| [Dec. 1st, 2011|08:13 am] |
“Yeah,” Genma said numbly. Twice, but he couldn’t tell her that. No one knew about that second time but Kakashi, who’d been there, Arakaki, a handful of diplomats and medics, one red-haired woman from T&I, and the Hokage himself.
And Raidou. He’d told Raidou just a few weeks ago, breaking his oath to keep the secret in the process. Did it even matter anymore?
He shook the thought loose. Katsuko was sitting there, looking like she felt as naked as Genma had when he’d stripped off after the mission. Six months. How had she survived at all? He’d barely made it through three weeks the first time, a week the second.
“I heard you were... I heard about you, a little,” he said quietly. “I heard you had some kind of chakra problem because of a medical experiment. I didn’t know it was an interrogation. I don’t even...” He looked at his hands, at the new scars layered over the old ones, then at her ravaged arm where barely any whole skin was left. It was as scarred and twisted as Raidou’s face and chest.
“I have no idea what kind of strength that must have taken.”
Katsuko looked away, pulling her arm in closer to her body. Shielding it, but not hiding it. “It wasn’t an interrogation,” she said flatly. Genma had to strain to hear her. “I was just a test subject. Sometimes they’d get...” She paused, eyebrows knitting for a moment. “Bored.” A wisp of breeze picked up the tail of her bandage, and she reached for it, winding and unwinding it around her fingers. Her arm stayed bare.
“Bastards,” Genma said. It wasn’t even close to strong enough. He still had the cigarettes Hajime’d brought for him, and he wanted one badly, but those burns — little, circular, exactly the diameter of a lit butt... He put a senbon in his mouth instead. “How’d you get out?”
Katsuko looked down at her feet, the dry grass, the reflection of the rising sun pinking the water. “ANBU found us,” she said. “Well, me. I was the last.” Her head came up, her dark eyes full of something Genma couldn’t quite read. They fell on his hands. “There’s more than one kind of strength.”
It was Genma’s turn to look away. “ANBU came for me, too, after three weeks. Iwa was out of patience with me by then, since I wouldn’t talk.” He chewed his senbon, feeling the metal grate against his molars. “I was lucky the ANBU squad got there when they did. My teammates... didn’t make it.” Kobo hadn’t even made it as far as the Iwa cells, and Seijuro— Seijuro had broken, apologized to Genma, screamed when they snapped Genma’s fingers, and died when the interrogator slit his belly.
(But on that second trip to Iwa, Genma’s teammate had survived. He’d held up under mental torture, held up the same way Genma had held up. The way Seijuro hadn’t. It had taken a lover’s death, not an interrogator’s implements, to break Kakashi.) |
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