He really shouldn’t have brought it up.

Kakashi gentled his fingers through black, sweat-spiked hair, cradling the back of Ryouma’s head. “Spent a few weeks in Iwa a couple years ago,” he said carefully, feeling his way around the classified edges. “About this time of year, actually. Inoichi cleared me when I got back.”

Two years ago almost exactly, a little after his nineteenth birthday. Inoichi had been newly thirty, still married, still stupidly proud of his blond little daughter. His jutsu hadn’t been quite so quick and polished back then, but Kakashi had been too tired to care.

Ryouma opened his eyes. “Captive?”

“Sure wasn’t a vacation,” Kakashi said dryly. The lift shuddered to a halt and Ryouma’s face greyed as the wall jarred his head. Kakashi re-steadied him, wrapping one of Ryouma’s arms over his shoulders. “C’mon, ask questions when you’re not falling over.”

He muscled Ryouma out of the elevator by main force, getting him down the short hallway, past the lobby with the chuunin desk — Machi bolted to her feet, but Reiko must have had a word with her because she stayed on her side — and outside, into fresh air. It was evening, cool and crisp, with the sun long down and the moon half up. Ryouma’s breath clouded the air and rasped in his throat, as if he was having a hard time getting enough air to keep his nausea down.

"Askin' questions is keepin' me on my feet,” he got out. “Give me another topic if you don't like that one. How’d you get away?"

For a claustrophobic moment, Kakashi remembered broad hands clenched around his throat, pressed over his mouth and nose. The stone at his back. Takajin’s mouth on his skin.

Takajin’s eye melting away beneath Kakashi’s hand and chakra.

It had only been a few weeks.

He licked his teeth. “Diplomats.”

Unsteadily, Ryouma managed to navigate his way down the steps from ANBU’s front door. "I'm becomin' real fond of diplomats,” he said, in a slightly breezy way that made Kakashi think he really wasn’t all there. “Maybe I should do that next. Is that what you were talking about, when you said I wasn't the only one to have been tortured?"

Or perhaps he was.

“Didn’t think you remembered that,” Kakashi muttered. It was that damn conversation at the Stone all over again.

We follow the rules, Ryouma. No exceptions, no excuses. And if we fall short then we make up the debt. You're not the only one to have been tortured, you know.

He’d been such an idiot.

Ryouma straightened up, tipping his head closer to Kakashi. His voice was very soft, rumbling deep. "I have a good memory. And a lot of time to think over where I went wrong."

Kakashi flinched slightly. “You weren’t wrong.”

Quiet dogged their foreshortened steps for a moment, as Ryouma kept his head ducked down and away from bright streetlights, and Kakashi kept them going in a straight line for home. Then Ryouma found his voice again: “Maybe we both were.”

“‘I’m a hell of a good ninja,’” Kakashi quoted. “‘And I can go on being a good ninja—or you can see me dead ‘cause your rules say so, screw the waste.’” He took a breath. “‘I can’t see how my death’ll serve Konoha more than my hands and muscles and jutsu will, but you’re the genius. Call it.’” He looked at Ryouma. “You weren’t wrong.”