| Survivor Mentality [Closed to Ryuichi] | [Apr. 21st, 2009|03:12 pm] |
[Takes place on March 20th]
It took the entirety of the journey back home for the Intel agent to realize that he wasn’t interested in any aspect of her—stretching from her conversation to whatever the hell else she was pedaling, and even then, she wouldn’t shut up. Of course the other two agents had found it amusing as hell—mostly the girl with yellow eyes—and of course the only way to make it stop would have been to fight. It took glance down at his hand, all bandaged up in the splint that shouldn’t have felt as makeshift as it did, to dispel any thoughts to start one. Pain came and pain went, but Ryuichi didn’t want to make more for himself.
He just gritted his teeth and started counting the steps back to Konoha, imagining the various ways he could conspire to skip the debriefing completely. Sleeping held a strong appeal, as did a shower, something to get the dirt out of his hair and the fatigue out of his joints. Alas, neither came before the debriefing, and though Ryuichi went, he spaced out thoroughly enough to avoid listening to a single thing the Intel agent said.
There was a certain kind of annoyance in her face when they filed out, and Ryuichi considered smiling to let her know it had been on purpose. In the end he didn’t, and she watched him leave without comment.
That was another victory in itself. Probably immature, defiantly petty, but he didn’t care just as long as she left him alone.
Konoha’s bright morning that he’d greeted at about the same time he’d greeted Konoha’s gate had turned to mid-evening, the sky dark gray with storm clouds. The air was clear and seemed to crackle a little, from somebody’s lightning ninjutsu or from actual lighting, Ryuichi couldn’t tell. Leaves swirled around the street, almost empty now, Konoha’s seal over the entrance to ANBU HQ for the obvious reasons. He was leaving it to go somewhere he didn’t quite know for obvious reasons. To relax. To lose the tension he’d been carrying around for too long. To forget that his hand hurt.
To get his head out of mission mentality, because that was the only one of his ills that he couldn’t just ignore. He scuffed his boots against the sidewalk and wondered if he wanted to get himself a beating in one of the training fields or just get drunk. There was a piece of bubblegum next to his foot, dried out and neon pink, and Ryuichi wondered if this was how the rest of his life was going to pan out. He wondered if it was always going to look like this—the intensity of life coming face to face with the other thing, adrenaline and blood and pain, and then mission over, sorry guys, you have to pretend to be normal for a while.
Well. At least until the next mission or he died during the course of another service to dear old Konoha. That could be long or short, hours or days, months if it got really bad. Some ninja enjoyed their time off. Some ninja needed it.
Ryuichi didn’t. He wanted another fight. He wanted his hand to stop hurting.
He wanted a great many things and wasn’t going to get any of them, short of sudden divine intervention.
The stone faces of all Konoha’s Hokages, past and present, loomed at the horizon line. Shadows deepened the somber lines of their faces, made by ninjutsu and civilian labor because shinobi always had better things to do. Yondaime, dead by one last good deed, looked off to the side, staring at something in the distance. Maybe the last dream that had truly been his, that hadn’t belonged to Konoha.
Ryuichi looked down at the bubblegum again.
It seemed that his life conspired to give him headaches.
“Hey, Ryuichi!”
His head snapped up, and Kurosuki Ise waved as she walked over. She was thick-wasted, heavy jawed, and a full two inches taller than Ryuichi himself. Scruffy blonde hair stuck out from under her forehead protector, dancing over her eyes and the ugly bruise over her right cheek, and the standard chuunin uniform hugged in a few of the right places and almost all of the wrong ones. It had never been flattering on her.
No one ever told Ise she was pretty. Ryuichi might have been the only one who thought she was.
She wore six earrings in each ear and a silver chain around her neck. Ryuichi had given her the earrings and didn’t know whether she kept them because she liked them, or because they had been a gift. For all he knew, they might have been horribly tacky and Ise hated them.
She wore them, though, so it meant something. Ryuichi just didn’t know what.
It didn’t matter in their profession.
“You look like shit,” she said in way of greeting. “I hope it’s not contagious.”
He groaned. “Don’t tell me you became a smartass while I was gone. I’ve already got a headache.”
Ise snorted. “And not a hangover? Damn, there’s a problem we need to solve.”
There was really no other option but to agree with her. “That’s a good idea,” he said. For a moment, Ryuichi smiled at her. It wasn’t much of one, but she smiled back, and it was big enough for the both of them.
“I’ve always got good ideas,” Ise said. “One of use has to, you know.”
“Of course,” he deadpanned.
“You’re all done in there?” she asked, indicating HQ with her head.
In the end, Ise was a shinobi, and duty always came first. It was one of the first rules they had been taught in the Academy, reinforced by a parade of teachers. The strongest one had been an ill-tempered Jounin named Kaede, who was probably one of the worst offenders of that rule. Ise knew her place in the great scheme that was Konoha, though, and Ryuichi did too.
