| Welcome to My Morning [Ginta, Ryouma, Kakashi] | [Aug. 29th, 2009|02:08 pm] |
[Takes place late morning on April 5th, almost a week after All We Know is Distance.]
A week in the hospital was enough to drive even the calmest man to extreme measures. Or at least that was Ginta's thinking. When they finally allowed him up from his bed, five days in, he immediately started making boredom contingency plans. Many of them, in fact most of them, involved finagling himself into a wheelchair and over to Kakashi's room with a deck of cards and a couple of cans of apple juice, to help Ryouma keep watch.
Shiratori had debriefed him and sworn that the docs said Kakashi was mending. The nurses and even his own doctor had said the same thing. Ryouma had gotten the same story, evidently. Chakra exhaustion and a soldier pill overdose were serious conditions, but they were known quantities. Kakashi would be in an uncomplicated coma for several days, and then he'd wake up. It had happened before, it would probably happen again. And it was happening now.
Patience, they said. Ironic that patient and patience were such similar words. Even his grandmother could get nothing more from the doctors. And, she'd told Ginta, she believed them. Of course Ginta believed them, too, at an intellectual level. Kakashi's vitals were stable, and his chakra readings were improving daily. Believing didn't make the wait any easier.
On the seventh day home, the fifth of April, at a little after ten in the morning, Ginta talked his nurse into helping him get set up in the wheelchair again. It meant hooking his IVs to the chair's pole, and carefully propping his haloed leg on an extended leg-rest, cushioned by an obscene number of pillows. It also meant a promise that she could find him in Kakashi's room if he wasn't in his own, but that was a promise Ginta was willing to make.
"I'll give you an hour, Ginta-kun," she told him. "But no wheelies, no trips down to the hospital cafeteria, and absolutely no trying to get up."
"What am I, five?" Ginta asked.
"Yes," she said. "I heard all about your accident in the hall last night from Akemi."
"It wasn't really an accident," he protested.
"So you meant to flip your chair?"
"I was testing its maneuverability."
"You were testing people's patience," she said with a mock scowl. "Go on then. Go cheat poor Ryouma-kun out of another day's pay."
"I don't cheat," Ginta insisted.
She handed him his cards. "I'll be by to check on you in an hour. If you get tired--"
"I know, I know. If I get tired, call for a nurse and get help getting back in bed. I am so sick of bed." If only it weren't a real possibility that at the end of that hour he'd be ready for bed, he'd have pouted. "You know, if you pushed me over there, I'd get less tired, right?"
She just laughed and started pushing. When they got to Kakashi's door, Ginta sat up a little straighter, started shuffling his deck of cards, and pulled up a smile.
"So are we playing something three handed today?" |
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