| [Aug. 23rd, 2014|03:41 am] |
Ryouma looked down at the tea again, but his silence didn’t feel like one of rejection. Katsuko waited as the seconds stretched out. Finally, he said, “I never killed anyone who wasn’t trying to kill me back, before this.” He paused. “You wouldn’t think it’d make that much difference. The girl even had a knife— she stabbed the lieutenant’s kage bunshin. It was one of those ornamental tanto they give rich ladies to protect their virtue. A kaiken. She couldn’t’ve even scratched me…”
There were red lines gouged across the backs of the fingers of his right hand. He rubbed at them absently. Katsuko studied his expression and asked, “Did she try to run?”
"She didn't get a chance. Nobody did." A muscle jumped in the side of Ryouma’s jaw. "Except Kiri. The lieutenant meant to let 'em walk, until that blood-bastard broke ranks."
Katsuko nodded. The Kiri kunoichi hadn’t given the impression of a captain who tolerated disobedience from her subordinates. What kind of mad dog had Iebara been, that even his squad leader had been afraid to bring him to heel?
"Tea's done,” Ryouma said irrelevantly. He dislodged Katsuko and crouched down to turn the burner off. He didn’t pull the pot off; just stayed there, flat on his heels, watching the bubbles break and die. Slowly, he said, “We had to kill them. Tsuto and his wife. They were traitors. They deserved to die. But the girl didn’t know that. She just saw ANBU killing her parents. And—” He cut himself short, biting down on his lips, and shook his head.
She settled her hand on his shoulder and squeezed gently. “Your first civilian kill stays with you,” she said, quiet. “The guilt never really goes away. And you’re never the same after it.”
Ryouma laughed, short, sharp, and without an ounce of humor. "’We're not the good guys anymore', you mean? I knew that. In the war, we did things— hell, you know. You probably did them too." He threw his head up, staring fixedly at the wall, and worked his jaw sideways. “Raidou— Taichou told me you had to take the little girl.”
Katsuko’s grip tightened despite herself; she felt the muscles in Ryouma’s shoulder shift. She forced the words out. “Yes. And the parents.”
Silence reigned for a few blessed moments. Then he said, "You'll have nightmares about it." It wasn’t a question.
She gazed down at Ryouma’s dark head. Honesty felt like agony, but she’d already come this far. “I told her to close her eyes and that it wouldn’t hurt. Then I killed her in front of her father. What do you think?”
He looked up, then, the skin around his lips pinched and pale. "I did the same thing. Except she was ten years older, and Kakashi'd already put a knife in her throat. But I had to cover her eyes before I ended it.”
Katsuko made a jagged sound. “Aren’t we a pair?” she said, bleakly amused. “Two grown killers who’d rather face a battlefield than look dying little girls in the eye.” |
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