“Heh,” said the speaker-clone. “You have a good point.” It turned away from the railing and—bowed to him. The exact quarter-dip inclination that shinobi didn’t use, because it exposed the back of the neck. This was a samurai’s gesture, to a colleague that had earned admiration. The clone straightened. “You’re okay, sparklefingers.”

Had he just passed a test?

More concerning. Did Katsuko actually have layers?

Kakashi pulled himself together and dipped his chin fractionally, which prompted a general vanishing of clones as they faded back to their posts. The speaker-clone tugged its mask up, revealing a grinning mirror of Katsuko’s face. It winked at him, then vanished out of existence in a plume of smoke.

At the back of the ship, a sudden loud rustle turned into a bang as Katsuko, presumably, got a rude update.

“Goddammit,” Kakashi muttered, and went to repair the damage.

First he had to repair her mask, which had entirely vanished except for a few clinging wisps of ice-mist. Except—no, this was a flawed long-term solution, since every fix drained chakra, and one swipe would remove the mask anyway. They could do better.

He pulled a spare cloth mask out of his belt-pouch before Katsuko had finished flailing her way to the surface of the sheep-skins, and shoved it at her. “Here.”

Katsuko stared at it, then at him. Taped across her forehead, the square of gauze was slowly coming unpeeled, revealing the edge of a half-healed gash. Her entire expression said, Uh?

“It’s a mask. For your face,” Kakashi said slowly. “Put it on.”

Katsuko managed to blink. “I only have one working hand.”

“And no working brain,” Kakashi said, and sighed. He reached across and stretched the mask over her head, pulling it down into place. Katsuko made a strange muffled sound, the bastard child of a squeak and a sneeze, then her hair fountained up like a palm tree made excited by static cling. The mask clung to the bridge of her nose, but fell a shade too loosely to outline her mouth, and bunched down around her ANBU turtleneck.

At least it made her look like a ninja again. Albeit a very tired one.

“Pretty cool,” she decided, giving the mask a tug. “You got anything to eat?”

Either she was too exhausted to put much focus into dissecting what her clone had just dropped into her head, or she needed food to function first. Or both.

Movement flickered out of the corner of his eye. Kakashi put a hand up and caught the ration bar Genma had just thrown. “Sesame seed,” he read, turning it label-side up.

Katsuko made impatient hand gestures until he passed it over, then paused before she ripped into it, eyes flicking up. “You good?”

There it was.

He found and discarded words, and finally settled on, “Yeah.”

“Hm,” Katsuko said, with visible doubt. “Alright. You want any?” She offered him part of the bar for approximately a nanosecond, before stuffing it wholesale into her mouth.

Naruto had that same trick. It still counted as sharing if you offered, never mind if you actually shared.

Kakashi really, really hoped Naruto was okay.

“Thanks,” he said dryly, wrenching himself back to current events. “You can go back to sleep.”

She nodded once, then chewed and swallowed the rest of the bar. She didn’t lie back down. “Hound,” she said, after a second. “You’re not the only one. We all have people back in Konoha.”