Haruichi had no notion of how it had happened, but at some point in the past he had gotten it into his head that hospitals were safe places. It was ridiculous. He knew they were full of illness, and stress, and disaster; and he'd nearly died in the one he was running through right now more than once. Still, the sense remained preserved within him and he was hoping it made some difference to the serried ranks of his patients that had managed to get themselves housed in Konoha General while he'd been gone.

Four in particular were going to need all the safety they could get when he got his hands on them, and gods help the first one he came across. Haruichi might have had a black eye and a sprained wrist thanks to his mission conduct; but he wasn't stuck here like Ginta, Kakashi, Raidou and Genma. Haruichi still didn't know if all of them would ever be able to leave; or if they'd want to.

Ito-sensei's forced wryness as he'd pulled Haruichi aside and mentioned Genma's hands stung in the younger doctor's memory. Almost as badly as the words that had sealed the chakra surgeon's impromptu report: 'Don't worry like that, it can be fixed again and at least he's safe in hospital now.'

His feet stopped on their own, sneakers squeaking on the linoleum in the bowels of the rehab wards. Haruichi flitted his byakugan to life and searched towards the physiotherapy rooms for Genma, feeling a cold twist in his lungs when he had to acknowledge that the parched tangle of chakra paths near the end of the corridor was him. He stood there in the empty beige hall for a good few minutes, watching tiny traces of Genma's life flicker around his body with the same beat of a sick sparrow's heart. Work had been expertly, excruciatingly done on his hand - Haruichi could tell by the way the paths were almost too straight, forced into a textbook shape instead of the languid curves a lifetime's rapid and expert seal use had brought to them.

The familiar sense of anger, of outrage that this had happened to somebody on his watch, and especially somebody who had somehow deserved to be on his watch, knotted itself up and sank into Haruichi's stomach. He quietened his eyes, scowled at the floor, and then padded buisinesslike to the door in question.

He crossed his arms over the chest of his khaki vest and felt his fists tighten at the sight Genma's surface made. Oh gods. Safe in hospital didn't feel safe enough.

"I'm thinking of investing in those huge bubbles," he announced, watching Genma's attention divert from the machine prodding and prising his fingers. "You know, the ones you put children with no immune systems in so nothing can possibly hurt them. Or those gigantic hamsters they get in Rice Country so they can run around safely. Or jounin with no ability to stay out of trouble."

Haruichi had managed to arrive just as the machine began another round, sending tendrils of current onto Genma's healing thumb this time, lifting and flexing it a scant few degrees. Thank god. Thank god for the distraction, because even if Haruichi was just here to yell at him, it would take his mind. Off. ... That.

"Hi," he gasped, grimacing more than grinning. "You're one to talk. What happened to your eye? If you got your mask broken already, Quartermaster will take it out of your pay if you don't have a really good story for it."

Index finger lifted, flexed, stimulated. Then middle and ring, the ones Sago hadn't broken, but somehow the ring finger connected to that shattered metacarpal under the also-broken... Pinky. Fuck.

Haruichi was pissed. Right. Pissed Haruichi. Genma remembered to breathe.

"I have a good story, by the way. Want to hear it?"

"Oh absolutely," snapped Haruichi, keeping a level expression. "Make it a page-turner would you? Because if you broke your bones without a good story for it I'll have to dock your pay to cover my therapy fees." Sarcasm seeping through, he narrowed his eyes at Genma, straining the swollen muscle around the right one's socket before he realized.

Haruichi's level expression tilted briefly into a frown, then he turned and retrieved a chair from its place against a wall. It took effort, but he didn't flick his byakugan back to life so he could see the proof of life darting weakly through Genma's body.

He was going to have to trust that the idiot wasn't going to die just because he took his eyes off of him at some point; irregardless of what the present evidence said.

Four metal-capped chair legs clapped neatly against the floor as he set his seat down opposite Genma and the physiotherapy machine. Haruichi watched Genma rather than the probing, pulling assemblage of steel and wires; his anger and concern restrained, but likely so clear in his eyes that he suspected anyone looking would see right through them and just see blank whiteness.

