By the next day Obito has come down with a fever. His sleep becomes restless as he struggles to wiggle out of the two layers of oilskins she covered him in. She stops again and shakes him awake, his's disoriented and bleary -not good signs.
Rin contains her panic as she tries to bring his fever down with medication from her heavily stocked med pack but by the time they've crossed into stone country he's passed out, Whether from blood loss or fever she didn't dare try to stop to try and ascertain.
She books it the last few miles to Nagai. Luckily it's near the border. The unfamiliar treeless terian of Ishi nu kuni throws her for a loop but as long as she keeps and eye for loose rocks and hidden canyons she was fine. It was dusk when she got to Nagai and she snuck her way in as discreetly as she could, thankful for the cover of the approaching night.
She'd been worried that one or both of the Sannin would have moved on by the time she got to Nagai, but as soon as she enters the town she easily picks out two bright chakra signatures in the red light district. One was fire affinity and the other was earth with the soothing feel Rin associates with medic-nin.
She traces the earth affinity she assumes is Tsunade-hime to an upstairs room in an onsen. Rin slips through the shadows off the still bustling red light district, moving mostly on autopilot. A few people probably spot them, but hopefully they will mistake her and Obito for a couple of drunk civilians, the blood is mostly hidden by their stolen clothes after all.
Finally she makes it the back of the onsen, she pauses for a second to examine the window off the room she can tell the earth signature is in. Luckily the senju princess seems to be alone in her room except for much smaller chakra signature, a water affinity.
Rin knows she already very lucky to find Tsunade-hime separated from the crowds in the gambling halls and bars of Nagai's large red light district. She'll take her chances with the other person, if they're staying in the same room as the Slug sage they're probably fairly trustworth and hopefully loyal to Kohana.
She uses wall walking to get up to the window. It takes her a bit of thought with her suddenly much worse chakra control but she manages to do it on her first try without dropping Obito's unconscious body.
Once she gets up there she considers trying to open the window, but she can sense that is heavily trapped so she just pounds on the wall and yells until someone comes to the window. She wishes she had her Konoha headband band but at least she'd had the forethought to remove Obito's scratched headband before she tried to walk up the wall.
She pounds out in morse code -help. injured- until the shadow she can see at the window slides open the screen. It's the senju princess herself. She's already bellowing at Rin to 'stop making a racket and leave me alone' before Rin can get a single word out.
Rin is stunned for a second but she manages to shout back "Please! My best friend is dying!"
Tsunade-hime takes a look at Obito's blood soaked stump and pales "Go away, I don't do medical jobs that involve blood"
"I'm a Konoha ninja and Jinchriki! If he dies the genjutsu on me will break and I'll be forced to go back to Konoha and my seal is designed to break as soon as I get there."
Tsunade-hime gapes at her looks and looks like she's going to shout again but Rin steam roles over her, desperation feeding her confidence
"I need Jiraiya-sama's help with sealing. We both do, he has some kind of mind control seal on him and he was captured by some one who gave him strange limb replacements. Please at least let us see Jiraiya! We're on Minato's genin team, surely he will agree to help his student's genin" technically they're chunin but they're still Minato-sensei's students.
Tsunade-hime is still gaping at her. "What the hell, come in" she says after second, opening the window wider and stepping back so Rin can jump down onto the floor.
"Shizune-chan go get Jiraiya" Tsunade-hime says to the other person in the room, a girl about Rin's age with short black hair and wearing a black kimono.
"Please can you help him, I can't get his fever to go down" Rin pleads with Tsunade as she lays Obito out on the floor. Tsunade turns away, her face is still pale.
"Not a chance kid, you two are covered in blood"
"Most of this is mud" Rin mutters plucking at the happi she's wearing
"I can smell it from here, it's blood" the sannin says, she's digging around for something in her bag. Rin hopes its medical supplies but after a second the senju princess pulls out a bottle of sake and starts to drink directly from it.
Rin busies herself unwrapping Obito's bandages, his stump has already scabbed over, she doesn't see any obvious signs of infection, but the skin around his injury feels just as hot as the rest of his body.
"His injury is scabbed over, if you let me wash him off there won't be any blood" Rin turns to Tsunade-hime. The woman throws her a clean scrap of cloth and after a second, a half full canteen of water, all without so much as a glance at Rin. Rin gratefully soaks the cloth and wipes around Obito's scab carefully.
She unties the cord around his waist and pulls of the yukata he was wearing, the lower half of it was encrusted with blood. then she tears a clean piece off the sleeve and soaks it with water before pressing it onto his forehead. He's got boxer shorts on underneath but they're also inscribed with dried blood, she cuts them off carefully with a kunai then rips another clean piece of the yukata and puts it over his crotch, more for Obito's sake when he wakes up than anything else. She bundles up the blood stained clothes, wraps them in one of the oilskins and throws the bundle in the farthest corner from Tsunade-hime.
