"Take your tea," Ginta said, setting the medical supplies aside and picking up the cup for Kakashi. His own was already a third drunk down, and Pakkun's had vanished into the pug almost as quickly as the coconut ration bar had. "Don't make me get up, it will disturb your dog."

"He's spoiled," Kakashi groaned. He levered himself up just enough to reach for the tea without singing his arm or catching the blanket in the fire, then settled back down into the same knee-braced posture he'd first adopted. This time with the hot tea mug steaming gently between his gloved hands.

Kakashi's eye fell pointedly on the medical supplies, but he didn't say anything. Ginta was grateful for that, for Kakashi's trust — or was it just too much fatigue? — that he could leave the actual bandaging to Ginta.

The gel, Ginta thought with a wry grimace, would have come in damn handy on their last mission. Or had they had it and he just didn't remember? There were a lot of little gaps in his recollection of the details. "You sure this stuff won't make me dopey?" He squinted at the tube, but in the firelight it was to much effort to read the small print.

Pakkun grumbled sleepily from Ginta's lap, "Would we be able to tell the difference?"

Kakashi, who had just pulled down his mask to drink his tea and was half-shielded behind his blanket, as if Ginta had never seen his unmasked face, made a fractured choking-coughing sound that might have been his best approximation of a laugh under the circumstances. "You'll be fine."

"Everyone's a comedian," Ginta said. He smeared a generous glob of the stuff along his shin, working the gel carefully over the slight but distinctive bumps below his knee where pins beneath the surface anchored bone to bone, and again over his ankle, which was too puffy to feel the pins or bone. After he got over the sheer chill of putting something wet on bare skin in the cold air, he felt a strange, warming sensation, as the gel went to work. It sank into the aches and eased them away with an almost numbing effect.

"Damn, this stuff's good. How come we didn't have any last time we went out? This should be standard issue."

"It is." Kakashi shrugged one shoulder. "For medics. I was supposed to give that kit back."

"In Feburary," Pakkun put in.

Kakashi eyed the orange ripples of firelight reflecting on his tea. "There is a very slight possibility it's out of date and your leg's going to fall off. But only if you're extremely annoying. Don't ask me — that's just how it works." Before Ginta could formulate a response, he sighed wearily, drank the rest of his tea, and curled over in an exhausted droop, with his forehead braced against his drawn up knee. "But I'm willing to take that risk."

"Eat," Ginta said quietly. Something in Kakashi's posture or voice, or maybe just in Ginta's own head, pushed the banter aside. "And then sleep. I'll take first watch." He wrapped his leg in the bandage, molded the ice pack over the worst of the swelling, pushed his pant-leg back down, and buckled the shin guard back on, using it as much to keep the ice pack in place as for any sort of protection. Then he shivered and sighed, and peeled the foil back from his ration bar.