"Huh," Katsuko said, and lifted Ryouma's arm off her shoulder with a little pat. "Sounds good. I could really go for a wash right now."

She gave him a playful shove with one hand and kicked off her combat boots, looking around elegant interior of the old inn. Reaching out with her chakra, she dissipated her clones and drew her energy into herself, calming it down to manageable levels.

After a minute or so, the tiny landlady shuffled back into reception area. "Your private baths have been prepared, shinobi-san. Follow me, please."

The hallway the hostess led them down was lined with paneled sliding doors papered with white cloth. The bubbling sound of the hot springs outside the ryokan reached her ears and Katsuko took a deep breath, savoring the clean, well-tended atmosphere. She was aware of Ryouma walking just behind her, a wall of solid heat right at her back.

"Here we are, shinobi-san," the old woman said, and slid a door open at the end of the hallway. Steam rushed out, enveloping her in a thick cloud. By the time Katsuko had blinked to clear her eyes she was gone, padding away down the hall at a speed that belied her birdlike frame.

Katsuko eyed the old hostess's retreating back and wondered how, exactly, one ran an inn that catered to ninja without learning a little bit about the shadow arts oneself.

Ryouma trudged past her and ducked into the steam room. A few moments later a low, impressed whistle sounded. She raised an eyebrow and followed him in.

"Let me see that shoulder, first of all," Katsuko said after she'd closed the door and pulled her mask off. "You're not doing anything if you let that go untreated."

"What--ouch!--did you have in mind?" Ryouma gave up on trying to pry the melted buckle of his shoulder-strap apart. The pain-killers worked all right as long as he tried his best to pretend his arm wasn't there, but even the slight jostle of his fingers against his burned shoulder woke the fire again. Water was probably going to kill. He gritted his teeth and set to work on the buckle at his opposite hip. With luck, he could open up the left side enough to peel out of the chestplate without cutting it open. He could reach the buckle on his left shoulder with that hand, at least, and with a bit of holding his breath and wriggling--

"You look like an epileptic stripper," Katsuko commented, setting her mask down on a low bench that held towels, scrubbing-brushes, and soap. "You don't really have to go through the whole writhing dance thing just to take your shirt off. I know it's a foreign concept, but--"

"Bite me," Ryouma invited. "Other shoulder, please." He set his teeth again, plucked at the mess of melted plastic sticking to his shirt, and strangled a hiss as his fingers brushed blistered, crackling skin.

Katsuko's sigh sounded suspiciously like a laugh. He didn't even see her palm the kunai before the cool metal was kissing his shoulder, slitting his shirt away from the wound and sawing through the reinforced straps of his armor. There was a tricky moment where the kunai skidded, and Ryouma's knees nearly buckled, but in a moment more the ruined armor was dangling from Katsuko's hand. Ryouma glanced quickly away from it--the Quartermaster was going to gut him--and down at his shoulder.

"Well," he said, when he was pretty sure he could trust his voice again, "at least when I go in for big-ass ugly scars, I get 'em matching."

Katsuko's breath escaped her in a long, low hiss. She dropped the chest plate on the floor with a thump. "Holy shit," she told Ryouma flatly. "Your shoulder looks like burnt steak."

He made a funny sound at that, but she ignored him and leaned closer to examine the wound. Oozing burn in the hollow of his collarbone; slight swelling around his shoulder; no skin sloughing off, though, and the bruises made the lightning-gash look larger than it actually was. So, not as bad as she'd originally thought.

She shrugged, stripping off her bloody gloves and going to retrieve her med-kit from her belt-pouch. "Well, look on the bright side. You're not gonna die, and all the skin will grow back. Eventually."

Her touch as she cleaned and bandaged his shoulder, though, was gentle.

"You're like one of those rubber punching dolls," she said a while later. They'd sat on the bench in the shower-room to make her job easier; steam from the bath billowed out through a connecting door, making her sweat under her armor. "You get hit with freaking lightning and thrown headfirst into a wall, and the worst you come out with a toasted shoulder and bruises. Just keep on bouncing right back."

Shaking her head, Katsuko cut off the ragged ends of the gauze roll and fastened a clip on the end, fixing it in place.

"I'm a favored son of the god of luck," Ryouma said. "Or something." He twisted to inspect her neat bandaging job, rolled his shoulder experimentally, and winced. "The rubber dolls probably don't hurt."

