And suddenly the world was full of Genma. Raidou blinked, disarmed on all counts, and landed back on his heels, throwing hand falling by his side. His dart seemed to have vanished mid-flight; he glanced down and saw the fletchings trapped between scarred fingers.

"The hell is this?" demanded one of his would-be opponents, red-faced and belligerent, as Raidou tried to remember why dinner seemed significant.

"This is Genma," he said, slashing an automatic smile. "Be nice. He can braid all your fingers together."

Which was true, but didn't explain why Genma was here.

"Ninja?" said the red-faced man, fast losing most of his belligerence. He backed up a step, colliding hip-first with his much drunker friend, and almost knocked a table over. "You never said you were ninja!"

Raidou glanced down at his bruised knuckles, his bandaged arms, and looked up with a wider smile that stretched his scars. Gauze pulled, but he was almost past caring. "Didn't I? My bad." He twitched his shirt sleeve up, baring the crimson curl of a faded tattoo. "ANBU, actually."

The men backed up another brace of steps, leaving their money piled neatly by the bank of empty glasses. Raidou reached for it--and found Genma still blocking him.

Right. Genma.

Something about dinner.

He shook off the slippery grip of far too much--or not enough--alcohol and riffled though his memory; something he'd been trying to avoid for the past several hours. Dinner...

At six. To talk about Kaito and just generally catch up. That dinner. Right.

He glanced at his wrist, found it entirely watchless, and grimaced. Then shook off the flicker of guilt by sidestepping Genma and reaching for his stolen shot. A missed meal was definitely preferable to waking up his friend by screaming the walls down with nightmares he was still sober enough to have.

"Sorry," he said, covering the thought with a smile as his fingers closed around Genma's wrist. "Raincheck?"

Raidou never went anywhere without his watch, Genma thought. Of course that was the least of his problems right now. Genma was fairly sure Kaito would have mentioned it if he'd managed to do to Raidou whatever was hidden by those bandages. The forearm wraps could be covering up senbon tracks from fighting Kaito's jutsu. But the face... There was no way Kaito would have gone after Raidou's face in a spar, was there?

No ninja walking the world with a scarlet spiral tattooed on his shoulder was stupid enough to go for a partner's worst scars in a spar. It was the kind of thing that you just didn't do. Like kicking a sparring partner in the jewels, or aiming a killing jutsu at a comrade. You didn't use lethal force in a workout. Especially not a match with a ninja older, better trained, more experienced, and outranking you, as Raidou did to Kaito.

Genma didn't flinch, even when Raidou's fingers crushed his skin to bloodless white.

"Nope. No raincheck. And you need some fiber, fat and protein to go with all these carbs." He smiled back. Matching wills. Knowing he'd win, one way or another.

"Come on, Rai. You wanna keep drinking, we can go back to my place and get hammered and have pizza or something."

And you can let me get a look at whatever the hell happened to you to set this off. If you did that to yourself... But that was not an avenue of speculation Genma wanted to go down.

He twisted in Raidou's grip, so that in one fluid motion he'd gone from being Raidou's captive to having an arm around his friend's waist. "You got a tab you need to pay off before we blow this dive?"

Ordinarily when Genma slipped into that particular mindset, like a steel hammer coated in velvet, Raidou clicked and behaved accordingly--whether that meant taking down seven charging jounin, or talking his friend back off the metaphorical ledge. But today was different. Today he'd spent his morning having a teenager practice emotional weaving on his heartstrings, his midday facing off against a damaged Inuzuka who'd come far too close to shredding it for comfort, and his afternoon spent trying to discover if there was a healer in alcohol, because he was too damn busy to get caught up with nightmares.

He'd almost gone to the medics, but thinking about volunteering for more hands near his face had made him feel queasy. Shots cut through beer was easier, if not cheaper. But that was where hustling darts came in.

He was entitled to spend his night doing whatever the hell he wanted just once.

And he'd been avoiding Genma--at least for the night--because Genma would only worry. Raidou wasn't in the business of making his friends worry.

Genma with his arm currently around Raidou's waist, making plans like everything was already decided.

