| [Jan. 31st, 2012|06:26 am] |
“I wasn’t sleeping well anyway,” Ryouma murmured. He tucked an errant lock of thick dark hair behind Katsuko’s ear, and dropped his hand.
It shouldn’t be surprising, really. People drank, got drunk; it was an accepted fact of ninja life. Hell, he’d taken women out for dinner and even bought them drinks, though he’d never joined them.
But he couldn’t help thinking of his dream, of the old men with their rotgut on the streambank. Had Kakashi joined Katsuko for drinking as well as company? The shouchuu bottle had vanished from the back of the fridge between one day and the next. Neither of them had ever mentioned it. What right did he have to ask or forbid?
He sat fully up, balancing crookedly on one hip in the narrowness between Kakashi and the wall. Katsuko had nearly half the bed to herself but was eeling for more of it, uncurling a little from her hedgehog ball to hook an elbow around Kakashi’s weight-bearing wrist. He startled back against Ryouma, like a skittish horse, then sat still. Katsuko sighed, rubbed her cheek against his knee, and uncurled a little more.
She’d slept curled into herself that night at the ryokan, as if cold, or frightened. Ryouma remembered waking in the night with her face pressed against his chest but her knees drawn up between them, arms cuddled against her breasts. The next time he woke she was already dressed, sitting on the edge of the futon and out of reach.
She’d wanted to get drunk, and she’d wanted Kakashi to guard her, and Kakashi hadn’t wanted Ryouma involved.
As ruthlessly protective as the wolf, in a way, and maybe he should be more grateful for it. He’d been grateful for the wolf; he hadn’t minded if it thought he was weak. But this wasn’t his dream and Kakashi was neither wolf nor rabbit, and Ryouma wasn’t so weak he had to be shielded from a drunk girl.
Or maybe Kakashi knew him, and understood him, and just wanted him to get some damn sleep.
He sighed, and scrubbed a hand through his hair. “S’fine. I’m not jealous at all ‘cause you left me out of your roof-party. Still curious about the part where she ended up in my shirt, though. Did she get naked? Was there a strip-tease? You could’ve woke me up for that, instead of letting her waste it on you. Did you tell her that shirt hasn’t been washed in six months?” |
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