Kurenai studied the level grey gaze, the thoughtful crease between straight brow and angling bandage, the shadowed cast of a steady-set jaw beneath the surgical mask, and believed him.

Even as a child, playing in the overgrown gardens of the Hatake estate or surpassing all his classmates at the Academy, Kakashi had been quick to observe, quick to judge. He had a keen eye and a merciless tongue, and he neither forgot nor forgave.

He also complained about everything under the sun that annoyed him, and he didn't seem to have grown out of that habit, either.

But he had nothing bad to say about Namiashi Raidou — not a niggling suspicion, not a creeping doubt. Not even a petty complaint about the new captain who could never live up to the only other man who'd commanded him. That wasn't quite as ringing an endorsement as Shiranui's He's a good captain, or Katsuko's The team and Konoha will always come first for him, but it was commendation enough, in Kakashi's own way.

"Thank you," she said, and uncapped her pen. "Tell me about your encounter with Iebara Shigematsu."

Kakashi's eyebrow twitched upward slightly, as if in quickly muted surprise. He'd clearly expected a deeper interrogation, but he followed her lead readily enough.

"He recognized me." He shrugged one shoulder: Bingo book, what can you do? As if he'd ever been overlooked, even once in his life. Kurenai kept her expression bland.

"We disagreed," Kakashi continued. "I killed him. You already have the lieutenant's report, and Tousaki's, too. Which part do you want in detail?"

"Shiranui and Tousaki didn't observe the bulk of your fight with Iebara." She'd read Riei's notes from Tousaki's debriefing yesterday, while Riei typed up the full report. Tousaki seemed to have an even more fractured view of the clash than Shiranui—not surprising, since he'd spent at least part of it drowning on his own blood. He'd been first on the scene after Kakashi killed Iebara, of course, and he'd offered some details Shiranui didn't, but the picture was still far from whole.

"They both reported that you protected the two of them from Iebara's attacks multiple times, and eventually drew Iebara off altogether. They briefly re-engaged, but were then drawn off in turn by Iebara's teammates. Neither of them witnessed your acquisition of Iebara's jutsu or his death."

She opened her notebook. "What happened that first time, when you protected them with an earthen wall?"

Kakashi was silent for a moment, his gaze drifting unfocused as he sifted through memories. She had a moment to wonder exactly how clear those memories were. He was untethered by IV painkillers, today, but the injection sites were still bruised and new-looking. How much of the mission and its aftermath did he even recall?

But when Kakashi finally spoke, he laid out a clean, stripped-down version of events. Neither emotions nor conjectures made it into the retelling, just one action leading to another as simply as winter into spring.

Annoyance shaded his voice only once, as he described Tousaki and Shiranui's intervention in the jutsu-blasted clearing. Listening to his carefully chosen words, Kurenai translated the professional cadences: Tousaki and Shiranui tried to get themselves shivved, but they did give me an advantage. She couldn't tell whether the annoyance was directed more at his teammates' near-suicidal intervention, or that he'd needed assistance at all. Likely it was both.

"And then he grabbed me," he concluded at last, with a quick gesture to the yellow shadow of healed bruises circling his throat. "Chokehold, from behind. I was out of weapons, but I'd gotten a good look at his jutsu. All it needed was blood, and he was bleeding all over the landscape. So I tried it, and…"

His mouth twitched up, behind the mask. His eye crinkled. "Boom, basically."