Kakashi was really starting to doubt the Hokage’s sanity.

The fourth training field was a riot of Autumn colours, scattered kunai, and genin incompetence. Team three hadn’t been able to take the bells from him; they hadn’t even managed to acknowledge each other’s existence. The girl had tried four head-on attacks without changing her strategy. The red-headed boy was complaining about the rules, as if that had any bearing upon proceedings. The dark-haired boy had just given up altogether.

This was the next generation?

He failed them before lunchtime, which had made the dark-haired boy cry, which further confirmed they were useless. Their teacher protested -- something about ridiculous goals and pushing youngsters too hard, which Kakashi stopped listening to after the third sentence. He’d been half these children’s age when he’d graduated.

"Why are you even a jounin-sensei?" the teacher demanded, exasperated. "I don’t think you even like children."

"Hokage’s orders," Kakashi said.

The academy was very different from what he remembered. The classes were bigger. The children were older. Instead of grizzled, crippled teachers imparting as much knowledge as quickly as possible to rapt, silent classrooms, there were fresh-faced chuunin chasing inattentive students around.

The class outside were at least six years old and learning how to hold kunai.

"They’d die on a battlefield," Kakashi said.

The teacher’s eyebrows pinched together. "We’re not at war."

A small blond boy missed his target entirely. Next to him, an Uchiha managed to hit the outer ring. The Uchiha smirked, the blond boy attacked, and Kakashi could practically smell the Kyuubi from here.

"Yet," he said, and took his leave before they presented him with more defective children.

It took a strength of will not to immediately go to the Hokage and demand reassignment back to ANBU, where he could actually be useful. This was only his third month back in jounin blues, and only his first attempt at a genin team. There were plenty of B-ranked, in-village jounin missions he could fill the time with until the next graduating class came around, in sixth months. And then he could fail that team.

Frustrated, Kakashi dragged a hand over his face and made tracks for the Stone.

Ryouma’s name still wasn’t on it.

It was past the six months deadline. Ryouma had been declared dead, his things long moved into storage -- except for the bag of clothes and DVDs he’d left in Kakashi’s hospital room -- and village concerns had moved onto other men and women, missing and dead. But his name hadn’t been carved. Either someone was still investigating leads, which Kakashi thoroughly doubted, or they didn’t think he deserved the honour.

Three more days, Kakashi decided, and he’d carve it himself.

He traced his fingertips over Obito’s name.

"Hey, dead last," he said, with the sharp, aching edge that had caught in his voice in April, and still hadn’t left. "I don’t think this is going to work."

They released him eventually, as afternoon faded into evening. He had strict orders to report for continued debriefing at 0900 the next morning, but even Arakaki Hisoka, Director of ANBU, could recognize when a man was at his limit. And, more to the point, he could recognize the Hokage’s discreet hand-signals. The ANBU Director excused himself with a sharp bow, and Ryouma was left alone in his chair in front of the Hokage’s desk. The ANBU who’d escorted him here had long ago vanished, free to start spreading their own rumors. Somewhere downstairs, some chuunin was already dealing with the paperwork to invalidate Ryouma’s death certificate.

He was back in Konoha, and it still felt like a dream.

“I imagine you have some people to see,” the Hokage said quietly, turning back from the window again. He’d spent a good deal of the day standing there, while Arakaki used his desk: watching the village, interjecting only the occasional question as Arakaki guided Ryouma through his story. A little of the burden had lifted from his shoulders, though not all. “And plans to make. Your apartment in ANBU HQ has been re-assigned, but I can provide you with a chit for a hotel room. And something for meals--” He rummaged through his desk drawer, producing a handful of cash and coins. “We’ll get your back-pay straightened out tomorrow.”

Ryouma accepted the money with a twisted grin. “Kind of inconvenient, coming back from the dead. Or--the incurably insane.” There was a bed going empty in a locked hospital ward, tonight; he could be grateful for that, too. Grateful that they’d brought him back even believing that he had lost his mind. He’d come near to tears a few times already today. Arakaki had pretended not to notice. The Hokage hadn’t seemed to mind.

But there was still one question he had to ask. “Sandaime-sama... Is Hatake Kakashi in the village?”

Sandaime’s age-spotted hands stilled in their search through the clutter littering his desk. “He’s here.” He drew out a blank scrap of paper, wet his brush, and wrote a few quick lines. “That will get you a room in any hotel in Konoha... You might look for Kakashi on the Monument, this time of day.”

Ryouma glanced at the incomprehensible script, shoved it in his pocket, and rose from his chair. Bowed as low as he could, nearly touching his forehead to the desk. “Sandaime-sama. Thank you.”

“You’ve nothing to thank me for, boy.” The Hokage’s voice was raspier than usual; he cleared it with a cough. “Welcome back.”

“Thank you,” Ryouma said again, and meant it.

He left the Hokage’s palace with a long strike that quickened the moment he cleared the doors. Damn, it felt good to run again! To feel the sun on his face, the wind in his hair, the low burn in overtaxed muscles as he took the steep path up the side of Hokage Mountain. He was out of breath by the second switchback, but even that felt good, hot and fierce and alive. He’d thought for months that he’d never run again--never see the sunset again, or the stars, or the way the autumn leaves turned to blood and fire when the low sunlight caught them just right. Even when the door opened and the ANBU were there, he hadn’t quite believed. The Suna nin had tested him with genjutsu for months.

But this was no genjutsu--his shirt damp with sweat, his breath hard and fast in his chest, his sandals crunching on rock and dirt as he crested the top of the trail and came out on the rounded knob of the Shodai Hokage’s head. And that slim figure sitting hunched on the edge of Shodai’s head, silhouetted black against the sunset, was no genjutsu either.

Ryouma’d practiced this moment a thousand times, in the last six months. He’d had a whole script, complete with the moment when Kakashi punched him in the face, and he couldn’t remember any of it now. His throat was raw; he had to fight for air, and then he only had enough for one word.

“Kakashi.”

It was a beautiful evening for a nervous breakdown.

Kakashi didn’t turn. The wind was soft and gentle, warmed by the day’s low sun, but enough to bring a coil of scent streaming past him. Salt and skin and the complicated weave of a living person — nothing a clone would smell like. Nothing he’d smelled in six months, since the night he’d spent almost dying in Team Badass’s old bunker.

Deep lakes and wild woods, a lick of slow-burning thunder. Something like terror carving out a hole in dense, shivering relief.

Impossible to fake. Too subjective to steal and use.

So — nervous breakdown.

“Well, it had to happen sometime,” Kakashi murmured, carefully calm. He got to his feet and turned, putting his back to the sinking sun.

Ryouma was like a cut out in the landscape, tall and dark and blood-coloured in the battlefield light, thinner than Kakashi remembered. He was dressed in ill-fitting civilian clothes: jeans that sat too low, a black tee-shirt with a v-neck that sliced down to sharp collarbones. No logos. His eyes were shadowed. His hands were in his pockets. He ached to look at.

Kakashi bit the inside of his cheek. Hard.

“You’re dead,” he said, and it came out rasping, as if he’d torn something crucial in his voice.

Ryouma had expected that, too. In the script he’d come up with half a hundred different ways of refuting it—but the script hadn’t had that catch in Kakashi’s voice, that porcelain rigidity in his shoulders. It hadn’t had Ryouma’s own heart stuttering in his chest, throat knotting itself closed, eyes burning in the sun’s dying glare.

He’d planned this moment for months, dammit. How had he missed so much?

He took a step forward. Kakashi’s eye flickered down to Ryouma’s sandals, as if he didn’t quite expect them to actually touch the ground, and then back up again. He didn’t move.

