Quack's finger gently ran down Mana's face down to her lip and examined it with its touch.
"Does it hurt? What is this?" he asked after finishing patching the magician's abdomen gash up. Strangely enough, despite there appearing to be no thread, the needle somehow still stitched the wound up and closed it with each puncture just like there would've been one.
"I bit it, accidentally from the pain..." Mana replied blushing a little since she was ashamed of such a stupid injury. Quack smiled and started examining the other scratches, moving away from the lip bite. He then handed the girl a purple pill, similar to that which he had been popping the whole time.
"What is this? Is this poisonous or something?" the girl asked confused, remembering quite well how violently the young man's body reacted to a pill just several shades different in color. The young man shook his head, he looked a bit annoyed, must've been the notion of his patient questioning his judgment.
"No, lovely, the poison is for me. This is an immuno-booster, it boosts your short-term ninja metabolism but it has a pretty nasty cooldown period, I'd suggest refraining from getting injured for about four to five days starting after tomorrow..." the man explained. Mana nodded and took the pill, swallowing it without water hurt her dry throat a little but she took it down with moderate effort.
"So... Why do you drink poison then?" the magician got curious, she guessed that the pills that the boy was taking were some sort of a drug or maybe medication from some sickness, apparently it was a poison which intrigued the magician a bit. Why would someone take poison in such continuous and prolonged periods of time, she could remember the boy popping the pill before sleep, he just popped one now just about when he'd have awakened under normal circumstances.
"It's a long story, lovely, a really long story..." the youth tried to dismiss the question but Mana shook violently, the medical youth then touched her forehead.
"You're getting cold, usually ninja metabolism counteracts the fever when it starts hurting the brain, my booster multiplied that reaction so your body temperature is now dropping..." the young quack explained removing his long coat and wrapping it around Mana, the girl was far too short and of quite different build to wear the man's long coat but she buttoned the top button and wrapped into it like it was a blanket.
"I guess we're not going anywhere..." the magician sniffed her nose and felt it clearing up, this immuno-booster thing just cured her cold during its starting stages within seconds. Obviously, there must've been a payback, by now the magician had learned that whatever use the Quack's medicine provided it had an equal counterbalance to it.
Quack stood up and took a sip from his flask, Mana looked at the young man's frail body covered with merely a tight white shirt. His skin had no goosebumps or signs of cold at all, was the man immune to it? He also had no fear taking poisonous pills with alcohol as he only took the poison maybe twenty or thirty minutes earlier. Did he have a death wish?
"Umm... Sorry if I sound annoying but... What's your real name? I mean obviously you have one, you're not just called "Quack" right?" Mana asked shyly rubbing her freezing cheeks against the man's coat. The blonde rubbed his messy hair with his arm swiping a bunch of rainwater off of it. He sat down and sighed.
"It's Eiju, Eiju Fuuhen" he grunted out, his voice sounded quite rough, he didn't particularly enjoy talking about himself apparently. Several minutes later the man angrily glared at the magician and asked, "Have you warmed up enough? I need to take a look at the other cuts and you're bleeding all over my coat, as sexy as I'd find a lady bleeding over my coat under normal circumstances, I'm not that much of a children loving person and you remind me still of a child..."
Mana removed the coat and looked at several bloodstains left on the coat, this made no sense, her ninja metabolism was supposed to have already clogged those minor scratches, was it some sort of a weird reaction to his medicine?
Eiju sighed and waved his hand, "Keep it, lovely, you'll find a better use for it, for now, return it to me when you wash it though."
Mana looked down and rubbed her heel against the dirt making a small bow mark on it. "So... Are we going to move soon?" she asked. The Quack shook his head and moved in closer unbuttoning and moving the cloak away from the injuries and started to look at Mana's cuts and scratches.
"No need, the two ladies will soon come to us, that's how I always like em... Bloody hell, are those chakra burns? Well, at least they cauterized the wound... How did you get those cuts?" Eiju asked angrily, for some reason he still acted pretty rude with Mana, the magician didn't feel too comfortable with that since he acted like she was just a burden for him to watch over.
"A Nekomata woman did them, she has that jutsu that forms pure chakra blades around her fingers, almost like elongated claws," Mana explained looking at the scratches on her shoulders and all over the other areas of the body.
"Well, the good thing is that you're going to get those completely removed by the time you're legally allowed to be hot. Blokes will line up behind you, chakra cuts and burns can be healed pretty easily as long as it's not an elemental release technique." Eiju explained and moved away from the girl giving her some time to cover up again and stop shaking from the cold.
"You're talking strange, I haven't noticed it before but... I've never heard words like "bloke" and someone referring to people as "lovely", you're not from around?" Mana was almost too afraid to ask because she knew that Eiju would get angry again for bringing up his history, he seemed to hate being around Mana, to begin with. Seemed to be a pretty common habit these days...
