| [Jan. 22nd, 2012|12:48 am] |
Judging by the grin, he just didn’t want to know what the stupidest thing she’d ever done was.
“You’d better not snore,” he murmured, almost soundless.
"If I do, I will snore right in your ear," she said, soft and fond, as if he were something fluffy and amusing instead of a ninja who could kill her with one hand. She curled towards him and pressed in close, damp hair brushing his shoulder, breath warming the skin through his shirt.
Mission, he told himself firmly, before panic could set in and demand what the hell he was doing letting this strange, cuddly, damaged woman into his bed. Teammates bunked together on missions all the time. For safety, for heat, for comfort.
He’d replaced that with rough-hurting sex for years, but he’d still sought people out.
Katsuko was like a hot brand against his side, burning chakra in the dark. Still drunk, but less shaken. On his left, Ryouma was a soft-breathing, hard-muscled press of long limbs and cooler skin, tucked in almost as close because the bed was really too small for three people. As Kakashi looked at him, he sighed and shifted, dropping his head against Kakashi’s shoulder and wrapping an arm across his chest.
“Hey, Kakashi?” Katsuko said quietly. He turned to look at her. “Thanks.”
Kakashi. She’d stopped calling him Hatake.
It took him a moment to remember what her family name was: Ueno. She’d drawled it at him the first time they’d ever met.
He licked his teeth, then shifted, lifting his arm up to let her press in against his ribcage, and dropped his hand across her blanket-covered back. Her shoulderblades were hard ridges beneath his fingertips. She let out a long, slow breath and hummed softly in the back of her throat, as if cuddling up against him was the most natural thing in the world.
“Go to sleep, Katsuko,” he told her.
Obedient as she had been all night, she did, going lax and quiet beneath his arm. It took all of a minute before her muscles twitched and a line drew down between her eyebrows, something like a thin moan rising from her throat. Can’t sleep. Dream things. Nightmare things. He eased his hand down her back, then reached up to flick his hitai-ate up, opening Obito’s eye.
He didn’t know her well enough to give her a personal image, but it was easy to spin out a fine thread of genjutsu and press it into her mind, reshaping the disorganized panic of chakra coils there into something simple and peaceful. Warm sunbeams in a grassy field. Maybe she could dream about being a cat.
He held the jutsu until her scent had calmed, then released it, dropping his head back onto the pillows. Enough of a nudge for her mind to pick up the slack and run with it, hopefully.
Almost immediately, Ryouma’s arm tightened around his chest, and a grating-glass groan made Kakashi’s heart sink. When it came down to it, he wasn’t a whole lot better than his clone had been at soothing, and he didn’t think Ryouma would appreciate secret ghost-fingers in his brain after six months of drugs and fear and iron-willed self control; six months relived under Inoichi’s jutsu.
Kakashi tucked his masked chin down onto ruffled black hair, brushing the barest whisper of shaped chakra around the edges of Ryouma’s mind. No image, just a feeling: safety, home.
The sound Ryouma made was almost a whimper, and Kakashi wanted to kill something.
“S’okay,” he said, around the catch in his throat. “Everything’s okay.”
Ryouma mumbled something unintelligible, fingers twitching against Kakashi’s chest, then finally settled again. He smelled like a bruised thunderbreak; Katsuko smelled like ginger candy and half-comforted tension. The weave of both of them made something restless and unhappy, blended like a broken pack gone to ground against stormy weather.
He’d promised Katsuko help.
He’d promised Ryouma (strings, no running) almost everything.
The numbers on the clock said 05:23. Kakashi kept his chin resting on Ryouma’s head and his arm wrapped around Katsuko’s back, and hoped, just this once, that he’d actually be able to keep those promises.
He guarded against nightmares until the sun began to rise, turning the distant sky pink, and sleep dragged him down into his own uneasy dreams. |
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