| [Aug. 23rd, 2014|04:59 am] |
Genma shrugged, amused at the suggestion. “I can’t tell you about Hatake’s checkered past, but I’ve been in court a couple of times. Never because I was on trial. I don’t think they’d promote you to lieutenant if you’d been court martialed.”
“Hmm,” Ryouma said, digesting the idea.
“Not more than once, anyway,” Raidou said, with enough ironic inflection to imply he’d heard stories.
Genma reached up to scratch an itch on his nose, and shuddered when his fingers encountered bandages and the whole front of his face throbbed.
Right. Broken.
He dropped his hand carefully, and took a slow breath through his mouth. “Promoted to lieutenant more than once, or court-martialed more than once?” he asked.
"Both," Raidou said. He dropped his hand casually on Genma's unbandaged leg, tapping out two words in code: hurt and kill—in ANBU parlance, ‘kill the hurt’ or, more specifically, ‘you need drugs, man?’
Technically, the answer was ‘yes.’ Genma’d shorted himself on painkillers back when he’d dosed Katsuko and Kakashi, because at the time he thought they had barely enough to make it through twelve hours just treating the two of them and the prisoner. Knowing they had breathing room thanks to Kakashi’s creative med-kit stocking helped, but it only got them to twenty-four hours.
He found Raidou’s arm and tapped back an all clear.
Raidou gave him a dark-eyed, assessing look, then turned toward the clone still working on Kakashi's tanto. Evidently it operated on the same silent telepathy that Katsuko seemed to sometimes share with Raidou: it met Raidou’s eyes, then glanced over its shoulder and whistled sharply. A second clone vanished from the doorway, reappearing a moment later with a glass bottle of non-opiates pilfered from the bunker's medical supplies. It held them out silently, waiting for Genma to take them.
He dry-swallowed a pair of tablets and gave the bottle back. Kakashi was too out of it to notice anything amiss, and Katsuko seemed deeply engaged in petting Kakashi’s pigtails, but Ryouma was studiously looking away, pretending not to mark the exchange of codes and medications.
Katsuko was probably only pretending not to notice, too.
Genma wasn’t sure what to make of that, but it seemed considerate. He shifted into a fresh not-quite-comfortable position next to Raidou, and tried to pretend he hadn’t noticed their pretending.
“Tousaki and Taichou get it,” he said, to break the spell of awkward silence that had descended over them. “But they’re wrong about why.”
Ryouma's smug cheerfulness at having guessed right faded into narrowed eyes. “You didn't actually like your date?”
“Nope, I liked my date,” Genma said.
Kakashi groaned in mock despair.
Ryouma's eyes narrowed still more. “So you were dumb enough to eat the spinach, and you got hives and stopped breathing or whatever allergies do, but it didn't ruin the date? Because your date secretly had a thing for hives.”
“Something like that,” Genma allowed. “It wasn’t me being dumb, though. I asked if there was spinach in the dish, and the waitress checked with the chef and they swore to me there wasn’t any. Turned out there was dried spinach in a seasoning packet that a new apprentice brought in and added to the soup without telling the chef.”
“Should have smelled it,” Kakashi said, like smelling a few milligrams of dried spinach in a bowl of soup was as easy as walking into a brick wall.
“Not an Inuzuka relative,” Genma told him. Maybe there was something to the rumors about Hatake clan genetics. “Could you really have smelled it? You’re official taster for me from now on.” |
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