| All My Regrets Are Nothing New. [Kakashi & Ryouma] |
[Oct. 30th, 2009|10:39 pm] |
Takes place seven hours after Welcome to My Morning, and begins two hours before The Little Things Give You Away
This time, when Kakashi woke up, it was with the little mental click of reality slotting back into place. He knew where he was, and why he was there. He knew that Ginta was across the hall, Tsuyako was in the ground, and Ryouma--
Was fast asleep in a chair.
Stiffly, Kakashi raised himself up on one elbow and glanced around the room. The clock said he'd been asleep for at least seven hours, but nothing much had changed. There were more food wrappers in a crumpled heap around the rubbish bin (Ryouma must have eaten), a stack of Intel forms on the rickety bedside table, and a pile of neatly folded black clothes at the foot of the bed: Kakashi's clothes, with a mask on top.
So Ryouma had paid attention to his free pass into Kakashi's room.
Kakashi raked a hand through oily grey hair, pulling it out of his eyes, and decided he was okay with that. Well, mostly okay with that. Ryouma wouldn't be curious enough to mess with his scrolls, at least; not if he couldn't read them.
Welded metal bed-struts creaked quietly as he shoved himself back against the pillows and looked at the man. Ryouma had curled himself up into the ugly vinyl chair, long legs folded beneath him, arms crossed loosely over his chest, head resting against a stolen hospital pillow. Definitely there, not easy to miss, but taking up as little space as possible. Which was not surprising, given that he'd probably had to negotiate for his right to be there all week.
The red Atomic Sunrise hoodie was draped across his stomach and wedged beneath one arm, a makeshift blanket. He breathed soft and slow, eyes not even flickering beneath their lids; too tired to dream, probably, if the fresh hollows in his face were any indicator.
( Good. That would make things easier. ) |
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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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| 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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| Love the Sound When You Come Undone. [Kakashi & Genma] |
[May. 17th, 2009|10:46 am] |
[Backstory. Set three years after the Kyuubi attack, one year after How to Lose a Life.]
Torture was an ugly word, but the kanji was simple to remember. Kakashi held his hands carefully above the paper as he wrote, trying not to smear wet ink with drying blood. He could feel the chuunin's eyes on him, tickling a wary brand as they looked him over from dripping silver hair to mud-caked sandals. He ignored the feeling for the most part, focused on not letting his fingers shake the words.
...captive was held for seven days, as instructed...
He felt buzzed--ramped up on chakra pills and bright red adrenaline. It hummed in his blood, danced along his bones. He narrowed one eye behind his ANBU mask, forcing himself to keep still as the pen scritched.
...genjutsu used first...
Illusions were easier. Quieter. They'd leave a scar, but not a mark. You could return a clean body and a shattered mind--if that was what had been paid for. Kakashi shifted, bracing his back against the cold stone wall. Fingers tapped against the board he was using to write on, spotting the wood with the marks of his trade. His left hand twitched through it, drawing out a pattern.
...progressed to physical methods on the third day...
( The chuunin was glaring. ) |
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| Blind-Sided [closed to Kuromaru, Kakashi, and Tsume] |
[May. 5th, 2009|07:11 pm] |
[Takes place March 25th, two days after Laugh Like You Really Mean It and Make Me Better]
Kuromaru shook the thoroughly-dead hamster, feeling its spine snap again, and trotted out of the Forest of Death. Forest of Death hamsters weren't easy prey. Not only did they have the agility of a rodent, but they had oversized teeth, too. And anything that weighed forty pounds and had nasty claws and paw-length incisors was something to be reckoned with. Not that Kuromaru had been worried--not even for a moment.
( Okay, maybe one moment when it had gone for his balls, but anyone would be worried under those circumstances. ) |
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| The Storm Before the Calm. [Closed to Kakashi and Ryouma] |
[Apr. 20th, 2009|07:19 pm] |
[Takes place the afternoon following Watch Me Burn]
When Kakashi woke up, it was to the dull soundtrack of agonized blood beating in his ears. He groaned very, very quietly, and curled up, pressing the heels of his hands to his overheated forehead. That prompted another deep-in-the-throat noise when he touched what felt like the morning after-impression of someone's fist, and ratcheted his headache up from bloody awful to apocalyptic.
Most ninja were relatively good at waking up, putting the pain aside, and working out why they didn't know where the hell they were. But Kakashi was fairly certain most ninja hadn't had their skulls recently unscrewed and filled with hot tar. He bit down a third unhappy sound and focused on breathing for a while.
( When it felt like he could move without his head spontaneously exploding... ) |
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| Watch Me Burn [closed to Kakashi and Ryouma] |
[Apr. 19th, 2009|05:10 pm] |
[[Takes place immediately following Stand Your Ground.]]
Thirty-six hours later, Kakashi was still the pretty one. Chestnut-haired and chocolate-eyed, lean in leather so tight it might have been painted on, he was drawing admiring gazes even before he paid the bouncer at the door of Club 69 and gave up his jacket at the coat check. The mesh shirt glided over pale muscles masked by the liquid curves of a tribal tattoo that covered his entire left shoulder blade and half his upper arm.