Actually, it wasn't that bad. They'd both taken another painkiller, and the ache was now pleasantly distant, as if he'd left it behind with the clones outside the inn. He smiled down at Katsuko. "Thanks."

Her mouth tilted in a wry returning smile, almost a smirk. The curve of her lower lip--thin, a little chapped, split from the same blow that had cracked her mask and opened a narrow gash under her left eye--snared his gaze. He wet his own lips, remembering the taste of ginger candy, and her smirk widened.

Right, then. Two could play at that game. Ryouma reached around her for the alcohol and bag of cotton swabs she'd used to clean his wounds. His hip protested a little with the sudden movement, but the cut had crusted over long ago and it didn't break open now. He pushed off the bench, skirted the medical kit laid out at her feet, and sank down again straddling the bench behind her. His breath brushed the strands of hair escaping from her bun and trailing down her neck. "Armor off, Katsuko."

Ah.

Katsuko's breath escaped her again, but this time for entirely different reasons. After a moment, she turned till she could see Ryouma's face out of the corner of her eye.

And smirked. She caught his gaze and held it, feeling his breath stir the loose hair across the nape of her neck.

"Well, if you insist," she drawled, voice low and steady as her hands rose to the first clasp. "It will make all this easier."

The armored vest came off deliberately; Katsuko eased out of the cracked and punctured thing like she had all the time in the world. The sting of numerous scrapes and cuts along her shoulder blades was nothing compared to the pleasant burn coiling low in her stomach. Rolling her shoulders, she dropped her chest plate on the floor and turned her back on Ryouma.

There was a moment of forbidding silence. After a few seconds, Ryouma hissed a bitten-off curse between his teeth and shifted. Katsuko gritted her teeth at the first light touch of the alcohol swab at the base of her neck. The blood was most clotted there, where the only thing between her skin and the wall had been the black turtleneck.

For someone with such big hands, his touch was soft. She bent her head as his callused fingers skated along the tops of her shoulders and absent-mindedly reached up to pull her hair away from sweat-slick skin. Their hands brushed against each other briefly and she suffered an almost electric jolt; she jerked her arm away with a muttered apology and focused on the opposite wall instead.

So much for that smirk. Ryouma chuckled. "I turned the jutsu off forty-five miles ago," he murmured, teasing a crusted clot away from pale skin. "It's okay to touch."

Katsuko laughed. He caught the flash of a grin as she turned her head. Encouraged, he let his thumb drift up to the unmarked skin just below her ear, and then down again. She didn't quite shiver, but she certainly didn't pull away. Focus, he reminded himself sternly, and went back to the cuts on her shoulders again.

Most of them were clean, shallow, caused by the hundred stinging blades of a wind jutsu instead of by a duller steel weapon, with its greater possibilities of infection. He cleaned grit out of a few cuts that had impacted the wall or floor, and butterfly-bandaged a few more that sliced a little deeper. Only a handful oozed as he worked the dried blood away, but they all left livid pink and red slashes across her winter-pale skin. Ryouma found his anger rising again. It was ridiculous to be furious with a man he'd already killed, but...

"You were brilliant," he said quietly, fiercely. "Like a blade yourself. I could've just stood and watched--except, okay, I was enjoying myself, too. Maybe I should've saved that bastard for you, but I'm glad I got him. For you."

"You, too," Katsuko stared straight ahead as she spoke, seeing not the walls of the shower-room but a pair of arrogant, pale eyes and Ryouma being thrown into the air by a shock of lightning. "You were, with the rot jutsu. You fought like a demon. It was amazing."

She flinched as a callused palm caught on one of the cuts along her back, shaking her head at Ryouma's muttered apology. "I had him," she said abruptly, and the patient silence behind her was incentive enough to continue. "Arrogant bastard. Too busy telling me what he was going to do to me to pay attention to what Iwas doing."

Her left hand curled into a fist on her lap. "I was going to tear him apart. But then he. At you--knew he couldn't catch me off guard any other way. The fucking coward."

Twisting around, heedless of the pull of recently bandaged wounds, she gave Ryouma a small, fierce smile. "But I'm glad that you got him. For the mission, but...me as well."

Ryouma looked--he looked--

She gripped the tense line of his shoulders reassuringly, and smiled again. "He's gone. We burned that place to the ground."

