| Working By Hindsight [Kakashi & Genma] | [Sep. 28th, 2010|07:28 pm] |
[Backstory: Takes place following Break Me Back Together]
Kakashi woke up when a sleepy shift dropped his hand from his face, and light struck his eyelids. Awareness came sharp and instant, bracketed by a carefully slow breath and tension hitting all the long muscles down his spine. He opened his unscarred eye. They were still in the cell. Genma's chest was still beneath Kakashi's head. Nothing had changed.
Except there was daylight.
Genma was asleep, head tipped sideways and down at an angle that was probably giving his neck a serious crick, chin resting a hair's breadth away from the stitches in Kakashi's scalp. His breath was slow and even, settled into the long-haul pattern of a man determined to stay unconscious for a while yet. Which was good -- he certainly needed it.
Kakashi licked cracked, dry lips and resisted the urge to stretch. Both of Genma's hands rested on his body: one wrapped around Kakashi's upper arm, the other splayed open between his shoulder blades, as if Genma hadn't been able to decide between holding and soothing, and had chosen both. Kakashi wondered how long it had taken for Genma to get to sleep. How he'd managed to get back to sleep himself -- and more importantly, how he'd stayed there.
It probably had a lot to do with those hands.
Very, very carefully, Kakashi eased free, sliding to his feet. Genma stirred, rolling onto his side and pulling his hands in close, but didn't wake. Kakashi tugged the blankets back up and covered his teammate properly, making up for the lost bodyheat. Genma still didn't wake. In the morning light, his eyelids looked bruised.
Kakashi pulled back and finally stretched, cracking stiff joints as quietly as possible. One hand lifted automatically to rake through formally-wild hair, but paused and fell away before it could yank stitches out. Then paused again when it hit Kakashi's leg and pain yowled up his arm.
He winced and looked down. Winced again. He'd almost forgotten about the sword slice to the back of his right hand -- had forgotten about it, really, in the midst of everything else. After hours of genjutsu, everything felt a little dreamlike. He barely remembered the medic who'd come in to stitch and bandage the wound; he hadn't really believed it at the time.
He believed it now, looking at the cracked red stain over neatly tied linen, marked with a splattering of clear dried droplets he didn't want to think too hard about. His pyjama pants were worse, but he didn't plan on sacrificing his last bottle of water to deal with them. Scowling, Kakashi shook his hand out, held the uninjured left one in front of his face, and cast about for his mask.
It lay in a crumpled heap by the opposite wall, where he'd flung it last night. Like a discarded, dusty shadow. He yanked it on after whacking it cursorily against one leg to get the worst off, and felt the rest of his waking mind click back into place.
Priorities.
The cell was a start -- something he should have started with yesterday, but he hadn't exactly been thinking straight. He was now. Or less curved, at least. Every corner looked the same; he picked one at random and made his way down the wall, working from the floor up to as high as he could reach, checking for pin-point cameras and seals. The cameras -- if they were there -- were superbly hidden, or just too high to reach. Kakashi didn't find any, even on the third circuit.
Seals were another matter. He couldn't see them -- not without using the Sharingan, which was an unhappy prospect in a chakra-limiting cell -- but he could feel them, like a dull-humming tingle in the cool stone. A dense, complicated matrix of exquisitely layered chakra: more than was necessary for a simple dampening jutsu. Or even a complicated dampening jutsu. Without examining the designs he couldn't tell exactly what they were rigged to do, but he could guess. Monitoring jutsu; nasty surprises if he or Genma got any clever escape ideas; slow, subtle, chakra-draining jutsu to keep them weak; maybe even something to instill nightmares, if Iwa was really smart.
That was what Kakashi would do.
He left the walls alone finally, when he'd learned everything he could, and turned his attention back to himself. Half a ration bar, two aspirin, and a deep gulp of water was more refreshing than it had any right to be; he used another mouthful of water to brush his teeth with over the toilet (minty breath was fantastic after inhaling nothing but smoke), then put the rest aside to save for later.
Genma was still asleep, breathing so quietly Kakashi had to stand directly over him to make sure that lean chest was still rising.
Keeping himself busy -- useful -- Kakashi left his teammate alone and ran through every exercise he knew that required zero chakra and not much thought. Under the onslaught of familiar movement, his body warmed up and relaxed a little, muscles unclenching from brittle tension to wire-strung alertness. He pushed himself as hard as he dared, killing time while the sun climbed and Genma slept on, until energy gave way to exhaustion and he collapsed on the spare mattress to catch his breath.
Five minutes of panting as quietly as he could, then boredom struck.
He reorganized his few Iwa-granted possessions, repositioned his mattress to better catch the slanting light from the window (still between Genma and the door, because some things weren't going to change), and turned his attention back on himself, finding one job that could still stand doing. The 'med-kit' Iwa had provided was a joke, but it was better than nothing. Kakashi retrieved the roll of gauze and the slim tube of antibiotic cream and settled down to check over and redress his hand, just in case the Iwa medic hadn't been thorough...
Thorough, as it turned out, wasn't the problem.
The wound was nasty, but well-cleaned and neatly stitched. The surrounding flesh was red-black with dried blood, and blue-purple underneath with spectacular bruising, slightly swollen, but infection hadn't set in to turn everything fever-hot and fatal.
The problem was the seal drawn in black, indelible ink across the back of Kakashi's hand. It stretched in complicated, unfamiliar loops from his knuckles to his wrist, almost blending in with the damage beneath, and Kakashi didn't know what it did.
Nothing good, probably.
He studied it until his vision blurred, but didn't dare tickle it with chakra to see how it reacted. Not in this cell. And not with Genma so close by. It was possible -- but not likely -- that it was a medical seal of some description, something exclusive to Iwa. Kakashi meditated on this comforting thought for as long as he could stand, before worry and curiosity broke down his resistance, and he reached out to touch Genma's shoulder.
"Wake up, Shiranui. I need your eyes." He shook Genma. "I need to know if you've got any new brands, too. C'mon, rise and shine." |
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