping roof of a low cave that met his sight first. Neither was it the high-vaulted arches of Konoha's forest trees. It wasn't even the familiar ceiling of his own room.

( Instead he groaned, shifted, and cracked one eye open to find his vision full of blue and orange. )

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Come Hell or High Water [Closed to Kakashi and Haruichi]

[May. 12th, 2008|12:09 am]

fallen_kakashi

[	Tags	\|	haruichi, kakashi, mission	]
[	Current Mood	\|	busy	]

Backdated. Set just after Dog of War Meets the Bloodhound, and Marked For Life and before Thicker Than Water

Missions could go wrong at any point; that was something you learned at genin level. It could be a sandal-tie snapping when you were getting ready, a teammate you hated meeting you at the bridge as you left. An alarm ringing out when you were breaking in, or a kunai in the back when you were leaving. It could be anything.

( For Kakashi it was the five mist-nin who tracked him all the way to the border before they struck. )

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Marked for Life [closed to Haruichi & Genma]

[Apr. 25th, 2008|02:58 pm]

fallen_senbon

[

Tags

genma, haruichi

]

Every now and again life throws you a bone. Genma got this particular one in the form of an anonymous message from someone in Arakaki Hisoka's office that one Hyuuga Haruichi was on the list for induction. It was a time-honored ANBU tradition--part hazing, part ceremony--that new agents were brought in for their official induction into ANBU by senior agents. When the time came for a new ANBU field agent to receive his tattoo and mask, to get his armor from the quartermaster and swear his oath before the Hokage, a senior ANBU--Hunter for a new Hunter, Intel for a new Intel--would be sent to the home of the rookie to escort him in.

Now technically Haruichi wasn't a rookie, seeing as he'd served as ANBU's in-house medic for several years already. But he was a brand new field agent, officially a Hunter-Medic. He'd never been tattooed before, never been issued a mask or uniform, because he'd never left the building. He'd been, like the chuunin who manned the mission desk, the Intel data analysts, the other non-combat staff, ancillary. Unmarked.

( Not Anymore. )

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All Over Again [closed]

[Apr. 5th, 2008|12:17 am]

[	Tags	\|	haruichi	]
[	Current Mood	\|	anxious	]

[backdated: set after Genma & Raidou's return from their ill-fated "It takes..." mission]

The next time Haruichi saw Kanae-sensei he thought he might completely lose control of himself and hug her. For apparently it was she who had achieved the nigh impossible - a direct line of communication between the HQ medic on call and the Hospital's ER. ( Not fifteen minutes after Raidou and Genma had returned from their mission in delerious bits and pieces the word had come through to Haruichi. )

Running in Circles [Haruichi and Open]

[Mar. 4th, 2008|06:06 pm]

[	Tags	\|	ayumi, haruichi, yuzuya	]
[	Current Location	\|	ANBU HQ	]
[	Current Mood	\|	content	]

Hyuuga Haruichi was no stranger to multi-tasking: it took a high degree of talent in it to snark somebody's brains out and stitch their limbs back together at the same time. Given the amount of work he always had to do, the medic nearly always did two things at once if he could manage it and today was no different.

Three-two-five: Shibata Yuzuya - A, twenty-five, Intel, no history, no history; papercuts, dietary/vitamins and getting blown up.

It was seven a.m., three hours until the end of his shift, and Haruichi was silently running laps around HQs apartments and matching names, basic medical profiles and predicted healthcare needs to each door number every time he ran past it. It was the kind of exercise his cardio-vascular system needed, and more. Primarily it was an old game from his days living here, and had made it easy to remember the medical histories of everybody under the same roof and to know where to drag them back to once he'd finished treating them.

Three-two-four: Yamashiro Aoba - record lost/check again, twenty-four, Hunters, optical photophobia, no history; burns and opthalmic migraine.

Pass the door, match number to name and recite the profile before hitting the next one. It was like a quick-wits version of a flashcard test, but Haruichi found it invaluable - especially now that he was getting back into his stride as medic at HQ. He'd need this information, and reams more besides, to be available in a second if anything happened to any of them, on his watch or off of it.

Three-two-three: Oyate Ayumi - A, twenty, Hunters, no history, flagged; muscle strains and exhaustion.

Especially if he was going out into the field to bring them back. You couldn't carry a filing cabinet out to some godforsaken ditch to cross-check blood types and persistant medical conditions before you administered treatment. No matter how well-organized it was.

Three-two-zero: Shiranui Genma - too long, didn't read.

