"Shut up," Ryouma ordered the rat. It grinned at him, baring teeth that wouldn't even break skin, and wagged its plumed tail. Then it bounced in the nest of clean shirts it had built for itself at the foot of his bed, and yapped again.

Ryouma yanked a tee-shirt over his head and considered throwing a crutch at it. Even if he hit the little beast, though, he doubted it'd have any effect other than provoking frenzied noise. In the fifteen or so hours since Kakashi had given him the hairy little excuse for a watchdog, he'd tripped over it three times and stepped on it twice. Apparently, it was made of rubber.

The rat's yapping rose half an octave. It danced in place, waiting for the half-second it took him to trip over a pair of discarded jeans and nearly lose his crutches again, and then streaked like a little bolt of furry lightning for the door. Someone down the hall shouted a sleepy threat.

"You're dead," Ryouma promised the rat.

It perked those enormous, ridiculous ears at him, and laughed.

At least it danced out of the way when he finally made it to the door. Wrestling with the knob took another few seconds; he couldn't quite get his balance right, and the crutches cut into his armpits, and he nearly fell over when the door opened at last. The rat slipped out past his foot and launched itself at the ankles of the woman who stood there.

"Step on it. Please," he said, and then registered who it was.

Tsume was drowning in an over-large black tee-shirt and ragged plaid pajama pants, but somehow he didn't think only the size of the clothes made her look so small. Discreet white bandages still hid her right temple and left ear: not nearly the mummy-like swathings she'd borne when they first woke up, but not nearly healed yet, either. The sharp edge of a collarbone cut through the wide collar of her tee-shirt, and her thin, fine-boned hands picked at its hem. They paused as she stared down at the fluffy rat swarming over her ankles.

"It's been holding me hostage," Ryouma said. "It's somehow managed to convince Kakashi it's a dog, and it has evil rat plans to kill me in my sleep. Can you go alpha at it and make it go away?"

Tsume looked dubiously at the tiny thing, some part of her mind distantly registering Ryouma's scent shifting downward. She was too wrapped up in her own anxiety and the living dust bunny to pay much attention.

Go alpha at it. She could do that. Something else to focus on, at least for a moment, than the man in the doorway. Her damaged chakra twisted and rose slightly, seeming much too small to even create a clone. But she didn't need to create a clone, and chakra had nothing to do with alpha.

She glared, and growled softly, her shoulders straightening.

The dog's head snapped up, brown eyes in black fur staring at her in astonishment for a moment. Then it lunged for her toes.

"Bloodworms!" Tsume snarled, leaping out of the way as itty bitty teeth scratched along flesh. "You little rat!" She kicked it.

It blithely dodged, still growling and lunging furiously.

She reached down to grab it, but it was so small that no matter where she touched, teeth met her fingers. Finally, she snarled, baring her own fangs.

It yipped and turned, tail tucking as it ran into the bedroom and behind Ryouma's legs. Once there, the tail came rigidly back over its spine, and it began barking again.

Tsume glared at it. "Do you have lunchmeat?" she asked without looking up. If she looked down, she could watch the dog. Not notice tanned skin or strong muscles or how very tall Ryouma was, even hunched over the crutches. She cleared her throat. "That'd probably keep her busy."

"If there was ever any in my fridge, it's probably grown legs and escaped by now," Ryouma said. He leaned heavily on his right-hand crutch and batted at the rat with his left foot. A fringe of silky fur brushed his heel as the little monster darted underneath and circled around to his other side. The next yap was definitely smug. She must have realized that if she stayed on his good side, he couldn't get her without falling over. Well, she was Kakashi's dog. It figured.

"I had her sleeping," he told Tsume. "I thought. Guess she just got bored of barking at the screen." Guiltily, he glanced back into the room, where the flickering screen of an elderly television painted blue light over the opposite wall. He should probably have shut it off before answering the door, but at this time of night and with Kakashi barricaded in his own room, he hadn't really been expecting anyone to stop by for a long visit.

Rumor-mongers wanting to verify vague stories they could never quite repeat, now--that was another thing altogether. He'd run into several of them around HQ before he finally followed Kakashi's example and retreated to his room. Even the dour Intel agent who'd debriefed him had seemed slightly less interested in the facts of the disastrous mission than in dropping hints Ryouma never quite managed to pick up.