“I’m not,” Ryouma said. “I just left the Hokage’s palace. They’re doing the paperwork now.”

“You vanished,” Kakashi said. His voice was as thin and precise as spun glass, words chosen with care, as if he were testing Ryouma’s claim to life the way he’d test the concept of gravity. “You’ve been gone for months. You were declared dead.”

Ryouma tried another step. It was getting harder to breathe. “I met a couple of missing-nin in Snow Country. Lost the fight—I’ve always been weak to genjutsu. They’d figured out who I was, though. Sold me to Kumogakure no Sato. Guess Kumo couldn’t take the heat; I ended up in Suna, five months or so ago. Convinced ‘em I was useless, so Suna decided a treaty was better’n a corpse. Sandaime-sama sent ANBU for me two weeks ago.”

The Sandaime knew?

“But we tracked you,” he said, ice and anguish splintering in his throat, because if Ryouma had been alive this whole time and Kakashi had stopped looking— “There was no scent.”

"One of 'em had a bat summons, bigger'n a horse. And it was snowing." The careful flatness in Ryouma’s voice was beginning to fray into something raw. He rubbed the tribal swirl tattooed on his forearm in a gesture that was new and nervous. "I took one of 'em down, but they dropped the body in the river. An' no one was using Earth jutsu, so you wouldn't've seen— I'm sorry. I kept thinking, once I could think, I should've tried—something."

A flying summons to break the trail. Why hadn’t they thought of that?

In the shadow of Ryouma’s jaw, the stupid, irrational mark Kakashi had bitten into his throat two-thirds of a year ago was white and clean, faded entirely to a scar.

If you die before I do, Kakashi remembered saying, I’ll kill you.

And later: I’ll leave you when that fades.

But Ryouma had left first, and died first — and it would be just like him to come back out of sheer stubbornness to knock Kakashi down.

There was a new scar on the other side of Ryouma’s throat, slim and white and tangled, like a knot of lightning sliding down under the collar of his shirt. New lines at the corners of his eyes that hadn’t been there six months ago. But he was standing there, solid and worried-looking, as if he expected Kakashi to bite, apologizing for surviving.

He’d survived.

“Y’know,” said Kakashi faintly, “I’ve never doubted that I wasn’t insane before.”

Ryouma frowned.

Kakashi crossed the five short steps to him, sure-footed and unsteady all at once, and stopped just long enough to look up into Ryouma’s face and see the fierce unbrokeness hiding behind the uncertainty there. Then he threw his arms around Ryouma’s rawboned shoulders and just grabbed.

Something deep in Ryouma’s chest twisted, strained, and snapped. Six months of guilt and tension and terror, maybe, wound up with a tangle of hope and despair. He’d tried to prepare himself for every possible outcome, from Suna discovering his subterfuge to the Hokage refusing to negotiate. Of the few scenarios that saw him returning home, only a handful ended anything like happily.

He hadn’t even dared hope for this.

It wasn’t a hug, or anything like it. It was the last desperate grasp of a drowning man, and he could have stopped his heart easier than stopping his hands from gripping the heavy canvas of Kakashi’s flak vest and pulling him in. And Kakashi came, pressing so close the seal-scrolls of his vest ground into Ryouma’s chest, latching one hand around the back of Ryouma’s neck, tucking his face against Ryouma’s throat, holding so hard it hurt. As if he didn’t quite believe it was real, either. As if holding on was the only way he could make Ryouma stay.

Ryouma’s breath hitched, broke. He buried his face in Kakashi’s wind-wild grey hair and finally let the last rigid fragments of his hard-won control shred away. He’d made it back. And the Hokage hadn’t rejected him, and Kakashi hadn’t turned from him, and maybe--maybe--six months of hell were worth it after all.

Hot breath seared Kakashi’s scalp. Ryouma’s arms tightened convulsively around Kakashi’s ribcage, hard enough that it actually hurt to breathe, and Ryouma just... came apart. Cleanly and completely, as if he’d been waiting six months to do it. Kakashi swallowed roughly and didn’t move, hands anchored around Ryouma’s neck and shoulders.

Beneath the thin tee-shirt, the double-curve of ribs was stark and defined — starved. For the first time in living memory, Ryouma felt light, as if Kakashi could crush him without too much effort. Up close, he smelled like desert storms and exhaustion — like himself with new complications, as though he’d changed in subtle ways.

Which lent a lot more credence to the ‘alive and impossibly returned’ theory. Death was static.

Ryouma choke-gasped, struggling to catch his breath. His shoulders were shaking — all of him was shaking. He sounded raw and wrecked and very definitely breaking rule twenty-five, and Kakashi was about a half-step from joining him. Obito’s eye was already stinging, because Obito had always been kind of a sap.

The one and only time Kakashi had disintegrated in Ryouma’s arms, Ryouma had dragged him back with a joke and a conversation that had turned into an argument, after he’d kicked down Kakashi’s door. The one time Ryouma had fallen apart in Kakashi’s arms — waking up from a screaming nightmare in the hospital, after the mission that had taken Kuromaru’s eye — Kakashi had needed to convince Ryouma he wasn’t a monster, which had mostly involved shouting.

And one other thing.

But if Ryouma was falling apart now, it was only through relief, and Kakashi didn’t care so long as he was safe and sane and home.

When Kakashi started to pull free, Ryouma’s grip tightened hard, but Kakashi only leaned back far enough to see Ryouma’s face. Hollow-cheeked and shadow-eyed, streaked with tears and desperately in need of a shave. Distantly, Kakashi thought about Katsuko and the whole stupid fight he and Ryouma had never managed to have, but six months of grief and guilt and wishing he’d said anything else at the Heroes’ Stone was long enough to not care about that, too.

I’ve just come from the Hokage’s palace.

Ryouma had found Kakashi first.

“Next time you vanish,” Kakashi said hoarsely, “write, you asshole. I thought you were dead.”

Ryouma opened his mouth, but Kakashi kissed him before he could argue.

Kakashi was still wearing his mask. But he was fierce, insistent, crushing his lips against Ryouma’s hard enough to bruise. He gripped like a drowning man, but he kissed like a man with the breath of life, as if his mouth could bring Ryouma back from the grave. As if nothing else mattered but here and now and him, and he meant to convince Ryouma of it, too.

Ryouma was ready to be convinced. His death-grip on Kakashi’s vest loosened, fingers skidding up to hook beneath the edge of the mask and tug it down. He remembered this, hard and reckless and rough, bumping noses, grazing his tongue on the sharp edges of Kakashi’s teeth. Remembered the taste of a hot drink in a snowstorm, the way Kakashi’s hand clenched on the back of his neck, the scratch of stubble against his palms. For a fleeting moment he thought of his own villainous scruff of two-week-old beard, but Kakashi didn’t seem to mind.

He was still crying, which was probably worse. Ridiculous, really. He was back, he was safe, and Kakashi had looked for him--had missed him, even after all Ryouma had done to royally screw up both their lives. Even after he’d sworn not to mourn him.

Ryouma’d hoped, sometimes, that Kakashi had kept his word--that he hadn’t cared, that he hadn’t hurt, that he hadn’t added another number to his tally of dead. One hundred and two, last Ryouma had heard. He’d never wanted to be one hundred and three.

But Kakashi had waited for him for three days in a hospital room; he’d run for him in Lightning Country, pulled him back to sanity in Konoha, kissed him on a riverbank and in a hospital and a hotel and a gay nightclub. He’d said, waking up from a mission where he’d nearly died, that he’d wanted Ryouma there. Ryouma had wanted to be there, every day for six months of chains and drugs and regrets. And knowing he’d likely never make it back, he’d wanted one man to miss him.

