| Wild Dog in a Nest of Vipers [closed to Ginta, Tsume, & Ibiki] |
[Apr. 6th, 2009|10:44 pm] |
[Takes place Saturday, March 22, three days after Don't Wanna Fight This War, and two days after Picking Up the Pieces]
Ginta was just on his way out his door when he ran into Tsume and Kuromaru. That wasn't unusual--they were neighbors. But seeing them in the company of Abe Jimon was. He knew the man more by reputation than direct experience. Officially he was one of Intel's debriefers, but rumor held that he worked Internal Ops, handling the sort of debriefings that followed mission failures, agent deaths, suspicions of treachery...
"Hey Tsume, Kuromaru," he said casually. "What's up?" He nodded a half-bow to Abe, who returned it with stiff-necked formality. "You coming in or going out?"
Tsume gave their escort a sharp-eyed glance. "Going out, apparently," she said. Her voice held nothing more alarming than irritation. Kuromaru, at her side, evinced a distinctly doggy version of the same sentiment, shaking his ruff and grumbling something so low it sounded like a growl.
"That good, huh?" Ginta asked. He gave Abe a cool look. "Something going on a friend ought to be concerned about?"
"Not at all, Sakamoto-san," Abe replied smoothly. "It just happens that I was delivering a request to Inuzuka-san to go over some details of her latest mission. Since she happened to be in, we agreed that there was no time like the present." ( His smile made Ginta itch. ) |
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| Don't Wanna Fight This War [Ryouma and Ginta] |
[Mar. 14th, 2009|03:32 pm] |
[[Takes place on March 19, thirteen days after The Safest Place You've Found and fourteen days after If the Door's Still Open--both of which you should probably reread for context.]]
Ryouma waited a week and a half before he let himself even think it. At first it was simply so he wouldn’t hobble down the hall and rip Ginta’s head off; then it was because nobody took a man seriously when he was on crutches, and if he wanted the man who never took anything seriously to do so for once in his life, it was going to be the moment when Ryouma punched Ginta in the face and then demanded what the hell he’d thought he was doing. Kissing Kakashi was one thing; if Kakashi had let him do it, obviously there would've been nothing for Ryouma to do but congratulate Ginta and offer to compare notes. But from the way Kakashi told the story, that hadn't been a kiss so much as an assault. And Ginta had lied.
Even so, Ryouma decided on the second day that he didn't really want to punch Ginta in the face anymore. An explanation--and, okay, a chance to do some yelling--would be enough. He figured he’d wait till he lost the crutches anyway, just so he’d have the option.
( In the meantime he tried not to think. ) |
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| Fighting Words and Dirty Talk [closed to Ginta & Asuma] |
[Mar. 12th, 2009|07:41 pm] |
Takes place Sunday, March 16, the morning after Pleased to Meet You, Won't You Lock Me in a Cage, two days after Keeping Secrets with the Koi.
Ginta was a well-connected gossip, so it was no surprise that he was one of the first to know that the Hokage's prodigal son was back. In fact, not only was Sarutobi Asuma back, but he had been sworn into ANBU almost as soon as the ink was dry on whatever abbreviated background check they'd done on him. Rumor was he'd had an ANBU tail the whole time since he ran away, anyway. He'd spent a while bumming around playing farmer and sword-sharpener and a few other things, then settled down and become a respectable shinobi, standing as one of the Twelve Elite who guarded Fire Country's highest-ranking Daimyou.
Blood proved true, was the word on the street. So it was no surprise at all that after that little coup attempt on his daimyou went bust, Asuma was back in Konoha wearing the leaf on his forehead like he'd never left it. Ginta had to wonder if Asuma's retirement from daimyou-sitting duty was by choice or edict. For that matter, there was every chance those twelve guardians had all been undercover ANBU to begin with. He was definitely curious to see how fresh the ink really was on Asuma's tattoo.