He still looked dangerous, but it was the kind of danger that drew men hungry for a thrill.
Ryouma gritted his teeth and tried to ignore the hungry gazes, the naked lust. The naked people were harder to ignore--some guy was dancing on a stage on the lower level in little more than a feathered G-string, and a few of the dancers on the floor around him seemed to be following his example. Most of them really didn't have the physique to pull it off. Perceptions got skewed in Konoha, Ryouma was beginning to realize. Sure, you saw other civilians on missions and in the streets, but for the most part the people you interacted with--the only ones you got close to--were young and lithe and supremely fit. There were a few of that type here, but for the most part...
His gaze was caught, in a sort of fascinated horror, by a man dancing on the fringes of the crowd, near the bar. Surely no one was actually that fat and still mobile? And--oh, no--he was pulling off his shirt--
"Kakashi," Ryouma murmured. "Lend me a kunai. I need to gouge my eyes out." |
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| Stand Your Ground [closed to Kakashi and Ryouma] |
[Apr. 19th, 2009|04:29 pm] |
[[Set on March 22nd, around two weeks after The Safest Place You've Found and Straighten Up, Face the Day]]
Kakashi was late to the briefing.
It wouldn't have been so bad if the Intel agent shuffling his files behind the desk wasn't forty, greying, married, and male. Ryouma rearranged all his conversational gambits, tried the safe ones and then the more edgy options, and still got nothing more than grunted monosyllables and, once, a flicker of a scowl. He wouldn't have even known it was Kakashi they were waiting for if the Intel agent hadn't unwisely asked him, just after he entered the tiny briefing room, whether he'd seen Hatake in the hall.
In retrospect, Ryouma probably shouldn't have pounced with questions. (He's back from his mission? When'd he get back? How come they're sending him out again? Who're we killing? Sure you're not setting me up for another ambush this time?) The briefer shut up tighter than any bank vault, and Ryouma eventually shoved the chairs aside and started doing one-handed push-ups just to keep himself awake.
He was on twenty-three when the door opened, and he counted twenty-four and twenty-five out of sheer stubbornness before he looked up. "Welcome back, genius. Got tired of running?" He rolled into a crouch, chest heaving as he caught his breath. The view was better, from here; he could actually see a narrow slice of Kakashi's pale face and a single grey eye between the mask and hitai'ate.
"Or'd you just miss my scintillating conversation an' supernatural good looks? I gotta warn you, I'm going masked this time." |
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| Straighten Up, Face the Day. [Closed to Kakashi] |
[Apr. 19th, 2009|07:04 pm] |
[Backdated. Takes place the morning after The Safest Place You've Found]
Ryouma tried to wake him when the sun began to set; a quick touch to a shoulder bared by ANBU blacks that completely failed to startle Kakashi into actual wakefulness. Long fingers hesitated, then settled and squeezed. Kakashi mumbled something vague, eyes slitting half open, before rolling loosely over and burying his face into the soft fur of Hoshika's belly.
"Gotta try harder than that, kid," Pakkun yawned, curling back into a ball of brown fur at the foot of the bed.
( Ryouma did. ) |
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| The Safest Place You've Found [closed to Kakashi & Ryouma] |
[Nov. 16th, 2008|07:50 pm] |
[[Takes place immediately after What Hell Is Like and Dog of War Meets Puppy of Emo, the day after If the Door's Still Open]]
When the warm little bundle of fur and fragile bones curled up on his feet vanished with a crack of chakra and a puff of smoke, even the lingering effect of a sleeping pill couldn't stop Ryouma from jerking awake. He stared blindly into the pre-dawn twilight of his deserted room. Kitchenette, TV, posters painted in shades of grey...
Tsume, sleeping on his arm.
He hesitated a moment, then slipped carefully free. It was harder clambering out of bed without waking her, especially since he had been against the wall, and his left knee still wouldn't bend without pain. She stirred once, mumbling something incomprehensible, and wrapped herself around the pillow she'd stolen from him at some point in the night.
( Ryouma bit his lip and jerked his eyes away. ) |
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| Like You Wanted to Go and Give Yourself Away [closed to Ryouma and Kakashi] |
[Sep. 26th, 2008|10:54 pm] |
[[Takes place the morning after Breaking Up Is Hard To Do]]
The late morning sunlight gleamed in Tsume's hair, picking out chestnut threads in the dark brown, burnishing the bandage a blazing white. Ryouma narrowed his eyes against the glare as he watched the mob of tattooed men, women, and children--and several dozen barking dogs--funnel away down the street with his former mission partner walking unsteadily among them. Half the Inuzuka clan had come to collect her from the hospital, it seemed.
He would lay even odds she'd have given up half the clan in a heartbeat, if she could stay with the one.