He'd had the rat yapping around his ankles by then, though, which had admittedly made it slightly harder to concentrate. It was making it hard to concentrate now. And that wasn't, he told himself, just because he was tired. Ten minutes on the crutches might still leave him sweating and shaking, but if he couldn't sleep even when he was alone in his room with the door locked and the television flickering its familiar comfort, he wasn't tired.

Tsume looked pretty near exhausted, though. New hollows sharpened her cheekbones, and her wild brown hair was lank and dull. If she thought she could hide the dark shadows under her eyes by refusing to look Ryouma in the face, she'd thought wrong. "You look like you need bed more'n you need company," he said. "What's up?" A thin thread of new fear touched the pit of his stomach. "Kuromaru's okay, isn't he?"

At his feet, the rat's sharp yap leveled into a growl.

"He's fine," she said quickly, her gaze yanking up. Had Ryouma heard something different--? But no, of course not. They wouldn't tell Ryouma something before they told her, no matter how many people he knew around here.

"I mean..." She hesitated, looking at him and trying not to. "As fine as he was," she finished at last. "I, uh..." why was she here? Other than she was too scared to be alone, which she wasn't going to admit to.

Looking up at him had been a mistake. She couldn't seem to look away from his face--paler than usual, with some of the liveliness sapped away by a body still recovering from injuries. He'd lost weight. Not enough to make him skeletal, but enough to make his collarbones stand out like knots of steel under his gray T-shirt.

She twitched her eyes back up to his face, only to feel them skid back down over broad shoulders. How could anyone carry shoulders that broad? Her gaze skipped again. Boxers. Not much else except lightly scarred skin and a black knee brace, with metal posts on each side for extra support.

Boxers. And nothing else.

Muscle corded heavily under flesh, rounding out the brace. But that was a reason, wasn't it? One that had nothing to do with--with--touching. She looked up at him, meeting nearly black eyes under black brows and black hair that kept getting shorter. "I heard noise," she lied. "I thought I'd check up on you. Make sure you were all right. Stairs and crutches, you know..." She gestured vaguely down the hall, and ignored the presence of an elevator.

"You can hear the rat barking all the way over at your place?" Ryouma said, surprised. "I didn't think it was that loud." Maybe Inuzuka ears were better than normal, though. It wouldn't surprise him. "Sorry," he told Tsume, and hissed down at the rat, "I'll make a cleaning rag out of you! And tell Kakashi I stepped on you by accident. Knock it off! Tsume's not a threat. Hell, you'd think you were a real watchdog..."

The rat bit his ankle.

Ryouma yelped, kicked, and lurched wildly against the door frame. "Son of a bitch! Sorry," he added hurriedly to Tsume. "Look, I--"

He hesitated. The rat, evidently recognizing the better part of valor, had flounced back into the room and begun rearranging its bed of tee-shirts. The cluttered lamp-lit twilight of Ryouma's room spread out behind him, comfortable, secure, with the TV chattering quietly to itself. Empty, but for the dog Kakashi had refused to leave him without.

Lonely, all the same.

It was stupid. Just spending five days sleeping with two other people in the bed, and the day before that with Kakashi watching over him, shouldn't make his own room feel so achingly empty. A few hours of pain in the dark shouldn't make turning out the lights so terrifying. He was stronger than that.

Should be stronger than that.

He took a deep breath, jerked the crutch back under his arm, and hobbled a step back. Tsume had entered his room once already, for five minutes and a cup of coffee. He could do it again. He had to do it again. Because the rat and the TV and the lamp just weren't working.

"You want some coffee?"

Something wired too tight released in her chest, and she took an uncertain step inside. "I wouldn't mind some." Never mind that it was nearly midnight. Sleep wasn't coming, anyway. She glanced around the small apartment, noting the changes that had occurred since she'd seen it before. More posters of bands she didn't recognize, more clothes littering the futon and floor. It was a stark contrast to her own room, which still didn't even have a place to hang her armor. She kept telling herself she didn't live there, and yet somehow she kept not going home...

"So... everything looks pretty good," she said lamely.

