Kakashi blinked.

“You’re kind of a lightweight,” he said at last, when better words refused to present themselves.

“I know,” said Katsuko, over the lip of her beer can. “It’s beautiful.”

“Makes you a cheap date,” he said dryly, watching as she made hard inroads on her second beer. At this rate, she’d be comatose within the hour—or throwing up everywhere.

Sixteen years of giving whatever they asked of you, and never taking.

Either she was disturbingly psychic, or she’d been one of the ninja assigned to watch him and Ryouma—or he’d been exactly right about her the first time they’d met. It had taken most of that short, bruising conversation for him to get past the gut-shock of anger (hurt) at finding her training in Ryouma’s shirt, drowning in Ryouma’s scent, enough to see her as an actual person. Only when she’d gotten angry, injured and betrayed in her own right, shoving her hands into her pockets and canting her weight sideways, eyes hooded and hard, mouth dangerous.

He remembered looking at her, and thinking maybe she was not so different from him.

Katsuko scoffed. “Ninja,” she said, in an eerie little echo of his thoughts. “Even if I’m three sheets to the wind, I can still break someone’s fingers if I don’t like where things’re heading.” She considered that for moment. “No, not fingers. Legs.”

Kakashi snorted darkly. “Depends on the someone,” he said. “Anyone can get taken by surprise.”

Katsuko gestured grandly with her beer can, as if she were bestowing permission on him to be maudlin. “Fine, be like that.”

“No,” he said quietly, remembering the world-lurching crack of bones breaking. His nose; Sadeo’s fingers. “Anyone can get taken by surprise.”

Like Ginta, three years before, by the same damn man. Or Ryouma, a lifetime before that. He was grey hair and a yellow grin, and he was so drunk I could taste it afterwards. It was probably a piece of irony that he had to yank up the only living girl he knew on what was more usually a kunoichi issue, but he was so tired of running into people who’d lost something that should never be taken.

Katsuko caught the clue, something like quicksilver flicking through her scent. “I know. That’s why you’re here,” she said. She shrugged one angular shoulder, tossing back another mouthful of beer. “Anyways, this is the third time I’ve gone drinking in five years. The less said about the first, the better.”

Kakashi lifted an eyebrow. “You realize I’m now obligated by law to ask, right?”