Most anyone, at any rate. Haruichi let out a quiet sigh of air and sat straight in his chair, sprained wrist resting on his knee below the table's height and out of Genma's line of sight. His other arm rested on the flat table, fingers conscienciously tucked into a flat, loose fist under his palm. "I don't care about the story, Genma. I never do. How are you feeling?"

Even distracted by the machine's rhythmic torments, Genma caught the way Haruichi's expression subtly shifted from an angry scowl to a worried one. The way his voice lost its hard edge and gained a ragged tint of something weary. A year or so ago, Genma might have made a joke, teased Haruichi back to anger, because the idea of the acerbic medic showing genuine concern would have been alarming. But not now. Things were different now.

A near death and a year's exile for Haruichi, and his return to ANBU not as basement medic but as field operative, was part of it. So was that night nearly a month ago in Genma's apartment, when Genma had mopped up the mess seeing Hyuuga Hiro had made of Haruichi.

So was a mission so terrible Genma wouldn't have had the words to tell Haruichi the story, if Haruichi had really asked. A partner lying in a burn ward, frantic with flashbacks and dread. A panicked wake from a coma with only one thing sure: his closest friend was dead because he'd failed. The miracle of finding he was wrong. Grief for three dead genin and one dead jounin he hadn't even begun to mourn.

A kiss.

Somehow everything had changed. He felt older. Tireder. Like this was far more real than it ever had been before.

"I'm getting better," he told Haruichi quietly. "It looks bad, I know, but it was a lot worse a few days ago." Pain made him grit his teeth, as the chakra stimulation kicked in. He waited for it to pass, eyes locked onto Haruichi's milky irises. "I've had worse." Four years ago, when it had been both hands, and there had been no best friend and partner by his side. "Rai's had worse." In the war, as alone as Genma had been, handsome face forever disfigured before he'd even grown a full beard. "We're getting better."

Haruichi didn't miss that who they were talking about went from 'I' to 'we' in the half-gasped silences between Genma's words. His focus, however, remained on Genma and on keeping his own eyes steady and still.

"Take your time with it," Haruichi advised, somehow unrelieved to hear that Genma believed he was doing better. It likely had something to do with the way it reminded his medic that he had been absent while things had been worse than they were. "It's a substantial jump, moving from being sized for a toe-tag to being here."

The machine whirred, clicked, and began its routine again. Haruichi didn't have to take stock of anything to recognize this situation as an old routine for the pair of them either. How many times had Genma come back to HQ in bits? How many times had he never left the building to get himself into a state? Not as many as the others, but as with all the agents, Haruichi believed one time was too many.

Sometime later, staring sleeplessly out of the window at home, Haruichi would wonder if part of his anger at times like these came from the automatic revelation that he couldn't deal with it. Even if it was just as instantly smothered by the reality that he was there, and he'd be there again, and evidently he could cope with watching the others come back like this, or worse - it still seemed to happen. A jab of doubt, too deep inside for him to reach; just as he was too deep in with ANBU.

In that moment, though, he simply shephered Genma's brown eyes and what he could of the other man's attention to someplace else. Someplace familiar.

"Are you on solid food yet?" The state of his neck was ambivalent about that much, for certain. "Hoshi will want to sneak something edible in here for you."

"Depends on if you count mush as a solid," Genma said, leaping for the safe topic when Haruichi offered it. "I'm on the thick porridges and custards diet at the moment. I'd kind of kill for curry, or sukiyaki, or really anything I could chew. Of course Rai's on mush still, too. He lost a couple of molars, and it's still healing. Wouldn't want to taunt him eating something he can't."

His tongue ran along his teeth, stopping at the gap that had saved him and Raidou, at least in part. "I lost a tooth, too. My fake." He reached up with his right hand to pull his lip down, showing Haruichi the space where a bicuspid had once stood. "It was the one I had rigged with cytotoxic spores. You never liked it, I know. But if I hadn't had it, and used it..."

Another jolt from the machine, and a short, chesty cough interrupted him, but Haruichi's deepening scowl got him talking again. "I guess even with my immunity it did a little damage, but when you consider how potent that stuff is, I got off easy. Cough's just about gone, really. I think my last chest x-ray was clear. And Rai didn't inhale any at all."

He hunched his shoulders, an almost involuntary reaction to what the machine was doing. To the look Haruichi was still giving him.

