“That should do it,” she’s a pretty young nurse that any other man might admire. Another man would probably stare at her loosely wrapped bosom as she makes one final adjustment on his bandages, or appreciate the way her full lips curve into a smile when she straightens.
The teen doesn’t even notice, though. He takes a cursory look over the work she’s done and sits up. His side flashes in pain but he ignores it, swinging his legs out of bed.
“I’ll be on my way, then.”
“Oh, no!” The nurse’s brown eyes are wide with concern and her small hands pushing on his chest—above the broken bones—are nothing more than an irritation as she guides him back to his bed. “You can’t leave, yet! If you go out now, you’ll only end up hurting yourself more!”
He scowls, “I don’t have time for this.”
The nurse offers him a sympathetic smile that might melt the heart of a man with a weaker will. It doesn’t faze the teenager. “I’m sorry, but you’re going to have to stay another two or three days, at least.”
With a sigh, he leans back against his pillows.
“I’ll be back to check on you soon,” the nurse assures him as she makes for the door, “So don’t you try sneaking off!”
He glances at the window. It’s still early in the day, but he feels pressed for time all the same.
They had been making great time on the last mission, and it had seemed like he’d be back a day or two ahead of schedule. Then they had run into an ambush. And now he’s stuck in the hospital with nurses watching his every movement like flesh-eating hawks. In uniforms.
His mind drifts; caught up in the heat of his last mission one second and spinning around grocery lists and training tips the next. And then, abruptly, he remembers what he has to do.
He considers staying in bed because his ribs ache and his head is pounding and he’s exhausted. But now that it’s on his mind, he can’t ignore it. He doesn’t want to ignore it. It’s the one thing he can still do anything about.
Carefully, he shuffles his feet over the edge of the bed. Blackness blurs the edges of his vision and the world spins for several seconds. When it finally stops, he’s looking up at the ceiling dazedly.
Slowly, he eases himself upright again. The wave of dizziness isn’t so bad, and he waits a few seconds before trying to pry himself from his bed.
His entire body weighs more than ever before, it feels like, and he silently promises to cut down on the extra meat-bun snacks between breakfast and lunch.
His legs are heavy, and his center of balance is nowhere to be found as he sways unsteadily on his own two feet. Belatedly, he reaches out to press a palm on the wall and manages to stabilize himself.
This is too much for simple exhaustion. The thought flutters through his head and he wonders if they’ve drugged him. Again.
And Rin wonders why I hate coming to the hospital so much. He grunts as he attempts a staggering step forward.
He manages the feat without falling flat on his face and counts it a success. He still waits several seconds before attempting it again.
At last, he’s at the door, leaning against the wall at just the right angle to peer through the small window into the hall. He ducks back quickly as a nurse walks towards him, but it isn’t the same one that had been with him before, and she passes as quickly as she came.
Satisfied that he has a few more minutes to himself, at least, he pushes away from the wall, swaying again without outside support.
Turning in a circle is a little tricky and he almost falls twice, but a few minutes later he’s managed to make it to the window.
The locks take a moment longer to figure out. He stares at them, at a loss, for several minutes before he remembers what he’s doing out of bed in the first place.
Then he’s out.
He isn’t sure how he made it all the way to the park, or how long he spent staring at the children playing there. He doesn’t even really notice where he was until something runs into his foot.
He stares at it blankly, not really registering what it is even as his mind files away information about it. The sleek, black curved mass of its body and the blue box fixture near the back. A small funnel sticks up somewhere in the middle, little white puffs of smoke occasionally being expelled from the top. Some part of him registers the fact that it is pushing against his leg, wheels moving desperately in a futile attempt to move forward.
“You’re in the way,” a scornful voice draws his attention to the pair of boys frowning at him.
A thin boy with messy black hair and a rounder boy with brown hair. The thin boy is obviously the one who spoke, because the round boy looks a little nervous to be standing in front of him.
He continues to stare blankly at them, not really registering what the boy said.
The thin boy sighs in irritation and reaches for the object—a train, he finally notices—muttering.
“Troublesome…”
“Is that yours?” He shifts at last, mind slowly focusing through drugs and exhaustion and blood loss. He sits up straighter and looks at the toy with renewed interest.
The thin boy frowns at him. “Obviously,” his tone was more disdainful than the teen imagines the situation warrants.
“Do you like it?” He asks.
They look about the right age. Is that the kind of thing three-year-olds like to have?
The thin boy shrugs, “Yeah, I guess.”
“… I’ll buy it from you,” he offers, reaching for his wallet only to realize he doesn’t have it.
I must have left it at the hospital, he muses distractedly. That will make things difficult. He can’t go back now—not until he’s done. They’ll probably knock him out for running away, and then he’ll miss his window of opportunity.
The boy looks at him dubiously, “How much?”
If he’d been thinking clearly, he might have estimated the worth of the toy, but instead he mumbles the first number that comes to his mind.
