Kiba is distracted, but it's only a question of who's doing the actual distracting itself.
[November 29th, 2003]
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Akamaru might have been a dog, but, oh, he was no fool. He knew things, because he was a dog, and because his ears were still young enough and his nose could still smell and his eyes could still pin down prey from sixty feet away, but mostly just because Kiba was Kiba and as easy as a two-piece jigsaw puzzle to figure out.
He'd whine, sometimes, nose at him and burrow under the other's jacket and wind up snug against his chest—and he'd get petted and fed and his ears scratched right there—but he'd never actually say anything, not even when the time seemed just perfect. Maybe he didn't want to push Kiba. Maybe he didn't want to see him hurt. No, wait, of course he didn't want to see him hurt. They were friends, after all, companions. Kiba played with him and gave him shelter and occasionally let him use his jacket as a temporary hiding place (when things got too scary for even him).
Lately, though, Kiba had been getting distracted.
One night he'd been feeding him dinner, and everything had seemed normal enough, what with the time (six o' clock sharp) and the place (right at the foot of Kiba's chair) and the usual fare (shredded fish head and chopped lamb). Except when he'd been scraping it into Akamaru's dish, he'd missed—scraped out all the perfectly good meat onto the floor, and passed over his plate by a good foot or so.
And then after that, when they'd been fooling around with their daily game of catch-the-squirrel, Kiba'd gone and let the squirrel escape—slip right out through his fingertips and not even flashing fang over it. Though the squirrel deserved a day off or so, God knew. (They'd been hounding the same one over and over for the past six years.)
And wasn't it only a day after when he'd fallen all over himself trying to get out of bed early and his hair brushed and his teeth brushed and just, well, clean? Kiba didn't /do/ clean. Sure he took a bath every other day like your average good little ninja, but it was generally with lots of teeth-baring and sulking. Akamaru had had to bully him into it since they were pups.
And then after /that/ there had been the escapade with the next door neighbor's flowers.... And the training session with Shino where he'd gotten his bottom kicked to six ways to Sunday (which was odd, since Kiba usually did decently against Shino)...and then the problem with missing his food tray /again/...
The point was, Kiba was acting strange. And Akamaru knew exactly why.
He was Kiba's, after all. He'd smelled the alarm on him when Shino'd told him about the preliminaries; how they started, how they ended, who against who—who exactly won and by how much. He'd felt the fingers that curled around his body, tight and worried. He'd known, and whined along because he was worried as well.
Akamaru was small, too, so when he scrabbled under to hide under the sofa no one noticed, least of all Kiba (or so he told himself). Akamaru was small and clever and sneaky enough, and he'd watched him help her out of the hospital bed, saw the worry creasing Kiba's brow, and the fingers that he curled, strangely gentle, around the Hyuga girl's thin wrist.
And he wasn't so blind that he couldn't catch the small grin Kiba sent his way, and the thumbs-up that came after. The door creaked towards closed but didn't shut all the way—not quite. Akamaru gave a soft whine, a bark, and trotted out after them, so quietly that not even his own ears could catch the sounds of paws against tile.
Kiba would've been proud.
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~fin~