"We burned half of it," Ryouma corrected. "And I turned his insides to pudding." He forced a smile. "Really nasty pudding." The corner of his mouth twitched up a little more. "Even worse'n the stuff they'd serve for lunch at the Academy..."

Katsuko's nose wrinkled in half-amused disgust; her grip loosened, and her hands dropped away. He caught them just before she turned back. "Katsuko. Thanks. Again, I guess. I owe you more'n I thought."

She looked bemused. "Well," he explained, "you did pretty much kiss me back to life. And nearly kill me doing it, by the way. Set a pretty high standard for first kisses. I gotta admit, I'm looking forward to the next one."

Katsuko raised an eyebrow and grinned.

Well.

That made things much more interesting, didn't it? If only...

"I--" she started to speak, then stopped and shook her head, ruefully. Her gaze skated over Ryouma's bandages, then her own. "Well, I guess you're just going to have to wait a little longer, sweetness. If I kiss you now, I might not be able to control myself." A smirk twitched at the corners of her mouth as she glanced at him. "In all seriousness."

With a pang of regret she disentangled their hands and rose to her feet, all lean angles and grace. "I'll see you in the bath, Ryouma."

And if her hips swayed a little more than necessary as she went behind a partition to change, well, then what of it?

"Tease!" Ryouma shouted after her. She laughed. Grumbling, he pushed himself off the bench again. The room tilted a little before it steadied itself. If he wasn't going to get laid, bath and bed was sounding like a very good idea.

Bath first. He stripped down there at the bench, grabbed a towel, a washcloth, and a bar of soap, and staggered behind another partition to find a shower-stall. Scrubbing clean took a little longer than usual, as he worked not to open the cut on his hip or ruin Katsuko's neat bandaging job. But eventually he was clean of grime and sweat and crusted blood, and he turned the water off and caught his balance again against the wall.

Bath now.

The towel went around his hips without a pause to dry off. He padded dripping to the door that led outside, eased it open, and stood for a moment in the chill wind and billowing steam. The hot spring was pleasantly laid out with tumbled boulders and shading trees; a wide ledge ran halfway around the bath, and a few stone steps led down into the water for those who wished to ease their way in. Ryouma shucked his towel and took the steps, hobbling like an old man. He hissed when the water hit his hip, but at least he was tall enough that his shoulder was in no danger.

And damn that felt good, as the hot water began to seep into aching muscles and soak away the strain. Ryouma collapsed onto the ledge, tipped his head back against the side of the bath, and started making plans to spend the rest of his life right there.

Katsuko padded out a few minutes later, keeping in the veiling steam as much as possible. Her skin prickled with more than just the sensation of air against parts she usually kept covered--although that was a large part of it, too. It was just--

The last time she'd went to an onsen was before the labs, for her fourteenth birthday. She'd never felt comfortable being naked (vulnerable) in front of anyone else...after. It was just too much work, with the questions and the staring and the crawling sensation of being watched.

But Ryouma had saved her from Masahiko and shown her his scars. Fair was fair.

Still, she kept her face turned away from him as she slipped out of her towel and into the water.

The squeak of the sliding door was warning enough, even over the burbling of the spring and a little water-fall that trickled down at the far end of the pool. Ryouma slitted his eyes open and settled in to appreciate the way the damp towel hugged her curves, the long pale lines of her legs, the water beading at the hollow of her throat...

She dropped the towel.

He sat up, eyes snapping fully open. Steam billowed around her, but it couldn't hide her body, or her scars--the thick cruel crescent curving under her belly, from hipbone to hipbone; the long white line carving down her sternum, where her ribcage had been cracked open and sewn shut again; the four savage claw marks raking over the left side of her ribs, seaming the edge of her breast. The needle tracks and burn-scars on her arms were almost minor, compared to this.

He'd thought it was torture. She'd said it was experimentation. This was-- This was obscene.

He was on his feet, with no memory of getting there. "Katsuko," he said. His voice was raw in his throat. "They--they're dead, aren't they?"

"No," she said after a moment, absolutely neutral. She met his gaze head-on, eyes carefully blank. Under the steaming water, her hands tangled together into white-knuckled fists. "The two leaders got away. Scientists, husband and wife. She was in charge of the whole thing. He just...liked to watch. Their daughter had been raped and killed by Leaf shinobi. I looked like her."

