Hitting the Wall

[Kaito-san]

“I’m trying!”, he screamed in frustration across the operating table, his face dripping in sweat. Kaito’s latex gloved hands shook as the hovered over the carcass laid out before him, dead eyes reflecting off the lenses of his googles from down below. A soft blue glow pulsed irregularly around his hands while his fingers stretched out as if to feel something just out of his reach.

“Focus. You’re not feeling with your fingers. Feel with your chakra.”, his aunts tone by comparison was extremely measured and calm. It was the complete opposite of the frustration written across Kaito’s mouth, his lip pulled back in a near snarl. From beneath the sleeves of his starched white lab coat began falling small translucent larvae, each about the length of a thumb nail. What began as a few larvae at first quickly began to grow in magnitude.

“Kaito…”, his aunt reproached as the worm looking insects began to swarm over the cadaver. Soon there was no bare flesh on the corpses chest, just a sea of roiling larvae climbing over one another. The sounds of their bodies slithering past one another filled the operating theater. Behind his goggles, Kaito’s eyes were shut tight, teeth clenched as he willed himself to feel something. Feel damnit!

“Kaito!”, his aunt called, raising her voice to break through his tunnel vision. Behind his goggles, his eyes burst open to the sight of a sea of squirming insects covering his hands and the cadaver both. He panted, leaning forward against the operating table for support as his shoulders hunched and head bowed forward.

“I just… I can’t do it. It’s too hard.”, he began making excuses as the Shijikonchū began inching their way back up his sleeves, his lab coat occasionally twitching as his skin rippled with movement underneath it.

“You can and you will.”, came the ever calm retort.

His hands clenched into fists as the last of the larvae disappeared up his sleeves. It was clear he was at his wits end, the path in front of him clouded by frustration.

“Okay. That’s it for tonight. We’ll try again some other time.”, Aunt Natsu said, softening her tone to try and soften the blow to his ego. Kaito ripped off his latex gloves, throwing them at the rubbish bin opening as if the bin were his enemy and the gloves a kunai. He pushed his way through the doors of the operating theater, heading down the hall in a huff. Back in the operating theater, the doctor looked up into the observation area, curious what the reaction would be of the audience they had garnered mid-way through the training.

[Tsedas]

Standing in the observation room were a couple of people, but one of the one that hadn't originally intended to be there was a pale blond man who was sipping from a cup of a strong brew. He had never seen an Aburame at work before and his curiosity of how a medical aspect could be found from the bugs was peaked. Sadly, his hopes of seeing something new were for naught as the young Aburame seemed to give up. When the boy left in a huff, the older woman looked to the observation suite at everyone that had gathered.

"Hmm." Saigo hummed thoughtfully as he sipped from his brew, turning and walking out the door as he made his way to the nearest set of stairs and descended, before exiting the door into the hallway one floor down, and looking in the direction of the operation theater's doors. Sure enough he could see the young Aburame there and he took another swig of his drink before lowering the empty cup and holding it between his fingertips on one hand as he approached the boy. "So, what exactly was that? I'm unclear as to what technique you were attempting to use in there and I don't see what the purpose of the bug larvae was... unless it was for cleaning burn wounds or getting rid of necrotic tissue."

Saigo thought for a moment as his eyes seemed to search through air before his head nodded, "Then again, the whole cadaver would be considered necrotic tissue at this point, but that's besides the point. The point is, What were you trying to learn and why couldn't you learn it?" Saigo asked, jumping straight to the point as he was confused by the boys attempts within the theater. Not knowing much of anything other than hearsay about the Aburame, Saigo wasn't sure what the boy had done other than dump bugs on a corpse. The hand that wasn't holding a cup shifted the Doctor's white coat back before sliding into a pants pocket as he watched the boy and tried to get a bead on him.

[Kaito-san]

Frustration often began as anger, but it was quick to swing into hopelessness. That was the emotional roller coaster that Kaito was on when Saigo confronted him in the hallway. His words stung, Kaito’s eyes beginning to mist up behind his dark goggles.

“It wasn’t anything. I screwed up all right! What more do you people want from me!?”, he called at the stranger in an almost accusatory tone. “You want to hear it? Fine! I can’t hack it at medical jutsu or bug jutsu. You happy!?”

