Author's Note
I would like to point out that in our modern reality, a lab and physician's assistant are two different things… but that NARUTO society is differently developed than our reality. Hence Katiya being quite a few things… we haven't really mixed in reality for two centuries or so… and probably don't want mixing for ethical and safety reasons…
(It sort of comes up later in this chapter…)
Chapter 25
Katiya (three months later, approximate time: 4:30 PM)
Katiya got off her last mission early—and decided to pay a visit to the labs. But as she rounded the corner of the door into the main laboratory, she was greeted to a barrage of running medic-nin and what appeared to be a panic. The prospect of privacy and personal research diminished. As a troop passed, she swung her gaze back into the body of the lab.
"What's going on?" she asked.
Finally noticing her, one of the medic-nin ran to swing a mobile medicine cart over to her, waving irritatedly at one of the other attending staff all the while.
"Overbooked—complications during surgery—out of nursing-level or higher medic-nin—take the cart down to tokubetsu ward three—the chart has everything you need to know," the medic currently in charge stated rapidly.
Katiya swung the cart around, thinking. "Tokubetsu"—Special Division? There was only one Special Division in Oto. What does Torture and Interrogation need with… Katiya looked down at the chart. "Curse mark stabilization pills, experimental class."
Katiya's eyes narrowed, understanding. It was a manipulation tool worse than any other, the curse marks; the pills painfully necessary for the prisoners, from what she gathered. Her voice cold, she changed her topic, "When I get back, should I prep for a rotation into surgery?"
Another medic, overhearing, snorted. "Yeah, duh—Something's up with our chief of staff—he's off his game and we need everyone skilled we can get in there—now hurry it up and go."
Katiya nodded curtly, pivoting the cart out the door.
She had been in Oto for over half a year, and the labs she had access to most of the time still were what she considered to be lower-level—just barely stocked with resources, relegated to simple tasks, and barely any privacy. She supposed having access to the pills at all meant she was climbing the unofficial loyalty ranks, but still—it wasn't going to be good enough for anything. She exhaled sharply once she was out of the vicinity.
Chief of staff is off his game, huh? Katiya mentally repeated. Looks like things are going to change soon.
She pocketed some of the curse mark stabilization pills into one of her waist pouches as she found a clear stretch of hallway, two of each distinctly marked vial.
The plan is moving up.
Kankuro (approximate time: 5:00 PM)
Kankuro knocked on the door of one of the senior puppeteers, hoping to put in an inquiry about some equipment changes he spoke to Lady Chiyo about. There was a muffled response. Kankuro waited. After some shuffling, the senior puppeteer opened his door.
"Oh—hey—I was trying to reach you yesterday—" Kankuro started but stopped after meeting his elder's face.
He had wiped off his warpaint, but the puffy eyes of sleepless stress reddened his cheeks.
"Senpai—are you… okay?"
The puppeteer opposite Kankuro breathed a sigh. "As well as I can be, I guess."
"Did something—?"
"In this way—not here," the other man said roughly, ushering Kankuro into his quarters.
Temari (approximate time: 5:20 PM)
"Thanks so much for keeping it—you have no idea what it means to me," Sen said, wrapping her arms around the cactus pot from Temari. Temari, having just gone to Sen's house to deliver a large, spindly specialized cactus that she had been keeping safe for her villagemate since before the day Gaara went on a rampage.
Temari shrugged. "It wasn't an issue… not like I really grow much myself."
Sen gave her friend a look. "Hey—for someone with a self-proclaimed 'brown thumb', you kept him pretty alive—not to mention through the missions you had to leave him behind for. Take a bit more pride in him, will you?"
"'Him'?" Temari asked amusedly.
Sen grinned. "When you come to appreciate plants like I do, you'll get why they have names."
Temari was silent for a beat. She was surrounded by people who named inanimate objects. "... Names," Temari repeated exasperatedly.
"This particular cultivar can take up to fifteen years to reach maximum growth—the best time to harvest pollen, flowers, fruit, cactus juice—everything. Fifteen years. And just a little bit of damage could have set the harvest back for who knows how long," Sen went on oblivious to Temari's expression.
Temari startled. "Then what do you do in the meantime?" she asked. She hadn't known she was harboring something so precious to one of her closest villagemates—else she might've doted on it a bit more.
Sen shook her head, knowing what was going through her friend's mind. "Cacti thrive on neglect, completely different from other foodstuffs that need everything… sorry about your lettuces, by the way."
Temari shifted her weight, recalling the brown lumps of dead plant she came home to after her last mission. "No worries, it's alright. I probably should have just stuck to admiring your plants knowing the missions I'd have to go on as a shinobi."