( Besides all that, they'd sort of known each other as kids. ) |
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| Keeping Secrets With The Koi [closed to Ginta] |
[Feb. 4th, 2009|01:35 am] |
[ Takes place March 14, three days after Justify My Reasons ]
The storehouse walls were cold and dusty, obscured by the boxes and bundles the building contained. The ceiling, Ginta thought, was absurdly high. They could have put in a whole additional floor where chains and draperies hung from a ceiling lost in darkness. On the grounds of a minor daimyou's estate, it was far from being a simple place to keep household items not currently in use. Thick, fire-proof stone kept dust, darkness, and sound in; robbers, flames, and inquisitive trespassers out. There were hooks embedded in the grey walls at regular intervals, some at a perfect height for restraining a man. It must have been built with holding captives in mind--a relic from an earlier age when every daimyou had maintained his own private army, before the rise of the great ninja villages.
Ginta was more than happy to take advantage of it now. He smiled at the man bound wrists and ankles to the wall. One red eye and one grey crinkled in an answering grin.
"You miss me?" he asked, and moved in close, rising on his toes, pressing his armoured torso against Kakashi's.
"Where were you, Jackass?"
"Mission, Genius," Ginta said. ( He pulled Kakashi's mask down. ) |
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| Rescue Me [closed to Ginta & Hiro] |
[Jan. 23rd, 2009|01:12 am] |
[ Takes place five years previously, the night the Kyuubi attacked Konoha. ]
The world was painted in shades of flame-blue and blood-blue and desperation-blue. (His eyes couldn't see that third but he knew it was there; he breathed it with every breath, thick and cloying.) Hiro's Byakugan took in the destruction around him, displaying a scene of monochrome catastrophe.
He was too tired for it to even affect him any more. Twenty-six hours since the first alarms had sounded--they still blared in the background unattended, repetitive klaxxons echoing through the fog and smoke--and Hiro had settled into a rhythm now.
First find the Kyuubi; he didn't need the Byakugan for that, following the screams would do. ( Screams were good, it meant someone was still alive. ) |
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| Justify My Reasons [closed to Ginta & Kotetsu] |
[Nov. 9th, 2008|11:50 pm] |
[Takes place approximately five days after If the Door's Still Open and three days after Hit the Bell Curve]
Ginta had picked up the mission assignment papers without even looking at them. He didn't much care, really. A mission was good. Any mission, he'd told the chuunin manning the assignment desk. Something to get him out of town and away from thinking about things that really weren't worth losing sleep over. People that really weren't worth losing sleep over.
It was straightforward; an easy B-rank. Take out some guy who might or might not deserve death at the hands of an ANBU assassin. Bring back proof of the death. Get paid. Go home. The perfect thing. Exactly what he needed.
He let himself into the briefing room, found it unoccupied, and set up shop with a bag of donuts and a steaming cup of coffee, loaded with enough sugar to make it nearly a syrup at the bottom before he stirred it. The donuts were good. He was halfway through the second one before he bothered to actually look at the mission brief.
Partnered with a chuunin. Hagane Kotetsu. That was the shaggy-haired kid with the bandaged nose who'd come to get him and Kakashi out of hot water back in December. Damn, he was kind of a doofus. But then this was an easy mission. And he could always cheat the kid at cards to pass the time. Speaking of which... He glanced at his watch. Did he have the wrong briefing room? Where the hell were Intel and Hagane? |
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| If the Door's Still Open [closed to Ginta and Ryouma] |
[Oct. 24th, 2008|07:41 pm] |
[Takes place the day after Just Promise to Keep Your Heart Broken and Heaven Forbid You End Up Alone]
The same medics who had discharged Ginta only an hour before were the ones to respond to Kakashi's clone. They found Ginta chakra-depleted and limp in the hall outside Kakashi's room, and couldn't understand how they'd managed to miss such a severe chakra deficit. It meant Ginta had no choice in the matter--he was admitted to the locked ANBU ward for tests and observation. He was there for a day and half before they finally let him go home.
Thirty-six hours was a lot of time to think about something. A lot of time especially if you didn't have any convenient distractions, as Ginta didn't. At first he'd sat shockingly still while medics examined him in the hall outside Kakashi's hospital room. Remained shockingly silent for hours, unable to sleep, in his own hospital bed on the locked ANBU floor after that. His silence, in fact, had so concerned the medics that they'd called in psych. It was uncharacteristic, they said. A sign that something was perhaps seriously wrong with Sakamoto-san.
