| [Dec. 22nd, 2013|05:16 am] |
“One of us should be,” Kakashi returned, fighting the reflexive twitch. Some days the mask was an annoyance, and some days, like today, he wished it would cover his whole face. Maybe he’d start wearing his ANBU dog full-time.
He clamped a hand over his arm. The bleeding was minimal, barely worth commenting on.
Katsuko laughed, soft and low, with a rasp. “You’re pretty without ‘em, too.”
Was this her new version of pet names? Kakashi gave her a blank look, since people usually used that as a template to draw their own reactions on, and he didn’t know what else to do. Finally, he drawled, “Boundaries, Ueno.”
She cackled at him, waggling her eyebrows in ridiculous victory.
In the two weeks, approximately, that he’d known her, Kakashi had learned that anything could amuse Katsuko, including dead silence. He’d think there was something fundamentally wrong with her, except 1) ANBU, 2) he’d seen her in a fight, and 3) it wasn’t just her. A good rule of thumb with shinobi was that, the higher the rank, the more subtle unhinging you could expect.
Or unsubtle, depending. Jounin were crazy.
Still, if there was a grain of something serious under that jester-mask, like actual interest—Ryouma had said Katsuko thinks you’re hot—he didn’t want to encourage it. He’d been up and down that road with Rin, and it hadn’t ended well for anyone. He stepped away from the table, retreating until his back hit the counter-edge, where he could lean, and flipped Icha Icha one-handed out of his hip-pouch.
Unlike Ryouma, Katsuko didn’t follow him.
Over the edge of Ikeda Terumasa-sama’s suicide scene (aborted by the arrival of Koyanagi Kiyohime, in the nick of time), he heard her say confidingly, “You should see Tousaki, Toushiro-sensei. He’s real pretty, too. In a taller way.”
Alternatively, maybe Katsuko’s interest was directed at anyone with a pulse.
“I cannot tell you how much I don’t care,” Toushiro-sensei said. “And if you keep wriggling, I’m going to fuse your knees together.”
There was drifting silence for a moment, presumably as Katsuko thought that over. “That would make a lot of things difficult,” she admitted, and quit fidgeting.
Medical jutsu were usually pretty quiet, unless there were broken bones to crunch back together. But flesh did make a sound when it was resealed, like paper ripping in reverse, except slowed down and wetter. A good medic would throw in a nerve-block for bigger injuries, but not for the papercut Katsuko had, so she had to be feeling the ant-fire of reconnecting nerves. The padded table squeaked as her hand clenched.
Kakashi flipped a page, attention split between Koyanagi Kiyohime’s desperate speech and the rising spike of stress in Katsuko’s scent. She hadn’t liked needles in the field. Clearly she didn’t like doctors any better at home.
“Done,” Toushiro-sensei at last.
Katsuko was off the table in the fraction of a second, bouncing gently on the balls of her feet with her obvious desire to leave. Toushiro-sensei turned to Kakashi. “Let’s take a look at that face.”
Kakashi didn’t lower his book. “No.” |
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