The longer, harder missions as my father's daughter.
Sen made a face. "No, you just need to take more pride in your plants, and fight for them like you would for any of your missions." She gestured to her plant. "This one's important because it's something of a symbol of peace here in the desert, not to mention the medicines we can make from it… and we did just have a field of night blooming cereus decimated…"
A symbol of peace… decimated… that day… Gaara, Temari thought distractedly.
"It's a sort of morale boost to have this guy around while the ones just outside of Suna are regrowing—those ought to take just about five years, maybe less, to reach maturity again. In war time, this baby's among some of the plants that tend to get trampled and have a hard time growing back—really shameful considering how useful he is—it's why peace is so important…. They're like people like that," Sen continued, "It takes time for a kid to grow up, and if war's around and the kid gets injured or gets too little water or nutrients, it's that much more of a struggle to get to their full potential later."
Temari was silent.
"In the meantime, we'd use imports—southern cereus, dragon fruit from the Land of Rivers, stored extracts—but it's not the same as the natural stuff you'd grow locally."
It's not the same as having a full functioning shinobi force of your own, Temari likened the sentiment to.
"But I suppose whether you'd even notice the difference might just be the difference between a civilian kid and a shinobi family… I'm not sure a spindly acacia tree would be as affected by war as a poor cereus."
Katiya (approximate time: 5:20 PM)
Katiya used her medical ninjutsu to move blood out of the area of operation on a patient. One of the upper-level surgeons were operating while she herself stood to the surgeon's aid. The person she had switched with, already gone and out the door.
"What happened?" Katiya mused as she and the medic-nin in charge worked to cauterize and sew the wounds shut before applying a modified version of the Mystic Palm Jutsu. Two comminuted fractures in the right arm in addition to a series of hairline fissures throughout the limb, unilateral mandibular fracture and avulsion, dislocated cervical vertebrae in two places, not to mention the internal and external tissue damage centered on the upper back and face, Katiya noted.
"Kimimaro—that's what happened. Lord Orochimaru wanted to test his strength—a good chunk of us dead—the stronger folks—" the surgeon nodded to his patient "—operations like these."
The patient—a mangled body of a boy—had been hit with the equivalent of a battering ram and then impaled repeatedly. The Shikotsumyaku kekkei genkai, which Kimimaro possessed, a bloodline trait that allowed one to manipulate the rate of bone development and even shape, clearly dangerous.
"This anything to do with the massive number of folks in the tokubetsu wards lately?" Katiya asked.
"The massive number of them missing? Yeah, I'd say."
"Missing"?!? Katiya mentally repeated. I saw we had many in there… but just how many are in there usually?
"Poor bastard's lucky Lord Orochimaru thinks he might have some worth as a squadron leader in the upcoming invasion," the surgeon continued whilst unaware of Katiya's thought train, "Guess he was deemed loyal enough too, to be getting an upgrade."
Katiya grumbled in acknowledgement as she manipulated a jaw half back in place and surged the area with non-elemental yin and yang healing chakra.
"Don't spend too long on his face—we're not here to be making lookers—got another body to deal with after this one, remember... so don't pour your chakra reserves out—and leave the eye to me—the thing's going to have to be removed."
Katiya grumbled again, instead sewing back the avulsed skin in place before moving her hand to the boy's neck. The excessive chakra and concentration drain, the primary reason why the medics in Oto cauterized and sewed what they could when a pure healing with the Mystic Palm would be more effective. People and their overall well-being were more expendable in Oto.
"This patient loyal enough for an upgrade, but not for our full care?" Katiya asked nonchalantly.
The surgeon snorted under his surgical mask. "Think he'd be in the mass infirmary with care barely better than field medicine if he was? He's got a head, but he's nothing special, you get what I mean? … Lucky enough he's got the two of us as is."
Katiya looked down the row of full beds—each one likely requiring an "upgrade", each one flagged with a priority number according to ability worth. Having just come from a full-on medical ninjutsu healing with Tayuya in a private operating room, Katiya sincerely doubted that statement.
The surgeon pulled out prostheses and reinforcers for the boy's arms, pausing only to nod at Katiya, "Usually, it'd be just the one of us medics to the entire ward… Be glad you've got that field medic training tucked under you—keeps you on this side of the table and all…" he trailed off while eying her with a hint of jealousy. "Set to change unless you start doing more to pull your own weight though. Chumminess is quick to change if you can't perform."
Katiya narrowed her eyes. Arguably, she did an equal or greater amount of work as a shinobi mix of a lab and physician's assistant—one of Kabuto's assistants—than a specialized shinobi medic on a day-to-day non-emergency basis. She exhaled the thought away. The surgeon's presumption aside, the statement was both a general warning but also a potential threat.
