Tsume dragged her feet toward HQ, scratching at the bandage on her temple. With great effort she pulled her hand away. Lack of chakra meant everything was healing slower than it should, and her skin was still a mess under the bandages. Her most recent check-up--unofficial, while she'd been visiting Kuromaru--had delievered the prognosis that, within a few years, the scarring might fade.

The missing half of her ear would never regrow. While she'd never been self-conscious about scars before, she wished her hair would hurry up and grow out. She tugged at it absently as if that might help, then dropped her hand to her side.

Bed sounded good, but her room was too... empty, and she doubted Ryouma was in his now. She couldn't go home to her clan; they were all using this mess as ammunition for why she shouldn't be in ANBU. And with half her usual chakra--and that so warped it was almost useless--she didn't think she could take any Pack challenges at the moment. Especially given that her earlier, probably ill-advised, work out had left her weak and trembling.

It was with all this going through her mind that she stumbled into the HQ.

And right into a man.

"Crotchticks, sorry," she muttered reflexively, one hand on his chest to balance them both back. Then the smell hit her, and she yanked away, clamping her hand over the lower half of her face. It didn't help. Now her hand smelled like that. "Bite me on the tail and call me Fido, what have you been rolling in?" Something chemical. Something with a spike of an edge to it, something to poison like napalm was to fire.

She looked up--not too far; she almost came up to his chin--into a face she already knew, glaring at almost gold eyes. Her chakra bristled, feeling disturbingly impotent as it didn't fill the hall but rather just the area around her. "If you've just assigned me back to the hospital, I am going to send my doctor out here to ream you, I promise." Black-faced wolf, she'd spent enough time there!

"Uh?" Genma took a step back and looked down at the woman he'd collided with. Tsume, but she was obviously much the worse for wear. Her face, what he could see of it, was pale and bruised, her right temple, forehead and one ear were covered in bandages, the hair sticking out above the gauze was raggedly chopped. And her chakra was wrong. Weak and pale, a presence nothing like her usual self. Genma looked around and realized there was no sign of Kuromaru, which given what he knew of the mission they'd nearly not survived, wasn't surprising.

"You sure you should be out of there already? I heard you had a rough one. If bumping into me when I'm not even going particularly fast is enough to make you think you might end up back there..."

Tsume was making a face of pure disgust.

"Are you okay? You're not gonna start puking again, are you?"

She glared at him from over the edge of her hand. "Yes, Shiranui, seeing you makes me puke. And I'm not that weak." Except she was, and the fact that he could tell, when he barely knew her, was alarming.

This wasn't a subject she wanted to be talking about. She pulled her hand away to point at him, and promptly clapped it back over her nose. It didn't really help, but it made her feel better. "I'm fine. You, on the other hand, smell like you've been rolling in poisons. You'd better not be working with contact anything." Poisons made her uncomfortable in the first place, and she'd run right into him--

Wait. Was her skin tingling? It was. "Crotchticks," she muttered, scratching at one arm. "It's not contact poisons, is it?" The look she gave his chest, where she'd hit him, was dubious at best.

"I didn't even go near the contact stuff," Genma protested, and sniffed at himself. There was maybe the faintest tang of sweat, his laundry detergent, deodorant. A slight tobacco scent, but he hadn't had a cigarette all day, and she hadn't complained about his smoking before unless he was actively doing so. "I was working in the lab, yeah, but I had a coat and gloves on, and I washed up afterwards."

Now he was worried himself. Had he spilled something on himself and not realized it? Or maybe one of the fume hoods had leaked. He cleared his throat and coughed experimentally, relieved to find no sensations that warned of inhalant poisoning. Although he supposed if he'd managed to get into something he had an immunity to... But even those gave him a reaction, they just didn't kill him.

"Are you sure you're okay?" Tsume looked worn out, injured, and pissed off. Probably a Very Bad combination, Genma decided. "I really don't think I got anything on myself, I mean Aoshi didn't smell anything, and he'd have told me if there was a problem. So I'm pretty sure I'm clean. But maybe I should go change and shower, just to be safe."

She didn't know who Aoshi was. She didn't actually care. "Maybe you should," she agreed, nose wrinkled behind her hand. "You smell like--" She wasn't sure. Braving the chemical burn again, she pulled her hand away, leaned in, and sniffed his chest. Now that she was expecting it, it wasn't as bad. It still made her reel back. "Chemicals and seafood." Her hand returned to over her nose. "Black-faced wolf, that's awful. I hate non-natural poisons. Even more than natural poisons. At least cyanide doesn't smell so... Fake. Metallic." She took a step away, putting more distance between them.

