Hi hi. This was supposed to be Kakashi planning on proposing to Sakura, but he decided to sulk in a corner. Eh. I'll just get him this weekend and have him be Monday's Update of Doom. Why update of doom? Because this story has rammed itself straight up to my school year, which starts on Monday. So this weekend I'll write a chapter probably twice or three times in length as usual, and then Delirium will be updating once a month on the 20th of each month, probably. I'm sorry to be doing this, but I've warned you for a good week and a half or so. I just can't keep up with updating twice a week as well as school.
For good news: Finally something from Takara's POV! (and then Sakura's...) Enjoy!
You and your mom are a lot alike—you've got big hearts, you've got pink hair, you're amazing at chakra control, the list goes on. Where you differ is that Mom works at the hospital still, and you only come in by appointment. It's not that you're being snobbish about your skills and who gets them, it's that the rest of your family needs so many home-repairs that you're on a semi-permanent S-class mission from the Nanadaime to take care of them. It's S-class, so you can't tell anyone about it, not even your mom and dad, so you feel like you're a little kid again pulling one over on your parents.
Your week usually starts with Takeo or Riichirou, because they are more specialized for particular missions and are sent out and return more often than Akihito. Your younger siblings rarely leave the village, so they get low-priority for their injuries unless they're truly grievous.
If it's Takeo, your younger twin—and you really don't rub it in, honest!—you blackmail him into doing your few chores around the house in exchange for your services as the family medic. He doesn't know you've been ordered to patch him up, but what he doesn't know can't hurt you and it gets the trash taken out. He rarely comes home injured anymore, at eighteen he's getting more agile every day, but Mom worries about her first pink haired boy—so you often will spend an hour healing bruising and closing up cuts and minor lacerations.
Riichirou is often dragged in by his current boyfriend, Fumihiko. Your seventeen year old brother makes manly bedroom eyes at "Fumi," and it's all you can do to prevent yourself from gagging. You are going to set him up with someone soon, and you're going to damn well get rid of "Fumi," and his crazy eyes that don't zero in on your brother—Riichirou isn't the pink haired Hatake son that Fumihiko wants. You and your mom often stay up late making plans—you've got a list going between you of the self-identified bi and homosexual shinobi in Rii-kun's age group, and your mom may or may not have broken into Shizune-sensei's hospital records room to get that information. And you may or may not have stood watch for her.
Your dad is another deal entirely—he probably has you figured out, and you don't know what kind of trick he's going to pull to blackmail you in exchange for his silence on the matter to your mother. She has always said that just because there are three and a half capable medics in the family does not exempt any of the Hatakes from going to the hospital. What you're doing is family treason, in a sense. Your mom has spent her entire adult life trying to get geezers like Dad to go to the hospital rather than going home and suturing their wounds themselves. Dad can usually whine and get her to heal him, but she will whine all the way through while he grins. When she won't or is at the hospital, your dad goes to you because he knows he can get more free healthcare. Not that he needs all that much usually. As a retired Hokage he doesn't get sent on many missions other than being assigned in-village ones to meet with diplomats when the Nanadaime is otherwise engaged. But there is always a very dangerous, very secret—very secret, Mom is a very neurotic woman when it comes to your dad's health—mission which only someone like the Nanadaime or the Rokudaime could complete.
And those are the ones no one likes to tell Mom about. Last month she threw an ANBU operative out of the panoramic windows of the Hokage Tower. A bit over a year ago, shortly after Dad retired, she almost made good on threats to break Dad's leg to keep him home and safe. Dad debates with you sometimes what constitutes "safe" these days if the one person in the village who could really hurt him is his wife. You try not to take sides.
On top of your own S-rank, you have to patch your father up faster than anyone else who comes whining to you after Mom says to go to the hospital. Mom literally can't know about some of the missions Dad comes back from, and it's best if he's only bruised and a little battered rather than bleeding from a dozen gashes. Or having random weapons sticking out of his person.
