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Hyuuga Haruichi was in a mood. The kind of mood which (literally, if you read it backwards) spelled doom upon the heads of any who crossed him, or even just those who crossed his path. It was his cousin's doing, but Hiashi was beyond his ability to throttle with his bare hands and so the agents were bearing the brunt of it instead.
Word had spread quickly amongst them to avoid the medic unless you were reasonably sure you were about to die otherwise; and even then it was being suggested that perhaps a quiet and dignified death might be better than what awaited anybody who decided to approach Haruichi-sensei. They had all been warned and yet they'd bothered him anyway. Bloody well gone and summoned him from the Infirmary to the briefing rooms when he was in the middle of alphabetising the autopsies.
Haruichi struck into the debriefing room and found himself setting his eyes on perhaps the most confusing double-image a Hyuuga could stumble upon.
There was a woman he didn't recognize, standing in a uniform which meant he should recognize her; poised in the most laconic manner imaginable, with a chakra system that looked like a tangle of lit fuses. And she was staring at him.
Haruichi managed to stop himself from staring back after a moment, especially once he actually bothered to take in the 360 field of vision his eyes were granting him and realized nobody else was around. A blink later and the stressed veins around his eyes vanished. His temper did not. Annoyed white eyes met lidded hazel ones.
"Someone in here had better be dying," he announced, shoving his hands into his pockets. "I'll be charitable and assume it's not you."
Katsuko blinked. So, a Hyuuga, then. An irate Hyuuga. She tilted her head to the side to examine him for a few seconds.
"Hello to you too," she drawled, and gave him a bland smile. "Name's Ueno Katsuko. Your mission partner, apparently."
Before the Hyuuga was able to reply, the door opened and a harried looking man with spectacles and an armful of documents rushed through. "Agents Hyuuga and Ueno?" he asked without looking up. "You have a B-rank retrieval mission to Suna. The details are in the report. You leave in twenty minutes." He stuffed a file into each agents' hands and rushed through the door again, slamming it shut on his way out.
Katsuko lifted an eyebrow at the man's abrupt departure and decided that if she was going on a B-rank mission right off the bat she was entitled to a little sit-down. Flopping down on the couch, she flipped open the file and shuffled through the thin sheaf of papers.
Retrieval mission.
Suna.
Target an heir to a valuable bloodline limit. Willing to defect to Konoha.
She blinked at the estimated pay and gave a low whistle. "Huh. Intel must really want this guy on our side." A quick glance at the medic showed he was still staring at the mission brief, brows furrowed. "You want a few minutes to get ready?"
Haruichi's own perusal of the file was less relaxed and far more thorough. Especially once he stopped staring at it and pushed his glasses onto his face so he could read. He'd actually never been handed an ANBU mission brief before. It'd always been 'Hyuuga-sensei, Hatake went off on a suicide mission so can you go fetch him back?' or 'Hyuuga-sensei, we think that team who left last week are gonna make it back okay, but just in case can you go check the border in case they lose any limbs' or 'Haruichi-sensei, can you go find Tousaki and the Inuzuka? We don't know exactly where they are but there's bound to be a trail of blood...'
Obviously none of those situations, or the dozen others, had included paperwork prior to departure - though there was always plenty to reward him when he got back. Running out to save somebody from an ungodly fate in the course of elite ninja bloodbathery couldn't wait for the medic to stand there and check through some forms.
Unless you were this poor bastard, apparently.
Racing his white eyes down the page, Haruichi snatched up the details with an eagerness his earlier demeanour would have excluded from all realms of possibility. Eastern Wind Country, a well-secured fortress in the desert, and a client demand from a clan even somebody with Haruichi's breeding had never heard of.
The Ayanami clan wanted Konoha to retrieve their heir from capture at the hands of some "freelance" scientific concern, and the prize for doing so to their satisfaction was the whole clan itself. A defection of about twenty-five souls from Sunagakure (who clearly hadn't protected them) to Konohagakure (so long as they proved that they could). Bring the heir back to Konoha, deliver her to the hands of the Ayanami envoys at Hokage-sama's Palace, and then Konoha would have a new clan in their ranks. Legitimately, no less.
Provided the ANBU didn't die horribly in the attempt first, of course. Haruichi automatically memorized every detail provided; the Heir was a female, and young - teenage at most. Haruichi's role was obvious - medical support to make sure Ayanami-hime survived the rescue, and the unwritten duty to use his eyes to be sure she had a kekkei genkai worth the trouble; Ueno Katsuko's role was even more plain - blow the "scientists" to smithereens on their way out the door.
There was another reason she was there, too, of course. Haruichi snorted softly as he reached the bottom of the brief - then looked up and tossed it to the woman sprawled prone on the couch.
"He gave me yours, Ueno-san," he said, voice clipped but quieter. Matter-of-fact, rather than matter-of-factly-pissed. "Check the bottom right corner, if you like. I'll meet you at HQ's front gate in twenty minutes, if that's acceptable."
Time enough to get changed, leave some patient notes and prescriptions for Kanae and the nurses, and put together a note to be delivered to Hoshi at home. A pause then, as Haruichi's long-abandoned manners were reawakened by the thought her.
