| [Mar. 5th, 2014|02:09 am] |
"But he—" Ryouma began, and then clamped his jaw tight on it. Genma's hazel eyes were steady beneath their heavy lids, his brows a little raised, and Ryouma—
Wanted to be able to meet that level gaze, without flinching or glancing away.
"I can do it," he said quietly. "Even the apology." His pride was already bruised; another laceration wouldn't make much difference.
Never crossing the line again would be far harder. But Genma was right about Kakashi's comfort level, though Ryouma hadn't seen it till now. Maybe Kakashi'd hidden it too well, beneath jibes and mask. Maybe Ryouma just hadn't bothered to look. But Kakashi'd given him a No that first time they'd met, on the rainy sidelines of the first ANBU Trial, and Ryouma should've remembered.
"Good," Genma said, with a rare, warming smile. He tapped Ryouma's bent left knee. Ryouma straightened that leg obediently, bending the right up to his chest instead. The healing muscle in his thigh ached in mild protest, no worse than any of his newer bruises. Genma's long, raw-jointed fingers palpated carefully around Ryouma's kneecap. "How's this doing? Any swelling?"
And just like that, they'd moved on.
"Not this morning," Ryouma said. "Just stiff, but not enough to limp on." He tipped his head back against the chakra-dried clay of Genma's bench. The mist had begun to clear, but the sky was still ominously grey. "It'll rain later."
Genma grimaced faintly in sympathy. His hands warmed, even through the worn-thin fabric of Ryouma's training pants; chakra tingled through the joint. "I'm no Hyuuga," he said, head tilted as if he was listening for an echo, "but have you thought about getting this worked on? Predicting the weather in your joints is something you're not supposed to be doing until you're at least thirty."
"It's never really been that bad," Ryouma said, watching tree branches toss against the clouds in a rising breeze. "Medic looked at me once, but it'd halfway healed on its own by then, and it was wartime, y'know. One kid with a bum knee wasn't much..."
He'd been lucky to get any medical attention at all, then. His first time in Konoha's hospital, and there'd been patients in beds in the halls, women missing limbs, men with their faces burned off. Iwa was on the offensive, and Konoha had suffered a devastating blow at Seirin Bridge. Ten minutes of a harried medic's time was all they could spare for him, and if he could walk without limping afterward, that was good enough, wasn't it? A little weakness or swelling on a rainy morning or after a bad mission wasn't incapacitating. He still had the knee, after all.
"I've got a brace to use on missions," he volunteered. "I could, y'know, actually start wearing it."
Genma's brows lifted again, drier than summer in Suna. "That could, y'know, actually be smart." He flexed Ryouma's knee back, then torqued it gently left and right. "I'm guessing the captain will be coming back with a mission for us, but if there's time you should get this evaluated and treated. You might have been an unimpressive kid back then, but you're part of Konoha's elite defense now."
ANBU probably did rank higher on the medical priority lists than barefoot, orphaned refugees. On the other hand, surgery was always a threat, and it wasn't truly bad now… "Hm," Ryouma said. "I'll look into it."
Genma shrugged. "I'll be making a note in my evaluation for Toushirou-sensei." |
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