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Dangerous Game [Jul. 6th, 2013|11:39 pm]
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[tousaki_ryouma]
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[User Picture]From: [info]tousaki_ryouma
2013-07-07 06:10 am (UTC)

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The Hokage's head was turned when Ryouma came in; he was speaking quietly to the pudgy, balding man on his left, Oita Gennosuke, while the hawk-masked ANBU commander listened with her chin on her fist. Sagara, Ryouma remembered hazily, from a very long twenty-four hours ago. A third man was just turning away from the dark window: Shibata Tomohiro, the commander of Torture & Interrogation. They'd met briefly a year ago, when Ryouma's team had brought a prisoner in. Even in a shinobi village, that scarring was impossible to forget.

Ryouma knelt in the shinobi's bow, and waited for them to acknowledge him.

They didn't seem to be in any hurry. The Hokage finished whatever he was saying; Oita barked a short laugh. Shibata's soft, husky lisp contributed a suggestion. Footsteps on the floor; a chair scraped. Yondaime said, finally, "At ease, shinobi."

He straightened, setting his feet a careful shoulder-width apart, tucking the bandaged hand and the good one at the small of his back. Shibata had taken a seat beside Oita; the owl-masked ANBU vice-commander was on Sagara's far side. Their eyes itched on his skin.

The ANBU commander demanded, "Explain your failure at the second trial."

Ryouma's fingernails bit into his palm.

"I trusted," he said. "Too much and too little. I believed Akiyama when he said Hatake was hurt and holed up; it tracked with what I knew of him, that if he was hurt he'd go to ground. And I didn't just toss Akiyama my med-kit and go on my way, 'cause I didn't know him, and I wanted to be sure Kaka— Hatake was all right. I could've sent a clone in. I didn't think of that."

What was left of Shibata's face wasn't easy to read, but he didn't look impressed. "So he used what he knew of your personal feelings for Kakashi, and played on them?"

"He saw us talking at the first stage," Ryouma said. His right hand flexed, impotently, in its puffy prison of bandages. Still only halfway there, but at least it moved. He swallowed. "I wasn't particularly discreet. I'm guessing he picked up on my, uh, overly emotional reaction to Hatake's use of the Sharingan, and figured I'd be easy prey. And decent bait."

Which he had been, until Kakashi refused to play by Akiyama's rules. Shinobi Rule of Conduct 48: A shinobi chooses his own battlefields. Ryouma'd just blundered into someone else's.

Oita Gennosuke said dispassionately, "Quote me Endo Tsuyoshi's third theorem on the transference of matter in an unequal henge."

Shit, Ryouma nearly said. He bit his tongue. "I don't know Endo Tsuyoshi, sir. But when you're henge'ing into something smaller—or larger—than you really are, the extra mass has to go to somewhere, or come from somewhere. Getting bigger's easy; you use compressed chakra to fill out the bulk. Getting smaller, you can compress yourself—which is what kids at the Academy do, until they realize any idiot can tell a fifty-kilo shuriken apart from the real deal. If you really want to make an unequal henge that nobody can tell, you've got to find somewhere else to put the mass. Best option'd probably be sticking part of yourself in the Summoning Dimension, but I'm not that good at space-time ninjutsu."

As Sagara and the Hokage had surely already noticed. He managed not to wince.

Shibata's ruined mouth pulled sideways, baring missing teeth, as he jotted something down on the scroll in front of him. He looked up. "Is that why you so jealously protect the jutsu that you are good at?"

Firmer ground. Ryouma scrambled for it gratefully. "Any shinobi has a right to protect the jutsu he's created," he said. "The clans have their kinjutsu. The sensei of my genin team had a seal branded on her forehead when she turned three years old, meant to slag her eyes the moment she died. If the Hyuuga can guard their doujutsu with their daughters' lives, I don't see why I should share my work with anyone with a Sharingan eye."

"The Sharingan can't copy a bloodline limit," the T&I commander observed. "Your jutsu are merely applied elemental chakra and seals, aren't they? Is there some reason you couldn't teach them to, say..." He glanced casually around the room. "Yondaime-sama?"