he doesn’t answer; not at first. it’s easier to let her speak, throw her words at his face, empty the bucket. this is why he didn’t want to come in in the first place. facing her was never on his list of priorities. out of fear, cowardice, out of anger against her, against himself.
“don’t go trying to teach me the laws i took an oath to–” he tries to cut her but his voice is like chalk falling on concrete, it breaks and makes barely a noise. his lips stay partially opened, his eyes searching for hers, brows frown in confusion. where did this come from?
she’s quiet. he can feel her anger from just the pointer finger against his chest, mixed with other emotions. kiba has to try so hard not to just pull her close (he’s been dying to do so; underneath the bitterness and anger, you can’t erase love that easily) but his hand catches her finger, her hand, driving it away from his chest and it’s the closest he can probably ever get to what they used to have. “i know what the rules are.”
(it doesn’t matter; you’ll always come first) he wants to say it loud and louder but this isn’t going to fix them or fix anything. “your reasons to join anbu should stay private if not confidential, your will to protect the village the only acceptable one to give to your family and closed ones,” he recites, as if out of a book, his voice calmer but still cold for who he is. “but i mean, i’ve already broken like thirty of them by now.”
if he was still the same, he would have smiled at his own joke.
“it’s the only way i found to…” stop thinking about you for more than five minutes, stop the pain of having lost you, stop loving you? “start over. it gives me a purpose.” he’s calculating every word and despite the calm attitude he wears, this is all such a mess.
it’s barely a breath out of his mouth, barely louder than a whisper. he might regret it but he thinks too late, speaks too soon. “i didn’t think you’d care, not after all that happened.”
ino yanks her hand from his grip—even now, months later, his touch sends sparks through her, and she refuses to think about that, what it means—and scowls. it’s not what she wants to do ( oh, god, what she wants is to pull him to her, have him fold his arms around her back, warmth and safety and home ) but it keeps her from doing something utterly stupid.
he quotes anbu law at her, word-perfect and she knows that without checking, because that one rule had been the start of her refusal to join; and his joke, his stupid fucking joke that he doesn’t even laugh at even though she knows that if everything were the same but if this were her kiba, kiba of four months ago, the kiba who curled around her in bed and made surprisingly good pancakes and brought them to her in bed on lazy sunday mornings—
nothing, though, nothing hurts as much as hearing him say that he didn’t think she would care. they broke up, sure, fine, whatever.
that never meant she stopped caring.
her earlier fondness for him melts away in the face of her anger—it surges forward and so does she, slamming her hands into kiba’s chest as angry tears burn her eyes. “don’t you dare ever say that again,” she hisses, face right up against his.
“ever, you understand me? i get that the breakup was hard; god, i do, kiba. but just because we broke up does not and will never mean that i don’t care about you. understood?”
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