They thought he wouldn't fight it, but he did.
Hooked up to all the tubes and wiring. Frosty eyed and bloody lungs, he hovered on the precipice. In Limbo. But the heartbeat was still there.
Tsunade was taking especially good care of him. Tsunade was putting out a search for the golden witch woman.
Kurenai was staring at the paper thin hospital gown and the paper doll man swallowed up in it through the plexiglass window. She couldn't get too close, she believed death was contagious. She had Asuma's arms around her waist.
Anko sat by his bed. She made up stories for him that she sat and told all night directly into his deaf ears. She rubbed her own special salve on his wounds when the nurses weren't looking. She asked them if she could help change his stitches She held his hand and massaged his knuckles. Big and irregular, some of them a jumpy crooked and misplaced and misshapen from so many hard hits. She stroked with her thumb the tough calloused skin on his scarred palms. She kissed the smooth underbelly of the scar on his eye. The eyelid thin and traipsing over it's ruined iris and swimming with little blue veins. She wore suns in her teeth. And moons in her eyes. She trapped seasons in her hands twiddling her thumbs. She waited. She remembered the golden woman and hated her with a seething passion that kept her eyes pinned open bright white like light bulbs all the time. She remembered herself and that he had never found anything unique about her. Not even in the triangular slice of flesh resting beneath her skirt. She watched the thick lifeline shaped scar forming and crusting over on his chest and hoped that when he awoke things would be different. When he awoke she was there.
He sat up in bed and eyed her as if she were a clear crystal necked bottle and looked right through her. She held his hand and patted the worn skin and said softly, eyes wet with gratitudefearreliefpainlove "I told you so." She expected it would make him angry. It didn't make him anything. He simply sat and said nothing. And continued to stare straight through her, expressionless. Emotionless. Lifeless. As if he hadn't heard a word or she hadn't spoken. Which scared her more than any of his angry outbursts ever could have.