| The Best Of Our Dreams Fell Apart [closed to Ryouma, Kakashi, Tsume, Waki] |
[Aug. 13th, 2008|10:43 pm] |
[DOOM aftermath. Takes place about 5 minutes after Small Hours]
Yasuo strode down the corridor, trying to make his thoughts work through sluggish exhaustion, setting aside the brief meeting he'd just had with Tousaki Ryouma. Kiba and Hana had been up half the night, worried about their mother, needing reassurance. They'd slept in his bed. Him and Aomaru, Hana's three puppies and the two children all crowded in. It wasn't the most restful sleep he'd ever gotten. But more than that, he'd spent the day before in Tsume's ICU room, waiting for Kuromaru to pull through the extensive and delicate chakra surgeries.
Tsume seemed to have come through all right, they reassured him over and over again. Despite the fact that her chakra levels were so low he almost couldn't feel them, and despite the wires and tubes threading around and into her--even a respirator taped to her mouth, fat pipe shoved down her throat to keep her lungs expanding and falling.
"Comatose," Waki had said, but Yasuo hadn't realized how dead that was. She didn't even smell right. More like a stuffed toy rubbed with her scent than a living, breathing human.
He hadn't let their pups come see her. It was too alarming. Waki-sensei said she was healing faster than he'd expected, that her chakra levels were rising. It was a good sign.
( They wouldn't know how much damage, if any, the surgery had caused until she woke. ) |
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| Small Hours [closed to Kakashi] |
[Aug. 1st, 2008|12:45 pm] |
[[Second installment of the DOOM aftermath; takes place after Let Her Die On Her Own. Title, like the title of The Hardest Part Is Over, is drawn from Rob Thomas's song Little Wonders]]
Ryouma woke in daylight, screaming.
He couldn't move. Heaviness burdened his legs; cords bound down his arms. Muscles contracted and nerves misfired, and he couldn't rip himself free. A light touch caressed his face; cool air, like a dead man's breath, flowed into his nostrils. He opened his eyes and saw white, a tiny room, walls closing in, a window opening onto nothing but cloud-ripped grey sky--
He screamed, and his voice was a whisper, a ragged thread of fear. He knew they would come for him; he could hear quickening footsteps not far away. He should be silent. Strong. He should die before he broke.
He couldn't stop. |
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| Nothing to Hold [closed to Ryouma, Tsume, Kakashi, Haruichi] |
[Jul. 9th, 2008|05:01 pm] |
[[Fifth installment of the Mission of DOOM. Follows Dark of the Morning]]
Two and a half hours after Kakashi blew sparkling dust into Ryouma's wounds, the painkillers started to wear off.
It began as a dull throb in his chest, where he'd slumped forward over Baiji's surging shoulders. The huge mastiff ran tirelessly, holding his position in an wedge-like formation of dogs and ninja. To his right, brindled Kaori carried both Tsume and Kuromaru, with one of Kakashi's clones running at her heels and a fourth lugging the unconscious Shiki over its shoulder. Two smaller dogs flanked the mastiffs, and Kakashi himself, lean and swift as a greyhound, ran at the head of the arrow to lead the way. One of his clones perched behind Ryouma, steadying him with both hands on his back. Warm chakra tickled Ryouma's shoulders and the backs of his thighs, as both Baiji and the kage bunshin worked to keep him on. They'd done a fine job of it so far. Even when Baiji hurtled a narrow canyon in a single chakra-propelled leap, Ryouma hadn't slipped.
But when the mastiff jumped over a fallen tree, and the clone's toe jogged the back of Ryouma's left calf, the tired ache blazed into real pain. A little blood spotted Baiji's fur. Ryouma swore, paled, and grabbed at Baiji's studded leather color with half his left hand. The clone's hands slipped lower, grasping his waist, trying to steady him. Ryouma's attempt at biting back a whimper ended abruptly when his broken teeth regained feeling.
"Don' touch me," he told the clone, slurring words with a tongue that hadn't quite yet shed the drug and remembered its acid-burned pain. "'ll throw up."
