“I am a forest, and a night of dark trees: but he who is not afraid of my darkness, will find banks full of roses under my cypresses.”

― Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

By the time that to-san had finished explaining the situation of the old men, we had arrived at the Central Hospital and it was time for to-san to sign in at the reception desk. There were seven official hospitals in Konoha, the Northern, Western, Eastern, Southern and Central hospitals, as well as the Shinobi hospital, which was not, contrary to the name, the only hospital for shinobi, but rather, the hospital which specialised in chakra diseases, and the Hospital of Neuroscience, which specialised in mental diseases such as PTSD and other mental psychoses.

The reason why to-san went to the hospital that day was, despite him not being a regular doctor, before he retired, he had a lot of experience as both a battlefield medic and a senior chiologist, a doctor specialising in the chakra system. Therefore, the hospital occasionally asked him to consult on certain cases as well as managing a team of junior doctors who had only just finished at the academy and been certified. To-san spent a day of each week shadowing one of them on an alternate basis and met up with the entire group once a month. While I knew to-san had these meetings, this was the first time that I had been brought in to witness one as he usually dropped me off Oji-sans for a while who would regale me of stories of him meeting various famous ninja.

Our first stop was the Nurses station, where to-san was greeted with smiles and I was instantly taken aside and distracted by a lot of head patting and cooing over my cuteness while to-san quietly talked with one of the more senior nurses, who seemed to be a lot more serious and some sort of pack leader, as demonstrated when to-san indicated that it was time to go and with a word, the rest of the nurses were back to work as if I never even existed.

The second stop was the office of the medical director, a grandfatherly man who had a quiet voice and seemed to know exactly what you were going to say before you were going to say it somehow, as well as constantly trying to offer me various lokum that he pulled out of a different place each time he offered. He and to-san discussed the progress of his students and various happenings throughout the ward. After he had finished with the medical director, he thanked him and, without a word, stood up and exited the room, leaving me to desperately try to keep up.

When I had caught up to to-san, he was about to enter a door labelled ‘Staff Room’. As we made our way in, I saw that there were four people already inside, all wearing white lab coats, one making coffee at a mini kitchen, while the other three were sitting on a set of sofas, quietly discussing something that definitely had them confused. As we entered, the woman making coffee at the stove seemed to have finished making her tea and having taken her oddly large red coffee mug, walked past to-san and I out of the room. As she walked past us, I noticed that the collar of her lab coat was strangely large and turned up, covering the bottom half of her face. she seemed to be rather subdued, not like a Nara, but in a more serious sense. She greeted to-san as she walked past us.

“Yo” she said, to which to-san replied:

“Yo”

I then started to pay attention to the other three occupants of the room, deciding that I was not going to be able to glean any further information from the mysterious doctor with the large mug and upturned collar.

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Despite there being three sofas in the area of the room that the three others were sat in, only two were being used. One of the two sofas that was being occupied by a slim teenager who had long and smooth black hair, a bandana on their forehead and the strangest pure white eyes. The other sofa was occupied by a green-haired woman and a red-haired man, both teenagers, who seemed to be looking at a piece of wood intently, seeming to find some deeper meaning to it than the fact that it was brown and wooden.

To-san guided me over to the third sofa, set in the middle of the two other sofas which were facing each other, and set me down beside him as he sat down.

“Good morning” he said, disturbing the pair who were still intently examining the piece of wood, somehow blocking out the rest of the world outside of them and the wood. “Today I have brought my son, Shinjiro, with me to observe what we do here.” I looked at to-san with wonder. As soon as he had started addressing his three students, it was as if he was an entirely different person, his back straightened, his eyes grew sharper and he no longer spoke with his normal slurring.

“Good morning Sensei” the others replied in perfect unison, as if they had been practicing for hours, a total contradiction to the attitude displayed previously by the wood pair, although it seemed that the white eyed teen had not changed their attitude at all as they had always been in a seemingly perfect sitting position.

“Shinjiro, these are Seishū Hanaoka, Ginko Ogino and Hyūga Sugita.” He informed me, gesturing in turn to the red-haired boy, the green-haired girl, and the white eyed boy. He continued. “Once they have finished their internship under me, Seishū-san and Ginko-san are Prosthetists and are planning on opening a Prosthetics clinic together where Seishū-san will treat civilians and Ginko-san shinobi. Hyūga-san, on the other hand, is planning on creating his own specialisation of chakra surgery which he will doing from this hospital, using his bloodline talents to do so.”

“Good morning Shinjiro-kun”

“Hi Shinjiro!”

“Hello Shinjiro-kun”

To-san asked each of the three how their weeks went, what they had learned, what they had found difficult and any questions they had. Throughout this process of questioning, very little questioning was actually done by my father, but rather, he allowed the students to lead the questioning whilst he just sat there, pensively, allowing the students to lead the questioning, and only intervening when they were about to go off track, somehow utilising the same techniques as the medical director had earlier. Hyūga-san talked about how one of his patients had been extremely erratic and hadn’t responded to any questions asked of him and then disappeared, therefore Hyūga-san couldn’t treat him. In response to this, my father asked whether or not the patient was Amano-san, a former shinobi who, since retirement had fallen into drug addiction and came into the hospital every couple of weeks to treat an overdose. After that, he left Hyūga-san to ponder that and what he could have done differently. To-san repeated the process for the other two, and when they gave examples of cases that had puzzled them, he used the information that he had gained from the Senior nurse or the Medical Director to ask them a simple question of where they went wrong. Once he had finished with the other two, he returned back to Hyūga-san and asked him what he could have done differently in his case. To which Hyūga-san responded that he should have checked the patients record and asked one of the other nurses or doctors who were more senior than him what they thought was happening. To this, to-san informed Hyūga-san that the reason for the patient’s disappearance was that one of the nurses who knew of the patient’s frequent visits had pity on Hyūga-san, who had been clearly confused as to the situation and had treated the patient and sent him on his way. Once again, this process was repeated for the other two students.