Raidou let out a shallow breath of relief and studied Genma with dark, weary eyes. His vibrant friend had been replaced with a pale shadow of himself, thinner now without the ANBU armour to cover what two days of vomiting had cost him. White and drained looking around his bruises, tangled in a spiderweb of wires. He was the single best thing Raidou had seen in five hours, drugs vision highs inclusive.

There was a collective group sigh of relief from the medics when Raidou managed to get his mouth into an echo of his usual crooked smile and rasped, "That wasn't even six seconds, mother-medic."

Genma was here. Of course he was okay.

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"I haven't asked you that in at least a couple of hours," Genma protested. Oh thank the Yakushi Buddha for his merciful healing intervention, Raidou was okay. Not great. Obviously not great. He still looked too flushed, he was still shackled to the bed and an IV line, his eyes looked too pained and too dazed, and white--the white of the hospital blankets--was not his best color. But he looked better than he had outside the gates and he sounded lucid. At this point Genma kind of thought he'd be pushing his luck to ask for more.

"Sorry I'm late," he added. "Had some issues." Couldn't really remember them, per se. Well he remembered telling them where the poisoned senbon were, and he remembered their happy confidence that they had a good antidote. The next thing he remembered was a heavy weight on his chest, and someone shouting in his ear, "Breathe, Genma! Breathe!" And then there was waking up hooked to every fucking machine known to man. That had been unpleasant. But that was in the past. Hours ago. Probably. Actually he had no idea at all how much time had passed since he'd last seen Raidou. It could have been days, although it didn't feel like it.

"Um... Am I very late?"

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Had some issues probably translated to someone fucked up. When this was all over, Raidou would find out who and make that person eat floor. He'd began the mission that way, after all, it was probably some sort of karmic balance to end it in the same manner. Either that or Genma had done what Raidou had spent the last two days fearing he would, and gotten a whole lot worse. But he looked okay now. Mostly okay. He was awake and breathing and talking. His current array of machines were beeping a quiet, gentle rhythm rather then a shattering clamor that spelled Bad Things. He looked exactly like a ninja who'd faced a tough mission and dragged himself through to the other side.

"You're always late," said Raidou, still in the low rasp that was all his voice could manage. "One day I'm going to put a bell on you so I know where you are half the time." That wasn't really the question Genma had been asking, though. He wanted to know how long he'd been gone. How much time he'd lost. Raidou would've been delighted to tell him, but he didn't have the answer. He hadn't particularly cared about the answer, either, until Genma had decided to show up and make it important. "I don't..." His eyebrows drew down in a frown as he tried to think around the fog of fever. "I'm not sure."

One of the medics came to his rescue. "You were both checked in at..." he consulted a chart, "1832. It's now 2340."

Five hours.

Raidou blinked slowly. "Definitely a bell," he said finally.

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"When I get nailed on a mission because some asshole Kumo genin heard the shadows ringing, you'll know it was your fault," Genma said, and a flicker of a hint of a smile ghosted across his weary face. His eyes locked with Raidou's. Smallish, dark brown, deeply penetrating eyes in a scarred face on which Genma had long since stopped seeing the scars. He could see in Raidou's eyes a perfect mirror of his own thoughts: Thank fucking gods you're alright. Do you have any idea how frantic I've been about you? How the hell did we lose five hours? Are you really going to be alright now? You fucking well better be, or I will come to the afterlife and kick your sorry ass.

Not a word passed. The machines beeped, a medic checked an IV, a couple more quietly shifted to positions where they could more easily asses whether this new silence from the formerly agitated pair boded well or ill.

Genma locked eyes with Raidou, thought about that odd night--was it just the previous night?--spent sleeping side by side in nothing but underwear and bandages, with hands clasped. Had that really happened? Had he really let Raidou not just touch, but hold his hand? And he laughed. A quiet laugh, a weak laugh, hoarse and whispery, but with something a little like mirth, a little like bemused astonishment, and a lot like relief.

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Sometimes Genma was prone to small moments of insanity. Raidou knew that in the same way he knew that Genma liked oranges and would quite cheerfully bathe in tea if he could--and probably would if he ever managed to find a way to do so that would leave him clean but scentless. Considering the state they were both in, he wasn't terribly surprised when Genma skidded through one of his weirder mental curves and ended up in a place that made his eyes glitter and his mouth widen into a grin that looked nothing like a knife edge. As he began to chuckle and then outright laugh as something tickled him.