"You coughed. Does that stuff make you cough?" Great, now she had a tingle in her throat. "If I just sniffed you and now I'm gonna die, I will haunt you for the rest of your life."

Chemicals and seafood. Metal. That would be the jellyfish toxin and the cadmium, no doubt. Genma was simultaneously deflated and pissed off at Aoshi. "You can smell that?" he moaned, frowning and sniffing at himself again. "But Aoshi said he couldn't smell it at all, and I know rats have way better senses of smell than humans. If that little bastard lied to me so he could get back to his doe..."

Tsume looked like she was considering whether or not she might start coughing up bloody shreds of lung. "It's not an inhalant," he assured her. "It mimics a stroke, it only works if you ingest it, and you have to get a good sized dose. Even if I had some on my skin and you licked me, that wouldn't be enough to hurt you. You'd have to down at least fifteen milliliters before you'd get anywhere close to a lethal range for a human your size. That's why I was working so hard to make it undetectable." He sighed heavily and hissed a breath out through his teeth. "Dammit, are you sure you're smelling fish?"

Most of what he said made no sense to her, but she got the important parts: She wasn't going to die. "Great," she muttered, rubbing her nose with the back of her hand. "That's always good to know. All of... that."

She hesitated, finally adding, "Definitely fish. Aoshi might not have realized it. It doesn't smell like poison, it just smells like chemical. But... well, chemical usually is poison, so..." she shrugged. "Keep working on it?" With that, she began to edge away. She was going to go dunk her head in a vat of bleach. Poisons. There was an interest she just didn't understand.

"So anyone with as good a sense of smell as you is gonna recognize it, even if it doesn't smell like poison? That's a pisser." Genma shoved his hands in his pockets and came up with a senbon to fiddle with. "I mean, there are probably people with as good a sense of smell as you in other villages, right? Or jutsu that can do it for them temporarily. And I'm supposed to be coming up with something completely undetectable. Like completely. Dammit."

Three weeks of effort and it came to no good? Maybe it was salvageable. He'd worked on the concentrations, diluting and diluting, but maybe it just needed to be more dilute. Of course then the volume would have to be even greater and then it would only be usable in a drink, not food.

Tsume looked like she was rather eager to get away from him. He supposed he couldn't blame her, if he reeked as badly as she acted like he did. They hadn't really spoken much since their mission in January. He was pretty sure she didn't trust him, probably didn't like him much. Not that he'd done much to encourage her to take a more positive view. The last time he'd spoken to her she'd been hung over, and he'd been bailing an equally hung-over Raidou out of the drunk tank. To say that his thoughts about her at the time lacked charity would be an understatement.

But Raidou liked her. A lot of people liked her. She had experience, an excellent reputation, and more importantly, she had the ability to detect the supposedly undetectable poison.

"Look, um. You wouldn't be willing to help me with this, would you?"

Crotchticks, he was still talking. And asking her for things. She rolled a distinctly unimpressed look at him, and debated the likelihood that he could petition for help for this poison he was supposed to be coming up with. Help from an ANBU who was off missions until her familiar was healed.

Pus infected crotchro--ticks.

"You are going to owe me. Something that will burn the smell out when we're through," she said, enunciating carefully.

She didn't want to work with poisons. She didn't want to smell chemicals. And she sure as blood farts didn't want to do any of that with a man who made her skin tighten, even if it had only been a genjutsu, and even if the exact memories of it had all but faded. She worse memories to take its place--but they hadn't irradicated things entirely.

All of which meant she probably should help. She couldn't, after all, go around tense about her teammates for something they didn't do.

She crossed her arms over her chest and smothered the growl that wanted to rise in her throat. "Lots of smell-blocking things," she added unhappily.

Maybe it was another aspect of being an Inuzuka, or maybe it was just Tsume's personality, but every emotion seemed to show right up on her face. She certainly didn't look like she wanted to help, even if she was saying she would. In fact she looked like the very idea made her ill.

"Look, it doesn't have to be you in the lab or anything. I could, you know, work on a sample, and bring it to you and ask you if you could smell it, or something," Genma offered. He tried to gather from her body language what the underlying problem was. Probably still that damn mission, given the way she crossed her arms like she needed to protect herself from him. What the hell had that bastard planted in her mind, anyway, that had made her so afraid of him and Raidou?