The dagger curve of a smile slipped away, caught in the wave of a rapidly darkening mood. Raidou pulled away, staggered when Genma's grip tightened, and clocked his captor with a heavy elbow in the gut, still fast despite a blood alcohol level that would probably thin paint.

The thing Genma hated the most about dealing with a friend who was using ethanol to facilitate his break, he thought as he grunted and crumpled around Raidou's elbow, was catching them when they were in the pissy terrible-twos. Booze regressed everyone, but only sometimes did it take a grown man all the way to the tantrum-throwing stage. A cranky toddler throwing a punch was one thing; Raidou, with his trained muscle and chakra at his disposal, and the alcohol neatly taking care of any inhibitory ideas like don't break your friend's ribs, was quite another.

Now there was going to have to be a takedown of some sort. Although that was obviously what Raidou wanted, which in his frame of mind was not necessarily a good thing. The assembled bar patrons seemed pretty excited by the prospect of a free-for-all, too, making that lowing-cow crowd noise of anticipation. And a brawl was really not what Genma wanted at all. For one thing, Raidou was obviously still sober enough to fight pretty damn well, and drunk enough not to care he was fighting Genma. That would mean injuries for both of them if Genma had a hope of winning.

His left arm stayed around Raidou's waist. His right hand clamped around his friend's elbow. He leaned forwards muttering fast and low enough so only Raidou could hear, "Dude, if we're gonna start a brawl, we gotta do it with a better class of fighters. These guys are pansy civilians. We'll look like major assholes now they know we're shinobi, and the Uchiha bastards will show up and throw our asses in jail, and I haven't even had a single drink yet. You got a big head start..."

Raidou's skull connected with Genma's jaw in a backwards head-butt. And his right heel crushed against Genma's instep.

"Oh for fuck's sake, Rai!"

Despite the crowd's eagerness for a fight, none of them were ready to face off against ninja clearly on the edge. When Raidou threw the obligatory starting headbutt, a burly man by the bar took the opportunity to bring down a pint glass on his neighbour's head, winning a bellow of outrage, a spray of shattering glass, and a fist in the face from his other neighbour.

The ensuing mess was a violent cross between a melee (with, admittedly, less blood than Raidou was used to seeing) and a knock-down, drag-out brawl, complete with a shouting bartender brandishing a hunk of unvarnished wood as a club. Chairs were thrown, glass got smashed, noses broke against knuckles.

And in the middle of it all, Raidou spun in a rough circle and tried to shake Genma's grip. It wasn't his friend that he was mad at, but right now pulling Genma around until he could punch him in the face seemed like a damn good idea. Hands were off limits--hands were always off limits--but everything else was fair game, and he was drunk enough, mad enough, not to care about anything else.

It was funny, the shape fear could take.

"Get off," he snarled, and twisted his hand into warm leather, yanking Genma around by the collar. Meeting him with a fist.

The sound of cheap wood splintering against the wall came from the right. The shatter and tinkle of broken glass from somewhere to the left. Shouts, curses, long strings of insults, shrill cries and deep groans filled the air, as booted feet and balled fists connected with faces and bellies and fleshier, more delicate bits of anatomy.

Genma tuned it all out, focused solely on his pas de deux with Raidou. He blocked the incoming punch with a forearm, ducking down to drive a shoulder into his friend's chest.

Raidou's knee met him on the way down, and only snake-like flexibility saved Genma from having his neck snapped backwards. He dodged to the left, tackling Raidou around the waist, so that they both staggered back against another pair of fighters, who quickly got out of the shinobi's way.

"Don't be an asshole, Raidou!" Genma groaned, as Raidou made another try for his face with his knee. He considered grabbing for one of those bandaged wrists, for a microsecond, and rejected it. Whatever was under that gauze, it was part and parcel of why Raidou was trying to obliterate his memory with alcohol and head injury.

"Come on, let's just get the fuck out of here!" He spun Raidou in an off-kilter circle, groaning when someone else's badly aimed chair crashed against the pair of them.

