“They’re already gone.” Genma’s mouth thinned unhappily around his senbon. “I don’t understand why they sprang it on her at the last minute like this, either. It’s not like Yondaime-sama could have been in the dark about this being on the horizon. Not even a twelve-hour notice to say her goodbyes?”

Raidou’s face was numb, but he thought his mouth had just found a particularly grim smile. His hands said, Earth Country. “No warning, no good choices. It’s like we never got out of the trenches.”

Genma’s head came up sharply. “That’s exactly what it is. Exactly. It’s the kind of thing they used to do when they were afraid of an information leak. No one got their orders until the last minute so no one could go telling tales.” Incredulous anger darkened his eyes until they were almost copper. “It can’t possibly be any of us, though. Or anyone in ANBU. Can it?”

Raidou sighed. “If you were management, and you didn’t know her, would you trust Katsuko to keep her mouth shut?”

“I would if I was any good at my job,” Genma muttered darkly, and Raidou could almost hear bastard Kuroda thrumming under his voice. Then Genma let out a breath, and his narrow shoulders dropped. “But I guess, if I really didn’t know her… I can’t claim I trusted her the first time I met her.”

“I didn’t either,” Raidou said. “Granted, I met her at Trials and she tried to burn my face off.”

Genma chuckled weakly. “That would endear her to anyone.”

“Yeah.” Raidou tried for a smile, but it didn’t fit right. He looked down at Genma’s restless hands. “Are they splitting the rest of the team up?”

“No. They’re not.” There was no breaking room in Genma’s voice, just hammered fact. “I have Sagara-sama’s word on that personally. She met with me right after Ueno gave me the news, and she showed me the memo she had from the Hokage himself. The rest of Team Six stays together. Including you.”

It was something. It sounded like a guarantee from the Hokage himself that Raidou’s suspension days were numbered, but it was hard to leap at that when one fifth of the heart of their team had just been ripped out. There were words he owed Katsuko, a lot he owed Katsuko after Tsurugahama, and—and—

“What’s the scroll?” Raidou asked, before his thoughts ate themselves.

Genma glanced down, as if he’d forgotten about the scroll he’d laid on his thigh. He picked it up to hand over. “Ueno’s clone came to give it to me, and told me to open it ‘later’. I’m guessing it’s something along the lines of, ‘Taichou gets all my stuff; Rookies, you’d better behave even without the best senpai in the world to watch over you. And Lieutenant, tell the QM I’m keeping my mask’.”

That sounded about right.

Raidou turned the scroll over and slit the cover open with a thumbnail. Four folded pages tumbled out, each marked with a name. Goodbye letters. It had been real since the moment Genma had said it, but now the frozen clench in Raidou’s chest actually started to hurt. He slid his own letter free, passed Genma’s back, and folded Ryouma and Kakashi’s away without opening them.

“You haven’t told the boys yet,” he said, not really a question.

Genma shook his head. “I came straight here as soon as I was finished meeting with Sagara and Kuroda. Hatake’s with Tousaki at the hospital right now to give Tousaki moral support for his knee surgery.”

Seriously? perhaps wasn’t the right answer to that. Raidou trusted, somewhere, that Kakashi had achieved the fractional amount of personal growth necessary not to traumatize his teammate.

He turned the letter over, and, like setting a broken bone, opened it to read.