| Lullaby for a Stormy Night [Ginta] |
[Jun. 12th, 2009|12:00 am] |
[Takes place approximately 4:00 AM on March 30th, immediately after Death and All His Friends]
The Sakamoto estate was quiet and dark. A nightingale sang in the garden, unheeded by all but the household cats. Suki, the head maid, was the one to answer the knock at the door, the one to usher the grey-uniformed man into the receiving room. The one to rouse Sakamoto Chihiro.
"I'm so sorry to wake you, Chihiro-sama," she whispered. She held a lantern for her mistress, who opened her eyes and sat stiffly up, clutching a rich, peach-colored silk duvet to her chest. "There is a man. Shiratori-san, from ANBU..." Suki looked away. "I've given him tea, mistress, and told him I would wake you."
"Shiratori-san," Chihiro echoed. It had been a long time since she'd been wakened in the darkest hours by this man. Not since Gousuke had been alive, and then the man had always been here to summon her husband, not her.
There was only one possible reason he was here now. She rose from her bed, took the dark blue, crested kimono Suki offered her, stood while Suki wound a pale green obi and a black cord around her waist, then reached for a comb and pulled her long silver hair into a bun. Suki knelt at her feet, buttoning white tabi at the ankles.
When she was composed, Chihiro nodded, and Suki led the way through the darkened halls, carrying the lantern. The sitting room was lit by two square paper lanterns that cast a warm yellow glow over new tatami. Shiratori knelt on a cushion, teacup at his side. He looked older and wearier than Chihiro remembered him. His hair was iron grey at the temples now, a match for his dress grey uniform. His face was lined, creased between his dark brows and around a thin mouth. But of course it had been nearly six years since he'd last been in this house.
Chihiro closed her eyes, smoothed her kimono, and steeled herself to hear that her grandson was dead.
Shiratori looked up sharply, then bowed low, when Suki's silent feet shuffled onto the tatami, followed by Chihiro's careful tread. "Sakamoto-sama," he said in a low voice. "Forgive the intrusion. I am..."
"Shiratori Shoun-san. It's been a long time." Chihiro folded herself onto another cushion slowly and carefully, sweeping her kimono skirts under her knees with a lifetime of grace. Suki brought an additional teacup on a wooden saucer, refilled Shiratori's, then her mistress's, and retreated to the far corner of the room.
"I apologize for the lateness of the hour, but we felt you would want to know right away. Your grandson, Sakamoto Ginta--"
Suki held her breath, watching Chihiro. Chihiro looked past Shiratori, fixing her eyes on a scroll painting of wisteria in the hall. It was one of Ginta's favorites. When he was a child, he'd loved the changing of household decoration with the seasons, and loved particularly the drooping purple blotches of ink blossoms on that scroll.
"--was gravely injured in the course of a mission. He is in Konoha Hospital, in intensive care--"
Chihiro's fingers on her teacup loosened so suddenly she nearly dropped it. Pale straw-colored tea sloshed over her age-gnarled knuckles and dripped onto the dark silk covering her kneeling thighs.
Suki's head snapped up. Chihiro locked eyes with her, not quite hearing Shiratori anymore.
"Sakamoto-sama," he said, calling her attention back.
"Ginta's alive?"
"Yes, but not out of danger. Not stable," Shiratori answered. He set his teacup down. "We felt it was better to notify the family immediately, under the circumstances."
"You'll take me to him." A command, not a question.
"Yes."
Chihiro rose. "Suki, my cloak." Suki was already retreating down the hall to fetch it.
***
The hospital lobby was nearly deserted at this hour. The elevator up to the fourth floor was empty. It opened into a sterile waiting room, with baby-blue vinyl couches and a tiled floor gone yellowish in the corners from uncountable waxings. A pair of masked ANBU stood guard outside double doors marked 'Authorized Personnel' and 'ID Required'. A woman sat at a desk next to them. All three snapped salutes as soon as they caught sight of Shiratori.
He saluted back.
"It's the same security protocol as last time?" Chihiro asked. "Ginta was here in December." And before that in July. Before that, April. Before that... It was probably bad karma to think of those other times. She offered her hand to the woman at the desk. "Right thumbprint, I believe."
"Yes, ma'am," the woman answered. She held up an ink pad that glistened like an oil slick, and buzzed under Chihiro's thumb when she touched its surface. Chakra-sensitive ink, they'd told her before. She pressed her inked thumb to the paper the woman held out, watching the print shimmer into the surface, then wrote her name beside the mark in careful, angular kanji. Stamped her seal in red next to that. The woman handed her a badge marked 'Visitor' and 'Escort Required'. In a blank rectangle below the print, the woman had written in five numbers: 10061.
Ginta's numbers.
