“A gentleman doesn’t fall in a river and tell,” Raidou said serenely. He added, “She might have been an Aburame.”

That won him a collective blank look.

“Was it… the faint humming sound that caught your attention?” Ryouma asked at length. “Or did she have particularly pretty bugs?”

“I liked her laugh,” Raidou said.

Kakashi connected two and two, and snapped his fingers. “Your flower offended her insects.”

“I was six. I wasn't born smooth,” Raidou said. “Or horticulturally trained. When did this become twenty questions?”

Katsuko was almost quivering with suppressed laughter against Kakashi’s side. Even the lieutenant looked like he was having a hard time maintaining a straight face.

Ryouma said stubbornly, “I’m still voting for the guitar. Life’s unfair enough as it is.”

“I’m sticking with Stripey-san,” Genma said. He looked at Kakashi. “You’ve narrowed it down to two, Hatake. Gonna go with the guitar or the cuddly toy?”

Both seemed equally plausible. Raidou looked exactly the type to drag a battered guitar down to some dive bar and strum it soulfully while people fell over at his manly-yet-sensitive feet. But he could have owned a stuffed tiger. It was a rite of childhood passage, Kakashi had learned, to bond furiously with scraps of fluff and descend into traumatized madness if anything ever happened to them. Like the time Naruto had accidentally lost Fukkura-san in the laundry hamper and cried for hours, until Minato had pulled an extremely clean rabbit from the washing machine.

Kakashi had spent his childhood bonding with puppies, but the principle was basically the same.

He rubbed bandaged hands over his face and said, “I hate this game.”

“Think of it as a training exercise in reading people,” Genma said.

“While stoned,” Katsuko chipped in helpfully.

Kakashi gave up. On a normal day he might have been able to scent the truth, but only because lying caused stress, and stress had a very distinctive smell. Right now the entire bunker smelled of pain and old blood, and too many people crammed into too small a space, and Kakashi was just barely capable of smelling his way out of a paper bag.

“I’ll side with Tousaki,” he said. “Guitar’s a lie. Drowning and stuffed tiger are true.”

“Wrong three for three, Hatake,” Raidou said cheerfully. “I never lost Stripey-san; he’s still on the dresser at my moms’ place.” He grinned at the chorus of groans and cries of cheating! that earned him. “Hey, no one said it had to be a blatant lie.”

Ryouma glanced sideways at Katsuko. “You said you knew the answer already. Did he used to bring his guitar along on missions and serenade the team?”

“Maybe their last team got a tiny little tiger mask from the quartermaster for Stripey-san and made him a mascot,” Genma said.

“Taichou’s got a guitar in his room,” Katsuko said. “He told me about the Aburame when we were both in the hospital once.”

“Oh,” Ryouma said.

“Can we go back to the part where the captain still owns a cuddly tiger?” Kakashi said.

“Abandoning him would’ve given me guilt,” Raidou said, mouth quirking, but his eyes were soft and fond, caught by some old memory. “Didn’t you hold onto any childhood relics?”

Nothing that wasn’t useful, Kakashi thought. Because that was the rule. No deadweight.

He sat up abruptly, almost tipping sideways. “Where’s my tanto?”