InsaneJournal

Fall to the Ground [Ginta & Kakashi]
[set roughly six hours following Hide from the Sound]

Sunlight slanted in through the window, golden and warm. Hot, in fact. Ginta floundered awake, drenched in sweat and so hot he could feel the air in every breath try to catch fire in his chest. For a moment he was back in that burning factory, with orange flames licking at his skin and chemical smoke searing his lungs. He choked and coughed, tensing up with a gasp, and finally broke the surface of consciousness.

Hot. Searingly hot. Burns pulled on his shoulders, and his right leg was a maddening blaze of crushed bone. But it was the left that had his attention now, a pounding inferno that kept time with his pulse, racing in waves from the deep furrow an arrow had dug. He reached gingerly under the blankets to brush the edge of a damp bandage, and felt bile surge in his throat before he quite realized it was pain that caused it.

His own breath rasped in his ears, purple-black blotted his vision. When it cleared, he lay still for several long minutes, trying to gather the strength to move. Hot. So hot. If only there were a breeze, but the air was stagnant, as if it were midsummer. He remembered missions to Suna, baking in the oven-like desert air. His tongue felt thick and dry in his mouth, and his hands swollen and clumsy. Every joint and muscle sapped by the heat.

Kakashi was there next to him still, asleep, or maybe dead. Ginta's eyes played tricks on him in the shimmering heat, casting a skeletal look to the masked face of his companion. There had been a dessicated body in the desert: a criminal sentenced to die, with his hands lopped off at the wrists, sent out into the unforgiving wind and sand. Ginta had been a chuunin then, barely fourteen. He remembered thinking the Kazekage was a merciless bastard Konoha should be careful of. A desert snake full of venom.

He coughed. Desert heat choked him. Kakashi's hands were still attached. "Get out of here," he murmured in a voice dry as a pyre. "Don't let them catch you."

Kakashi didn't stir.

His face was bone-white, his closed eye lost in the dark shadow of its socket.

Dead. He was dead, left to mummify by his enemies. They were both dead. One of the hells was a vast, trackless desert populated by demon centipedes and scorpions. Maybe it was scorpion venom that had killed them. Ginta pushed the blankets off his chest, shuddering and whimpering when the cloth piled up on his injured legs.

A scorpion had stung him, perhaps, or a centipede bitten his legs. He reached a hand out to touch Kakashi's shoulder, and was shocked to find living chakra under cool skin. Not bones. Not a mummy. His fingers tightened around Kakashi's arm.