| Let Her Die On Her Own [closed] |
[Jul. 20th, 2008|03:29 pm] |
[First installment of the DOOM aftermath; takes place after Nothing to Hold]
Waki paused outside the hospital room door, gathering his thoughts and papers into order.
He'd been called in as soon as the rescue team had arrived. The Hyuuga boy had done remarkably well; the ninja who'd been tortured was in surgery, where they were repairing the damage done to his jaw, and the Hatake boy was waiting for him. They'd both be taken to a Critical Care unit when it was over, treated for chakra exhaustion and solider pill overdose, but they'd be all right. That was some field-patching job.
The two Inuzuka and their rotting chakra, however, were a problem. Their energy circulated slowly, and the links between them had been severed. The Hyuuga boy had done good work on that; they hadn't gone into amputation shock, despite the severity of it, and the fact that their chakra moved sluggishly within them meant the rot spread only very slowly.
It didn't mean it wouldn't spread, and the moment they tried to use their chakra it would grow. Streams of black had crept across the dog-human's face over the hours-run back and subsequent time it had taken to isolate the problem. The skin was slowly beginning to slough away in the darkest areas. They needed to clean out his chakra--Tsume's too, though it wasn't as bad.
Cleaning out chakra wasn't something they normally did. Waki had some ideas. They just weren't the safest ideas, and he needed the next of kin's permission.
Inuzuka were vastly annoying. He glanced at the hospital room door, knowing inside was one of the many members of that clan. With a deep breath, he opened the door and pushed into the room.
A man stood there. Square-built and small, like a whip-cord pit bull with a wary eye on the doctor. Waki closed the door and ignored him, setting his patient's folder down on the table and flipping through until he found what he wanted.
"Ah ha!" He pulled the chart out, walking to the examination bed and spreading it down. "Do you know what this is?"
The Inuzuka--Yogi? Yoshi?--frowned at it. Probably didn't know. "It's a chakra chart."
Waki nodded. "Yes, yes, very good. Your--" he paused, peering at the short man beside him. Yukio? "--lady and her dog--"
"Familiar."
The shaggy beast sprawled across the tile looked up and growled.
Waki stopped to stare at it. "Bad dog! No growling!" Then he turned back to--Yoshifumi?--and continued. "These chakra points have been..." How to explain? "Poisoned. When your lady and her dog draw on these points, the decay will spread, and eventually kill them." He paused to see if the man understood.
Yasashiku had turned pale. "Is there... a jutsu or seals--a healing thing--"
"No." Waki looked back at the chart, realized he was holding only the woman's, and bustled over to get the dog's. Both were marked in red where the chakra points had been contaminated. On the woman's, it was only the sixth chakra point--the brow--that had a touch of rot. He suspected most of it had been in the pathways when they'd been cut, and for that he was grateful.
The dog, however, had rot in both brow and crown points. His chart was painted in scarlet, covering a good part of the outlined head. Waki set that down as well.
"Wait--" the Inuzuka man said, pointing at the dog chart. "Why does he have so much more? It'll spread--"
Waki waved a hand, annoyed at being underestimated. "A Hyuuga severed the links. Saved the lady's life."
"So... they aren't sharing chakra. And you said they can't use their chakra, or it'll spread." He spoke slowly, thinking his words through.
Good gods, he thought he was being asked for an opinion. Waki hurried on. "Yes. Now, what I am going to do is to drain out the damaged points, and then bolster them with chemical chakra until their bodies replenish." He stared at the Inuzuka--Yoshimitsu?--hard, willing him to agree.
"Draining an entire chakra center sounds dangerous," the man said cautiously.
Some day, they would learn to just do what he said and stop arguing. Waki's arthritic fingers tapped impatiently on the bed. "It is."
Yukata looked alarmed. "When chakra points are drained completely, that section of the body stops working, doesn't it? This is her head."
He had no faith in Waki's abilities. "I don't believe I learned about that in medical school. Perhaps I missed that semester. Or maybe you should let me do the thinking!" He looked around for a ruler--or a rolled up newspaper--but couldn't find one. He let a glare suffice.
"So you think you can do this without making her a vegetible?" Yogi asked suspiciously.
He would have liked to have just said yes. Full disclosure was vastly annoying. "Yes. And no. There is a possibility that something could go wrong and leave them brain dead." He looked around, found the form, and dug a pen out of his lab coat. "Sign here."
Yukio took a step back. "I'm not signing that! You just said she could go brain dead!"
No one had any faith in the medical establishment anymore. "Are you the doctor? Do you know what's best? No. Without this, she will eventually use her chakra and die anyway. Sign here." He held the pen out farther.
Yasashiku looked hesitant. "She wouldn't be able to use her chakra. No more jutsu. So... she'd have to retire. Right? She has two kids. I'm not sure--"
He didn't have a ruler or a rolled up newspaper, but he did have a pen. He threw it at Yukata, nailing him on the forehead. It bounced to the floor. "You imbecile! She can't not do jutsu! How often do you use your chakra in every day life? How often do you strengthen your muscles or run fast enough to grab a child before they fall off--" he waved his hands around. "Whatever children fall off of! Sign the paper!"
