"Ah," said Kakashi, almost sub-vocally, as if that explained something. Because it did. More than one thing, even, because no one had the kind of drive Ginta embodied unless they came from a background with a missing piece. Like a missing father.

Or mother, Kakashi thought, with a twinge of something he couldn't identify.

Ginta had sprung from a teenage mother, a lost father, and a family that had shunned them both. But somewhere along the way he'd been welcomed back -- almost welcomed, anyway, judging by his grandmother's fierce love and even fiercer condemnation. Was he the only grandchild? Kakashi would have bet a year's wage on it. It was amazing the kind of compromises a family could make when they realized you'd be the only one left.

Or the kind of disappointment they'd face, if you refused to settle down and have children.

"Your grandmother must have had a fit when you joined ANBU," he murmured, resting an elbow on one knee and cupping his chin in his hand. Fingers spreading wide over masked lips.

"She knew from the time I was a chuunin that that's where it was going. Because of Grandfather," Ginta said, with his eyes fixed somewhere in the middle-distance. Detached unhappiness flattened the usual curve of his mouth. "Anyway, when I joined up, it was right after I..." Silence stretched out, so long Kakashi thought about filling it. Then Ginta drew a breath. "I separated from a lover she didn't approve of. She probably hoped ANBU would 'cure' me."

Behind a guard of black cloth and caged fingers, Kakashi's mouth cut a dry, brief smile. "Did it?"

"Cured me of him." Ginta's laugh was sharp, his eyes were bleak.

One of those relationships, then. Probably with the kind of man Kakashi would have used cheerfully, painfully, for an hour and been grateful to never see again. Like most men.

He didn't share this thought. Or the sideways tagalong thought that Ryouma had never been that kind of man. They had no place here, in the complex, painful silence of this room. And they'd do nothing to ease the white-edged tension lining Ginta's jaw.

Kakashi leaned forward a little, still resting on his hand, and shared a point of connection instead. Despite how close it cut, and how much it still hurt.

"When I first met him, I wanted Minato-sensei to be my father, too." His smile was faint and crooked, balanced wrong. "Later I just wanted him to look at me like he looked at all those pretty women. But that didn't exactly work out."

He almost couldn't count the ways in which that hadn't worked out, beginning with a too-kind blue-eyed smile, a careful 'It wouldn't be right, Kakashi-kun', and ending with a body in the ground.

He let the memory slip through weary fingers. Looked at Ginta again, and tried to find something else worthy of saying. Something that was actually good, for once.

"If you're still looking for your father's identity, I know a few people in Intel who owe me a favour. Access to records, if nothing else." He waited until Ginta looked at him, all blue eyes and bone-white face, and added: "I'll trade you for that photograph."