Baiji's stride lengthened. Bent nearly double, silently and savagely cursing the painkiller that brought relief instantly and returned agony almost as fast, Ryouma managed to glance over the dog's shoulder and catch a glimpse of the couple riding Kaori. Kuromaru lay slumped in human form, but no longer still. For the first time since losing his eye, he'd slipped back to consciousness to discover exactly what Ryouma's jutsu had taken from him. |
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| Dark of the Morning [closed to Kakashi, Ryouma, Tsume] |
[Jul. 7th, 2008|05:22 pm] |
[[Mission of DOOM, 4th thread, Directly follows Bruised and Alone]]
Tsume's clone had run straight for twelve hours. It hadn't been made to grow tired. It hadn't been made to eat. It had been made with one thing in mind: Get home. Get help.
It hadn't been made to feel pain, which was good. Under the ANBU mask, skin sloughed away. All of the poisoned chakra--or as much as possible--had been funneled into it as Tsume had created it. Flesh was gone right down to the bone. It was missing an ear.
It didn't feel pain.
The village wall rose into sight, and the clone gave two heaving leaps before clearing it, flaring her chakra as she ran. Two chuunin fell into step.
"ANBU-san! Where?" one of them shouted.
"Headquarters," the clone snarled, and ran a straight line as the chuunin fanned out, keeping anyone else from intercepting her course, letting her go as fast and as direct as she could. Rooftops shot past under her, barely seen below the edge of her mask.
Moonlight gave her enough to see by, made her armor over-white and the tattoo on one narrow shoulder black against her skin. She focused on headquarters and trusted everyone would feel the ragged edge of chakra and stay out of her way. |
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| Bruised and Alone [closed to Ryouma and Tsume] |
[Jul. 6th, 2008|09:58 pm] |
[[Third installment of the Mission of DOOM. Follows Restlessness and Fury.]]
Ryouma woke in darkness, screaming.
He caught himself almost as soon as he knew that the ripped-raw voice was his, but it was already too late. Cloth rustled in the black; skin brushed his bare shoulder and tickled down his side. A finger traced the lips of the gash along his ribs, dragging little ribbons of fire in its wake.
"Not even a scratch from us," a woman's voice said thoughtfully. "But those bandits carved you up pretty well, didn't they?" The finger slipped; a nail dug into the open wound. Ryouma strangled a hiss. The woman laughed.
"Stop poking at him, Yuuko," a man said. He sounded bored, and his voice was roughened with smoke. Ryouma could smell the cigarettes clogging the air, under the thick reek of rot. No breeze at all; they were in some enclosed space. He sat upright in a straight-backed chair, arms hanging loosely by his sides, legs sprawled casually apart. He stared straight ahead into darkness, and the brush of the woman's fingers through his hair and across his forehead told him they could see his face.
He couldn't move. His chest inflated just enough to allow him shallow breaths; his head could turn just enough to track sound. But his arms and legs hung as loose and still as if every tendon had been cut, and his back could not pull away from the chair no matter how hard he struggled.
Paralyzed? he thought, wildly, and then, Captured.
And Kuromaru was dead, and Tsume had to be, too, and their blood gloved his hands.
The woman laughed in astonishment. "Hey, look at this, Sano! He's crying!"
"Bitch," Ryouma said, very quietly. "I'll kill you first." |
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| War Stories [Closed to Kakashi and Ryouma] |
[Jul. 5th, 2008|05:43 pm] |
[[Set approximately 7 years ago, a few months after the events of the Kakashi Gaiden and How to Save a Life. Kakashi is 13, Ryouma 16.]]
He was getting better; that was the main thing. Painkillers kept the headaches down, soldier pills kept exhaustion back, willpower kept him on his feet, and he was getting better.
Faster, too.
Kakashi skidded right, sandaled feet kicking up soggy clumps of moist earth, and drove forwards. The Rock-nin couldn't keep up. Metal struck metal as Kakashi's tanto flicked for the man's jugular and met his wakizashi instead. Kakashi wasn't stupid enough to test his muscles against a fully-grown jounin's. He ducked a blow to his temple and rammed his chakra through his blade.
The Rock-nin gaped as his sword snapped in half.
( He was even more surprised when Kakashi ripped a hole through his chest ) |
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| Restlessness and Fury [closed to Ryouma and Tsume] |
[Jul. 2nd, 2008|02:55 am] |
[[Second installment of the Mission of DOOM. Takes place immediately following Drunk on Dreams.]]
