The air was still purring when I woke up the next morning to my attending iryo-nin wanting to poke and prod at me with various tools and iryo-ninjutsu. What was her name again?
She laughed, a merry jingling sound that tried to wipe away all my trust issues, as she prepared a swab. "Oh, I guess you missed it when I introduced myself, poor thing. You were in such a sorry state of course you wouldn't remember it. I'm Mijikai. Tilt your head back for me please."
...Did I say that out loud?
She nodded, and I complied with her request, and immediately regretted it when she moved my cannula and stuck the swab up my nose, further up than anything is ever supposed to go, and dug around my sinuses. I tried not to let my eyes water but to no avail and sort of just whined in annoyance instead. That was a little kid thing to do, right?
No, I totally remembered doing that in my old life too. Whining about this, even as an adult, was perfectly socially acceptable.
Mijikai-sensei (that was the right honorific to use for a doctor, right?) offered no consolations during the task, but eventually the torture stopped. She left to run tests on the swab I guess, throwing praises at my good behavior over her shoulder. Good behavior my foot. I wanted to mutter profanities but that would give me away, so I had to settle for grumbling. Could pneumonia pathogens even be found in the sinuses? I didn't recall having any nasal symptoms while I had been sick. I hoped there was a good reason for what she had done.
Tou-san was asleep in his chair, so I sat and stared at my hands for a bit, poking and tracing the few meridian lines in my fingers that I knew exactly where they were located, trying to restart my chakra circulation without disturbing the needle in the back of my hand. I could feel it had grown somewhat stagnant from prolonged sitting other than the occasional healing session to stir it up. My mind supplied a distant comparison to the lymphatic system, which is stimulated by movement, but moving still wasn't too plausible at the moment. The oxygen tubes in my nose and taped to my face and connected to the wall made sure of that. Mijikai wouldn't even let me out of bed to use the bathroom and I had been using a bedpan when I wasn't comatose and catheterized. Talk about humiliating.
I was feeling mostly better already, though still a little down on my energy. But I could definitely get up and walk around like a well human if I wasn't taped down to my bed. I knew somewhere from previous times that medic-nin preferred their patients remain utterly still and bedridden while in the hospital.
Okay, I get it. Rest is important for recovery.
But lying down not moving for too long was also bad. I had known someone in that other life who had lost the ability to walk because the doctors kept him in bed for three months straight because he was having grand mal seizures and the hospital staff were afraid he would fall and hurt himself if he tried to walk. As a result, the muscles of his legs had atrophied from disuse to the point of being completely useless and he had relied on a fancy electric wheelchair to get around.
(He got better after a long time and a successful run with some experimental drug. But still.)
Of course, I was nowhere near that point, and this four-year-old body retained a lot of plasticity and recovery potential. And who knows if Tou-san had done some physical therapy on me while I was under the way Asuna's rich family had paid to have done in that one show from that other life.
But still.
I hung my head a little, slightly overwhelmed by the flush of angry and distantly familiar feelings, antagonizing the existing healthcare system and processes, for prioritizing symptom relief over eliminating the cause of the symptom, and when they did work to eliminate the cause, taking care that the method of cause elimination didn't cause a whole new set of problems like how the vaccine industry had failed to do in That Other Life.
Plus there was the risk of deep vein thrombosis which was why people sometimes died after long, uneventful flights, usually international ones.
Maybe Tou-san was onto something with his snivelling and his vow to learn proper iryo-ninjutsu.
Not that I wanted to become another Mon Kasa. I already had the 'missing possibly dead mother likely from Uzushiogakure' (come on, where else could the "uzu" in "Hamauzu" have come from?) and the 'born and raised under an oppressive regime' parts down. Though I think I was safe from becoming a copy based on the fact that Kasa was a suicidal person playing a game and defying anyone who dare threatened her, even if the split personality had taken a lot of the credit for that. I had far too much survival instinct and had yet to defy anybody on my own, even my own bullies.
I ripped the tape off my face, removed the cannula from my nose, and reached up to grab the IV bag, draping it and all the tubing over my shoulder so I could get out of bed and go to the bathroom.
