“Sarutobi,” Yondaime-sama continued, “we’ll find a secure place for you to rest once you’ve finished answering Yuuhi’s questions.” A pause, pregnant with meaning. “Thank you for your loyalty.”

Asuma looked back up and raised his uninjured arm to tap the opposite shoulder. “Thank you, Hokage-sama,” he said quietly.

The others offered their own salutes, and then the Hokage was gone. The bathroom suddenly felt much larger.

Kurenai’s red eyes went out of focus for a moment, as though she was staring through the door that closed behind the Hokage, before she turned back to her notepad. “The map,” she began. “Can you draw it? Or will you need assistance?”

Referring to his messed up arm, no doubt. “Lefty,” Asuma replied, and held his good hand out to her, palm up. “Thankfully. I can draw it.”

“If I may?” the medic interrupted, putting aside her cleaning tools to pull a pair of small, rattling vials from her kit. “Blood and chakra pills. Best to get that in your system first.”

Asuma offered his hand to the medic, and was rewarded with two small pills. He swallowed them down along with a provided canteen of water, blinked back the copper-bright aftertaste that threatened a sneeze soon after, and relished the sensation of artificially replaced chakra. But that energy wouldn’t last him long. The sooner he could debrief, the sooner he could sleep.

And grieve.

He took a breath, a moment to center himself, and accepted the pen and scrap of notepad paper Kurenai gave him.

The hour that followed passed quickly, hastened by the pills that helped Asuma wrestle his emotions into place. For now he could pretend that those were only letters on a hastily scribbled map; they were not markers for the bodies of ninja who had become closer than family in the last year. The wounds that Hyuuga carefully cleaned and stitched up could have been from any mission; they were not inflicted by friends who inexplicably became enemies in a matter of minutes. With faces carefully obscured in memory, the actions he described to answer Kurenai’s questions could have been performed by any missing-nin that defected in the last ten years.

Undoubtedly he’d be forced to write all this himself, later, a report penned in his own hand and filed away with Kurenai’s and other investigators’ impersonal observations of this night’s aborted war. But at least that retelling of the story could be done in private. No one would be trying to interpret his reactions then.

“Thank you, Sarutobi-san,” Kurenai said, and tucked the messy map into her vest when he handed it to her. She’d embodied nothing but cool professionalism from the moment she showed up, with a pokerface that rivaled any Hyuuga. There was something bizarrely reassuring about it, to be debriefed by someone who displayed absolutely no opinion one way or another about all of this. “I believe that will suffice for now. Hyuuga-san, how close are you to finishing?”

The medic didn’t look up from her work, focusing on the worst parts of the burn—or at least Asuma assumed she was focusing on the burn. Could never tell, with those eyes. “Ten minutes or so,” she replied. “A bit left here, and then I can set the break.”

Kurenai nodded, flipped her notepad closed, and tucked it away. “We’ll continue this discussion once you’ve rested, Sarutobi-san,” she said. With a quick seal she dispelled the silencing jutsu she’d cast earlier, every move as efficient as her debriefing technique, and turned neatly on her heel. The bathroom door opened under her light knock, and a familiar badger-masked ANBU poked his head into the room.

“I’m finished here,” Kurenai said.

The mask dipped in acknowledgement, pulled back to let her through, then stepped in to fill the doorway. “We have a room for you, Sarutobi-san, when you’re ready.”

Code for ‘prison cell with amenities’, more likely. Until they could verify that he wasn’t lying through his teeth, it was only proper to treat him as a potential threat. Things had a tendency to look suspicious when only one person in a thwarted coup survived.

“Thank you,” Asuma said quietly.

Hyuuga pulled her hands away from the burn on his upper arm, and laid cool fingers on his wrist and elbow.

“You don’t have any antibiotic sensitivities, do you?” she asked, and set the break.