| Suffering Fools | [Sep. 24th, 2013|07:43 pm] |
[Takes place Yondaime Year 5, April 28, immediately following When the Reckoning Arrives]
Miles bled by in a waking dream. The litter-carrying clones' gait wasn't smooth enough to sleep, even if Ryouma'd dared. His head ached, a low fuzz of tension under the haze of morphine, and he kept hearing Genma's raw voice rasping, B-brain bleed?
The pain became something to hold on to, jostled back with each long running step, sinking away again in the space between strides. Rain spattered against his face, faded to drizzle, and then pounded down with renewed fury. Someone tried, briefly, to hold an oiled cloak over them, and then gave it up.
"Betcha I can boil the rain to steam," Genma offered.
"Don't," Raidou growled, somewhere behind them. Ryouma snickered, coughed, and curled painfully against Genma's bandaged side. There seemed to be waves of heat rolling off the lieutenant, pulsing with his heart; if Ryouma squinted he thought he could almost see the visible haze of fire chakra burning through veins. It looked like it hurt. His own chakra-charred pathways ached in sympathy.
But the heat was beginning to sink into his shiver-knotted muscles, like sunlight on frosted ground. He tucked his chin down very carefully on Genma's shoulder and tried to press a little closer.
Genma twitched as if he meant to turn his head, but nothing moved. He took a deeper breath instead. "Doing okay, Tousaki? Don't think I can turn the heat up any higher. I'm kinda over the line already."
"I'm fine!" Ryouma tried shifting back against the sloping side of the stretcher. Cold air clawed between them. "Just takin' my chance to cuddle up to the hottest lieutenant in the corps. Sorry, you can turn it down—"
"Don't be an idiot," Genma said, but there was no bite to his voice. "Stay close. You need the heat, and so do I."
That sounded reasonable. And Raidou hadn't yet intervened with any reminders about boundaries—Ryouma might bite him if he did, he thought darkly.
He let himself ooze down into the center of the stretcher again, against warmth and solid muscle and the painful bite of a shuriken pouch against his hip. Genma made an encouraging noise. Ryouma eased his head down, loose brown hair tickling his nose, and dared for just a moment to shut his eyes.
He woke when the bunshin halted. There was a shout, running feet, and Ryouma came up on one elbow with a kunai in his hand.
"Down, rookie," Genma's hoarse, amused voice said beneath him. "We're safe."
Ryouma blinked fog out of his eyes and looked. The evening's rain had given way to a misty night, moon hidden by clouds, a few strung-up streetlights casting a flickering yellow glow. Boxy paper lanterns were beginning to draw closer, with tight clusters of villagers bobbing behind them. A woman called out a name, her voice raw with grief and hope, and broke down sobbing in the silence.
A slim, dark body slid in front of him, eclipsing the lights. "Lie down," Kakashi's voice said. "Don't move too much. Don't touch your face." Shadowed fingers twisted through seals. A fine mist of chakra left his hands and settled over Ryouma's face.
Ryouma sneezed. Kakashi made an impatient sound, pulled the kunai out of his hand, and pushed him down. Then he pulled a dark-eyed tanuki mask off his belt and leaned over to fit it carefully over Genma's face. "Tell Ram if you can't breathe through that."
"Thanks," Genma said quietly, muffled beneath the mask.
Beyond the rigid shoulders of the bunshin carrying the litter, Raidou raised his voice. "We need a doctor. Do you have one in the village?"
Voices muttered anxiously. The clone carrying the upper left pole of Ryouma's litter shifted her weight and blew out her breath beneath her mask. But the crowd was moving, parting to create a narrow path around a greying, heavyset woman in a garish raincoat. "I run the clinic," she said warily. She wrapped her arms around her middle and stared down at the two litters. "It's not—we're not a hospital, and I'm no medic-nin. We don't work miracles."
"I'm not asking for them," Raidou said calmly. "We've got a medic-nin. He's just dealing with a little temporary paralysis right now. If you can get everyone stable and keep 'em that way long enough for him to shake it off, we can do the rest."
The doctor's mouth tightened, but she nodded. "I'll need my assistant," she said. "If someone could fetch Daisuke—"
"I'm here!" a young man called from the far side of the ring of villagers. He forced his way through and came by the litters, casting a curious, anxious look down as he passed. "'Where are the others?" he demanded.
"I'll explain after we get the injured out of the rain," Raidou said, with an edge to his voice. "I need your mayor, or whoever's in charge of the village. And anyone who can get a message to Mizudera."
There was a radio installation in Mizudera, Ryouma remembered fuzzily. It had been fortified as a front-line command center during the war. The transmitter might not be strong enough to reach Konoha, but it could relay a message on.
We've just contaminated half a mountainside and collapsed the rest; send a cleanup crew…
People begin to move. A few thrust themselves out of the crowd to talk to Raidou; others cleared the way for the clones and their stretchers to follow the doctor and her assistant out of the square, with Katsuko and Kakashi hovering dangerously behind. They turned down a side street lighted only by paper lanterns hung up outside doors. The doctor chattered to one of Katsuko's clones about her limited facilities, her handful of experience with shinobi injuries. She didn't seem able to tell which was the real woman, and so just talked nervously to the nearest. "We mostly just have broken arms here, minor illnesses, a few difficult births—I try to get the high-risk ones to the hospital in Mizudera before they're due—"
Ryouma's head hurt. He closed his eyes again, and waited for the jostling to end.
He missed the moment of transition between street and clinic. Lights flared suddenly, blindingly bright. The stretcher thumped down onto a tiled floor, and cold hands peeled Genma away from his side. "Here, lay him down," the doctor said, raising her voice above the powerful thrum of a nearby generator. Ryouma slitted his eyes against the piercing light and saw Katsuko's clones easing Genma onto the first clean bed in a dormitory-style row, while the doctor shed her raincoat and washed her hands at a sink against the wall. The assistant crouched over the civilians' stretcher to palpitate their distended stomachs.
