Paperwork took forever.

After the eighth form Kakashi was required to sign in triplicate, he began to seriously suspect the nurse was just messing with him again. When he protested, she pulled a medic aside and Kakashi was required to sit through yet another quick physical, just to make sure he wasn't about to drop dead on the spot.

The medic tutted over his blood pressure, checked his sugar levels, and told the nurse to order a high-calorie lunch.

With great effort, Kakashi restrained himself from punching a hole in the wall. Why was everyone suddenly obsessed with giving him food?

Macaroni and cheese was the dish of the day. He ate it with chopsticks and a side-salad, standing over the nurse's desk, signing slowly through paperwork with his free hand. Every third second someone tried to catch a glimpse of his face; Kakashi considered it a mark of significant personal improvement that none of them succeeded.

Then Intel wanted a word.

He sat through a second interview with his battered patience slipping rapidly through his fingers. But he answered their questions, kept a lid on his temper, and clarified the few points they wanted to double check. When you first reached Sakamoto-san, what kind of state was he in? (Tortured, injured, falling towards a vat of molten metal.) Where, exactly, did you bury Kinjo Tsuyako-san's body? (In the southern mud bank of the Kintama river, twenty-three miles outside of Komatsuyama-city proper.) How are you feeling in yourself? (None of your business.)

When that was done, the nurses had begun their early afternoon rotation, and Kakashi was long past ready to go home. He collected Masuru's folder, retrieved the two bags of Ryouma's stuff from his former-room, and finally signed himself out at the nurse's desk.

He was halfway to the door when he caught sight of Ginta's empty room, the bed being re-made by an unfamiliar nurse, and almost had a heart attack on the spot.

The nurse leapt quietly out of her skin when his hand dropped on her shoulder. But she was quick to explain that Ginta had not, in fact, relocated to the hospital's morgue. He was getting surgery on his leg and--

She paused to check her watch.

--he should have been done an hour ago. Maybe more. Kakashi would probably be able to find him in the regular ANBU ward, if he was inclined to look.

It was a decision that took less than a millisecond to make, motivated almost entirely by the shotgun beat still rattling behind Kakashi's aching sternum. He threw Ryouma's sports bag over his shoulder, hung the plastic bag from his other wrist, jammed the folder beneath his arm, and absolutely didn't limp on his way down the hall.

Ginta's room was easy to find, in the end. Kakashi met it gratefully with a shoulder against the laminated wood, catching his breath yet again, and dropped his hand to the handle--

Skinny, steely, blue-veined fingers wrapped around his wrist.

It was another mark of personal improvement, he thought later, that he didn't add another broken neck to his record. Or maybe that was just a learning curve.