| Speak My Language [Ginta & Hiro] | [Aug. 15th, 2010|04:31 pm] |
Takes place April 12, one week following Hiro and Ginta's last meeting in The Little Things Give You Away, six days following Ginta's confrontation with his grandmother and Never What I Expected, and three days following his intervention with Ryouma in This Time Is Different
It had taken a few days following that last surgery, but Ginta had finally been allowed home, with crutches and a heavy cast, and an arsenal of pill bottles that came with detailed instructions about what and how much he should eat (and not eat) with them, which pills could or couldn't be taken within three hours of which other pills, and as complicated a schedule for meals, medications, exercise, and rest as any mission plan.
At a quarter to eleven in the morning, after a few rounds of pushups and some experimental chakra-mediated handstands, he was busy resting.
In theory.
He swung between his crutches like a pendulum, pivoting back and forth without letting either his bare left foot or the cast-encased right one touch the tatami. Chakra kept the crutch tips anchored, and callouses from years handling steel weapons protected his palms, but eventually his armpits started to ache, and he flopped onto the bed in disgust, letting the crutches clatter to the floor.
He wasn't even really home.
Not in his own bed, anyway. Not home in his apartment with his wall scroll now showing the wrong month and his lacquer desk gathering dust. And he didn't even want to think about his refrigerator, which would be full of things well past their sell-by dates. At least when he'd left for that mission to Komatsuyama with Tsuyako he'd planned on it taking a week or more, and gotten rid of all the potentially nasty items, like milk and fresh meat. But by now the carrots would be mushy, the apples starting to wrinkle, and the cabbage was probably decomposing into black slime. He hoped it didn't stink.
He'd missed Tsuyako's funeral. Somehow he kept coming back to that, worrying at the thought like an aching tooth. He'd missed her funeral, though Grandmother had attended in his place, when he'd asked her to. An inquiry was still underway as to the circumstances of her death, Ginta knew, because there had been several visits from Shiratori and one of his Intel colleagues to discuss the matter. He doubted Tsuyako's name would ever appear on the Heroes' Stone, but at least someone in the chain of command was keeping the possibility alive.
She wasn't a traitor, Ginta had told them. Going over the details again and again. She had been captured, she had been tortured, and in the end, rescued but dying from her injuries, she'd confessed she'd broken, but he didn't know what she'd told her captors, and it couldn't have been much. And those captors were dead now, anyway, so how could it matter?
He tossed on the bed, stared sourly at the latest copy of a mission statement Intel had sent for him to look over, cast it aside and picked up a book with a colorful dustjacket: The Zen of Koi Breeding and Management. Inside the front cover, in his grandfather's firm hand, was an inscription and a date: To my grandson on his eighth birthday. Sakamoto Gousuke.
Lying in the same room he'd slept in when he'd been eight, Ginta stared at the ceiling for a moment, wished life were as simple as it had been back then, then sighed and flipped the book open to the chapter on breeding for color. |
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