"At least you know what's coming." Genma looked at her face, seeing Raidou's in his mind's eye. Tsume's injuries were hidden by bandages, but most of her face seemed unmarred.

Of course visible scars were hardly the only remnants of major combat injuries.

Genma looked at his hands again. The gloves hid the scars, but not the deformation of bone and sinew.

Tsume's wounds would heal, and with luck whatever scars she'd carry from it would be minor. Raidou's face had healed, and all he saw when he looked in a mirror, if he looked at all, was disfiguration and a reminder of failure. Genma's hands had healed, but they never stopped hurting. It was a hazard of being a ninja, just like Tsume said.

"That thing that gives you nightmares. The thing they don't know about. You gonna add this to it, or are you gonna make up a whole new set of nightmares about what happened this time?"

She gave a bark of laughter. "Oh, I try not to mingle my nightmares. One set for one trauma, a new set for another. I'm working toward enough of them to have some variety, you see." Her eyes twinkled. For the first time she took a sip, letting it spread char over her tastebuds. They'd left the coffee on too long.

"Why? You prefer to combine them? There a nightmare system that the specialists are holding out on me?"

The smells of chemical and ozone burn were wearing off, fading into the background as her hindbrain realized she wasn't under attack, no matter how odd the scents were. It made her relax a little, and while Genma was poking around at things she'd rather he not, he wasn't poking hard. Everyone had nightmares they didn't like to talk about.

Genma laughed, too, and blinked at Tsume. He'd been waiting for her to snap at him, preparing for a fight, and she was making jokes? It reminded him of Ginta, and the way he turned everything on its side. "I uh. Yeah. Well I used to try to keep my nightmares separate, but lately the Fox has been showing up in my favorite torture nightmare. Or my sister. So you know. It's a little like curry, with everything mixed up together to give it more flavor."

He laughed again, watching Tsume closely. Her eyes were alight. Alive. She was watching him, but he didn't see any sign of a pending attack. In fact, he thought maybe what he saw there was understanding. That made him look away in a hurry, gulping at his own coffee so fast he could feel the roof of his mouth blister from the heat before he tasted it.

When she lowered her coffee enough to smell other things, she smelled a potent combination of sour fruit and rust, the heavy tang of lead, intertwined with a rise in heat and sweat, all radiating from Genma.

She didn't mention that she could smell the upswing of stress and anxiety, a veritable flood of battering emotions. Sometimes, that made people uncomfortable.

Instead she offered a slight smile, gaze soft and a little bit ironic. "Wait until you have pups. They want every minute of your time--even the time spent in nightmares. They'll start showing up there, and you won't get a moment's peace." Those were the worst, when it was family and loved ones hurt as badly as your mind could conjure.

Her legs didn't reach the floor. She crossed her ankles and hooked her toes around one stool foot, keeping them from swinging. "But maybe you won't have pups. And then those torture nightmares can just remain personal."

She paused, thinking about what she'd just said, and snorted. "I'm not sure that's better..."

"My little sister shows up in them sometimes. And Raidou. I don't even want to think about kids. I mean my sister was a... was still a kid when she died. So maybe it's a little like having a kid. Probably not. Having a little sister." Words tumbled out over a burned tongue. Weren't they supposed to be working on poison here? But Tsume had tapped a vein with her talk of nightmares. Although he had been the one to bring it up in the first place.

Torture, she said. But he'd told her. It had just slipped out, plain as day. Something he'd told his very best friend only when it had been obvious and he'd had a lot of alcohol in his system. Something he talked about with the psych guys just enough to keep his supply of little red tablets to a minimum without risking a break.

But on that mission with Kuromaru, he had broken. Pretending not to see a rotting corpse didn't make the stink go away.

"So you know, they're already not just private. I never know who's gonna turn up in my nightmares to watch, for me to watch, or to hold the damn hammer in their hand."