Katsuko shrugged. "I joined ANBU because that's the only level high enough to hunt them and...others like them. HQ knows I'm interested in any missions related to those two. They called themselves Kaminari and Inazuma, can you believe that? 'Lightning' and 'thunder'. How trite." Her lip curled.

"So?" She narrowed her eyes at him and smiled humorlessly, lifting her hands out of the water and spreading her arms. "Still like what you see? I wasn't anything special even before they took me apart and stitched me back together with pieces missing, but I can still do a mean sword kata."

One dark eyebrow arched. "And I still rather like you."

"You'd better," Ryouma said, almost reflexively. "I'm a real catch, didn't I tell you?" He took one step forward. Another. The floor of the spring was rough and pebbled under his feet, reassuringly stable. Water dripped from Katsuko's fingers and sparkled like short-lived diamonds in the lamp-light from the inn. He reached out, caught one hand in his, and drew her in.

She stiffened, but she didn't pull away. When he set his free hand gently on her hip her muscles tensed as if he'd hit her, and her face set like carved ivory. But she held still, even when his fingers slipped lower to glide over the raised thickness of the scar under her belly, no parallel at all to the thin ridged line slicing down his. The jounin who'd nearly gutted him had been trying to kill him. The monsters who'd experimented on her--what had they wanted?

He had a brief, horrible image of rape, a child cut living out of her body. But they hadn't had her long enough, had they? Six months, she'd said. Long enough for other horrors, but not for that.

He splayed his hand over her ribcage, scattered with the more normal scars any ninja accumulated over a life in Konoha's service, and a few that probably weren't. Her breath caught when he moved up, rubbing his thumb over the base of the surgery scar between her breasts. The taut muscles eased a little, then tensed again. "You aren't...?"

"Disgusted?" He smiled faintly, shook his head. "I saw the kid who might've been my little brother die in the mud when I was sixteen. I melted the face off the guy who killed him and spent the next hour throwing up. When I was seventeen the girl I loved was killed on top of me. I wish I could avenge you, like I did for them--but you survived. Made it out of there when no one else did." He traced the white line down her sternum again. Wondered if he dared try it with his tongue.

"Try fascinated, maybe."

Katsuko's eyes fluttered shut at his touch, gentle and alien because it was gentle. She inhaled, sharply, and what felt like a dam broke apart in her chest. "Oh. I--"

She caught herself before she could do anything stupid, like crying or wrapping her legs around his waist and taking him right then and there. Instead, she managed a small, happy smile and reached up, cupping his cheek with one hand. "Thank you."

They were stark naked in a pool full of steaming water, with freshly bandaged wounds that would probably have to be rebandaged once they got out. Katsuko had been thrown into a wall, kicked in the ribs, and attacked by a cutting-wind jutsu less than a day ago--but right now, for the first time in years, she didn't feel any pain.

And there was the smile again, the one that softened the hard lines of her face and lit her eyes brighter than the lamps burning behind her. He'd wanted to kiss her the first time he saw it, and he wanted to even more badly now. The edge of her thumb, curled against his cheek, nearly brushed his mouth. He took a deep breath and thought fixedly about the dangers in getting personal on missions, the probability that he would be very very dead when he got home, the outside chance that he'd hurt her even more.

She was still smiling at him, naked and strong and beautiful.

None of it mattered.

He ducked his head, and her hand slipped through his wet hair and curled around the back of his neck. Her lips softened beneath his, and he caught a hint of that lingering taste of ginger candy. Did he still taste of blood? She wasn't pulling away...

He ended it first, nipping gently at her lower lip, slipping his hand around her lower back to hold her close. "You're beautiful," he said quietly, fiercely. "And I want you just about as much as I've ever wanted any woman. But you deserve to be happy. What do you want?"

A condom, Katsuko did not say, because even she had the sense not to ruin this particular moment. "You," she said instead. "But I can wait. Say, until we're done with the bath and back in our room." Which was more than long enough, in her opinion. She tugged him in for another kiss again, hungry and insistent, and then slid out of his arms with a positively shark-like grin.

Ryouma made a sound low in his throat that sent a jolt of lust straight through her, but he let her go. The expression on his face put her resolve to wait until after the bath to sore test, but, well.

It was the foreplay that was half the fun, wasn't it?