Content Warnings: Body-decay delusion, mentions of vomiting, mention of weed smoking.

From the second day after the surgery and moving forward, all of them feel awfully similar.

His siblings take turns making sure at least one of them is always around (both, most of the time, and he does wonder what excuse exactly Temari is giving to her firm to have this much free time). She tries to chat with him a little in what he imagines to be an attempt at keeping him somewhat awake and grounded and connected to them, and Gaara shows him drawings of flowers whose names he keeps forgetting and asking again, but his brother always looks happy to answer and his genuine enthusiasm is actually soothing to witness.

A physical therapist comes in every morning to try and make him sit up and walk a bit. She's not gentle nor kind, though not particularly brutal or rude either, but he still hates her by default because she keeps fucking touching him and the phantom sensation of her hands holding his arms (or, in the worst of cases, waist) when she moves him around stays on forever like dirty fingerprints on a glass window, except the window is flesh and the flesh is rotting. The smell of it makes him want to throw up, but he knows if he does, they will push away the moment he's finally allowed to eat by himself for another day, or several, and more than anything in the world he needs the tubes out so maybe the feeling of his blood catching on fire and the one of his body leaking out of itself will recede, so he swallows the heaving back down and prays that he will still manage to fucking breathe.

Some things do evolve with time. On the second day, Dr Senju passes over, and at first, she speaks to him as if they've seen each other already since he woke up, but rapidly stops mentioning it faced with his confusion and, distantly, he once again wonders what exactly she knows and understands of his situation. (More than most, that's for certain. He couldn't have completely foregone addressing the issue when her meds of choice for dealing with flare-ups ended up sending him into the worst paranoid episode of his life – "so far", something hisses over his shoulder – but he had really put his all into being as evasive and non-explicit as possible. She isn't stupid though, and she is painfully good at reading him, so he assumes that, to some extent at least, she knows.)

On the third day, Lee's patience eventually loses to his acute need to constantly take care of people, and he insists on Gaara giving him a little get-better-soon card that says he wanted to buy him a cake for moral support but he wouldn't have been able to eat it, so the card also doubled as a coupon for him to ask Lee to buy him a cake later.

On the fourth day, Kiba – presumably after having heard about Lee's gesture and feeling like he was falling behind in some sort of competition Kankurou wasn't aware of and didn't think actually existed – buys him a puppy plush and asks Temari to pass it along.

On the fifth day, Kankurou comes to the conclusion that letting the more eager of his friends inside the room for half an hour might be less tiring than waiting and wondering what random shit they would send him next. He is also allowed to eat lukewarm mashed potatoes for lunch, but the tubes don't come out yet.

All of those events barely suffice for him to keep track of time though, because the amount of pain and fatigue he is in flattens every single of those experiences, and because a non-negligible part of his brain is still focused on pushing the theory that the medical team is trying to trick him into thinking that time passes, when it actually doesn't, to prevent him from trying to get back out in the real world where it does. He does trust Temari and Gaara, however, not completely, maybe, but enough to keep the idea as something closer to "I should keep that possibility in mind, so in case it turns out to be true I am ready to act against it." than to "This is decidedly what's happening and I need to get out now."

When Kiba walks into his room, he looks like he's experiencing so many emotions all at once he might start crying. It's tiring just to watch, but there is something a tiny bit endearing, behind the bone-deep fatigue settling in his body at the mere thought of having to talk to someone.

Tenten is here too, and she seems half as happy to see Temari as she is to see him, even if she tries to hide it. (A little, not that much.) Then Hinata comes in when she leaves – two people at a time max, outside of his siblings, that's the compromise he's settled on for now – and through the crack of the door with the comings and goings he can tell Shino has made the trip as well, but he doesn't come into the room (which makes sense since they must have seen each other about three times in their life and never actually talked directly together in any of those occasions).

Lee passes very quickly by the end as well, and Kankurou can tell he is actively trying to restrain himself from taking too much space because he knows he's not one of Kankurou's closest friends and he doesn't want to impose, but not being included in everything, especially when it's about his friend struggling, is evidently very hard for him.

When everyone finally leaves, although it's apparently only been under an hour, the repercussion of it feels like that of an uninterrupted forty-eight-hour party and he passes out shortly after.

