Kakashi woke up with a hand pressed flat against the base of his throat, work-roughened skin rasping the strip of flesh left bare between mask and shirt. Bright new chakra singing through his coils.

He stifled a gasping breath and snapped his hand up, catching a wrist. Gripped it tight, nails searching for a place to dig in between ropey tendons, where crucial pressure points lay. A second surge of chakra made his head spin; someone peeled his fingers away.

There were words. Sieved through the jangling white noise in his skull, they sounded like: --el-ome --ack--.

He grabbed with his other hand, and someone caught that, too. There was movement, noise, overwhelming pressure in the back of his skull, (pain), then everything reshaped itself around the heavy, wild-musk smell of fur and threat and dog-stress, and the needlepoint scratch of sharp teeth grazing his forearm.

He stilled. In the time it took to wrench unwilling eyes open (someone had thoughtfully wrapped a bandage around Obito's), the hand left his throat and a heavy weight landed against his side, pressed up tight against his ribs. He couldn't touch it, not with people holding his hands captive, but he didn't need to.

"Hey, beautiful." It was a croak, broken halfway through into real words. He tipped his head down to look at her, whole and breathing and healed-looking, and relaxed like a dam breaking. To his right, the white-hatted medic made a quiet noise, like a grudging sigh. To his left, there was silence. The thundery kind, filled with the promise of coming words. Kakashi hitched half a smile behind his mask, looking down at living brown eyes. "How much trouble are we in?"