| [Feb. 7th, 2015|05:32 am] |
Kakashi scratched beneath the elastic strap of his inadequate face mask. “Some massacring,” he said. “Some explosions. Is Intel done with my teammates?”
“Not yet. Tousaki and your lieutenant have been fully debriefed, but Katsuko will have an agent visiting her sometime today for her report. And your captain should be meeting with T&I for an investigation into his blackouts.” Her eyes flicked subtly, watching for his reaction to that last tidbit.
‘Katsuko’, Kakashi noted. Not ‘Ueno’.
The thought folded away, replaced by ‘blackouts’. No one had said that before. They’d said broken port, investigation, uncontained losses. No one had said anything about a mental factor at play, or the lack of one.
If he’d had to guess at a berserker on the team, he would have said Katsuko, easily. Maybe Ryouma in the right circumstances. Not the captain. Raidou moved like a man who always had his feet planted on solid reality.
Kakashi said, “We’re torturing mental health into people now?”
Kurenai gave him a look. “T&I has always provided Konoha’s best mental health experts,” she said quietly. “You know that. Namiashi-taichou told me he suffered memory loss, regarding the events at the harbor. We need to understand what happened, and why it happened, and how to keep him and his team safe.”
Reflecting on Akiyama’s homicidal breakdown at the Trials, Kakashi was starting to have some quiet doubts about ANBU’s screening methods.
Then again, if you put people in a vise long enough and kept cranking the lever, stress fractures were inevitable. (Which did not excuse wrist-slicing psychopathy, but Kakashi could see an excuse for Raidou, maybe, in the right context.)
“I’m telling you this, Kakashi, because I know you,” Kurenai continued, which Kakashi read as, I know you’re a paranoid, judgemental asshole. “Have you observed anything, either on this mission or in the past two months generally, that would give you reason to believe Namiashi-taichou could be a danger to the team or to himself?”
One that was concerning enough to remember, but not important enough to report at the time?
Kakashi didn’t say that because her question wasn’t stupid, even if it felt like it. Hindsight was twenty-twenty, and you never knew what tiny clue you might have overlooked. Instead he sat in silence for a moment, turning memories over.
Boundaries, training, Raidou’s particularly offensive brand of 5 am cheer. No mood swings, no groundless anger, nothing that foreshadowed, Hey, this week I might feel like punching apart a shipping dock.
Sakumo had been pale and distracted in the weeks before his death, bleakly sad. He’d burned rice, forgotten to shave, sat on the porch and stared at nothing while his bare feet turned blue-white in the morning frost. There had been so many signs, all of them missed.
The funeral had been tiny, but Kakashi still remembered one woman saying, Such a surprise. Such a shame. He’d wanted to stab her, but the tanto was still being cleaned.
Raidou had only ever been present and grounded, clear-eyed. Kakashi tried to think of warning signs, but he kept remembering Team Six’s first mission, when they’d camped down for the first night by a stream, and Raidou had offered to spar. They’d wrestled to a mud-covered standstill, panting on the ground.
Kid, if you don’t let me go, this is going to turn into the world’s most awkward hug, and I don’t actually have a backup plan for that.
“No,” Kakashi said at last, and meant it. |
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