There was something surprising and unbelievably tender about Katsuko’s gesture, something that made Genma freeze for a moment, before he relaxed into her embrace and leaned against her slender side. He could feel the too-hot buzz of her chakra like a fever or an electric current, and the uncertainty in her touch.

Maybe it was just that she was the same size Haruko had been, or maybe it was her frightening fragility packaged in a tough exterior, but when he looked down at Katsuko, she was everything like his little sister... and nothing at all. He swallowed, glancing at her bandaged arms and remembering thick circles of overlapping burns; at least Haruko had never had to face torture.

If she had, would she have come out as diamond-bright as Katsuko?

“She probably would have liked you,” he said, still gazing at the photograph. “She’d have thought you were funny, sleeping on the bank roof and rolling off like that. She always said she wanted to fly. I used to piggy-back her around and go roof-running. It was good training for me, and it was about as close to flying as I could give her. This one time I missed a jump and we fell. She ended up with a black eye, and I twisted my ankle pretty bad, and we were both scraped all up. Yumi, our big sister, was so pissed off, but Haruko just laughed.” He shrugged at the memory. “I’m not exactly sure why that reminds me of you, but it does.”

“Maybe the whole falling-off-a-roof bit,” Katsuko suggested, dryly amused.

“Yeah,” Genma agreed. “Probably that. Let’s go with the obvious.” He chuckled and yawned, and reached for his tea. His stomach rumbled for the rice balls he’d skipped, but it was late, and he wasn’t sure he cared enough to look for something else. “She would have been nineteen this year, in December,” he said, turning the photograph over in his fingers. On the back was written his and Haruko’s names in Yumiko’s elegant script, and a bolder, more exuberant annotation in Haru’s hand, ‘Nii-chan’s new uniform!’

He shrugged his shoulders when Katsuko turned her face up at him. “This was from the summer I got promoted to Special Jounin, when I was seventeen. She was thirteen. That fall was the Fox. It set the whole neighborhood on fire, over in the Five Wells area. She didn’t get out of the house in time.”

Katsuko didn’t say anything, but she tightened her arm around Genma, gripping his shoulder with a hot palm. Her dark eyes never left his face.

He flipped the picture back over and put it back with the others, looking away. “Okay, wow. Sorry, didn’t mean to get all...” He shrugged again, not finding the words he wanted, and slipped the photographs back into their envelope. “I was supposed to be cheering you up, not making you sad.”