InsaneJournal

After the Rain [Hiro, Genma, and Raidou]
[Takes place in the early morning of April 2nd, four days after Meet You on the Other Side and eight days after Dude, that was YOU?.]

It was two weeks later, on a different floor, but to Hiro the deja-vu felt palpable. Shiranui Genma, back in the hospital... And yet again, Hiro was walking down the white-walled hallways with a sheaf of papers--considerably thicker, this time--and a mission scroll.

This was actually his second attempt. The first time, he'd been intercepted by a hawk-faced woman who'd flashed her ANBU tattoo and credentials and told him in no uncertain terms to go home. Sato Kotoe, apparently, matching the face to the name heading his handful of reports--she was his superior both in general and on this case, and it had only taken a moment of meeting her eyes to read her clearly-projected implacability.

Hiro had nodded sharply, and left.

Now it was eight hours later, and Kotoe-san was nowhere in sight. But the desk-chuunin just waved him through, wide-eyed and a little bit shell-shocked, without any additional paperwork. Apparently, Hiro thought, she'd been by.

The wide ICU-wing thoroughfare was full to the brim, doctors and nurses silently rushing in both directions with white-knuckled fingers clutching medical records and distant eyes clearly focused somewhere else; Hiro neatly sidestepped out of the flow of traffic and leaned against the wall, out of the way. Room 408, Shiranui Genma, with Namiashi Raidou neatly penciled in below. Hiro activated his Byakugan with a twitch of chakra as natural as breathing, and refocused his gaze through the thin hospital door and into the room beyond.

There was a sink in the restroom across the hall. Avoiding collisions with a frantic nurse and two doctors who were outright running, Hiro barely made it.

Crisped and shining flesh, barely paved over by a layer of glowing seals and an oh-so-tenuous boundary of freshly-grown skin, but flayed open by his eyes to expose the raw ruin beneath. Chakra-splintered bones, forced together by a network of yet more spidery seals, visible in enough detail that he could count the fragments.

A piece of flesh hanging suspended from one arm, barely maintaining any resemblance to a hand at all--the fragments were too many to count.

Injury upon injury, each a carefully planted pickaxe driving its way deep into fault-lines that had been visible for the whole world to see: fresh searing burns cutting devastating swathes through already-rippled flesh; a delicate micro-architectural construction of bones and tendons and chakra channels, fragilely wound together and then smashed beyond any hope of recognition.

Leaning over the sink, rinsing out his mouth and holding sweat-damp hair back with one barely-steady hand, Hiro thought that--with Genma, at least--Psych had made a mistake. Nobody with that kind of target painted on them should have been assigned any task more sensitive than B-rank.

Still, all he could do right now was complete his own mission. One wind jutsu and a long gulp of water later, he stood in front of the same doorway and knocked.