Was he supposed to say you’re welcome?

Something scraped in his shoulder, distant and dull, as the medic pulled the blade out. Probably not steel on bone; he didn’t think it had gone that deep. Just a nerve misfire drowned in adrenaline.

His hands were still steady.

Well, the right was. The left felt leaden.

“Are you nearly done?” Kakashi asked, when he’d pulled himself back inside his skin enough to find words again. Chakra signatures still glimmered at the edges of his flung-wide senses, some orderly, some more tangled, but none of them had the bruised malevolence he remembered.

If Orochimaru was here, he was even better at hiding himself.

Behind the Tanuki mask’s red-circled eye holes, a flicker of surprise went past, but the medic just said, “Hi. Can you lift your arm?”

Kakashi clenched his left hand. A faint twist of pain darted down his arm, following the muscle tension, but it barely ranked. The arm lifted stiffly; he held it in midair, then turned his hand over, testing the range of motion. Wrist was fine, elbow was fine, all his fingers flexed. It ached in the joint, but not deeply. He raised his eyebrows at the medic.

“Good,” said Tanuki. He pulled Kakashi’s fingerless glove off and took a kunai to his fingertips, pricking each one in turn, then ran a series of tracks up the back of Kakashi’s hand. “Can you feel this? Do they all feel the same?”

Focusing on sensations that small took a degree of effort. “Yes,” said Kakashi after a moment, twitching his fingertips together.

Tanuki offered two of his own gloved fingers. “Squeeze,” he ordered. When Kakashi passed that strength test, the medic made him hold his hand out, fingers spread, and keep them there while the other man tried to force his fingers together.

Kakashi passed that one, too, and decided he was done. “That’s good enough,” he said, pulling his hand back.

Away in the distance, high in the mountain, a sudden thunderclap of familiar chakra made his chest loosen. Minato-sensei had landed at the base.

Bracing his better hand on the ground, Kakashi started to his feet.

“Not yet,” Tanuki said, reaching to grab him. “Sit—”

ANBU or not, Kakashi knew how to evade. He flickered back, pulling up a twist of chakra to get out of arm’s reach. Tanuki’s hand closed on empty air.

Tanuki paused. The mask lifted, reassessing.

"They’ll come to us,” he said, after a moment. “I need to see your other arm. What did you get tagged with?”

“It can wait,” Kakashi said. “How many ANBU do you have near? I can feel—five close, not including you two. Do you have a perimeter set up? Eyes on the other candidates?”

Tanuki was up and inside Kakashi’s personal space in the edge of a second, but he kept his hands to himself. “The area's secure,” he said. “What kind of threat are you anticipating?" Two gloved fingers tapped the comm in his ear.

Behind Kakashi, the crescent moon ANBU asked for a status update.

Kakashi hesitated. He didn’t know—he just had a guess, based on a dying man’s mockery and a gut feeling. But if Orochimaru had planted a rotten seed in the candidates, there was no telling what he could have already twisted into ANBU’s central corps. If you wanted to strike Konoha’s heart, hitting her best soldiers would give you direct access through the arteries.

Of course, if you already had the soldiers, why bother with a candidate?

“Potential S-class,” he said. “Can you vouch for everyone in range?”