A lot like Akihito. Your oldest brothers, Masato and Akihito, go out on longterm missions, often together, and just about the only thing they never treat on one another is the condition of having a shuriken or a kunai sticking out of their leg or butt cheek. There have been odder places to leave a weapon, but with all the tumbles and rolls they use in combat, your brothers are a couple pieces of work. One or the other of them is going to lose an eye with how they fight, if they're getting knives embedded so deeply in their skin that they wait until they get home to get the weapon out. Akihito is a decent field medic, so neither has ever come home in serious danger of an infection or anything. It's just…
You look up at the rat-a-tat-tat-tat-a-tat of Akihito's knock. And there stands your older brother, who, at twenty two, is far more of a child than your youngest brother Minoru. He has a boyish set to his dark eyes, and a lazy grin on his pasty lower face, his shoulders are slumped just like Dad's, but at least he's standing up mostly straight, and holy— you didn't know Shuriken could go places like that—!
He has three shuriken embedded one by one down his thigh, settled so deeply they must be touching bone—and Masato is nowhere in sight which means that this wasn't from a mission but from a spar. If your brother were dead, Akihito would have a face straighter than Dad's on his visits to the Memorial Stone. Because Akihito looks like the prankster who pranked ANBU, you can instantly deduce where he got his injuries.
It's simple to stabilize the wounded area and gently work the spinning knives out of your brother's skin, and he knows enough about house treason to not make any sounds of pain as you work. The only person allowed to commit house treason is Mom, because she made up the rule and none of her three medically trained children has ever gotten up the courage to break it openly. Akihito because he isn't good enough to heal away even the marks of healing, you because you're on an S-rank to commit house treason secretly in the name of keeping the Rokudaime's family safe, and also because you're not that stupid, and Hoshimi because while she can heal pretty well, she doesn't like to do it unassisted yet.
The operation on your brother's leg, as well as healing his many bruises, lacerations, and even minor scrapes, is successful and only takes an hour and a half. You and your brother had chatted about life, the hospital, your parents being completely nuts, as well as Akihito's fear that the Nanadaime is going to assign him a Genin team and that he's not sure he's really mature enough to teach. You tell him to go talk to Dad about it, but he thinks that's weird—Dad didn't mean to, but he eventually found a wife out of his original Genin trainees. It gives Akihito the willies, willies which will no doubt get worse in time: every year more and more kunoichi are graduating from the Academy—more and more girls on Genin teams, more and more of them growing up.
Mom, Shizune-sensei, and Tsunade-baa-chan have taught you that your bedside manner is the calmest out of all medics they've ever trained. You know that if Mom were allowed to know about your mission to heal your family members, she'd be proud. Your brothers, and occasionally younger sister, never even feel the need to glance at their injuries as you work. They never tense up, and they rarely look like they want to howl in pain. You are a damn good medic, and you sometimes wish that your Mom would be allowed to know about it.
You mask your chakra when you come into the house, mostly to try and surprise Kakashi—which rarely works, he says you mask too much of it, that you don't feel like a civilian, and that it's good you don't go on combat missions fighting S-class criminals anymore. The new generation of S-class guys are way too good for the likes of the two of you old people. You usually don't have to heal any broken bones from how hard you punch his arm, but once in a while he isn't prepared for the blow and something cracks. Nothing ever shatters, you're not a monster.
The first time you detected your pink haired daughter healing in the house, you almost felt like being a monster—raining down your wrath at her breaking the rule of "Go to the hospital, not home." But then you kept yourself in check, to investigate what was exactly going on. Takara isn't loose with her life, doesn't break promises easily, and wouldn't benefit from a lecture about the rules. She knows the rules, which brings about your question: why is she breaking them?
From what you could read from her chakra patterns and those of little Minoru's—well, to him fourteen was most certainly not little, but you're his mother you'll call him what you want—the kid had broken his wrist. Probably trying to learn a new tumble from Riichirou, but you'll never know. Just reading your daughter's chakra signature, figuring out what she was up to, brought tears to your eyes that first time. She is a damn good medic, and you're glad to know it.
This newest was probably a knife wound, from what you can read as you stand outside of Takara's closed door, and you can hear the codewords for what is going on. She never lets on in conversation that she's healing, but you've been listening in to her healing sessions whenever you can recently so you can hear the coded "can you feel your toes?" and "Now you're going to be put on a weeklong rest break so that your muscles can heal. Come back tomorrow for some therapy." She never actually says these things, but you can hear them.
If only your little girl would just heal someone out in the open, you could stop spying on her and praise her efforts openly. You want your little girl, your own spitting image save for her dark Kakashi eyes, to know that you're damn proud of her.
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