"It's... I'm from Kirigakure, a certain rich and snobby layer of society there speaks that way, "bloke" means a guy, "lovely" is how we used to refer to women." Quack rudely replied, his tone was still a bit rough but this time there was something different in there, longing for his home perhaps?
"And "jiffy" means... Quickly?" Mana smiled at him moving her nose out from the coat for the first time in a while feeling warm.
"Yeah, something like that..." Eiju replied.
Mana's sad eyes moved away, suddenly she felt something tearing inside her chest, something pulsing and burning her from inside, some kind of profound sadness the source of which she couldn't initially understand but then she did and the realization of what it was terrified the girl.
"You know... I could beat your story out of you, you look like an asthmatic zombie, to begin with, even if I couldn't I could just tell Hisako and Kiyomi that you're from Kirigakure and they wouldn't trust you, they'd beat it out of you too..." Mana had no idea where this rude anger rose from. This realization that this man was from Kirigakure just angered her, somehow brought all the pain that the country was responsible for: hurting her father, killing Tanshu-sensei and the Fourth Hokage...
"Well, fuck me... Never thought little brat had thorns... Don't expect me to call you "lovely" for a while, only blokes talked to me that way so I may start referring to you like that from now on, little bloke." Quack grunted back at her but for some reason Mana's negativity fuelled him, the man started to enjoy talking to her as if it was the magician's softness that made him dislike her.
"I'm sorry it's just... Kirigakure..." Mana admitted lowering her head and removing one scratched up and beaten arm from the coat's collar to fix her messy and wet hair.
"Yeah... I get it, kid, tough history, to you it may be the place that killed your whoever and had your mum through the bottom-hole but to me it was home, it was where I ate my crumpets and sipped my mum's tea so stick your hatred to your bumhole and push it down with a walking stick." Eiju replied, while the content of his words was hateful but they were delivered in a soft manner.
"Could you... Talk to me? Like... About where you're from, just until Kiyomi and Hisako come, please?" Mana asked looking at Eiju with the largest and wettest puppy eyes she could make. The girl just wanted to hear how he was brought to this corner of the world from entirely another, she wanted to know how a young boy from Kirigakure's aristocracy could've ended up in Konoha as a Quack to whichever mercenary gang claimed him.
"Jeez, kid... Fine. I'll talk but only to keep your mouth shut." Eiju started but Mana interrupted him.
"Don't lie to me though, I'll know..." she lied.
"Fine. So I guess I was popped from my mother's womb in Kirigakure, the high and mighty layer of society, crumpets, and tea all day long was my diet until I was old enough to enter the Academy..."
Mana shook her head and raised her weak and wobbly palm from under the coat. "I'm sorry, what's a crumpet?" she asked.
"It's not like it's bloody ruining the story, kid, stay focused, that's not the detail you should focus on..." while Quack kept trying to explain the concept of his story Mana's eyes forced him to sigh and plant his slap onto his own face.
"It's a bloody dessert... Okay? So the point is, a kid can only grow that large and that strong eating just cookies and tea, right? So I was a thin, sickly little chump, not unlike now but now I'm more plagued by lack of crumpets than an overdose of 'em, anyway..." Eiju stopped, looking down, he pointed at Mana and then reached into the inner pocket of his coat removing a bottle of pills and showing them to her.
"Basically I lied to you already but you didn't notice, so much for your lie detector skills, huh? I wasn't booped out my mummy's funny hole like I said, I was lab-bred because my mum was as sick as I am, you take a chunk of your daddy, you take a chunk of your mum, mash it into a mass and give it to a funky little bloke who does some insane and, quite frankly, illegal Quack work – you end up with a world's most handsome baby... I suppose."
Mana looked up into the sky and then turned back at Eiju, the man sort of looked like he was finished but Mana's look encouraged him to keep going.
"Can you really do that sort of thing? Why would people ever have normal babies then if you can just make one? Why would it be illegal?" she wondered.
"Well there's one chick who never made babies, it's bloody fun, I'll tell ya one thing... The point is that you don't simply "make babies", the result isn't random, you "create babies", you give them whatever you want them to have, you want them freckled, you have that, you want them blonde – easy. The prospect of just creating a human like it's a bloody chunk of clay is scary to some, having in mind what I've seen, there's a reason behind that fear... Let's just say there were a lot of... Less fortunate Eijus before I was bred, ones with funny looking heads and extra limbs if you catch my cold. Because the practice is so hated it didn't have time to be polished yet."
Mana shook from disgust imagining a laboratory somewhere underground filled with fail genetic experiments. If she ever actually saw one she'd probably be pretty messed up for life and started swearing herself.
"So why were you made? Why didn't your parents just make you the casual old way?" the magician got curious as to why one would go for such a risky and disgusting way to breed heirs.
"Because my mum was pretty sick and her sickness was very much hereditary, I've lost a brother and a sister before parents decided to model me in a tube. They asked the bloke who made me to program a tissue inside of me that constantly regenerates me before my body gets eaten from inside by my mum's sickness, technically I'm sick with what my mum had before her death, whatever killed my sister and brother, however, the tissue counteracts it and heals me. That's both what keeps me alive and is a bloody nuisance..."