Ginta was a good actor, though. And he recovered quickly. By morning he was winking at the male nurses, trying to set up dates for the females, acting like he hadn't a care in the world. It was enough to convince the brown-eyed woman from psych and the stern-faced Intel agent with the scarred lip that he was fine. Just suffering from overexertion on his mission. That he'd failed to report his ankle injury and the bruising evidence of a choke hold in a fight because he'd been tired and wanted to go home. Not because he'd been hiding anything.
( No one even suspected that choking had happened well after the ninja he'd fought on his mission was dead. ) |
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| Breaking Up Is Hard to Do [closed to Ginta and Kakashi] |
[Sep. 20th, 2008|09:00 pm] |
At a quarter past midnight, Ginta got back to Konoha from a ten-day mission. He checked in with the chuunin at the gate, stole coffee from one of them, agreed to go to the hospital to get checked out voluntarily so they didn't have to accompany him, and was mildly annoyed to notice that one of them shadowed him all the way to the hospital itself anyway.
"You can go back to your post now," he shouted at the apparently empty street. "I'm a man of my word. See? Hospital. Going in."
He didn't wait for a reply.
At nearly one in the morning he was being simultaneously stitched by a doctor on his eleventh hour and debriefed by an Intel agent who was far too perky for her own good. He was also on his third cup of coffee, and starting to feel awake again.
At one-thirty he was given a sling, a bottle of pills, and a lecture about coming back to get checked out before he resumed training from the medic, and a cheerful, "Good night, Sakamoto-san. Thank you for your hard work," from the Intel agent.
He could have gone home and crashed. He should have gone home and crashed. Instead he went prowling the silent corridors of the hospital, looking for Kakashi, Tsume and Ryouma, who were, according to sources, here, hurt all to fuck, and possibly all in the same room.
( He needed to give Ryouma hell about it, if he was hurt again. ) |
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| Barking Up the Wrong Tree [closed to Ginta & Kuromaru] |
[Aug. 7th, 2008|02:27 pm] |
Takes place at the end of January, the same night as Sacred Spaces
Ginta has enjoying a little midnight snack of canned peaches on toaster waffles. Actually perhaps, given the hour, it was more of a pre-dawn breakfast. But since he hadn't slept yet, it really wasn't breakfast. Breakfast was the meal you ate when you got up after you'd been asleep. This was more of a very-delayed midnight snack. Or a midnight snack several hundred kilometers to the west, somewhere in outer Wind Country, where the sun was farther from rising and it really was closer to midnight. Or something like that. Actually Ginta didn't care much about the definitions. ( He cared about his peach waffles, dripping with syrup and topped with a glob of whipped cream. ) |
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| Words and Deeds [Closed to Kakashi & Ginta] |
[May. 23rd, 2008|07:01 am] |
Set five days after Visting Hours Are Over
"Got your present?"
Kakashi glanced over his shoulder, looking down at a pair of amused brown eyes. "For the last time," he muttered, turning back, "it's not a birthday party. There won't be cake, I'm not taking a present, and... shut up."
Pakkun snorted and rolled onto his back, four paws held up in the air. "Yeah, right, brat. It sure sounds like a party to me. There's a birthday, you got an invite... And explain that bit to me again? Because I'm still trying to work out how you got over your anti-social weirdness long enough to say yes."
Kakashi rolled his eyes, and checked himself over again. "I'm not anti-social," he began, ignoring the chorus of disbelieving dog noises that filled his apartment. "I just have... refined people taste. I'm choosy."
"You're neurotic," countered Pakkun.
"And you're short," Kakashi muttered, kicking a foot back to roll him over. "Besides, it's not a party if there's only two people. It's..."