They didn't find the bandits that day. They did find evidence of an old attack: a stray arrow still lodged in a tree branch, splashes of dried blood painted so deeply into creviced tree bark that the rain could not wash it out, a severed hand rotting in the lee of a rock. The bandits had cleaned up their mess casually, presumably leaving the bodies behind; Inuzuka noses reported that the corpses had lain where they'd fallen for almost a week before someone from the village recovered them. Rain had washed away any tracks and any scent the bandits had left behind.
"We'll get 'em anyway," Ryouma told the forgotten hand, as he used a tiny earth jutsu to bury it. Rotting it away might have been easier, but that was for enemies. That was for the guys who'd done this.
They scouted for the rest of the afternoon, finding a deserted campsite, a couple of shallow graves, and nothing else. If the bandits were out there, they were well-hidden. It would take something more than a couple of ninja to draw them out.
( So it was a good thing Konoha had sent ANBU. ) |
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| Drunk on Dreams [closed to Ryouma and Tsume] |
[Jul. 1st, 2008|11:50 pm] |
[[This thread begins the Mission of DOOM. Its title, along with the titles of subsequent threads, is inspired by the song Let Her Go. Takes place five days after The Hardest Part Is Over]]
By the last week of February, Ryouma had already begun concocting a grand theory on why Intel guys were notoriously drab and Intel girls were, without fail, gorgeous. (He included the mission desk chuunin in this assessment; when you were able to concentrate on something besides bleeding on their desks, those girls were knock-outs.) So far he had a few possible explanations for his Theory of Why The Intel Girls Are Hot and the Guys Aren't (But Are Ambiguously Gay Anyway), including the possibility that pretty women preferred desk jobs to field missions and the rather more likely possibility that they had invented some sort of arcane jutsu to suck attractiveness from their male coworkers and bestow it upon themselves. His current favorite was that the top brass knew that some of the ninja they'd send out would never return, and decided to give them something blazin' hot to look at while they were receiving their death sentences.
That didn't quite explain why many of the male debriefers weren't terribly good-looking, given the preponderance of gay men in the Hunter ranks, but Ryouma had faith that someone would sort it out.
In the meantime, he was certainly enjoying his time alone with the gorgeous brunette holding his mission file. "When's the departure time?" he inquired, slinging one arm over the back of his chair and gazing at the girl instead of the file. "If we've got time for dinner, I know this great little place out along the river. Y'know what they say about heading out with any regrets..."
"You'll only have an hour, Tousaki-san," the girl said. "I'm terribly sorry." She looked like she really was.
"I'll just have to make it back, then," Ryouma said, and grinned at her. |
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| The Hardest Part Is Over [closed to Ryouma and Kakashi] |
[Jun. 25th, 2008|04:49 pm] |
[[Takes place the morning after Words and Deeds, following this conversation.]]
At one o'clock on a February afternoon, the little coffee shop down by the river wasn't particularly crowded. A few customers were lingering over their lunch; a table of pretty young women was breathless with laughter and gossip. The waitress had turned her attention to cleaning up after the lunch rush, but she straightened with a smile as a new customer ducked in. The gossiping girls poked each other into a moment of silent aesthetic appreciation.
Ryouma tossed them a distracted grin, but his eyes didn't linger long. The "ninja tables," with clear sightlines to all the exits and a little more elbowroom around them, were mostly taken, but no absurd shock of silvery hair caught the light. His brows knit in momentary irritation. Waiting for someone was bad enough; waiting for coffee was agony.
He ordered one cup while he waited, and drank it sitting by the window, where he could see the door and half the street. Twenty minutes passed. He finished his coffee, tossed the cup, and headed back to his seat.
"Waiting for someone?" one of the girls asked, as he passed their table. She tilted her head to look up at him with a bright, sympathetic smile. Ryouma smiled back.
"Meeting a friend," he said. His eyes flicked to the empty chair next to her. Three girls at the table, all pretty, all well-dressed, all probably a little older than him, all looking forward to the chance of a more interesting afternoon than they usually had. The girl who'd spoken to him discreetly moved her handbag off the seat of the empty chair. Ryouma's smile twisted a little. "I'd better go hunt him down. See you around, ladies."