He didn't seem to be doing any better on his crutches than he had been in the hospital, but he wasn't banging into things.

She winced as he banged into the kitchen counter.

Okay, mostly.

Silence reigned, awkward and uncertain. No brilliant conversation came to mind. Nothing at all came to mind, except that she didn't want to go home and she couldn't think of a reason to stay except that one.

How long could coffee last?

She fidgeted with the hem of her shirt and tried not to notice the muscles flexing down his legs. He'd said all sort of pretty things before, but how well did she know him really? Better than any of the other ANBU. That wasn't saying much.

She should have worn her sports bra. And a sweater.

"Well, the rat hasn't eaten anything yet," Ryouma said darkly, in the tone of a man who isn't at all convinced that the situation will stay that way. He lurched into the counter again and stayed there, balancing awkwardly on the crutches as he scrabbled for the coffee can. Filter, grounds, cold water from the tap. He plugged the machine in, turned it on, and hitched half a step around to face Tsume.

If she'd ever looked less at her ease, he hadn't been there to see it. The faint light spilling over from the lamp beside his bed picked out the sharp line of her jaw as it shifted, choosing and discarding words. Her hands flexed at her sides, closing and opening again, pulling the dark fabric of her shirt in tight lines across her chest--

Averting his eyes took the strength of a saint. She wasn't wearing a bra. In what kind of twisted world was this fair?

And if she smelled his reaction--even noticed that he'd noticed--she'd run. In desperation, Ryouma swept his hand out and knocked the open can of coffee grounds sideways. He'd meant to tip it over on the counter. It teetered on the edge, and upended over his feet.

Ryouma closed his eyes. "My life," he told the darkness, "hates me. So much."

Tsume stepped away as the scent bloomed sharply up between them, filling her sinuses with the bitter flavor of coffee. She laughed, and if it was a little edgy she hoped he wouldn't notice.

Just as a topper, the dog came trotting over to investigate--and promptly rolled in the grounds spread across Ryouma's broad feet.

"Get!" she shouted, swiping at the beast. It gave another twisting writhe and leapt up, scurrying off with a greatly offended look and a yap.

"Stay there before you kill yourself," Tsume told Ryouma, still chuckling as she turned to regard the kitchen. "Do you have a dustpan? Or a rag?" She eyed the mess, privately doubtful a rag would do it any justice.

Black-faced Wolf, all she could smell was coffee grounds. Much as she liked the stuff... "I think those crutches make you dangerous." She quirked a smile up.

"Konoha's secret weapon," Ryouma agreed. "ANBU Crutch Corps. The ninja nations will thrill with terror at the sound of us falling down three provinces away." He tried to smile back. He was pretty sure it worked. She wasn't actually looking, anyway; maybe it didn't matter.

He hitch-hopped to the side, found a bone-dry cleaning rag at the back of the sink, and dropped it again. "Hell, I'll get it tomorrow. I'll get someone else to get it tomorrow." Or he'd leave it there until the rat tracked it everywhere or he had enough chakra to manage a cleaning jutsu, whichever happened first. Judging by his current chakra levels, it would probably be the rat.

"You wanna--" He gestured lamely at the room beyond the tiny kitchen counter: the rumpled bed, the bean-bag chair, the TV with its late-night epic samurai film. Clothes he'd worn two weeks ago were still scattered across the floor, dropped wherever he'd stripped them off. "Sorry it's, um, kinda messy. I don't get visitors much."

Ever.

Well, Tsume would just have to not be a visitor. Friend worked fine, if she didn't want to be anything more.

She chuckled, relaxing a little more, and grabbed the rag. A flick of fingers had the water running, the cloth wet, and the water off again. "Don't move," she said, crouching. "You're as bad as the dog." Which was currently rubbing all over the floor, spreading the coffee grounds caught in its fur.

She put one hand on Ryouma's ankle, the other wiping over his foot, across hard tendons and long toes before switching to the other one.

"Okay," she said when he was clean enough, "see if you can't swing out of this mess, crutchy, and I'll see if I can't get the worst of it up." She wasn't making any promises about the yapper. In fact, she could make the promise that she wasn't going to attempt anything near it. "I'll even bring you some coffee, if only so I don't have to rush you to the hospital with third-degree burns." Still crouched, she twisted to look up at him, pretending to give it some thought. "I think you might break me. And neither of us wants the Hyuuga medic up here, I'm sure."

