| Armor Wearing Thin | [Dec. 18th, 2013|11:43 am] |
[Takes place Yondaime year 5, May 3, in the early afternoon of the day after Ain't We All Just Runaways and Done This Dance Before.]
There were possibly less pleasant places to be on the day after a hard mission than the ANBU Quartermaster's office. Hospital, maybe. The morgue. Meeting someone's parents on what you thought was a second date.
On second thought, you could just walk out on a date. Ryouma doubted anyone had ever successfully walked out on Quartermaster Morita.
"I didn't ruin my gear intentionally," he tried. "And I didn't scratch the naginata! Look, brand-new."
"That's because it's been under your bed for two weeks," Morita snapped. "Don't think I can't see the dust, Tousaki. Did it ever occur to you to look for your mask?"
"Since I was dying at the time," Ryouma said sharply, "no."
Morita rolled his eyes. "If I had a ryou for every time I'd heard that, my budget would be in much better shape. You still have all four limbs, right? Still have your face? Then you're fine. Try again."
Ryouma picked up his reeking, blackened chest-armor from the table and held it out. "I was swimming through rot."
"And you let it into your kit," the QM said, unimpressed. He flicked the catch on the kunai holster and let the few remaining blades spill out. Their razor-sharp edges were spotted with rust. "You didn't even bother cleaning it afterwards."
"I had chakra exhaustion and lung inflammation," Ryouma said dangerously.
Morita touched the ring-hilt of a kunai with a gentle fingertip, rocking it on the table. "Yesterday, a kunoichi with third-degree burns apologized to me for allowing the guard of her katana to melt," he said. "You lost your sword. And your mask. You destroyed your gloves—though, granted, I never should have given you palm-coverings in the first place. Your uniform, armor, boots, and belt are so permeated with reek they may never be usable again. You let your kunai rust." He shoved the holster back across the table. "A soldier is as good as his weapons, and you have ruined yours. This was careless, Tousaki."
"I didn't—" Ryouma started, and cut himself off. Morita wasn't looking for excuses. He wanted apologies, apparently, or maybe atonement.
Well, Ryouma wasn't sorry. He'd done the job, he'd killed the demon queen, and he'd have drowned in her guts if Raidou hadn't dragged him out. Was he supposed to have demanded Raidou go squelching through the muck to find the sword and mask he'd lost, or hauled up to do it himself? He'd have pitched over inside three steps and drowned for good.
He could have cleaned the kunai, though, either in his brief moments of lucidity on the boat or at some point this morning, between rolling out of bed and getting lost on his way to the QM's office. There was no excuse but laziness there.
He said stiffly, "I'll do better next time. And I'll take care of the kunai."
Morita snorted. "Guess that's as good as I'm going to get." He pulled an arm guard out of the pile and turned it over, looking down at the rot-smeared straps with weary eyes.
A new armload of bloodstained armor dropped with a heavy thud onto the tabletop at Ryouma's side. "What was that you were saying about a soldier only being as good as his equipment, Morita?" Shiranui Genma's voice was as light and even as ever, like sunwarmed sand, but there was danger lurking beneath. "I have a lovely new scar I can show you that matches this." He gripped the vest in both hands and twisted. The chest-plate flexed reluctantly, opening up along the bloodstained gash in the broken plate over the belly.
The QM shot him an irritated look. "I didn't say only, Shiranui." He pulled the vest from Genma's hands and turned it in his own, studying the breach. "What did this?"
"Demon," Genma said, as easily as if Ryouma hadn't spent the last twenty minutes trying not to divulge classified information. Maybe the QM had clearance after all. Genma added, "The one that got me was the size of a horse. The one Tousaki lost his equipment to was as big as a building." He fished a few folded sheets of paper out of his zippered sweatshirt and handed them over. "Details are in here. Ueno sketched it for you."
If even the QM was getting reports, Ryouma must have slept through a lot of paperwork.
Genma looked like maybe he'd been up half the night finishing that paperwork. His face was drawn and sallow, sunstreaked hair scraped back in a rough tail at the base of his neck, eyes still shadowed as if he hadn't yet recovered from the sleep he'd lost on their journey back. He wore faded, frayed jeans and a silk-screened teeshirt under his rust-colored sweater. Ryouma tried to recall if he'd ever seen the lieutenant in anything but uniform or jounin workout gear, and couldn't. He looked — younger, somehow, which was ridiculous; he couldn't be more than two or three years older than Ryouma to begin with. But ANBU armor and authority always aged him, lent him an extra air of danger and confidence. He didn't look any less competent without it, but he did look more tired.
Whatever was in the QM's version of the mission report had grabbed Morita's attention just as completely as the ruined armor had. He studied it page by page, flipping back and forth to check details, and lingered especially long on the last. Katsuko had drawn a sketch, after all. It looked surprisingly artistic, to Ryouma's untrained and upside-down eye. "Claws, teeth, tail," Morita muttered to himself. "Looks chitinous, and chakra…" He put the report down and picked up the vest again, looking it over as if he could dissect it layer by layer. Finally, he looked up to Genma.
"Lose the layers, Shiranui," he said. "Let me take a look at that injury. You, too, Tousaki. One of 'em got you on the leg? I want to see that."
Public nudity was always preferable to chastisement. Ryouma went for his belt. |
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