"How is she?" Shizuru asked when the doctor finally came out into the waiting room.
He finished peeling off his gloves and dropped them in the marked trash can. "Asleep. We don't know for how long - minutes, hours, days... perhaps more. She had lost a lot of blood, and the timing was very close. Five minutes less to get here and she would be walking out with you this very moment. Five minutes more would have been too late for anything. As it is, she should wake up eventually, but there's no way to say when."
Mai let out a breath of relief, and Kenta slumped back against the wall at the news. "I tried to get her to..." he said.
The doctor smiled and shook his head. "You did well, son. We had problems of our own getting Minagi-san to hold still long enough to treat her - and that with her not even able to stand straight. No, rest easy - you got her here soon enough."
"Stubborn girl," Mai whispered, with something that looked almost like a very quiet sort of smile.
Akira had gone off on her own, checking up on the HiME who weren't answering their phones. Now she came into the hallway outside Mikoto's operating room with a terrifyingly serious look on her face and asked the doctor to leave them alone for a few minutes.
No fool, he glanced at his guests, then did just that.
Midori's eyes were still a little bloodshot, but they were no less clear when she looked up from the floor in front of where she'd been leaning on the wall. "How bad is it?"
A bit of a cruel place to leave it, I know, but also well-timed. And it gives me a breather to do some rewatching and get my HiME groove back on, since it's been sort of disbalanced.
Ja, -n
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"Puripuri puripuri... Bang!"