And he did need her help. Or could use it, anyway. "How about coffee? Does coffee block smell enough? We could get some coffee and I could let you see which component of the things I'm working with is smelliest?" He kept his own posture as neutrally unthreatening as possible, which given how much taller he was, wasn't easy.

Black-faced wolf, she really was going to have to help. Still, coffee would probably block the smell. It wasn't that strong, unless she got right up close. And she liked it, anyway. "Yeah," she said reluctantly, glancing around the area as if Kuromaru might show up and give her an excuse not to. He wouldn't, of course. He was still in the hospital.

Tsume scratched the back of her skull, dropping her other arm to her side. "Coffee'll do. Don't suppose I have anything else I'm busy with..." If the smell got too bad, she could always say she had to go deal with children. Facing her family might be preferable.

Hunger had been the motivating factor in getting Genma out of the lab. Hunger and a certainty he'd gotten the undetectable poison perfected. Which it wasn't, damn it all. Tsume could help him. Would help him. At least right now. But from the look on her face, if he even asked for a twenty minute break while he grabbed some chow, that would be twenty minutes in which she could very well change her mind and rescind her offer of help. He looked at Tsume, glanced at the door to the cafeteria, and decided that all things considered, he could let the dubious Tuesday lunch curry wait a little while. After all, he'd still be hungry when they finished, and curry--especially the cafeteria's curry--improved with sitting. And with hunger. Maybe they'd even throw something good like shrimp in by the time it was dinner curry.

"Great," he said, and gave Tsume a grin. "We should get coffee from the machine in the encryption office. They have better stuff than the rest of us get, on account of the fact that they're practically chained to their desks working on that stuff till their eyes cross. I wouldn't work Intel Internal if they paid me five times what they do now." He laughed, sure Tsume would agree with him on this point. Most Hunters would, but Tsume especially. He didn't think there were any Inuzuka working paperwork anywhere in Konoha.

"We'll go steal their coffee and then swing by the lab, if that works for you."

Tsume gave a laughing snort at the very thought of any Inuzuka sitting at a desk--though wasn't there that halfbreed that had bonded with a poodle mix?--and followed Genma reluctantly downward.

Sounds echoed off of bare walls in the stairwell, and when she took a breath her chakra didn't fill half of the space. She rolled her shoulders instead and tried to distract herself. "You work with poisons a lot?" Enough to leave a lingering scent around his room, once she knew to look for it. It made her skin crawl.

"A fair amount," Genma agreed. He led her down the hall past the quartermaster's office and to an unmarked door, keyed in a lock code, and held it open for her, revealing a narrow, brown-carpeted hallway of nearly identical unmarked doors. "Third door on the left," he instructed as he carefully resealed the door behind them.

The hallway was empty and silent, but the presence of the place was humming with the lingering effects of jutsu being cast, chakra being manipulated. Genma moved noiselessly along with Tsume, a rolling, graceful, silent gait that said as much about his profession as the scent of poison on his clothes or the weapons in his pockets.

"I use senbon a lot. They're very effective ranged weapons with a little poison added, and there are all sorts of effects you can get, not just killing. But you know what part of the Hunter force I'm specialized in: most of my missions are gonna end up with someone dead. Poisons are good for keeping people from knowing you were there, for getting people asleep when you need them asleep, sick when you need them sick, and for making a death look like it wasn't at a ninja's hands. That's what this one is for. Make it look like a stroke, leave no trace for a snooping coroner to find."

Her hackles rose, walking down the corridor. Her steps went quiet in response, and she slid along beside Genma.

There were scents here she didn't know, tickles of chakra that made her uneasy, an overall air of wrongness that hit her in a purely animal instinct way.

"That's... interesting." She'd mostly stopped listening as they'd walked, taking short, sharp breaths as she tried to catalog and pinpoint the smells of death. It didn't work. She consciously went back to breathing normally, but by the time she got into the break room she was scenting again, shoulders tense and chin up, head weaving slightly with every step.

She shook herself and tried to knock it off. Coffee would help. She grabbed a styrofoam cup and poured dark liquid in, lifting it to let steam curl up around her face. It blocked most of the scents, leaving only a vague unsettling sensation of something wrong. Both hands on the cup, she looked at Genma over the rim. "I don't know how you work down here." She wasn't claustrophobic, but the light was all artificial, and there weren't any windows to see outside. It made her twitch.

