Raidou stretched, too, graceful in his strength, before he sighed and slipped the navy shirt on over his head. Hastily, Genma did the same. Kurenai, who was already in jounin uniform, stood with her arms crossed, alternating between watching her teammates while they changed, and scanning the path down into the village.

Kakashi, of course, had vanished. He reappeared just as Genma was wringing the last of the damp out of his ANBU underpinnings with Kakashi’s jutsu. He looked as fresh as if he’d just come from a bath. Genma folded the blacks and piled them with his pale armor, for resealing in a fresh scroll.

“There’s one advantage to jounin gear,” Ryouma said, turning slowly to look at each of his teammates in turn. “They might be too busy lookin’ at our faces to think of any lies.” His eyeline seemed to fall on the rumpled looseness of the shirt at Kakashi’s waist. “Ginta was right about the tailoring, though.”

“Ginta thinks everything should fit as tight as ANBU blacks,” Genma said. Had Ryouma ever used Ginta’s given name before, or had it been Sakamoto-fukuchou up until now? “Have you… seen much of him? Since the mission, I mean?”

Ryouma looked nonplussed, and then wary. “Not since the club. We’ve been spending all our time drywalling your bathroom.”

Genma wasn’t quite sure why he breathed a sigh of relief — was it for Ryouma or for Ginta? “And I appreciate your labor, believe me.” He activated his jutsu, and the scroll curled up around his ANBU kit. There was a soft pop as the mass of clothes, armor, and sword disappeared into the summoning dimension, leaving a vacuum to be filled, and then there was just the scroll, neatly sealed. Genma caught it one-handed before it hit the ground.

“Ready to go, Taichou?”

“Yep,” Raidou said. “Tousaki, since you made a point about it, let’s have your face front and center.” Genma resisted the urge to laugh. Ryouma was pretty, even if he was highly aware of that fact.

“Yuuhi, I want you next to Shiranui in case this is an ambush,” Raidou continued. He paused as he got to Kakashi. “Hatake, do your shadow-thing and watch our backs.”

Shadow thing? Like something a Nara might use? But that was bloodline. Did Raidou mean shadow clones?

Kakashi nodded once, and vanished.

Ah, that shadow thing.

“Smart leadership,” Genma murmured, mostly for Kurenai’s benefit. “Order him to do what he’s going to do anyway, and then no one’s being insubordinate.”

She gave him a quick, amused smile. “You two seem to have worked out how to handle him.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t go as far as that.” Genma fell into an easy pace next to Kurenai. “Getting there, maybe.”

Raidou and Ryouma made a solid bulwark in front of them. Muscle in the vanguard, stealth at their backs. It was a little strange to be the ones being escorted. Not that Kurenai and Genma weren’t one-hundred percent lethal in their own rights, of course, but it was a marching order that made sense.

The way down the narrow road into the valley was entirely safe and unremarkable. Crickets and frogs sang in the trees, a slight wind carried only the scent of cooking fires from below, and the few clouds in the sky shredded away, revealing a blanket of stars bright enough to light the path.

A group of worn stone statues to Jizo stood at a fork where the main path went into the village and a branch angled to the right, heading downhill towards the sound of falling water. There was a stone tanuki statue, too, old and moss-covered. It didn’t have any buns; Genma hesitated a moment, then dropped a square of chocolate he’d been saving at its feet. When Kurenai gave him a look, he shrugged. “It’s the local deity, right?”