| [Jul. 8th, 2012|05:00 am] |
Genma shrugged, looking away from Katsuko’s face. “It’s no big deal,” he told her, but the way the scroll shook in his scarred hands as he unsealed it proved him a liar. He cleared a space on the table to unroll the papers, revealing an almost beautiful ink drawing of a pair of hands and forearms, palms up, with bones and muscles, blood vessels, nerves, and chakra paths each traced out in a different color. Even a cursory glance revealed awkward junctions and splices, almost inorganic corners, but every line was intact, every circuit complete.
“Okay. So, this is how it is now. There’s other views, too, if you want, but this one shows everything pretty well,” he said. He flipped up the paper, revealing another one underneath showing the hands from the back, and a third that held side views.
Katsuko leaned in to study the diagram, expression serious and intent. “How many sessions did this take to complete?”
“I don’t know for sure. It was... Let’s see. It was March when they brought me in, and I was in the hospital for eleven weeks.” He stared past the curling edges of the papers, remembering those months, and the months of outpatient rehab that had followed. “And they sometimes did two treatments a day. So... a lot. But I was back on active duty by September. That’s not that bad, really, if you consider everything.” His eyes strayed to the date on the page, carefully inked in Rina’s neat script. “Rina made these diagrams March seventeen, about a week after I got brought in. When it still looked like this.” |
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