Ordinarily, spindly wooden chair legs thumping against his flank wouldn't have done much, but a touch right now where he wasn't expecting one was enough to drag Raidou's slippery attention sideways--which was all the time Genma needed to shove a leg between his knees, cantilever with a twist of weight, and knock them both off balance.

They landed on the chair, which crunched. Genma's elbow drove into Raidou's solerplexus, dishing out a bit of karma and a lot of breathlessness in equal measure. Raidou grunted, gasped, and brought his knee up, catching Genma solidly between the legs.

Tsume would probably have appreciated that, he thought darkly, as amber-brown eyes crossed and breaking wood groaned beneath them. Glass shards pattered down on leather and skin as another bar patron turned the traditional bottle on yet another neighbour.

Civilians fought just as dirty; that was something to bear in mind.

Raidou twisted, slammed Genma to one side with an airless gasp, and bolted back up to his feet. Swayed once, caught his balance, and turned to the door.

Eyes like a nightmare pinned him before he could get there, swirling red and black. He reared back, closed his own, and punched the Uchiha before a genjustu could catch him.

It was surprising, he thought much later, how hard the cop punched him back.

In the space between one groaning, desperate breath and the next, Genma's world changed. Because one minute he was trying very hard to breathe and not vomit in response to Raidou's masterful attempt to castrate him, and the next he was launching with the full fury of a fully-trained ANBU assassin at a long-haired Uchiha cop. The cop who had just aimed a punch for the scarred, bandaged side of Raidou's face.

The hit connected, Raidou's head snapped back, his knees buckled. Genma, too late to prevent the hit, too enraged to abort his own drive, arced over the falling body of his best friend, and hammered a chakra-filled blow into the Uchiha's neck. He felt the snap as the man's collarbone broke.

Then his hands were wrenched up behind his back and he was driven to the floor, landing next to Raidou in a sticky, reeking pool of spilled alcohol and broken glass. He still felt like he might puke from the seething explosion Raidou's knee had unleashed in his groin. The person pinning his hands only added to his misery.

Someone grabbed him by the hair and yanked his head up. Before he could gather the presence of mind to shut his eyes, Genma looked into a scowling pair of pinwheeling red and black pupils.

The next thing he knew, he was leaning miserably back in a wooden chair with an ice-pack between his thighs, and a different Uchiha asking him how much he'd had to drink.

"Nothing," Genma snarled. "I was trying to get my buddy out of there when those other guys decided to make it into a brawl. Where's Raidou?"

"Namiashi-san is being charged with disorderly conduct, public drunkenness, disturbing the peace, assault on a comrade..." She looked pointedly at Genma's abused groin. "And assault on a police officer."

"He didn't assault me!" Genma protested.

"As are you, minus the public drunkenness charge," the woman continued. "And he did indeed assault you, there are several witnesses."

"There wouldn't be any of that if you assholes would have just let me get him out of there. Where is he?" Genma demanded again. "He's ANBU and..."

"We are well aware of what your service is, Shiranui-san. You will be held..."

"He's right on the edge of a fucking break. Do you have even a tiny clue what that means? I need to be with him."

There were lots of cops working at their desks. Messy desks, neat desks. Genma tried to stand up and found he was thoroughly immobilized by some sort of jutsu. "You need to let me go!" he groaned.

Someone came up to the woman and handed her a slip of paper. She read it over carefully, then looked up at Genma with a raised eyebrow.

"Namiashi-san will be held here until he is sober. You will be held with him. Someone from ANBU will be here to see about you in the morning, unless you are telling me you believe Namiashi-san needs to be transferred to the psychiatric ward for..."

"No! Dammit, no! This is exactly why I hate cops," Genma growled.

Raidou woke up with his face on fire--which was a damn sight better than acid, but still not one of his top favourite feelings. He groaned, tried to think through a brain stuffed full of fluff, and put a hand up to his cheek. His fingers touched damp gauze and yanked away.

There was a bandage on his face.

The sharp bite of fear cutting under his breastbone did all the work of ten gallons of coffee and a tax rebate. He jerked up, hands reaching for weapons that weren't there, eyes snapping open and casting around to find the jounin--and promptly fell off a hard wooden bench.