Kaito sucked in a breath shakily, the tears dripping from his eyes getting caught by the goggles, hiding what the way he breathed revealed. Hopeless, powerless, worthless. That’s how he felt in that moment. There was a pause as he got his breathing under control, arms crossed over his chest defensively as he headed towards the entrance one more.

[Tsedas]

Saigo patiently waited as the boy gave a quick retort before the Doctor quietly clicked his tongue against as teeth as the boy's body language told the older man the young Aburame was becoming defensive as he started trudging toward's the Hospital exit. The boy didn't a get steps before Saigo opened his mouth. "So that's it? You fail once then call it done? What would've happened if you failed to become a Genin? Would you have forever given up on the idea of being a shinobi? Failure is inevitable, but people with the will can get right back to it and find a way to turn failure into success. Doctor's and medical shinobi have to keep their mind focused on their goal and fight a different kind of battle. Because in an operating room it's not our lives on the line, it's the lives of others that are placed in our hands."

Saigo started walking towards the boy as he talked, if the Aburame stopped then he'd easily catch up, if not then Saigo would pick up his pace until he was within arm's reach and place a hand on Kaito's shoulder to halt his exit. "You say you can't hack it, that you screwed up, but that's why you're supposed to be learning. If it was easy, everyone would be able to heal their own wounds and not rely on us to heal them." Saigo would stare at the boy as he spoke before tapping a finger against the side of the cup in his other hand. "Tell me, why do you think you can't hack it? Because it's hard? Because you don't have the hang of it? What technique were you trying to perform that gave you such disdain for your own skills that you'd give up on being a medical shinobi?"

[Kaito-san]

Saigo quickly caught up to Kaito, a hand on his shoulder stopping him in front of a bathroom with an “Out of Order” sign on the door, a cleaning cart standing sentinel outside. He took his dressing down in silence till he couldn’t stand it any longer, voice horse with mucus running down his throat.

“Fail once? I’ve been at it for… I don’t know! Hours maybe!? Maybe I’m just not cut out it. Maybe I’m just one of those other people and I can’t heal other people. I’ve been learning for nearly seven years and I’m still a failure! I can’t even figure out what’s wrong with someone, let alone cure them! Why did I ever think I could? I was stupid and foolish. Who was I, that I would come up with some cure that no one else could? I did all of this for nothing!”, Kaito boiled over, kicking the nearby cart loaded with cleaning supplies. Though he didn’t look it, his ninja training had made him strong for his size. Luckily, his technique had left much to be desired, or the cart might have been damaged. Instead, it simply knocked over a couple of spray bottles and roll of paper towel.

The halls of the hospital were used to tears as loved ones were forced to face bad news. For Kaito, it was like a delayed bomb had gone off, only growing more potent for all the time that it had laid dormant. As time grew shorter for his mom, Kaito was being forced to acknowledge his helplessness. In the past he might have thought it was all going to be okay because he would learn how to become a doctor and would fix it, but that illusion was slipping away like sand between his fingertips. Every time he failed was another moment that was wasted and there weren’t enough hours in the day. The worst part was he could clearly see every time that he had lied to himself. ‘It’s okay, you’ll get it soon.’, he had thought, but it wasn’t okay. He needed all that time back.

And yet he felt bad for giving up. He wasn’t just letting his mom die, but his teammates. They were relying on him too. Who would pay the price for tonight’s failure? Taku with his chronic illness? Perhaps Akiko? Around Kaito’s feet sat a pool of his Shijikonchū, the larvae reacting to his emotional state rather than his commands, just like before. Kaito barely noticed, his eyes were so clouded by tears. The inside of his googles were well misted, hot droplets of salt water rolling across the inside of the lenses as he looked down at the floor.

“They’re going to die no matter what I do, aren’t they?”, he asked, voice shaking. The anger was gone. All that was left was sorrow.

[Tsedas]

Saigo felt one of his eyebrows rise up slowly as his mouth twist and gave him this slowly appearing look of skepticism as he looked at the boy facing away from him still. His words made Saigo ponder if iijutsu was that hard when he first started, but that was probably when he was super young and a couple of decades back. Trying to recall those days for a moment, his face returned to normal as he closed his eyes trying to visual those days. Shaking his head at someo f the memories that it drudged up, he let his eyelids part and reveal the green orbs beneath as he removed his hand from the Aburame's shoulder. As the Doctor listened, he watched as the boy kicked a nearby cleaning cart and seem to shift from angry to sad and his final words made Saigo's eyebrows come together a little as the boy said something about people dying.