( A date! ) |
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| Running on Empty [closed to Ryouma & Ginta] |
[May. 14th, 2008|07:43 pm] |
Backstory set approximately eight months after Pleased to Meet You, Won't You Guess My Name
October was, Ginta decided, even prettier in these mountains than spring. Maples flamed red on every hillside, punctuated with the gold of aspens, the deep greens of spruces and pines. He and his companion had traveled from Konoha for two days, careful to use only the code names they were assigned. Seishi for Ginta, Masashi for Rokusaburo. Ginta had teased him about how he should adopt the code name permanently, since it was so much cooler. Rokusaburo had responded with a grin and an offer to prove which of them was the pencil-necked genjutsu geek and which the cool man with an arsenal of taijutsu and weapons at his disposal. Cool men, he'd informed Ginta, did not need to worry about whether their names were cool.
( It was a good partnership.
) |
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| Visiting Hours Are Over [closed to Kakashi & Ginta] |
[Apr. 19th, 2008|10:07 pm] |
Set three days after Before You Hit the Ground
The morning after the incident, there was no evidence in the showers that anything had taken place, other than a newly cracked tile in one of the shower stalls, and a scent of lye and antiseptic soap. There was no blood, no odor of decay, no shreds of rotted flesh clogging the drain. No one would ever know what had gone on in the third floor men's showers except the people who had been involved either as principals, or as clean up crew. Of course, this counted the investigating MPs from Internal Ops as clean up crew.
( Ginta wasn't one of them. ) |
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| It Takes a Genius to Watch a Jackass [Closed to Kakashi, Ginta, Kotetsu & Kanae] |
[Mar. 6th, 2008|05:46 pm] |
Immediately follows It Tales a Jackass to Save a Genius. Takes place in mid-December
When Ginta woke up, he was surprised first of all to be waking up. He was surprised again to be warm, dry, and in what felt like a feather bed. There was light coming in a window. Misty, pre-sunrise light, with that cold quality that said it was reflecting off of snow. And there was a dim lamp burning in the room. They had to be in the farmhouse, Ginta decided. He assumed they'd been captured, then, except it didn't make any sense. If they'd been captured, shouldn't they be tied up? But he wasn't tied up, or...
No, he was. But it was medical equipment and IV lines, not shackles. And Kakashi was there beside him, warm, solid, and still breathing. There was a strange hissing sound. Oxygen. Kakashi was on oxygen. That wasn't good. But... Ginta brought a hand up to his face, pushing at cold plastic tubing. Huh. They were both on oxygen? And there was a sharp kind of insistent pain in his side. Ribs, right.
Okay so... They'd been about to die. Or something a lot like it anyway, because Ginta couldn't keep the fight up anymore.
Right. He remembered that. Choking and the guy coming at him, and falling down and choking and blood and... Something. It didn't add up. How the hell was it that they were alive and evidently getting medical treatment?
He kind of hated to wake Kakashi, but Kakashi was the only one who might have a clue. He rolled ever so slightly to his side and reached a hand out to the body next to his. Touched naked skin under the covers. Also interesting.
"Kakashi." Ginta's voice was a raw whisper. He coughed softly, tried again. "Genius. Wake up. What the hell is going on?" |
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| It Takes a Jackass to Save a Genius [Closed to Ginta & Kakashi] |
[Mar. 4th, 2008|03:45 am] |
Continues from Genuis is Subjective, Jackassery Is Universal
Good, Ginta was correcting his pronunciation. He wasn't dead. Now Kakashi could kill him.
The copy-nin let his head fall back with the barest ghost of a chuckle and rested against the warm, wet bulk of slightly bemused mastiff. "S'good to know," he managed, and closed his eye as his vision blurred, slumping a little. Not good. He grabbed onto the fresh chakra from the soldier pill and threw it into the embers of his own, coaxing up weak flames. It was a drop in the ocean, but better then nothing. He swallowed painfully and shivered.
Fuck he was cold. Soaked right through and chilled. It froze his fingers like twigs, crawled up his limbs and chewed right into his bones, left them thin and brittle feeling. Old, old breaks ached. Most bones. It was a hazard of the job. He'd gotten used to the snap and the crunch and the broken glass grind, little splinters of white in the red of muscle.
Skin wasn't a good colour. Purple under the blood on his hand -- dried now, black and cracked -- Kakashi could make out mottling flesh, tinted blue around the violet, colours like a child's toy. Bruise colours. Flower colours. Pale, pale fingernails, short and blunt and edged now with red-black gore that wouldn't come out without a scrubbing brush and a painful round of work.
