Genkaku (Naruto fanfic)

Chapter 2: Of ducks and dogs

When Shizuka awoke for the first time in an unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar place she had screamed and trashed around so much that a couple of medics had to hold her down and jab a sedative in her arm.

The second time Shizuka awoke, she was calmer. The sedative made her mind feel hazy, like she was seeing herself from a third person point of view, which should have made her more unnerved than it did. 

Her eyes dragged around the room languidly. White walls, white ceiling and white bed sheets. There was a screen on the right side of the bed. A green line moved up and down in sharp spikes almost hypnotically. There were numbers next to it. 60. 62. 63. 61.

Oh. That was her heartrate. She was in a hospital. But Hoai didn't have a hospital, they were only a small border village. Shizuka absentmindedly drew the conclusion that she was in fact not in Hoai currently. But why?

fire, smoke, blood

 The beeping at the machine got louder, drawing her attention back to the funny green line and its numbers. 89. 95. 102. What was she thinking about again? 98. 87. 81. 76.

A woman stepped into her room, her hair a shade of blue that reminded her of bubblegum. Mmm Shizuka wanted some bubblegum now, but not the blue one that tasted like artificial bananas but the pink one that tasted like strawberry and her mom always told her was bad for her teeth. Oh right there was someone in her room.

The lady was wearing a standard nursing outfit, clipboard in hand and she seemed mildly surprised to see Shizuka awake as the girl merely blinked at her lazily. The nurse stepped closer to her bed, slowly and deliberately.

"Good morning, dear. How are you feeling?" Her voice was sweet and lilting, kind of like her aunt's before she succumbed to some kind of respiratory disease many years ago.

"Goood. M'tired." Her voice sounded like she had swallowed a ball of cotton, her lips not quite forming the vowels properly.

The woman smiled at her, adjusting something on a bag filled with clear fluid that was... ohhh it was going inside her arm. That was weird.

"Why don't you go back to sleep for a bit then?"

Oh yeah. Sleep. Mmmm.

~~~

The sound of several ducks quacking and splashing around filled the small hospital courtyard. Mindlessly, Shizuka tore off another piece of her bread and tossed it into the water, the family of ducks immediately scrambling towards it. The bread was actually supposed to be her lunch but she wasn't hungry.

It had been a week since she had first awoken in the Konoha hospital and the burns on her back had almost completely healed over, only sending small pinches of pain up her spine whenever she made sudden movements. Shizuka hadn't cried when she first saw the big stretch of scar tissue spanning her back from her left shoulder down to the upper part of her right hip. No. By then, she hadn't had any tears left to shed.

The nurses had slowly decreased the dosage of whatever they were using to keep her mind fuzzy, afraid she'd react violently towards either the medical staff or herself after she had remembered that night.

The smell of charred flesh, the feel of blood on her hands

Her hands clenched tightly into fists as Shizuka desperately pushed down the wave of sadness that was threatening to swallow her whole. She tightly closed her eyes as her breathing picked up speed. A therapist had told her to count down from 100 in intervals of seven when she needed to calm down.

100. 93. 86. 79. 7- Her eyes snapped open as something wet touched her ankle, right where her hospital scrubs ended.

She stared down in bewilderment at the small white puppy in front of her. Its tail was wagging rapidly as it looked up at her with wide brown eyes. Shizuka glanced around the courtyard furtively to see if its owner was anywhere around, but she was alone in the small rest area as most patients were having lunch right now.