| [Sep. 14th, 2013|01:29 am] |
At least there was one standard model shinobi on the team.
Katsuko was the next to settle down. Her night ritual was a little longer: she checked her weapons, honed the wicked edges on her swords, tended her feet and her armor, and curled up in her bedroll on the softest patch of grass, having graciously allowed Genma the second-softest patch. Her chakra banked down like a dragon coiling around itself, ready to take a brief hiatus from decimating villages. “Night, taichou,” she mumbled.
“Sleep hard,” said Raidou.
The fire crackled softly.
Ryouma stood, stretched, and walked carefully on his newly repaired feet down to the stream to brush his teeth. Leaf shadows hung over his armored shoulders like dappled scale-mail, rendering him nearly invisible. His light skin and dark hair suited ANBU’s colors. When he returned, he sat cross-legged by the fire, peeled out of his armor until he was just in his black underpinnings, and began to run through empty seals. It looked like a routine night time exercise; something to keep a ninjutsu user’s fingers limber.
Kakashi was a silent wraith at the edge of the fire’s light, making no move to settle or engage.
No surprises there.
Raidou drew his black-blade sword and laid it across his lap, inspecting the edge. “Planning to sleep, you two?”
“Eventually,” Ryouma said. “When I fall over.” His hands slipped neatly through a complicated Reverse Half-Dragon into Snake, shaping who-knew-what jutsu, and he glanced over his shoulder. “I was going to hope you'd both be impressed by my stoicism on the trail, but turns out Kakashi was doing the same thing and we both forgot Rule 4. So I'm just going to have to be extra good tomorrow.”
His dark eyes glittered in the firelight.
Ryouma, Raidou suspected, flirted like he breathed and didn’t even realize he was doing it. Half a coping mechanism, half a way of life, definitely a trap Raidou didn’t need to get caught in.
“I’d settle for you not hurting yourself,” Raidou said, without humor. “Same for you, Hatake. You’ll pick up injuries without trying here. Don’t add more.”
Kakashi looked over. “We weren’t being gutted,” he said. “Don’t you want self-sufficiency on your team?”
“I’d prefer common sense,” Raidou said.
“I thought we joined ANBU because we had no common sense,” Ryouma said thoughtfully. He laced his fingers together, palms outward, and cracked his knuckles with a yawn. “Though I hear the death rate's actually higher in the chuunin corps. Must have better captains looking after us here.”
“Hah,” said Raidou.
More likely, the chuunin who weren’t quite good enough to make jounin found it out the hard way.
“Taichou,” Ryouma said in lieu of ‘goodnight’, shoving himself up. The quasi-neat scatter of his armor glistened like a heap of bones in the firelight. He unrolled his blanket, tossed it down, kicked his pack over to make a pillow, and flopped down with a quiet sigh, still barefoot.
And that made three. |
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