Genma got his own coffee, stirring in a generous portion of creamer but no sugar. "You'll like my lab better," he told her, leading her back out of the break room and down another anonymous corridor. They passed a woman in jounin blues carrying a heavy-looking piece of unidentifiable equipment. Genma gave her a wink, and she returned it with a blush and a shy smile, before disappearing into another of the unmarked doors. He pushed open a door marked, 'Emergency Exit Only', led Tsume into a room filled with shelves and cabinets and lit by yellow lights, set his coffee down on a precariously stacked pile of boxes, and gave Tsume an appraising look.

"Here," he said, and passed her a knee-length lab coat and a pair of absurdly oversized goggles. "Do you want a respirator too? We're not going to be working with inhalants, but given how sensitive your nose is, maybe you should have one." He gestured at a rack of nose and mouth filters hanging from straps on the wall, and shrugged into his own lab coat. The goggles he slipped into a pocket.

Tsume held the lab coat and goggles in her arms and looked with alarm at the respirator. "You think if my nose is sensitive, I might inhale more of something? Because I can't sniff with that thing on, and if this stuff is really that dangerous..."

Inuzuka reacted funny to things. She couldn't see why having a better sense of smell would increase the chances of her getting poisoned, but if he was worried... She shifted, one foot edging back toward the door as if she might make a grand escape. Then she looked doubtfully at Genma.

"Oh it's not gonna hurt you," he said. "Not as in actually hurt. But you were puking that one time from smells from Ryouma's jutsu, so if smells bug you, then you could, you know, wear the mask until I give you something specific to try. Like keeping one eye shut when you walk from a dark place into a light one 'cause you expect to go back into the dark and don't want to lose your night vision?" Genma gave her a hopeful look. She definitely looked like she wanted out of this. Probably the claustrophobic little room they were in didn't help much.

"Here, look, I'll just grab one and bring it, so if you think you need it, it's there." Speaking of which, he wondered if he ought to grab a waste basket in case she got sick again. Although that was from putrefaction smell, not chemical smell, right? And the smells in the lab were mostly chemical. A sort of sharp melange that was just a little dangerous and quite exhilarating. "Okay?" He pushed the door open, revealing a large, brightly-lit room filled with long tables. Glassworks for various experiments were set up here and there, and there were shelves of carefully labeled bottles and jars and boxes along each wall.

"My station's over there, next to the window." A window that faced out onto the hallway separating the poison lab from the infirmary. Genma's station being immediately next to that window was by demand from the infirmary staff, after one too many accidents involving his attempts to develop various immunities. Tsume didn't need to know that, he decided.

She paused another moment, then finally yanked the labcoat on and followed Genma's example, sliding the goggles into an oversized pocket. Armed with her cup of coffee, she stepped warily into the room.

Chemical smell hit her like a blunt force, a wall of unnatural scents reminiscent of oils and weapons, burned blood and the lung-choking odor of charred Teflon. A riot of smell that she couldn't quite sift through--too many scents she was unfamiliar with to identify which were dangerous. Of course, that was easily answered: all of them. She found a low growl trying to ease its way up her chest, and forced it down.

Instinct said to remain aware. She fought it, lifting her coffee and inhaling the rich darkness of over-roasted beans instead.

The window he was heading toward showed yet more halls. Not a speck of natural light in spitting distance. Tsume reached his station, started to lean against a table, straightened quickly and leaned against the wall instead. "So, how's this work?" she asked warily. "You just give me things and I smell them?"

"Here, you can sit," Genma said, pulling a tall, swivel-seated stool with a low metal back over towards them. He grabbed an identical one for himself. She looked like she needed to sit. Not that she'd likely ever admit such a thing, but the bandages on her head and face were enough to say it for her. And maybe if he sat she would get over her machismo--could women have machismo?--anyway she'd get over it and sit down, too.

"And everything's safe to touch. I keep a clean workstation. Everyone in here does. If you don't, people end up dead and then there are inquiries and paperwork..." He laughed, hoping she'd get the joke. Gallows humor was, after all, a specialty in ANBU all its own.

"So I guess I'll start with the finished product I was working on," he continued, and pulled the bottle of poison down from its shelf. "And then the lethal ingredients, and you can tell me which ones are the most prominent."

