About the age difference between Gai Genma and Ebisu . It's gets really weird when you read Raido.( Kurenai and Asuma's teammate) is about 5 years older than both Kurenai and Asuma.
THIS! I think it's an interesting detail.
The team (Asuma-Kurenai-Raidō) is anime-only, and it's stated in the Wiki that in episode 386 of Shippūden, they are put on the same team for the Chūnin Exam. So there's actually a possibility that they're not initially a team, whether because Raidō's teammates (and/or Asuma and Kurenai's teammate) have passed the exam or, in a darker sense, died in the war.
(Of course there's also the possibility that Kishimoto just didn't think much when assigning their age, or that he just wanted to show familiar faces for Kakashi and Obito's flashback.) In any case, Raidō, Asuma and Kurenai being on the same team gives much more layer to the fact that:
Raidō is one of Sandaime Hokage's closest confidants (as shown in Naruto's generation's chūnin exam) and trusted subordinates (as stated in the databook) despite his young age.
Raidō is one of the few people present when Asuma dies.
.
On a fun note, though. Raidō's favorite phrase is "Time is money" (時は金なり, Toki wa kane nari) and Asuma's is "Not right now!" (今のナシ!, Ima no nashi!)
Reposting here from the Dreamwidth 3 sentence ficathon, prompt: "any fandom, any characters, reunion kisses", originally for @kalira. Naruto Shippūden, Jashin/Hidan, postcanon happy ending!
~~~
First it hurt until the whole world was nothing but pain, and then it stopped hurting, and then there was nothing at all.
Hidan blinks, and between one moment and the next he passes from nothingness to something. He stands confused beneath a moonless dark sky, on the gentle slope of a hillside planted with black-barked trees that bear leaves as bone-white as the grass beneath them and are laden on every twig and branch with crimson buds that hang like clustered drops of blood. Red spider lilies grow thickly among the knee-high grass, and the air smells of honey and blossom and blood and death.
And a mere fifty yards away a dark figure kneels among the grass and flowers, gaunt and half-shapeless in tattered, rotting draperies. Blood-blackened, silver-tipped shinigami horns curve upwards, sticking through the front of a wide black kasa hat.
Hidan runs.
He's as fast on his feet here as he ever was in the mortal world, but the figure still turns and opens their arms before he can reach them. They're as tall kneeling as he is standing, even his full weight at full speed only barely enough to move them as he flings himself against a gaunt dark chest striped white with exposed ribs, into long, strong, bony arms that fold around him and hook claws like a vulture's over his bare shoulders. He looks up into a black-and-bone mask of a face, familiar-and-not as his own reflection glimpsed in shifting water; into empty eyes as deep as the grave, above a mouth like a serrated wall of dark-glinting iron fangs...
"Jashin-sama!"
"Oh, Hidan," the god of suffering murmurs, and his soft indulgent laughter mingles with the rustle of the wind in the leaves before he bends his head and his jagged mouth slants fondly across Hidan's breathless, joyfully parted lips. "Welcome home."
This may actually be my longest playlist thanks to the fact that both Toshio Masuda & Yasuharu Takanashi have all their Naruto pieces on Spotify. Its 21h 22m total!