Ginta looked worse. Kakashi wondered if the red on his face was from burns or cold. Both. At least the frozen air kept the swelling down. Breathing was all wrong though, cold didn't help that. Just made it visible in little white clouds.
Rock under his hip. No warmth there. Warmth at his back but not enough. No chakra to keep him warm inside.
"Twenty hours." In a cave, in the middle of nowhere, with a mastiff and an I'm-not-even-sure-what-the-hell-that-breed-is to guard them. "You make it twenty hours?" There was a slight inflection of 'wuss' around the words, knee-jerk reflex.
His mask was still down, he didn't have the energy to yank it back up. Kakashi leaned against the mastiff, looked at his comrade, and didn't count the ways they were probably going to die. |
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| Pleased to Meet You, Won't You Guess My Name? [closed] |
[Feb. 28th, 2008|06:46 pm] |
Backdated two years.
Ginta had traveled solo all the way to the border of Rai no Kuni. It had been an easy journey, carried out at a fairly sedate pace, with a stop overnight near Fire Country's northeastern border at a cozy little inn in the town of Shinano, and once more when he was nearly at the Lightning Country border, in the province of Mutsu. That was where he was meeting his contact, a Konoha ninja stationed in a Leaf outpost there. The man he was meeting--Ginta read over the mission scroll once more--was none other than Tousaki Ryouma.
( They'd met once before, during the war. ) |
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| How to Save a Life [closed] |
[Feb. 27th, 2008|09:57 pm] |
[Backdated to seven years ago, in a bunker in north-western Fire Country.]
They'd been stuck in this hell-hole for three days now, and rations and nerves and tempers were all wearing thin. The sole genin had curled up in a corner when they first brought him in, and hadn't moved since then; people were getting tired of stepping around him now. He shouldn't have been anywhere near the front lines anyway, but Konoha was growing desperate. They hadn't managed to save any of the rest of his team.
Of course, most of them were sole survivors anyway, or ramshackle teams cobbled together somewhere in the past few weeks. The suture-lines were beginning to tell, as tempers frayed and killing intent slipped. Ten minutes ago, two of the chuunin had nearly come to blows. Now the girl was amusing herself in a dark corner with one of the devil-eyed jounin, and the boy slouched against the wall and shuffled a tattered pack of cards between his hands.
( Ginta had grown very tired of all the jounin by this time. ) |
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| Old Faces, New Names [closed to Ginta & Ryouma] |
[Feb. 24th, 2008|01:07 am] |
Ginta came back from his mission after less than twenty-four hours had passed. Some missions--a lot of missions actually--weren't particularly time consuming. They were close by, they involved some sort of quick in and out. In this case the most difficult aspect of the mission had been the need to hang silent and still from the rafters above a dropped ceiling in a small temple and observe a meeting between several daimyou's vassals. It wasn't the tedious memorizing of the meeting details, the managing the concealed recording devices, the boredom, the hunger or even the hanging upside down by his knees for hours on end that had been problematic. It had been the need to remain unmoving. For an inveterate fidgiter like Ginta, that was most trying indeed. Ironically, rather than being tired from his long hours of mastering the urge to squirm, Ginta was nearly bouncing off the walls when it was all over. He'd run home at double the pace he had to, so now he was sweat soaked and exhilarated, and just a little what his grandmother had called "full of beans" when he was a hyperactive little child. His grandfather had used the rather more striking "full of piss and vinegar." And Ginta was definitely full of all three.
( He strode into the HQ basement with his mask tipped back ) |
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| Sleeping? Is Also Hard To Do [closed to Tsume and Ginta] |
[Feb. 13th, 2008|11:13 pm] |
Set after Dog of War Meets the Blood Hound, early January.
Tsume had lost all of her covers. She blamed Kuromaru. He was, after all, laying on top of a giant pile of them, rolled into a little ball right in the middle of the futon. So directly in the middle of the futon, in fact, that her back was getting sore from twisting around him. But, really, how did you move almost two hundred pounds of dead weight dog?
