Raidou didn’t know what he’d expected, but it hadn’t been that. Katsuko had never buckled under pressure before; she’d only gotten harder. Last year, he’d seen her cut a man’s spine out with one sword and blind a kunoichi with the other, and she’d slept like a baby afterwards. She was war-bred all the way through.

He had watched her break in other ways, but it’d always been like a grenade. Outwards, with shrapnel, and only ever aimed at the enemy. He could count on one hand the number of times she’d seemed visibly troubled, and most of them had happened in the last month.

Well, there had been that thing with the poisoning, but nothing counted when you were under the influence.

“Let’s not blow it bigger than it is,” he said, to himself as much as to her. “The last couple weeks have been rough for everyone, and that mission would’ve tested a veteran team. The only real slip I saw you make was at the house, with those two little girls under the floor. Can you tell me what happened there, at least?”

Katsuko’s eyes rested on him for a long moment, the clear green-brown shadowed with exhaustion. Then, resigned, she said: “He’d brick up the bodies underneath the floor when he was done with them, back then. You’ve read my file.”

Oh.

Raidou had vastly underestimated how completely unqualified he was to deal with this.

But there was no one else in the room.

“Actually, that whole section of your file was redacted,” he said. “All they left were the broad strokes, and a page about Yondaime-sama’s shutdown seal, if your chakra ever runs wild. Nothing about floor bodies.”

Katsuko’s eyes flickered, and her mouth twisted. “Redacted. Of course.”

“Your mission history was a party to read, though,” he said, like that helped. Katsuko didn’t grin. Raidou sighed. “Look, you’re a grown-ass adult and your business is none of mine. If you want to talk about it—if that would help—I’m here, and I’ll listen. If you want to tell me to step off, that this was one slip because it’s been a bastard of a month, I can do that, so long as you get a handle on it.”

Her slim shoulders set tensely. She opened her mouth.

“Wait, one other thing,” he said. “I don’t mean get it perfect—we’re all screw ups off the field. Sometimes on the field. Witness me sending our only two chakra-sensors down into a demon nest together. But no more blank-outs on a mission.”

A thin crystalline tension descended, which Katsuko filled by looking at him and saying nothing. And more nothing.

Then, at last, she said, “Alright.” She shifted slightly in her chair, and twitched one sharp shoulder. “I can do that.”

Probably they weren’t going to talk about it, then. Maybe he should push, but—he’d had captains who’d made him talk things out, and others who’d let him keep his silence, and he couldn’t say which was better. Even his mothers disagreed: Ume liked to process aloud, with any family member who’d listen; Shen kept things quiet, to herself. They were both well-balanced.

None of them had seen bodies stuffed under a floor, though.