"So who's dying exactly?" Saigo asked, walking over to the cart that Kaito had kicked and started straightening up all the things that the boy had knocked over. Taking his time with the menial task, Saigo gave Kaito time to answer his latest question. If anything, Saigo would have to guess, going off what the boy had said, there was someone he knew or someone close to him that was dying and he was trying to learn iijutsu to find a way to cure it. As he righted bottle after bottle, he turned his head and looked at Kaito, his expression stoic as he peered at the goggles that covered the younger man's face.

'This kid is impatient, he isn't gonna get far if he can't reign his own emotions in. If anything he'll probably look for shortcuts and I know that's never a good thing.' Saigo thought to himself bleakly as he recalled numerous experts he'd done as a young man himself. The sad thing that still separated Saigo from Katio when the Doctor was his age is probably the cold detached personality the old man had back then. He had no qualms about what he was doing, but this kid probably wouldn't have the same resolve to slice living people open for his own edification into the mysteries of the human body and iijutsu. 'Maybe there is someone at Konoha's academy that can help him.'

[Kaito-san]

“All of them. Not now, but eventually. My classmates, Taku, my Mom…”, Kaito taking in a long shaky breath before continuing, “It’s all just a matter of time, and I’m just too slow.”

Kaito looked over to Saigo standing at the cart, realizing that he was cleaning up the mess he had just made. Something about that made his decorum return, his swarm of larvae moving from a listless puddle into a surge of movement as they turned like a school of sardines, the entire body shifting at once. They moved with a swiftness many didn’t expect, the swarm covering the distance in the time it would have taken him to step to the cart. Faster in fact. What was more, they didn’t just act as one, but could do the tasks of many. Each bottle and roll that was still knocked over getting surrounded and righted by handful of the larvae, all at once. It was if he had six hands.

But it wasn’t just six hands, it was six hands that each were as dexterous as a surgeon’s. Not only were the bottles righted, but each had its label pointed outward in a neat little display, the Shijikonchū reversing directions in a flash of chitin as they surged back down the side of the cart towards his own body once more. They were returning to their place of hiding along side his emotions. Neither belonged in the open in this place. But his emotions weren’t so easy to order away as his swarm was. His breathing wouldn’t steady out instantly just because he willed it.

“It was the diagnosis technique. That’s what I was working on… Back there.”

[Tsedas]

Saigo quirked an eyebrow as the kid answered his question. There was a horrible realization to mortality, but the Aburame seemed to be taking it to the next level like it was right around the corner. Looking back to grab the next bottle, Saigo noticed the larvae were all working as one and fixing the mess and neatly arranging the bottles with labels pointed out. Leaving his hand there for a moment, mid reach for a no longer downed bottle, the man let his green eyes shift to the boy. Glinting coldly in the light of the hallway, Saigo's features darkened as he eyed the young man, "Mortality comes for everyone. Trying to prevent it isn't good medicine or something someone should be thinking to thwart. That way lies madness and the creation of an abomination that you once called yourself. Believe me on that matter, I've dabbled in things people should not tinker with and it led me nowhere."

Turning away from the boy, Saigo let his features soften as he pictured his sister from so long ago. "If it was so easy, I would have stopped death long ago..." The glint faded from the older man's eyes as a heavy sigh escaped his lips and his shoulders sagged. Turning his whole body and facing Kaito, the Doctor looked down at the boy's body he gestured with his hand toward's his person, "Back to the possible things to be dealt with, you just need guidance and perspective on how to use what you can do to achieve your goals. Were you using your bugs for the diagnosis technique or trying to perform it like most iijutsu users? Back in the operating theater I saw the bugs start swarming out onto that cadaver and figured they were playing a part in it all."

[Kaito-san]

‘What use is this power if I can’t use it to save them?’, he thought as Saigo lectured him. Thwarting death was their job, their reason for existing. Not trying seemed like cowardice. His weakness wasn’t lack of effort, but lack of genius. Time was running out. How many would perish before he gained the skill to do something about it? He wasn’t fighting old age or the heat death of the universe. Everyone would die someday, but he wasn’t concerned about that. It was the people who were or would lose their lives before their time was up.

“They are like my hands. We are linked through my chakra, the swarm and I. There is almost no difference between the two to me, it’s merely a difference of destination, them and my hands.”, he explained exasperatedly. “I should be able to do it either way. They are just a conduit.”