Kakashi's mouth pulled into a tight line behind his mask, Yamato's words managing to saunter past every barracade and wall he'd placed around his heart and it's weaknesses. The things Yamato said hit him hard - so hard in fact that he almost found it difficult to breathe as he stared back into those large, dark eyes. He was right, of course; that Kakashi hadn't noticed how close he was letting Tenzou get until it was too late to back-track... and now Kakashi wondered how he'd ever spent five years treating the other man to nothing but radio silence. Yamato was one of the few people Kakashi could be broken around, and one of the few people who could fix him again. Yamato knew things about Kakashi's psyche that no-one else did, just as Kakashi had seen similar moments of raw vulnerability in him. There was something comforting about that, though he couldn't quite place why.

He nodded his head, pressed his covered mouth to Yamato's open palm in the ghost of a kiss, and let out a heavy exhale that seemed to unwind the tenseness to Kakashi's frame.

"I'm sorry," he muttered, softly. "I wanted to avoid hurting you by disappearing, but.. I know that's not the way it works. It won't happen again."

He let that small moment of quiet spiral, and then suddenly opened his good eye and shifted back into a sitting position.

"And for making this about me.." he added gingerly, with an awkward laugh as his hand furtively tucked his mask a little better over his nose, the fabric masking a little dusting of pink creeping up from behind the fabric. "My bad..."