| [Nov. 2nd, 2013|03:54 am] |
She needed a lot more than that. A hug was a band-aid, even if it stretched long. But they were manacled by what Katsuko couldn’t say, and Raidou didn’t know.
“Any time,” he said instead, reaching for the midway between gentle and normal. Even if Katsuko felt fragile, she wouldn’t want to be treated like a soap bubble. “You can stick there longer if you want to. I don’t have anywhere I need to be.”
It was the right thing to say. She tipped against him, pulling her legs up to prop her chin on her knees, and wrapped both arms around her shins. Against his side, she was just a tick above normal human warmth; her chakra made her burn hotter than most. “Okay,” she said, sounding immeasurably tired, and just faintly relieved.
He slung his arm around her back again, snugging her in close, and rumpled her hair.
When this was over, he thought, he’d have to send a thank you note to his moms. Unlike the average ninja family, who seemed to treat human contact like a communicable disease, he’d been raised to appreciate the value of a hard hug, band-aid or otherwise. At least it was loosening some of the tension in those narrow, wire-strung shoulders.
Or maybe that was exhaustion.
Very gently, he pressed his fingertips to the back of Katsuko’s neck, calling up seedlings of chakra to hit the knotted trigger-points that usually needed strong pressure to work out. They gave like stacked dominos, and she made a very quiet noise: oh. That didn’t seem to be a bad noise, so he kept going, working carefully across the arches of her shoulders. She melted slowly against him, like a cat in a puddle of sunlight.
Eventually, she murmured, “Hey, Rai?”
He looked at her.
She hesitated, then said, “I’m still hungry.”
For a second, though, it had looked like she wanted to say something else. He laughed anyway, because he’d take any constant in a storm. “Yeah? I think there’s still a bowl of udon with your name on it, and a metric ton of cold egg rolls. That do?”
“Give me some of your udon, too,” she said, with a shameless, reflexive grin. But then the hesitation again. She added, “Please?”
He snorted. “Hell no. You can eat your own udon and your own heap of ridiculous grease.” He reached behind her, catching the edge of the blankets, and pulled them loose from their military-grade sharp lines, yanking them over Katsuko’s head.
She squawked, but then wrapped them around herself until only her nose showed, and a tuft of ruffled brown hair. Raidou left her to nest. He unearthed actual bowls to pour the remaining udon in, and tossed them into the microwave to reheat. The egg rolls went in after.
He made tea on the theory that you could never go wrong with tea, and dimmed the lights on his return. The shades were already drawn; the light outside was rich and warm, fading towards late afternoon. He pushed a steaming bowl and a mug into Katsuko’s hands, and set a plate by her blanket-bundled knee.
“If you get crumbs on my bed, they’ll never find your body,” he told her.
One hand snaked out of the blankets, retrieved an egg roll, and vanished. “I’m a trained ninja,” she said with her mouth full. “I can handle some crumbs.”
“In my experience, trained ninja are some of the messiest people alive.” He glanced at the dark TV screen, with its stack of videocassettes piled neatly on top. “Still want to watch a movie?”
“Yeah,” she said. “Pick that one with that hot actor. You know, the one with the hair.”
Given that Katsuko’s tastes were wide-ranging and slightly outside the normal bell curve, that could apply to anything he owned. He grabbed Strawberry Pie, which was funny, light-hearted, and had at least one drag queen and two well-rounded lesbians to provide a bit of rainbow. The musical score was mellow enough to fall asleep to, if he remembered right.
He slid the tape into the video player, set it going, and took the remote back to the bed. Katsuko had firmly established herself in a comfortable nest of blankets, but she’d also unwound enough to reveal her face and hands. Her hair was even more messy than usual, sticking up in little bolts of static. He dropped down next to her and leaned his back again the wall, pulling his udon bowl into his lap. |
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