"Do you know the definition of persistence, sensei?" said Kakashi, without opening his eyes. "'Continuing in a course of action without regard to discouragement, opposition, or previous failure'." The laughter was still there, rippling under the surface of his words. He didn't know how to make it go away. "Which is basically a colourful way of saying if you touch me one more time, I'll break your hands off at the wrist."

There is a shinobi code that translates, in its roughest form, to do not kill the medics, dumbass. If Haruichi didn't heed the warning, Kakashi would feel more than justified in calling his death a suicide. Well, he probably wouldn't go that far--protect your teammates, you had to protect your teammates--but he wouldn't feel bad about inflicting a few bruises.

Probably.

He needed to get up. He needed to get up and get away before he broke something. Before he shattered all over the stupid wet grey carpet. Before he ended Haruichi's brand new career and his own in one move.

The door was the only thing in the way.

Kakashi didn't need to actually go through the door, he just needed to get past it. He opened both eyes, focusing on Haruichi with one weary blue-grey and one wrecked scarlet swirl, using up chakra he didn't really have to track the medic's intent. Tears dripped down the left side of his face as Kakashi wrenched his hands up and forced them through three very simple seals. "Give my armour to the quartermaster, I'll pick it up later." Energy gathered, chakra drew together with a violence that made his inner coils tremble, and the copy-nin translocated himself up one floor. He'd been aiming for three.

I really don't like this carpet, Kakashi thought as he collapsed on it. His stomach apparently agreed with the sentiment and threw up to prove it. Kakashi yanked his mask down just in time.

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Haruichi's eyes had narrowed to angry little slits at Kakashi's words (that's what you got for trying to be considerate around here, he supposed) and then widened in utter surprise when Kakashi was suddenly no longer there.

Alright. That was it. That was absolutely, unquestionably, inexorably it. Haruichi's temper snapped like the frayed rubber-band it was and he was back on his feet in a millisecond, and without a second's consideration for the face he'd just been sealed not two full days ago and certainly hadn't slept since, he activated his Byakugan and went looking for the little bastard. The selfish, ignorant, fucked-up little bastard that he was and wasn't it just as fucking well that Rin-sensei wasn't alive to see this. Hinaji too, since she'd have had more than a few choice words for what was about to happen and plenty of them would be aimed at her cousin.

He spotted a shape prone on the floor above, puke and angst all over the floor nearby. Yes. That'd be the one. Closing down his eyes and having to shove his palm against his aching forehead again, Haruichi unlocked and opened the closet door, dragged out Kakashi's armour by the strap, then unlatched and opened the Infirmary door before heading up the stairs.

Haruichi found Kakashi collapsed half on his side having thrown up on the floor. His immediate instinct was to re-break his arm and leave him there. He very, very, very nearly did it. Haruichi had been driven past caring if Arakaki-taichou threw him back onto the streets, or if his family caught and killed him; he was too tired and too angry to even think about anything except that he was drowning here. The grim, lunatic tides of ANBU were closing over his head and apparently he couldn't swim. He couldn't force the ANBU to be sensible, or to look after their health, or to let him treat them - not if he couldn't manage it with the first one he dealt with. And if he couldn't do that then it wouldn't be happening at all. Haruichi was a chuunin, he was a Hyuuga, and he'd been a soldier for a long time - but if Kakashi wasn't planning on accepting him for a medic then Haruichi would make sure he accepted for what else he was.

Pissed off.

Before Kakashi could say a word, not that he was likely to have had much to say, Haruichi had swung his armour right at his head and cracked him one for the ages. "That was for every medic who wasted their time and their energy on you," he snapped coldly and loudly. "And the next one will be for every person who took so much as a scratch for your sorry sake, and the rest will be because I fucking feel like it, Hatake! And what are you looking at?" Haruichi swivvelled his head to glare at the desk chuunin who'd been walking past the junction they were at and had stopped with his mouth quite agape. "Haven't you heard of doctor-patient confidentiality, get the hell on with your business!"

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That hurt.