She edged onto the chair, still clutching her coffee. Lethal ingredients. Great. "Yeah, paperwork can be a bloodworm." Her eyes twinkled, and she looked at him sidelong, remembering the last time she'd worked with him, and the paperwork involved then. "Your familiar gives two little love bites to teammates on a mission and suddenly they want forms filled out and assessments done..."

Genma had pulled rubber gloves out and was sliding them on over heavily scarred, slightly twisted hands. Then he offered her a pair.

She reeled back. "I'm not touching anything. You can do the touching. I'll just sniff." Maybe she was being paranoid but, ticks chew it, she remembered what happened when they'd given Touga the wrong painkillers that time. And that hadn't even been a poison. They'd cleaned up vomit for days.

"If that was love, I'm pretty sure I'd have lost my leg to hate." Genma gave Tsume a wry grin and patted his thigh. "It's all healed up now, but it took a whole week to get back to my usual weight on leg presses."

He could feel her eyes on his hands. Speaking of assessments. Undoubtedly Kuromaru had told Tsume all about the incident in the dugout, while they'd waited for her. It wasn't necessarily because of anything she or her familiar had reported, since his own mission report and Raidou's had both described what had happened, but he'd had two interviews, one with Intel and one with a medic who tried to pretend he wasn't from psych, that had probed heavily at that little weakness.

Big weakness.

"I, uh, hope the hoops they made you jump through weren't too harsh. I know the psych interview about the genjutsu effects had to suck. At least mine sucked. I mean, psych interviews always suck, but that one sucked extra hard." He unstoppered the bottle, inserted a glass rod and lifted it out, holding it over a piece of blotting paper and offering it to Tsume. "Don't get too close, and don't touch it. It will only hurt you if you ingest it, but I don't want to risk it. Actually put on the gloves, okay?"

Tsume didn't bother agreeing with him about Kuromaru and the removal of limbs. She did, however, wince at the mention of psych interviews. She was relatively certain the psych people hated her. Possibly her whole clan, and probably for good reason. There was nothing quite like trying to interview someone while their familiar sat there, staring unblinkingly at you and panting to show off very long teeth.

She shrugged, though, glad to be a returned veteran if only because they assumed she had her act together. "They didn't pester me too hard about it. I think they expect me not to have any obvious triggers--and if I did, my clan would knock 'em out of me before psych ever noticed." Her last words were dry, accompanied by a bare twist of lips. She couldn't stop the flick of her gaze at his hands, now covered by gloves, before she looked up at him and shrugged. "Nothing in my files to make them worry."

The smell of something alien, fish, and metal hit the air as he unstoppered the bottle, and she pulled away even before he'd held out the rod. "Okay, yeah, it stinks. Like... metal chemicals and seafood. Ever licked a spoon? Something like that." She ignored his command about the gloves. If she didn't have them on, maybe he'd keep that away.

Instead, she practically buried her face in her undrunk coffee.

Genma wiped the rod clean and disposed of the blotter paper in a burn box, then carefully resealed the bottle. Definitely not undetectable. He picked up the gloves and held them out to Tsume again. They lay limp across his palms: empty hands, a second skin. His own hands almost looked whole in their latex sheaths. Triggers, she said. Said she didn't have any and stared right at his hands.

Kuromaru had definitely talked to her.

Nothing in her files to make them worry? How the hell did you get to be in the service as long as she had, at a rank as high as hers, and not have something that set you off? He didn't need her dog's ability to smell a lie. He'd seen how badly she'd been triggered by that genjutsu, after all.

"Nothing they know about, huh?" he asked. If psych didn't know, and her clan didn't know, that only proved that even the best of the best could be fooled under the right circumstances.

One eyebrow arced upward briefly at his question, a bland smile touching her mouth. "You can keep the gloves," she said quietly and firmly. Then added, "Nothing they know about." She shrugged, eloquent shoulders rising and falling under the starched white of the lab coat. "I certainly have some things I don't like. I don't think there's a ninja with three months under their belt who doesn't. But no, nothing they've put in a file on me." Her smile was quick and sharp, slightly bitter as she lifted one hand, fingers fanning along the bandaged side of her face with a quick butterfly flicker before settling on the cup again. "I'm sure this'll go in the file. I'll probably get called up after my first active mission and be grilled."

And hopefully that would satisfy him.