| [Feb. 7th, 2015|06:37 am] |
Ryouma’s left sleeve had rucked up when he moved, revealing the lower curve of his ANBU tattoo and the straight, angry welt of Iebara’s blood-draining injury. The wound was healed, but its edges were puckered and strained: the hallmarks of a hasty battlefield fix. It would be an ugly scar.
Apart from that, a few bruises, and the fading burns on his fingertips, he'd made it through the mission almost unscathed. And yet, except for the captain, he was the one Kakashi was most worried about.
Or — he had been.
Stretched out comfortably on the bed, smelling of other people's skin and a night of actual sleep, wearing civilian clothes instead of sour fear, Ryouma looked mostly like himself again, and Kakashi wondered if he'd been too hasty. You needed to backstop your teammates, and Intel was a simple way to do that, but perhaps he should have talked to Ryouma first.
Except that talking was messy and complicated, and Kakashi wasn’t good at it.
He scratched his cheek beneath the strap of the medical mask, and tried, “Are you going to have a breakdown?”
The long stretch of Ryouma’s body went entirely still. Kakashi thought, crap. Then Ryouma laughed roughly.
“Hell,” he said. “I’ve had this conversation with everyone else on the team, might as well go for an all-kill. No. I don’t think so. Talking… helped, actually, and coming back home. Seeing what we did it for.” He pushed himself upright, hands restless. “Seeing Ayane. We got off better than she did. Her whole team’s down. And I was thinking…”
Kakashi kept very still, in case a thoughtless word would kill the conversation. Ryouma pulled at one of the loose threads at his knee, fraying the hole wider.
“Killing Tsuto’s wife and daughter fucked me up pretty bad. But if we’d been where Ayane’s team was, if I had to kill that girl to save your life, I would have done it and not lost a wink of sleep over it.” The thread snapped between his fingers. “And I’m not sure what that means, except we killed them for Konoha, and that’s not too different from killing for your own team…”
“We killed trash,” Kakashi said, in case Ryouma had forgotten. “The daughter might have been blameless, but she wouldn’t have stayed that way, not in Tsuto’s family. They attacked the Daimyou. They targeted our home, Tousaki. If they’d won, they would have replaced the Hokage, and then how many people would they have made us kill?”
Ryouma had turned to face him, eyes fixed intently on Kakashi’s face. His lips parted before he took a breath, showing the edges of his teeth. Finally, he said, “So we did it for that little blond kid. All right. I can hold onto that.”
Some days, the concrete was all you could deal with, when the abstract was too big and distant to get your mind around. Naruto was a good lynch-pin. Kakashi didn’t mind sharing him for that.
“Whatever you need to be okay with it,” he said. He stretched a leg out and kicked Ryouma firmly on the hip. “But you need to get okay with it, soon. I’m not breaking in another teammate.”
“Hey!” Ryouma locked a hand around Kakashi’s ankle to prevent further assault. “I’m not leaving this team unless you kick me off. And I’m not taking any more kicking. Especially not from a guy who can’t even walk.”
His fingers were warm and strong through the thin cotton of the sheets and Kakashi's hospital pyjama pants. Steady and, maybe, capable of staying that way.
I’m better at talking than I thought. |
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