| Devil in the Details | [Dec. 6th, 2015|07:29 pm] |
[Takes place the morning of May 16, Yondaime Year 5, the day after Break It Down by the Numbers and Killing Time Between My Sins]
The wonderful thing about team practice at 0500, Ryouma decided, was that you didn't have to wait. You rolled out of bed and into clothes, and maybe you had time to burn your tongue on coffee and gnaw a protein bar on your way down to the training field. By the time you got there, shivering in the dark, Raidou was already warmed up and entirely likely to greet you with a Doton jutsu to the face.
Meeting the interim team captain at 0900, on the other hand, meant a solid three hours of anxiety between waking and showing up at Team Six's office. Katsuko's intervention at the bar last night meant he hadn't drunk nearly enough to either oversleep or wake with a hangover. She wasn't in the ANBU gym to share his morning workout, either.
Ayane, who had no team to train with, was. They exchanged tight smiles, and helped each other with the weights without speaking a word.
0830 came eventually. Ryouma showered, shaved, dressed in uniform, and re-styled his hair twice before he settled on something that looked appropriately serious. He forced himself through most of a rat bar and crammed the rest in his belt-pouch. Genma would be proud.
At 0855 exactly, he opened the office door.
Genma was already there.
So was the ANBU Vice-Commander.
Ryouma stopped in the doorway. The Vice-Commander stood by Genma's desk in polished armor, abstract Owl mask clipped to his hip and narrow brows drawn together as he frowned down at a clipboard in one hand. Kuroda Ushio was a hard-muscled man in his middle years, a little shorter than Genma but built more like Raidou. The hilt of the ninjato protruding over his shoulder was shiny and dark with use. Ryouma had seen him around HQ a few times in passing—the first time pointed out by Katsuko as someone to avoid if possible, which had of course necessitated the story of Ryouma's first encounter with the Vice-Commander and Kakashi at the ANBU trials. In most of those distant sightings Kuroda had looked preoccupied, perhaps annoyed, as he strode at Sagara-sama's heels or shuffled stacks of papers from one meeting to another.
Now, standing in Team Six's office, studying what had to be Team Six's paperwork, he looked as coldly unreadable as his painted mask. Even the flick of dark eyes up and back again, as Ryouma entered the room, gave nothing away.
Genma stood behind his desk, stiff and formal even with his crutches — no sitting allowed when a superior officer stood, of course, even for an injured man. He was in uniform as well, with his wheat-brown hair tied back in a neat tail and only a thickness around his right thigh betraying the hidden bandages. Apprehension or pain, or both, tightened the fading bruises around his eyes.
"Vice-Commander," Ryouma said, and saluted as crisply as he could. "Fukuchou." He tried to form the hand-signs discreetly with his other hand, against the side of his leg. Danger?
If there was a signal sequence for What the hell is wrong?, Katsuko hadn't taught it to him yet. That was starting to seem like a severe oversight on their part.
Genma's mouth tightened. That was all the warning Ryouma had before Kuroda flipped a page on the clipboard and looked up at him. "Tousaki. Have you heard the expression: 'If you're not ten minutes early, you're five minutes late'? This is not a promising start. You may fetch me some coffee, black."
"A promising what?"
He hadn't meant to say that out loud. Genma's eyes closed briefly in that Buddha help us all expression Team Six had learned to fear even more than the lieutenantly eyebrow, and opened again on a forbidding glare.
Vice-Commander Kuroda lowered his clipboard and regarded Ryouma with flat contempt. "I was told you would be quick on the uptake. Coffee, black, and then stand against the wall and be quiet."
Either everything had gone terribly, unspeakably wrong, and they were all under official review before Raidou would be sentenced for immediate execution, or—
Dimly, Ryouma recalled his own voice saying, If this captain's a hardass, they're gonna want someone able-bodied for an errand boy.
"Vice-Commander," he rasped. He dragged together another salute and reeled out of the office.
There was a tiny breakroom at the end of the hall, with an electric kettle for tea and an industrial-sized coffee pot. Ryouma found a clean paper cup in a cupboard and poured without the slightest attention to what his hands were doing.
He'd cracked a joke at the end of the first Trial, and the Vice-Commander had nearly killed him for it. Or, really, had tried to goad him into losing his temper, possibly his head, and certainly any hopes of acceptance into ANBU. The man might just have been looking to get a little of his own back after his humiliation during Kakashi's ninjutsu demonstration, but Ryouma didn't find that explanation any more comforting.
Granted, this was ANBU, with all its paperwork and psych reviews and emphasis on tight-knit and healthy teams. The sort of petty miseries that chuunin or jounin captains could inflict on their temporary teams wouldn't survive long here. And Kuroda was Vice-Commander, not an aging special jounin with a particular grudge against mouthy young hotshots. He would run a tight ship, and he might keep an eye out for any slackness or cracks in Raidou's team, but he wouldn't deliberately set out to break a man.
He damn sure wouldn't tolerate tardy coffee, either.
Ryouma filled another cup for Genma, crammed sugar and dry creamer packets into his pocket, just in case, and headed down the hall.
An incoming flare of firestorm chakra warned him well before the door to the staircase banged open. Katsuko barrelled through, spotted him, and drew up sharply enough that her loose hair fluttered like a banner. Smooth and shining, it hung past her jaw, not quite to her shoulders.
"You brushed your hair," Ryouma said, idiotically.
Katsuko blinked at him. "I did," she agreed slowly. She reached up with her good hand to pat his cheek. "And you look like someone set all your favorite shirts on fire. Hangover?"
"Worse," Ryouma said. "I think our interim captain is Vice-Commander Kuroda." |
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