In retrospect, I didn't think that over too well. Doing anything with my hands - messing with clothes, using toilet paper, washing my hands - when one had a needle stuck in the back of it was hard. Replacing everything - IV bag, cannula, tape, blankets - without waking Tou-san was hard. Despite my defiance of the no-getting-up rule implied by the tape, I had intended to make it look like I had never left. Then Mijikai came back and noticed the state of the tape, and gave me a tongue lashing that put the fear of God in me and in Tou-san. This time she tied me down with rope, and I was going to stay in bed, dammit!
Lesson: Never question the status quo of medical procedures when you're four.
Even rest and recovery protocol.
And vaccines I guess.
(To this day, I still question the necessity for a flu test when it was clear that I did not have the flu.)
Well what do you know. Maybe Mijikai did know what she was talking about. I just woke up from how many hours of sleep? Thirty? Anyway. It worked. I think. And it didn't hurt to breathe.
And I didn't lose my ability to walk.
I guess rest and recovery are good for me, short-term at least.
(Don't expect me to do a hundred jumping jacks or be running circles while water walking though.)
"Hallelujah, half-real food!" I cried as I practically ran to the hospital cafeteria, dragging my IV pole along behind me, ignoring how the line tugged sharply at the skin under the tape holding the cannula in place. I had energy. I had excitement. I even had enthusiasm, and yes, those are all different. This is what four-year-old children are supposed to act like.
I don't know what they had fed me while I was sick, or how (I wasn't keen on learning how), but Mijikai had finally freed me from compulsory bedrest and I was more than ready to sink my teeth into something delicious again.
I scurried up to the cafeteria window, the IV pole almost-but-not-quite slamming into the counter in my failure to stop it, and stood on my tiptoes to see what was in there. Rice, fish of all sorts, seaweed salad, mushrooms, other vegetables, miso soup, ramen. All being prepared fresh. I counted the coins in my left hand that Tou-san had given me, laid them on the counter, and pointed at what I wanted.
Some minutes later at my table, someone brought me a fresh, steaming bowl of ramen topped with bamboo shoots, squid, mushrooms, pieces of nori seaweed, pieces of pickled something, and a naruto fishcake.
(Of course I was getting the fishcake. It was what the series had been named after, after all.)
I broke my chopsticks, grinned hugely, cried, "Itadakimasu!" and dug in.
"Not so fast, Kizuna-chan," Tou-san chided me lightly, picking at his salad.
I ignored him and continued to fill my hungry little mouth with the sheer deliciousness that was this soup. Oh my god, I don't think I'd ever had ramen that tasted as good as that soup. It was almost as good as I remembered pho being, if I had ever decided to get all seafood toppings instead of beef. I picked up the bowl and slurped up the last of the salty broth until there was nothing left.
"Gochisousama!" I cried triumphantly, replacing the bowl on the table. "Tou-san, more please!"
"Honey, this is hospital food."
"I don't care, it's good and I want more."
"How can you still be hungry? That was a big bowl."
I folded my arms and stared at him seriously, sticking out my lower lip slightly for that cuteness factor. "Did I say anything about being hungry?"
Tou-san laughed. Holy shit, Tou-san was laughing. Not nervously chuckling. Not a forced reassurance. This was real and maybe a bit terrifying because I had never heard him just cut loose and openly laugh before.
The horror he must have seen cross my face made him laugh harder. He grabbed and held me against himself.
That was also new.
"Tou-san!" I whined, pushing him away but not really trying. "Let go of me!"
But he was deep into the heartwarming family bonding. I gave up my not-struggle and patted him gingerly as he continued to hug me and guffaw into my shoulder.
(He did eventually let go, and I got to enjoy my second bowl of ramen. Pork and associated vegetables this time. It was also delicious.)
(I also spent half an hour in the bathroom later, my young gut unable to handle all of the salt, especially after having not eaten real food in so long. I maintained to Bunshirou-tou-san that the ramen had been worth it though, and urged him not to utter a single word about it to Mijikai.)
"But I don't want to travel anymore," I whined. "Can't we just stay here?"