“I lied,” he said at last, low-voiced. His throat was raw; he tried to swallow and nearly couldn’t. Couldn’t quite meet Kakashi’s eye, either, though Kakashi had drawn back enough to watch. He focused on the faint white scar pulling that bared lower lip a little askew, instead, and tried not to see the tension in the sharp teeth biting the other corner. “Not to you--myself. I used to think, when things got too close, when I got scared, I could just run. Head back to the border, where I knew what I was doing. Six months without a good-bye’s long enough to make anybody forget. I get back, they’ve gotten over me, nobody’s hurt. But this time--”

He stopped, tangled up in his own words, in six months’ worth of thoughts and fear and the desperate need to say what he should have at the start. “I didn’t mean to run, Kakashi. I didn’t ask for that mission. I couldn’t talk to you right off, I needed to get my head straight, but I was going to--and then I couldn’t. Didn’t think I ever would. And I did lie, when I said I didn’t want mourners. I didn’t want you to forget.”

Kakashi let out a slow, careful breath.

“I didn’t,” he said simply, like the bare edge of a blade. “I couldn’t, even if I wanted to.”

Ryouma was in his head and under his skin and stamped all over his paperwork as the reason Kakashi wasn’t allowed to wear ANBU’s magpie uniform anymore. Ryouma had, in a very real sense, wrecked his career — and if Kakashi had been in the kind of mood to care about anything in the last six months, that might have mattered to him.

As it was...

He eased his grip free and cradled his hands either side of Ryouma’s face, using his thumbs to sweep away free-falling tears, and pulled Ryouma close enough that he could press their foreheads together.

“I’m sorry, for everything I said.” He swallowed hard, halfway to drowning in Ryouma’s scent. Felt his voice crack. “I shouldn’t have given up on you. I should have known—”

Ryouma laughed, fractured and hiccuping. “Right. ‘Cause you’re a genius, so you’re supposed to know everything. Even what’s happening halfway across the world.”

Somewhere, Kakashi found it inside himself to laugh back. “Exactly,” he said, closing his eye. “I knew you’d understand.”

Ryouma took a deep, shuddering breath, finally getting himself under some measure of control. His scent furled itself into a steadier shape, like rainwater and steel. Very quietly, he said: “I had to come back. Couldn't leave things—leave you—the way I did. That's all that kept me sane. So—Thank you. For being here."

For the first time in a long time, Kakashi remembered the Hokage was secretly a fiendish genius. If he hadn’t intervened and stopped Kakashi’s missions, forced the reassignment, then Kakashi might not be here. And if he hadn’t been here—

How long had the Sandaime been bargaining for Ryouma’s release?

“It wasn’t my first choice,” he admitted, rough but honest. And because he knew Ryouma would take that the wrong way, he tried to explain: “I was ready to run S-ranks until I beat the odds. The Sandaime didn’t let me; he kicked me out of ANBU.” Ryouma stiffened, and Kakashi quirked a wry smile. “Guess I should thank him.”

Ryouma hadn’t even thought of what it meant to see Kakashi wearing jounin blues. Hadn’t even properly looked. Kakashi was there, alive and waiting for him: what else could possibly change enough to matter?

But Kakashi had changed. His shoulders were a little broader, his hair a little shorter. Under the bulky flak vest his chest was beginning to fill out. He didn’t look quite so half-starved anymore, or strung out on exhaustion and painkillers. Still pale, still tired, but no longer a man running himself into the ground.

How bad had things been, before the Hokage intervened?

For as long as Ryouma had known him, ANBU had been what Sharingan no Kakashi was. Probably even their first meeting counted, with a fourteen-year-old jounin already half-courting death. Somehow he’d lasted five years--nearly six, by now--in a service where few men survived past three. He’d seemed born for the black-and-bone, the perfect assassin, dancing with lightning in his hand.

And the Sandaime had kicked him out.

Ryouma moistened his lips. “When?”

“Three months, give or take a week.” Kakashi’s mouth twisted. He glanced up sideways from beneath silver lashes. “They assigned me a genin team.”

“They what?” Ryouma pulled free, glancing wildly behind him. No small spies revealed themselves in the twilight, which was no guarantee at all; even ninja kids were still ninja. “Wait--they pulled you off ANBU and stuck you with kids? Did I come back to an alternate reality where this makes sense?”

“Tragic, isn’t it?” The wry smile flashed suddenly into a grin--a real one, all crinkled eyes and gleaming teeth. Ryouma caught his breath. But Kakashi was already tugging his mask back up, grin fading into a grimace. “They were terrible. I failed them.” His hands dropped to Ryouma’s arms, fingers curling loosely around his biceps. “You look worse, though. Have you eaten? Where are you staying?”

“Sandaime-sama gave me a pass for a hotel.” Ryouma fished the crumpled slip of paper out of his pocket. “An’ we had a break for lunch--what, seven hours ago?” He could be hungry, he discovered. He’d spent so long trying to divorce himself from his body’s reactions that it was almost a surprise to realize he could still feel his empty stomach wrapping itself around his backbone. “I didn’t even know you could fail a genin team, after graduation. Did they do that when we were kids? Or were they hurting for troops so bad they’d shove us through whether we were ready or not? And what the hell made them waste you on babysitting duty?”

“I’ve been asking that for three months,” Kakashi muttered. “At least it’s given me time to train.” He shrugged, but his mouth tightened briefly beneath the mask. Annoyance, maybe, and Ryouma could guess at the reason. Six years of a service so intense they’d send him out on another mission before he’d healed from the first, six years of being needed, and suddenly his most important assignment was telling a bunch of snot-nosed kids they weren’t good enough.

Kakashi shook it off, and looked up. “Can I buy you dinner?” The grin flicked on again like a light, brilliant, heart-catching, ridiculous beneath the mask. “I can buy you dinner.”

Ryouma kissed him.

Kakashi expected something hard and fast and half-desperate, like their usual fare. Moments that were stolen, rather than given. Ryouma’s hands didn’t put the lie to that, one tangling in Kakashi’s hair and the other curving around his back, pulling him close, but Ryouma’s mouth was gentle. He didn’t seem to care about the mask.

Kakashi had forgotten how tall he was.

And how very good he smelled, warm and breathing and here, filling the universe with his broad shoulders and absurd hair and non-linear logic that never quite made sense. Ryouma laughed softly, mouth still pressed against Kakashi’s, and his scent warmed like sunlight on water -- gratitude, relief, happiness -- and Kakashi... came apart. Just a little.

It was a lot like getting stabbed with warm ice: breath-stealing and painful. He choked and grabbed Ryouma’s shirt, afraid suddenly that it wasn’t real and he had snapped, and if he opened his eye there would just be a tall, good-smelling stranger waiting to get his clothes off.

"Hey, hey. You okay?" Ryouma pulled back, concern shading his voice. His fingers caught under Kakashi’s chin.

Kakashi opened his eye. Ryouma was looking down at him, frowning and very much himself, the same storm wrapped up inside a single person who didn’t know it, and Kakashi had never been the type to demand hugs before, but he thought that if Ryouma stopped touching him, he’d be in genuine danger of breaking down.

“Not really,” he said, and pressed his forehead against Ryouma’s chest, where the remains of the dragon tattoo had been. The double-thump of Ryouma’s heartbeat felt like a two-handed punch: still-alive, still-alive. “I should never have made you leave. I’m so glad you’re home.”

