| [May. 22nd, 2014|05:21 am] |
And Genma looked worse. The lieutenant swayed once on his folding chair, grey-faced, nearly pitching off. Raidou snapped out a hand and steadied him, jaw clenching when he found Genma’s chakra burned down to a simmer. Not dangerously low, not yet, but getting close.
“Hang on,” Raidou said, as Genma blinked hazily through blackening eyes. He’d healed Raidou’s damn tongue, but he hadn’t bothered with his own broken nose yet.
“Mm-hm,” Genma managed, faintly breathless.
Raidou cracked a second soldier pill between his teeth. Salt-and-steel flooded his mouth, followed closely by the hot chakra slap. He waited just long enough for the energy to hit his coils, then laid a hand over Genma’s cold forehead. A forehead-to-forehead transfer was useful for exchanging chakra fast, but Genma was on the edge of his reserves and Raidou’s chakra control wasn’t exactly subtle; letting it trickle through a palm was better.
He pulled the energy up, focused it, and poured it carefully, carefully into the access point between Genma’s eyebrows, where Buddhists believed the third eye lived. Genma sighed softly, shoulders slumping. His eyes fluttered closed, dark lashes making an inky sweep against bruised, pale skin.
As Raidou kept the channel open, funneling chakra through as slowly as he could, Genma’s cheeks gained color. The paper-white lips pinked up, and his nail-beds lost a little of their faint bluish edge, fingertips warming. Chakra helped blood move, and Genma had given up too much of both.
A blood transfusion would help, but they weren’t exactly flush with sources. Raidou was AB-positive, Ryouma was B-positive: both poison to Genma’s A-positive. Kakashi and Katsuko were O-negative, universal donors, but Kakashi wasn’t in shape to donate anything, and Katsuko had broken bones and a chakra system that would gladly knock her flat if she used too many reserves—she was already struggling to eat enough.
Which left the Kiri-ninja.
If Genma got worse, Raidou would tap her for everything she had and lose no sleep over it.
But he didn’t think they were quite there yet. Genma had blood pills, food in his stomach, fresh chakra in his coils, and an IV spilling fluids into his veins. If he could hold on, it was safer than filling him up with unknown, risky blood. For now.
Genma opened his eyes; they were tired, but less dizzy. "Thanks, taichou,” he mumbled. “Didn't mean to drop myself so low. I misjudged that.”
“You wouldn’t be the first,” Raidou said. As far as he knew, even Konoha’s medical elite had a rich history of falling face-down on battlefields and in hospitals, and Genma wasn’t in their shiny echelons. It was just a hazard of the job.
“Yeah,” Genma said. “And I was just lecturing Tousaki about conserving his chakra—” He stopped mid-sentence. Then, with the particular skill that came from battle-experience and a lot of practice operating on vapors, snapped himself back together, eyes going sharp. “We need to talk about Tousaki.”
Raidou blinked. Ryouma was the least injured of anyone. “Why?”
“He wasn’t okay when we finished our mission,” Genma said. “I took the grandparents and the teens, but the teenage girl got away from me. Tousaki and Hatake had to deal with her.”
Ah, Raidou thought.
“Hatake handled it well enough, but Tousaki’s never had a mission like this,” Genma continued, clearly determined to get his full report out before he fell over. “I was going to talk to him on the run back here, but we picked up the Kiri ninja’s signatures before we’d even left city limits. I never got the chance.”
That was ANBU missions for you—always ready to deal more harm before you’d recovered from the last piece.
“Not okay how?” Raidou asked.
“Unsettled? Unhappy?” Genma said, with the grimace of a man who wanted better words. He straightened his face out immediately; that’d probably jarred his nose. “He barely spoke in complete sentences in the immediate aftermath, and his energy was off. If I had to guess, it didn’t sit well with him having to kill two—no, three—defenseless civilians, no matter how corrupt they were. Especially the daughter. She was just collateral.” His eyes dropped to the ground. “I’m sorry I let her get past me. She had a tanto we didn’t know about; she got my clone with it.” |
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