| [May. 22nd, 2014|04:48 am] |
Her collarbone reset with an audible snap. Katsuko, understandably, was vocal about it. Then: a flash of grey out of the corner of her eye; Raidou’s lunge; the jarring halt as the chaos resolved into the single point of Raidou’s hand wrapped around Kakashi’s wrist. Kakashi croaked something, voice rasping low enough that Katsuko couldn’t hear. Then he crumpled.
Nobody moved in the silence that followed. The haze of pain and fatigue muffling Katsuko’s brain added an extra layer of confusion to the whole mess.
In the absence of anything resembling normal in this situation, Katsuko fell back on the one familiar thing she could count on.
“Did Kakashi just faint again?” she demanded.
Raidou lowered Kakashi carefully down and pressed two fingers against the younger man’s pulse. “Looks like it.”
Genma leaned over to check Kakashi’s chakra. “Yeah. Honestly, I’m surprised he stayed awake as long as he did.” He looked up at Raidou. “Thanks for intervening. That was about to go badly wrong.”
Katsuko stared at Kakashi’s unconscious face and, in a spectacularly delayed reaction, realized that the shaky feeling in her chest was shock. “Shit,” she breathed. “He almost mangled you.”
Genma looked down at his hands and let out a low breath, giving himself a quick shake. His expression was as phlegmatic as ever, but adrenaline had leached some of the color from his skin. “Maybe that’s how we should try to recruit new field medics. ‘Do it for the rush.’”
“Hah,” Katsuko said, faintly, and considered lying down.
“I think he’s okay,” Raidou said, and pulled the rumpled blankets over Kakashi again. He moved himself around to settle behind Katsuko, offering his steady presence as support. Genma braced Katsuko’s good arm and searched her face with a medic’s concerned, clinical gaze.
“You alright?” Genma asked. “Want me to do a nerve block on that shoulder before the next part?”
Katsuko really, really did not need a repeat of the last few minutes. Kakashi might be unconscious, but the man had the hearing of a cat and the same predilection for doing the opposite of what she expected him to. She eyed the motionless, blanket-covered lump and leaned back, propping herself up on Raidou. “That’d be great, lieutenant.”
"Sorry I didn't do it first, but I wanted to be sure you still had feeling in your fingers when I finished setting the bone back into place." Genma took her right hand and squeezed her fingertips one at a time, watching for the color to return to each blanched nail. There were the usual kind of questions checking for nerve damage: do you have feeling in this finger? What about this one? Is it the same amount of feeling, or do you think your thumbs are going to fall off? |
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