Kimura-sensei was an older gentleman with grandfatherly hands, warm chakra, and a vicious lack of mercy.

"Gah-ah-ow," Raidou said, as his internal cartography was restructured with painful, precise efficiency. Genma had healed the surface injuries, layering new skin over deeper damage, which had done an excellent job of keeping Raidou’s blood where it was supposed to be, and not letting raw muscle flap all over the landscape. But the underneath was, in Kimura’s words, a godawful disaster, what the hell did you run into, idiot knothead?

Medics never appreciated taijutsu fighters.

"Really big claws?" Raidou suggested, which earned him a whack on the back of the head, in the name of decent bedside manners.

It was harder to trance out under Kimura’s hands. Where Genma’s chakra had cajoled, piecing Raidou back together piece by careful piece, Kimura’s demanded. The end result was prettier, but the ride was much less fun.

"Done!" Kimura said, after a geologic age. He slapped Raidou on the back of one bare thigh. "You can put your clothes on again."

"Hnk," Raidou told the sweat-dappled bench he was lying on. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Thanks."

Kimura waved him off, already moving onto the next patient. For a mid-week afternoon, the hospital was surprisingly busy. Every nurse was harried, and every medic had hollow shadows beneath their eyes. The second Raidou had scraped himself upright and poured himself back into his jeans, someone was wiping down his bench and installing another patient on it.

The capitol must have taken some hard knocks, to send casualties here.

He grabbed his shirt, accepted paperwork (always paperwork) and a paper cup of water from a nurse, along with instructions to drink more, and made his escape. It took a second to catch his stride again; his muscles felt like sun-hammered taffy, and his chakra had been put through the wringer. But when he did, it was easier going. No more bandages, and no more bone-deep catch of a body that didn’t quite want to move right.

Time to find Katsuko again.

The hospital was fringed with chakra dampers, dulling the constant nerve-prickle of jutsu that even he could feel. It even managed to dampen Katsuko’s massive chakra, but her ANBU spark was there. A constant little beacon against the edge of his senses, subtly different than anyone else’s. He followed it up two flights of stairs, limping when his right thigh decided to cramp, and into a back-set wing of special offices, where Konoha devoted a small but significant fraction of its medical resources to the care of unique bloodlines, unusual injuries, and heavy chakra damage.

The gentle sound of swearing filtered down the hallway. Raidou set that as his north star, and followed it to the source.

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"—toe-licking, piss-shitting, goat rotted—hi, taichou—mouth-breathing—" Katsuko was saying, when he opened the glass-plated office door. Chakra shifted, and, very quietly, bone gave the crunch of rapid re-healing. "Mother—"

Raidou raised both eyebrows.

"—hugger," Katsuko finished.

"You only just got to the collarbone?" he asked.

Ryouri-sensei came around the exam table, flicking her long purple braid back over one shoulder. "Had to make sure the chakra was in order first," she said. "Namiashi, you look like hell."

Raidou tipped his chin down. Even in solid-heeled boots that gave her an extra two inches, Ryouri only came up to his mid-chest. Despite that, she was square in the shoulders, powerfully built for a tiny-framed woman. Two green arrowheads marked her left cheek, legacy of her clan. Her white labcoat draped across the back of her desk chair, discarded. Just like every other time he’d seen her, she was wearing plain jounin blues, no vest, and an expression of slightly acid judgement.

And then there was the sixth finger on each hand, because every doctor on this floor had some kind of inherited weirdness.

"Rough week," Raidou said dryly, and nodded at Katsuko. "How’s the patient?"

"Less than patient," Ryouri said, to Katsuko’s visible eyeroll. "The collarbone’s knitting. I was going to work on the cuts next—which, what the hell, did you drag her through a hedge with teeth?"

"Yes," Katsuko said. "Angry, vengeful hedges."

"It’s a surprisingly common problem," Raidou said.

"I’m sure," Ryouri said, and turned away, putting her hands back on Katsuko. Healing green chakra rose like a veil across scar-cut skin. The bandages had already been removed, and Katsuko’s jounin shirt was off and folded up, held against her stomach; Raidou watched as scabbed wounds drew together, skin bonding until there was nothing but raised, reddened lines. Only specialized medics could heal without leaving scars, and only for agents who exclusively served in infiltration and espionage. Regular shinobi lived with their marks, and were thankful they weren’t worse.

Or celebrated them, depending on the ninja.

"I could do a better job if these weren’t old," Ryouri said, sounding annoyed. She poked Katsuko in the shoulder, where demon teeth had left a half-moon circle of notches carved over the unbroken clavicle.

Katsuko hissed. "Watch your nails, evil woman."

Ryouri hissed back, longer and louder, and exacted revenge by healing the thin slice across the side of Katsuko’s throat. Then the mostly-healed gash on her forehead, and a ragged wound on Katsuko’s outer left thigh, where a serrated demon leg had slashed her. A half-dozen other cuts, scrapes, and lesser injuries were attended, while Katsuko focused on the opposite wall and visibly counted seconds. The long, messy injury down the outside of her right arm was the last thing to go.

"There," Ryouri said, sitting back and getting her breath. Small beads of sweat caught the light at her temples; it wasn’t easy to dance with Katsuko’s chakra, or force it to bend inwards for healing.

Katsuko let out a shallow breath, then scrambled back into her shirt, dragging it on so quickly that she got it backwards and had to stop, pull it off, and try again. "Thanks, sensei," she said, muffled through cloth.

"Welcome," said Ryouri.

Raidou kept his eyes at face level, not on the sweeping, netted hack-job of scars that criss-crossed Katsuko’s lean stomach. He’d seen them before; quick glimpses when her shirt rode up in training, and the two memorable times she’d suffered catastrophic uniform failure in the field, but mostly she was careful to keep them hidden. She finished pulling her shirt down to her hips and immediately crossed her arms low, layering an extra shield over rumpled blue cloth. Her eyes ticked away, not quite landing on Raidou or Ryouri.

Fourteen, her file had said. The parts of it he could read past heavy censorship. She’d been fourteen when some lunatic with a scalpel had sliced her apart and played medical hopscotch with her insides. Which still made her an adult, according to shinobi law. You were an adult the moment you graduated and accepted the hitai-ate, and everything that went with it, but—

A very small adult, in a much bigger world.

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