He stepped over to Ueno Katsuko, head tilted slightly to the side. "It's par for the course in this madhouse, but the fact remains - we haven't been properly introduced." A slight bow. "Hyuuga Haruichi."
Katsuko blinked as she caught her folder. What was with all the hating? This guy went through mood swings faster than her mother did during her "time of the month". She scanned the bottom right corner of her mission brief, lips pursing as she realized...
Agent Ueno, you are to monitor Agent Hyuuga to ensure that the Hyuuga bloodline is not compromised in any way during the mission...
...That besides blowing things up on this mission, she was basically a glorified babysitter.
Damn. Well, she couldn't blame the man, then. Hyuuga had been here longer than she had. Being "monitored" by a new ANBU had to sting.
His abrupt change in manner and his cordial introduction caught her off guard for only a second.
"Ah...well, just call me Katsuko. Honorifics take too much work. And it looks like I'll be needing your help after this mission--this is my first day at ANBU. Sorry we had to meet like this, though."
There, no room for him to get insulted, right? It'd be a pain in the ass to piss her medic off on the first day.
"It could have been worse," Haruichi told her - and he knew what he was talking about. They could have met when she was bleeding all over the stairwell, for instance. Or perhaps when she was in the middle of a particularly spectacular psychotic episode. Hell, Haruichi had occassionally met agents under his care on autopsy tables.
The thought sobered him most of the way out of his temper, though the irritation had already begun to lift in the face of a mission assignment. Haruichi always had his head in the game when work was at hand, and this would be no different. He wouldn't let the details slip his grip, and he needed a clear head for that.
He picked up Katsuko's discarded file - his one, intendedly - and scrawled an initial in the bottom corner to verify he'd read it and accepted the mission. Then, with a final nod to his new mission partner, he departed in a quick sprint for the Infirmary and the myriad tasks that had to see to before they took off. It was most certainly not every day that Hyuuga Haruichi went out into the deserts storming fortresses to rescue princesses, but he wasn't about to let it go to his head.
It was raining. It was cold and dark and miserable and it was raining.
Katsuko gritted her teeth and drew her civilian-issue raincoat tighter around herself. Packing for the mission had taken three short minutes: one minute to check her armor and weapons, one minute to rearrange the contents of her ready-to-go field backpack, and one minute to glower out her window at the thunderstorm the heavens had decided to dump on their heads this very fine evening.
Lightning cracked bright fire across the sky. Katsuko flinched and cowered leaned into the wall of HQ's front gate, hoping that the slanted roof would shield her from the worst of the storm. Damn storm. Damn lightning. Damn lightning storm. Wasn't Konoha supposed to be sunny, like, all the damn time? What the hells had happened?
At least it wasn't hailing. Tonight's resemblance to...that night...was already too much.
Katsuko narrowed her eyes and shook herself.
Whatever. No time to trauma-flash now. She had to focus on the mission. The desert mission. The desert mission in which there was absolutely no rain. Thank the gods for deserts--just not Suna ninja. Suna ninja were tricky bastards.
And where the hell was Haruichi? The sooner they started off on this adventure the better.
There was nary a splish as Haruichi's booted feet dropped onto the rain-soaked ground beside Katsuko a moment later - not that she'd have been able to recognize him from earlier. Pale armour and black cloth had replaced his lab coat and regular clothes, a white mask marked only with a small green cross below the eye had replaced his temperamental face and the curse-seal marking his forehead. He'd changed for the mission, literally, and in more ways than were visible. It was never easy writing that note for Hoshi, but after the first mission he'd left in these clothes he would always be grateful for the chance.
He was also wearing a sandy-beige coloured coat with a cavernous hood from which his masked face looked out. The sleeves were long, the pockets deep and the material utterly waterproof and perfectly temperate.
From behind his dark eye holes, Haruichi's white eyes took in the rather pitiful affair that was Ueno Katsuko huddled against the rain in civilian issue tat and decided he must be psychic after all.
"Quartermaster must have forgotten to issue you with this," he said, diplomatically - handing her a coat of her own in exactly her size.
He told himself he wasn't being kind, it was simply the case that if she wasn't properly attired she'd come down with pneumonia and he'd be left to clean up the mess.
It wasn't a sigh of relief that escaped her. No, sir , not at all. Just letting some tension go, practicing those breathing exercises.
Katsuko resisted the urge to hug the Hyuuga and instead reached over to take the lifesaver raincoat from his hand. "Thank you so much," she said with heartfelt sincerity. "You are now my favorite person."
Okay. So, she might as well have given him a hug. Never mind. Katsuko divested herself of the pathetic thing that was her former raincoat and wriggled into the ANBU one, relishing the sudden absence of rain splashing against her extremities. This time she really did let out a sigh of relief. Pride was overrated, anyways.
Haruichi had apparently shed his anger with his civilian clothes and was waiting impassively for her to finish changing. His body language revealed as much about his current state of mind as his mask did, which was to say: nothing.
Katsuko grinned broadly at her mission partner, clapping her hands together to form a translocation seal. "Ready to go?"
Deserts. Nice, beautiful, no-rain deserts. She couldn't wait!
