Ryouma's mouth twisted. "Special kind of cowards."

She made another rough noise in the back of her throat; it sounded like agreement.

Her skin was waxen and drawn with pain and tiredness, and dark circles puffed under her eyes. He thought of the clone in the shower, sparing its only good hand to squeeze his shoulder. Of Raidou, sitting on the folding chair just a few feet away, telling him that Katsuko'd had to kill a toddler and her parents, and that she might need a spare shoulder of her own.

He'd tried to carry Raidou's burdens, when he had no right to. Raidou'd made it easy on him, refused to give him all of it. And here Katsuko was, trying to do the same: to be the good senpai, to let him talk out his nightmares and give him only what she thought he could bear of her own.

Heat itched behind his eyes. He wanted to cry, or to kill something.

He poured tea instead. It was overbrewed—he'd forgotten what he was making, when he first poured the powder in, like campfire coffee instead of tea—but they both took it oversugared, which helped a little with the taste. Katsuko crouched down beside him and curled slender fingers around the last of the clean mugs, breathing in the steam. For a moment her lashes lay long and dark on her cheeks, almost hiding the shadows under her eyes.

Ryouma burned his tongue on his own tea and set the mug aside. He said, "I'm not sure if I could have done it. I told myself I could, when I signed up—that I'd be fighting for the village; that I could kill babies, if it was for the village. But I was glad when taichou told me I was going for the traitor and his wife. And—glad Kakashi threw that kunai, before I had to."

Katsuko blew the steam away and took a careful sip of her tea. She studied him for a moment over the rim of the mug. Then she lowered it to reveal a faint, crooked smile. "I was glad, too, when the plan was for taichou to take the kids. Telling yourself it's for the village doesn't make it any easier."

"Taichou said you don't get used to it, but you do get better at it." Ryouma dropped his gaze to his hands, the dead skin over his palms where the chakra-limiters on the cell bars had bitten him. He picked at the edge of a blister. "I did it well, though. I didn't hesitate. About the only thing I could've done better is the...dealing with it. And I'm not sure how you get better at that, or if I want to."

Killing without a qualm—he had that down already. He'd killed men and women painfully and often horrifically since he was fourteen. But surely there were some lines you had to draw for yourself, some way to tread the cliff edge between forging yourself into a weapon and discarding everything that made you human.

Was guilt enough?

"I never got better at dealing with it," Katsuko said, so bluntly that he looked up. She was gazing into her tea. "I just learned how to delay the fallout until I get back to Konoha." Her fingers tapped a brief, broken rhythm against the side of her mug. "Some people can shut everything off during a mission and switch back to normal as soon as it's over. Other people go cold on their first ANBU assignment and stay cold for the rest of their career."

She lifted clear hazel eyes to him, sharded with startling green in the dull yellow light. "Those are the ones you have to look out for."

Ice-cold Kakashi, Ryouma thought, and then cut himself off: no, that wasn't fair. Kakashi'd offered a traitor the comfort of a rebirth Kakashi himself didn't believe in, simply because Tsuto might.

Genma and Raidou hadn't gone cold, either. Genma'd killed Tsuto's parents and son and seemed unbothered by it, but he'd kept the household staff safe and tried to talk the Kiri team out of a fight. He'd saved Fukuda, when it would have been far easier to let her die. When everyone else had had to die.

Maybe that was why Genma'd done it, Ryouma realized, with a slow cold hollowing of his belly. Because everyone else had died, but there was still one person he could save…