“You didn’t make me leave,” Ryouma said, swift, emphatic, because Kakashi was a magnet for guilt and damned if Ryouma was going to let him shoulder a burden that wasn’t his. “I took a mission. Both times. First time ‘cause I was an ass, and second time ‘cause--”

Get your own head right, Ginta had told him, and he’d made it sound like maybe Ryouma was supposed to figure out he and Kakashi were no good for each other, because Ryouma screwed up everything he touched. Or maybe he hadn’t said that, and it was just Ryouma’s own despair and anger and self-loathing twisting everything he’d heard.

He’d taken that mission, solo to Snow Country, because he needed to think. When he’d run before--to Lightning Country with Team Badass, to Plains Country with Katsuko--it was always the desperate unthinking flight of a caged animal, a scrabble for escape from people who demanded more than he could give. This time was different. A three-hundred mile run to Yukihana Village in Snow Country, an estimated week of surveillance, a quick assassination, another easy three days running home. Plenty of time to sort out his head, to detox from his soldier pill overdose, to work out an apology that might leave them both somewhere to stand.

Instead he’d run straight into a gang of bounty-hunter missing-nin, and all his plans shattered into ruin.

“Second time,” he said quietly, “I was trying to figure out a way to come back to you. Sorry it took so long.”

Kakashi mumbled something, muffled against Ryouma’s chest; it sounded a lot like “ Writing.” Then he sighed, and turned his head to speak clearly. “That’s not what I meant. For every time I made you leave...”

Ryouma had to laugh. It hurt a little, deep in his chest where heartbreak always did, but Kakashi looked up sharply anyway. Ryouma laughed again, and pressed a kiss to the pale slice of forehead bared by a skewed hitai’ate. “Twenty years old and you’re losing your memory. How many times did you try to get rid of me? I never left unless I wanted to go.”

The grey gaze flicked away as if Kakashi was actually calculating that. “Twenty-one,” he said, after a moment. “I’m actually twenty-one. And I made you leave at least once.”

Not at the Stone, not in the showers after Sadao, not on the hospital rooftop after Kakashi’s Sharingan-induced breakdown... Ryouma blinked. “Y’mean that time with Shiba? When I couldn’t follow ‘cause I was on crutches, and then I kicked your door down?”

Kakashi hesitated. The mask dimpled over the corner of his mouth, as if he was biting his lip again. “Shut up.”

“Sorry,” Ryouma said. “I’ve been catatonic for six months. I may never stop talking again. Did I miss your birthday? I owe you a present. You owe me one, too. You promised me a coffee mug.”

Ryouma was a ridiculous man.

“I did what? When?” said Kakashi.

“I knew your memory was slipping!” Ryouma said, mock-horrified. “Y’mean you don’t remember everything you said ten minutes after you woke up from a coma, six months ago? An’ they call you a genius...”

Humour glinted suspiciously in dark eyes.

I remember the important things, Kakashi almost said, but the words caught behind his teeth. Ryouma wasn’t a sensitive man, and Kakashi wasn’t nice, and it was entirely possible Ryouma had held onto that particular promise for six months just to needle Kakashi about it, but...

Had Ryouma ever had a birthday present?

He’d had teachers and teammates — but he’d come to them later, when the war was already in full swing. Maybe one of the girls he’d dated for six months, before bolting.

“You call me a genius,” Kakashi said, with a quick, angular smile that — interestingly — made Ryouma’s pupils dilate. A flicker of storm-scent curled on the air. “I think I can probably do better than a coffee mug. Like food and a hot shower.” He hesitated fractionally, unsure of Ryouma’s reaction. “And a place to stay, if you want to ditch the hotel.”

Ryouma stopped breathing for a half-second, which was not reassuring. Then his arm tightened around Kakashi’s back, and his voice came out slow and soft, and very low, as if he’d been given something fragile and precious, and was afraid to break it. “Yeah. I’d like that.”

Relieved, Kakashi cleared the catch out of his throat. “Good.”

He’d get Ryouma a real present later, when he’d had a chance to think about it.

“Actually,” he said, reaching up to card his fingers through Ryouma’s stiff, dust-streaked hair, “maybe you should shower first. I think your clothes could probably stand up without you.”

“Two weeks on the road,” Ryouma agreed cheerfully, rubbing his itchy new beard. “You’re just lucky you didn’t see me in Suna.”

A thought struck. “I don’t know how much you listen to the rumor-mill, but... You might hear some pretty crazy stories coming from the ANBU. They had a rough time of it, bringing me back. I owe ‘em a hot springs vacation or something... I’ve got psych evaluations tomorrow and the next day, but I’m not crazy. And I didn’t break this time.”

He’d been trying not to watch Kakashi’s face, but he couldn’t help it, now. He caught the tail end of a wince, the creased mask over a bitten lip--anxiety this time, not embarrassment. Remembered pain darkened Kakashi’s eye. But he said, quietly, “I know.” And then, as if compelled to brutal honesty: “You wouldn’t be out if you had.”

“I’d have died in Suna, if I had, before Konoha ever knew about me,” Ryouma corrected. “They don’t tolerate traitors, either. Man who betrays one master’ll turn on another.”

Fortunately they had more tolerance for imbeciles. An old, lingering respect for the gods-touched, he’d guessed, though under the new Kazekage such outdated superstitions were supposed to have been abandoned. Once they’d finally decided that Kumo’s drugs had turned his brain to mush he’d been moved to an airy, white-washed room in the medical compound, fed at regular intervals, even sponge-bathed by pair of arthritic old woman who clucked over him pityingly. After the cells, it was like entering paradise.

“Kumo kept me drugged,” he said. He dropped his arm and stepped back, turning towards the trail. Easier to focus on finding his footing in the growing dusk than to look at Kakashi’s face again, to see pain or pity or--or anything else. Still, the tightness in his chest eased a little when Kakashi fell into step beside him. He shoved his hands in his pockets and tried to sort his way through.

“I don’t remember much. But the drugs’d wear off, eventually, and they didn’t always bother to give the new doses on time. I overheard ‘em talking, sometimes. Worrying about whether there’d be anything left inside my head once they’d sold me off, ‘cause that particular cocktail had about a twenty-five percent chance of liquefying my brain. So, when I woke up in Suna, I took a gamble.” He grinned crookedly. “Guess I’m a better actor than anybody thought.”

Kakashi seemed to have mirrored him unconsciously, hands in pockets, chin tucked down toward his chest. He snorted. “Seeing as you’re a lousy liar, how are you sure the drug didn’t do something?”

Ryouma aimed a kick at him. Kakashi dodged easily, light-footed. But the teasing died out of his voice, replaced by a sharper edge. “Did the Hokage track down the group that caught you?”

Something prickled down Ryouma’s spine. He hunched his shoulders. “Not yet. He didn’t know about ‘em till my report this morning, and I don’t have much information to give. I mean, I sure’s hell remember that genjutsu, but...things get slipperier when I try to remember the bastards themselves. That’s probably the genjutsu, too. Useful, for a bounty-hunter.” He winced. “Arakaki’s probably gonna get T&I in for some mind-searching tomorrow. Damn. Not looking forward to that.”

“Ask for Yamanaka Inoichi,” Kakashi advised. “He’s funny, and he doesn’t hurt.” Or get annoyed if you reflexively jolted off the table and tried to break his neck.

Ryouma glanced at him sidelong. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

They’d probably get along like a house on fire, Kakashi thought, amused despite himself. Ryouma was the romantic’s version of an idiot savant, and Inoichi made half his living from the kinds of mistakes that took flowers and grovelling to fix. Even Kakashi had been in the Yamanaka flower shop, once or twice, years ago.

Ryouma’s steel-edged scent drew him back to more pressing matters. A genjutsu with lasting effects sounded like an Uchiha trick, or something entirely new, unless the combination of battle-adrenaline and injuries and chakra-scrambling had just confused Ryouma’s memories, which was probably more likely. The drugs wouldn’t have helped.

