| [Jan. 22nd, 2010|04:01 am] |
Ginta looked up again, licking dry lips as he considered Kakashi's question. "I think we have a picture of her, actually. I mean Grandmother has a picture. It's of Grandmother and Grandfather, and your dad and a woman... Your mom. Yeah, she has to be your mom. She's got kind of the same eyes as you. Shape, I mean. Only female. And Minato-sensei."
The hungry look he saw in Kakashi's eyes shouldn't have been startling, but it was. The hungry, anguishedly hopeful look of a starving man staring at a bowl of rice.
"I'll get it for you. It's in an album of stuff from way back, you know? On the picture it says Gousuke and Chihiro, Minato, Sakumo and Kyouko, at Hizuren's blossom viewing party. I remember it, because of that, because it called Sandaime-sama by his given name, like he was just a guy, you know? I mean, Minato-sensei, too, but I was used to calling him Minato-sensei, even when I was little. But Sandaime-sama was always Sandaime-sama to me."
Holding Kakashi's hands in his own, holding out this tiny piece of a memory, as if it were something useful, Ginta was overwhelmed with the awareness, suddenly, of just how entirely alone in the world Kakashi really was.
Not entirely.
Ginta was going to make damn sure it wasn't entirely.
"Grandmother said she was.... she was lovely," he said, groping for half-remembered answers to the questions he'd asked as a child. Who are these people? Is that you, Grandma? Is that Grandfather? Who's that lady? Who's that man? Is he a ninja, too? Is that my dad? (Not his father. His father was dead. The man in the photograph with hair as shockingly golden as Ginta's own was Minato-sensei, didn't Ginta recognize him?)
"She said your mom was very good at the poetry card game, and that they beat the men playing it."
How could that be anything close to enough? But Kakashi looked grateful.
|
|