And she really didn't need to be crouched at his feet looking up. Her eyes got as far as shadows against his thighs before she realized what she might see. She yanked her head down, nearly falling on her rump in the middle of the floor. It had been the wrong angle anyway. If she told herself that enough, she might believe it.

"So there is a bright spot to this invalid thing? Personal coffee service. I'll have to let the Crutch Corps know we should keep you around. Might even be able to get a cute little maid outfit for you." That got a scornful snort and a half-amused shake of the head. She didn't look up, though.

Well...maybe spilled coffee was just that exciting. Or maybe there was more than curiosity behind this late-night visit, more than generalized anxiety in the hands that had fidgeted with the hem of her shirt. Maybe she'd taken the bandages off and seen what lay beneath. Maybe she'd come to tell him--

And he had nightmares enough to deal with without creating more. "C'mon, rat," he said, swinging a crutch at the wriggling little beast and then hastily planting it on the floor again before he pitched over. "Knock it off, or I'll throw you in the toilet for a bath. I bet if I flushed, you'd go right down..."

The dog's enormous ears flattened. It retreated haughtily to its mess of tee-shirts, rearranged them to its satisfaction, and curled up to watch the TV with its back to the rest of the room. Ryouma choked on an entirely unsympathetic snigger.

Tsume laughed at the image that conjured, getting the worst of the coffee up with the rag. It was all route motions; scoop it up, toss it out. There was standing in there somewhere, and she should have been paying more attention. From cleaning around his feet to standing straight up put her a breath from his chest.

She startled back, suddenly reminded of her earlier plan. If it had been breakable, the rag would have shattered as she tumbled it into the sink. Wolf, she was jumpy. Still facing the sink, she took a deep breath to try and settle her flighty thoughts, then turned--stepping away from him slightly--and smiled up. She couldn't smell anything except coffee. "Cream and sugar?" she asked, just to ask something.

'Coffee' didn't mean, 'Hey, Tsume, stay the night.' She could just come on to him, and then she'd know. She could stop jittering everywhere. They still had her on pain pills for her face; nothing could hurt bad enough to overwhelm them. Her nails scratched over the edge of the sink. She hadn't realized she'd been holding it.

Or she could just wait a little longer and see.

"Milk's in the fridge, but it's probably gone bad." Ryouma pulled a face. "I meant to get some today, but Kakashi dumped me with the rat, and...and people kept looking at me funny. I dunno if it was the rat or the crutches or what." They'd all been very careful not to ask questions, though he was certain they were hinting at all kinds of questions he couldn't quite hear. It was like being in a roomful of Inuzuka, except they kept expecting him to hearing with his nose, too, and drifted away disappointed when he couldn't.

He wondered what he'd pick up from Tsume, if he could. Kakashi said he could smell emotions. Could he pull out the reasons behind them, the connection between Tsume's too-wide smile and her nails scraping against the steel sink? Would he know how to deal with it if he did?

Given that Kakashi dealt with emotions just about as well as Ryouma dealt with his crutches, probably not.

He thumped sideways at last, allowing Tsume access to both coffeemaker and sugar jar, and then found himself with absolutely nowhere to go. If he collapsed on the floor, he'd probably never make it up again. Same problem with the bean-bag chair. The bed was the obvious choice, but this wasn't quite the hospital, anymore. Kakashi was hiding in his own room, and neither nurses nor random Inuzuka were likely to burst in within the next five minutes. The rat-dog was a poor substitute for Kuromaru.

At the moment, his bed looked a lot more like a cramped bedroll in a tiny tent than it did a hospital cot.

Well, they'd still made that tent work, hadn't they? He'd got an answer, and if things hadn't been quite the same after that, at least she hadn't bitten his nose--or anything else--off the next morning. She'd come here as a friend. She wouldn't pinch any of his stuff, and he wouldn't ask for what she couldn't give, and they'd drink their coffee and then--

She'd leave, and he'd spend the night watching TV with the light on.