"It bought us the room to fight back. To get away," he continued, low and serious. It was suddenly important, somehow, that Haruichi understand this. "As soon as I'm well enough to see the dentist, I'll get another one just like it."

Haruichi bit his tongue before he said something worse than what came out instead. "And as soon as you're well enough not to die because I did it, you'll get another clip around the ear." He didn't have to be a medic to be entirely horrified by that godawful death trap and every implication it held; and what tended to piss him off most was that Genma had medical responsibilities too - and relied upon it all the same.

Because Genma had other responsibilities, and they relied on him. Haruichi knew it, and still hated it. But now was not the time for this. He huffed out a tightly coiled sigh and reached up to push back some stray hair before carefully replacing his hand. "Suicide tooth aside, are there any other medical procedures you want explained or adjusted in the course of your care? Not that you can't get your own way in here if you try, but if you'd like to be spared the bother I can see what can be done for you and Namiashi."

"It's not a suicide tooth if you've got enough immunity," Genma insisted. They'd had this conversation before, when Genma had been working on developing a tolerance to that poison. When Haruichi had reluctantly agreed to supply sufficient antidote so long as Genma promised to stick to a very strict regimen of minuscule dose increases. They'd had the conversation, and Genma hadn't quite convinced Haruichi then that the risk was worth the benefit. But now...

"It saved our lives, Haruichi. Suicide was the last thing I was trying for."

Haruichi's look conveyed just how much he was holding back. And there was his offer. Not just for Genma, but for Raidou, too. For all that Genma trusted Ito-sensei, and the nurses and Raidou's doctors... Having Haruichi offer...

Genma took a slow breath. The machine clicked and whined and started work on a different set of motions. More circular this time, grating frozen joints back into flexibility. Genma's breath became an open-mouthed gasp, for just a second. Then a pant. A closed-eyed bout of deep concentration.

"Ito-sensei said two months before I can try casting jutsu. He said it's not as difficult a repair this time, as before..." Four years ago. Haruichi had been new to ANBU, but he'd been there. "And they said Raidou's burns aren't going to scar in a way that restricts his motion." Dare he even ask? Haruichi had to know already, what question was coming. "We're both going to be fit to return to duty, right?"

They'd said so. Ito-sensei and Raidou's doctor from the burn ward, and Kotoe-san, the woman from Intel. They'd all said yes, you will return to active status in ANBU. But Haruichi was the one person Genma really trusted not to lie. If Haruichi said it, said yes, especially if he sounded pissed off about it, then it was true.

An immediate reply to that would have been an empty platitude, and Haruichi had never gone in for wasting words that way. He frowned and eyed Genma up and down quietly, taking in what any doctor could see before he looked again at what only he could visualise.

Faint but fighting whispers of chakra moved uneasily in an almost-Genma shape. In the simplest terms, the incomplete image Genma's insides made was like looking at a partially coloured drawing... which had also been run through a shredder. Haruichi found it unnerving, but it didn't stop him from noting where regeneration had already begun and repairs had already completed. Tiny kinks, patches, glimmers, loops, circumventions and amputations in Genma's chakra paths were catalogued in Haruichi's mind, and a conclusion drawn.

He closed his swollen white eyes, and opened them as expressionless plain ones. Then frowned even more deeply.

"You'll be fine so long as you do what your doctors tell you," he informed Genma, factually if quietly. "Once I take a look at Raidou I'll have an answer for him, too."

The regret in Haruichi's voice when he offered his judgment was telling. A huge relief for Genma, who felt the tension in his neck ease at last. "Raidou's burns were bad, but I don't think he's in as rough shape as me, actually," Genma said, meeting Haruichi's gaze. "And really, I'm a lot better already and so is he. We went for a walk yesterday. Well, sort of a walk; he walked, I rode. I could have walked, though," he added with a touch of bravado.

The machine wiped the bravery off his face before it had time to settle into a defiant grin, smearing it instead into a grimace.

"We walked out to the balcony, and sat out there and talked. It was nice, seeing some fresh air." And that kiss. That kiss had been more than nice. Not that he could tell Haruichi about that. Or would. Not when he wasn't even sure what he and Raidou were telling themselves about it, yet.

