Rin pursed her lips at him in mock severity. “Start with what made you stagger into my office like you wanted to collapse. Did they put you on a team with an Uchiha? Did they give you a chicken mask?”

Kakashi paused, sidetracked from what he’d been about to say. “Why a chicken mask?”

She shrugged. “I’d want to kill someone if I had to wear a chicken mask. And I know there’s a squirrel mask and a grasshopper mask. It wouldn’t be a big stretch.”

“The quartermaster did threaten me with a cockroach,” Kakashi said. “But I got a lion-dog.”

Rin considered this, and smiled in amusement. “I’m sure you could have pulled that off. I guess a wolf would have been too cliche.”

“I guess,” Kakashi echoed doubtfully. The hand not propping his chin up rested on the tabletop. Rin reached out to give it a comforting pat.

“At least it wasn’t a cockroach,” she said. “And a lion-dog is almost as dashing as a wolf.”

His mouth curled up in a smile behind his mask, fleeting but real. “There is that.” Then he sobered. “I’m on Team Six. No Uchiha, but do you know Namiashi Raidou, or Shiranui Genma? They’re both veterans.”

Rin frowned in thought, rifling through the mental files she kept on the Hokage’s hand-picked elite. “Namiashi, I’ve treated once or twice. He’s durable, but all taijutsu users are. Never heard of Shiranui. Why?” She raised an eyebrow. “Or should I ask, which one’s your captain?”

“Namiashi,” Kakashi said. “I think it’s his first time.”

Rin felt the corner of her mouth twitch. “What makes you say that? It’d make more sense to give you to an experienced captain.”

"You'd think," Kakashi said. "He felt new, and happy. This whole team are babes in the woods."

Rin didn’t point out that all his ANBU teammates were probably older than him. Everyone was older than Kakashi. “Maybe Minato-sensei sees something in them,” she said. “He has a reason for everything.” Even if the reason was a painful lesson intended to make Kakashi grow as a person.

“Or he lacked options,” Kakashi told her darkly. “Or he had an early stroke. I haven’t even told you about the other two.”

Mahito returned with Rin’s wine and Kakashi’s water, setting the drinks down on the table. Rin waited until Mahito had swept away to lean in. “They’re that bad? Are they jounin or special-jounin?”

Kakashi’s visible eyebrow creased in a frown. “I’m not actually sure. Tousaki Ryouma and Ueno Katsuko. I think Tousaki’s a jounin. I’m not convinced Ueno’s human.”

Ueno, Rin knew about. She’d never met the woman, but the team of specialists at the hospital assigned to Ueno’s case were very vocal about the headaches caused by a chakra system mangled beyond repair.

Rin took a sip of wine. “Why? Does she have wings and a tail?”

"She has chakra like Kushina used to," Kakashi said. "Just without the demon."

Kushina’s name didn’t make Rin’s throat close up in grief like it used to, not after this long. The little spike of melancholy in her chest, though, would probably always be there.

“That could be useful,” Rin said. “As long as Ueno has control over it. What about Tousaki?”

Kakashi made a face of extreme doubt at the mention of ‘Ueno’ and ‘control’ in the same sentence. He turned his water glass between his hands, stalling. “How much did Minato-sensei tell you about the second Trial?” he asked at last.

Rin studied him, then the bandages on his wrist. “I know you saved a candidate’s life,” she said. “And that another candidate stabbed you.” She left out the part about how shocked and furious she’d been when she’d heard—Kakashi could read it in her expression. Injuries on the battlefield were one thing, but Kakashi shouldn’t have been attacked by someone who was supposed to be a Konoha ninja. Not after all he’d given to the village. “I know that without your built-up resistance to poisons, I would have lost you.”