A bucket of water was one option, but then her bed would be wet.
With a sigh, she sat up and glared at him.
He kept sleeping.
Rubbing a hand through her hair, mussing it farther, Tsume reluctantly admitted to herself that she hadn't really been sleeping in the first place. You'd think after a day like she'd had she'd sleep like a baby, but instead thoughts chased themselves around her mind like puppies just discovering their tails.
Kuromaru cracked one sleepy eye and looked at her.
She smiled, reaching out to run a hand over his fur, newly brushed after his romp through the snow. "Gonna get some water." Her zip-up sweatshirt was laying in a heap on top of her still-packed duffel; she grabbed it as she stood, pulling it on over her tank top without zipping it up and padding out of the room. The stairs to the cafeteria were to her left; she looked at them a moment and then went past them and to the right, pacing the hall, her chin tipped up and weaving slightly as she scented.
There was no reason to be scenting, really, except it seemed right to patrol her new place. Her bare feet were silent on the carpet, her pants shush-shushing across the floor, slightly too long and dragging. Down the hall and back, teasing out individual aromas. At the apartment next to hers she stopped, head tipping, listening.
Movement inside. Whoever lived there was awake. Tsume brought up the mental map Ryouma had given her, and realized even that didn't tell her who lived here. Well, if they were going to be neighbors, might as well be neighborly. Tsume lifted a hand and rapped on the door, open-knuckled and softly, trying not to wake anyone else.
He--it smelled like a him--could always pretend not to hear, if he didn't want company. |
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| Genius is Subjective, Jackassery Universal [closed to Kakashi and Ginta] |
[Jan. 31st, 2008|06:25 pm] |
Ginta and Kakashi made their way to the target's room passing unseen through the quiet halls of the little inn. They were no more than swiftly moving shadows in the dimly lit halls, unmarked by any they passed. Once in the room Ginta looked around, pleased with himself. Their timing was perfect, the man wasn't back yet. The room was on the small side, but the furnishings were traditional, and the maids had already rolled up the night's bedding, so there were only the target's personal effects, a low tea-table, and a pair of floor chairs cluttering the room. Ginta couldn't help the wince when he trod upon the tatami in his shoes. No matter how many missions he took that forced him to do so, he couldn't quite get past the manners of his upbringing.
( He marked where Kakashi hid, balanced on a beam that crossed the room's high ceiling. ) |
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| The Genius and the Jackass [closed to Kakashi & Ginta] |
[Jan. 31st, 2008|04:31 pm] |
Ginta had heard good things about his mission partner, but then who hadn't heard good things about the legendary genius copy-nin Hatake Kakashi? He'd picked up the mission assignment scroll fresh from the desk of Yuta Ken, one of the chuunin in Intel that he'd been kind of stringing along. The guy was cute, and it really was useful having an in with the people who assigned missions. Although, reading the scroll, Ginta was starting to think he might have blown it with Ken.
Mission Rank: A
Number of Agents Requested: Katake Kakashi, Jounin 009720; Sakamoto Genta, Jounin 010061
Description/Objectives: Kawai Akira, Kumogakure jounin, has apparently broken ties with his village, following what Konoha Intel believes to be a crime of passion. He is known to master several highly-specialized Cloud ninjutsu, which Konoha would like to obtain and analyze. Agents Hatake and Sakamoto assigned for their respective areas of expertise. Sakamoto will draw out Kawai and induce him to use his specialized jutsu. Hatake will observe and copy. Kawai is to be terminated once jutsu are obtained.
Expected Hazards: Kumogakure Hunters are expected to be in pursuit of Kawai. Kawai himself is a skilled ninja who utilizes unknown lethal jutsu.
Pre-mission Briefing with Intel: 11/28, 1300, Room B1-124
Signed
ANBU Mission Desk
He might as well just paint a couple of big red bullseyes on his armor.
He found Kakashi's apartment. It was only a few doors down from his own. Interesting he'd never bumped into the guy much. Maybe one or twice on the way to a meeting or the showers, but really they didn't know each other. He knocked on the door. "Yo, Kakashi. It's Sakamoto Ginta. Open up." |
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anxious
drained
bouncy