"I walked this morning, too. They made me ride for this, because--" Another tight grimace, and a sick feeling in his stomach that came from low-frequency chakra waves resonating through the rawly reconstructed coils threading around pieced-back-together bone. "Because of this. Because this fucking hurts." His words trailed off into a hiss.

The machine moved on to something less excruciating, and Genma started breathing again.

"If you tell me I just have to suck it up and be a man about it, Haruichi, I will get right out of this wheelchair and kick your ass. Even if you are already beat up. What the hell happened to your eye anyway?"

Again, there was that unintentional suggestion of attachment when Raidou was mentioned, and again, Haruichi didn't miss it. And again, he didn't dwell on it. There were more important things to concern himself with. Such as the fact that there was nothing either of them could do about the distress Genma's hand was putting him in save try to ignore it.

"As if I'd ever be so crass, Genma. Not having a bedside manner isn't the same thing as provoking patients into killing themselves trying to break my nose." He paused, remembering. "Well, usually." Swiftly moving on. "At any rate, as for my eye... I was on a mission, a longish one, and it went reasonably well until we got back. At which point there was a disagreement."

The quietly purpling swell throwing Haruichi's white eye deeper into relief attested to that, for certain. The medic reached up and gently scritched to the side of the bruising at his temple. "I think I would have won, too. If only Arakaki hadn't stepped in and mentioned you, and Namiashi, and Kakashi, and Sakamoto."

Haruichi shrugged slightly, and dropped his hand back to the table top. "By the way, when you get back to HQ you may find that Arakaki has had the chairs and tables in the debriefing rooms bolted to the floor." A spark of Haruichi's arrogance glowed in his expression for a moment. "Not that I needed to resort to props to make my point during a perfectly legitimate argument, but some people have no etiquette."

Whether or not it was deliberate, Haruichi's distraction technique was perfectly timed. The machine's hold on Genma's attention was not nearly as compelling as that little bombshell lobbed neatly into the conversation. "You pissed off someone enough they threw a chair at you while Arakaki was in the room?" His eyes narrowed, studying the bruise and the stiff way Haruichi held his neck. Stiffer than normal. Injured-stiff, as opposed to haughty, though there was plenty of haughtiness there as well.

"Who threw the punch? Your teammate, or Arakaki? And why was he in there telling you about me and Raidou and Ginta and that other bastard? I saw Ginta, he looks like hell. He's all in traction, can't get up except for like an hour or so a day."

The machine drew Genma's attention for half a second, But just that, then his focus was zeroed back on target. "I can't believe you pissed Arakaki off again. Wasn't once enough?"

"It's cute that you think I've only incensed our fearless supervisor once," Haruichi replied snippily, arching an eyebrow and ignoring the twinge in his neck it cost him. "When I was recalled he was ready to throw me out the window, never mind fling furniture at me. I hadn't even been tattooed, then."

It struck him, in a corner of this mind, that that cold night and everything that had changed (and stayed the same) because of it was only months ago. Not even a year.

Beneath the navy turtleneck he wore, Haruichi felt his dogtags shift a little bit. Remembered the ring kept on a chain around Hoshi's neck, at home. It was amazing what could change so much in so short a time.

He pushed those thoughts back, focussed instead on what had changed for Genma in an even shorter time. "And I'm not going around tattling on my teammates," Haruichi informed Genma, equal parts relieved and annoyed by the interest sparked in those brown eyes, partially edging out the reflected ache from his broken hand. "Even if they are exemplar idiots who mouth off about things they know nothing about and don't care to be told as much."

There was a fringe of brittle anger in that last part, a remnant of what he had been boldy inflicting on his two jackass teammates once they'd been out of danger. Haruichi tried to stifle it, but it was hard to entirely eliminate without physically grinding his teeth. And he'd done enough of that out in the field, trying to hold his tongue.

"Anyway, Arakaki mentioned the four of you so that I'd stop and excuse myself before I broke one of them beyond what I could be bothered fixing," Haruichi told Genma, still not having clocked that the inverse of that might be the real reason behind Arakaki's use of more words than kicks as he broke up the fight. "So I got changed and came right over."

