"Hatake-san," Chihiro said quietly. "Ginta is sleeping, and you hardly look fit to be out of bed yourself." She looked up into a gaunt masked face--so like his dead father, and yet so unlike. His coloring and build were all Sakumo, but that doe-shaped eye and delicate jaw had come from the mother the boy had never known.

And now here was the son. She remembered him from that hospitalization in December, when he and Ginta had both come home with pneumonia and assorted other ills. She remembered the way Ginta had talked about his new friend. The delight he'd taken in meeting a true intellectual equal.

The way Ginta had talked about him that had sounded just a little bit too much like the way Ginta's mother had once talked about the boys in her life, when she'd been young and flirty.

"Perhaps you should sit down." She gestured at an empty wheelchair, standing in the hall. Across the back of the blue vinyl was stenciled, 'ANBU ward, F4'.

She remembered Ginta's early morning visit to her koi pond a month ago, the devastation in his eyes. She remembered the way he'd told her to send for Ryouma. The way his gaze had flinched away from Kakashi's door after Ryouma arrived, the hard edge that had crept into his voice when Ryouma was there.

You have hurt my grandson, she thought fiercely. I'm grateful to you for saving his life. But you shame your family and mine.