The dog was whining. The man stooped, picked up the pen, and signed quickly. "I'm sorry. You're right. She'd be miserable--"
Waki grabbed everything, uncaring about the man's self-recriminations. He had a patient to practice experimental, newly-created treatments on.
"Waki-sensei. What... what are you going to do? How dangerous is this?"
He shoved the paper into the folder and flopped it closed before looking at the man. Yasuo! Inuzuka Yasuo. It was a fair question, even if he didn't feel he had time for it. Waki took a breath and thought. "It is simpler on the woman. Tsume. The rot doesn't go as deep. We're going to seal her centers so their energy doesn't flow and try to re-balance throughout all her points. When they're sealed--" if that worked, "we will siphon her chakra down in the sixth major artery. She can live without it for up to a minute," in theory, "so we're going to use the last of her chakra--the deepest energy, which should be clean--and run it through purifying seals before putting it back into her body." If the seals worked. They were adaptions on blood dialysis, and his specialist thought they would function the same. "It should take thirty seconds. Then we're going to boost her own levels with chemical chakra--"
"I thought that burned out pathways, in doses that high."
He hated being interrupted. "Of course it does! This is why she'll be unconscious! Her own chakra will buffer the worst of the burn, and we're going to keep the levels as low as possible. She'll be comatose and her pathways will be raw and unusable for a time because of the chemical overdose, but they'll heal. As her own chakra levels replenish with rest, she'll wake up naturally." He waved a hand. "Of course, we'll keep her on monitors and IV fluids. It will likely take forty-eight hours or longer."
It was more dangerous than that, really. Chemical chakra overdose could, if not managed carefully, burn out the pathways permanently and do great damage to the centers and the surrounding tissue, not to mention the long-term side effects of unusable pathways and consequently low chakra levels. His hope was that keeping her comatose, with the chemical chakra so low as to only keep her alive while her body replenished, would stop any of those problems from happening. Time would tell. Healing seals would help. Provided the dialysis worked; otherwise all the activity in draining and refilling her chakra could very well re-activate the jutsu and send it eating through her face.
It was still their best hope.
"If everything goes well, Tsume should be out of surgery within a few hours, once we have her levels stabilized."
"And Kuromaru?"
Assuming all of this worked, he was the real trick. Waki opened the file back up, pulling out the chakra chart again, and another of just the two infected centers. He spread them on the bed. "We can't drain both arteries at once." His body would go into cardiac arrest trying to replenish them. "We're going to try to start with the brow point, as that's closest to the eyesocket and if it goes through into his brain there will be nothing we can do."
"Wait--if what goes through into his brain? Why does that matter?" the man was looking at him with alarmed blue eyes.
He'd forgotten to explain the physical aspect. Damn. Now he was going to have to talk to this man more. "The jutsu that was used was developed to decay organic matter. That it lodges in the chakra system is more of a side effect." Hopefully that would be good enough. In case it wasn't, he talked faster. "We're going to drain the sixth chakra point much like we will for Tsume, but only halfway." The chakra movement would likely trigger what was left of the rot. They were going to paint more seals on him, keep his system as depressed as possible. Nearly dead, truthfully. With luck, it would stop any extra chakra activity as it started, and keep the jutsu from growing too much.
"It won't clear out all of the rot, but we don't have days to wait for it to replenish before we drain the seventh chakra point." If they waited, the other center would be eaten through before his body replenished far enough to keep him alive through a second chakra-surgery, and he'd die anyway. Doing this might trigger the remaining rot into growing. It might kill him. Or it might create enough time to get both rot levels down. "This will buy us some time. From there, when he's well enough, we're going to try to flush his centers out--fill him with chemical chakra and drain it. It will do some damage, but hopefully not much. If it works, we'll only have to do this once. If it doesn't, most of the rot will be gone and we'll have time to decide what to do next."
He didn't think it would work--if any rot was left, it would continue to grow, and they couldn't fully drain his points. Two-thirds would be risky enough. Leaving a third of his chakra centers would surely leave some decay behind--but it was a stopgap. They'd have more time. Maybe even enough to give him the days to replenish between surgeries, so they could drain the centers completely like they were doing for Tsume.
"Now, if you're done pestering me, I have two patients to take care of. Good day." He stuffed the files into the folder, tucked it under his arm, and fled before Yasuo could come up with another question.
Some day they really would learn that he knew best, and they'd just sign things and stop asking. He waited for that day.
In the meantime, he had one other thing to do. He stopped at the main desk, handing the file over to the clerk. "Have a basket sent to Hyuuga Haruichi, care of ANBU headquarters. Sake, crackers, cheese--that sort of thing. Include a sympathy card, please. Write, 'My condolences for saving your teammates. Thanks to you, they might survive and you'll have to deal with them again. Good luck.'" With a crack of laughter, Waki turned and scurried down the hall toward the ICU. |
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