The concrete floor was not forgiving.

Boozy laughter crowed through the dank air. "Graceful, buddy. You gonna dance next?"

Raidou pulled his head up, gathering his weight on bandaged forearms, and stared at the glint of moonlight shining off metal bars. Nothing like a battlefield--no sun, no ring of steel, no screams of the dying--and even less like a bar. On the other side, trapped in an identical cage, flushed faces leered at him.

"Wakey, wakey, sleeping beauty. Your momma's calling you!"

Raidou grunted quietly and levered himself up, staggering back to his feet. He wasn't fourteen, he wasn't about to get slammed down, and even if his face ached (just a bite and a punch, not claws. Just a bandage he'd put there himself), it wasn't anything like it could be.

"Go to hell," he told his audience, and groped his way back to the bench, lying down with his face to the wall. He was still drunk--he could feel the heaviness in muscles, the slipperiness in his thoughts. Maybe that would be enough to sleep.

And if he woke up screaming in the drunk tank, who would care?

Genma, whispered a tired little voice. Raidou slapped it down. If Genma had any sense, he would have listened to the Uchiha and gone the hell home. It was the advice they always gave to the friends of idiots.

And seeing as he wasn't here, he'd probably done exactly that.

Raidou closed his eyes, let his hot cheek and his aching head rest against cold wood, and tried to find the courage for sleep.

The bastards didn't even have the decency to undo the jutsu binding his legs. And his hands, Genma shuddered, were aching, miserable lumps of meat, shot through with misfiring chakra and arcing nerves, from the long compression behind his back.

He shuffled awkwardly between two Uchiha guards on the way to the cells, and was surprised to see a parade of derelicts and drunks coming up the very stairs he was about to be led down.

One of the more grizzled looking of the drunk-tank regulars gave Genma a knowing grin. "Lookie here, cops caught some big fish in their net tonight. You gonna go berserker, boy? You got that ANBU look to you, I can tell."

One of the guards shepherding the drunks cuffed the old man and told him to shut his mouth. "Police brutality, you're my witness, ANBU boy," the old man shrilled.

Genma gave his own escort a sharp scowl.

"We've got orders, Shiranui-san. ANBU get held all on their own. There have been incidents..." The ominous twist to the word made Genma's stomach knot, imagining what sort of incidents could possibly transpire when ANBU and civilians were confined together in an Uchiha holding cell.

The stairs, though only a half flight, proved nearly impossible to negotiate with his legs hobbled, and Genma lurched and staggered as gracelessly as any drunkard. The guards at his side had to catch him by the shoulders to keep him on his feet. A third cop opened the cell door and snapped on a yellow light, casting harsh shadows over the figure of a man huddled on a bench bolted to the wall.

"Rai?" Genma asked.

"Hold still, Shiranui-san," the jailor told him. He released the binding jutsu, and Genma felt blood rush back into his feet, as if they'd been asleep. The other guard freed his hands, which Genma immediately brought up to his chest, trying to rub pain out of his joints.

"Don't bother trying to cast any jutsu down here," the taller cop told him, mistaking his gesture for an attempt at hand seals. "Chakra limiters in all the cells, and even if you manage it, you've got thirty guys with active Sharingan ready to make sure you don't get past your first seal.

"Fuck you," Genma told him, and limped towards the unmoving form on the bench.

Drunken choruses of cat calls were not conducive to good dreams. Apparently with chakra-nullifying bars to keep them separate from scary ninja, the group in the next cell were less intimidated by ANBU.

Raidou ground his back teeth together and ignored them. Picking a fight in the drunk tank--especially after punching a cop--would definitely get him dragged up in front of the Hokage. And he was already treading a thin line.

A very thin line, if you took into account he was supposed to be a responsible mentor.

If he was lucky, Kaito would never hear about this.

Sleep seemed like a much more promising option when heavy boots stamped down the stairs, and voices full of Uchiha-flavoured-authority ordered the civilians out of their cell. The cat calls went abruptly silent, and cowed footprints vanished upstairs. Raidou let out a quiet breath of relief and moved to lie on a cooler part of the bench.