"Lots of sugar," he told Tsume gruffly, and hobbled over to collapse on the bed. He threw his crutches against the opposite wall, and cracked a small grin when the rat jumped and glared at him.

She looked up, watching him closely as he dropped on the bed and chucked his crutches. Even if coffee overrode everything scent-wise, she could hear the sudden near-growl in his voice.

The light from the television flickered over him, sliding pale across his skin, catching shadows in muscles and folds of cloth and twists of hair. It didn't tell her anything more, though, and eventually she looked away.

The coffee didn't take long to percolate. She found two reasonably clean mugs, poured, and picked both of them up, balancing the sugar in the crook of her arm.

"Lack of maid outfit aside, I might be fired from the Crutch Corps due to my terrible serving." She handed him one mug before pulling the sugar from her other arm and handing it over, too. Then, with a glance around, she sat down in the bean bag chair and sipped her coffee.

Strong, black, cheap. It was just right.

"So..." She hesitated, not sure if she should even ask. But, crotchticks, she wasn't doing anything else at the moment--and this, at least, didn't fill her with anxiety. "You okay?" Her tone spun the question into this moment, his mood swing, not the last few days. He could choose to hear it or not, she supposed.

"Aside from attempted assassination by rat?" Ryouma tipped a generous shake of sugar into his coffee, considered the time remaining till dawn, and repeated it. He screwed the lid back on the jar, dropped it on the floor beside the bed, and cradled his mug in both hands. The first sip was caffeinated bliss. He squirmed down against his pillow and took another.

"Aside from the rat and the crutches," he added after a moment's thought. "I'm doing great." He still hadn't managed a shower, but he'd got a sponge-bath just that morning, which totally counted. And--the nurses were used to his tattoo, or at least used to ignoring it. He wasn't sure he was quite ready yet to face the questions the public showers would provoke.

And anyway, the crutches were a convenient excuse.

The coffee was still a little too hot, scalding his tongue when he unwisely took too big a gulp. He set the mug between his thighs and used both hands to heave his left leg a little straighter. "And hey, I'm out of the hospital. I've got coffee and a TV and--good company." His quick smile edged towards anxious; he hid it behind his mug. "Glad to see you aren't the kind of girl who'll sleep with a guy and then forget to call. Although I'm noticing a real lack of flowers."

For a moment, she tensed. Sleep with--how'd he know--? No. No, past tense. He was kidding. She angled a warily amused look up at him. "Hey, I never promised flowers. But then, I don't forget my one-night-stand's names, either." She didn't have one-night-stands, but if she did she liked to think she'd remember who they were.

Raidou didn't count.

Neither did... whoever that guy before him had been.

And Hana's father certainly didn't. Her shoulders hunched briefly, and she busied herself drinking her coffee.

The television kept it from going too quiet. She hadn't missed Ryouma dodging her question, but if he didn't want to answer... well, it wasn't her place to push. She didn't know him that well.

Rotten missions were funny. They fostered a sense of camaraderie, of kinship, and just when you were feeling like you understood this person inside and out... you realized it was just that. A feeling.

And you didn't know much more about them than you had before.

She liked him. He was attractive. Warm. Funny. She'd had maybe a handful of conversations with him, and most of those about nothing more than the weather. Now she sat in his room, trying to muddle through talking with a stranger who felt like a friend.

She didn't quite know what to do.

"Mind-blowing sex is a perfectly good excuse for minor memory lapses," Ryouma said haughtily. He might with equal truth have pointed out that he'd never forgotten the name of any girl he'd slept with--at least, not before morning--but they weren't looking for truth here, exactly.

Were they?

He took refuge in babbling. "Had a kunoichi girlfriend a couple years back, one of the girls who does seduction. She's--somewhere, now; that break-up totally wasn't my fault. I got sent back to the border and she got bored. Two letters and bam, she's stringing the Daimyo's finance minister around by the--uh, well, she decided she prefered old and rich to young and virile. Anyway. The things she could do with her tongue--I swear, some mornings I woke up not knowing my own name. But I always brought flowers," he added belatedly.

A little more of the tension had seeped out of Tsume's shoulders, replaced by an unnatural stillness. She was hiding behind her coffee again. Was that a bad sign?

