A wickedly sharp blade was pressed into Kakashi’s hands.

He’d studied kyoketsu-shoge back in the academy, but he’d never worked with one. They were the precursor to kusarigama—a peasant weapon, from the pre-ninja days when farmers had defended their own lands and used the tools that came readily to hand. This one seemed... slightly updated. The main blade was about the length of Kakashi’s forearm from elbow to fingertips, forged from folded steel and backed by a shorter blade curving like a sickle from the black, leather-wrapped hilt. A slender eighteen-foot chain was fixed to the base of the hilt, and neatly looped into a ribbon-tied coil.

The weight was beautiful.

Kakashi tested the edge with his thumb, and cut himself. “Do you give weapons to everyone?”

“Not everyone,” Morita said. “Just the ones who look like they’ve got something to learn.”

“The smart ones, then,” Kakashi said, dryly amused. He tilted his head towards the door. “Except that doesn’t explain Tousaki.”

“Hey!” Ryouma yelled from the hallway. “I don’t insult your face!”

“You can’t see my face,” Kakashi said.

“You wouldn’t hide it if you were hot,” Ryouma shot back, sticking his head around the door jamb.

Kakashi rounded on him, irritated—and was interrupted by his own shirt being shoved in his face.

“Out,” ordered the Quartermaster. “Foreplay and fighting are both off-limits here.”

“It’s not flirting,” Kakashi said, yanking the shirt down.

Morita bundled the abandoned jounin vest into Kakashi’s arms, narrowly missing the kyoketsu-shoge, and pointed firmly at the door. “I don’t care. Get out. Go punch him until you feel better, or whatever coping mechanism validates your issues more.”

Maiming might, Kakashi thought darkly, and stepped down from the measuring box. He slipped through the crowd of conspicuously silent candidates and through the door, which was suddenly absent of mocking heads.

Ryouma was leaning against the opposite hallway wall, grinning. “It’s a little like flirting,” he said. “And you’re welcome for the rescue.”

“I will kill you and everything you hold dear,” Kakashi said.

“Hope you’re up for a long, boring afternoon,” Ryouma said, with the lazy unconcern of a man who doubted the threat, or didn’t have many people to care about.

Kakashi pulled his shirt back on, layered the jounin vest back over it, and calmed his ruffled feathers. Clothes improved matters. Fewer eyes on his bare skin definitely improved matters. He’d thrown the first barb; he couldn’t bite at Ryouma for throwing one back.

The cool weight of his reinstated hitai-ate anchored him down. “Actually,” he said stiffly. “I’ll be using my afternoon to pack.”

Because he’d made it into ANBU.

At some point, that was actually going to sink in.