| [Oct. 1st, 2015|01:39 am] |
The fattest cat Katsuko had ever seen had followed her home from her early morning training. It had settled on her doorstep as if it intended to colonize it, harassed the runner who’d dropped off Genma’s message, and it’d still been there when she’d left for HQ in the afternoon. The racket it caused made her head hurt long after she’d gotten out of earshot.
Thinking about the cat was easier than speculating about the possible reasons Genma had called a team meeting. The situation with the cat, at least, was something she had some modicum of control over… even if she wasn’t exerting much control over it at the moment.
She didn’t know why she let the cat stay. Something about the proprietary way it had clawed at her ankles, maybe. She’d always had a soft spot for wild, wary things. Even though the cat was the furthest from ‘wary’ a living being could attain, it was undoubtedly wild. Its thick dark fur was tangled and matted, except in the places where old scars showed through bald patches. One front tooth was chipped. It smelled horrifically of old fish. It was so wide and heavy that Katsuko wasn’t sure how it had managed the five flights up to her apartment without breaking some of the steps.
Even so, its yellow eyes had gleamed up at her with the kind of vicious cunning she had to admire. This was a cat that had seen things and left behind bodies. It didn’t seem quite as intelligent as a ninneko — besides, no self-respecting ninja would let their animal summons reach such an unsanitary state — but that didn’t mean Katsuko couldn’t respect a fellow survivor.
She always carried a pen and small pad of paper with her. She balanced the pad on her sling-bound arm as she walked, trying to draw the smug expression the cat’s face seemed to be stuck in. Her path towards HQ turned slow and meandering, with long pauses as she tried to remember the correct placement of scars and matted fur. She didn’t know if the cat would be there when she got back. Cats got hungry and bored, after all. It seemed important to her that someone, somewhere, remember that the cat had hauled itself up five flights of stairs just to block her doorway.
When she finally looked up and caught sight of a clock through a shop window, it was four minutes to 1500 and she hadn’t even reached the base of the Hokage Monument. ‘I was late because I was drawing a picture of a cat’ wouldn’t have been an acceptable excuse even back in her genin days. In ANBU, it would probably get her punishment laps until she died.
Pen and paper she shoved back into her pockets, almost snapping the end off her pen in her haste. A hasty series of short translocations slung her the rest of the way through town without colliding into any civilians; a longer, final translocation took her right to HQ’s front door.
Sprinting to the office was as good as admitting she’d waited until the last second to follow orders. She wasn’t in the mood for one of the lieutenant’s speaking looks. Instead she made her casual, unaffected, but still very swift way down the halls, and reached the office door only a few minutes late.
The lieutenant, of course, was already at his desk when she let herself in. She gave him a quick salute. Glancing at the clock would be a rookie mistake, and she wasn’t a rookie.
Genma looked up and smiled at her. It lit up his face enough to almost draw attention from the bruises under his eyes and around his throat. In his dark t-shirt and jeans, with his hair in a loose topknot, he looked very different from the neat and professional team medic that Katsuko was used to. “Hi, Ueno. How’s the shoulder?”
He wouldn’t look that happy if he’d called the team together to give them bad news. Katsuko tapped her sling-bound arm with her free hand in a vague sort of salute and smiled back, hopeful. “It’s getting better, fukuchou. Any news on taichou?”
His smile widened. “Yes. And it’s relatively good news.” |
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