| [Sep. 27th, 2013|10:48 pm] |
“They’re not a hundred percent. You need to be careful still,” Genma said, but he smiled slightly, pleased he’d gotten as much healed as he had. “Glad you’re feeling better.” He pulled out a pair of ration bars and offered one to Raidou. “Hound asked me what was up in Konoha. I told him about the code, and that we didn’t know more. He seemed a little shaken up. I tried to reassure him, but I think I just pissed him off by noticing he was unsettled at all.”
“Sounds about right,” Raidou said. He inspected the wrapper on the rat bar before he peeled it, but he didn’t take a bite. He stared out at the river spooling out ahead of them, leading the slowly south. “You can’t blame him for being worried. I am, too.”
“Yeah,” Genma said. “Me, too. I told him I figured it wasn’t an attack on Konoha itself, or we’d have gotten told to either abort the mission and return at once, or regroup with other ninja in the field. I figure it’s probably either a border skirmish, or one of the bigger cities had an attack.” He traced the edge of the wrapper on his unopened rat bar with his thumbnail. “I keep thinking about that time during the war when Iwa set off that bomb in Chiyoyama.”
“And now I am, too.” Raidou stared past Genma’s shoulder as he spoke in the distant voice of a man remembering blood-soaked rubble and unidentifiable remains. “Thanks for sharing that.”
“You weren’t already thinking about it?” Genma said. “After the Fox, that’s the one I get the most nightmares about.” He worried the seam of the rat bar wrapper until it yielded, peeling the foil back from the nut and fruit-studded bar. “You have any theories about what’s up?”
“Something big enough overshadow a demon attack,” Raidou said. “Since Konoha’d usually be all over that.”
“Yeah.” Genma shifted, trying to find a comfortable position that didn’t involve leaning against the hot smokestack. “Maybe they finally tracked down Orochimaru. Or maybe Kumo? They’re always threatening to start shit up. They could have attacked one of the border towns.” Moving wasn’t helping at all. He sighed and gave up on comfort, opting instead for fuel. The raspberry-oat bar was ordinarily one of his favorites, but it might as well have been cardboard for all he tasted it. “What do we want to tell the rookies? And will Rat be okay? She’s… a little easy to trigger,” he said, choosing his words carefully.
“She’ll be fine,” Raidou said firmly. No room for discussion there. “If they ask, we’ll tell them the truth. If they don’t, I’d rather they focus on healing, anyway.”
“Well, given I already discussed it with Hound, they may end up talking to each other about it even if we don’t,” Genma said. “Though if I had to pick one of the three most likely to keep his own council, it’d be him.”
“You’re not wrong,” Raidou said. He rubbed a hand over his face, looking altogether haggard. “I should check on them. Did you heal yourself, yet?”
“I’ve done what I can for myself,” Genma said. Which was a lot less than he could do for someone else, but it would do, for now. “It takes a lot of chakra to work on yourself. Tsunade-sama can do it, and they say Shodai-sama could completely heal himself, but…” He shrugged. “They also say he was a kami of ninjutsu who took corporeal form to create Konoha.”
“If you start pulling villages out of the air, I’ll assume you’re feeling better,” Raidou said.
“Or you’re hallucinating from low blood sugar. Are you hoping airing out that rat bar will make it taste better?” Genma asked. “Or have you got some new jutsu that lets you take calories in from things you just hold?” He looked at his own half-eaten bar. “Actually, that’d be a seriously cool jutsu. If you do have one, you have to teach it to me.”
“What?” Raidou said, blinking. He looked down at his hand like he was surprised to find the bar he was holding had just materialized there. “Oh. Right.” Two bites later it was gone.
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