| [May. 28th, 2009|07:26 pm] |
"I thought I could change it up with a little dancing," Asuma said easily, vaulting after his touchy partner. "Just to keep things fresh. Variety's important, y'know." And it was more than a little entertaining to watch Natsumi's mood skid between annoyed and reluctantly amused, with occasional touches of homicidal.
She was an interesting travelling companion. Occasionally talkative--even snarky sometimes, when he caught her just right--but often thoughtfully silent, when she wasn't being bossy as all hell. Picky about their camping site, fiddly with little things (like the arrangement of branches in the campfire, which was just weird), determined to lead the way (which included stealing his map--then handing it right back when she couldn't make sense of the coded annotations; he'd had to laugh at that), and she took far too long getting ready in the morning.
It was just too easy to like her.
Especially with his current view.
"Besides, they'll expect to see us coming," he added, leaping another scatter of fallen branches. "Or one of us, at least. Unless you can be stealthy on the middle of a rope bridge."
The closer they got, the more he recognized the landscape. And on the other side of that hilltop was nature's version of a hole in the world; a tall, rocky canyon stretched high above a violent white-water river. It was a human nature thing, he thought, to see something like that and decide the other side was the perfect real estate for a shrine. How they'd wrestled the building materials over one slender rope bridge, he had no idea.
Good place for a ransom, though. Provided you weren't the guy paying up. |
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