For a moment, just a moment, Chihiro's breath caught in her throat.
There was only one set of numbers that meant more to her: 00016. Gousuke's. He'd called it propitious his grandson's registration number held the same digits as his own. Chihiro had called it a coincidence and sniffed. And never failed to think about it a single day since, when she looked at Gousuke's worn dog tags in the top drawer of her jewelry chest.
"You'll be escorting Sakamoto-san, sir?" the woman at the desk asked.
Shiratori nodded. The guards held the door open for them.
The first thing Chihiro noticed, as always, was the scent. A blend of alcohol, sickness, dust, and fear. A hospital smell. The corridor was lit with a dull fluorescent glow; the patient rooms on either side of the hallway were dark. A few doors stood ajar, revealing blanketed feet and quietly glowing medical equipment. Shiratori led her past it all, to a second set of guarded doors.
Chihiro's lips pressed into a firm line. ICU. ANBU's own, private ICU, separate from the general population. When Shiratori pushed the doors open, Chihiro hesitated, then stepped inside the cocoon within a cocoon.
There was a nurses' station in the center, with the rooms ringed around it like satellites. Glass-walled rooms, so no patient was ever hidden from their watchful gaze, though one of the rooms had curtains pulled. Two nurses and a doctor raced past, barely stopping to glance at them. Alarms shrilled from the room they disappeared into, and two more medics hurried in.
Shiratori led Chihiro past the room where someone was, presumably, dying. She tried not to dwell on it.
On the far side of the monitoring station, there was a short hallway. A woman in identical uniform to Shiratori's emerged from the glass-walled room on the right and hurried towards them. She stopped, saluted her colleague, and bowed to Chihiro. Chihiro returned the bow, and turned towards the room. The bed held a pale young man with almost white hair. A man Chihiro recognized. He looked dreadful: corpse pale, with bloodless, chapped lips, and dark hollows under his closed, scar-marked eyes. "Sakumo's son?"
"Yes," Shiratori said. "He was involved in Ginta-san's mission. He's also--"
"Where is Ginta?" Chihiro's head swiveled to the left, and her question was answered. Her grandson was there, in the opposite room. Unmoving. His left leg was suspended from a canvas sling, haloed in metal that pierced the flesh. Even at a distance and through glass, even with the lights dimmed in his chamber, she could see how ghastly the injury was.
She took a step towards his door.
"There's been no change in either of them," the woman said. She stood looking hesitantly at Shiratori and Chihiro. "Sakamoto-san is--"
Shiratori nodded. "Sakamoto-sama, Ginta-san--"
"I need to see my grandson," she said, pushing past him. "You can explain the medical details to me after I've seen him."
Ginta's face was almost as pale as his pillow, bruised and scabbed, with fever-flushed cheeks and cracked, blood-crusted lips. He'd always looked small to her, when he was asleep, but now he looked broken. Tiny. He was taller than she, and outweighed her by a good margin, but looking at him now, she wanted to take him in her arms and rock him as she'd done when he was a child.
"Ginta-chan," she crooned softly. She reached out a hand and brushed back his hair. Dirty hair, sticky with oil and grime. "Ginta-chan. What am I going to do with you?"
His skin was searing to her touch. The monitor above his bed silently blipped out a too-fast pulse, too-rapid breathing. It listed a blistering 39.7 for his body temperature, a blood pressure far too low. She eyed the IV pole with its dangling packets full of life-giving fluids: clear, and yellowish, and thick, opaque, liver-red.
"What am I going to tell your mother? What am I going to tell Suki?"
He was barely covered with a sheet. It fell away from his suspended right leg, slipped off his bare chest. She eyed seals painted over his heart and trailing down his bandaged right arm. Looked unflinchingly at the yellow-crusted linen that did little to hide the gruesome deformity of his broken leg. At a catheter tube draining deep amber urine into a bag suspended from the side of the bed. After a moment, she reached down and twitched the sheet higher, smoothing it over his shoulders.
He didn't stir.
Shiratori stood quietly behind her, waiting.
"Is there a prognosis?" she asked, looking up at him at last.
"He has a wound infection that's entered his bloodstream. If he survives that," Shiratori answered, meeting her gaze levelly, "and there are no other complications, then the outlook is guardedly good. The doctors said they believe the damage to his leg is entirely repairable."
"Meaning he'll be able to return to active duty?" Chihiro's words were emotionless. Brittle and distant as ice.
"Yes."
Chihiro didn't answer. She turned back to Ginta and brushed his hair back again. "You troublesome, troublesome child. You have too much of your grandfather in you." She reached into her sleeve and pulled out a small jar of ointment, dipped a finger into it, and smeared balm delicately over Ginta's lips.