Adrenaline spiked. Tsume lowered her coffee cup, setting it on the table nearby as Genma started to talk. She couldn't smell with it too close, and suddenly she wanted that extra clue. Watching him steadily, breathing slowly through her nose to sift out scents, emotions, the heavy brush of fear and uncertainty twined through with the old leather of bitterness, she listened as he babbled out more of his inner thoughts than he probably meant to.

When he stopped, as suddenly as he'd started, whiskey-colored eyes looking a little stunned in a narrow, pretty face, the room seemed to echo with silence.

Torture, he'd said, and hammers, and she'd seen the marks on his hands, the twisting of bone still visible underneath gloves so thin they were like sallow flesh. She'd seen his hands. She'd read his file. She knew as much about this young man as anyone else did, and she suspected that wasn't half.

There were any number of things she could have responded to. She spoke quietly, drawing from her own experiences--different, and yet the same. "It's almost worse when there's someone there, in your dream, isn't it? When they see what happened, everything that went wrong. Whether they help or not. You wake up and want to blame them or save them..." she trailed off, shrugging wordlessly.

She woke up, and the familiar who had witnessed it was always there. She couldn't blame him, and she couldn't save him. And she couldn't pretend that no one knew, because someone did.

It was as breathtaking as a punch to the solar plexus, this strange confessional dance with Tsume. Sitting at a lab bench lined with death, talking about dreams. Genma found himself speaking again, heard his voice low and sounding like someone else's. He could see himself sitting there, hunched over his coffee, with his thinly-gloved nails raking dents in the styrofoam of the cup. He could feel his pulse pounding in his throat as if he'd been running. As if he'd just woken up from one of those nightmares.

"Seijuro was really the one who was there." Genma's voice broke softly on the name. "You were in service before, so maybe you knew him. You probably knew Kobo. Kamiyashi Kobo. He was mission leader. But it was Seijuro who was there, who watched. They made him watch, you know. Before they killed him. To try to make him talk, because I think they got it I wasn't going to talk. Or maybe it was to try to make me talk. I don't know. Only now it's Raidou watching. Or it's me watching, and Haruko-chan getting her hands..."

He choked. His eyes darted around the empty room, pausing on a half-complete distillation of some plant toxin on Matsuda's table. On the fume hood and its massive exhaust pipe. On the row of glass tanks holding venomous animals and insects. On anything but Tsume's face.

She was silent. Still. Calm. He finally found himself looking at her again. Not in the eye. Too dangerous to look her in the eye. He stared at her bandaged ear instead, at the layers of gauze wrapped around hidden wounds.

"Once, not too long ago actually, it was Hokage-sama himself holding the... holding it. Think you can be locked up for a traitor for having a dream like that?"

It was a joke. She could see that in the quick flicker of his smile, there and gone again, unable to remain. She answered anyway. "No. But sometimes, you feel like you should." It had been eleven years since they'd tried to get Kuromaru to talk, promising they'd stop hurting her.

Even if she and her familiar hadn't been able to smell the lie, Kuromaru couldn't have told them anything. At that point, he hadn't had the ability to speak. But locked into human form, they had no way of knowing that. They only knew he was a person who looked like her.

"How long ago," Tsume asked, nodding toward Genma's hands, "did they do that?" She knew the answer. But it wasn't the answer that was important, anyway. It was the sugar-sweet tide of fear scent that twisted around them, the nauseating odor of someone purging a wound left festering too long. That was what was important.

"Four." It was a whisper. A harsh parody of Genma's voice. He cleared his throat and tried again, but only managed to sound more strained. "Four years ago. Just hit the... the four year mark. Happened in February. March. Funerals for Kobo and Seijuro were in March." He looked down at his hands. They had somehow found each other, abandoned the coffee cup and turned to a sort of desperate clinging to one another, with gnarled fingers laced over aching knuckles, the left hand shielding the right.

"I don't remember the funerals. It was snowing. I think snowing. Or it might have been cherry blossoms." He'd been heavily drugged, and in a lot of pain despite medication. Dressed in a black silk kimono over his hospital gown, because getting him into a dress uniform had been out of the question. Carried on a stretcher by a pair of chuunin medics, and carefully monitored, hooked to IV lines and painted with chakra seals, lying stone-faced as Kobo's wife sobbed enough for all of them. Endured the pitying, bitter stares of Seijuro's parents.

