As the only member of Team Six without an actual assignment, Kakashi spent most of his afternoon skulking on rooftops, spying on his teammates, and brushing up on his medical reading.

Genma’s old class notes were smoke-stained and brittle — “House fire”, he said with a thin smile, and didn’t elaborate — but they were legible enough, printed in the lieutenant’s neat hand. A young medic’s first attempt to sort body systems and the traumas that afflicted them into coherent lists. There were a lot of mnemonics. And a lot of unnecessary complications, Kakashi thought. ‘Front’ became ‘anterior’. ‘Away from’ became ‘distal’. The skin was the integumentary system. Each section of a bone had its own name and function, far beyond the force it took to break them.

But Ryouma had to know it, so Kakashi memorized it. And now he knew more about flesh avulsions than he’d ever particularly wanted to. Between pages (and the occasional rooftop nap in the sun) he circled Konoha to check on his teammates.

It was an old reflex. He wasn’t spying for the sake of research now. He knew who his teammates were — at least the broad strokes of them. This was to satisfy the flicker of worry that wanted, at all times, to know where they were.

Preferably in a way that didn’t announce his concerns to the world, since then he’d have to drop himself in a hole out of shame.

Genma divided his day between PT and paperwork, working on both with the single-minded intensity of a man who knew that his time was short and deadlines loomed. Ryouma met with Ayane in his room at the ANBU dorms. She was pale and distracted — a fact visible even from Kakashi’s distant spy nest — but she didn’t leave immediately, and when he swung back a few hours later, she was sitting next to Ryouma on the bed, reading the labels on medication bottles aloud while Ryouma scribbled laboriously on a much-corrected sheet of paper. Katsuko spent all day in HQ, only appearing to trail Kuroda to the Hokage’s palace and back again. Viewed from three stories up, the set of her shoulders looked tense.

Kakashi wasn’t sure what Kuroda wanted with her, and it bothered him. Minato rarely brought up the inner cogs of ANBU, and on the rare occasions when he discussed personnel, it was Sagara, the commander, who drew the limelight. Kuroda was a footnote. Minato hadn’t appointed the man to his present office, and neither had the Sandaime. Kuroda was Sagara’s personal choice for second in command.

Which… was puzzling.

And now Kuroda was picking on Katsuko, with a methodology that was equally puzzling. Kakashi wouldn’t have chosen Katsuko for an office assistant, unless he wanted the office to burn down.

He dozed on the palace rooftop as the sun began its slow evening descent, turning Konoha gold. When he woke again, the first stars were breaking through a velvet sky and his muscles felt like languid honey. He stretched, yawned, and tensed when a flicker of worry said, you don’t know where your teammates are.

His chakra sense couldn’t return fast enough. He did the rounds on foot.

Raidou — in his room on the officer’s side of the ANBU dorms, scowling intently at Seeing the Unseen, Yoshinaga Kenzou’s oldest treatise on genjutsu.

Genma — sprawled asleep on the couch in Aoba’s apartment, a field medic’s guide splayed open on his slowly rising chest.

Ryouma — still studying at home, writing brush in hand, frustratedly attempting the same ragged kanji over and over again. Ayane yawning next to him.

And Katsuko, heading to the training grounds with her swords and a determined stride.

No one else looked inclined to move any time soon. Kakashi considered the consequences of interrupting her after a day of extreme aggravation — then he considered the consequences of not interrupting her.

Konoha actually needed its training grounds. They were less useful as smoking craters.

He stopped at his room — it wasn’t quite home yet, but it was starting to feel familiar — and collected his new swords. He was already wearing his basic blacks, which were as good as any training gear, but he did take the precaution of throwing back a few mild painkillers to take the upcoming edge off. He thought the lieutenant might be proud.