Despite himself, Genma watched. He watched the changes, the rerouting, the healing to those charted hands with a growing sense of disbelief. Disbelief guarding a tiny, newborn sprout of hope.

"You can... You can do that?" he asked, when the lines had stopped moving. "You think you can really do that?" He wanted to reach out and lay his shattered fingers over their painted counterparts. "Ito-sensei thinks he can... you can...?"

But he'd said he could, hadn't he? He'd told Genma, You're going to make it. And he wasn't the kind of man to give a patient false hope. He'd told Genma it would hurt, told him it would be a nearly impossible recovery. But he'd sworn it was possible.

"How long? And you can't.... You can't really..." He stared. Even the most broken nexus, a shattered scramble in his right palm that was an unending void of pain, was restored in that drawing.

For a moment, just a moment, he wanted to cry.