| [Jan. 22nd, 2012|12:24 am] |
Kakashi struggled to contain a snarl. “That’s no excuse.”
She tipped her head back to stare at him, pupils blown wide and cheeks flushed. On a man he might have mistaken it for attraction; on her it was just drink. “What?”
“That’s no excuse,” he snapped, abruptly furious. “They abandoned you. Gave you to Konoha and didn’t like it when you came back different. You shouldn’t forgive them, you should hate them.”
For a long, silent moment, Katsuko said nothing, then a fine tremble ran through her. A harder shiver followed, blanching the colour out of her face. It was like watching shock in slow motion. Her scent was black.
“I don’t—” she said. “I can’t.” She broke off in a jagged breath, covering her face with both hands, and Kakashi remembered Ginta saying what the village asked of your father was wrong. He’d shut Ginta down. The village wasn’t wrong. It had hurt too much to think anything else.
Was this what he’d looked like from the outside?
Katsuko’s breathing rasped ragged, then it twisted into laughter. Kakashi gave her an alarmed look. Her hands pulled down, fingers spread over a raw, rueful smile. Her eyes were too bright. “Nobody’s ever reacted like that before,” she said hoarsely. “I was a little—thank you. Thank you.”
“I thought you were having a seizure,” he said, caught between relief and continued alarm. “Don’t do that.”
She stuck her tongue out at him, giggling. It would have been funny if the edge of hysteria in her voice hadn’t cut like a razor. "Man, you know what I'd really want to be?" she asked. "A cat. Lazy fuckers just get to eat and sleep all day. That'd be the life."
It was an obvious attempt to swerve the conversation back onto safe ground. Kakashi exhaled and didn’t call her on it.
“Dogs’re better,” he said, pulling up the shadow of a smile. “Collars and leads, for starters.”
And loyalty. |
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