“What’d you see?” Kakashi asked. Off Ryouma’s raised eyebrow, he added, “In the genjutsu.”

Ryouma’s mouth thinned unhappily; he shrugged one shoulder. "Not much. The world went red, and I couldn't move. Affected my perception of time, somehow--I swear I stood there for days. Then I blacked out. Not even sure when the genjutsu ended--they must've started me on the drugs as soon as they got me to Kumo, so I might not've woken up for weeks."

Kakashi frowned, thoughtful. “So you knew it was genjutsu, but couldn’t break it?”

Ryouma shook his head. "Kai didn't work. I'd have stuck a kunai in my leg, but I couldn't move." His scent was corroding, rusted with unease. He was talking because Kakashi was asking, but not for much longer.

Kakashi pulled a hand free from his pocket and reached out, wrapping his fingers loosely around Ryouma’s bare forearm. The sweat from Ryouma’s run was chilling cold; his skin was goose-bumped. The sun was set and the light was fading, the wind drawing in. A thin shirt was no kind of protection. Kakashi rubbed his thumb across the break of an old scar, feeling muscle flex underneath. Ryouma stepped a little closer to him.

“All genjutsu is different,” Kakashi said slowly, while his thoughts went in twelve directions at once. “But I’ve never heard of something that affects time--not without keeping you under for hours, days maybe. But why waste the chakra? Once you’re caught, you’re caught. A knock on the head would do the same job with less cost.”

Ryouma flinched almost imperceptibly.

Forcibly, Kakashi derailed himself. It had waited for six months; it would keep another day. He squeezed Ryouma’s arm -- the chakra coiling under desert-tanned skin was unsettled and weaker than he remembered. Disorganized, probably on purpose if Ryouma had been playing insane. But still bright enough.

Kakashi let a handful of blue-white sparks dance between the gaps of his fingers, lighting the crescents of his nails. A little ticklish.

“When was the last time you translocated?” he asked, with a swift smile.

Not on his last mission to Snow Country--he’d never had a chance. Not on his mission with Katsuko. Space-time jutsu weren’t his forte; even when he used kawarimi he generally ended up in the middle of a thornbush. Real translocations took concentration and chakra and mostly an emergency to get right.

“Seven months ago,” he said. “March.” Wrenching himself to the hospital, as soon as Reiko had given him the news of Kakashi’s coma. Not something he wanted to think of, just now. He reached for his chakra, and it slipped like sand through cupped fingers, trickling back into its wild paths. He gritted his teeth and reached again. This time it molded reluctantly in his grasp, like a feral horse slowly remembering the taste of the bit.

He was sweating. He released the chakra with a gasp. “I think I might end up in a wall, if I tried now. ‘f you’re sick of walking, though, feel free to pull a ride-along. I’ve been walking for two weeks. Got no sentimental attachment to doing more of it.”

“Lazy,” Kakashi teased. His chakra sparked over Ryouma’s arm, raising goosebumps in its wake. A little slipped beneath the skin, coursing through Ryouma’s pathways and tangling his own chakra in the blue-white rush, yanking it back into a smoother rhythm. Ryouma’s breath hitched, steadied, and caught again when Kakashi slid both arms around his waist, pressed his hands together, and dissolved the world in a swirl of leaves and smoke.

Ryouma’d always had a strong stomach. The results of his flesh-melting jutsu never even made him queasy, anymore; he could cheerfully eat swill that made his comrades gag, and in a summer of masquerading as a fisherman in the choppy waters off the Lightning Country coast he’d never once been sea-sick.

But translocation grabbed the bottom of his stomach and turned it inside out, as the world lurched and settled in a different configuration. There were walls, a bed, shelving, an open window framed with curtains fluttering in the whirl-wind of their arrival. His head spun, refusing to sort component parts into a coherent whole. This wasn’t Kakashi’s apartment in ANBU HQ. But Kakashi wasn’t in ANBU anymore, had left (been kicked out) three months ago. This was somewhere new. He could see a slice of the Hokage’s palace, windows still lit with late workers, out the window; beyond it the black bulk of the Monument loomed against the darkening sky. It was something to focus on, while his stomach heaved and settled and his chakra surged with the memory of jutsu.

The warm solid strength of Kakashi’s arms around his ribcage, the absurd silver fluff of his hair tickling Ryouma’s nose, and the uncomfortable press of his jounin vest were even better. Ryouma swallowed hard, and breathed in the long-remembered scents of sweat and skin and lingering soap, and told himself that he was home.

Kakashi released him far too soon. “You’re cold,” he said critically, as if goosebumps were a personal failing.

“I was in the desert,” Ryouma said. “And I’m wearing a tee-shirt. And it’s, what, October?”

Kakashi ignored him, heading for the closet. Ryouma took a cautious step, didn’t immediately pitch to his knees, and followed. “Your shirts probably aren’t going to fit me, if that’s what you’re thinking. My shoulders are wider’n yours, even if you have put on muscle.” Quite a bit of it, actually. Ryouma tried to refocus. “I’m okay.”

“You were shivering,” Kakashi snapped. He turned with something in his hands, just as Ryouma was about to protest that that was the translocation, he wasn’t that much of a pansy--

It was the red Atomic Sunrise hoodie, the one Ryouma had forced Kakashi to wear to the Hero’s Stone half a lifetime ago. He’d given it up for lost.

The knot was back in his throat. “You kept it?”

Wordlessly, Kakashi hooked the black sports bag out from under the bed with his foot, laying all his cards down at once. Ryouma’s eyes flicked to it. The bag was half-unzipped, just open enough to show neatly folded clothes, a pile of CDs, and a stack of video tapes Kakashi hadn’t been able to bring himself to watch.

“You left them at the hospital,” he said, looking at the new scar on the side of Ryouma’s throat and nowhere else.

Ryouma dropped into a stiff, sore-legged crouch and went through his things, fingers lingering on brightly printed shirts and frayed jeans. He handled the videos carefully, as if they were glass instead of plastic, something precious. When he looked up, he was biting the inside of his cheek. “Thanks for keeping ‘em till I got back,” he said, quiet.

They’d been a shrine lurking under Kakashi’s bed, like the photo on his windowsill and the broken tanto in the bottom of his weapons chest. Now they were a present, and Ryouma smelled flayed open again.

Kakashi sank to a level crouch, pushing the hoodie into Ryouma’s hands. “Your standards for nice things happening to you are ridiculous,” he said roughly. “Normal people would get medals and parties and--” he paused to think. “Pretty girls flinging underwear at them. And they’d expect it. You get choked up at old clothes.”

"You could fling your underwear at me," Ryouma suggested, grinning crookedly. He was starting to smell like liquid sunlight, warm and bright and happy. Kakashi swiped at him on principle, but he dodged, grin spreading as if he couldn’t contain it. His whole face was alight. "No one's ever--" he began, and then stopped, visibly changing his mind. "Maybe I'll get a medal, too. Later. Did you ever get one for saving Tsume an' me?"

Kakashi had to think. “Yes,” he said. “I think Arakaki has it.” He’d gotten one for rescuing Ginta, too, despite Tsuyako’s snapped neck. And a stern lecture from the commander about breaking the laws of reason and physics.

"You've probably got a lot,” Ryouma said, with the glint in his eye that always accompanied a mad idea. “You should get it back. Pin 'em all up on a board for everybody to gawk at. Or wear 'em on your chest, you'd probably overbalance--"

Ryouma’s voice broke around laughter, the kind of giddy, stomach-aching, breathless laughter that came from six months of having none. He buried his face in the Atomic Sunrise hoodie, shoulders shaking, and went sprawling when Kakashi shoved him.

