Rin tucked the urge to smile away and finished her paragraph. “Who did you offend this time?” she asked, mock-exasperated. She glanced up as Kakashi made his way across the room to sit on the corner of her desk.

“Why do you always assume it’s me?” he asked. He was in his usual jounin uniform, the curve of his spine accentuating the way the material hung off his lean frame. Was it looser than normal?

“Because there’s a weapons manual where your manners should be,” Rin said, and frowned. “Have you been eating enough? I saw your kitchen.”

He waved her concern away. “Can we focus on my semi-genuine desire to murder Minato-sensei? Because he might have actually hated me for years without telling me, and now he’s punishing me with idiots.”

“Your new team?” Rin said. She put down her pen and reached over the desk, taking Kakashi’s right hand. The bandages wrapped around his wrist were still fresh; she looked up at him for permission before she pushed his sleeve up to his elbow, calling on her chakra. “I thought ANBU was the best of the best.”

“So did I,” Kakashi said, a trace of real despair behind the theatrics. Rin looked up, searched his face to find the telltale downturn at the corner of his eye and the slight slump of his shoulders. He hadn’t looked this disillusioned since before the Fox. She made a sympathetic noise and sank her chakra into his system, expanding her senses. The familiar electric edge to his coils was a comfort after all this time.

“If Minato-sensei picked them out, they can’t be completely incompetent,” she said. There were still minute traces of poison in Kakashi’s system, an acrid tang that was fast losing its bite. With his developed immunities, it wouldn’t even be enough to give him a headache. Rin purged it anyways, sending her chakra through his pathways in steady waves. “I take it your first day didn’t go like you’d hoped?”

Slowly, Kakashi started to relax underneath her hands. Obito’s Sharingan always tended to strain his system a bit, though he was loathe to admit it. “It was... different than I thought it would be.”

“What about the oath-taking ceremony?” Rin asked quietly. “Did Minato-sensei say anything to you?”

After a moment, Kakashi said, “That there’d be no glory in it.” He looked away. “And no lone wolves.”

The last of the Oomukado toxin dissolved, filtering out of Kakashi’s bloodstream. Rin reached up and squeezed his shoulder, offering silent support. “I missed you,” she said. “Tell me a little more about your new team.”