"Resonating echo speaker—new prototype," he announced smugly as he began mounting it on top of the damaged arm at a speed that was just slightly too quickly for the average person to catch and remember the process of. Rushed job, job security, she supposed. For him. She frowned under her surgical mask.
Kankuro (approximate time: 5:20 PM)
Kankuro stood in shock at what his senior puppeteer had said.
"I hope you don't see them any differently now as you did then, Kankuro. Understand, these are desperate times."
Kankuro sat down. "How many more—do you know?"
The senior puppeteer leaned back on his seat. "Six upper-level shinobi from my division… maybe fifteen or so who transferred into genin infantry… but most likely more including the other divisions… I only know of the ones I've spoken to… who went missing… put the pieces together myself."
Kankuro breathed shallowly. What was he to do? "And what about you—did you ever—?"
The puppeteer was already shaking his head. "They had families, Kankuro. People who needed the extra money just to get by... Me, no, I never did." He turned his head to a team photo taken during his genin years. "They knew the risks…"
Kankuro shook his head. "No—No… How could you?!? How could you keep this a secret knowing it's a breach of Suna's security? How can they—you—be so heartless?" Kankuro grabbed the shirt of the other puppeteer. "Doing missions for another village is one thing—but when it spirals out to selling our information—do you even know how many people have we might have lost from that?!?"
The puppeteer jumped to a stand. "But how many people did we lose? Kankuro, only the ones who joined Oto out of necessity are missing—no one else. They're shinobi—not fools—nothing they gave away was anything worse than what could have been figured out from another nation's Bingo Book."
Kankuro stood up as well. "You don't know that."
"But I can tell you, I trust their judgement."
Trust, Kankuro mentally repeated in disdain. Grimacing, he stuffed away his revulsion, averting his eyes from the senior puppeteer. "You know I have to report this now…"
The senior puppeteer nodded his head slowly before shifting his eyes to meet Kankuro's. "I know. But know this and think carefully: if you do that, we'd be losing even more shinobi… Your father doesn't take kindly to betrayal."
Katiya (approximate time: 7:40 PM)
She had just come from a check-in with a member of the Sound Five—the team constructed and trained by Orochimaru to form an indestructible Four Violet Flames Barrier at his discretion—and a "chosen one", Kimimaro. And following Kimimaro's strength test, that meant she had to report directly to the medic-nin chief-of-staff. Katiya knocked on his door.
Though, all things considered, besides said member's indignation on having to be treated by a barely-better-than-trash-nin, there really wasn't much to be reported.
Kabuto responded. But rather than opening the door to allow her in like most nations' custom, Kabuto opened his door just enough to allow himself to slip out into the hallway. Katiya wordlessly stepped back accordingly. Oto was an odd nation, being run effectively by a dictator, so the action by itself was innocuous. "Report?" Kabuto asked, rubbing his forehead with a thumb and forefinger.
"Tayuya's coming along quite smoothly, sir. Especially considering it's only been a few hours since the… battle," she said tactfully.
"How much of it was our medical ninjutsu and how much was her own or her curse mark's healing?"
Katiya handed him a copy of Tayuya's medical chart along with the side notes from herself and every other medical staffer's care. "Sir? Are you okay?" she asked, seeing Kabuto's obvious distraction.
"I—Yes, I'm fine," he replied dourly, "Heaven forbid a shinobi to have just the one specialty…" he grumbled in an undertone.
"Sir?"
"What?"
"You're awfully distracted, sir… and the medical division's been feeling the same strain," Katiya said carefully, "I don't suppose there's anything I should be doing to help besides taking up extra shifts? Everyone's been in overtime already since Kimimaro sent everyone to the infirmaries… but apparently something's up with tokubetsu?"
Katiya wasn't sure if the question would have been a dead giveaway to the train of thought she had, but shouldn't have had she been just a regular crazy-loyal Oto-nin… but it was safe enough to ask given the extra rounds the medical division knew she had to give to the tokubetsu wards.
"Yeah. We've been having issues with some of our members, so we've been tossing the disloyal ones we found into there. Replenishes the ones we lost for Kimimaro's power test, anyways," Kabuto said with barely any pause.
Katiya nodded, her face impassive despite her earlier worry. She wouldn't have even guessed Kabuto was under the Sleeper Jutsu if not for Itachi pointing out the possibility. "Have you managed to find any commonalities in all of those … disloyal shinobi?"
"Well, they're all from regions southwest of here, but I don't know what else to tell you," Kabuto said vaguely, shaking his head.
"Ah," Katiya verbally responded in acknowledgment, letting the issue rest.