“You’re hilarious,” Kakashi drawled, lips twitching.

“I know,” gasped Ryouma, flat on his back and not caring. He was red-cheeked and bright-eyed and too thin, and Kakashi had the ridiculous urge to buy him a house or a puppy or a rock band, maybe all three.

He’d promised Ryouma dinner, at least. But the idea of staying in was suddenly much more appealing.

Leaning close, he flattened his palm over Ryouma’s heaving chest -- he was still laughing -- and ducked down to kiss the broken, breath-stealing joy of life and home on Ryouma’s mouth. Ryouma’s fingers tried to curl in his hair, but Kakashi pulled free before he lost his mask again. “Shower’s in the next room. Are you hungry? I can cook or get take out, unless you really want that meal.”

“Tease,” Ryouma muttered, but he sat up anyway. Kakashi probably had a point; he was filthy, scruffy, smelly, and ready to murder for a toothbrush. The clothes in the sports bag weren’t precisely clean, as best he remembered, but they were miles better than his current gear. The ANBU had dressed him two weeks ago and hadn’t spared time for anything more than the most casual of scrub-downs since. His tee-shirt and jeans probably needed to be burned.

He dug out a slightly cleaner set, placed the hoodie carefully on top of the sports bag, and pushed himself to his feet. “Take-out’s good. Unless you want to cook.” He hadn’t even known Kakashi could--hadn’t he lived off ration bars and microwaved meals, half a year ago? “Can I borrow a razor? I’m a better kisser when I look less like a caveman.”

Kakashi snorted, his eye suspiciously bright. “So, never?”

Ryouma eyed him, calculated the new weight of muscle in Kakashi’s chest and arms and the corresponding lack in his own, and swung anyway. Predictably, Kakashi dodged. Ryouma stumbled, recovered, and found himself nearly at the wall, with the promised bathroom door just a few feet away.

“I’ll spit on your toothbrush,” he promised direly.

“See, now I’m confused by your need to shave,” Kakashi said. “Seeing as you are clearly twelve. The razor’s by the sink. Should be a package of new toothbrushes in the medicine cabinet. Use whatever you need.”

“Mostly about a million years of soap and hot water,” Ryouma said. He hesitated a moment. “Thanks.”

Kakashi waved him off. But Ryouma caught a glimpse of his masked face, in the moment before he turned away: the lips curving faintly, the eye creased in a fleeting smile, warmth and pleasure and a little relief. Enough to go on.

He ducked into the bathroom, and set about trying to make himself worth this homecoming.

Nearly an hour later he reeled out again in a Shuriken Force tee-shirt, jeans, and a cloud of steam. He was bright red from scrubbing but cleaner than he might ever have been in his life, and aside from a few clotted nicks at the edge of his jaw and a faint tan-line the beard was gone without a trace. It was almost a pity; he’d fancied it gave him a rather piratical air. And it had done a decent job of hiding the hollows in his cheeks, which were altogether too evident now.

He was almost as thin now as Kakashi had been then, he’d realized in front of the mirror. He looked worse, because Kakashi was built to carry less weight of muscle, and slender on him looked half-starved on Ryouma. Building up that muscle mass again was going to be hell. Though, on the whole, much preferable to the process of losing it.

Kakashi was intent over the stove in the tiny single-counter kitchen, stir-frying something that smelled miraculously like meat and vegetables. He’d shed his flak jacket and sandals, though the mask and hitai’ate remained. A rice-cooker on the far end of the counter was blinking its red Finished light. The lamps were on, the heater humming; the floorboards were warm beneath Ryouma’s bare feet, and his toes curled in pleasure. He swiped the towel over his wet hair once more and then draped it around his neck.

For a moment he entertained thoughts of stealing up behind Kakashi, snaking an arm around his waist, proving his point about kissing. It had its points over his worn-out old fantasies, starting with being actually possible. But if the cardinal rule about Not Sneaking Up On Jounin was one Ryouma had broken before, he’d always been more certain of his reflexes before he tried it. Probably better not to start things off with a broken neck.

He cleared his throat. “So you learned to cook while I was gone. Smells amazing, by the way. What else’s changed? Any chance I’m gonna wake up tomorrow morning and find squirrels’ve learned to talk?”

“I think the teeth would get in the way,” Kakashi said. “But I taught Pakkun to talk. Maybe a squirrel summons...”

He turned away from the stove and lost his train of thought entirely. Free of travel-dust and overgrown beard, dressed in clothes that actually looked like his, even if they hung too loose, Ryouma was himself again. Tattooed and towel-ruffled, flushed from the hot water. The new scar on the side of his throat stood out like white lightning.

It felt surreally like Kakashi had blinked and missed six months of his own life.

Ryouma’s grin was broad and easy; he tipped his head a little to one side. “See something you like?”

“I would, but you’ve put clothes in the way,” Kakashi said, managing not to sound strangled. The spatula in his hand splashed a drop of hot oil onto his foot. He twitched and dropped the spatula onto the counter, rubbing his foot on the back of his other leg.

Ryouma’s grin edged into a smirk. “I could take them off again,” he offered, “but I’d worry about the stir-fry.”

He was a step away from waggling his eyebrows. Kakashi could tell. But beyond the smell of onions and cooked beef, Ryouma smelled so ridiculously happy Kakashi couldn’t hold it against him.

He grinned in spite of himself. “If any of your blood goes south before you eat something, you’ll faint,” he said. “And I’ll laugh at you. And the Uchiha will probably arrest me for willfully endangering your health by being too attractive.”

“Is that a crime now?” Ryouma asked, cheerfully undismayed. “They only got me on public indecency charges, before.” He padded over barefoot to peer into the wok, which was starting to smoke a little. “So when did you learn to cook?”

Kakashi hastened to turn the heat down. “When I was seven. Just because you don’t do something doesn’t mean you can’t,” he said, casting a look sideways at Ryouma’s profile. There were small, blood-clotted cuts dotting the edge of Ryouma’s jaw; the footprints of an unfamiliar razor. “When did you learn to shave?”

"Fifteen. One of the jounin pulled me aside an' told me he was sick of looking at me." Ryouma swiped absently at his jaw with the back of his wrist. "Nearly took my upper lip off a couple of times before I figured out you could use something other'n a kunai."

Kakashi winced faintly. He’d learned on the battlefield too, but at least he’d had Minato to teach him. Ryouma’s sensei had been a woman -- and a Hyuuga, from what Kakashi remembered. Puberty probably hadn’t been discussed much.

Actually -- Kakashi recalled one or two particularly excruciating conversations with Minato -- maybe Ryouma had gotten the better deal.

“At least you didn’t have to deal with stubble coming through your mask,” he said, stirring the wok. “Not a good look.”

Ryouma stepped comfortably into his personal space, slinging an arm around Kakashi’s left shoulder and propping his chin on the right, staring intently down at the sizzling food. “I’m surprised you bothered with the mask,” he said distractedly.

Kakashi’s mouth quirked. “Helps you look fierce when you’re four feet tall. Though that was pre-shaving.” He reached back, fingers curling around the nape of Ryouma’s neck. The hair there had been cut so short it was velvety, all traces of the proud mullet gone. Ryouma’s bangs were still long enough to hang into his eyes, but only just.

Kakashi leaned back, firebrand warmth soaking through his shoulderblades.

“New scars, new hair, new confirmation that you’re psychologically unbalanced.” He turned his head sideways, making sure Ryouma knew he was teasing, and flipped the question back. “What else did you change?”

“I can count my ribs,” Ryouma offered. “And sing four new Wind Country lullabies. They had a couple of old grandmas looking after me, the last three months. I can tell you all about granddaughter Ritsuko’s drunk husband and nephew Eiji’s baby-mama drama...”

