Ginta went under like a dream, no fight at all, and for five blood-pounding seconds Kakashi was blind.

It was just a headache, but it felt like a spike between his eyes, hollowing out his skull. He breathed raggedly until it faded back to merely agonizing, and set about putting Ginta’s face back together. A blood pill under Ginta’s tongue first, left to dissolve where it wouldn’t choke the man. The cut on Ginta’s cheek was next; it was deep and ragged, coated in rock dust and crusted with tacky blood. He cleaned it ruthlessly and tacked the flesh back together with rough field stitches. A taped square of gauze covered the damage.

The nose wasn’t too bad. If it had been displaced Ginta had already re-set it, and he’d managed pretty well. A medic would be able to fix it properly if Pakkun ever came through.

The left eye was more worrying. Blackly swollen and half-closed, it spoke to a cracked eye-socket or smashed cheekbone, and Kakashi had no cure for that.

He left it and moved onto the lower half of Ginta’s face, cleaning away as much of the crusted gore as possible. Ginta’s mouth was smashed and split, but not badly enough to justify stitches; he’d managed to escape losing any teeth. With the blood cleaned off and the tear tracks gone, he looked almost human again. More like himself, albeit after going five rounds with a prize-fighter.

Kakashi checked his arms and legs and neck more out of habit than true belief that Ginta had broken something and failed to mention it. Ginta was bruised all over, just as Kakashi was, but they’d both managed to come through things remarkably unscathed.

Which made two out of three, and Ryouma still dead.

He pushed himself back, bracing his back against the jagged wall and the slope of the roof, and touched his head gingerly. There was a rough bandage stiffened with dried blood, and a raw point of pain squarely above his temple. The same damn blind spot that had killed Obito, seven years ago, when Kakashi had failed to dodge a landslide then too.

He left it alone.

In the quiet, Ginta’s air rasped, backed by the slow meditative sound of Baiji. breathing. When Kakashi stretched a sliver of his chakra out, he could feel the mastiff’s energy wound tightly into the ceiling, holding it together.

The dog stirred slightly at his touch.

Don’t translocate, Baiji rumbled. It makes the seals bite.

A second trap, then, built into the first to make sure that anyone caught really died.

Clever.

You smell terrible, Baiji added.

“Not my best day,” Kakashi muttered. “Whose chakra does that feel like to you?”

There was no word in canine for human names. The closest nickname the pack had for Ryouma translated roughly to dragon-man; Kakashi didn’t know if that was for the destroyed tattoo, or the first kanji of Ryouma’s name, or both. He’d never asked. It was likely Pakkun’s influence.

They called Ginta noisy-golden.

After he’d answered, Baiji settled back down, sinking once more into his patient trance.

Kakashi pressed one hand against the wall, feeling the broken shreds of a jutsu that was still active enough to kill them all. Ryouma’s chakra. Ryouma’s trap. This was why the search teams had never checked the bunker; they probably hadn’t expected it to be still standing.

“I think this is officially my worst rescue,” Kakashi said quietly, because it was joke or scream, and if he screamed he’d lose his hold on the genjutsu. He looked down at Ginta’s massacred face. “Your Intel skills could use some work, too.”

Ginta said nothing.

Kakashi held the genjutsu as long as he could stand, kneeling until his legs went numb, leaning against the wall that felt like familiar energy and promised nothing like it. When his headache had built itself past agony and into entirely new territory, he released the threads of the jutsu, riding out backlash of returning chakra, and closed the sharingan.

Ginta groaned and shifted.

Kakashi shoved him over and collapsed next to him, shattered tiles digging into the places where there was no armour to guard skin. He didn’t much care.

“Think I’m ready for that morphine, now,” he managed.