If one wanted to survive, they followed some of the rules. Not all of them, but a few couldn’t be avoided. It was the nature of the game, understanding which rules could be bent, which could be broken, and which couldn’t be ignored.
“Yeah,” Ryuichi said.
“Need to see a medic?”
He scowled at her.
“Guess not. Let’s get drunk.”
***
Time passed, as time was known to do in the presence of alcohol—in blurred segments twisted up in emotions that defied titles or definitions. They drank on the roof of Ise’s apartment and watched the sky turn black. Sometimes they spoke, mostly of unimportant things they forgot minutes later. Mostly they touched each other, Ryuichi running his hands up her bare arms, pausing at the scars he knows and brushing over the ones he doesn’t want to think about, and Ise fussing with his hair, braiding and unbraiding it over and over again until she lost the tie and gave up. They didn’t have sex and didn’t need to, intimacy possible through gestures and the things they tell each other without words.
No one understood them. Sometimes they didn’t, either, but comprehension wasn’t required in their relationship. It never had been.
Above them, a few stars peaked through the clouds. It didn’t rain, though the air still tasted like lightning to Ryuichi. They sat on the edge of the roof and saluted all the teammates who didn’t make it back, a silent look between them that said they knew how lucky they were, even if they’d never admit it aloud.
If those words ever hit the air, if either of them ever admitted they weren’t indestructible, barriers would fall and they wouldn’t ever come up again. And neither of them were the type of shinobi who could survive that.
“I think I’m going to be miserable in the morning,” Ise said, head resting on his shoulder and hands touching his good arm, ghosting over the most recent scars-to-be. “A hangover to beat all the hangovers I ever had before. Do you think we drank too much?”
Ryuichi spared a glance to the bottles of grin and whisky glinting against the dark concrete of the roof, all but a select few empty, the sheen of glass and amber liquid fading as the stars glowed brighter. Then he closed his eyes against the truth of the morning that he didn’t want to contemplate. “We’ll be fine.”
“We always are.”
“Yeah.”
Ise shifted against him. “When’s your hand gonna heal?”
Ryuichi thought about it for a moment, and then another when he realized he didn’t know, didn’t remember what the medic had told him, or if the medic had ever said anything about it at all. “Week, maybe,” he guessed. “I’m not sure. Brass won’t give me any new missions ‘til then, anyways.”
He’d take missions even if he were hurt, even if he couldn’t use his hand, because Ryuichi couldn’t contemplate a life that didn’t include fighting. He was a shinobi, too much of one to ever consider stopping until he died because of it.
It might have helped if he had been better, if he had been a true prodigy, like his sister or Sharingan no Kakashi. At least then he would’ve had an excuse as to why he couldn’t quit, couldn’t even take a break when his head felt like it was going to implode.
As it was, Ryuichi had no excuses, and no desire to explain why he was how he was. He’d train harder to make up the lost time gained from no missions for a month. It wouldn’t be so different. He’d keep working and the next mission would kill him, or it wouldn’t.
“I think,” Ise began, “you can use these more than I can.”
She pressed a small pill bottle into his hand, and Ryuichi opened his eyes enough to give her a questioning look. Her eyes didn’t give anything useful away and so he looked down at his hand. The bottle was orange and made of durable plastic, a mirror image of military grade medicine except for the fact that the white label was utterly devoid of kanji. He shook it once and saw the pills inside, maybe twenty, maybe more. They were all the dark red color of old blood, no marks or symbols to explain their use.
That was probably the idea.
Ise wrapped her arms around his waist, pressing against him silently. Ryuichi couldn’t see her face from that angle, couldn’t imagine her expression then, and wondered briefly if he really wanted to. “A medic gave ‘em to me. Traded, actually.”
The hint of a frown entered her voice, and it might have been a scowl except for the alcohol. Ryuichi closed his hand around the pill bottle and waited for Ise to finish explaining.
“He said I could hand over three weeks’ pay or suck his dick, and then it’d be square between us. Stupid fucker,” she snickered. “Got himself blown up on the border, so turns out I didn’t have to choose after all. Gods bless the makers of explosive notes, ‘case fuck if that wasn’t ironic as hell, going out in a blaze of glory and what not. Guess he got what he wanted, a dead guy needing a grave and one last good time before it all came crashing down.”
She laughed again, digging her nails into Ryuichi’s sides. He didn’t complain. “I’ve got a fucked up sense of humor,” she mumbled, maybe sad, maybe just drunk.
“I think everyone does,” Ryuichi said quietly.
Ise shook her head. “Maybe. Or maybe I’m a special case. Sensei says that sometimes. Think she means it?”
“Probably.”
“Fuckit. She shouldn’t be talking,” Ise muttered. “Goddamn alcoholic.”