"Girl, there's a clean yukata in the bag on top of the futon, you can borrow it just get out of those clothes." The senju princess takes a break from chugging her sake to order Rin, she's still not looking at her.
Quickly Rin wipes off her muddy hands off and shuffles through the aforementioned bag till she finds the yukata, then she unties her apron and shrugs of the happi. After a second of consideration she strips off her spandex shorts, they're soaked with Obito's blood and a little of her own from three days ago.
Reluctantly she also takes off her mesh armor, she doesn't like being unprotected but she's in the same room as the strongest Kunochi in the world and Isobu will be able to heal any injury she might get.
She wipes some of the dried blood off her self with one of the last clean parts of her apron then she bundles her clothes and the weapon pouch that holds obito's headband into the second oil skin and throws them into the corner. she keeps her med pouch though.
Then she puts on the Yukata, its pale lavender that reminds her off her favorite Haori back in her dresser in Konoha. She feels tears rise in up her throat, she'd been running on nothing but adrenaline since Obito had come down with a fever, maybe even since her mission went south and she was kidnapped.
The last time she ate was in the cave two days ago, she'd shoved a few berries in her mouth and stopped to drink dirty creek water and then sit still while Isobu prevented it from poisoning her a few scant times while they were in rain country, but that hardly counted as it was not much fuel, only the bare minimum her body needed to keep functioning. She hadn't slept at all since her kidnapers had turned her loose three days ago.
Now that she's so close to getting Obito healed and her own seal looked at she can feel the adrenaline fleeing her system and leaving her exhausted and hungry.
Rin hasn't cried since that night at kannabi bridge and the last time before that was when she made her first kill, but as Tsunade-hime crouchs beside Obito's pale and now blood free body she can't stop the tears from welling up in her eyes. She sinks to her knees and cries as silently as she can while Tsunade-hime runs her green glowing hands over Obito.
She can't tell if the tears are from relief or the stresses and revelations of the last week. But the memory of the lavender haori her mother had bought for her years ago pushes her over the edge. Her mother had died when Rin was a newly minted genin, she had cried then too.
Rin wipes her eyes on the senju princess's yukata and looks up. The Tsunade-hime is frowning as she examines Obito, she's already closed up the stump of his left leg and his breathing is much more even, but she's hovering over his left arm.
"Whats wrong with him?" Rin asks, swallowing down the last of her tears.
"I already purged his system of the bacterial infection that was causing the fever, but you were right, these limb replacements are strange, their grafts, not prosthetics and they're made of something more wood-like than human flesh. This material is exactly like wood, but there's no chlorophyll or pigmentation of any kind, and the bark seems to only be growing in a few places. There's something strange about his chakra too, besides the seal on his heart I mean..." Tsunade mutters, her eyes still fixed on the patches of birch bark on Obito's upper arm and collarbone. She seems to be more taking notes out loud than talking to Rin.
Rin scoots a bit closer, examining Obito's fingernails where hard black birch fades back to papery white and begins to peel off as it gets closer to his second knuckle
"It looks like the bark has pigmentation?" Rin offers tentatively, hesitant to correct the senju princess. Tsunade-hime grunts non-comitaly and it's clear she's not listening to Rin.
Rin feels for Obito's pulse with two fingers on the inside of his barkless left wrist. She finds it almost immediately, it's strong and after fifteen seconds she can tell it's his usual resting heart rate. It's reassuringly normal and Rin find she can't bear to take her fingers away, even though she knows logically that her best friend is under the care of the best medic-nin in the world who is undoubtedly keeping track of his pulse and all his other vitals.
His pulse raises a lot of questions about the nature of his limb graft though, none of the tree's Rin's encountered have had pulses, he must have veins and arteries instead of Xylem and phloem. The artificial circulatory system in his arm must be perfectly attached to the rest of his circulatory system and she's seen him move his left arm quite often, he doesn't appear to favor it at all so there must also be an artificial nervous system. Rin turns to get try to get the senju princess's attention so she can share her observations but just as she opens her mouth the door slams open and cuts her off.
Rin whips around and jumps up into a crouch, her hand tightening around Obito's arm. Rin curses her self, she'd been too caught up in the implications of Obito's fake limb having a pulse to sense another person approaching. Luckily it's not one of the zetsu she knows have to have been tracking them or the kiri hunter-nin that had been herding toward konoha before Obito slaughtered them.
Instead Jiraya of the sannin stands in the doorway, hand still resting on the shouji he'd just thrown back. Rin can hear Shizune pursuing him down the hallway, scolding him about wearing his sandals inside
