They were all jounin. Messenger-hawks' screams regularly shredded their days, and their nightmares. Ryouma leaned back; Kakashi shoved Katsuko off his chest and shook sweat-damp hair out of his eye. He was breathing hard, though he wasn't the only one, and somehow he still managed to give them both an extremely dry look. "Get off?"

Ryouma tipped his head, trying to track the hawk against the leaden dawn sky. "Maybe," he said. "Don't forget. You started this." He leaned a little harder on Kakashi's legs, just in case Kakashi tried to take advantage of the distraction. The hawk was circling overhead. It could be looking for any of a number of teams in this sector of training fields, even at this obscene hour, but—

It folded its wings, and dropped.

Raidou threw his arm up to the stooping hawk. He must have pulled a towel out of his kit bag, because his bare arm was swathed white and bulky, but he still winced when the hawk hit and its talons flexed into the makeshift wrapping. The hawk cocked its head to eye Raidou more carefully, then folded its wings placidly and held up one scroll-encumbered foot.

"Mission!" Katsuko yelped. She seized the top of Kakashi's dust-ruffled head, planted a kiss on the ridiculous spikes of his hair, and then wriggled free and ran for the edge of the field.

"You deserved that, too," Ryouma said.

Kakashi'd been staring after Katsuko, a little wild-eyed, but his gaze flickered back at that. He dropped a pointed look at their tangled legs, before the grey gaze lifted to Ryouma's face. There was the edge of a drawl in his voice. "This is getting to be a habit."

"What, sitting on you? You're the one who kept trying to get me on my back this morning." Or, more frequently, on his face. Ryouma wiped the back of his wrist across his sweaty brow, which probably only distributed the mud more evenly. At least his nose had stopped bleeding. "You're not still pissed about the other night, are you? 'Cause that was—"

An ill-advised joke pushed too far, that was all. Things were complicated enough with Raidou already; they really didn't need to get any more complicated with Kakashi. He'd gotten points out of it, anyway, in Kakashi's bizarre scoring system, though after this morning he was probably back down to negative fifty. Plus bruises.

He pulled himself free, and stooped with an ache of bruised back muscles to offer Kakashi a hand. "Let's go see what the captain's got for us."