"Pack for what?" Ryouma asked, interested, just before understanding rose up and smacked him in the face: "Right, they have dorms, don't they? Or we do, now. Will."

"Barracks," Kakashi corrected. "For you, maybe a kennel."

"Hot times with the Inuzuka ahead, I see." Ryouma nodded sagely. "I hear they're wildcats in bed." Which was a comparison that probably didn't make much sense for a clan rumored to be descended from mountain wolves, but no one'd ever said innuendo had to be logical as well as hot. Descending from wolves wasn't all that logical anyway.

Kakashi was raking his hair flat with his fingers—unsuccessfully, from Ryouma's point of view, but maybe he found the action calming. He stopped to shoot Ryouma a half-suspicious, half-fascinated glance, as if he were wondering what color the sky was on Ryouma's home planet. "Maybe a pen outside," he judged at last.

Ryouma grinned at him. "Aww, you'll come visit me, right?"

"No," Kakashi said, very firmly. He looked down the hallway, frowning. "We were supposed to do paperwork, I thought."

"Briefing room 37-A, she said." Ryouma shoved off the wall, and leaned instead on his unwieldy new naginata. At least it was tall enough to be a useful prop, even if carrying it wholly occupied his only good hand. His long-sleeved shirt, with its narrow wrist-cuffs, dangled from the crook of his elbow. Next time he got dressed, he was choosing short sleeves.

Next time he got dressed would be in sleeveless ANBU blacks. He hugged that thought to himself for a moment. Twenty-four hours ago he'd been sitting shirtless on a hospital table, gritting his teeth at the ice-and-fire needles of healing chakra in his nerves, dreading the possibility that his fingers would never twitch more than halfway to his palm. Asuka-sensei had never been more than noncommittal about his prognosis—but if they were admitting him and outfitting him, that meant the hand specialist's report to the Hokage had to have been good, didn't it?

He looked up the hall. "You didn't happen to see it when we passed, did you? 'Cause the last room I remember was 16, and the one before that just had a squiggle."

Kakashi's eyelid dropped briefly, as if he was reading a script off the back of it. Then he took off, heading purposefully toward the stairs. "It's back up a floor."

Up a floor and down three halls, as it turned out. Ryouma was fairly sure they should be ending up close to the stairwell where they'd begun, but with no windows and no markings other than the bizarrely labeled and staggered doors it was hard to tell. What would they do to a rookie who wandered in with a stick of charcoal and a fondness for maps? Would it be worth it?

Some rookies, apparently, didn't need maps. Kakashi halted in front of a door that looked identical to a dozen others they'd passed, down to the dull brass plaque screwed at eye-level. "Check for traps," Ryouma advised. Kakashi gave him an evil glare, shifted the shoge to his other hand, and tried the doorknob.

It swung open without any accompanying explosions, revealing a room that could have been any nondescript classroom in the Academy: three rows of wooden desks, a blackboard at the front, a bespectacled older man in a blue and white happi coat over a green uwagi shirt belted with a hitai'ate. There was a neat stack of paper and a sharpened pencil on every desk.

"Is this another test?" Kakashi demanded.

The man looked up from his book, blinked, and said mildly, "Of manners, perhaps."

"Please excuse him," Ryouma said. "He was half-naked just now, and he took it badly. Are you the God of Paperwork?"

The man's mouth quirked. "God-king, in fact."

"It's like you infect people," Kakashi hissed under his breath.

"Kindred spirits will always find each other," Ryouma informed him, and abandoned him in the doorway. He leaned the naginata against a wall, slipped a stack of paper off the nearest desk, and approached the God-King of Paperwork with his most charming smile. "I'm Ryouma. I injured my writing hand in the trials, which might be a good thing; my spelling's terrible anyway. I don't suppose you could lend me your hand?"

He could hear Kakashi's snort all the way from the back of the room.