Bel, Erskin, and Jethro: Be celebrities.

You sputter and hunch, batting at Bel and the slime drizzling over your face, and finally manage to shove him away from you, at Jethro.

"Help him," you demand. "He's hurt, I hurt him!"

 

"Yeah, I can see that," you say on a sigh of relief. "Just making sure you're with us first. Jethro, how bad is it?"

He gives a one-shoulder shrug. "Dunno if this is broke or just dislocated. Other'n that I ain't but a lil' bit scratched up. Don't you blame yourself, darlin'," he says seriously to Erskin. "You was havin' a fever dream."

"Okay, gimme the hand, Pancho taught me how to do this." You feel along the delicate bones of the finger, watching his face as you try gently squeezing in various places, and conclude it's only dislocated. "Relax if you can. Long exhale." A slight tug and push, and it's done. "I'll get some ice for that and the leg."

You hand Erskin your medkit. He can patch up his own moirail.

 

You clutch the medikit and stare helplessly at Jethro, then wince back when he moves closer. You shove the kit out in front of you, arms' length. "I can't."

 

"I'm too sore for drama, babe," you scold. "Pull up your big troll pants an' do it, okay? I need you."

 

Your fins fold back, but you buck up and let Jethro come sit between your legs, as you rest your back against the couch. Jethro helps you get out the right containers, though you have to open them, and you clean sweat and a bit of blood off his bruises and scratches, then wipe the broken skin down with cleanser, and put dermal tape here and there as necessary. The bruises are around his chest and shoulders, and the scratches are on his upper back. He looks cartoonishly well-conciliated, but it wasn't that you were, that the two of you did anything rough, you hurt him.

He told you no more drama, so you just press a very, very gentle kiss to the back of his neck, beside a stripe of tape. Then you lean back against the couch and rest there, trying not to fall asleep again as Bel approaches with ice. That seems good, like a good idea. You're all sweaty.

 

You rest your arms around his neck and your cheek on his shoulder. "Thanks. I feel a whole lot better."

Bel, still dripping sopor but wearing a hotel bathrobe to cover his soaked undies, returns with an ice bucket and a stack of hand towels. He makes you a fold-over for your hand, then a bigger pack for Erskin's leg. When he peels back the edge of Erskin's shorts to see where to put it, you suck air through your teeth.

"Shit fire an' save matches!" you exclaim. "No fuckin' wonder you was thrashin' in your sleep!"

Bel chews his lip, brows knitting. "I'm calling the engineer. This prosthetic is no good, it's incompatible or something."

"Get 'im a glass a water to take aspirin with first," you remind him, taking the ice pack with your good hand to put it on Erskin's leg yourself.

 

You change your mind about the ice as soon as it hits your skin: it is not good idea. You whine through gritted fangs and dig your claws into the carpet, trying not to buck him off, but the sensation is awful and you hate it, if cold isn't sinking into your leg from the bite of your prosthetic ever again that would be really great.

"I'm alright," you say, trying to push Jethro off you very, very gently. "I'm fine. Don't do the thing, with the thing, stop it. I'm alright."

 

"You ain't remotely all right," you correct, but you take the ice pack away. "Dangit, I don't know what to do. It's all swole up but -- Bel? The ice hurts him a whole lot."

In response, Bel leans over and snaps a phone picture of Erskin's leg. "Let's see what the engineer says."

((idk if you want to play out their pesterlog, or just cut to her arriving, or what.))

 

(one worried bel request later:)

SS: Yeah that looks nastier than a —cholerbear with a bu—cket in every paw and an amorous fu—cking gleam in her eye–clusters. Send me a –car I'll bring what I got done so far.
SS: He'll have to —come in for a se–cond fitting if he'd like most of the bells and fu–cking whistles you wanted slathered on though to be tremendously fu—cking frank it might be in everyone's best interest to bury all memory and eviden—ce of you ever a—ctually asking me for real like as a serious request to give a prosthetic limb EMP shielding.
SS: Meathead.

~sinisterSpanner has dropped the connection, chumplord!~

 

CH: * EMP shielding is a brilliant idea. If you can't do it, just say so.
CH: * The car will be there in ~15 minutes.

You arrange transportation, call down to the front desk to make sure they'll let her up when she gets here, then go have a quick shower and get dressed. When you come back to find Erskin still feverish and Jethro still unable to get him to accept the ice pack, you suggest, "Maybe I should move you to the saltwater pool. At least then you won't have any weight on it."

 

You nod and raise your arms up for him, and instead of helping you walk to the pool he just carries you. It's vaguely insulting, but you forget about your pride when you're lowered into cool water and can sink down to the bottom of the pool and curl up there, where there's only the beat of your heart and the soft flow of water through your gills to have to listen to, and nothing much else to care about, either. You tuck your face into your knees and work on breathing through the wretched aching, in, out, in.

