He’d been silent too long. Kakashi was still leaning against the bed, still holding the back of Ryouma’s neck in one hand and bracing himself with the other, but his muscles had gone wire-tense beneath his milk-pale skin, and one sharp canine was pressing a deep dent into his lower lip. Ryouma couldn’t smell anxiety the way Kakashi could, but he could read the signs of it well enough. How much did it matter to Kakashi, that Ryouma not go back into ANBU without him?

“I signed up for ANBU ‘cause it seemed like the right place to be,” he said, haltingly. “Spent five years on the border, off and on, and it was either mind-numbing or deadly.” He pressed a hand against his stomach, over the long ridge of scar-tissue curving from ribcage to hipbone. “Closest I ever came to death was as a jounin, up in Lightning Country. Got a good view of my own guts then, and still stuck around for more. But half the time we were just the back-up, me and my team--they’d send a pair of ANBU out and wouldn’t even tell me what they were doing, just I was supposed to use my team however the ANBU said. Until the ANBU screwed up and we got busted saving him, which is why we trapped the hell out of that bunker and spent the next three months on the run. I figured after that, I wanted to know who I was killin’, and who was comin’ for me, and why.”

“You joined the wrong side of ANBU for that,” Kakashi said colorlessly. “Intel gets the details. Hunters get the orders.”

“Well, yeah, I figured that out. Maybe I should’ve gone for Hokage instead.” Ryouma’s mouth twisted wryly at the thought. He still wasn’t sure he’d made his point, or that he even had a point to make. Something about what ANBU meant to him, maybe, or that service in the regular shinobi corps had been just as dangerous, or perhaps even that he wasn’t always the one to make mistakes. But for once Kakashi wasn’t hearing what he meant. And Ryouma knew that this time, above all times, he needed to be clear.

“I don’t know what ANBU meant to you. An’ I didn’t have all that much time for it to mean something to me. I didn’t get the bad missions, the ones Ginta warned me about--all the guys I had to kill were bad guys, and mostly I killed ‘em. Most of the partners I paired I was proud to be with. I got hurt some, but I pulled through.”

He took a deep breath.

“But I don’t need it. Not like the way I need you.”