"We'll proceed," Morita announced, and whipped the end of his tape-measure around Ryouma's neck. He was moving on before the lizard part of Ryouma's brain had even begun to panic, measuring shoulders, chest, waist, hips, inseam, and a series of increasingly bizarre items, like the circumference of Ryouma's thigh and the distance from the hinge of his jaw to his lips. He paused, curiously, to brush the hair back from Ryouma's right ear, exposing the angling scar that had sliced off the tip and furrowed the scalp. "Forget to duck?"

Ryouma grinned. "You shoulda seen the sword. You'd be asking how I've still got the top of my skull."

Morita tugged cheerfully at his hair. "Good job keeping it. It'd be a shame to lose this nice hair." He'd climbed up onto the box at some point in his frenzy of measurement; he hopped off now, and took another critical pacing turn around Ryouma. "That'll do you," he decided at last. "Ah, Aiko, thank you." He accepted the polished two-meter shaft, ran a hand over the sheath capping the long, curved blade, and held it out to Ryouma. "Play with it for a week. If you don't like it by then, bring it back. If the blade is even scratched, I'll have your scalp."

Maybe Ryouma wouldn't take up spear-fishing after all.

The Quartermaster was looking over his shoulder already. "You, with the hair," he said, pointing.

Ryouma had crouched to scoop up his shirt and vest. He stopped, looking up. The candidates were staring at each other—or, more accurately, at each others' hair. Abe ruffled a hand through his blue spikes, looking unsure. Tottori tugged her red braid.

Kakashi sighed through his mask, tucked his book away, and pushed himself off the wall, unzipping his flak vest as he came. "Do you actually need my shirt off?"

Morita's eyes narrowed. "Do you want a shirt three sizes too big under the arms and armor two inches loose in the gut? Those jounin uniforms are barely tailored at all. Shirt comes off. You can keep the mask."

The vest dropped on the floor by Ryouma's feet. Ryouma shrugged his own vest on, not bothering to force his shirt over the bandage, and tucked his hitai-ate in his pocket. He straightened, just as Kakashi set his back firmly to the other candidates and pulled his shirt over his head, taking the hitai-ate with it. The mask stayed put, a thin, stretchy tube of blue material that just skirted his scarred collarbones.

There wasn't, actually, much skin that wasn't scarred, from the purple-seamed closed left eye to the shiny burn ripple stretching over the sharp curve of his hip bone to burrow beneath his waistband. Most of them were healed and old, faded silver by time or medical jutsu, but some were still raised and red. Slicing and raking blade marks, acid dimples, crescent-moon animal bites on his forearms and wrists, shrapnel gouges in his shoulders, a barbed wire tear wrapping up his left forearm to the elbow, debris-peppered blast burns on his stomach and chest. The line on his shoulder where Akiyama's scalpel had hit was knitted closed, but still pink.

Beneath the scars, Kakashi was muscled lean and spare, all glass-cut planes and angles. Veins knotted under the thin skin up his forearms. The hard lines of his stomach muscles were interrupted by one small, unexpected surgical scar. If Ryouma had to guess, Kakashi'd had his appendix out.

Morita was looking at Kakashi's hands, not his abs. "Reinforced gloves," he concluded. He skimmed a professional eye from hips to hair, and frowned. "What, you block with your everything a lot? I'm not sure we've got armor tough enough for you. You may have to take lessons from the tall one here on how to dodge."

"Especially if you insist on leaving my shoulders bare," Kakashi said coolly.

Ryouma snickered. The Quartermaster flicked him an irritated glance. "You got an opinion, you can air it outside." He turned back to Kakashi. "How do you feel about cockroaches?"

Ryouma laughed all the way back to the door.