Ryouma finished one kata and began another, and Kakashi didn't move. The sinking sun caught the red sweat-shirt draped over the wheelchair and the scarlet tattoo on Kakashi's arm and turned both to blood, and then to ashes. In the twilight Ryouma straightened, panting and damp with sweat, and watched Kakashi standing there. Bent head, blade-straight shoulders, one arm thrust out to brace against the weather-beaten Stone. His black shirt and trousers were already beginning to fade into the long dusk-darkened shadow of the Stone. When the rising moon slipped behind a cloud, even his hair lost its light.

Shouri, one of Ryouma's genin teammates, had liked ghost-stories. He'd always found something else to do while she was telling them, and now he remembered why.

Ninja lived too close to the dead already, and Kakashi lived closer than any of them. Even when he wasn't fresh off a mission from which he'd failed to bring someone home, he seemed to spend half his time with the ghosts of memories, waiting to add one more name to the tally. Waiting to join them himself.

Ryouma took two steps closer, caught himself, and watched.

At last Kakashi seemed to waver; he took a very careful step back, reached for the wheelchair, and lowered himself slowly down. Did that mean he was done? Holler, Ryouma'd said, but he wasn't sure he could imagine Kakashi hollering anything. Even in the heat of battle or emotion his voice went hard instead of loud. And he didn't yell now, either--but he did slouch back in the chair and tip his head back, glaring up at the sky. Ryouma couldn't hear the sharp, frustrated breath, but it wasn't hard to imagine.

That was probably good enough. Ryouma wandered back, stopping once to retrieve a half-buried kunai some genin had left behind. When he reached the Stone, he crouched down and sank the kunai to the hilt in the thick grass springing up at the memorial's base. His fingers found one name, at shoulder-height; another, eleven years later; a few more further down. Misao's name wasn't here, of course. She'd died on a mission, but not honorably, not in combat. He was still sometimes surprised that his mother's was.

"You said what you need to?" he asked. He glanced over his shoulder to find Kakashi's face. For a moment, between black mask and shrouding hair, he almost couldn't.