Mana shook her head, "Nuisance how? I'd really find such a tissue useful for my father's burns..."
Quack spat to the side and waved the pills he removed previously up in Mana's nose. "The tissue starts growing, breeding, it's basically regenerative cancer, I need to keep popping poison to kill its excess growth, because of the fucking thing the poison doesn't work like it should on me. It feels bloody disgusting but the fucking thing always keeps me alive and kicking, always sacrificing its bloody chunks to survive as a thing, it's a living, growing thing. Well, at least I can drink as much as I bloody want, no fucking old hag will mess with my drinking habits cause every drip of poison I take, whether drug or alcoholic keeps me alive..."
Mana listened and struggled to believe in any of it, then again she did see the man down a pretty large amount of poison and his reaction was quite grotesque...
"Okay... So let's say that's true, how did you end up here though?" Mana asked for Eiju to continue.
"Eh, if you've been paying attention you'd piece it together: little bit of jealous aristocratic rivalry slipping the Mizukage some delicious info of an artificially bred child, an abomination of nature, a little bit of good ole discrimination and prosecution and violence and you've got one little kid on the run and two beheaded snobby parents... I just didn't feel like sticking around Kirigakure or the Archipelago of islands around it, I got into a pirate ship, this medic there noticed my tendency to drink poison, initially he went all "Kid, don't drink poison, you'll die!" but then he found out too..."
"And? Did they cast you out again?" Mana asked sadly, she was starting to really feel bad for the difficult life that this young man had for something that just didn't seem a crime to her at all, more so not one he should've been held responsible for since he had no control over it.
"Nope, turns out pirates are a pretty merry bunch, they started teaching me stuff, the old medic on that ship was a rogue Kirigakure Hunter Ninja, he was a master at gutting people and harvesting their organs. He was also a dying fellow so he decided to try and gut my tissue out 'a me. Since I thought it was the source of all my problems I let him keep operating on me as much as he wanted, hoping that he'd succeed but then one day we both realized he won't, he found out that the tissue is linked with my body, he knew if he'd extract it I'd die so he chose to make the sacrifice and let me live..." Eiju started rubbing his eyes, Mana turned away because she noticed that the man tried to hide his tears, maybe he wasn't even crying but he was about to.
"Since I was a source of a lot of the old bloke's chopping sessions I picked a thing or two from him, he finished my training on his deathbed... The pirates decided to keep me around, I was the best at cutting out and transferring organs. The only thing I was always shite at was actual medicine, medical ninjutsu, harvesting DNA and organs, entire bloodlines, that I can do, but stitching still makes my hand shake. Conventional medicine just wasn't the Quack way so I self-taught that stuff from spying on ninja on the field right before the muscleheads I was with decided to off them..."
For a moment, the Quack stopped talking, then he looked at Mana and back, visibly annoyed that the two other kunoichi were taking so long to get there.
"From then on it was just one gang slaughtering the other and taking me with them as their Quack and harvester, most didn't even know that I was good at it, they just used me as a Quack but this Hachi bloke realized my potential and forced me to do all the stuff he had on him, in the end, he was more a weapon than he was a man, to think they called me an abomination of nature... I've no idea how he could even mate with women when I replaced his fun stick with a kunai shooting cannon long time ago, must be really good with his tongue..."
"So we leave you for five minutes with a fourteen-year-old and your best idea is to give her the birds and the bees talk?" Kiyomi's voice thundered behind the two, Mana turned around and smiled at her friend. The angry blonde leaped down and examined Mana's wounds and heard Eiju's suggestion not to storm the bunker out.
"No! We may be wounded but so is the enemy, we can't give them a chance to regroup and move away from here, they're too close to the border, from here on it's just one day away." Kiyomi seemed to finally agree with Hisako on something, with a worried look she looked at Mana who nodded and stood up and gestured that she'll be fine.
"Well then, those fuckers woke us up, let's shove things up their asses so that their screams play us the anthem!" Hisako smiled drawing her blades and playfully spinning them around before sheathing them back.
Kiyomi squinted at the dark-haired swordswoman, "I thought you told me you were going to try the whole "no cursing" thing..."
Eiju stood up and started moving east. "Yeah, not until she can cure whatever's causing the itch in her sandy panties..."
Hisako shrugged and then looked at Eiju, "Nah, I just don't want to wet turkey it... Wait... What did you just fucking say, fucktwig!?" she snapped and started chasing Eiju, it was impressive that the Quack could escape his inevitable evisceration so effectively.
"It's cold turkey, Hisako... I'm starting to think you swear just because you are verbally challenged." Kiyomi sighed as she and Mana followed the trail of destruction behind Hisako's attempt to cut Eiju to pieces which resulted in a lot of trees being cut down, at least it was easy to follow...