"Why," Genma asked patiently, "were you fighting? You know you're still probationary your first six months. Am I gonna get a visit from Arakaki about you being impossible to work with and disrupting team cohesion?" Probably not, he mused. There was no way anyone in the ANBU hierarchy hadn't known exactly what they were getting when they handed Haruichi that mask.

"I get disagreements, but you're just... Look at you. Your eye's a mess, your neck's wonky, and what the hell are you hiding under the table where I can't see it? Something, that's for sure." The thinning of Haruichi's lips was as much of a confirmation as Genma needed.

"You got all that from your teammates? Nothing on the mission? Shit, Haruichi." The machine's working gave extra strength to Genma's curse. A guttural edge to his voice. When it relented, Genma sagged. "Shit," he said softly. "If you're gonna fuck up, wait until I'm in good enough shape to kick your ass for it. Who were your teammates, and what were you fighting about?"

"Oh that's rich, coming from you," Haruichi retorted. "Sorry, I can't hear you over the sound of the machine jabbing your hand. Or the respirator you should probably still be on." Not needing to bother hiding his wrist any longer, Haruichi lapsed right into his familiar arms-crossed posture. "You should probably be impressed that I didn't have a scratch on me after a bloody fortnight playing at being Intel's x-ray specs up on the border between Grass and Rain - those people shouldn't be trusted with a blunt spoon, by the way - and instead, here you are lecturing me on playing nice."

Haruichi had sort of forgotten that Genma had some symbolic responsibility for him in the organisation up until this point, but even if he'd just been reminded Haruichi wasn't about to be told to behave. By Genma, especially. By Genma, ever at all.

The medic shifted his arms a little, crossing them to favour his sprained wrist, and tilted his head slightly as he regarded Genma's pallid face. For all that he looked atrociously unwell, at least he didn't look like he felt every inch of it any longer. Every mile, maybe, but that was when the little reliefs counted the most.

"And if you want to find out any more about the whole stupid thing and who those two bigoted idiots were, you'll just have to wait until you get out of hospital." Haruichi's clipped tones marched right over the mechanical tick and whine of the machine manipulating Genma's hand, and - he fully intended - right over any of Genma's further admonishments on the topic.

Bigoted idiots? And a mission that had taken Haruichi to spitting-distance of Rain Country? Genma put two and two together and came up with a deaf, orange-eyed Rain expatriate who spent her days painting and her nights curled up in Haruichi's arms.

"If they said anything against Hoshi, I'll help you kick their asses, as soon as I'm better."

Although until Haruichi had introduced Genma to Hoshi, Genma'd been just as likely as the next shinobi to make disparaging comments about the revenge-crazed, inbred provincials in Rain. But knowing Hoshi had changed his perspective. Revenge-crazed, yes, and their idea of government boggled the mind of any citizen of the well-ordered Fire Country, but...

But if Genma had another assignment like the one three years ago, to eliminate a family of Rain ninja and retrieve their startlingly orange, doujutsu-containing eyes, he wasn't sure he'd be able to complete it so easily.

Haruichi's eyes slipped back over to Genma's own, though his slightly downturned face didn't shift. "I appreciate the sentiment," he said quietly. "But I can defend my fiancee's honour myself. That's somewhat the point."

He cricked his tender neck slightly raising his head, and tried not to wince. Ow. "Though I won't say 'no' if you're around to defend me, the next time."

He wouldn't admit it, but he had been getting the stuffing beat out of him. It hadn't been the first time Haruichi had discovered that being right meant being hit if you opened your mouth about it. Nor would it be the last. Oh well. After all, Haruichi had only needed to realize once that he'd rather be noisy and dead than right and quiet.

Speaking of quiet, the apparatus strapped to Genma's' arm had begun to slow its clicking. Haruichi's eyes zeroed in on it, a frown beginning to quirk his mouth to its accustomed position: one of suspicious annoyance.

"How long have you been hooked into that thing?"

"Long enough," Genma groaned. The machine was slowing down now, reducing the current, easing back into almost imperceptible motions. The recovery phase, the medics called it, like the cool down after a hard workout. That meant soon there would be ice packs and the careful reattachment of the stabilizing halo. A different kind of torture.

But one there was a reason to look forward to it, because finishing up here meant getting taken back to his room. Meant getting back to Raidou, who should be finished with his own treatment already, judging by the clock.

