[Action Thread][I'll Go Where You Want Me To Go][tag Kabumi, Sasoriza]
Hanato missed the grand entrance. Not surprising, really, seeing that he'd been cooped up in the bowels of the hospital all day, tending a succession of pregnant cats, hamsters with overgrown teeth, dogs who'd eaten something they shouldn't have, and one truly awful case with a kitten that had somehow gotten into its owner's stock of poisons. The antidote was concocted for humans; Hanato couldn't make adjustments in time.
He left his lab coat on the hook and his assistants to deal with the poor kitten's stiffening body, and his girls followed him silently as he headed through the waiting room where they napped while he worked. He didn't much feel like lunch, right now. And the girls'd like the run anyway.
So he was half-way around the village, racing his girls along the canal, when the first blood splashed the wall. And by the time he was drawing up abreast of the ANBU HQ, only a block away from the hospital, the survivors were already pulling bodies out of the ruins.
Hanato stopped, frozen, just short of a masked woman who'd been nearly disembowled. A little beyond her, another ANBU was kneeling over another body, feeling in vain for a heartbeat. For a moment, Hanato couldn't breathe.
The stench was overwhelming when he did.
Somehow he managed to ask a question. He couldn't even remember the answer when he heard it, but he did manage to pause long enough to not find the pulse, to tell the man to run to the hospital and call out all the medics; and then he was moving on, toward the ruins of what had been ANBU T&I, fervently wishing he'd brought his kit with him and ready to send one of his dogs to the hospital for it--
When he caught another scent among the reek of blood and bile and pain and death.
Faint lavender, from a scrap of cloth that had torn on a jutting beam that protruded from the massive hole on HQ's wall.
At that point, Hanato stopped thinking. And started running.
He left his lab coat on the hook and his assistants to deal with the poor kitten's stiffening body, and his girls followed him silently as he headed through the waiting room where they napped while he worked. He didn't much feel like lunch, right now. And the girls'd like the run anyway.
So he was half-way around the village, racing his girls along the canal, when the first blood splashed the wall. And by the time he was drawing up abreast of the ANBU HQ, only a block away from the hospital, the survivors were already pulling bodies out of the ruins.
Hanato stopped, frozen, just short of a masked woman who'd been nearly disembowled. A little beyond her, another ANBU was kneeling over another body, feeling in vain for a heartbeat. For a moment, Hanato couldn't breathe.
The stench was overwhelming when he did.
Somehow he managed to ask a question. He couldn't even remember the answer when he heard it, but he did manage to pause long enough to not find the pulse, to tell the man to run to the hospital and call out all the medics; and then he was moving on, toward the ruins of what had been ANBU T&I, fervently wishing he'd brought his kit with him and ready to send one of his dogs to the hospital for it--
When he caught another scent among the reek of blood and bile and pain and death.
Faint lavender, from a scrap of cloth that had torn on a jutting beam that protruded from the massive hole on HQ's wall.
At that point, Hanato stopped thinking. And started running.