His doctors told him his recovery had been set back two weeks by that three-quarters of an hour on the parade grounds. The psychiatrists told him attending that funeral was the key to his having recovered enough to resume active service in ANBU.

His eyes were on his hands, but his gaze was turned inward. Remembering. Tsume tipped her head to catch his expression, glad his hitai-ate kept his hair back. She watched him for a long moment, listened to his stuttering uncertainty in talking about any of it, and remembered being sent on a mission to see why, exactly, he and his partner were snapping teeth.

Eleven years, and the smell of arousal and anger combined still made her heart race. He saw his hands every day. Constant exposure could make it better.

Or it could make it worse.

She inhaled swiftly, checking his scent before she spoke. Checking to see how much it would change. "Kobo and Seijuro escaped, one way or another. Did you?" Or was he still trapped in a torture cell, dragged back there every time he so much as noticed his twisted fingers?

"I got out." Genma's head snapped up, eyes suddenly fierce and shining. "I got out of there. I never broke. Not even when Sei... when..." His jaws clamped shut, teeth clacking together. What the hell kind of question was that? What accusation? Kobo and Seijuro escaped? They'd been murdered, right in front of him. Maybe Kobo escaped. He'd died first. Died in the ambush. But Seijuro... To say he'd escaped?

"They.... He was a fucking hero. A hero, got that? He didn't escape. He endured, just like I did. He endured as long as he possibly could." Endured and then broke. Gave them names, gave them tidbits. Useless things ultimately, but he'd broken. Genma had known it the moment he saw him on that last day. They'd shattered his spirit when they sat him down and used Genma's pain as a weapon.

"I'm here now, aren't I? What the hell do you know?"

She shifted as his scent spiked with anger and pain, uncrossing her ankles and putting one foot flat on the leg of the stool. If she had to, she could push off. Bolt. She didn't think she had to, but it was always wise to be prepared.

Her tone remained calm in the face of his gale. "I didn't say they weren't heroes. I said they escaped. By foot or by death, it's still an escape." Her mouth twisted in bitter memory of her most recent mission. "I don't consider our ninja who are tortured to be anything but heroes." She wouldn't call Ryouma anything but.

She scented again, marking the changes. The rise of anger was obvious, but under that swirled grief and guilt, combining into a sickly sweet odor like melted toffee and dark molasses. "And you're right. You're here." She waited a beat, then shrugged and lifted her foot, bracing her heel on the seat of the chair. Curling. Coiling. Relaxed but ready to move. "I'm just wondering if you remember that."

Her eyes flicked away, breaking his gaze, traveling lazily over his workspace. Non-threatening. "But I'm sure you're right. I don't know anything." Her words were carefully neutral. She had six years' life experience on the man before her. Enough knowledge to back off.

Genma stood up, backing away from Tsume. Too agitated to sit any longer. He pushed the stool in between himself and her, a paltry shield when words were the weapons. "Were you there?" he asked, and turned away sharply before she could answer. "I was there. And I'm not there now. I know that. I know exactly where I am!"

He tore off his gloves and slapped his hands down on the black lab bench, gnarled fingers splayed out for Tsume. "See? See how I know I'm here? I fucking survived because I... Because. I was stronger." He could feel his breath catching. Could see ripples forming in his cooling coffee from the tremors his hands sent through the table. There was a spider in a glass terrarium at the station next to his. He watched it pick its way carefully down one strand of web and up another.

Tsume was watching him. He didn't look at her.

She watched him. Watched tense muscles shiver under a thin layer of skin. Watched tendons stand with alarm. Watched his ribs heave.

She slid off the stool with a quiet whisper of cloth and the soft thump of landing. "Kuromaru," she murmured, "doesn't have flashbacks. I can't quite explain them to him. He understands them as a nightmare, waking. But he only understands nightmares as a frightening dream. And he barely remembers dreaming." She stepped carefully around the stool, closer to Genma, to where he leaned against the table.