"When we're better, Rai and I will spar with you, teach you some techniques for fighting two-on-one." He hissed as the machine went through it's final series of manipulations.

"Almost done, Genma-san," Sanji interrupted, coming over to twist a dial. "Just sit tight, I think Ito-sensei wants to take a look before I bandage you back up."

"Yeah, okay," Genma agreed. He gave Haruichi a tight smile while Sanji disappeared into Ito-sensei's office. "So you're coming upstairs with me when this is over, right? To check on Raidou? I mean, if you have time. He was getting the burns debrided again, and then fresh seals applied. They said so far there's no infection, which is really good."

Haruichi kept himself quiet for a moment longer than necessary, and as usual it proved to be a mistake. Because while he sat silently and allowed Sanji to adjust the settings on the contraption menacing Genma's hand unmolested, he wound up paying more attention to Genma than he should have. Specifically, to the razor thin wire of concern he could see gilding Genma's expression and eyes when he mentioned Namiashi; and to the words he used - never mind how he spoke them.

He'd picked up on it earlier, and now tried to drop it again. It wasn't his business, and it absolutely wasn't his concern. Until he dropped his eyes to Genma's savaged hand and remembered how tightly Hoshi had been holding his own when she had been afraid for him, in the hospital.

How much a little reassurance meant, when more than your health was on the line.

"Of course I'm coming with you," he said automatically, arms crossing a bit tighter as he felt his chest constrict. "He's due a talking-to as well, and I promised you I'd check on him. Don't worry about something like that on top of the rest."

"Okay, but go easy on him." Genma locked eyes with Haruichi, not evading this time. Not flinching from invisible pupils that could see far too deeply inside a man. "He saved my life." For a moment the haunted, terrified 'what if' sensation that Genma had been evading ever since he'd woken in a Konoha hospital bed came back. It took a will that was wearing thin to banish the thought; Genma's treacherous mind replaced the fear with shame. "If there's anyone to yell at, its me. I was the one who didn't recognize the ambush in time."

He held still, watching Haruichi's equally still face for some kind of reaction. What he saw, though, was hardly what he expected. A slackening of tension around Haruichi's chapped lips, a wince that creased bruised and unbruised eyes. Sympathy, maybe, or understanding. A few months of field experience in ANBU had, it seemed, given Haruichi a subtler conception of the choices an agent had to make, the risks he took, the myriad ways a mission could go suddenly, catastrophically wrong.

Genma blinked first, turning his face away before Haruichi understood more than Genma wanted him to.

Sanji returned with Ito-sensei in tow. The older man smiled and bowed to Haruichi, and laid a hand on Genma's shoulder. "It's looking much better, Genma-kun. Really, much better. That junction between the seventh ulnar deviate and the medial plexus has completely restored flow, and the chakra graft is taking. Would you like to take a look, Haruichi-sensei?"

Genma let his gaze drift to the wall while the doctor worked. He pulled his awareness as far from his left hand as it was possible to do, but Ito-sensei called it back with another touch on the shoulder. "I'm afraid we wore you out pretty well today."

Managing to hold his tongue (twice in one month, this was becoming a new and disturbing trend) and not pass comment on the guilt in Genma's expression, Haruichi stayed quiet until Ito invited him to inspect the hospital's handiwork. It was not often that the other medics were so willing to let Haruichi pass comment on what went on under their roof. A lot of it was professional pride (he had only just qualified, and was definitively not a specialist in any arenas save the ones the other medics had the good sense to keep the hell away from), but mostly Haruichi was sure that his lunatic high standards and willingness to inflict them on others played a part in his not really being a part of Konoha's medical community.

Still, Ito being the best of the best meant that none of that really applied. Haruichi put on his specs and took a series of quick, careful and considering looks at the work that had been done. Despite the little twist of illness that looking at the remainder of that damage gave him, he kept his expression schooled and focussed on what Ito was really asking him to see.

"It looks like it will heal nicely," Haruichi noted, glancing up at the elder doctor with a sort of respect that might have verged on deference - if he hadn't been Hyuuga Haruichi. "Thank you for doing such an excellent job on him, Ito-sensei," Haruichi said quietly.

And if there was a little gratitude audible in those words, Haruichi would swear up and down that it was in response to Ito's professional courtesy and nothing more.

