Shock and stiffening muscles slowed her down. She hadn't expected him to crawl into the shelter just after announcing he wanted a cigarette break, any more than she'd expected him to crack a joke and collapse. He was face-down on the end of her bedroll before she got to him, and his breathing was slow and shallow. His left hand, flung free as he fell, glistened scarlet in her sharpened sight.

She should have thought. He'd been moving all right, steadier on his feet than she was; but pride and will-power could drive any man beyond his limit, and Asuma had plenty of both. Even so, he'd managed to do his part. Now it was up to Natsumi to do hers.

Setting her teeth, she hooked a hand and a half under the ragged straps of his chestplate and dragged him onto the bedroll she'd already spread out over a pine-needle mattress. A moment's pause, then, to drag her own clean shirt on; no time or bandages to waste with binding. She dragged the ancient sword free, wrestled him out of his armor, stared in dismay at the clinging, wet shirt beneath, and reached for a kunai.

One clean cut down the center of his chest didn't even raise the thinnest of red lines on winter-tanned skin. Natsumi peeled him carefully out of the sodden shirt and lapped the edges of the blankets over his goose-pimpled shoulders. The long gash curving around his left side was easy enough to see, now, with blood still oozing dark and hot between the raw lips of the wound. Natsumi scrambled for gauze pads, antibiotic cream, a long roll of bandages to wrap tightly around his belly. Her right hand was shaking again; her left was almost unnaturally still. He was so pale, beneath the tan...

But his heartbeat was still slow and steady when she finished the bandaging and set a red-streaked hand against his throat. Her own calmed a little. She took a long, deep breath for what seemed like the first time since the river, and rocked back on her heels. Bleeding stanched. What was next?

Her own shivering reminded her. Incipient hypothermia, right. She had dry trousers; he had, well, the blankets. Changing one-handed in a narrow space was still horribly awkward, but she managed it with a minimum of wiggling. Asuma didn't move, even when she accidentally kicked him. Even when she buttoned the waistband of her own pants, and reached for his.

This was another of those stories she was never going to tell. She tried to be quick, efficient, as brusque and professional as the most experienced medics. The broken fingers hampered that effort. She bumped her knuckles against his hip-bone and lost an agonized minute curled up around her hand, biting back whimpering tears.

Praying for strength seemed a little ungrateful, at this point. How much had she been given already?

Somehow she managed to finish the job, to check his bandages again and re-wrap him in the heavy wool blanket. Curling up beside him and letting the world fade away seemed impossibly enticing. She checked his heartbeat again, instead, and scrabbled for her med-kit for blood pills.