"Sometimes, I think it'd be easier to be him. He doesn't--" She stopped, remembering the way he'd screamed and fought when they'd amputated first his ear, and then his eye. Remembered sitting on him, holding him down while Ryouma cauterized everything. While flesh burned, and her familiar writhed, unable to grasp why they were hurting him.

"--He doesn't always understand what's going on." Her voice was hoarse. She cleared it and leaned against the table, beside the strong arms braced on broken hands. "But for him, once it's over... it's over. He moves on."

She reached out, fingertips brushing a white lab coat, feeling the strength of sinew and bone beneath. "Humans aren't so lucky. It's harder to move on."

Some never did. Half of Ryouma's dragon was gone, his symbol of strength torn away with skin and nails and acid dripped down his arm. She dragged her thoughts away from that.

ANBU were different. ANBU were stronger.

The ninja next to her trembled.

Something was happening. Something Genma didn't really understand. He let Tsume's words wash over him, tolerated her closeness, concentrated on trying to understand her. Her body was tense beside him. He watched the spider in its tank.

Tsume's voice died to a rasp, picked up again. Kuromaru wasn't with her, because he was still in the hospital. Ryouma was badly injured. Tsume had been badly injured. Something had happened. Something was happening.

Her hand closed over his forearm, and he shook. His gaze wrenched away from the spider to her fingers with their curved, pointed nails, her small hand resting on his arm protectively. He looked at his own hand, so much bigger, and couldn't see the details, the scars he knew by heart, because his vision was suddenly blurred. His throat choked closed.

Charred flowers. Rain water. An ocean storm. Crab apples. Tsume tightened her grip on his arm silently, breathing through her nose as his scent bloomed over her. Her chakra unfurled, pathetically small against emotion as devastating as this. It lapped at them both, warm and guarding with an edge that whispered alpha.

"Sometimes, surviving doesn't mean--" She stuttered to a halt. Her hand dropped away from his arm. They rested on the table, one on either side of her hips where she leaned back. Her gaze skittered over the room.

When she spoke again, her voice was quiet. "Everyone has things they survive. We're all strong. If we weren't strong, we wouldn't be here." Her fingers tightened. "But sometimes, being strong and surviving... doesn't mean you can move on." Her words were nearly a whisper.

She thought of Ryouma, of spending the last several nights in his room, unable to sleep for the lack of her familiar and the nightmares that took his place. "Sometimes you need..." she floundered and shrugged, gaze firmly on the floor. "Sometimes you can't do it on your own."

For several long moments the room was silent, but for Genma's rapid breathing as he worked to master his emotions. Breathing, breathing, feeling Tsume beside him. Feeling something still happening, like a delayed-action jutsu.

Tsume's voice was dying again. Withering away like a parched fern, crumbling to dust. Genma took a deeper breath, breaking his trance and turning to look at her. She looked small, head bowed and bandaged, eyes downcast. She looked as small as he felt. Smaller.

"What... What do you do then? What do you do?" he asked in a whisper nearly as fractured as hers.

She couldn't pretend that he meant in general. The question was specific, his gaze locked on her. She rolled her shoulders in. A claw scratched across the underside of the table. "Usually, I go home. My clan is fairly large, and closely knit. What we can't talk out, we fight out." She tipped her head to look up at him, exposing one canine tooth in a half smile. "I know most people think we're crazy, but it works for us." To throw her strength against another, come out on top and know she was the strongest one to keep them going. To walk away knowing she would protect them--and they'd follow and back her to the ends of the earth.

It gave her power unparalleled.

But occasionally, she couldn't go home. Her half-smile faltered, and she looked away again. "And if I can't do that..." She gave a humorless laugh, a single huff of air as her lungs fell. "I suppose I stay with a friend." Genma's room was next to Ryouma's. Surely, even as scent-blind as he was, he'd smelled her coming and going.