"Genma-kun's a special patient," Ito-sensei said, "A special challenge. I think I'll write up this case, actually. Repeat trauma's certainly nothing strange in military medicine, but this is a rather remarkable situation even so." He squeezed Genma's shoulder again. "Although I'm sure there are a number of us who would appreciate it if you could perhaps let this be the last time you have such a serious injury, hm?"

Genma felt like he was five. If that. He could feel his pale cheeks flush, and the edges of his ears burn. "It's not like I wanted to ever see this rehab unit again," he groaned. "And if you get a paper published, make sure there's no way I'm identifiable. It's not like Konoha's enemies need any extra reasons to go after my..." he hesitated, eyes tracing the fingers Ito-sensei and Sanji were carefully re-wrapping in gauze and splint. "My vulnerabilities."

Ito gave him a long, hard, almost reproving look. "Have a little faith in my discretion, Genma."

"Sorry," Genma mumbled. He was suddenly and completely exhausted. Even holding his head up was an effort. Sweat beaded on his lip.

"Let's get you back up to bed," said Ito. "I expect we've put you through enough for one day."

Genma glanced up at Haruichi, and saw a wordless exchange between the two physicians, but couldn't divine its meaning. His own eyes, when they caught Haruichi's held a silent appeal of their own: You're coming with me, right?

You didn't have to be a Hyuuga to interpret the little plea in those foggy brown eyes, and Haruichi managed to not roll his eyes a little in reply. He gave a last silent nod of thanks to Ito and - seeing that every cable, wire and whatnot was safely stowed - gingerly snagged the back of Genma's wheelchair and toed the brakes off.

"Come on Genma, let's get your special backside back in your sickbed," he said, ignoring the slight twinge in his wrist as he took the other ANBU's weight and pushed it into momentum. Once they were on a roll, he called back over his shoulder. "Thank you again, Ito-sensei. I'll try not to crash him into any particularly expensive equipment on our way back to the wards."

Whatever well-deserved reply there was for that was lost as the doors swung shut behind the two of them and they were back in the cool hospital corridors. Haruichi huffed impatiently as he shoved the chair along the linoleum, headed for what was for now passing as Genma's home; not much enjoying the bizarrely slow nature of the event.

He supposed that you knew you were in ANBU when it didn't feel right to return an injured patient to safety without having to run for your life at the same time.

"I'll take a look at Namiashi once you're settled," he told the top of Genma's tousled head. "And then you are going to sleep. Understood?"

"Yes, mom," Genma said tiredly. He let a shrug of his shoulder stand in for an eye roll that Haruichi couldn't see. Let a tilt of his head back so that his hair brushed over Haruichi's knuckles serve for a thank you.

They rolled over cracked linoleum gone deep yellow in the corners where years' worth of floor wax had built up. Rolled past white-coated medics carrying on hallway consultations, past students feverishly pouring over notes and charts, past nurses walking briskly with medicine in hand, or strolling in pairs and gossiping about things that had nothing to do with blood and bandages. They passed uniformed shinobi, some on duty, some just visiting laid-up friends.

On the fourth floor, at the ANBU ward's guarded threshold, Haruichi signed himself in as staff, and Genma back in as a returning patient. Genma felt his breath hitch. On the other side of the double doors, one grey-and-black-clad Intel agent stopped mid-conversation with another spook to give Genma a curious look. Genma just leaned his head wearily on his uninjured hand.

The silence between him and Haruichi was a comfortable one, somehow. A safe one. For the duration of that trek through the hospital halls, Genma could drop his guard and let his friend carry the load.

And then they were at the door to the double room, taped with paper signs advising of protocols to be followed, both medical and psychological. With hand-lettered slips listing Genma as occupant of bed A, and Raidou in bed B. With another sign, in blocky print, advising all visitors to check with the nursing station before entering. The door wasn't what interested Genma. It was what he could see just beyond it, as Haruichi pushed it open: a covered shape in that bed nearest the door. Bed B. A shape that moved as soon as that door opened wider. And a voice, gruff and raspy and just a little slurred, full of secret relief. "Took you long enough."

"Yeah," Genma agreed, with a smile that was only part bravado. "I brought us a visitor."