Then more footsteps came downstairs, bringing familiar chakra and a voice he wasn't entirely sure he wanted to hear with them. The light snapped on, bleeding red through his closed eyelids, and Raidou sighed.

Genma never had been the type to listen to good advice.

Carefully, wary of his aching head, he rolled onto his back as the cell door clanged open, left side of his face to the wall, and let his forearm rest over his eyes, blocking the light. If it happened to hide bandages as well, that was only a coincidence.

"I hope you brought a harmonica," he muttered. "It's traditional."

"I can sing for you, if you want, but I gotta warn you, I suck." Genma said. Which Raidou knew, since in less sober moments Genma had sung for him before, just long enough to be told to shut up.

There was almost enough room to sit on the bench next to Raidou's head. Or there was the floor. Given the choice, Genma decided to go ahead and crowd his friend a little; drunk tank floors were none too comfortable or sanitary, in his experience.

"Dude, after we get out of here, you totally owe me some booze. There is no way it's fair to get tossed in lockup for having a bar brawl while you were still sober." He leaned back against the wall, flexing his feet back and forth, trying to get the circulation back into them. His hands he held close to his chest, rubbing first one, then the other, then shaking them both out, as returning sensation set his teeth on edge.

Fair point. Though anyone who actively tried to get between an ANBU and his coping mechanisms generally deserved what they got. Especially when they happened to know the ANBU...

Raidou opened his eyes a crack, got a glimpse of harsh yellow light haloed around his own hand, and closed them again. He didn't need to see Genma to know where he was; chakra and body heat were enough, even without Genma's general presence that said I'm here! -- at least for those who knew how to read it.

Cloth rustled. Bone cracked quietly. Raidou would have wagered even odds that Genma was doing something with his hands. Flexing them, maybe; it was too cold in the cells for someone with old, temperamental injuries.

Which probably meant Raidou shouldn't be here, either, but at least he'd earned his place--

"What the hell're you doing, kid?" he asked. It came out with a growl.

"Cooling my heels in jail, same as you," Genma returned. "Also wondering if I'm ever going to be able to father children. Did you have to go for my nuts? I know you were pissed, but that was really low."

And it still ached. As bad as his hands felt, he told himself, his balls felt worse. Focusing on the sick, swollen feeling between his legs was a distraction technique applied recursively, a sort of mathematical method of circumventing a break by not letting yourself dwell on the things (being tied up, being imprisoned, having your hands hurt like fuck-all) that might trigger it.

Besides which, Raidou was the one about to have some kind of break. Or had had one. Or something.

Genma glanced at the bandaged forearms again, and the bandaged face of his best friend, hidden behind his own hand. He had no idea how to proceed: did he ask bluntly? Pretend there was nothing wrong? Hint at the fact he could see injuries there? Offer to heal them?

Playing mother-medic might be simplest, but that meant using his hands. Although if what the Uchiha had told him was true, he couldn't use chakra down here anyway. It was probably true. He stared down at his hands, at two knuckles already growing red and misshapen with swelling. Maybe that was a way in with Raidou.

"You got any idea what the penalty is for beating up a cop? Cause I think I might have punctured that Uchiha bastard's lung before his buddies took me down."

In the cold, echoing air of the below-ground cell block, the long silence that followed Genma's question was particularly textured. Raidou wet his lips, resisted the urge to check himself for significant head trauma, and pulled his hand down just far enough to give Genma an upside-down look of pure disbelief.

Amber-brown eyes met his squarely, level and calm beneath dark eyebrows.

"I think I just hallucinated," Raidou said finally. "Could you say that again? Because it sounded like you punched a cop."

"I punched a cop," Genma repeated. "While completely sober. Which is why I'm locked up with you without the benefit of alcohol. If there'd been fewer of them I might have been able to get us away. Sorry about that."

