Ginta barely looked up. "I'm decent," he told the door. It was probably time for some pill or other. Or maybe Intel wanted another word with him, now that they'd debriefed Kakashi and had a story to compare to Ginta's. There were bits Kakashi didn't know, of course, from before he'd arrived to stage his dramatic rescue. And bits Ginta didn't remember from when he'd been out of his mind with septic fever.

And bits that didn't make it into either of their reports, because they had nothing to do with the mission. Long conversations made hazy by exhaustion and delirium. Pain that trumped a shattered leg and seared chakra coils, and had no place for either of them.

Ginta turned the page of his magazine a little savagely, ripping the edge of a starlet's smile. He waited for the nurse to say something about pills and uneaten dinner trays, or the debriefer to ask for clarification about how long Ginta had hidden in that air duct after he was separated from (abandoned) his partner.

The silent ghost that slipped into the room was certainly a ninja. A ninja accompanied by pungent, gingery scents and a stunning lack of questions. Ginta had to look up at last, to find...

"Hiro?" Scowling blond eyebrows lifted in surprise, and Ginta's fierce pout turned into a wide, delighted smile. "Wow. Wow, I totally didn't expect to see you. I thought it was someone from Intel again. Although you are from Intel, but you know what I mean. Unless they're gonna make you debrief me. Are they? No, you're field ops, you wouldn't be doing a debriefing. And I've been debriefed already. Shiratori's assigned. You know him? Probably. Everyone knows him, I think. Anyway, wow. So, hi!"

He paused for breath, glanced down at himself to be sure his pro forma assertion that he was decent had in fact been true, twitched the sheets a little higher, and grinned even more. "You have two cups, does that mean you brought me tea? You're a saint, did you know that? So you know that mission I had to ditch our conversation for, when I had to take my noodles with me? Yeah, so I ran into some little snags." He shrugged his shoulders and shot a wry look at his leg. "Anyway, hi."