He could've kicked himself as he headed out the door. But he let it close behind him anyway, and headed for the training fields where, with luck, he might find Kakashi.
The jerk owed him. |
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| Get Your Story Straight [closed to Ryouma, Raidou, Genma] |
[Jun. 11th, 2008|10:36 pm] |
[[takes place two days after Three is a Crowd. Four is Salvation.]]
Inside ANBU Headquarters, information spread through a precise and rule-regulated path. Intel field agents collected it; Intel internal agents distilled it; Oita Gennosuke, the director of Intel, read their reports and briefed Arakaki Hisoka, who personally briefed the Sandaime Hokage.
But if anyone really wanted to know what was going on, they had to talk to the chuunin who staffed the HQ Mission Desk.
Ryouma was there now, perched on the edge of the desk, swinging one leg and gossiping happily. Reiko was happily married and eight months pregnant, but she was also cheerful and funny, and she loved gossip as she loved breath. She and Ryouma were speculating vividly on the exact nature of the rumored relationship between two Hunters--Ryouma thought they were sleeping together, and Reiko wasn't so sure--when ( a man in the casual clothes of an Intel agent ducked his head in. ) |
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| Better Things to Do [Closed to Ryouma and Sumire] |
[Jun. 11th, 2008|06:32 pm] |
[[Takes place after Attack of the Ankle Biters]]
Sumire had visited the baths on the first floor less than a handful of times. She'd always had her own bathroom to use, always enjoyed the private act of cleaning oneself. Especially with no one there to look on and judge whether the marks you had came from some over-amorous lover, if they were self-inflicted for psychosis's sake, or if you just came home from getting hammered by some man in a dirty room out on a mission. As she dumped the water over her head several times to get her hair properly sopping, Sumire corrected herself - sometimes the room was clean. The bath next door was suspiciously empty; the sound of drenching herself echoed harshly against the white tile and steam.
The lights flickered every once in a while, as she thought and cleaned herself thoroughly. Her skin was scrubbed pink and clean and she managed to catch a glance at herself in the tiny mirror packed away in her bath basket before it clouded over; a harshly young woman stared back at her, topaz eyes wide and surprised, lips parted and only slightly pink instead of darker and more kissable. Sumire wondered who she was looking at for a moment, and closed her eyes. Just a girl still, really, unable to make the leap to adulthood without the aid of her lipsticks and blushes, foundations and eye shadows. A shiver ran down her back and up again.
( Sumire wondered if she would ever get the chance to take a proper leap. ) |
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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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| Attack of the Ankle Biters [closed to Tsume and Ryouma] |
[Apr. 23rd, 2008|08:24 pm] |
Set after the Three is a Crowd threads, the day after Good Morning, Beautiful, following this journal entry.
Tsume was pretty sure that somewhere along the line, she'd gone crazy. Possibly during that hellish mission with Genma and Raidou. Maybe earlier, though. Maybe just a few weeks back, the first time she'd hauled tail after Kuromaru and ended up nearly tackling a naked man in the ANBU showers. Yeah, that was probably it.
She straddled a branch, high in a tree outside the Academy as children streamed out, gleeful at being allowed a half day. Above her, Kuromaru lay panting in the crook of two boughs, making the whole tree shiver and sway despite the lack of wind. The older academy kids noticed, slowing as they walked past and peered up into the winter sky. A couple of them actually saw her. Tsume flashed them a half-feral grin, and if that didn't scare them off she waved.
( Then two kids spilled out of the door that she had no intention of scaring off. ) |
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| Before You Hit the Ground. [Closed to Kakashi & Ryouma] |
[Apr. 8th, 2008|08:03 pm] |
Takes place two weeks after Thicker Than Water and Good Morning, Beautiful
The ANBU men's showers weren't exactly private, but they were out of the way. The set up was utilitarian, spartan almost. A bank of metal fixtures arrayed down one wall for those that didn't mind stripping off in the open, and a row of cubicles down the opposite wall for those who did. The place was reasonably clean, the water always ran hot, and it was barely half a minute's walk from any apartment on the third floor. Perfect for any weary ANBU who just wanted to sluice the blood off before he dragged his way home and collapsed on a bed. Or a floor. Or whatever flat surface presented itself first.