He could see Raidou trying to process that idea, and failing to make sense of it. "He was going for your face." It was a simple and succinct explanation. "The bastard could see you had bandages, and he aimed right for them. Obviously I wasn't going to let some stupid cop get away with that. It's like they were trying to send you over the edge."

His hands clenched in unconscious fists as he spoke, sending tendrils of pain through bruised knuckles. "Fucking bastard. I'm sorry I didn't get there fast enough. But I definitely did him some damage. Then there were like twenty of them and I was down for the count with you."

For the first time, Raidou wished fervently that he wasn't drunk. If only so he had enough co-ordination to get up and kick Genma's foolish ass around the cell until some sense got knocked back in.

That or hug him. It was hard to decide.

He stayed where he was, hand splayed over his mouth and jaw, and dug up enough sense to say something equally important. "Stop apologizing. If you're--" brave, stupid, (Genma), "--planning to get involved in all my fights, you can at least let me take my bruises without throwing up a fuss."

Something flickered in those level eyes. Hurt, maybe. Chased with a spark of anger.

Raidou took a mental backstep. Any other time, Genma having his back would have been wanted and perfectly normal. But tonight...

He was grateful--and not. And the numbing warmth in his veins made it all much harder to figure out. He didn't want Genma here--and he did. Didn't want his best friend to see him behaving like a jackass, but he didn't want to be alone, either.

The last time he'd come this close to the edge, Genma had been the one to drag him back.

The last time he'd been this drunk, he'd shoved Genma up against a wall and--

Raidou clenched his teeth. Then he dropped his hand down by his side. "Can we not do this? I can yell in the morning and you can ask questions that we'll both pretend I'm not trying to dodge, but right now..." He lifted his hand again and rubbed his eyes. Tried to decide how much he felt like admitting to. "I'm tired, Genma."

Scared to sleep, he couldn't say.

Genma. With a single, almost mundane word, Raidou spoke volumes. Genma went still and quiet as dead leaves in the fog. It was funny, he thought, how between him and Raidou his real name was at least as much a code word as 'kid' or 'fearless' or 'loverboy'. Though he only ever called Raidou by his real name, or Rai, which was as good as, unless they were slinging insults during a spar.

He called him by it now. "Rai." It echoed in the chilly silence. One battered hand found its way, somehow, to brushing through none-too-clean hair resting by his thigh. Raidou stiffened, raised a hand as if to brush Genma's away, then let it fall again, relaxing.

"Can't do anything to get us out of lockup for the night," Genma said. He could feel a cut on Raidou's scalp, a bump where one of the brawler's projectiles had glanced off. "I tried, but we're dealing with Uchiha. You know how it goes."

He let the silence swell around them again, silent and protective.

"I'm not asking. You tell me what you want, when you want."

He could guess, anyway. Something had happened, Somebody, somehow, had gone for Raidou's face. Somebody, somehow, had set him off on a collision course with his demons, and Raidou had done the best thing he knew how--he'd gone to drink them under the table. If Kaito was responsible, Genma'd... Kill was too treasonous, but he'd figure out something. And if it was someone else he'd find out who and he'd find out how, and he'd make damn sure it never happened again.

Just as soon as he talked his way out of whatever the penalty was for assaulting a fucking Uchiha.

And he could walk straight.

Damnit, Raidou.

As Genma's hand settled on his head, long, slightly crooked fingers threading through his hair, Raidou felt a little shatter of nervous sparks glitter down his spine--but it was just Genma. Genma who knew when to push and when to step back. Genma who'd only ever touched his scar once, when they'd brushed right up against each others boundaries, hand in hand, and hand to scar.

He'd made a joke about Genma's hands once, when they'd been half-drunk on exhaustion and drowning in post-mission paperwork. Genma had laughed, bright and surprised, relieved that someone had finally talked about the monster in the room.

But they hadn't said anything since.

You tell me what you want, when you want.

Tension unknotted slowly beneath his breastbone, released with a quiet breath. Of all the people in the world, of every teammate he'd ever met, every girl he'd ever talked to, every boy he'd backed up or beaten, Genma was the only one he'd trusted with a hand near his face--even for a moment. The only one he'd ever thought about really talking to.

