| [Jan. 23rd, 2009|01:25 am] |
Genma had been avoiding Tsume for days now. He pushed his way into the men's showers with a glance up the hall to her door, glad he didn't see her. After his night in jail with Raidou, knowing he had her to thank for it, he wasn't sure he trusted himself around her. Raidou had told him some that night, a little more in the days that followed, about how the Inuzuka woman had been close to a break herself. She'd practically begged Raidou to spar with her in a way that would push her right into her worst fears, Raidou had said. And left those worst fears unspecified, but Genma could guess at what they were. At least some of them.
Mix that with her issues about being Alpha, and severed from her familiar--Genma couldn't forget that horribly diminished feeling she'd had, that day they'd talked in his lab--and it wasn't hard to understand why she would have done what she did.
It didn't make it forgivable, though.
When Genma had set hands glowing with healing chakra against Raidou's bitten cheek, and felt the tremble in tense muscles at his touch, when he saw Raidou's fingers probing his jaw as if he expected the skin to tear away...
It made it really, really hard to forgive Tsume. Even if logic and Raidou both told him she deserved compassion and understanding.
So he'd avoided her, because he liked her. Respected her. She was one of only a tiny handful of people he'd ever talked to about his own scars, after all. And she'd shown him a lot of consideration. Told him a few things he didn't want to hear, but even he knew how much he'd needed to hear them.
Yelling at her about Raidou wasn't going to change what she'd done.
But he couldn't let it go, either. You go for the weak point, she'd told him. You establish who's Alpha and you prove you're strongest. And she'd gone for Raidou's weakest, most vulnerable point, while he was trying to do her a favor she'd begged him for.
It was on his mind while he washed his hair, and shaved his face. On his mind while he dressed in fresh jounin blues, and bundled his sweaty workout gear into the basket holding his toiletries. On his mind when he walked out, clean and damp, and heard Cheater! shouted from down the hall.
From Tsume's room. In not-quite Kuromaru's distinctive voice.
He was avoiding her, he told himself, and he wasn't going to go start something now. Even so his feet carried him left, towards her apartment, not right towards his own.
Her door was ajar, and she and Kuromaru in his human form were sprawled over what looked like a game of fifty-two pickup, giggling and shoving each other. For a moment Genma just watched them. Kuromaru was back, and Tsume was happy, that much was obvious. Her chakra felt better, even from here. Maybe the reconnection had begin?
"I thought you guys couldn't cheat each other, because you'd smell it," he said. "But then I hear you taught Raidou that trick he played me with his knee in my nuts. Guess that's cheating, too." |
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