By any definition of the word, Kankurou doesn't look good when Kiba gets let into his room again on Saturday. Or rather, he does look good – as in: he is still himself and Kiba's compromised enamoured little heart is incapable of thinking anything else of him at this stage – but he doesn't look like he is doing good.

He is still uncharacteristically pale, and the bags under his eyes have gotten worse rather than better, despite spending most of his days sleeping, according to his own words. The amount of pain he is in is harshly visible too, in the tension of his face, the tightness of his breath, and the hiss he lets out every now and then when moving. Yet it's not any of those things that trouble Kiba the most.

He looks… far away. Somehow. Like he's looking at all of them on a screen and he's just pretending to be here. He didn't expect him to be enthusiastic and lively – though he had hoped maybe he would be – he gets that the situation is far from comfortable. But he expected him to look better, maybe, and he looks so much worse. At least when he was annoyed, angry, or anxious before, he was there. Flesh, bones, mind and all. This right here is not an expression he knows Kankurou to get, and he doesn't like that.

He doesn't comment on it. It's probably not going to be useful, and he can only assume the best thing he has to offer for now is some company that is positive and ideally not overwhelming, so he puts on a smile and chats a little, telling Kankurou about the rehearsal they had the day before and how they missed him, about the cutest and ugliest and funniest dogs he's seen at work this week, about anything that comes to his mind that makes Kankurou look at him and not through him, if only a little.

When he leaves, he doesn't feel more reassured than when he came in in the slightest.

"You don't look so happy," Tenten comments, raising a hand for Kiba to lend her his pen for a vape. "I thought you were looking forward to this."

Behind them – and around, and before… sort of everywhere that isn't the couch they're sitting on, really – lie boxes of his and the rest of the polycule's belongings, most labelled with care, some – the ones Kiba finished doing yesterday night in a deadline fueled haze – less, but at least they're all here, in their new apartment, ready to be opened and put away, and that's way enough for today. Shino has gone to his room to cool down from the day's event after they built the bed back up – the only furniture that will get handled further today – and Hinata and Lee are lively chatting in the kitchen a bit further away.

He is happy. He's been looking forward to getting a proper place with Shino – and Hinata, when she became a serious addition to their relationship – since essentially the first day they put a foot in their previous apartment. It wasn't horrible, really, they even managed to get one with an actual bedroom and not just a studio, but the bedroom was, well, not much more than the size of the bed, the rest about just as small, all of it propped on the third floor of an elevator-less building… he's always known Shino would have never lived there if it wasn't for him. He wasn't in a particular rush to leave his father's place to begin with, and if it had been solely on his terms he probably would have stayed there up until the day he'd been able to offer something actually fitting his needs. As it was, however, Kiba was both in desperate need to sleep somewhere that wasn't his mother's apartment, and not exactly in a state where he nor Shino trusted him to be able to spend most of his days and nights alone and not badly crash again, so he had agreed for them to look for a place together.

So, yes, of course, he is happy they've moved out, proud too, of having managed to pull his life together enough to live up to what he wanted to be able to offer to his partner and friend, but the timing makes the whole thing a little hard to properly appreciate.

"I'm just worried about Kankurou," he says eventually when he's retrieved his pen. He texted Hana the address he'd parked the van at earlier and had her agree to come pick it up when she'd be back from her date. He felt a little too exhausted and jittery to drive again today, and a little too craving for a high, too.

"He's almost a week post-op. If anything should have gone majorly wrong, it probably already would have," Tenten answers. "I know it was a bit impressive seeing him yesterday, and of course he still looks sick and everything, but Temari said he was healing as expected. These things just take time. He'll be alright," he assures.

Truthfully, Kiba can actually believe that. Tenten's right on the fact that he's just at an early stage of a complicated physical recovery, and that it's not particularly worrying that he still looks like he's having a hard time. But it's not really the nature of the thoughts that have kept turning in circles under his skull for the past twenty-four hours.

The way he'd looked, Kiba had realised sometimes after leaving the hospital, was not an entirely unfamiliar one. He'd never seen it on Kankurou, but he'd seen it before, on himself, on Shino. It's not a look that simply says "in pain and in urgent need of actual sleep". It's one that says "burnt out, depressed, and unable to keep in mind that this isn't going to last".