Mijikai had just delivered discharge papers. I didn't need to know the squiggles of kanji on that paper to know that that's what they were. She had also removed my IV, which I took was a clear message to "go home." Not that I had one to go to, but she didn't need to know that.
"No, Kizuna-chan," Bunshirou-tou-san replied, unamused by my protest.
I pouted. "But I'm tired of walking all the time. And here I have a bed! Like at home!"
Tou-san's face fell a little. "Honey, that's a hospital bed. It's for sick people. You're not sick anymore."
"So?"
"Besides, we're shinobi," he whispered. "We can't live here. Kumo would never accept us."
"I'm four," I countered. "I have plenty of time to learn how to be a civilian."
And it wouldn't have been totally awful. I was less likely to die that way, at least.
"We have clan heritage," he said, "and you already know how to water walk. Your chakra coils are already too well developed to really pass as a civilian, and so are mine. There's no way we'd be allowed to live here as civilians."
"Okay, fine, we can never be civilians because we have shinobi clan heritage or whatever." I folded my arms. "What about the food?"
Tou-san put his hands on his hips with almost as much sass as I remember Kakashi having in the anime from that other life, which was about a third of the sass I had ever seen from Naomi-kaa-san. Basically it was the most personality I had ever seen him with. "Are you saying my cooking is bad?"
"No, but I really really like the ramen here," I said. "Can you make ramen?"
He laughed. "I'll do my best."
"Okay, Tou-san," I conceded, lowering my head. It was never a real argument. I didn't have it in me to openly contradict him. I was only doing it for the sake of getting better perks.
"But not every day. We need to make up for lost time," he added, growing serious again.
"What do you mean?" I asked. "How long have we been here? And where are we going anyway?"
"It's been over two weeks, Kizuna."
I did the math in my head. I had first woken up on a Friday and today, the day of my discharge, was Wednesday. So that was six days right there. But when had I passed out before then? I thought it was a Tuesday. I could understand being out for a few days, but for a week and a half?
I looked up at him seriously. "Why was I out for so long? And how, anyway?"
"You won't understand."
"Tell me anyway." When he hesitated, I added, "We're becoming iryo-nin, right?"
Bunshirou adjusted his glasses and took a deep breath. "Do you know what war is?"
I nodded, ignoring that growing petulant voice in my head that I didn't need to be coddled like a little kid even though I clearly (physically) was. And at least kid language meant I could probably understand it.
"Well Kumo is at war with a lot of other people, and when I brought you here there were many Kumo-nin who needed help right away. But they still wanted to take care of you, so they put you into a deep sleep until all the hurt Kumo-nin were better and someone could pay attention to you."
Translation: Injured Kumo-nin were more important to the Kumo hospital staff than I was, and so during triage they put me into a medically induced coma stasis state until they weren't too busy to actually have a look at me. (And they probably charged Bunshirou for all that time I had been under while nobody paid attention to me.)
I nodded again, understandingly. Grimly. I felt the last dregs of the childlike enthusiasm I had displayed before wisp away like dust in the wind.
It was true, I wasn't thrilled to be moving on. Sleeping on the ground had gotten old quickly, as did the food pills once our bulkier rations had run out. And I really did miss having a place to come home to.
But I understood that we needed to move on.
To wherever the heck we were going.
It wasn't terribly far from Kumogakure to the border with the Land of Frost. And it was quite obvious when we did arrive.
The steep crags I had become accustomed to seeing in Kaminari no Kuni immediately gave way to flat land and what looked like tundra. Every here and there I could also see bits of grass and scraggly trees struggling to poke through the top layer of permafrost. Even the sky, as few clouds as there were, looked like it was struggling to be blue and not a cold, steely gray.
The change in climate was equally jarring. Kaminari no Kuni had been slowly warming up as spring lazily meandered in, but all that backtracked in Shimo no Kuni. It was freezing again, and stupidly dry, and I cursed whoever had designed this world.
I had already dealt with four and a half years of non-stop cold, after spending an entire lifetime in a place where in some years the temperature didn't drop below freezing even once, even in February.
Sure, I could handle it now, but that didn't mean I wanted to.