Shiratori pushed a chair closer to Ginta's bed. "Would you prefer to sit, Sakamoto-sama? Perhaps a cup of tea?"
Chihiro gave him another cold look. "Thank you." The chair was a dingy yellow recliner, designed for a loved one keeping vigil. Every room in the ICU held one. It had been almost nine months since she'd been here last, sitting in the sticky late-July heat, watching her grandson's pale face for a sign of life. Nine months, not even a whole year. She brushed Ginta's hair back once more.
"Far too much of Gousuke in you, child."
***
Hours later, Chihiro was still in her chair. Nurses had come and gone. Doctors, too, including a thin-faced tall woman who'd explained all they were doing for Ginta. Her words had fallen shy of reassurance, but they'd held a ring of honesty. Shiratori had gone at last, leaving instructions that he was to be fetched at once when Ginta woke. One of the nurses had brought Chihiro a pastry and a cup of orange juice, and a blanket for her lap.
She was shocked to realize she'd dozed off, startled awake by some instinct, perhaps. When she looked over at Ginta, she found narrow slits of blue peering at her through his bruises.
"Grandma?" His voice was a scratchy whisper. Chihiro felt her heart falter. She rose to her feet, blanket slipping to the floor.
"Ginta." Her nostrils flared, her mouth thinned. She could feel tightness in her tear ducts. A tightness that betrayed her. Her hand reached out to touch her grandson's cheek.
He opened his eyes a little wider, took a shallow breath. "Where's Kakashi?"
Chihiro's hand stilled. Sakumo's son. Shiratori had said they'd been on the same mission. And it wasn't the first time. In December, when Ginta had come home from a mission burned in the face and wracked with pneumonia, he'd come back with Kakashi in nearly as bad a state. And now the Hatake boy was lying comatose across the hall.
"He's here," she said. "He's right across the hall." There were questions she couldn't ask. Questions he wouldn't answer even if she asked them: What happened to you? Why do you keep taking such risks? How is this possibly worth it? They were the same questions she'd learned over a lifetime together not to ask of Gousuke. The same questions she couldn't fathom how the men in her life could not be asking themselves.
Ginta's cold fingers wrapped shakily around her wrist. Hot cheeks, icy hands... The fever was coming down a little, the doctor had said, but it was too early to tell if the antibiotics were working.
"Is he okay?" Ginta asked. He sounded frightened, though his face held only weariness and pain.
"I'll find out," Chihiro told him. She didn't want to leave him, but they needed to know he was awake. And Ginta needed to know his mission partner was okay, if he was. If he wasn't, well... Chihiro hated these moments. Hated the times she'd had to sit next to Gousuke and tell him devastating news. She didn't want to relive it with Ginta.
A nurse peered in. "Sakamoto-san? Is everything alright? Oh! Ginta-san's awake!" She swept around past Chihiro to the other side of the bed. "Back with us, Ginta-san? How are you feeling?"
Ginta turned his head towards the nurse. "I..." His head swiveled back. "Grandmother, Kakashi. Please?"
He sounded like Gousuke. So much like Gousuke. She squeezed his hand, and stepped back. "I'll find out what I can."
Chihiro left Ginta in the nurse's care, and crossed the hall. The slim woman in a grey uniform, Shiratori's counterpart, was still there. She was reading a paperback, sitting in the visitor's chair in the Hatake boy's--Kakashi's--room. He looked unchanged. Silent and still, as dwarfed by his hospital bed as Ginta had been. He looked young, so painfully young. Younger than Sakumo had ever looked. His face was marred by scars: a long one bisecting his left eye, a smaller one skewing the corner of his mouth.
The woman from ANBU looked up. "Sakamoto-sama," she said quietly, bowing without rising. "Is Ginta-san--"
"He's awake. Barely," Chihiro told her. "He's asking about his partner. What can I tell him?"
"I'll send for Shiratori-san," the woman said, rising from her chair.
"I need to give him an answer," Chihiro insisted. "What can I tell him about Kakashi? Is he going to make it?"
The woman glanced at the unmoving patient in the bed, then back to Chihiro. Her face was unreadable. "We think so, yes."
"And that's all you can tell me?" Chihiro's words were icy.
"You are not family, Sakamoto-sama. And you are not cleared--"
"Is Ginta cleared?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Then go in there and tell my grandson what he needs to know." She drew herself up tall, fierce with dignity, a mother fighting for her child.
The woman nodded in something like a bow, and rose to her feet. "I'll have to ask you to remain in the hall a moment," she said, waiting to Chihiro to go.
Secrecy and protocol! As if she posed a threat to Sakumo's son. As if any of it mattered to her at all. She sniffed and gave Kakashi one lingering glance. Covered by blankets, pale and vulnerable, with the roots of his hair still tinged brick-red. Whose blood, she wondered, had stained him so?
