| [Nov. 14th, 2011|02:43 am] |
While Ichiba murmured the first rote prayer, Asuma pressed his aching forehead against the iron bars and fought the urge to kick the door to filings. He’d break his feet before he broke the metal, and it wouldn’t help Hakuin.
Nothing would help Hakuin. Even if a squad of ANBU and a fleet of medics tore the whole place apart, Kaminari had still taken his eyes, and done deeper damage to whatever lay under those hack-job stitches.
Asuma had been on battlefields; he knew what the thick rattle in Hakuin’s breathing meant.
Clenching his fists around the bars, he cursed himself for a reckless idiot and wished he’d struck faster. Ripped Kaminari apart with raw chakra and bare hands. Had they taken the old man in payment for his insults, or had it always been Hakuin’s day to bleed out blind on a rotting cell floor?
He forced himself away from the door.
Ichiba’s voice was thin but steady; it only cracked once, dropping half an octave into a teenager’s deeper tenor. He managed not to stumble, well into the seventh sutra and still going. At the end of the hallway, a woman’s ravaged voice picked up the words and echoed them back.
Katsuko wasn’t speaking; he wondered if she could.
The only useful thing he could think of to do was to strip off his blood-stained shirt, wad it up, and crouch down to shove it through the bars separating their cells.
“Katsuko,” he said. “Here. Use this to cover him.”
He had to call her name twice more before she even heard him. Her head came up. Slowly and painfully she crawled over to him, took the shirt without a word, and crawled back. It took her three tries to unwad it, feed it through the bars and lay it over Hakuin’s wasted body. Then she stretched out on the floor and pressed herself as close to the iron as she could get. Her arm was skinny enough to go through almost to her shoulder. Gently, she stroked Hakuin’s forehead.
She wasn’t crying. Her shoulders didn’t shake. Ichiba’s voice went on and on.
Asuma sat by his grating, feeling the cold sink into his bare shoulders and the headache wrap wolf’s teeth into the back of his skull, and watched the forgotten girl from his hometown try to comfort a dying man. |
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