And so, despite the fact he'd been up all night, Haruichi didn't pause in his run - just reached up to flick some of his black hair out his eyes and kept racing along the corridors of the third floor over and over - his sneakers silent on the malfeascent carpet, delicately taking corners and gracefully navigating chairs and potted plants, hoping to do his twenty laps on this floor and head down to the second again before anybody arrived to interrupt him. ~~Like that ever happened.~~

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First Impressions Are So Important. [Closed to Kakashi & Haruichi]

[Feb. 28th, 2008|11:50 pm]

fallen_kakashi

[	Tags	\|	haruichi, kakashi	]
[	Current Mood	\|	determined	]

Set five years previously. Three weeks after the Kyuubi attack.

The hospital was busy. The hospital was always busy--that was the hallmark of any good hospital--but the last month had seen a marked increase in patients. The lucky ones just had Kyuubi-sized claw marks, the unlucky had missing limbs, missing families, missing minds... Three floors of wrecked human beings and not enough medics to stick them back together. The war with Rock was over. Long over. But the fox had smashed the borders right open, and Konoha was doing its best just to stay afloat in the wake of its aftermath. To survive the constant attacks of other villages taking advantage of the carnage.

( ANBU was the worst hit )

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Pride and Falls [Haruichi, Raidou & Genma]

[Feb. 7th, 2008|08:49 pm]

[	Tags	\|	arakaki, genma, haruichi, raidou	]
[	Current Location	\|	ANBU HQ Training Rooms	]
[	Current Mood	\|	pissed off	]

follows directly from Paradigms of Professionalism

Hyuuga Haruichi, being who he was and the way he was, very often deserved an ass-kicking. He didn't dispute it, just took steps to avoid it, especially when the person looking to knock him senseless out-ranked him in just about every way possible. Unfortunately, Arakaki Hisoka was entitled to deliver this one under the guise of testing his physical profficiency; and thus it was that before Raidou returned from dropping his unconscious sparring partner at the hospital, Haruichi was twenty minutes into being kicked wall-to-wall and knocked floor-to-ceiling in the training rooms by the Director of ANBU operations.

Haruichi would've been utterly affonted if he wasn't so busy trying not to lose his teeth. He was a Hyuuga, his ultimate fighting speciality was close combat. Hand-to-hand and up-close-and-personal was the way he worked in a fight, his blood, his training, his whole combat style was geared to it to the nth degree.

He'd have been kicking Arakaki Hisoka's round ass square if only the bastard had let him use the jyuuken. As it was, Haruichi was going to be lucky if he managed to keep his brain in his skull by the end of this, because if he wasn't allowed to channel chakra into his strikes (if he had to fight like "the common people", as Arakaki put it) the best he was going to manage was the honour of landing a few fingerprint-sized bruises on the man currently and repeatedly smashing his foot into his ribcage.

Because they were both discovering, asking Haruichi to throw a good old fashioned forward punch was like asking a cat to bark, and in the end the sound that got made as his face hit the mat for the tenth time that minute was pretty much the same.

Clearly Poke-of-Doom-no-jutsu wasn't going to cut it, so when the older ANBU knocked him down once again Haruichi decided to embrace new levels of "commonality" and bit him square in the leg.

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Paradigms of Professionalism [Closed to Haruichi & Raidou]

[Feb. 2nd, 2008|02:16 am]

fallen_raidou

[	Tags	\|	arakaki, genma, haruichi, raidou	]
[	Current Mood	\|	cheerful	]

Raidou was, by all accounts, a reasonably smart man. He could speak in full sentences, conjugate a decent verb when the mood took him, and even add up columns of small numbers.

He certainly considered himself a logical man.

When he discovered that Shiranui Genma, his solid mission partner for the past six months, had been assigned to a reasonably complex mission requiring back up without him, Raidou suspected the higher-ups of non-logical thinking.

Being a logical man, he set out to correct that somewhat egregious error.

Being a decent shinobi, he considered the official channels first. Time, however, was against him. Genma's mission commenced first thing in the morning and that was not nearly enough time to request a transfer with the ninja partnering him.

Raidou's replacement.

( Of course, there was always the more direct route... )

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Back in Black-Ops [closed to Haruichi]

[Jan. 28th, 2008|12:09 am]

[	Tags	\|	arakaki, haruichi, sandaime	]
[	Current Location	\|	Konoha	]
[	Current Mood	\|	cynical	]

Night had fallen quick, bitter and icy throughout Konoha, once again reinforcing Haruichi's belief that venturing outside was the business of fools and heroes - and he was emphatically neither of those. Nevertheless, outside he was - skirting rooftops and chimney vents fast as he could move, and if he was less than thrilled about it he was smart enough to hide the fact.

After all, if your Kage called you to an out of hours meeting late at night you were definitely about to be pitted against more than gales, snow and patches of black ice… and in Konoha since you weren't the slave of some insane despot or patently homicidal lunatic warmonger you were expected to look cheerful about it.

( Haruichi was settling for looking a little less like he'd just crankily dragged himself out of the wrong side of the bed, and to hell with anybody who didn't think that was a colossal enough effort - even if it was the Hokage himself. )