"But..." She hesitated, struggling with thoughts only barely recognized. "I'm not..." Not like others. Inuzuka weren't. They were more human than canine, but they were more canine than other humans. "Inuzuka don't think the way non-Pack do," she said at last, slowly. "Pack is protection. It's... it's knowing that if you're not stable, they'll protect you until you are." She smiled dryly. "And when you think you are, they'll test you until you can prove it, and hold it, no matter what."

She looked up at Genma, apologetic. "I don't know what everyone else does, though."

Staying with a friend... Pack. Going home. Where was home? Genma had come home from his last mission too sick to pay much attention to the world around him. When he recovered enough to catch up on gossip, he'd had Raidou and Kaito to distract him, and hadn't dug for details about Tsume's disastrous mission. But he had heard Tsume's voice in the hallway, talking to Ryouma. Found out both of them were barely two days out of hospital themselves. Was Ryouma the friend?

Pack protected you when you couldn't protect yourself. Wasn't that what any friend did? What any ANBU did? The rescue team that had come for him four years ago had protected him though none of them had known him.

Maybe it was the testing part that was critical. Maybe that was the difference.

Why did she look so small?

"They tested me before they reinstated me." Genma found his coffee again, and sipped at the lukewarm oily bitterness. "Physical tests, mental tests, psych tests. I passed them all. I always pass them." He laughed, a sharp sound as bitter as his coffee. "Guess they aren't testing the right things."

He looked at his hand wrapped around the coffee cup. It was just a hand. A hand that worked. Could hold a cup, write with a brush, cast a jutsu.

"Maybe I ought to... I don't know. Maybe I could... Make a new test." A half-formed idea. Raidou had held his hands.

Tsume frowned a moment at his mention of tests, confused. Then she barked a laugh. "Not that sort of testing." She relaxed and angled a grin up at him. "Testing like..." Glancing around, her gaze landed on his hands. Purposefully, she went loose limbed and slouched, offering as little threat as possible. Her gaze flicked back to his eyes, and stayed there. "If you were Inuzuka, and you'd been through the things you have and came back and said you were strong again... someone would test you. Someone, some time, would smell your anxiety about your hands. And if that someone was as strong or stronger than you, they would challenge you over it. They'd attack, and you'd--" spar wasn't right, but it was the closest she could come. "Spar, and they'd go for your weak spots."

She paused, keeping her own fingers wrapped around the table--as much assurance as she could muster that she wasn't going to attack, no matter what she described. Her words were clear and slow when she spoke again, making sure he understood. "If you panicked, they would keep attacking until you submitted. When you do that, it's--" She didn't let her eyes roam from his face, though she struggled to put into words what was instinct. "It's like knowing deeper than thought that you're safe because the other person is so much stronger. And as the stronger one, it's their job to keep you safe. And if they're stronger, they can do it better than you can. And you calm down."

Kakashi understood this. He'd done it, out in the forest. Had drawn blood along her throat before she stopped fighting. She was naturally alpha, and submitting was foreign. But he'd been more powerful, and when his threat had gotten serious, she'd given in.

If he hadn't drawn blood, she wasn't sure she'd be alive now.

But that was neither here nor there. "When you're strong enough to fight them off," she said slowly, "then you're also strong enough to fight your demons. You have to fight through your own panic, before you can fight through another person." She smiled slightly and shrugged. The edges of the lab coat swirled around her calves. "And until then, you know anyone who beats you is instinct-bound to protect you with their lives--against everything. Even your own nightmares."

She pulled her gaze away at last, shaking her head in frustration. "But that's Inuzuka. That's... canine, I suppose."

A claw scratched against the underside of the table again. "I don't know that anyone else has that instinct."

It was almost too far out of Genma's experience for him to understand. Losing a fight meant you were safe? The winner honor-bound to protect the loser? Submission? He shook his head and stared down at his own toes, bared by sandals, dry and dusty-looking. And suddenly he thought of frostbitten feet cut by ice. He thought of miles run, and rolling through snow, working to subdue Raidou before his own nightmares tore him apart.

Of course he'd been honor-bound to protect his friend. Of course tackling him, pinning him down, making him submit, had been the right thing to do.

