Raidou glanced at his last errant duckling. Kakashi had braced one elbow on his knee, cupped his chin in his palm, and was staring slightly to one side of the fire with a frown that suggested unhappy thoughts. If he’d had a happy thought since he’d joined Team Six, Raidou had yet to see it.

Raidou tightened the bindings on his sword hilt, and re-sheathed the blade. Insomniac tendencies, Kakashi’s file had said, which put him about on par with half the battlefield-raised kids. Even Raidou had his bad nights, every now and then. Despite the darkening night, it wasn’t exactly late—they’d just been moving all day.

“Want to spar?” Raidou said.

Kakashi glanced up with a blink. “Now?”

“Why not?” Raidou stood, shed his armor in a tidy, economical pile, until he was down to his underpinnings and boots, and tipped his head towards a clearing across the stream. “No jutsu, no blood-drawing. Whoever wakes a teammate loses.”

A faint spark of challenge lit in Kakashi’s grey eye. “All right,” he said, and followed suit, laying his armor down by his pack.

The clearing was grassy, dotted with moonlit wildflowers, and broad enough to throw someone across. Training field luxury. Two of Katsuko’s clones followed them to it, quietly trading bets between them. Kakashi stayed three steps behind Raidou, because lurking like a creeper seemed to be his comfort zone.

Raidou picked his spot, rolled his shoulders—and ducked a punch that would have broken his C-3 vertebrae like rock-candy.

“Cheat,” he said, tumbling out of the way and flipping back to his feet.

Kakashi shrugged one shoulder and attacked like a bare-handed whirlwind.

In the ten days Raidou had been training with Team Six, he thought he’d gotten a pretty good handle on their abilities. Genma was a distance-killer, quick with blades and poisons, clever with ninjutsu, shakier on taijutsu. Katsuko was a force of nature, lethal as a landslide but easily unfocused. Ryouma was fast on his feet, well-balanced between the three disciplines, but reckless and wasteful with his chakra.

Kakashi was a different animal.

Raidou blocked a flash-fire of hammering, testing blows, realized they were the seventh pattern-set of the Tonbo clan's dragonfly style, and responded accordingly with the sweeping tiger counter—just as Kakashi switched flawlessly to an entirely new style. Their first spar had run the same way, one school of strategy blending seamlessly into the next while Raidou played catch up and tried not to get curb-stomped in front of his own team. By his own team.

This time, Raidou followed through three change-ups, playing defense, and waited for Kakashi to break out northern Wind’s armor-shattering Kanashiki style—

There.

And there was the hole.

Cracking the Yondaime’s golden boy in the jaw shouldn’t have, in good conscience, been a thrill, but it was a goddamn good feeling to watch Kakashi hit the ground so hard he dented it. One of the clones snickered. Raidou went for the choke-hold, but Kakashi twisted and flipped out of the way, scrambling back up. He shook his head once, like there might be stars dancing in front of his eye, and went on the immediate counter-offensive.

Mist-style this time, with their weird blend of fluid hyper-aggression. Raidou’s jounin-sensei had once called it tai-chi that went for the throat, except a thousand times faster. You could block it, if you wanted, but you’d probably break something—diverting was better. Raidou made himself bamboo, bending out of the way, and caught a lucky hit against Kakashi’s right inner-wrist, hard enough to numb the hand.

Kakashi hissed quietly.