"I will go and get a fresh cup of tea, so you may speak to my grandson without interference," she said. She strode to the end of the hall, turning left at its end, into the nurse's lounge, got herself yet another overbrewed cup of tea from their dispenser, and waited. She needed to let Yukari know her son was here. Needed to get word to Suki, who would be worried. Needed to cancel her appointments for the day.
She was tired. Her bones ached. And Ginta was down the hall with his bones shattered. She closed her eyes a moment, leaned against the window, and watched people walking on the hospital grounds four floors below.
When she returned to his room, the ANBU woman was gone, and the nurse had the curtain pulled. Chihiro stood uncertainly at the doorway. "May I enter?" she asked.
"I'm just changing Ginta-san's bandages, you might want to wait a moment more," the nurse answered. A scent of disinfectant and decay came from the room, and a soft, pained gasp. It tore at Chihiro's heart. When there was another low whimper, she hugged her arms to her chest and stalked away. There was nothing she could do. Nothing but look into the other room and watch Sakumo's son lie in a coma.
When the nurse finally came out again, Chihiro gave her a questioning look.
"He's a little uncomfortable, but I've given him a fresh dose of painkillers," the nurse said. "He's probably going to be getting sleepy from that, but he's awake for now. Go ahead and sit with him. Can I get you anything?"
A little uncomfortable. As if all that was wrong was that the sheets were wrinkled, or the room a bit too warm. She stood straighter, answered the nurse's question with a shake of her head, and went back in.
Ginta's eyes were closed again, but he opened them and turned his head towards her the moment she sat down. Bright blue eyes, glittery with fever and something else. "She said he's in a coma. Said he OD'd on soldier pills. Said he did it because he didn't think I could survive waiting for an evac team to get to us." His voice was dust dry.
"He's your friend?" Chihiro asked. Keep him talking. Let him talk it out. Gousuke had been the same way, in the immediate aftermath of a mission gone wrong. He'd needed to babble himself into silence.
"My friend," Ginta echoed uncertainly. "He shouldn't have... shouldn't have done that. But the doctor said it's a good thing he did. Said he was probably right."
Chihiro caught the inside of her lip against her teeth. The thin-faced woman had told her the same thing: that Ginta had made it to the hospital with scant margin. That they would certainly have lost him if he'd been any later. That, technically, for a few minutes, they had lost him. But he was a strong young man, a fighter.
She didn't want a fighter. She wanted a grandson.
"My partner, she didn't make it. Her sister was getting married next month. She didn't make it. I tried to save her, Grandma. I tried, and she didn't... She didn't make it." His voice cracked now, like a mirror dropped onto tiles.
He needed to babble it out. Drain it away, like the pus draining from his wounds. Chihiro steadied herself and reached out to take her grandson's hand in her own.
"Someone needs to tell her sister. Someone needs to tell..." His breath hitched. The fire in his eyes shimmered and threatened to spill. He turned his face away. "Someone needs to tell Ryouma. Kakashi shouldn't be alone."
Chihiro leaned in closer. Ginta's knuckles were scabbed, his fingernails dirty and cracked. There were burns on his arms, little blistered flecks. She stroked carefully around the damaged skin. He needed to talk until he couldn't talk any more.
"She was going to her sister's wedding. And he... He..."
"Hush, child. Hush. It will be alright," she said. She couldn't stand to let him hurt any longer.
His face turned back to meet hers, his cheeks were flushed under bruises. His eyes red-rimmed with exhaustion and fever. "Someone needs to tell Ryouma. Tousaki Ryouma. He's Kakashi's... Friend. His friend. He needs to know. He needs to be here."
Chihiro went still. Kakashi's friend. Like Tomoya had been Ginta's friend? Sakumo's son was... like her grandson?
"Please, Grandma. Please?" Ginta sounded four. He sounded forty. Sounded like Gousuke. Please, Chihiro, please? Get a message to Shibori's wife. She needs to be here for him.
"Hush, Ginta. Close your eyes." She brushed his sweat-damp hair back. "I'll tell him. I'll take your message."
Ginta's eyes closed. Moisture spattered his lashes. "He shouldn't have run so hard, Grandma," he whispered.
"Of course he should have," Chihiro told him. "You're his friend, aren't you? He did what he had to do." Sakumo's son had done what he had to do. She was grateful. "Sleep, child. Ginta-chan. It will be alright. Grandma's here."
Ginta finally relaxed. She felt the tension leave his fingers, heard his breathing fall into the cadence of sleep. Then she leaned her head back against the tall recliner, looked up at the ceiling, and silently wept. |
|
|
