Raidou snorted and sat back to peel himself out of arm-guards, gloves, armor, and shirt. He folded them up fairly neatly and set them aside, moving with the slow care of a man whose bruises were starting to assert their dominance.

There was a spectacular one wrapping the left half of Raidou’s ribcage.

“Wow,” Genma said. “Good thing I didn’t put all my chakra into fixing your headache yet. Those feel broken to you? How’s your breathing?” If there were significant lung contusions, Raidou’d probably be coughing and breathless, but with minor damage, the adrenaline focus of managing a mission might have kept the impairment beneath his notice.

Raidou glanced down and raised a hand to give his ribs a thorough, professional mashing. “Just bruised, I think,” he said, pushing hard enough that if there weren’t fractures grating under the skin yet, there would be soon.

Genma cringed. “Try not to make it wor—”

“Maybe a crack?” Raidou said, ignoring Genma. He dropped his bandaged hands from the spreading bruise and held them out. “But I'd rather you look at my hands first.” There was a subtle tension in his voice, with good reason, Genma guessed. A ninja with crippled hands was looking at the end of his career.

He leaned forward, ignoring the throb in his thigh when he put even a little weight on the outstretched leg, and cast a first-level concussion-mending jutsu. When Raidou’s eyelids flickered and he took a slightly deeper breath, Genma let the jutsu drop.

Raidou yawned almost immediately. That was a good sign. As a field medic, Genma’d seen it often enough he’d learned to rely on it—when pain was relieved, the patient relaxed and often yawned without even realizing they’d done so.

“Feel better?” Genma asked, knowing the answer was yes.

“Mm,” Raidou said. “Thanks.”

“Good,” Genma said, pleased. “Hands?” He found his bandage scissors and started snipping the gauze and tape from Raidou’s left hand, finger by finger. When he got everything unwrapped, he took a minute to study the damage. Despite the thick scars from years of taijutsu toughening, every knuckle was flayed raw, and there were dark swellings over the heads of the metacarpals.

Genma raised his eyebrows. “Minimal cuts?”

“Minimal-ish?” Raidou offered guiltily.

“Let’s have the other one.” When Genma’d repeated the de-bandaging, he found Raidou’s right hand even worse than the left. “Ueno did a good job bandaging these,” he said. There was something whitish gleaming in one of the deeper lacerations. Genma frowned. “This looks like it’s down to bone.”

Raidou squinted at the injury in the dim light from the overhead bulb. “I don’t think that’s mine,” he admitted.

“Ah,” Genma said, nodding with a medic’s practiced reserve. “Well. That’s potentially both better and worse.” Better if it wasn’t Raidou’s own bones denuded of flesh. Worse if there were shards of infective material lodged deep in the wounds. “I need to irrigate and flush the wounds, debride them, get all the foreign matter out—it’s going to hurt. Do you want me to do a nerve block, or should I just give you something for pain before I start?”

Raidou shook his head with an irritated scowl. “Don't waste the chakra. I've taken painkillers. Just do whatever you need to.”

’Ask the captain,’ Ueno’s clone had said, when he’d asked if there was more to the story.

“Namiashi-taichou—” Genma started, and hesitated. It was hard to know your place on a new team. If it had been Hajime, Genma would have asked straight out. And he’d have known exactly what that grim, inward-focused expression on his captain’s face meant.

Katsuko’s clone came back at last, with its twin. “No radio,” one reported. The second craned its neck to look at the gory desecration of Raidou’s knuckles.

Genma swallowed a curse. “Go get me another IV setup,” he told the gawking one. Maybe it was his tone of voice, or maybe it was something in Raidou’s face, but this time it obeyed without hesitation.

“Figures,” Raidou muttered. He addressed the remaining clone. “Pick two more of your friends; I want three messages run out on foot. Uotani Temple, Akasugi Ridge, and Porei Cove are the closest safehouses, and I know the first two are definitely staffed. Porei was having turnover, but it's worth trying.”