| [Dec. 8th, 2011|08:34 am] |
Watching Ibiki’s ass flex its way up a mountain-side was a life experience Asuma could actually have lived without — along with the mud Ibiki kicked back behind him. Especially when they hit a forty-foot stretch of vertical wall.
“Y’mind?” he shouted up, shaking away the grit that wanted to clog the eye holes of his mask.
Ibiki paused on a slab of solid rock, waiting for him to catch up. “You'd prefer to take the lead?" he asked coolly.
“You bet I would, chuckles,” Asuma said, without stopping. He forged ahead, slip-sliding on chunks of mud that peeled away from the crumbling cliff-wall, slapping palmfuls of chakra down to steady himself when his boots skidded. The ANBU cloak around his neck flapped behind him like a lead-weighted sheet, already drenched by the rain.
Ibiki fell wordlessly into pace behind him, staying slightly to one side to avoid the showers Asuma kicked down, and shadowed Asuma up to the next plateau. The trail evened out again, becoming something that was actually hikeable with chakra-help. They kept up a sturdy pace and mostly made it to the top without incident, discounting the one time Asuma lost his footing completely, and the moment Ibiki was almost killed by an uprooting tree.
Ibiki caught Asuma; Asuma grabbed Ibiki. By silent agreement, they would never speak of it again.
At the first opportunity, Asuma collapsed face down on flat, snow-covered ground. “Urgh,” he informed the general universe. “How long was that? Felt like hours.”
Glacier-calm, Ibiki stopped next to him. “Are you alright?” he asked, and Asuma was only mollified by the way he sounded breathless, too.
Asuma turned his head, squinting up. Ibiki had his hands braced on his knees while he checked his watch.
“Five hours and fifty-seven minutes,” Ibiki said.
“You timed us,” Asuma said. “What am I saying, of course you timed us. Six hours? Kannon save me, I think my knees are melting.”
"But you're not actually injured, correct?" Ibiki asked, concerned as a stone wall. Then he surprised Asuma by holding a hand out. "Shall we get out of the sleet?"
There was having a moral objection to someone, and then there was staying on your face in a snowbank until bears came to eat you. Asuma pulled himself up, took the mud-caked, ANBU-gloved hand, and let Ibiki haul him to his feet.
“First time I’ve liked your logic,” he said. “Y’reckon the village will have pie?”
"At the inn?" Ibiki shrugged, flicking wet snow from his pony-tail. "It seems likely." He set off, pausing a half-step for Asuma to catch up to his shoulder, and continued: "I imagine pie is a topic we can actually agree on."
First one so far.
Ibiki stretched out broad shoulders, working off the kinks of a hard climb. "If Hatake and Sakamoto are taking the expected route, making the time expected of them, given Sakamoto's condition, we should have half a day to enjoy pie before they show up."
“Gives us time to track down that medic, too,” Asuma agreed. “We’re probably going to need her.”
If there was any justice in the world, she’d be pretty, curvy, and sympathetic to men half-drowned by a mountain. |
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