| [Apr. 22nd, 2018|09:46 pm] |
Genma said, abruptly, “Are you a tanuki?” He was staring at Kakashi too, but suspicion darkened his amber eyes.
“Me?” Ryouma clutched bottles and folded yukata to his chest.
“Either of you. Both of you.” Genma propped himself up on the edge of the pool again, a breath away from, presumably, emerging to kick their furry asses. “I’ve seen Hatake stripped down; he’s barely got skin between the scars.”
“We offended Himself’s aesthetic sensibilities,” Kakashi said, without looking back. “So he made us pretty.” He switched to scrub the other foot. “Also your last apartment burned down and you once made me do paperwork for sitting on a river.”
Genma’s eyes narrowed, skimming over the smooth, unmarked surface of Kakashi’s back. “Huh.” He sank down chest-deep again. “Did it hurt?”
“No,” Kakashi said. He sluiced himself from shoulders down with one bucket of steaming water, dumped another over his head, and shook the spray off. Raking back dripping hair, he eyed Genma. “You want to poke us, don’t you?”
Genma’s gaze swung to Ryouma. “Did he remove your scars, too?” He peered more intently. “Your nose is straighter.”
“Just elbows up.” Ryouma set the yukata on the nearest dry rock, placed the sake bottles and cups at the edge of the pool, and hesitated before he straightened again. He’d never been nervous about stripping before...
Well, it wasn’t like they didn’t know what they were getting. He loosened his belt and shed the yukata, dropping it over the rock with the others. Too late, he realized that the partial scar removal might lead to even more questions. “It felt weird,” he muttered. “And my knee’s fine now.”
“You mean only the parts your uniform doesn’t cover?” Genma asked, sounding puzzled. “With the gloves, I guess that makes sense. But it looks like Hatake’s lost all the scars on his torso and legs, too. But not the one over his eye.”
“Kakashi’s braver than I am,” Ryouma said, and grabbed a bucket.
Kakashi was already in the pool, damp mask still clinging to his jawline, a small towel folded on his head. Pakkun paddled over for ear scritches. Kurenai reached for the sake bottles. Ryouma set about determinedly scrubbing himself clean.
Genma sank down until his chin touched the surface of the water. “Tanuki,” he muttered, and held out a sake cup for Kurenai to fill.
“Regretting you turned down the healing now?” she asked him.
“Maybe a little,” he admitted. “I guess I’ll just have to hope my scars make me look rakish.”
Ryouma’d intended to ignore everyone else until he was clean and potentially less flushed—or at least uniformly red from scrubbing—but he had to turn round at that. “What did happen with the tanuki? You spent a day with ‘em, and the kids seemed cuddly but kind of terrifying too… If they’re the ones who dropped the statue on Taichou, I mean.”
“Same tanuki kids.” Genma sipped his sake. “Cuddly but terrifying is pretty accurate. I spent half the time concussed, then broken in half to ‘fix’ me. It did fix the concussion, so…” He shrugged and tipped his hand back and forth, balancing the scales of experience. “Then they alternated between trying to convince me I was a victim of domestic abuse, treating me like a pet, and making it clear I was completely powerless. The youngest one took me down like I was a sack of feathers.”
There was a moment’s frozen silence. Raidou said, “Relatively speaking, I prefer the statue.”
“That’s horrible,” Pakkun agreed. He’d squished up in Kakashi’s arms, a sodden bundle of big eyes and fur. For once, he seemed completely serious.
Kakashi said nothing, but his arm locked around Pakkun, holding him tight.
When it came to being treated like a pet, Pakkun probably knew what he was talking about.
Kurenai said quietly, “Himself treated us like sentient beings, at least. The kits… seem very young, still. Not malicious, but not yet empathetic. They’re clearly attached to you, but they know just enough about the world to make them dangerous.” |
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