| [Aug. 23rd, 2014|05:20 am] |
The flavor was as good as the scent, mild-roasted and smooth, with hints of complexity. Ryouma looked up, startled. "You weren't kidding about the good stuff. Why—?"
He bit the question down. The answer was patently obvious. Genma hadn't opened his secret stash on the journey to Ibaragashi, or during the previous day in the bunker, because it was meant for more than just a morning wake-up. It was a peace-offering, or at the least a conversational lubricant, because Ryouma wasn't exactly handling this mission well and everyone on the team knew it.
Well, maybe not Kakashi. All his filters had crumpled beneath the battering-ram of morphine; if he'd noticed something, he'd have said it.
But Genma had noticed. Genma'd watched him all the way through. And Genma was sitting there now, hands laced around his tea mug, watching him with honey-amber eyes, and waiting for him to crack.
Ryouma licked the taste of coffee off his lip. "It hasn't been my best mission, has it?"
Genma's mouth quirked. "You gave yourself a hard act to follow, what with dealing the death blow to a giant demon scorpion-dog on the first one and all." He fished the floating tea bag out of his cup, tossed it into the bucket where they'd been scraping food scraps, and took a slow sip. When he lowered the mug, his eyes were serious again. "This was Team Six's first mission where we didn't get to be unambiguously the good guys. There's no easy way to prepare for the reality of ANBU. You think you know what you're agreeing to when you take the mask, but until you have to hold the knife to some innocent kid's throat, you don't know."
"You wouldn't think a jounin'd have all that many illusions left to lose," Ryouma said.
"And yet," Genma said gently.
"And yet." Ryouma sighed. He tried another taste of his coffee. "I thought, maybe… I thought you'd saved Fukuda because we couldn't save anybody else."
Genma blew out his breath through pursed lips. His gaze fell away for a moment, seeking something in the shadows. "I… don't know if I was thinking that. Maybe part of me was. I saw her there, and she was clearly going to die horribly if I didn't do something. But this was an S-class mission, and she was the only surviving enemy—and Iebara's commander. She's at least a moderately high value target for interrogation."
His gaze wandered again, this time to his mug, as if there was something in green tea with brown rice that could help him marshal his thoughts. He said slowly, without looking up, "The effects of your jutsu are gruesome, and the medic in me recognized her suffering. But I'm a field operative first. I saved her because I thought Konoha would need her."
At least she'd be able to confirm Kakashi's Bingo Book kill, since they hadn't salvaged Iebara's dogtags or his head. Ryouma wrapped an arm around his legs and decided he didn't, actually, want to think about her destined meeting with Shibata.
"You thought about a lot of things I didn't," he said. "I just wanted to stop her from killing Kakashi. And then I didn't care how long it took her to die."
Genma lifted one shoulder, silent acknowledgment: He was the lieutenant. It was his job to think about those things.
"I get that," he said quietly. He looked up at last, and his eyes met Ryouma's. His sandstone gaze was unflinchingly direct, but there was anger lurking in the depths. "When I saw you bending over Hatake, holding him, I thought I was too late. And when I got to Fukuda, what I wanted to do—what I almost did—was cut off her head." |
|