He'd stopped talking. Which meant it was her turn. Crazy thing about conversations, they were predictable like that. First one person spoke. Then the other. Then the first went back to it, unless there was a third, then maybe they got a turn. Otherwise, back to the second again, just like clockwork. Tick, tock, one, two.

And no amount of thinking about conversations and the patterns they held would take away the fact that it was her turn, again.

They were talking about sex. How had that happened? This wasn't a conversation she wanted to be talking about. It wasn't even a conversation she wanted to be thinking about.

She should leave. Now.

She shifted up, mouth opening--

And sat back down, leaning against the bed in a parody of calm. "So, uh..." She cleared her throat. "Those flowers didn't really work out for you, huh?"

"Not when he could buy her orchids." Ryouma grinned lopsidedly. "Probably a good thing, anyway. I spent six months in Lightning Country and then ended up in the hospital with my belly cut open. She was done with her finance minister by then, but I came near enough to not coming back that I was glad she wasn't waiting."

He spun his mug between his hands, watching the coffee swirl. A little of the steaming liquid splashed on the back of his hand; he licked it off and took another drink. "It--makes a difference, when you think someone's waiting. Not sure if it's good or bad. You don't wanna let 'em down. On the other hand, you--really don't want to let 'em down."

He'd learned when he was three years old that dog-tags and a few characters chiseled into the Heroes' Stone were the best way to break a heart. Maybe he couldn't determine when his name would join the others, but so long as there was no one waiting to accept his dog-tags and the Hokage's sympathy, he was playing it safe.

He hadn't realized, until it felt wrong to wake up alone in a hospital bed, how lonely that was.

By the time he stopped talking Tsume had twisted to watch him, one arm up on the futon, mug still held in both hands. Tension drained out of her as she focused on what he said, blue eyes steady while she listened, coffee far enough away to let her catch a whiff of everything else. There was something beyond his simple words--but then, there always was.

"You can't make everyone happy," she said, and smiled wryly. He'd seen that with her own family, over the last few days. "At some point, you're going to let someone down. But dying on a mission..." she paused, gaze falling as her thoughts turned inward.

If she died in ANBU, would her children understand? They were young, still. They'd just know she'd left them.

"I suppose," she said at last, changing what she'd planned to say, "that it's not whether you let them down once, but whether you let them down always."

Her gaze sharpened, seeing him again, and she gave an apologetic shrug. "'Least, I know there are times when I wouldn't have made it home, except I was afraid someone would resurrect me so they could kill me again." Her smile was wry.

Times when she wouldn't have made it home, except that she wasn't leaving her cubs motherless.

Not that they would be, she told herself firmly. They had Tori.

"Seems to me once is all it takes. If it's final enough." Ryouma hesitated. "But maybe--your family, they've had you a long time. If you didn't come home, I guess they'd have the good memories to go on, to temper all the rest."

Would they really make that much difference?

And would it be worth it, to have a few good years before the heartache?

He drew his right leg up, wrapping his arm around his knee and chewing on the rim of his coffee mug as he thought. "I spent most of my life learning not to get close to people. Seems like every time I forgot, they'd shove me back down... And it's easier not to get tied up, you know? Enjoy the company, but when you start thinking about planning for the future, then you know it's time to run... Except Kakashi told me I'm running around handing my heart out to people, begging 'em to take it and waiting for 'em to break it. I don't think that's true. Not a damn puppy, for one thing, and I've got good at breaking free." His fingers tapped a nervous dance against the rumpled bedclothes.

"But...you tell me you don't want to give me a chance, and I can take that, but it still hurts. Wanting to be closer, and not being able to. And seein' you, your kids--" He made a wide, frustrated gesture with his right hand, nearly slopping coffee over the rim of the mug again. "Makes me wonder if maybe I been wrong all along."

Her gaze dropped briefly, when he spoke of wanting to be closer. Physically. Even emotionally--people asked too many questions.

At least here, they couldn't smell when their questions made her anxious. They couldn't get suspicious so easily.

But that was one comment in a babble of many, and she turned her mind back to what he'd said. It seemed alien to her, to try and think of how it would be without her kids. Without her bothersome sisters and meddling pack members and even Yasuo. To have grown up without aunts and uncles and a tumbling crowd of cousins, and that even before she counted the rest of the clan...