But Tsume's injuries were mostly healed, and Kuromaru's would require hospitalization for weeks yet. Ryouma had tried not to listen very hard to the the doctor delivering his solemn prognosis at the side of the other bed, this morning; he'd concentrated on getting dressed in the ill-fitting jounin blues the nurses (finally!) brought him, on shaving himself for the first time in a week, on figuring out what had happened to drive Kakashi so silent and grim. He'd woken up this morning with Kakashi curled in a chair across the room, and Kuromaru whimpering and clawing at his bandages, and Tsume crooning meaningless reassurance at her familiar as she tried to hold him still.
The tiny hospital room had become far smaller in the last twelve hours. ( Ryouma, for one, was damn glad to be leaving it. ) |
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| Breaking Up Is Hard to Do [closed to Ginta and Kakashi] |
[Sep. 20th, 2008|09:00 pm] |
At a quarter past midnight, Ginta got back to Konoha from a ten-day mission. He checked in with the chuunin at the gate, stole coffee from one of them, agreed to go to the hospital to get checked out voluntarily so they didn't have to accompany him, and was mildly annoyed to notice that one of them shadowed him all the way to the hospital itself anyway.
"You can go back to your post now," he shouted at the apparently empty street. "I'm a man of my word. See? Hospital. Going in."
He didn't wait for a reply.
At nearly one in the morning he was being simultaneously stitched by a doctor on his eleventh hour and debriefed by an Intel agent who was far too perky for her own good. He was also on his third cup of coffee, and starting to feel awake again.
At one-thirty he was given a sling, a bottle of pills, and a lecture about coming back to get checked out before he resumed training from the medic, and a cheerful, "Good night, Sakamoto-san. Thank you for your hard work," from the Intel agent.
He could have gone home and crashed. He should have gone home and crashed. Instead he went prowling the silent corridors of the hospital, looking for Kakashi, Tsume and Ryouma, who were, according to sources, here, hurt all to fuck, and possibly all in the same room.
( He needed to give Ryouma hell about it, if he was hurt again. ) |
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| In the Sky With Diamonds. [Closed to Kakashi and Tsume] |
[Sep. 7th, 2008|04:49 am] |
Takes place several hours after Give the Other Fella Hell and Lead Me Away
Morphine, Kakashi decided fuzzily when he woke up again, was the drug that just kept on giving. He'd been sponge-bathed, re-dressed, re-catheterized, moved around by nurses--and he absolutely didn't care. In fact, he felt warm; toasty-comfortable in a way that had nothing to do with blankets or body heat; though there was a blanket, covering him from toes to chin, and stretching away in a vast swathe of baby-blue to envelop Ryouma and--
Kakashi inhaled.
--Tsume.
( It took him a few minutes to realize that meant she was actually back in the bed with them, but when he did it didn't change much. ) |
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| Lead Me Away. [Closed to Kakashi and Ryouma] |
[Sep. 1st, 2008|09:04 pm] |
Takes place about ten minutes after the start of Give the Other Fella Hell
Kakashi never moved when he had nightmares; a lifetime spent sleeping on the edge of war had twisted that habit into an essential survival trait. He lay next to Ryouma and Tsume, tied to his own softly beeping machines, and slept like the dead.
Which was fitting for a man who dreamed of nothing but the dead.
It was the sharingan's fault. Its first moment in Kakashi's head had been spent memorizing the image of Obito, half-crushed and fully blind, yelling at them to run while the rocks tumbled down. Its next moment had witnessed the birth of Kakashi's first working chidori, and the men that had broken beneath it.
( And there were always more. ) |
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| The Best Of Our Dreams Fell Apart [closed to Ryouma, Kakashi, Tsume, Waki] |
[Aug. 13th, 2008|10:43 pm] |
[DOOM aftermath. Takes place about 5 minutes after Small Hours]
Yasuo strode down the corridor, trying to make his thoughts work through sluggish exhaustion, setting aside the brief meeting he'd just had with Tousaki Ryouma. Kiba and Hana had been up half the night, worried about their mother, needing reassurance. They'd slept in his bed. Him and Aomaru, Hana's three puppies and the two children all crowded in. It wasn't the most restful sleep he'd ever gotten. But more than that, he'd spent the day before in Tsume's ICU room, waiting for Kuromaru to pull through the extensive and delicate chakra surgeries.
Tsume seemed to have come through all right, they reassured him over and over again. Despite the fact that her chakra levels were so low he almost couldn't feel them, and despite the wires and tubes threading around and into her--even a respirator taped to her mouth, fat pipe shoved down her throat to keep her lungs expanding and falling.
"Comatose," Waki had said, but Yasuo hadn't realized how dead that was. She didn't even smell right. More like a stuffed toy rubbed with her scent than a living, breathing human.
He hadn't let their pups come see her. It was too alarming. Waki-sensei said she was healing faster than he'd expected, that her chakra levels were rising. It was a good sign.
( They wouldn't know how much damage, if any, the surgery had caused until she woke. ) |
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