| [Nov. 16th, 2016|09:08 pm] |
Ryouma sucked in a breath. The clean, arctic edges of Kakashi's chakra had blurred with a muddy darkness, like fine steel gone to rust. Winter sunshine with the ugly oppressiveness of a storm, slowly fading, but leaving a nasty prickle on the spine.
Iebara's chakra had felt wrong. Kakashi's did, too.
Genma winced, as if it hurt to sense that blot on the cold, clear chakra they'd grown to know. Genma was a far better sensor than Ryouma; maybe it did.
"Iebara's had the same kind of edge," Genma said, reluctantly, "but it's different on you. Sort of a breath-freezing in your lungs feeling. I don't know…" He crossed his arms. "It's not something I'd want to let leech into my chakra for long. One of those jutsu you save for real emergencies. Probably explains a thing or two about why his teammates didn't trust him. Someone from Intel should have a run at Fukuda about it."
"Maybe you should try the jutsu on Fukuda," Ryouma muttered. "Since we've run out of pigs."
Kakashi gave him a sharp look. "Because Mist needs more reason to torture the next Leaf-nin they catch?"
"Intel's had her a month," Ryouma shot back. "If Mist gave a shit for their shinobi, they'd have ransomed her before now. Hell, Himura Tadao said we've practically got her in a long-term apartment up at Intel HQ."
Genma grimaced, tight-lipped. "Fukuda is not Team Six's problem anymore," he said. "If she's in Intel's care in a dungeon cell or a penthouse suite, it's because Intel still has use for her." His amber eyes flickered, for just a moment, toward their observer. Otani gazed blandly back.
The lieutenant shrugged and shifted his weight, arching his shoulders back in a stretch. He added quietly, "Besides, there's no guarantee Konoha would accept a ransom if Mist offered it, given recent events."
If Hokage-sama meant to make an example of Fukuda, they'd have executed her weeks ago, when the ashes of Hikouto and Ibaragashi Port were still warm. The only reason Ryouma could see for Konoha to reject a ransom was if Fukuda'd asked for asylum. But who the hell would reject their own village for the people who'd killed her team and took her arm?
He opened his mouth. Genma looked at Otani again, meaningfully, and Ryouma thought abruptly of the way she'd arrived at Team Six's office after training that morning, in company with Kuroda-taichou…
His teeth clicked together. He resisted, barely, the urge to glance over his shoulder. Kuroda wasn't lurking in the shadows at the edge of the training fields, but the paranoid prickle down his spine didn't seem convinced.
"Kakashi," he said desperately. "Reverse Horse. You think it helped?"
Kakashi was always willing to talk about jutsu. His hackles eased; a little more of the ugly edge faded from his chakra. "It did. I lost half the volume, but I could actually use what I had left." He scratched at the blood clotting in his hair. "Up until it exploded."
"I know you were working on controlling it," Genma put in, "but it felt like your lightning nature got away from you at the end, when you were starting to fatigue. I'd guess that's why—" His fingers flicked out, miming the explosion. "Did it feel like that to you?"
"Ye-es." Black motes spun slowly in Kakashi's red Sharingan eye. Ryouma looked away. He wasn't exactly worried about the lurking hypnosis in a spinning Sharingan, but he'd courted stupidity enough already today.
"And no," Kakashi decided. "It was more like— I could feel the moment of death, and my chakra didn't want to get yoked to it."
"Does that happen?" Ryouma glanced, instinctively, at Genma. "I thought Iebara's jutsu'd be more like mine, that it'd just feed off the victim's chakra, but if he's still hooked in— Wait, does that happen to medics?" |
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