 

You strip down to your shorts and sit on the in-pool bench so you can reach his poor fussy head, to soothe him as best you can. You pet his seaweed-drifty hair until you hear Bel go to answer the door.

 

You hold the door wide and gesture Clarke in. "He's in the pool, it seems to help. He's a bit of a pill, don't take it too personally, he's in a lot of pain."

 

"What's your excuse, then?" she asks, and punches Bel's shoulder as she strides by. In the bathroom she gestures for the greenblood to fetch up his sick buddy, then helps to haul him the rest of the way out. When he coughs and struggles she scruffs him firmly and flips him over to have a look at the leg.

She whistles. "Yeah, this wasn't calibrated right," she says, pointing out to Bel the raw red-violet skin pulled taut over swollen, pulsing coils of bioware. "I don't figure the software was prepped for his hemochrome, it never integrated. See how it's displacing the flesh here, and here? It's still running a search for the body of the blueblood— maybe indigo— it thinks it's been made for, it'll keep growing this aggressive search-and-bind tissue instead of an integrative neural comb until your fishboy's body temperature seems right to it, which if I don't miss my guess will be sometime after the infection fever or whatever the hell else he's got cooks brain omelets in his thinkpan. Who gave him such a dick-fisted install, anyway? The hardware looks like a real classy custom mod."

 

"Cloris Vhines," you answer, in case she knows the name. "I shot her in the face, so. You know."

Jethro gathers Erskin to himself and helps him settle more comfortably. "Don't treat him like a thing," he says, calm but very serious. "Cloris treated him like a thing. What she did to his leg was part of that. Don't be like her."

"Or I'll shoot you in the face too," you finish brightly, and clap her amiably on the back. "So how do we get it out of there without hurting him worse?"

 

"Never heard of her, but then again I make a point of not hanging around with dickfisted schoolfeed-dropouts, present company excepted." Clarke studies the leg. "I gotta tell you, I don't know how much of the meat is hooked up to what parts of his nervous system, in there, so it's probably gonna hurt a lot. Still! We gotta get it out."

She kneels down, pulls a few small, sturdy tools from her lunchbox modus, and starts decoupling the plates of the leg casing where they sink into the inflamed flesh. "Heyo, check this shit out. See how the bioware's standard imperial? It would have cooled to his purple if it had started tapping into his circulatory system. If we pull it out carefully it shouldn't fuck him up hardly at all."

She gestures at Bel and shuffles back on her knees. "You do it, captain, if he gets bitey I care about your fingers significantly less. Grab it just above the knee and pull back smooth and slow. Lumberjane, you try to keep him from kicking."

((erskin will fuss and squirm but it will feel mostly icky and bad, not agonizing.))

 

You nod. "Erskin, grab the edge of the pool. Jethro, over here, try to steady him. Ready? In three. Two. One."

You may never again do anything as blackromantic as pulling overgrown bioware out of your rival's infected leg stump. Jethro couldn't do it; he can't even look at it. A stranger would probably get pulped. Only you are both willing to hurt Erskin to save him, and trusted enough that he'll let you do it. This is what a kismesis is for.

 

You pant and growl, not trusting yourself to so much as lean on or nuzzle into Jethro while the whole mess is being made of you. It hurts and feels wrong but it's Bel, you're blurrily certain it's Bel, and his cool hand on your hip is reassuring. You lie there while bits are dragged out of you and slid around inside you and then it stops, and you're suddenly a good deal lighter on one side, and you remember that your leg was getting taken off and that's why what's happening just happened.

You flail vaguely back until you grab a handful of whatever it is Bel's got on, pull him over to your general mouth area, and bite his ear.

Revenge is yours.

 

"Brat," you grin, relieved, "I knew you could take it." You hug him tight while Jethro praises him for being brave and tough and cleans up the mess you made.

When you look at it again, you have to fight your rising gorge for a moment. "Jegus. I should've called you sooner, Clarke. Can you work with what's left?"

 

"I've worked with less," Clarke says doubtfully. "Can't promise he won't have some motor impairments, that is an unholy mess. It's been scarring up internally, see? the connective matrix won't knit in smoothly, and it's going to have to extend pretty far along the pelvic girdle for a proper anchor. But it oesn't seem like anything higher than the socket got too messed up, so, that's good. It'd be a shame to waste an ass like that. Can you imagine? You'd have to put a paper bag over the droopy half."

While she gives her assessment she's pulled out a plain, dark black leg and is snapping plating on to continue the shape of the upper thigh.

"What kinda shape is he in, anyway?" she asks. "We're gonna need something like a pint of blood to flood-prime the bioware with— I want this to take right the first time, if it doesn't we're going to start having to route the cables into the torso mass and that's only not a slow fucking suicide if you're replacing an arm. With legs, anything that climbs into the pelvic bowl starts displacing reproductive organs and, yknow—" she makes a finger-fork and prods herself in the chest, "—that's not really considered a great life decision."