Kakashi looked puzzled, or perhaps insulted--from this tilted, foreshortened view it was hard to tell. His single visible eyebrow came up, at any rate, and his stirring chopsticks stilled. “Baby what?”

“Eiji got some civilian girl pregnant,” Ryouma said, channeling those wrinkled old kunoichi’s contempt. “She’s keepin’ the baby, of course--abortion’s illegal in Sunagakure--but she can’t decide between one week and t’next whether she’s keeping him around. Sounds kinda like my mom.” He shrugged and tucked his chin a little more comfortably into the hollow between Kakashi’s shoulder and clavicle. “I don’t think it was legal in Konoha twenty-four years ago either. Is the food done yet? I’m starving.”

For a moment Kakashi’s hand tightened on the back of Ryouma’s neck, then relaxed again. He riffled his fingers through Ryouma’s hair once more, then drew away. “Yes. Plates are in there.” He pointed with the chopsticks at a cupboard over the sink. “What do you want to drink?”

“Soda?” Ryouma asked hopefully, but without any real expectation of reality; if there was anything that sounded less like Kakashi than caffeinated sugar-water, he hadn’t yet encountered it. He snagged a set of plates and rice bowls from the cupboard, then detoured by the refrigerator for a glance inside. No soda, of course. Ready-made protein shakes, a carton of grapefruit juice and one of milk, and a half-empty bottle of shochu lurking in the back.

It was the cheap stuff, the yellow-label kind. Ryouma’s grandfather had called it rotgut, and kept the empty green bottles in a box by the door, saving them up to trade in again; every twenty bottles returned meant one free. Ryouma could still remember the harsh, sinus-biting smell that lingered in the bottles and in spilled puddles on the floor, the way it sank like cigarette smoke into walls and floorboards. The way it tasted on an old man’s breath...

He grabbed the carton of milk, and shut the door. He had other fears now, and damned if the old bastard’s ghost was going to come between him and Kakashi on his first night back. “Behold!” he announced, juggling his armload enough to pass the plates to Kakashi, and then dropping the bowls beside the rice cooker. “You’re lucky enough to witness a sight few have seen--the Starving Man’s First Meal upon his Return to Civilization. Sandwiches with the Hokage don’t count. Neither do all those first meals after the war. I think I remember how to use chopsticks this time, though.”

Kakashi’s eyebrow arched even higher than before. He began divvying the stir-fry out onto the plates, leaning back from the rising steam; his nostrils flared subtly beneath the mask. “Did you just manage to concuss yourself on thin air?”

Babbling, Ryouma remembered, was something he mostly did when he was on edge, and Kakashi knew him well enough to recognize it.

But he didn’t have anything like the right to criticize the contents of Kakashi’s fridge, or to remind him of a seven-month-old promise that might not have been serious in the first place. Guess I’ll have to give up drinking, Kakashi had said, but even if he’d meant it then he’d had a damned good reason to pick it up again.

I thought you were dead.

“I was just thinking,” he said, and reached for the rice paddle. “What’ve you been doing since you got out? Aside from makin’ kids cry.”

Kakashi leaned his back carefully against the kitchen counter, traded Ryouma a plate of stir-fry for a bowl of rice, and debated honesty. The last time he’d told Ryouma the naked truth (”I broke Tsuyako’s neck”), it hadn’t exactly ended well.

Lying hadn’t worked much, either.

“Training,” he said finally. “Busy work. I taught a few chuunin workshops. Spent a month helping Intel catalogue their backlog of enemy scrolls. Did a day on genjutsu in the academy.” The corner of his mouth twitched. “I don’t think they plan to ask me back anytime soon.”

“‘Cause scaring the crap outta the eight-year-olds goes over so well with the janitors,” Ryouma murmured. He poured a glass of milk and raised an enquiring eyebrow at Kakashi, who shrugged. Ryouma poured a second glass and set it on the counter. Carefully casual, he asked, “Run many missions lately?”

“I don’t have anything planned,” Kakashi said, because that was easier than saying no, and less worrying than I’m not allowed. Psych had declared him mission-fit a month ago, but Psych’s idea of mental health was apparently too flexible for the Hokage. Kakashi was restricted to the village until further notice.

Now, with Ryouma standing in front of him, he suspected there had been good a reason for that.

"So you can keep me company for a while." Ryouma drained his milk in three long swallows, poured another glass, and drank half of that, too. "I'm pretty sure I'm gonna be restricted to the village till Psych makes sure my brains aren't jelly after all. And that I'm not some planted Suna spy. And that I'm not gonna crack and go crazy on everybody next time I get sent out." He balanced his rice bowl in one hand, fiddling with the chopsticks before taking a mouthful, following it with a messy bite of beef and vegetables. "Arakaki was real careful not to say anything about my reinstatement."

Kakashi’s chopsticks stilled in his hand.

“You want to rejoin?”

Kakashi’s voice was flat as a sword-blade. Ryouma looked up warily from his rice. The clean lines of Kakashi’s masked face had frozen into ice, angles sculpted so sharply they could cut. He looked like a man who’d just seen his own death.

Or Ryouma’s, maybe.

“I was planning on it,” he said, carefully. He ate another mouthful of rice, because it was something to do with his hands, and didn’t taste it at all. “If they’ll take me back. I mean, Genma came back, and everybody knows what happened to him. I wasn’t nearly that bad. Kumo just kept me drugged, and Suna didn’t bother with me, much, after the first little while. I just need to let that Yamanaka dude mess around in my head, talk a couple days with Psych, and then get my weight back up. Get back in fighting trim. And maybe change my mask an’ dye my hair, so people stop comin’ after me.” He tried on a grin. “How d’you think I’d look as a redhead?”

“Bloody,” Kakashi said quietly.

Then he jerked his chin up, visibly snapping that train of thought, and set his plate aside. “If you join up again,” he said, as matter-of-fact as if he was discussing the likelihood of rain that night, “the Hokage will still keep me out.”

Ryouma stared. “But--”

But you’re the best. But I’ll never measure up to you in a dozen lifetimes. But you’re wasted cataloguing scrolls and giving lectures at the Academy...

So why had the Hokage kicked him out?

“You said you were ready to run S-ranks till you beat the odds.” His voice stayed steady, but his knuckles were beginning to whiten on his chopsticks. He set them down, before they snapped, and flattened his hands on the counter behind him. “What exactly did that mean?”

Kakashi faced forward, putting Ryouma in his blind spot. The apartment was small; the opposite wall was bare, lacking anything of interest to look at. He studied a crack in the plaster and couldn’t think of any way to say You died, and I wanted to without ruining the evening.

“It’s your first night home,” he tried instead. “Can we just... be happy about it?”

Ryouma hesitated for a moment, then his voice came quiet and intense: “I'm happy. You got no idea how happy I am that we're even having this conversation. I made it home, and you're--still here, and you're a pretty damn good cook.”

Chopsticks clinked firmly against ceramic, as if in proof.

Some of the chill icing Kakashi’s ribcage eased away, letting him breathe again. He picked up the glass of milk Ryouma had poured for him, cradling it between his hands, and pulled his mask down. The chopsticks stuttered in their rhythm slightly, but Ryouma said nothing.

He was standing maybe a foot away, but it felt like a gulf. Kakashi actually missed him. The spot on his shoulder where Ryouma’s chin had rested felt cold.

