It was a red cedar. Kakashi tilted his head back, studying the monolithic tree with its burnished copper bark and immense branches, leaf-studded in the middle months of Spring. The safehouse--revealed by the standard issue jutsu that all Konoha jounin used--had been half carved straight into living wood. Curving branches shrouded and shaded it, breaking up its unnatural shape, making it difficult to see even when you knew where to look.

It was about sixty feet up.

Kakashi was still tempted to kiss it.

Instead, he crouched down, dug his blood-stained hands into Shouma's knotted ruff, and leaned his forehead against the dog's. Shouma's panting breaths trickled through his mask, laden with the stench of meat. Kakashi was equally winded. He swept a shaking hand down Shouma's long spine.

"Good job," he rasped simply, and snapped the bond. Shouma vanished in a rippling shiver of fur and fallen leaves. Kakashi straightened up again.

The clone tipped its head, regarding him with one tireless grey eye. Ginta seemed barely sensate in its hold, one arm hanging loosely down. Kakashi caught the hand and lifted it back up, replacing it carefully on Ginta's chest. Then he nodded.

Without pause for the mimicry of breath, the clone leapt straight up. Ten feet vanished in the first flicker of movement, another five in the second. It settled into an easy, half-horizontal run, Ginta cradled against its chest, and sprinted the remaining distance. Kakashi watched until it vanished, disappearing through the door he'd unlocked, before he turned around.

The safehouse didn't stand in a clearing. Identical trees surrounded them, pressing the forest in close, blocking out the sky. Old traps, deactivated but maintained, called his attention by memory. There was a pattern to them; the same pattern used in at least a tenth of all safehouses. He pulled it directly from Obito's sharingan, and set to work.

Twenty minutes later, the land was a fortress, and Kakashi had used up more than half of his remaining chakra. Their remaining hawk had returned, settling down to roost in the one safe spot Kakashi pointed out to it. He hauled himself up the tree-trunk, climbing more than walking, and lost his grip near the top.

The clone caught him.

"Took care of Ginta," it murmured; Kakashi was too tired to focus on any information drifting between them. "That arrow wound's starting to turn nasty. I cleaned it and got more antibiotics in him. Re-bandaged everything else."

Kakashi nodded, muttered something incoherent, and pulled himself up with trembling arms. Braced on shaking legs. The clone hauled him up by the back of his armour and through the door.
He caught sight of Ginta laid out on a camp bed, wired up to an IV-line with two hanging bags--antibiotics? Fluids?--and bathed in a shaft of moonlight that turned his skin ice-blue. His eyes were open.

"Halfway home," Kakashi managed, staggering. "Y'should sleep." He twisted to glance back at the clone. "Watch. Wake me up--four hours."

His knees hit the floor halfway through the sentence. It was only the clone's lunging catch that stopped him cracking his head open on wooden planks.

Kakashi wasn't awake to thank it.