| [Sep. 24th, 2013|10:05 pm] |
Every time Kakashi left, he came back looking worse.
“I’ll be right there,” Raidou said, tucking the rat-bar into his belt. He dropped a hand on the radio controller’s shoulder. “Thanks for your help, Amaya-san.”
She smiled at him, and touched two fingers to her temple. “My pleasure, ANBU-san. I’ll keep an eye on the frequencies, in case you get anything back.”
Probably not for the few hours it’d take to relay and decode that message, but then, hopefully, help would come.
“Thank you,” he said again, and tipped his head at the mayor. “The two villagers we brought back are probably desperate to see their families, and vice versa.”
With only one doctor and one assistant in the clinic, it wouldn’t hurt to get a few extra pairs of hands about, either.
“I’ll identify them,” the mayor, Kudo Nobuyaki, said.
Raidou nodded at Kakashi. “Lead on.”
Outside, the press of desperate civilians was claustrophobic, and eerily silent until they saw the mayor. Then the questions started.
“Kudo-san, did they find my son?”
“My daughter was only taken a week ago! Did they bring her back?”
“Was it bandits?”
“What kind of bandits could injure shinobi like that?”
“Was it enemy ninja?”
The last question was a woman, who almost screamed it, and Raidou almost couldn’t blame her. The war was five years over, but this village was right on the border. They would have seen fighting. They’d probably been raided for supplies.
“Please!” Kudo shouted, raising his hands. “Please be calm!”
“My wife!” A man rushed forward and tried to grab Kakashi. “Tell me what happened to my wife!”
Blue-white sparks crackled over Kakashi’s skin. The man yelped and fell back, which did not help the mood of the crowd. Raidou grabbed Kakashi’s shoulder warningly, squeezing hard.
“It wasn’t enemy ninja,” he said loudly. “It was an animal threat, which has been dealt with.”
“Bullshit,” snapped a woman. “What kind of animals could do that to ninja?”
Kakashi muttered something under his breath which sounded a lot like really big bees. Raidou gave him a tiny shake.
“The captain will explain when he’s had a chance to tend to his people,” Kudo said. “There are two of our own in there. They are—the captain has told me—” His voice cracked, then strengthened. “They are the only two who could be saved. As soon as I know their names, I will come back to inform you.”
Hope or despair cracked more than one civilian; faces crumpled in the flickering lantern light. Family members clutched each other tightly, and the man who’d grabbed Kakashi broke down into hoarse, wordless sobs. A young boy crouched down next to him, eyes dry, and put a hand on his arm.
The girl they’d brought back wasn’t old enough to be anyone’s wife, or mother.
I’m sorry, Raidou wanted to say, but he’d be saying it for days, and he still had his own people to worry about.
He put a hand between Kakashi’s frozen shoulder blades and pushed him forward, through a crowd that fell back and parted. At the door of the clinic, two clones stepped aside—Kakashi and Genma’s, left over from the mission start. Raidou and Ryouma each had one somewhere in the village, and Katsuko had ten more, orbiting like satellites. They’d all vanish by the next morning, but for now they were a useful reassurance.
The clinic was in better shape than he’d expected, given Genma’s urgent-sounding message. Katsuko and Ryouma were both clean, judging by the wet hair, and bundled together into one narrow bed piled high with blankets. The civilians had a bed apiece, and were being checked by the medic’s assistant, who looked up in faint alarm at the mayor.
Genma also had his own bed, and a lot more naked skin than anyone else. He’d been stripped to the waist, though his ANBU mask was still in place. Thick, clean bandages wrapped around his stomach, strapped over a broad pad of gauze that hopefully covered sutures. His left, stinger-lacerated shoulder was also freshly bandaged. The medic was halfway through piecing together the ragged flaps of bitten skin on his right shoulder, in what looked like the world’s least fun jigsaw puzzle.
At Raidou’s back, Kudo swallowed hard. |
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