He looked up at Tsume with a flicker of understanding lighting his eyes. A hesitant, uncertain grasp on a new idea. "I... think... I think I understand. Maybe. Maybe a little. I..."

Memories of Taisei, too, the nearly-destroyed boy he'd brought out of that Iwa hellhole with him. Taisei who was still a patient in a locked facility. Taisei who could be taken out for ice cream, and to talk to the plants in the park, and who had to be watched like a hawk. Taisei who had broken Genma's ribs once, in a fight against demons only he could see. Taisei whose shoulder Genma had dislocated during that same fight, giving his friend something real to rage against, and something stronger than himself, to break against. Taisei who trusted him, because Genma'd proven more than once that he was stronger. Because he could protect him.

The idea fluttered feebly, trying to be born. Raidou holding his hand. Raidou fighting him until he was too exhausted to fight anymore. Taisei fighting not Genma, but his demons, with Genma just the stand-in for invisible foes.

His head ached. He sniffed harshly, wiping at a clogged nose with the back of one scarred hand. "I don't know. It's confusing," he told Tsume. "I think... I think there's something like that though. Like what you said."

She watched him doubtfully, marking it as he calmed down. "Then... why haven't you done it?" Despite his assertions that he wasn't back there, he was obviously still broken over it. Still haunted by ghosts and memories of what had been.

Maybe he was more confused. Maybe he didn't really have something like that. In her experience, people didn't. In her experience, they rebelled against the very thought of letting someone stronger take the lead--no matter how much sense it made to her.

Maybe he was part Inuzuka, and he had a sibling who could take him down... but she doubted it.

"Um, I don't... It's not..." Genma stammered and turned to his coffee, staring into it as if it had the answer he was struggling for. "See, me and Rai... Raidou..." he corrected himself, as if Tsume wouldn't know who he meant. "We spar, right? And if, you know, I think he's being weak about guarding his right side or whatever, I go after that. And same for me. Like we had a mission a few months ago and I caught a hit on my leg, and Rai saw it, and said I was being an idiot about my footwork. So we worked on it, right? He was totally right. I was being an idiot about my footwork."

He looked up at Tsume, eyes unconsciously going to her bandaged ear. "So I could maybe, if Rai was cool with it, or whatever, get him to..." Hands gesturing, one vaguely attacking the other. Half-drunk coffee sloshing to the rim. "Don't know. It'd have to be someone like Rai. He's the only person besides the docs I can take it if he.... My hands. You know?"

She probably didn't know. Not if he couldn't even say. But maybe she could smell the meaning, with her weird canine nose.

Tsume eyed him dubiously. That didn't sound like what she was talking about at all--and she couldn't imagine Raidou attacking like she meant. She thought about going back, clarifying... but perhaps this had been enough picking over old wounds for one day. Wolf knew that after her work out that morning, she didn't have the energy to keep going.

Besides, Genma wasn't Inuzuka. Maybe it was better for him, however he was talking about. "So... You and Raidou spar and you trust him to help you with your hands?" she asked, just to clarify. He didn't smell quite so sour anymore. The sugar-sweet odor of panic was receding, drifting off in the stale air of the compound. That was good. That was hopeful. He was working through things, rather than freezing up just talking about it. She relaxed a little, too, reaching out once more to pick up her coffee.

"Yeah. We spar." Genma half-smiled, seeing Raidou's scarred, flushed-from-a-spar face in his mind's eye. Sparring with Raidou was one of the best things in life, really. Sparring, then hanging out afterwards. There wasn't really anyone else he knew he felt so easy with. Not even Aoba or Ginta. "And yeah, I trust him. He's..." There had to be a word for it. A word for a friend who was more than a friend. He couldn't think of it, though.

"He's different," he said at last. "No one else really gives me that... I don't know. Something. I mean, with any of my pals, I know if I needed them, they'd help. But Rai, he's... It's like he just gets me, you know?" Genma laughed, sipped his coffee, gave Tsume a sideways, shy smile. "He'd tell me I was being totally gay, talking like this."