In fact, that really hurt. Kakashi winced and bit back a yelp as his head met hard armour on one side and equally hard floor on the other. The fact that Haruichi had taken off his hitai-ate off earlier meant he lacked even that scant protection against minor concussion. The fact that he was too busy feeling like he'd ripped out all his chakra coils and braided them to block Haruichi's very basic hit was the most upsetting thing, though.

Well, that and the fact that it made him throw up again.

In the midst of all his dry-heaving, Kakashi decided he needed to stop thinking in facts. They weren't helping.

Neither was the chuunin staring at him, Haruichi, back at him, the mess he'd made on the carpet, Haruichi once again, and finally Kakashi's unmasked face, with wide green eyes. Kakashi growled. It hurt the acid-scorched mess that was now his throat, but it made the chuunin back up a hasty step. Then another when Kakashi dragged his hands underneath him and set them against the floor. In the time it took the copy-nin had realized there was absolutely no way he was getting up--about three seconds--the chuunin was a fast moving blur disappearing around the corner.

Kakashi slumped back down and considered what Haruichi had snarled at him. It took him less then three seconds to decide Haruichi no longer merited his Shit List. Haruichi deserved a brand new list all of his own. In fact, Haruichi deserved many things, including a throttling as soon as Kakashi could move.

Except he couldn't move.

He could, however, talk. Mostly. And Haruichi could damn well lip-read now if he couldn't hear Kakashi's voice clearly. "Every person who ever took a scratch on my account is dead, Hyuuga. They don't care how hard you hit me."

There was vomit on the floor. It was pretty much all Kakashi could smell. Obito's eye was still leaking salt-water down the left side of his face, even though he'd closed it. Stupid cry-baby Obito. At least he had Rin to keep him company. And Sensei. And half the damn village.

Everyone important.

Kakashi couldn't work his fingers with enough accuracy to drag his mask back up, but he could cover his lower face with one hand. It stopped Haruichi seeing the way his mouth twisted into an ugly broken line.

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"Then I guess this is purely for my benefit," Haruichi replied viciously, not about to plunge into self-pitying drivel along with Kakashi. Haruichi had loved people and he'd lost them, and he'd been left all alone - and irregardless of how much it tore him up inside and threatened to kill the better parts of his nature not one time had he ever ever felt sorry for himself for being the one left behind. Not once had he ever spat on the sacrifices his family had made in protecting and loving him by acting like it wasn't worth it. Like he wasn't worth it.

His forehead was aching now, straight through to his brain like little needles, so Haruichi snarled and clenched his fist around the strap of the armour, ready to swing again. And again. Until Kakashi wasn't able to keep him from healing him up.

Only... the blow didn't come. Haruichi's shoulder just wouldn't move. And in concentrating on the pain in his seal, Haruichi hadn't realized he'd been ignoring that Hinaji's heart didn't feel all that great either right now.

Hinaji always, always used to say he took things too strongly to heart. And here he was willing to beat a patient unconscious so he could treat him because he cared too much about the living and the dead. Hinaji used to say it was a good thing he didn't want to be a healer, because it took a different kind of heart to try and heal than it did to fight a war and she hadn't thought he knew how to be detached enough. Looking at Kakashi busy martyring himself on a carpet and half-seeing himself doing the same only hours ago back home on the compound's polished floor... Haruichi realized she'd been right.

Well, the girls always were. Haruichi listlessly ditched the armour, looked away down the hall where the other chuunin had vanished, and then reached down and grabbed Kakashi's unsplinted wrist, the one not hovering over his face. An exhausted and ugly sigh fell out of him and he started dragging Kakashi down the hall. "You're lucky I still care what they'd think. I already earned one slap from Rin-sensei, it strikes me as the height of poor behaviour to earn another when she's not around to deliver it."

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That also hurt.

Kakashi's snarl became a wince as Haruichi got a solid grip and dragged him by one wrist down the corridor. It struck him absurdly as something Sensei would have done. One of his very practical object lessons in actions and consequences and what happened when you did one without expecting the other. It also struck him that he couldn't do a damn thing about it. The translocation had wiped out most of his remaining chakra, draining it down to the very bare minimum that would just about keep him alive if he didn't get any smart jutsu ideas in the next few days. The sharingan would have to stay closed.