The medics were briefly alarmed--unsurprising considering where Raidou's earlier laughing fit had taken him--and a quiet flurry of conversation resulted in a chuunin moving quickly over to lay a careful hand on Genma's forehead, checking the laughter was true mirth, rather then the edge of a brand new deliruim. Once satisfied, he stepped back again, returning to his team.

Raidou simply answered a smile with a smile, and fought the suddenly hard battle to keep his eyelids from sliding shut. Apparently Genma's soft, slightly raspy humour was a siren song. "Should... lemme in... on th' joke," he said quietly, with his broken-glass voice.

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Genma tolerated the medic's hand, quieted a little, but not entirely, until Raidou spoke. "Yeah.... Yeah. Should," he agreed, and tried to find a way to put into words the complicated set of thoughts and emotions that had led to his laughter. His usually quick mind was mired in the syrupy confines of sedatives and painkillers and exhaustion, though, and while something had gone skipping over the surface like a flat pebble and triggered his laughs, he couldn't really find a way to say it in a way that made sense.

In the end he settled for, "We're not the ones dead this time." Which wasn't really it, but he didn't know what else to say. And he couldn't ask about that Night. Even if he and Raidou had been alone, it would have been a hard topic to broach. Did we seriously hold hands all night like a couple of teenage lovers? Hands? Seriously? No, seriously? Hands? He certainly couldn't ask when he felt so close to the edge of something resembling delirium himself, with Raidou already over it.

Raidou was fighting sleep. Genma could feel himself fighting it as well, especially now that he was warm and calm, with pain eased and nausea depressed by the same jutsu he'd cast on Raidou the night after the disastrous birthday party. He blinked slowly back at Raidou, still smiling softly.

"Go to sleep, Rai. Promise I'll still be here when you wake up. No bell."

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Eyelids were a pain in the ass, Raidou decided. They wouldn't listen to his demands to stay open. The fourth time they slid closed without his say-so, he gave up the battle, turning his head slightly to hide the left side of his face against the pillow. Genma was there, Raidou could hear him breathing. Knew he'd be able to see him if he could gain some mastery once more over his stupid, stubborn eyelids. He was right there, less then ten feet away--the distance felt like a gulf and nothing all at once--and safe. They were both safe. Alive and out of danger because they were home. "When were we... ever th' ones... dead?" he asked, trying to comprehend.

They'd never died. He'd remember, surely?

Maybe that was the joke.

Raidou fought the soft shroud of sleep long enough to say, "'kay. Hol' you to tha', Gen." Maybe he'd get Genma a bell anyway. That could be a better joke. Raidou slipped into fever dreams without a murmur, truly relaxing for the first time in a week.

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In the moment of silence before Raidou spoke, Genma dazed into something not quite sleep, but close. Raidou's voice got his eyes open again, heavy lids not lifting all the way to look at Raidou, burrowed into his pillow just like always, face relaxed as he mumbled his question.

No, see. It's not that we died, it's that the other guys did and we didn't, Genma thought. The words couldn't quite find the way to his mouth. The sight of Raidou so close and so nearly asleep couldn't quite keep his eyes open. The anti-seizure medicine didn't have to work particularly hard to pull Genma back under the softly reflective surface of consciousness in the next bit of silence.

Raidou spoke again, a mumble even less distinct, and Genma's eyelids strained to open a bare slit, then fell shut again. "No bell," he muttered again. You don't even have to put a bell on me, because I'm not going anywhere until you're up and out of bed and going there with me. The thought shimmered like a light silk scarf blown by a March wind. Genma followed it into a weird dream of Raidou drifting closer, of a hand reaching out for him.

A medic came close. Checked his pulse, checked his breathing. Checked the monitors and made notes. Did the same for Raidou. The others had gone, for the most part, quietly leaving when it was clear the danger was past. There were other patients to worry about, other jounin waking up in a sweat-stained panic, screaming themselves hoarse with mission flashbacks. Genin with amputations, facing the end to a career they'd only just begun. Chuunin plotting quiet suicide as they realized they'd gone out in a team of four and come back alone.

It was, in other words, like any other day at work for the medics at Konoha's hospital.

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