Ryuichi thought of the bottles piled on the roof and wisely refrained from comment. “What’s with these?” he asked instead, shaking the pill bottle.
Ise wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. “Medic told me the name, but I forgot. He was working on makin’ new soldier-pills—better ones, supposed to work for longer, less of a crash at the end, shit like that.”
Somewhere on one of the training fields, somebody detonated an explosive note, and then another. Somebody else retaliated with what sounded like either a katon blast or a wind jutsu.
“’Course, he made some mistakes,” she continued, grabbing one of the bottles that wasn’t completely empty and taking a quick swing. “Made some stuff Higher Ups didn’t like—selling ‘em to speed freaks like us didn’t help much either, I’m guessing. Probably would’ve gotten a visit from the MPs if he hadn’t gotten blown up. Anyways, this stuff’s a hell of a lot stronger than what you’re usin’. Works like a monster.”
Ryuichi thought about the track-marks dotting her arms and the scars around her veins that hadn’t yet faded. He thought about the times when he’d used things stronger than what the medics proscribed, tried to remember if he regretted any of them.
The answer came back negative—because nothing bad had happened or because he was stupid beyond hopes of redemption like several teammates had claimed, Ryuichi couldn’t tell.
“Painkillers?” he asked.
“Has that side-effect, yeah. Dulls anything short of death, from what I heard.”
“You tried it?”
“Once. Made me sick afterwards, but it did what I needed,” Ise said, taking another gulp of whisky. “Fuck, this stuff’s nasty. Anyways, I thought you could use it more than me. ANBU’s more prone to injury than the rest of us mortals, as it were.”
Ryuichi laughed quietly, gallows humor.
Ise gave him a sideways look, part indignation, part drunken confusion. “I’m doin’ you a favor, Ryuichi.”
That sobered him faster than a slap would have, and he shook his head in apology. “I know.”
“‘Cause if you get caught with that, nobody’s gonna be happy,” she warned, shinobi instincts bleeding through the haze of bad whisky and worse gin. “You’ll never pass those off as soldier-pills, so don’t even try.”
“I know,” Ryuichi repeated.
Ise snorted. “Do you? Do you really?”
He was quiet for a long time. There was nothing he wanted to say and nothing that would change what Ise thought of him. Eventually she mumbled something that might have been an apology and they didn’t talk about the pills any further. The topics of kunai and old friends came up—Ise inquired after his most recent teammates though she’d never met them and Ryuichi said they were fine, a generic response because he didn’t want to think too hard about the last mission.
Too many things could have gone wrong. It was one of Ryuichi’s faults—or at least he considered it to be one—that the consequences of his decisions chose to hit him only after the fact, when there was no chance of changing what he had done.
Setsu could have died if he’d been a second slower in getting to her. Hiroji made a mistake bad enough to cost him his mask if anyone figured out the team had lied—the punishment wouldn’t have been lenient if they’d written out the mistake with the clones, but gods, it would be so much worse if the brass discovered it by chance.
Likely it wouldn’t be discovered. Setsu had no reason to speak about it, and Hiroji had less of one. Ryuichi knew it was possible, though, and the alcohol made him worry about it.
Setsu and Hiroji were not his friends. They shouldn’t have meant anything at all to him, and yet…
And yet he had lied for them, for Hiroji and for Setsu because they were friends even if Ryuichi didn’t share the sentiment, and they looked out for each other.
He looked at Ise and wondered when he’d lost that ability, to make teammates into something more without having to think so damn hard about it.
“I think I made a mistake somewhere,” he said suddenly.
It seemed important. Maybe it was.
Ise gave him a look he couldn’t read. “One you can’t walk away from?”
“I don’t know yet.”
She shrugged, pragmatism learned from a taijutsu-master and long-time alcoholic named Kaede. “Then you’d best keep going. We’re not dead yet.”
Ryuichi smiled ever so slightly. “No. How’s the ending go to that? I forgot.”
“Sensei won’t be happy to hear that, but she’ll get over it,” Ise said. “’s like this—we’re not dead, so we’re gonna keep going until we are, ‘cause giving up's for losers.”
“She wasn’t very eloquent.”
“She never needed to be.”
“No.”
The silence stayed for a while, and neither of them broke it. Above them, a storm gathered, no contrast between the new clouds and the night that had been there for several hours. If not for the first raindrops, they wouldn’t have known it was coming at all.
Ise pressed her forehead against his. “Don’t die on me,” she said.
“I won’t.”
“Promise?”
“Yeah,” he said, even though it was a lie, and she knew it was a lie, never something a shinobi could hope to guarantee even when they were drunk.
As the rain came down, Ryuichi almost told Ise he loved her. Instead he watched the storm fall on Konoha, remembering a time before things got complicated. |
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