Kakashi had gotten used to living in a world where a blink at the wrong moment could kill him.

But the pain in his arm--shoulder, head, back, hip, anywhere you cared to name--and the nausea wrapped up with cold wasn't where Kakashi's current focus lay. Neither was it on the distressing fact that Haruichi had left the armour he'd just barely gotten broken in lying on the floor. His very tired mind had locked on one word and that was all he cared about. One blue-grey eye widened as he stared upside-down at Haruichi. "You kno--," Kakashi grimaced, "you knew Rin?" And there was something slightly more shocking. "She slapped you?"

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Dragging Kakashi around a corner at that moment neccessitated turning and checking he didn't haul the jounin's head into a skirting board, which was how Haruichi saw Kakashi looking up at him and Kakashi saw Haruichi's pink cheeks, which had coloured the instant he'd remembered the entirety of that episode with Rin-sensei. It wasn't the only thing that made him feel about five years old to recall, but it was one of the few that got itself to show without fail. Even now. Even now.

Ah bugger. Screw Kakashi's head, Haruichi turned right around again and kept tugging him along for the stairs. "She did. And as if you need to ask, of course I deserved it." Gritting his teeth, as much against this completely unexpected twist in his responses as for the sake of how heavy Kakashi suddenly seemed, Haruichi shouldered open the door that led to the stairs and managed to drag Kakashi in without letting the door swing shut on his fat head. There was a moment's deliberation where he considered the satisfaction that would come with tipping his superior officer down the stairwell in a manner akin to a slinky, but he banished it quickly.

Putting Kakashi's wrist down, Haruichi took a moment to breathe and calculate the angles, then finally glanced back to Kakashi's face. He was relieved that he wasn't capable of moving around anymore, and Haruichi reflected that it took a special kind of idiot to make their medic glad of that. "I'm picking you up now. If we fall to our deaths because I'm too tired the blame is squarely on you."

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Kakashi's vision was starting to tunnel again. The crack as his cheek hit the skirting didn't particularly help. He fought looming unconsciousness on the grounds that he actually wanted to hear the rest of that story. Haruichi's scent had changed, along with his skin tone, colouring from the lead-tones of anger and the bitter note of something that struck a chord with the black hole in Kakashi's chest, to a scent that was a whole lot warmer. A scent that was more him. A scent, Kakashi thought, that was definitely embarrassment.

That was a much better thing to focus on then anything else. Including the fact that he still couldn't move.

"Translocate?" he managed, forcing the word out of lips that felt numb. Riding along on someone else's translocation was always miserable, but it was a better thing then dying because a medic slipped on the stairs and dropped him on his head. Kakashi swallowed, too tired to pull a face at the taste of bile. "What'd y'do?"

Rin never slapped anyone. He'd known her five years and she'd never slapped him, even when he'd deserved it.

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Haruichi didn't much feel like confessing that he couldn't translocate to save his own life inside a building, not to mention the fact he didn't have the energy to try by this stage in the shenanigans. He felt even less like telling Kakashi how and why he'd earned a belt across the face from one of the most peaceable individuals the planet had ever known. Not least because if Rin-sensei had slapped him for it, he was more than sure Kakashi would find the motive to kill him.

"Ask Tsunade-sama if she ever comes back. I'm sure it's a tale she tells at parties." Haruichi replied shortly, but with no bite that his previous words had held, even though his cheeks went even redder. "And it's going to have to be carrying." With that he crouched down with bent knees and hauled Kakashi up much the same way he'd dragged him down in the first place, arms around his chest, back of his head against his breastbone, and started tugging him - bare, bruised heels dragging - down the stairwell. "This is going-" Breathe. Step. "-to be-" Breathe. Step. Step. "-absurdly sore-" Step. Step. Step. Breathe. Step. Step. "-and you deserve it."

