| [Aug. 14th, 2008|11:41 pm] |
Ryouma flinched beneath her touch, and only afterwards remembered Yuuko caressing his flayed chest, painting warm wet designs over his throat and shoulders. It wasn't that. Yuuko's hands had given pain and taken pleasure, and Tsume was nothing at all like her.
She tried to comfort him, and his chest ached with the deadly longing to touch in return. To take security and comfort and to give it, the way he and Kakashi had done on a riverbank in the warm afternoon sun. To lift the swathing white bandages and see the horror and the healing. To reach out and find solid ground...
But his hands held nightmares, now, instead of chakra.
"The whole time," he whispered. "She came to get me. To save Kuromaru. She said if I couldn't--"
She'd have killed him. Maybe she should have done it anyway.
"It was an accident," he said, clinging like a drowning man to the memory of Kakashi's words. It wasn't your fault. I still trust you. You're not a monster!
Kakashi was wrong. He was a monster; they all were. They killed in the dark and under the sun, without hesitation or mercy, for a uniform and an ideal and a paycheck in the bank. They sacrificed everything to complete the mission, and they left their dead where they fell. They were ninja, ANBU, weapons in the Hokage's hand, and they had to be monsters to live.
But if this was the price of survival, he wasn't going to pay.
He caught his breath on a gulp that might have been a laugh, or a sob. "I don't want to be a weapon anymore." |
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