And he doesn't know what to do about it.

"I guess you're right," he still says.

He doesn't fully believe it, but he also doesn't know how to share his worry without, one, making it worse, and two, digging into something that Kankurou doesn't want him to. The way he'd looked and snapped at him when he got to his apartment a week ago was quite a new sight on him, too. It's evident that these matters are hard on him, and that he's been keeping a bunch of shit for himself and intends on keeping doing that if he can. It doesn't really feel like Kiba's place to intervene in that decision more than he already has, if he can help it.

"I hope he'll be better soon."

On the eighth day, he finally manages to convince the medical staff to pull the IV out, under the promise that he will be hydrating as much as they ask him to. The prospect of being forced to down any liquid or food coming his way while being watched over to check is not exactly doing great things to his paranoia, but it's arguably still more manageable than the acute body decay caused by the tubes and needles and pouches and slow drips into his bloodstream, and he's regained enough of a grasp to at least cling onto his siblings' presence as a safeguard and assurance that if any of his fears manifest in something more real or urgent they will do something to help him.

"Where do you plan on spending your recovery?"

Temari's voice comes to him with a bit of a delay – he must assume, it seems more likely than him being able to see her lips move in advance, though he doesn't push that possibility aside entirely either, you never know – and half covered by the semi-constant static in his ears. He's definitely saturating from his past week of forced socialisation and company, and while he can tell that most of his symptoms are rather receding and slowly coming back to their usual level, his ability to process voices and interactions is not improving with every day spent locked in a room with half a dozen different people checking on him way too regularly for his own liking.

He knows it would probably help on that front to have Temari and Gaara leave him alone for a day – they do go sleep home at night most of the time, now – but he also fears discovering he has overestimated his sanity and ability to not see all of his progress unravel before his eyes if he pushes aside one of the few stable grounding points he has right now.

"Home. Where else would I go?"

"Somewhere that isn't on the fifth floor while you can barely stand up without support?" she suggests with some cynicism in her voice.

Kankurou knows it's not actually meant to sound judgemental, just the genuine expression of both her worry and confidence in being right. He can't completely fault her on that, of course. He might be delusional, but not to the point of believing he's going to have a good time walking up stairs by what should, G-d willing, be the end of the week if everything continues to go as planned. To be fair, even in a more acute psychotic state, he's not really the type to ever fall into omnipotence delirium. If anything, he usually rather goes the other way around into "half-dead body that cannot uphold any function without collapsing" territory.

"I'll manage," he assures. "I can get groceries delivered until I feel better or something."

Anything that isn't being babysat for another week – or several – is fine by him at this point. If he's home and not watched over by strangers in lab coats, he will manage being alone. And he fucking needs to be.

"Does that mean you're going to let me buy a pair of crutches as your physical therapist advised, or is your plan to crawl your way up to your studio?"

Right, that, too. Frankly, if conceding that one means Temari backs off of forcing him to stay at her place or whatever her plan is, he's in. He can always shove them under his bed and never use them again once home anyway.

Distantly, he's aware that avoiding the crutches is not really going to solve his whole issue with medical equipment and how dissociated from his body it makes him feel. The more the pain of the wound recedes, the more aware he gets of the feeling of the stoma bag stuck to it and brushing against his skin at every movement. And with all that for most other aspects of his recovery, as annoying and distressing as they might get, he can at least comfort himself with the knowledge that they will be over, eventually, this one he's going to have to deal with for the rest of his life.

Surely, he can stay in denial of this fact a little longer, though. (Not much. Soon enough, he will have to empty and change it himself every day, several times a day, touch it, see it, feel it, look at his fucking organs sticking out of his body as if the thought of them didn't torture him enough already when they were inside.)

"Okay. Sure. Let's do that."

The frown in Temari's expression indicates she finds his change of mind a bit too easy and suspicious, but she doesn't comment on it. For now.

"I'll go tomorrow then. But please spend the next few days thinking about how confident you are you can even just reach your doorstep without killing yourself. It would suck if you'd done all that to be terminated by a bunch of stairs and your own stupid ego, wouldn't it?"

Yeah, there's no way he won't be thinking about it.

Fucking hell.