He took a sip of milk, licked his teeth, and stepped left, until Ryouma’s scent was sharp and present, even over the smell of onions, and the warmth of his arm was flush against Kakashi’s shoulder. Ryouma leaned into him as they stood together, both with their backs to the counter, looking at the apartment. Gratifyingly, Ryouma continued to eat. Kakashi drank the glass of milk down and stayed where he was, letting his head tip sideways to rest against the tall, hard edge of Ryouma’s shoulder.

“I got a TV,” he said eventually, breaking the silence. “Turns out Pakkun likes daytime soaps.”

Ryouma was nearly finished -- he tipped the bowl to get the remaining rice, ate the last scrap of meat with his fingers, then set everything down on the counter. "You should get him started on historical dramas. All the birth-secret and fatal-illness and star-crossed lovers craziness of soaps, plus samurai. How's Shiba doing?"

Kakashi felt himself smile. “Want to ask her yourself?”

“How likely is she to bite off my toes?” Ryouma asked, but he sounded excited and smelled delighted, like something bright and surprised.

Kakashi snorted. “She’s ten inches tall. I don’t think she could open her mouth wide enough.” He peeled himself reluctantly away and went to the closet, taking the right scroll from his abandoned jounin flak-vest. In the last three months, his chakra was the strongest it had been in years; it was the work of a moment to bite open the pad of his thumb, draw the blood-work seals, and bring one tiny dog into existence. He barely felt the bite.

Shiba eyed him with wary surprise, half-crouched in a coiling wreath of smoke. Then she caught sight of Ryouma. Her ears flicked up, her tail rose, her jaws opened in the closest approximation to a canine grin -- she bolted at him, leaping the five foot jump into his arms with ease, and set about bathing his face.

Kakashi licked blood from his thumb. “Quick, run before she eats you,” he drawled, amused.

“Nah,” Ryouma gasped, half-smothered under a wriggling ball of fur and delight, “she just knows how to greet someone back from the dead. Jump straight into his arms, cover ‘im with kisses-- Whoa, girl, not there-- Yeah, yeah, I’m glad to see you, too. Sorry I didn’t bring you any souvenirs.”

“I don’t think she minds,” Kakashi said. His voice warmed around a smile. Ryouma peered around Shiba’s wriggling fluff to see that smile curling Kakashi’s lips and crinkling his eye. Then, unexpectedly, the brow rose again. “I kissed you.”

Ryouma grinned into a faceful of fur. “You did a good job of it, too.”

Kakashi’s smile broadened enough to flash his teeth. He crossed the floor again and tweaked Shiba’s fringed ears until she turned almost absently to lick his fingers. “And I was worried I’d be out of practice.” Then he leaned up over Shiba’s head to kiss Ryouma, careful and deliberate this time, without a mask or a breakdown to get in the way.

The last knots of tension in Ryouma’s shoulders dissolved away. He shifted Shiba to the crook of one arm and wrapped the other around Kakashi’s waist, pulling him close as his lips parted to invite him in. Kakashi tasted of milk and blood and lightning, and it hadn’t yet begun to feel any less of a miracle to be kissing him. Maybe it was more of one this time, because it was slow and gentle, almost tender, a promise in itself. No drowning, here, no affirmation of life or of possession, only the barest hint of a rising need.

Well--maybe more than a hint. Now that he was clean, fed, and clothed, his long-suppressed libido had finally begun to awaken again. Kakashi would notice in a moment, if he hadn’t already. Ryouma broke the kiss long enough to murmur, “So I ate somethin’. Okay if my blood goes south now?”

Kakashi heard himself laugh, rough but steady. “Say goodbye, Shiba,” he said. The little butterfly-eared dog yelped in protest, trying to scramble between them and press herself up against the underside of Ryouma’s chin. Ryouma rumpled her long fur, and was left holding a palmful of smoke when Kakashi broke the summoning link.

“Got a feeling I’ll pay for that later,” Ryouma said ruefully.

“I’m prepared to let you take that risk,” Kakashi said. He studied Ryouma’s dark, handsome face, raking a hand through the shorn haircut just for the novelty of it; Ryouma tilted his head into the touch, eyes half-closed. He smelled like storm fronts and smoldering wood, a breath away from catching fire. Kakashi didn’t insult him by asking Are you sure you’re up for this?

It didn’t seem like it would be an issue, anyway.

“I’m good at taking risks,” Ryouma said, sounding like he was barely paying attention to the words. The hand around Kakashi’s waist had slid underneath his shirt, calloused fingers sweeping wide and strong up his spine.

“Aren’t you just,” Kakashi murmured, half-wry, mostly truthful. The touch made his breath shiver. He hadn’t been with anyone since the day with Ryouma in the hotel room, almost seven months ago. Hadn’t wanted to; hadn’t thought he’d ever want to. He’d salted and burned dangerous, painful sex with strangers as a coping mechanism, and replaced it with... not coping, mostly.

Ryouma kissed him, catching the corner of his mouth. Kakashi kissed him back, then broke away long enough to strip off his own shirt, taking his mask and hitai-ate with it, removing all three obstacles. Ryouma’s free hand settled on his shoulder, fingers splayed over the muscle Kakashi had devoted all his spare time to earning, and something very appreciative flared in that dark gaze.

“Your turn,” Kakashi said, catching the thin, frayed hem of Ryouma’s tee-shirt. Obediently, Ryouma raised his hands.

It was possible to count his ribs, but the muscle tone wasn’t gone completely. The basic architecture was almost exactly as Kakashi remembered it: broad shoulders, lean hips, flayed dragon tattoo, the long tracery of a scar where Ryouma had almost been gutted. There were newer scars, too, matching the lightning strike on Ryouma’s throat. A knotted, sharp-edged pinwheel the size of Kakashi’s hand caught his eye first, splayed over the right side of Ryouma’s chest, easily half a year old. It looked like someone had tried to blast their way through his lung.

It looked a lot like a chidori, actually, except Ryouma’s heart was still beating.

Kakashi’s fingers hesitated next to it, then went to the healed lines of a kunai blade scored across the ribcage. The marks of shrapnel sprayed over the right hip. The ripple of a barely dodged fire-jutsu crawling up the right biceps.

Ryouma caught his breath, and Kakashi looked up, but Ryouma didn’t quite meet his eye.

It took Kakashi a second to get it.

“Don’t be stupid,” he said, around the sudden twist in his chest. He brought Ryouma’s chin up. “It’ll take a lot more than this to ruin your looks. You’re still the prettiest ninja.”

Ryouma snorted, a flush burning over his sharp cheekbones, but a smile curving around his mouth -- then he grabbed Kakashi, backed him up hard against the wall, and licked his way up Kakashi’s throat. Low and deep, with a rumble Kakashi could feel, he said: “Been dreamin’ of this for six months. So long as you don’t mind, I don’t.”

Whatever thoughts Kakashi had been having crashed and wrecked, lost in a strangled groan. Ryouma laughed, chasing hot breath across his throat. His hands were at Kakashi's waistband. Drenched in scent and heat and the feel of Ryouma's entire body pressed against him, trapping him in place, Kakashi realized he was about to be the one in trouble if they didn't make it to a horizontal surface.

"Bed," he managed, grabbing Ryouma back -- as much to steady himself as to make the point -- and shoved them both away from the wall.

Ryouma moved with him, easy as breathing, as if he'd never gone away. They landed on stiffly made bedsheets, Kakashi underneath, absorbing the fall easily, and it was another strange moment to realize that even with the height difference, he was stronger than Ryouma. He could feel the asymmetry between them; his new-found solidness against Ryouma’s whipcord leanness.

But Ryouma’s teeth were at his pulse, and his hands were skating lower, and Kakashi didn’t care.

He raised one hand to grip the headboard, splayed the other over the scar-cut crescent between hip and ribcage, and let Ryouma do exactly what he wanted.