"Battlefield's always easier," Ryouma said, watching the blur of kunai blade whip around his thumb. "You got the adrenaline kick, and so many other things to be scared of that you just stop being scared at all." He tried a doubled figure eight between his fingers, then reversed the pattern. "Did you know it was your appendix?"

"Medic figured it was, once I started throwing up," Kakashi said. "Before that, they thought it was gas."

Ryouma looked up. The dryness in Kakashi's voice mirrored in his face: the sidelong eye, the wry skew of his mouth under the mask, inviting Ryouma to share in the indignity of it all.

Small, sick, hurting, terrified of both the present pain and the promised surgery... Ryouma remembered that.

"I was ten," he said. "Coming back to Konoha." He grazed the kunai across the backs of his knuckles, so lightly that the thin white line bloomed only one drop of blood. Kakashi kept his kunai sharp. "I had my mom's dogtags, so I figured the Academy'd let me in again, but— I knew they wouldn't want a kid with a fucked-up knee. So I had to get it fixed, but I couldn't let on how bad it was, or how it still hurt after I saw the medic, or they'd figure I wasn't worth it."

His thumb had a ragged cuticle, peeling up. He caught it with the edge of the kunai and pared it away. The faintest tug of pain, another bead of blood. "I guess that's still at the back of my head. Alongside the risk this'll screw it up more, or—"

A third drop of blood, enough to smear the blade. He was getting sloppy. He closed his hand on the kunai hilt and wiped the blade on his thigh. "I know it's stupid. Niimi-sensei's good. She said it'll work. Still. You probably knew you weren't going to die of appendicitis in Konoha hospital, but you were scared anyway."

"Yes," Kakashi agreed.

A moment passed.

"Tousaki, what happened to your knee?"

He should have expected that. Kakashi never had met a hornet's nest he wouldn't poke. And Ryouma… had said too much already, dropped too many details, invited too many questions.

Had he wanted Kakashi to ask? He'd already told Kakashi the beginning of the story, after all. My mom died and my granddad took me away…

He knew Kakashi was smart, curious, stubborn, that he wouldn't leave a trail once he'd found it. And yet Kakashi had asked other questions, had prodded other sore spots, but he hadn't pushed at this one. Until now.

Kakashi had listened before. Was listening now.

"My granddad was a drunk," Ryouma said. "A mean drunk, except that'd imply he was any better without the shouchuu. I didn't get out of the way fast enough, once."

More than once, but those cuts and bruises had healed years ago. They weren't worth bringing up now.

"He died a month or two later. I walked from Shitara to Konoha. It took four weeks." It might be two days now, running. He'd measured it once on a map. Food and chakra and a working knee all made a difference.

"You didn't kill him," Kakashi said.

Startled, Ryouma looked up. All the dry humor had dropped from Kakashi's face, leaving his mouth rigid beneath the mask, his eye sharp and glittering cold. That was the look of the killer behind the ANBU mask.

It hadn't been a question.

Would Kakashi have killed Tousaki Yousuke, in Ryouma's place? Did he think less of Ryouma for failing to try?

"I wanted to, sometimes. Stole a knife and told myself I'd use it. I never did. The shouchuu got to him, first." Ryouma scrabbled for the edges of a black grin. "Alcohol poisoning's probably worse than a clean kunai, anyway."

"Good," Kakashi said. It wasn't the killer's voice. The low intensity was still there, but not the razor bite, and not a hint of acid mockery. "Some lives aren't worth burdening yourself with."

He reached over to tap Ryouma's bad knee, fingertips gentle, and didn't pull his hand away. "He didn't break this badly enough to end your career. A surgery won't, either. It'll get the damage out, so you don't have to carry it anymore."