“What good looks?” Kakashi said. He couldn’t relax his weight back down onto the other man; there’d be no way to get to Ginta’s face if Kakashi was lying on him. But there was barely any room to move, and his arm was already shaking.

“The ones that always used to work,” Ginta said, with an edge of self-deprecation, “until I met you.”

A blade in the windpipe would have felt better.

He locked his supporting arm, steeled himself, and used it to twist around, taking his weight entirely off Ginta and finding an awkward balance on his hands and knees, legs straddling Ginta’s, his back an inch below the ceiling. Tile chips dug into his knees.

“They worked just fine,” he said shortly, as he looked over Ginta’s face and tried to figure out where to start. “I was just a screw up.” Still a screw up. “And you’re not good at listening.”

“That’s a relief.” Ginta’s mouth twisted with something like self-mockery.

Kakashi stared. “What?”

"That it wasn't all my fault for passing out drunk on our one and only date." The twist was still there, shifting to pained when Ginta pushed himself a little more upright. "Although that was a pretty spectacular failure on my part.”

“Pretty sure you said it wasn’t a date, either,” Kakashi muttered, remembering. It’d been Ginta’s birthday — a week after the catastrophe with Sadao in the showers, the night before Kakashi had run into Sadao’s friends out looking for revenge, and Ryouma, who’d bailed him out, shouted at him, and taken him for coffee.

He’d run into Sadao’s friends because he’d been running away from Ginta.

“Yeah, well,” said Ginta, with a wave of one knuckle-grazed hand. “It wasn’t, until you kissed me.”

“Yeah, well,” Kakashi echoed numbly. “I’m pretty easy.”

He crouched over Ginta, opening the med-kit on Ginta’s blood-caked armoured chest, and searched through it with shaking hands. They needed antiseptic, stitches, bandages — Ginta still hadn’t taken a damn blood pill.

“Yeah, if you pronounce it ‘difficult’,” Ginta said with a raw chuckle. Then he sobered up, eyes searching Kakashi’s unmasked face in the green light. His hand touched Kakashi’s arm. “You okay?”

“We’re never going to find him.” Kakashi ‘s voice sounded distant to his own ears. “Even if— when we get out of here, we’re done. Neither one of us can run.”

Three weeks too late. Ryouma wasn’t coming home.

One-hundred and three.

Kakashi closed his eyes and let out a breath that burned. Then he shoved it all down. Locked it up tight, where it couldn’t hurt and wouldn’t kill them.

He reached for the antiseptic and Ginta’s face. “This is going to sting.”