Ryouma was right. It didn’t hurt. Himself’s tail swept over his skin like featherdown. When it got to Kakashi’s hip, the sudden unlocking of skin that had been held clenched for a decade made him stagger sideways. He caught himself.

He thought about physics after that. There was no light when Himself worked. There was heat, but barely enough to account for the massive amount of energy Himself was manipulating. When Rin performed complex ninja surgeries, she had to keep a person standing by purely to manage temperature control, or the person on the table would come out with a functioning spine and third-degree burns. Kakashi just felt pleasantly warm.

It was a frightening level of skill. He would have given a lot to experience it with his chakra sense intact.

He made Himself leave the appendectomy scar, for the purely practical reason of not wanting to undergo that surgery a second time if he ever showed up delirious at a hospital. Judging by the frustrated whisker twitch, Himself was strongly considering adding a matching scar on the other side.

Acid marks and animal bites washed away. Blade cuts. Blast burns. Most of his war career. Kakashi thought about physics some more.

Then, abruptly, Himself was stepping back, and Kakashi realized they were done. He looked down. An unfamiliar map of skin met his eye, smooth and sleek, wonderful and frightening all at once. Hesitantly, he touched his stomach with his fingertips. The skin dented. His nerves reported the sensation. There’d been a numb section there. He could feel it now.

He ran his hand over his hip. Sensation there too. He crouched, testing, and the joint rolled smoothly in its socket. No twinge, no catch. His muscles moved like butter. He straightened again.

There were still faint marks, he realized. When he moved, light caught on silver shadows, like a watermark memory of the previous ruin. It was... a little grounding, actually. Not everything was gone.

“Well,” he asked Ryouma. “How does it look?”

Ryouma’s expression was complicated. Still hungry, wanting, which made relief and heat coil down Kakashi’s spine in equal measure, but there was something else, too, almost like… awe? Ryouma reached out, slowly enough for Kakashi to shy away if he wanted to, and brushed warm fingers over the hollow of Kakashi’s shoulder, where Akiyama’s scalpel had sliced a purple scar.

Ryouma swallowed. “Like… new.”

“Like good new?” Kakashi pressed.

“Yeah.” Ryouma’s voice had gone low. He flattened his palm under Kakashi’s collarbone, callouses rough and welcome against sensitized skin, and then (annoyingly) pulled his hand away. “You still look like a ninja. Just a good one, now.”

“A— hey.”

Kakashi briefly considered dragging Ryouma back to the leech pond and shoving him in it, but the frank undercurrent of heat rolling through Ryouma’s scent like smoke and thunder told the true story. He liked it. He wanted his hands on Kakashi.

Well— damn right.

Kakashi pulled his yukata back up around his shoulders and dipped his chin at Himself, a respectful gesture that would have made the wolves bristle. “This works. Thank you.”

Himself’s silver muzzle crinkled wryly. “The marks you gave each other are gone, but if you insist on generating new evidence before you see your comrades again, I can’t help you.”

“I wasn’t going to,” Ryouma said, with exaggerated innocence.

Himself made an amused sound in the back of his throat, something like a bark and a chuckle.

As useful as it was not to have screaming evidence of their recent activities, Kakashi was starting to get exhausted of the twinkly eyed, all-knowledgeable tanuki chief. Or perhaps he was just reaching the end of his tolerance for a long and very strange day. He took a step closer to Ryouma, and murmured: “Bed? Or are we tracking down the others first?