I Can't: KankKiba: Part 2

The two entered the kitchen and sat down at the table. The whole house was empty save for them and a few goldfish on top of the refrigerator. For a moment they just hung there in awkward silence, then, finally, Kiba found his voice.

“So, erm, what do you want to drink?” He inquired, pushing himself out of the chair. Kankuro shrugged, leaning his head against his hand.

“What do you have?” The dog-boy opened the cooling mechanism and stared for a minute.

“Um, milk, apple-juice, water, tea…” He trailed off, hoping for the puppet-master to answer so that he could sit back down.

“Water is fine.”  Kiba reached up in the cabinet and pulled out two glasses, filling them one at a time with clear, cold water from the tap and setting them on the counter. Shaking the excess water from his hands he took one glass in each hand and began to walk back to the table. Unfortunately he was going a little too fast, and they were a little too full, so he ended up spilling them all over his shirt and dropping one on the floor.

“Shit.” He muttered, bending over to pick up the glass and slicing his hand open. Kankuro nearly knocked over his chair he stood up so fast to go over and help the leaf ninja. He was handed the one remaining cup. “Stick that on the counter, will you? And get the broom and dustpan from behind that fridge.”

While the puppet-master busied himself with those tasks, the dog-boy pulled off his wet shirt, and, throwing it aimlessly behind him, shuffled over to the sink to run his hand under some cold water and wrap it up in a white towel he had hanging on the stove. The blood soon soaked through, even though it was thick.

By that time, the sand ninja had finished sweeping up the glass and dumping it into the trashcan, and had turned to see if Kiba’s hand had stopped leaking, what he saw stopped him in his tracks and nearly bowled him over. Trailing up and down the boy’s spine were bruises. A lot of them, of varying sizes, the largest being roughly as big as a small paperback book.

“Oh my god dude. What the hell happened to your back?” The dog-boy turned, Akamaru barked. It had only been a few minutes, and yet the towel was sopping from the life seeping from him. All thoughts of discolored skin halted as Kankuro hurried over and took the injured hand in his, unwrapping the towel to survey the damage. It looked pretty deep, so he turned the water back on, washed off most of the blood and wrapped it up in gauze that he kept in his pocket. “Okay, we need to get you to the hospital, that looks like it needs stitches.”

Kiba didn’t put up a fight, didn’t say anything. Just looked a little woozy, like he was going to faint. Not wanting him to fall and injure himself further, Kankuro lifted the boy up into his arms and started to run to the infirmary, blood soon dripping on the ground as he sprinted.

They arrived minutes later but not soon enough for the puppet-master, who could already sense the weakness of blood-loss growing. The moment he was through the automatic sliding doors he pushed his way through a crowd of people to get to the very front of the ER line. The person on duty, an older woman with white, curly hair, and blue-grey eyes, lowered her horn-rimmed glasses with her right index finger, staring at him disapprovingly.

“Please, you have to help me. My friend is bleeding out!” He shifted the boy’s weight so he could hold up the hand that was oozing life. She sighed and called a doctor over the loud-speaker.

“Dr. Wimbledon should be with you in a moment, in the meantime, Ms. Shelly,” she pointed to a young woman with long brown hair standing beside her, “will help you stop the bleeding and get checked in.”

The woman immediately raced over and began applying pressure using a thick gauze pad she had unwrapped on the way over. Almost immediately, it had stopped. She taped the pad on and got a wheelchair, indicating for Kankuro to set him on it. He was almost reluctant to let him go at first, but quickly got over it and set the barely conscious lad inside and strapped him on.

“How did you stop the bleeding so fast? I’m a ninja and I couldn’t do that.” She smiled and reached into her bag to pull out a few more of the gauze pads, handing them to him.

“They have a special ointment on them that temporarily seals up the wound. Tsunade’s formula. Now, how long has he been bleeding?” The puppet-master racked his brain for time, quickly coming up with a semi-accurate trail of events.

“Well, he cut his hand on a piece of shattered glass and went to tend to it, it took me about five minutes to get the shards up with a broom and dustpan. That’s when I noticed the bruises and asked him about it, he turned-” She put up her hand to stop him from continuing.

“What bruises?” He unbuckled his companion and leaned his body slightly forward so Ms. Shelly could look them over. When she finished, she didn’t look happy. “Okay, continue.”

“Then, he turned around and I saw that he’d bled through a towel and looked like he was going to faint. Not really surprising, he’d looked like he was going to keel over any minute all day, but anyway, I washed some of the blood off and wrapped it tightly in gauze, picked him up and it took about three minutes to get over here. So he’s been bleeding about ten.” She noted all that down on her clipboard and felt Kiba’s forehead.

“Do you know his blood-type?” He shook his head at first, and then remembered the last time he’d had to rush this kid over to the hospital. The doctors who had run over immediately had yelled at the nurses to run and get a canister of blood.

“I think it’s B.”