Though Haruichi's focus was less on how un-fun it must be for Kakashi to be dragged with his heels thumping bruises upon bruises down the stairs and more on how much effort it was taking just to navigate the stairs backwards on the balls of his feet hefting a load like this. By the time they reached the Infirmary Haruichi was practically wobbly-kneed and the effort it took to elbow open the door, though his finest moment came when - upon levering Kakashi back onto the exam table at an entirely awkward angle he wound up slipping on a patient file he'd left on the floor and nearly fell on his face. Nearly, because he wound up catching himself on the exam table in possibly the most graceless save the world had ever seen. Haruichi yanked himself back up to his feet, hissing to himself about that, and got the IV into Kakashi's arm and taped it in this time and found the pillow for his grey-haired head again. "Go to sleep, Hatake," he muttered, too tired to think of much else to say.

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Haruichi was right about the absurdly sore. He was even, Kakashi conceded, probably right about the deserving it. That didn't make living through the experience of having bruises hammered into bruises and not being able to do anything about it any easier to take. Kakashi clenched his teeth hard enough to make his head ache, and forbid himself to whimper. He did swear quietly around the ninth step, and considered the possibility that he'd fractured both heels by the seventeenth, but he managed not to make a noise like a kicked dog, which was the thing that counted.

Kakashi might have been a genius, a ninja, a soldier, an ANBU, and the last survivor of far too many people, but he was also fifteen-years-old. Pride was not dead.

It did take another blow when Haruichi tossed him back on the table like a rag doll and put the damn needle back in his arm. But with the needle came painkillers that would make the world a little more liveable, and sedatives that would make sleep a little more survivable. Haruichi's semi-spectacular fall also prompted a half-smile to flicker over Kakashi's unmasked face for a second. For once it wasn't spiteful. It was just... funny.

Maybe the drugs were getting to him.

Kakashi exercised every scrap of willpower he had left and managed to turn on his side, putting his back to the wall and his face half into the pillow. If he opened his eyes he could see all of the medic bay. No one could sneak up on him. Not that he could do a great deal about it if they did, but at least he'd know about it. His new view gave Kakashi a fairly decent look at Haruichi's face. The curse seal looked blistered, red raw and painful. Between that, the shadows under his eyes, and the parchment pallor of his skin, Haruichi looked years older then the boy Kakashi had met on the stairway.

Welcome to ANBU.

Kakashi didn't realize his eyes had flickered closed, nor did he realize he'd said the last thought out loud. The last thing he remembered before the black rose up and swallowed him whole was mumbling, "Y'u, too... medics need it more..."

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Oh, would that Haruichi was prone to moments of cammaraderie in the face of unimaginable oppressive odds and ungodly situations the likes of which his father's fathers had never imagined; Kakashi might have caught a break there and made a pal. But he wasn't. As Kakashi had so surely and glaringly confirmed there really was nobody left who gave a damn about him and Haruichi had decided upon his example that the only way he was going to keep his own sanity intact while he hid here (which might be for the rest of his life) was to not give these people an inch of slack. He wouldn't be able to psychologically bitchslap all of them to their senses, and it'd barely worked here even though it'd come at a price to himself. The fact was that whether he was proud of it or not, it had taken a blow to the head to get Kakashi back to the Infirmary, and if that was going to be a regular occurrance then Haruichi was going to have to silence his qualms and his memories. He'd do his job like any shinobi on a mission and that would be that. He would. He could.

Welcome to ANBU in-bloody-deed.

Haruichi pushed Kakashi onto his back once he was sure he was out, and straightened his arms. His feet would be sore, but fine, same with the large corner-shaped bruise on the side of his face. Not that Haruichi felt up to trying any more healing jutsu on him anyway. After getting a warm flannel and sticking it on Kakashi's bare forehead, Haruichi checked his IVs (the sedative in particular) and pulse one more time before closing the Infirmary door and going back to his paperwork.

He'd sleep later, there was work to do. Files to organize and read up on. Requsitions to draft. Floors to clean. People to save whether they liked it or not. That sort of stupid thing.

He'd get the hang of it. Or they'd get the hang on him.

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