It wasn't about good memories to overwhelm the bad. It was about... about...

She didn't know what it was about.

"I... I'm not sure..." She tapered off, struggling with the words. "I can't imagine being alone in the world," she said finally, with an apologetic shrug. "The Inuzuka are two hundred strong." Her mouth twisted wryly. "There's always another. But..." How would they feel if she left?

She couldn't answer that. But how had she felt when her father was killed, when her mother slipped quietly away, when cousins vanished, when her only brother had died on a simple genin mission?

"When my father died," she said at last, "we were all devastated. But it wasn't unexpected. He was a ninja. You brace yourself for that, knowing the risk." She felt her way through the thoughts, trying to catch threads of them, struggling, trying to place emotion, trying to explain it. "It was horrible." She frowned. "And yet, if we hadn't had him... if he hadn't been my father, I wouldn't be who I am now. He shaped my life too much; I can't regret having known him." But maybe that wasn't Ryouma's point. If she'd had only her father...

The idea was incomprehensible. She shook her head. "I have a whole clan. My entire family could die, and it would hurt, but I have an entire clan to fall back on. I think it's different."

Then her gaze snapped up, wary. "Not that I'm suggesting you should go out and get attached to people. It has its own hazards."

"Kakashi certainly thinks so," Ryouma muttered into his mug. He sighed, blowing a tiny wave of coffee across the dark surface. Kakashi was a whole bundle of problems he didn't feel equipped to deal with right now. Not with Tsume still talking about family, and losing it.

About fathers, and losing them.

"See," he said to his mug, "but if you didn't have your clan. If you had two people in all the world, and both of 'em betrayed you. One of 'em left, and the other--didn't leave as early as he should've. And you grow up wanting people, the way you saw in the movies and in the parks, and knowing at the same time you can't have 'em. 'Cause they'll die, or you'll die, and either way somebody'll be alone again... Who do you fall back on then?"

Konoha, he'd answered, when he was fourteen and tying on a brand-new hitai'ate. He'd tried to make it true, and for the most part, it had been. Somehow ANBU had stripped that faceless ideal away. A village became the people in it, and the people in it became the harsh voices that insulted him onwards and the strong arms that carried him home. The man who held him when he woke screaming, and the woman who sat in his room drinking coffee and chasing the dark away.

"You don't have to answer that," he said quietly, and drained the rest of his coffee.

She twisted farther, settling her mug down on the edge of the futon, other hand rising to idly trace the angle of his ankle bone. He'd said she didn't have to answer. It was good; she didn't have an answer. She searched for one anyway, floundering in a sea of emotions, of experiences she couldn't imagine, much less solve.

Finally, Tsume shook her head slightly, gaze still tracing the path her fingertips made over his skin. A two-inch square of space along the hard knob of bone under tanned flesh. "I suppose the cliched response is friends," she said at last, with a wry little smile up at him. "But I don't know if the world really works like that."

She hesitated, knowing that what she wanted to ask wasn't diplomatic. It wasn't done, with people who lost loved ones and friends as often as they slaughtered enemies. It wasn't her business. He wasn't her family.

She found herself asking anyway, eyes on his face. "What happened?"

Someone who'd died. Someone who hadn't.

It wasn't any of her business. She watched him anyway.

Her touch tickled, a little, but not enough to pull away; maybe tingled would've been the better word. He held his breath, watching her fingers trace a random path over skin-sheathed bone, and had to force himself to follow her words. She wasn't-- They'd slept half-dressed and tangled together in the hospital, after all! Drugs and shock had had a hand in it, sure, but this wasn't anything different.

His throat ached. He cleared it roughly. "I told you halfway already. Back when you came to the hospital, with your kids. My mom didn't know my dad, and I barely knew her. My granddad shouldn't have been left in charge of a sick cat, let alone a kid. He died before I was old enough to kill him, and I was glad." His hand fisted over his braced knee. For a moment the old hatred, worn thin by years and forced forgetfulness, rose up and threatened to choke him.

He swallowed it down. "Friends're better. If you can keep 'em."