For the first time in years, Raidou found himself losing track of time. There was no clock disgracing the pristine white walls of his sterilized room, no window to let him get a fix on the outside light, and the nurses would have rather stripped off and danced naked than put anything so potentially contaminating as a watch near a burns patient.

It was that more than anything that convinced him he was home. What was the point of trapping him in a genjustu if Sago was only going to torture him with neurotic medical staff and excruciatingly sporadic updates about his partner? There were much quicker ways to break a person.

Though, after the tenth hour of drifting in and out of drugged consciousness, waking to find no more news, sleeping just to dream of Genma's name on the stone, Raidou couldn't think of many.

The medics weren't stupid; they kept his wrists in padded cuffs, his ankles in foam-lined shackles, his blood full of morphine and carefully graded tranquilizers, trying to minimize pain and whatever damage they expected him to do after the thirtieth I'm sorry. We still don't know anything. It was its own kind of torture, but one he could almost understand.

Every few hours, a medic with scrolls and seals came in, dressed in sterile white from the neck down, and peeled away bandages to weave chakra through seared flesh. To scrub sloughing skin and weeping pus away, exposing deeper layers of red tissue. Twice the pain crested so high that Raidou passed straight out. Three times they held him down and drugged him unconscious. Once he managed to last through it, sweat-soaked and pale, half a breath from screaming himself silent, but awake.

It was, in a very small way, the only fight they let him have.

Sometimes, the green-eyed medic sat and talked to him. He couldn't see much of her behind the surgical mask and cap, the neck to ankle shrouding of achingly white clothes--just her eyes and a glimpse of red hair. It was from her that he finally found out what had happened. That Genma had translocated them (five miles, one handed; how?) and the safehouse ninja had brought them in. That Sago had been tracked down and slaughtered (he was dead; how could he be dead?), and a team dispatched to bring Yukaho and her kids home.

His right shoulderblade had been shattered, he learned. Cracks marbling out through the bone from the strike Sago had managed to get almost dead centre. It had been partially healed, his skin painted with an intricate web of seals that would promote natural healing to do the rest. Apparently it would leave the bone stronger, but for now it just ached.