"Hey," Ryouma said, but the bartender had already turned away.

"This isn't using words!" Ryouma said.

"I said that it was on you." Kakashi leaned one elbow on the bar and angled to face Ryouma. His brow lifted quizzically. "You don't want to get something good?"

"Most expensive doesn't always equal good," Ryouma said. "How often do you drink?"

Kakashi's shoulder hitched. "Not so much since Jiraiya-sensei nearly gave me alcohol poisoning."

Ryouma's brain tripped over Legendary Sannin and took a moment to recover. Someone shoved past him, waving bills at the next bartender; he edged forward automatically, against Kakashi, and then wished he hadn't. "Sorry." He tried to pull back, and received a vicious elbow jab to the kidneys.

Kakashi was warm and taut against his chest, and he didn't try to knife Ryouma for crowding. He didn't translocate across the room this time, either. He reached past Ryouma, instead. The slippery brush of a silky sleeve, a momentary press of muscle against Ryouma's side, and someone yelped and opened a sudden space behind Ryouma's back.

He could hear his heart pounding. Or maybe that was the music, pulsing in his blood. He stepped back, and the bartender flourished two glasses down on the bar and said, "Six thousand."

That was more than half what Ryouma had left in his wallet. The drinks looked nice but not that nice, garnet-red liquor in tall frosted glasses, without even a citrus twist or a fruity parasol. Kakashi leaned in to inspect them curiously. "Aren't you supposed to light them on fire?"

The bartender paused, disgruntled. He had a matchbox in his hand.

Ryouma slapped down three bills and a spark of chakra.

The resulting billow of flame was impressive, he had to admit. It cleared another little hollow around them, civvies chattering excitedly, shinobi side-eyeing in disapproval. Ryouma ignored them, and pushed one of the glasses toward Kakashi as the flames burnt away.

Kakashi took the drink, but his gaze slipped sideways, shoulders tensing beneath the weight of stares. His fingers tapped once against the sharply angled bowl. Then he reached out, curled his fingers around Ryouma's wrist, and tugged him away from the bar.

Ryouma kept his glass somehow, and his feet.

They skirted the dance floor and took the stairs, then ducked into a dark, narrow hallway behind the balcony bar. A bathroom door loomed, the private kind that locked.

Kakashi passed it, and took a second set of stairs to the roof.

"You scouted exits," Ryouma said, as Kakashi muscled the door open. "Of course you did. Are we making an escape? Did you actually kill that guy at the bar? Did you bring me up here to murder me?"

"Yes," Kakashi drawled. "The last three months have been an elaborate deception leading up to this moment, where I shank you on a club roof."

He released Ryouma's wrist at last and wandered toward the waist-high wall rimming the roof edge. A single yellow bulb over the door shed a harsh glow that gilded his hair and shadowed his eye. He perched on the wall, one leg dangling free, the cocktail glass caught between two fingers. His voice came softer from the shadows. "Why don't you have better friends?"

He'd dragged Ryouma up to this empty rooftop to ask that?

"Hakone lent you his shirt," Ryouma said. There were still white marks on his wrist, the ghost of Kakashi's fingers. He stepped away from the light, and they faded. "You don't even know the rest of my friends."

"You said you'd never been out with anyone who wasn't looking out for themselves," Kakashi said.

"Well, yeah. You go out in a group after a mission, nobody's looking to go home alone. Unless you're showing up and leaving with the same person, and everyone knows it, but I've never really dat—"

He cut himself off. Sweat cooled on his skin, in the night breeze.

"Haven't really done this team thing before," he said, carefully. "Still learning. I'll do better."