Bunshirou only trained me as far as making sure I could still water walk and still had the flexibility to utilize the Hamauzu taijutsu. We couldn't do more than that. It was too cold, and there were too many shinobi lurking around. At least the trees were starting to thicken, the landscape becoming less tundra and more taiga.
Our third day into Shimo no Kuni, a clash broke out. Bunshirou shushed me and carried me into the trees, hiding far enough away that we probably wouldn't be associated with either village but close enough that we could hear shouts and clangs of metal and the ongoing ring of who knows what, and close enough that I could see, not that I wanted to. There we hid as the battle played out in gory, graphic glory.
We walked around the area after the fighting cleared, him physically inspecting the bodies strewn about. It was eerily silent except for our footsteps on the disturbed gravel. I recognized hitai-ates from Kumogakure and Konohagakure. I hoped nobody important to the plot had been killed.
(Not that the others weren't important at all, but if I was to have even a small measure of predictability in this world for survival, I needed things to play out as they did in canon.)
"Look here, Kizuna," Bunshirou said. I trotted obediently over to him, taking care not to step on anything or get blood on my feet. He was kneeling over someone. This one's hitai-ate was missing and he was wearing combat gear in a style unfamiliar to me. Besides that, he was covered in blood. I couldn't make out hair color for all the drying blood obscuring its roots. (It was probably brown. Mooks, especially Japanese animation mooks, were usually brunette.)
I fully expected a lecture about the dangers of being a Village shinobi like one of the ones he had given during our trek through Kaminari no Kuni. But it never came. One look at him and I knew this was something completely different.
"This one's still alive, for the moment," he said, and something dropped inside me. Shouldn't we get help for him? Save him somehow? Bunshirou-tou-san's iryo-ninjutsu was mediocre at best, but maybe it would be enough to get the guy to a more experienced medic?
"Watch," he continued as if I wasn't internally trying to come up with a way to heal the unconscious man.
I watched with morbid fascination as chakra pooled into Bunshirou's fingertips and he pressed them purposefully to non-bloodied parts of the man's face Vulcan mind meld style. The contact was brief, maybe three seconds though it felt like forever, and then he pulled away, formed a few hand signs, and executed a flashy raiton, a lightning release jutsu.
"Lucky," he said. "Lightning is my affinity."
"Tou-san, what is this?" I asked.
"Ah yes. This was a demonstration of the Imanara hiden jutsu."
"...What?"
He tilted his head at me. "You don't understand?"
I shook my head. "What'd you actually do?"
He shook his head. "And after everything I've told you over the past month."
"All I know is why we're hated and useless for having the jutsu. You didn't actually tell me anything about it." They were Tales of Imanara Mediocrity, after all, not a manual on every jutsu the Imanara supposedly knew.
"I copied his jutsu," Bunshirou said.
"How?" I asked.
"You're not ready to learn the mechanics yet, but I basically used my chakra to create an impression of his recent chakra flow, which I now possess as if it were my own jutsu."
"So like carbon copy paper and those old credit card slider things," I noted.
"Like what?"
"Nothing. What about the guy?" I said, indicating the dying shinobi.
Bunshirou's gaze darkened, and he tilted his head so that, intentionally or not, the light reflected off of his glasses and obscured his eyes. "There's nothing we can do for him now."
I felt a chill as the cold of the stagnating air and of his hanging words hit me harder than before. I regretted that we had been forced to shed my travel haori at the hospital, and Bunshirou hadn't seen a need to replace it.
We left the scene. The chill followed.
A|N: Merry Christmas and Happy New Year and other holidays, y'all. Santa brought me... nothing, actually. I guess not working on Chapter 4 landed me on the naughty list. But the relatives were mostly generous.
Chapter 4 might be late. Having to babysit visiting family and the subsequent sleep deprivation put a huge damper on my writing muse. Plus I don't actually want to write this part of her life right now. My brain wants to worldbuild stuff that doesn't become relevant until much later. Basically I know quite well where the story is going. I just need to carve a path through the swamp in front of me to get there.
Thanks to GlidingOne for (sort of) keeping me on track! It might not be the track that leads to a well-written and on-time Chapter 4, but it's a track! *twitch*