Haruichi took one last look through the gate, to the rain-dimmed village that was his whole world, and then closed his eyes to save it inside himself. Thinking especially of Hoshi, and how he wished he wasn't leaving her with only Pika for company during this storm.
I'll hurry back home.
Half a second and a deep breath later, he looked at Katsuko - poised ready for action behind her mask with eagerness in her voice. Definitely ready to try and outrun this rain. "Ready," he confirmed, bringing his own gloved hands together.
Minutes later they were out of Konoha.
Hours later they were out of Fire Country.
Days later they were ankle-deep in whipping sands, night having fallen deep around them once more. The cascades of rain and strikes of lightning had indeed fallen far behind them, but now Haruichi and Katsuko were facing difficult weather of a different kind. Wind Country had its name for a reason and Haruichi was busy cursing onomatopoeia in all it's godforsaken forms as the wind howled and screeched around them and kept moving over the eternally shifting dunes. He hunched deeper into his trench coat, and turned out his sand-filled pockets for the fifth time that hour.
It seemed that though their coats were highly effective camouflage, the desert itself was doing a far better job of hiding their target from them. No landmarks existed on this side of the desert, and the perpetual gales worked to whip the dunes into altered shapes almost before their eyes. It was no wonder that these kidnapping bastards had chosen to establish themselves out in this desolate stretch of Wind Country's territory; there was no way to find your way.
Haruichi, running about ten feet to the right of Katsuko, gestured out with his hand to catch her attention and signal a stop. His boots whispered on the soft sand as he dug his heels in, and skipped a few steps until they both met in the lee of a high dune. The wind hissed overhead, but they put their heads together and spoke below it.
"We're completely bloody lost," Haruichi declared, nipping the map Intel had furnished them with from his inner pocket and holding it out under their noses in the eerie desert starlight. "Look, Intel's map places the target compound somewhere around this... wait..." Off came Haruichi's mask. On went Haruichi's glasses.
Out came Haruichi's most infuriated scowl. "They called this place the Dunes of Doom? You are fucking kidding me!"
The Dunes of Doom? The Dunes of Doom? Katsuko bit down the first five things that came to mind and said, dryly, "Well, they get points for alliteration. Also, for self-explanatory titles."
She shuffled to peer over Haruichi's shoulder, squinting at the vague squiggles and random shapes that was Intel's idea of a map. Some chucklehead had circled a despicably large portion of "The Dunes of Doom" with a red marker, writing that the targets were located "somewhere in this general area, in a sandstone bunker hidden under the Cliff of Sorrows".
The bastard had even drawn a smiley face.
Katsuko let out a forlorn sigh, shoulders drooping.
This was troublesome.
But it wasn't raining anymore, so that meant...
She glanced up at the night sky, resplendent with stars.
Crap. They'd have to do that celestial navigation thing.
"Haruichi?" The set of her mission partner's shoulders suggested extreme, if not homicidal rage. Katsuko tapped him on the back. "The stars are out. Can you navigate by that?"
Hopefully he wouldn't ask why a jounin didn't know her astronomy. Katsuko had learned that telling people she'd slept through survival training in the Academy didn't inspire much trust.
Haruichi was wondering if this was becoming a trend: being supplied with motive to ensure he made it back to Konoha alive due to the neccessity of - as the kids these days said - having to smack a bitch. He was going to get the name of this thing's Intel cartographer and demonstrate to the git the exciting and painful ways in which a set of compasses could be used to find one's way from their ass to their elbow.
But right now, such hopes did neither them nor their client any good whatsoever. Haruichi took one last incredulous look at the map --Cliff of Sorrows? He'd 'sorrow' them, alright-- and then to Katsuko's hand and then her rat-masked face, tilted up towards the canopy of space above them.
It was purest starlight. Moonless, cloudless and devoid of any light pollution. The stars above them were spectacularly distant and bright, speckled screeds of light from horizon to horizon. Haruichi silently gazed up into it, finally having to close his eyes gently, before the sensation of falling upwards into it took grip in his body as well as his mind.
He loved the stars. Being reminded of that brought his mind to Hoshi, and he felt a strain of traitorous feeling as he pushed her name away from his thoughts.
"Of course I can," he responded quietly, turning his face away from the stars. Astronomy was a stronger scientific love of his than even medicine, and he'd never once gotten lost when it came to tracking a path by the night sky. He didn't even think of why Katsuko might not be taking charge of finding their way herself, too busy with the calculations in his mind to spare thoughts for why he was the one making them. It took only a minute, and the consultation of a compass to align the arcs of several key stars, and he had them a point of reference.
"Alright," he said, finger tracing along the axis of the map. "We can keep track of ourselves if we start a grid search now," he led his finger north past the... Wastes of Woe (official now, somebody would be dying when he got home)... and paused at the far edge of the mapped Dunes. "North by Polaris. Then we can reference East by Sirius. I'll use my byakugan as well, to expand our search area."
Night was cool enough, and Haruichi had no intention of storming a sandstone fortress in the middle of the day with sunburn and heatstroke. He wanted to do this quickly, and he had no doubt Katsuko did too. | |
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