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Death and All His Friends [Jun. 9th, 2009|04:26 pm]
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[Set immediately after Fall to the Ground]

They had almost fifteen minutes' warning that there were two critically injured shinobi on the way in. Fifteen minutes, plus the ninja's registration numbers, so there was already blood typed and crossed and ready to hand. O-pos for one, B-pos for the other, eight units of each, almost enough to replace every red cell in their bodies. They had time to send for a chakra specialist, because the medics radioed in that one of the casualties had been poisoned with chakra pills. Technically an overdose, not a poisoning. And technically not even an overdose, so much as overuse. Massive overuse, combined with some kind of brutally draining jutsu.

They had time to bring in crash carts and chakra monitors. Time to order up pre-made seals for chakra support, sterilization of wounds, tissue repair. Time to set up the trauma room to receive two criticals, to assemble doctors and nurses and technicians. Time, even, for a grim faced agent from ANBU's mission control to arrive and set himself up in the corner of the room with recording devices.

Fifteen minutes after the call came in from the north gate, non-critical patients had been moved to side corridors, the man having a heart attack sent to ICU, the kid with asthma shunted off to pediatrics. There was a quiet anticipation, a nervousness underscored by the hum of fluorescent lights.

Sixteen minutes after the call came in, the silence broke in carefully choreographed chaos. They brought in a man who was more blood than skin. The chakra-pill overdose. It was a brutal secret they didn't talk about, that the pills that could keep a shinobi alive could also be the ones that killed him. Somewhere in the hospital's bowels, someone, some team, was still trying to create a soldier pill that didn't silently destroy clotting factors while it boosted life force. If a ninja took two or even three a day, over the course of a week-long mission, by the end of it he'd be covered in bruises, and every cut would bleed like a fountain. If he took six or seven in a day, just one day, he'd find his gums bleeding when he brushed his teeth, and tiny purple spots freckling his skin. He might see a pink tinge to his urine, blood staining his toilet paper. His nose might bleed after a sneeze. In either case, with rest and proper nutrition, he'd recover.

For a man to be hemorrhaging from every orifice, crashing near pulseless, bleeding from the IV sites they taped in place before the life-saving replacement could run in, like this one, he'd have to have taken a dozen pills or more in twenty-four hours.

He was lucky, this one. Five years prior, or ten, he'd have died. But medical advances meant they could replace clotting factors along with blood. Even without any chakra of his own to spare--and chakra-pill ODs never had their own chakra left to call upon--he could be saved. They stripped him, cutting clothing and armour off of him. The blood-drenched things landed in sodden piles on the tiled floor, a problem for housekeeping. They slapped seals on his bare skin at key meridians, at the direction of the Hyuuga chakra specialist. They poured fluids and painkillers and chakra into him, and blood. So much blood.

He convulsed and retched, vomiting it faster that they could pump it in, but a pair of gloved hands, glowing green and pressed to the man's forehead, stilled that. Stopped it. Stopped the twitching muscles and desperate groaning seizure. Other medics attached monitors, injected drugs, pressed on yet more seals.

There were supposed to be two.

They'd said to expect two.

At twenty-eight minutes after the call came in, the second team finally arrived. The second patient had been down, they said, since they'd reached him. He'd had a pulse, then lost it. They'd gotten it back. He'd crashed again. He had a hideously open fracture of the right tibia. He was septic as all hell, from a puncture wound to the left thigh. He'd been tortured, someone said.

It would probably have been a mercy to let him go.

Mercy wasn't what they were here for. They stripped him like his partner. They slapped seals on his body at different points, different seals. Seals to send oxygen to dying organs, force blood pressure to rise, and fever to plummet. They piled ice around his pale body, and poured fluids in through wide open IVs inserted directly into femoral arteries. They shocked his heart into trembling, then beating again.

He was young. At the peak of conditioning. They both were. They all were, the ones with red ink swirls marking their shoulders, darker than their blood.

He had a chance. Both ANBU had a chance. And the man in grey, recording it all, wouldn't have let the medics quit even if it had been hopeless.

***

Two hours after the call came in, the trauma bay was spotless. There were no crimson spatters, no piles of discarded clothing and blood-soaked bandages, no dropped syringes and empty vials. No patients. Just two gleaming metal-edged gurneys, a forest of unused IV stands, a phalanx of powered-down monitors.

The man in grey had had to call in a second, when the patients were split up, one sent to surgery, the other straight to ICU. The teams of doctors and technicians and nurses split, too, like a cell dividing. Some went with the OD patient, breaking the silence of the intensive care halls with softly beeping monitors and the shush of an infusion pump feeding blood and platelets into his veins.

Some went with the other case--the one the orthopedist and internist were fighting over custody of, arguing about whether his broken long bones or the infection raging in his bloodstream was the greater threat to his future.

The man in grey brought his cameras with him into the operating room. His counterpart monitored the ICU patient's installation in a glass-walled observation room. She had them bring her a comfortable chair, and settled in for a long, long wait.

Two hours later, the only sign left in the ER that anything unusual had happened, was the third ANBU agent, this one from Intel, whose job it was to be sure none of the staff who'd worked on those patients would reveal their identities to anyone outside the hospital.

***

Six hours after the call came in, the man in grey shook his dozing counterpart's arm. They had a hushed conversation over burnt coffee with artificial creamer. She showed him the OD patient's chart. He pointed to another observation room, where the sepsis patient was dwarfed by the sling and halo holding his broken leg in traction. They shared grim looks, exhausted faces.

The man had a folder, plain brown paperboard, edged in black. He flipped it open and pulled out three pages of Konoha's own ANBU Bingo Book. A photograph of the OD patient, stony-faced, staring unflinchingly at the camera with mismatched eyes, marked the corner of one. The sepsis patient grinned broadly from the second. On the third, a quiet-eyed woman with just a hint of a smile. The man shook his head. The woman reached into a bag of the OD patient's belongings and extracted a scroll, opening it to show five bloody fingerprints.

For a long moment they looked at the scroll and those ID pages together, and sipped their bitter coffee. Monitors beeped. A nurse whispered by on crepe-soled shoes, carrying a fresh unit of blood. B-positive. She slipped into the sepsis patient's room.

The man broke the silence, tapping a line on one of the dossiers. Notification, it was labeled. On two of the papers--the smiling man's and the woman's--it was filled in with a string of kanji. Family name, given name, address. On the third one, the odd-eyed man's, it was marked simply with the Hokage's seal. No family. No next-of-kin. No one who needed to know this man was here, had managed to cheat death, but the Hokage himself.

The man in grey frowned, and rubbed his forehead. He glanced up at the hallway, eyeing rooms across the hall from one another, holding his agents. The woman sighed and handed the papers back to the man. He sighed, too, and stood up, offering the woman a weary salute. Fingertips to an hidden spiral inked on his left upper arm. She mirrored the gesture, touching her right shoulder, and watched him leave to deliver his heavy news.
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