The only one who'd given him a peaceful night's sleep, just by lying down next to him.

Slowly, carefully, Raidou reached up and touched the hand resting in his hair. Slipped calloused fingertips beneath the scarred, chilled palm, felt tension ripple through the lean body behind him, and tugged his hand gently back down, bringing Genma's with it. Paused only when those broken-healed fingers edged against the bandage lapping over his jaw and cheek.

His breath stuttered for a second, then caught and held.

"Got into a spar with a..." He hesitated slightly. "Friend. Caught her on a sore spot, and she caught me back. Wasn't her fault, really; she was damn close to a break herself. I just didn't dodge fast enough. Probably should've just come and found you, but... I wasn't really in the mood to be sweet company."

He lifted his hand above his head, leaving Genma's unguarded, and dropped it to land on his friend's thigh, fingers splayed over denim. Let his eyes flicker half-closed against the fluorescent lights.

"Guess you figured that out anyway." Half a weak smile stretched tape and gauze, pulling on the scabs beneath. "Sorry about that knee."

Genma's heart raced, feeling heavy and wild under his sternum. Raidou's hand on his hand, his hand on Raidou's face--on the scarred side--because Raidou had put it there. And then that letting go, that warm hand splayed over his thigh. It was more than enough to distract Genma from the words.

He didn't move his hand away.

"Don't care what kind of company you are, jerk," he said roughly.

There were scratches across Raidou's temple, shallow furrows raked there by sharp claws. Claw marks. A woman Raidou hesitated before calling a friend. A drunken bar brawl to ease the pain of whatever had happened in their spar. Was there anyone other than Inuzuka Tsume to blame for this? Was this more of her driving for the weakness, like she'd told Genma about that day in the poison lab and later in his apartment?

He wasn't sure he could forgive her.

Something more sinister hid under the gauze and adhesive tape on Raidou's jaw. The medic in Genma urged him to probe beneath the bandages. He ignored it. This wasn't about healing a flesh wound.

He let his hand slip down, until his thumb caressed Raidou's cheekbone and his fingers curled delicately, cupping bandaged jaw and rib-textured neck. Then he went still again. Feeling Raidou's breath, fast and careful, matching his own.

"Guess you figured that out, too."

"That I'm a jerk or that you need your taste in friends rechecking?" The words shivered a little, breathed out between teeth he was trying not to clench. It didn't hurt, Genma's careful touch against covered skin and bone, but it didn't feel quite right. There wasn't the phantom echo of edged steel that he'd come to expect, flickering up like nerve-memory; instead, Genma's fingers left a rash of weird little tingles trailing behind them.

It wasn't bad. But it wasn't quite good, either.

All things considered, that was a lot better than anything he'd ever hoped for.

Relaxing, Raidou turned his face ever so slightly into Genma's hand and closed his eyes. With palm and fingers bridged carefully over bandaged scars and new wounds, it felt a lot more like cool armour pressed against overheated skin than any kind of threat. He trusted Genma.

More than anything, really.

"Yeah, both," Genma agreed. He held his breath when Raidou shifted, leaning into his touch. The tension peaked for a second, then vanished. Suddenly they weren't in a jail cell, and Raidou wasn't on the verge of a break. He was drunk and exhausted, and safe. Genma felt the weight of that trust as heavy as Raidou's head against his hand.

A weight that felt right.

He shifted slightly, leaning back against the wall, stretching lanky legs out in front of him, and reached his bruised right hand across his lap, resting it against Raidou's on his thigh. Fingertips overlapped, nothing more.

"Get some sleep, Rai. I'll keep first watch." It seemed an almost meaningless offer in an otherwise unoccupied Uchiha jail cell, in the heart of Konohagakure. Meaningless but crucial just the same.

A soft, drowsy sigh answered him, warmth and moisture ghosting across his palm from Raidou's parted lips. A booze-scented whisper of breath.

Genma looked down at his friend, his comrade, his partner, and felt the ache in his knuckles ease just a little. It's the heat of Raidou's face, he told himself. It's the heat.