"There's something in them!"
"It's a parasite," Genma rasped. "Keep them warm and hydrated. I'll do what I can as soon as I can move." He jerked his chin at one of the clones. "Tell the captain we need a Hyuuga medic here, if we can get one."
The clone saluted, fist to shoulder, and ducked out. The others busied themselves transferring the civilians to two of the remaining empty beds. There was a fourth, but Ryouma waved off the clone who tried to help him to it. "Not hurt," he croaked. Well, not badly. The shallow, hastily bandaged gash on his thigh wasn't much in comparison to Katsuko's collarbone or Genma's belly-wound, or both of their savaged shoulders. He scrubbed a hand across his face and tried to think. "Need to get clean," he decided.
Genma made an aggrieved sound. "Get clean and then get in the damn bed, Ram."
"You have a shower?" Kakashi asked the doctor.
She lifted her chin, indicating a closed door at the back of the clinic. Kakashi nodded. "The medic-nin there has a belly-wound that needs looking at, and his shoulders aren't in great shape. The woman in the rat mask—that one—has a broken collarbone that probably needs setting better, and ditto on the shoulders." He crouched to haul Ryouma up, hissing in disgust as his fingers found slime in the grooves of the shoulder-straps where rain hadn't washed it away.
They lurched an unsteady four-step into the tiny bathroom, where a shower stocked with harsh soap and floral hair products took up most of the space not occupied by a toilet and a standing sink. Kakashi leaned Ryouma up against the wall, vanished, and returned a second later with a metal folding chair, which he set up inside the shower. He turned back. "Need help stripping?"
No matter how exhausted, Ryouma couldn't let a line like that go. "Why, Kakashi," he murmured, fumbling for the buckles on his right shoulder. "'f I'd known all it'd take was burying myself in rotting demon guts to get you to ask, I'd've done it earlier." The buckle popped loose. He took a moment to catch his breath. "Or maybe found an easier way."
"Do you do anything the easy way?" Kakashi demanded. He shoved Ryouma's hand off the left shoulder-strap and released the catch himself, then stooped to the buckles at the left side. His right arm was mostly working again, though the fingers were clumsy. He still had all three buckles open before Ryouma had managed the lowest one on the right.
After that Ryouma simply let himself be handled, stripped out of armor and underpinnings as ruthlessly and efficiently as Kakashi stripped weapons to clean them. Kakashi bundled Ryouma into the shower and onto the chair, turned the water on steaming-hot, and scrubbed his hair with floral shampoo and the rest of him with a lye-based soap that burned in his cuts. He was pink and prunish when Kakashi retreated at last for a final scrub of his own hands. Clean and flower-scented, they reeled out of the shower and into towels. Ryouma leaned shivering against the wall, one fuzzy towel girded around his hips and another draping his shoulders, while Kakashi squeezed water out of his hair, pulled dry clothes out of a scroll, and performed possibly the fastest change ever witnessed by man.
Well, he was the Yondaime Hokage's protege.
He'd also managed to change his mask without ever revealing his face—a slight turn of the head, a lifted shoulder, a convenient fall of wet silver hair. Ryouma watched in a pleasantly detached daze.
"Y'know," he said, as Kakashi wrestled his new shirt down, "I made a bad offer, back in the Trials. Shouldn't've asked for the Raikiri in exchange for the Nikutai Hakai. Probably couldn't master it anyway." He had to stop for breath. Had the shower been that hot? The tiny room was dense with fog, Kakashi a hazy ghost in black and grey.
"Not without a lightning affinity and your own Sharingan." Kakashi sealed his wet armor and underpinnings into the recently emptied scroll, vanished all Ryouma's ruined gear except his laden utility belt into a second, empty scroll, and tucked both scrolls away. He pulled his ANBU mask back on, and slung Ryouma's belt over his shoulder. The painted red face leered at Ryouma out of the fog.
Ryouma blinked hard. Kakashi was there, suddenly, gripping his arm below the ANBU tattoo. "Did you have something in mind?"
"Thought maybe your face," Ryouma said, which had made more sense in his head. He tried to explain, "Nobody I've talked to's ever seen it. 'Xcept probably the Hokage. And whatever lovers you've had, I guess. Wouldn't put it past you to wear a mask to bed."
Water dripped and puddled on the tiled floor. Ryouma shivered in the growing cool, and huddled into his towel. Kakashi said at last, "We should get you back to the others before you fall over."
That was beginning to sound like a better plan, though curling up on the floor here wouldn't be a bad idea, either. Ryouma yawned into his towel. "Think about it," he said, and let Kakashi reapply his misty henge mask and tug him back into the clinic.
Genma had his ruined armor and blacks off, but he'd kept the Tanuki mask on. The young assistant was swabbing his torso clean with a white cloth, while the doctor sterilized instruments over a spirit-lamp. The wound on his belly gaped angry and open from his left side nearly to his navel. Without his armor, he'd have been eviscerated.
The clones had gone; only one Katsuko sat on a metal folding chair, masked head tipped back against the wall, the useless arm still bound tightly to her chest. Her head came down as they entered. "Showered already?" she asked, with an exhausted archness. "Never heard of ladies first, boys?"
"They teach that at the Academy?" Ryouma asked muzzily. "We both graduated early." He found the edge of the single empty bed, dropped onto it, and then grappled at Kakashi's arm with a sudden stabbing fear. "'f my brain bleeds—"
Without medical chakra, there was nothing they could do.
"Don't wake me up," he said, and let himself fall. |
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