| [Dec. 1st, 2011|08:19 am] |
“A day,” Genma echoed. He sat up a little straighter and slid his arm behind Katsuko, as hesitant as she had been to touch him, and as determined not to let her bear her witness alone.
He’d taken eyes for missions. Taken eyes and brought them back to Konoha in carefully prepared boxes that preserved them for study, or as proof of death. It turned his stomach just to think of it.
“Were you with him?” he asked.
"At the end," Katsuko answered. She leaned back against Genma’s arm, unhesitating. Her voice steadied as she spoke. "I held his hand, and Ichiba chanted the sutras, and I fell asleep. When I woke up, he was dead."
Genma nodded, tucking her closer to him. She felt narrow-framed and fragile despite the corded strength in her muscles and the almost-violent strength of her chakra. It pushed at Genma like a light turned too bright.
“Some blessings look like curses,” he said bitterly, quoting something he barely remembered from childhood.
Katsuko laughed dryly. “I don’t think I can see the blessing in that curse.”
“Yeah,” he agreed. “Me either. I’m way too unenlightened.” That got a more genuine laugh from his companion.
“Was ANBU looking for you? Or was it... Were you like Taisei? Lucky they were looking for someone else.”
"I don't know," Katsuko answered, sounding raw. "Six months is long enough to have been given up for dead, and from what I learned there was an ANBU outpost within a day's travel the whole time. I don't know why they came when they did."
“You weren’t in ANBU when they took you, were you?” Her head shook a tiny no. “Then... Yeah. Six months. Even if you had been in ANBU, if they didn’t know that facility was there, and they didn’t find you...” Genma blew a tight breath through teeth clenched hard on his senbon. “Something else must have tipped them off, and you were just lucky.”
It was a hard world, where luck meant you didn’t get your eyes ripped from your living flesh. “Your chakra — they’d already done that to you by the time ANBU got there?”
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