| [Nov. 2nd, 2013|03:29 am] |
Kimura-sensei was an older gentleman with grandfatherly hands, warm chakra, and a vicious lack of mercy.
"Gah-ah-ow," Raidou said, as his internal cartography was restructured with painful, precise efficiency. Genma had healed the surface injuries, layering new skin over deeper damage, which had done an excellent job of keeping Raidou’s blood where it was supposed to be, and not letting raw muscle flap all over the landscape. But the underneath was, in Kimura’s words, a godawful disaster, what the hell did you run into, idiot knothead?
Medics never appreciated taijutsu fighters.
"Really big claws?" Raidou suggested, which earned him a whack on the back of the head, in the name of decent bedside manners.
It was harder to trance out under Kimura’s hands. Where Genma’s chakra had cajoled, piecing Raidou back together piece by careful piece, Kimura’s demanded. The end result was prettier, but the ride was much less fun.
"Done!" Kimura said, after a geologic age. He slapped Raidou on the back of one bare thigh. "You can put your clothes on again."
"Hnk," Raidou told the sweat-dappled bench he was lying on. He cleared his throat and tried again. "Thanks."
Kimura waved him off, already moving onto the next patient. For a mid-week afternoon, the hospital was surprisingly busy. Every nurse was harried, and every medic had hollow shadows beneath their eyes. The second Raidou had scraped himself upright and poured himself back into his jeans, someone was wiping down his bench and installing another patient on it.
The capitol must have taken some hard knocks, to send casualties here.
He grabbed his shirt, accepted paperwork (always paperwork) and a paper cup of water from a nurse, along with instructions to drink more, and made his escape. It took a second to catch his stride again; his muscles felt like sun-hammered taffy, and his chakra had been put through the wringer. But when he did, it was easier going. No more bandages, and no more bone-deep catch of a body that didn’t quite want to move right.
Time to find Katsuko again.
The hospital was fringed with chakra dampers, dulling the constant nerve-prickle of jutsu that even he could feel. It even managed to dampen Katsuko’s massive chakra, but her ANBU spark was there. A constant little beacon against the edge of his senses, subtly different than anyone else’s. He followed it up two flights of stairs, limping when his right thigh decided to cramp, and into a back-set wing of special offices, where Konoha devoted a small but significant fraction of its medical resources to the care of unique bloodlines, unusual injuries, and heavy chakra damage.
The gentle sound of swearing filtered down the hallway. Raidou set that as his north star, and followed it to the source. |
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