Liar, Ryouma thought.

But he’d told the same lie, when Kakashi asked: Everybody has bad dreams. I will be fine.

And he was, mostly, in the light of day, or in bed with Kakashi beside him, in a village where he knew every street and half the faces. He’d known where he was when he woke up almost every day this week. He was building muscle, taming his chakra, recovering stamina; yesterday at the training field he’d managed to sustain the Nikutai Tokasu for almost thirty minutes, throughout two full series of katas.

His chakra wasn’t burning him up from the inside out.

He smoothed a hand over Katsuko’s hair, smearing the wet trickle from the washcloth. “I don’t have enough little sisters I can afford not to worry about ‘em.”

Katsuko’s half-slitted eyes flared open. She stared up at him for a moment, silent, lips half-parted on an indrawn breath. Then her gaze slid away to the wall as a flush warmed her cheekbones. Her lips tugged on a smile. “I’m not calling you nii-san.”

“S’okay,” Ryouma said. “I know you love me.”

“More than pie,” Katsuko told the wall solemnly, and then looked back at Ryouma long enough to stick her tongue out at him.

He tugged at her hair. “Whether or not I love you, on t’other hand...”

Katsuko cackled, pinched his cheeks in both hands, and pulled.

“She-demon!” Ryouma gasped, and attacked her blanket-swaddled ribcage. As he’d suspected, she was even more ticklish than Kakashi; she convulsed with giggles, nearly kneeing him in the gut, and relinquished her grip on his cheeks to draw her elbows in and guard her sides.

Her arms were bare, livid with scars. He did his best not to touch them. She had no such compunctions, he learned when she head-butted him in the chin. He reeled back against the pillows, and she made a ridiculous noise of glee and pounced.

The bathroom door opened.

Kakashi slipped out with a damp white towel tucked low about his hips and a hand-towel held to his face. His hair was darker grey with wet, roughly toweled into messy spikes; a few gleaming drips rolled down the back of his neck and traced their way between muscled shoulder-blades toward the small of his back.

Katsuko swallowed.

Kakashi grabbed a set of folded blacks out of the closet, added a roll of underwear and a clean mask, and turned back for the bathroom.

“No threesomes.”

The door closed behind him.

Ryouma’s head thumped back against the pillow. “The Lords of Karma are real, an’ they love me.”