“Twenty ryu.” The price of the beef chews his pack likes so much.
The boy snorts and picks up the train, switching it off—the steam issuing from the funnel stops and the wheels grind to a halt. “No way,” he replies, “It’s worth a lot more than that.”
He doesn’t bother to reply because he notices someone else enter the park; a woman dressed in the standard medical uniform.
He slips into the woods and disappears without either boy even noticing until a few seconds later.
By now he is aware enough to realize he needs money, and he returns to his apartment briefly to obtain some, sneaking past the medic posted as a guard in case he returns there. He sneaks out again without ever being seen.
It is still early in the day and the toy shop is open. He is out of it enough that he doesn’t feel embarrassed, even when he notices parents with their small children staring at him.
Perusing shelves of toys and child-sized clothing, it doesn’t even occur to him to purchase a train like the one he saw the boys playing with at the park. He’s distracted before he ever sees a toy train.
There’s a bin of plastic lizards, of every color of the rainbow. He crouches down in front of them, staring. Perched on the top of the pile, a lizard stares back at him, with softly molded yellow scales.
“Kakashi!” His teacher’s voice echoes in his mind, and he can almost see his own small foot, frozen in the air, just above a small, struggling lizard, stuck on its back.
He almost smiles.
It must have fallen out of a tree or something, he remembers distractedly, but at the time he’d only known one thing.
That that tiny lizard had just tried to kill him, and he’d barely saved himself when he knocked it off his head.
He only has a vague idea of what things were said at the time. It happened so long ago, and the memories are fuzzy.
That was probably the first time I realized it, he decides. Sensei had a very odd taste in animals.
He’d thought it was very strange, as a boy, that the man preferred playing with frogs and lizards and other slimy, unpleasant things rather than dogs.
He hadn’t understood how anyone could prefer something like that lizard to a dog, because dogs were the perfect animal. Dogs were soft and warm and smart and loyal. Lizards and frogs were cold and slimy and rough and they were pretty stupid, he’d thought.
It doesn’t occur to him as he purchases the toy that maybe that child might prefer dogs to lizards, like he had. It’s only natural, after all, that the boy prefers slimy reptiles, like his teacher.
He realizes he has a problem when he stands outside the foster house. All the other times he came, the boy had been asleep, but it is still early for that, and the windows in the house are lit up, with people moving around inside. He can’t just slip inside and leave the toy beside the boy before disappearing without being seen. Not like he had last year. Not like he had the year before.
He ponders this problem for longer than should really be necessary before climbing up the side of the house to peer inside the boy’s window.
The room is abandoned, the bed messed up and empty of its owner. He experiences an unexpected thrill of pride when he notices the stuffed shuriken lying next to the pillow on the small bed. It’s followed by a twinge of embarrassment.
Sticking to the wall with his feet, he eases the window open and places the toy lizard on the sill, where the child will see it as soon as he enters the room. The sunlight on its yellow scales makes it even brighter, and he is confident that it won’t be missed.
He considers sticking around, to watch the child’s reaction when he finds it, suddenly longing to see the look of surprise and delight he imagines the boy will wear, or the happy expression his teacher might have worn if he’d given such a thing to him. But he is beginning to feel light headed and belatedly realizes that using chakra to climb up to the window was probably not his best idea.
He falls when it gives out a second later, barely managing to twist around and land quietly on his feet. He straightens unsteadily, using the wall of the house to steady himself again and not entirely sure what he is planning on doing next.
“Kakashi-san!” A voice calls before he has enough stability to move away from the wall again.
He turns automatically, and cringes under his mask as his eye lands on the medic from earlier.
Her pretty young face is twisted in a scowl as she quickly navigates towards him.
Suddenly, he has a very good idea of what to do next. Pushing against the wall, he only manages a few steps, the ground tilting wildly underneath him, before his balance finally loses its battle against gravity and he tumbles ungracefully to the ground.
Looking up, the nurse is already standing over him, and he offers her a sheepish smile, most of it invisible under his mask.
“I told you!” The young woman snaps, “You’re not recovered! You’re still suffering from chakra drain, and your body needs rest to finish healing! Are you trying to get yourself killed, Kakashi-san?”
Chastised, he shakes his head. “There was something…”
She doesn’t allow him to finish, hauling him up by his arm roughly enough to make him hiss in pain. Her expression softens slightly and she positions him more gently until she’s supporting most of his weight.
“It’s time to go back to the hospital now,” she says, her tone allowing no argument from the young Jounin.
Recognizing the futility of it, he doesn’t bother trying to argue, shuffling along beside her as she begins to guide him away.
“I swear,” she grumbles as they slowly make their way back towards the hospital, “Sometimes I think the entire lot of you are mad. Running around the village when you’re that low on chakra?” She scoffs in a decidedly unladylike manner that may have made her previous admirers reconsidering their opinions—Kakashi hardly notices. “Geniuses.”