Kakashi had to stop and lean his shoulder against the wall, panting hard as he distantly regarded the remaining steps. They didn't seem quite so important now. Ryouma was good at doing that; he could make the world fade to a distant background with nothing but a word. Or a half-conscious speech.

"Pull your chakra back," he ordered, focusing on something he had an answer for. "I'm okay, you--" He snapped the reflex insult off before it made it past his teeth, and softened his voice. "I'm okay; I don't need it. And you're going to kill yourself trying to make a few scrapes feel better."

For a moment, nothing happened. Kakashi waited the three long heartbeats it normally took for Ryouma to swallow his pride over a command he didn't have to follow, and then bit down a hiss when the ice-jutsu melted away. His shoulders burned.

He made himself focus on other things; he didn't have a lot of chakra left, especially not after the sharinagan's attempts to rip half of it away, but he had far more than Ryouma did. He forced a little to collect in his left hand, pooling under the skin, and let it seep into Ryouma's leg, reinforcing the energy-brace the man had wrapped around his injured knee.

Then he started to walk again.

By the time he made it to the last set of steps, he still hadn't worked out what to say. There was some kind of universal irony at work, he was sure. Only Ryouma would need to be carried back from his attempt to yank someone out of their own red slice of personal horror.

"I'm not going to leave you," he muttered finally, made honest by the new twist to the old ache in his chest. "Not after I've put all this effort into keeping you in one piece. I was... I was waiting until you actually scraped up some common sense and got shot of me. Only a complete masochist puts up with this sort of hassle, you know..."

He grunted and staggered down the last four steps. Ryouma's arms stayed firmly around his neck, broad hands spread over sharp collarbones.

"And unless you plan on chatting to a gravestone, you'll never meet my family. Not that I'm a girl," he added belatedly, and made a determined effort to reach the hallway door. "Now don't you dare pass out before I find a nurse to yell at us both."