Kakashi was roughly in that frame of mind when he staggered in at some dark hour of the very early morning, dropped his gore-splattered swords on a bench, stripped off his armour and his clothes--not his mask--and leaned himself against the first wall that had a showerhead above it.
( He was not alone ) |
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| Good Morning, Beautiful. [Closed to Kakashi & Ryouma] |
[Mar. 13th, 2008|07:01 am] |
Set just after Thicker Than Water
When Kakashi woke up he'd lost twenty-nine hours, his mask, his hitai-ate, his remaining armour, and a decent amount of pride. On the flip side he'd gained two newly bandaged hands, a hospital gown, a bandage over his sharingan, and an almost empty room with no view. Unless you counted Ryouma as a view, which Kakashi didn't. And he wasn't worried that Ryouma hadn't woken up during his first fight with the medics. Not in the slightest. Nor the second fight, or the third...
It definitely wasn't the reason Kakashi was still there after seven conscious hours and at least a dozen escape opportunities.
( As non-views went, Ryouma certainly wasn't a good one ) |
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| Thicker Than Water [closed to Ryouma, Kakashi, Genma, Raidou] |
[Mar. 4th, 2008|02:23 am] |
Ryouma wasn't quite sure how they made it up the stairs. Obviously it happened, but--like a few too many other things about the past day--it lost itself somewhere in a dim fog of dull pain and dried blood. Drying blood. He'd dripped on the forms the mission-desk chuunin gave him to sign, the 43-A for Mission Accomplished, Personal Injury; and he knew damn well he shouldn't have been signing them, because he couldn't see clearly enough to read even if he knew the kanji, but Kakashi's left hand was blistered and burned and his right hand was swaddled in brown-stained bandages, and somehow they couldn't get by without a signature.
The report could wait. The report could damn well wait, Ryouma had snarled, and the blood masking his face and the broken lips curling back from his teeth must've been persuasive enough, because the chuunin stammered an assent and reached for another file.
Then it got hazy again, and by the time Ryouma managed to blink the mist away he was lurching against the door to the men's showers, leaving dark stains where his side hit the doorframe. The door swung half-open, revealing a long, pale, bare expanse of tile under harsh fluorescent light. Some thoughtful janitor had left a stack of towels on the bench in the changing room. Ryouma made a low ragged sound in his throat that might've been a laugh.
"All ready 'n waiting for us," he breathed. "How nice."
Then his arm slipped off Kakashi's shoulders, and he took a nosedive for the floor. |
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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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| Pizza and Morgues [closed to Tsume and Ryouma] |
[Feb. 16th, 2008|08:49 pm] |
Set the morning after Sleeping? Is Also Hard To Do. Early January.
Tsume woke later than she normally did; the night with her neighbor, Ginta, had been nice but sleep deprived.
She was tired enough that it wasn't until she'd yanked a top from her bag--at some point she needed to at least put her clothes away, even if the rest of the apartment still looked unoccupied--and pulled it on that she realized she hadn't returned Ryouma's shirt.
Currently, she was wearing it.
She frowned at herself and pulled it off, tossing it into a heap on the futon and digging another shirt out of her bag. It only took her a few minutes to be ready for the day--she made some passable attempt at de-tangling her hair, brushed her teeth, and called it quits.
"You getting up?" she asked the giant pile of fur sprawled across her bed, covering dark blue sheets in black hair.
"Did you get breakfast?" Kuromaru grumbled.
"'Course not." She rarely ate it.
Her familiar buried his head under her pillow, tail curling closer to his legs. With a chuckle, Tsume picked up Ryouma's shirt and headed down the carpeted hall. His room was down and around the corner, nearly as far as you could get from hers and still be on the same floor. Tsume scent-checked as she walked, so automatic it was almost unconscious. Most of the people seemed to be gone; almost all were healthy. A strong odor of medicinal rub leaked through one doorway, but nothing overly alarming.
When she got to Ryouma's door she could smell him, his scent overlaid with coffee. She paused, sniffing, and decided he was there. Tsume rapped on the door with the backs of her knuckles, fingers curled loosely. "Oi! Coyot! Got a present for you." |
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uncomfortable
worried
bouncy