| [Feb. 21st, 2010|04:47 am] |
No instant answer came -- and Kakashi realized in a background, shaking way that the drugs were finally out of his system. His thoughts were his own again, locked safely behind clenched teeth and an aching jaw. He exhaled raw gratitude through his fingers and inhaled through his mouth, trying not to catch Genma's dying-faith scent.
Shook his head.
"You're wrong." Genma's head jerked up, eyebrows furrowing sharply together, and Kakashi didn't have to guess what he was thinking. Optimism, denial, Kakashi's lost his grip. But there was a flicker of desperate hope there, too -- buried deep, barely a glint in Genma's haunted eyes -- but there. Kakashi reached out and closed a hand over Genma's knee; Genma's breath hitched. "I don't know how with it you were, but I sent a message back to Konoha. Pakkun, one of my dogs. If we've been here as long as I think, he should've made it by now."
Genma's eyes were too wide, halfway to shocky, but re-focusing fast. Seeing nothing in the world but Kakashi. Listening. Relieved, Kakashi cleared his dry throat, coughing on the echo of words that caught and broke. The IV had kept him alive, but it hadn't done much else.
"And Konoha sent a message back. I saw Takajin's face." Kakashi slashed a brief, dark, triumphant smile, trapped behind his mask-hand. "He was pissed. He wasn't going to let me out unless he had to. Someone made him."
Which Genma hadn't seen, Kakashi guessed. But he'd seen everything else.
Self-disgust tasted like bile; Kakashi swallowed it down and kept going. He could fall apart later, in private, when they'd made it home.
His grip tightened on Genma's knee. "You didn't tell me -- did they fix your chakra? I need to know everything that happened." |
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