Okay, so Kakashi’s memory was better.

Ryouma stared down at his scuffing sandals and dusty toes, and tried to make his pounding head actually produce thoughts. Shouldn’t Inoichi’s painkillers have kicked in by now? Maybe they already had, and this was as good as it was going to get.

“I still think that’s true,” he said, carefully. “And I’m glad you called it the way you did. But I was wrong goin’ into that argument. You were hurting, and you told me what you couldn’t tell the Stone. I threw it back in your teeth. And then I ran, ‘cause I couldn’t handle not being who you thought I was. Who you wanted me to be. And I was wrong as hell that whole way through.”

He could hear Kakashi swallow.

Streetlights and headache be damned. He looked up, just as Kakashi tipped his face against the side of Ryouma’s neck. From this angle, with a stiff brush of wild grey hair between them, it was impossible to read his eye at all. But the ache in Kakashi’s voice was clear enough. “I just wanted you to be you.”

Ryouma’s eyes burned. He blinked hard. “I didn’t much like myself, right then. Sure didn’t after.”

He thought of that acid-edged conversation with Ginta, the day he’d come back. The sharp ache in his throat, the bitter taste in his mouth. Soldier pills and self-loathing. I screw up everything I touch.

“Sometimes I still don’t like being me. But I told myself, in Suna, if I ever got back—I’d work on being a man you wanted, and I wanted to be.”