“Didn’t take much,” Raidou said, remembering the way Ryouma had looked at his wrist and said I’m a ninjutsu man. But that was the only thing he’d done. No crying, no raging, no panic. Just the one quiet acknowledgement: Oh, my career might be over.

Shock could level a man with calm, but so could a life on the guillotine edge.

Still, Ryouma had been flat on his back, drugged half-comatose while a lunatic (comrade) wielded a blade over him, and rescued only by a slice of good fortune. His wrist was mending, but who knew where his head was at? Raidou should’ve come to talk to him sooner.

In all their copious free time, with all his copious psychological training.

“I’ll bet you one thing,” he said. “If there’s a guy out there who could wring jutsu out of someone’s hands, it’d be Orochimaru. Even if you were a second choice, you were still a valuable target.”

Ryouma’s head pulled up, startled. His mouth twisted. “Thank you. That’s very comforting.”

“Score one for team self-esteem,” Raidou said, and tried a new tack. “How is your hand doing?”

Coffee steam coiled up gently as Ryouma took his hand away from the curve of the chipped blue mug and held it out, palm up and open. Flesh-coloured flexible bandages covered most of his palm and wrapped a few inches up his wrist, most likely to keep him from bending the joint too much. He curled his fingers inwards, tapping the pad of his thumb to each one. The middle two fingers were a hair clumsier, but not much.

“Still hurts a little,” he said. “But it works. I’m doing seal exercises. Going slow, but I can make the shapes.”

Not bad for only four days' healing.

“And how’re you doing?” Raidou said.

Ryouma’s eyes flicked away, dropping to the floor. He laced his fingers around the mug again, took a sip, and kept the mug pressed against his mouth, shoring up whatever words he didn’t want to spill. “All right,” he said finally, lowering it to his chest. “Had a few nights of bad dreams once the drugs wore off, but 0400 wake-up calls don't give you much time for cold sweats. I'll be fine by the time we're heading out.”

That was more than Raidou had ever thought he’d reveal.

“Vindication for the training schedule,” Raidou said, stepping carefully over raw ground. He’d seen Ryouma stripped down before, but that had involved fun, and consent, and nothing that bled. This was different territory. “You want to talk about it?”

Ryouma’s thumbnail scraped his mug. He shook his head. “Nah. I cried on you once already. That’s my quota for the next ten years. I’ll get over it.”

“Fair enough,” Raidou said, because sometimes you had to know when to not push. “That does circle us around to the other conversation we should probably have, though.”

Ryouma groaned and slumped backwards on the bed, managing not to spill a drop of coffee. “Do we have to? I thought ‘I don’t sleep with subordinates’ pretty much covered it.”

“And yet,” Raidou said, with a tilted smile, because sometimes you did have to push. “I just want to make sure we’re okay.”