Even though the alcohol burned like hell in his throat, Hog chugs down the vodka with abandon as they settle down in their campsite for the night.
Over the past week they’d managed to dig themselves out a little hole few dozen miles from the destroyed trailer. They aren’t sure if the bounty hunters had friends who might come sniffing around, but they wanted to stay near the scraps until they are picked cleaned, and if anyone else did come… well, they could deal with them the same way they delt with the first wave, but with more eagerness and efficiency.
Tonight, though, Hog has to show Rat his face again. It had been a solid week of very obviously avoiding it. He’d cleaned his mask and thrown it on, wore it 24/7 again even though before their trailer was destroyed he’d started taking it off for bed if he didn’t need it… His excuse was that they couldn’t know if anyone else could see them, but the reality was and still is that the attack had brought up bad memories. His eye is a trigger point for him, something he’d only barely been getting better at letting Jamie see and touch, and now…
Well now, not only will Rat see and touch that side of his face, he has to take a bunch of fucking tools and dig around in his eye like it’s a gooey fucking sandbox. And even though Hog knows he should man up and stop letting himself think too much into it, he’s terrified.
And as a result, he is already on his second bottle of vodka.
To be fair, Hog does have a tolerance against alcohol combined with his size, it’s hard for him to actually get wasted, but not ‘two bottles’ hard. Usually about half a bottle will get him pretty damn buzzed, but Hog isn’t looking for buzzed and he and Rat both know it. He leans back against a tree, surveying their small camp with his one good eye.
They bought a tent that’s big enough for Rat and Hog together (Rat sorta has to be propped up on Hog’s gut for them to both ‘fit’, but it counts). They hadn’t used it yet, though, it’s just for emergencies, case it rains. For the most part they’ve been sleeping by the fire each night on a mattress they nabbed for the time being. They’ve talked about stealing a new trailer, but they both decided that waiting until Hog’s eye is bullet-free and Rat’s shoulder is better would be for the best.
Finally, Hog sighs and reaches up to pull off the mask. He hates his face. Rat knows that much, even though Mako hasn’t actually said the words. Even before the sniper, he flinched away when Jamie’s fingers brushed the left side of his face. The scarring around that eye is… well, an eyesore. He knows it. The other scars could maybe be seen as manly, the cut across the chin, two thin lines over his right cheek, but that left eye… He tries not to think about it as he reaches up for the bandage.
He underestimates the alcohol. Unwrapping them on his own isn’t possible. He feels dizzy trying, so he looks up to Jamie. It’s hard to tell how much of the red on his cheeks is due to alcohol and how much is due to shame. He just grunts lightly, swaying just a bit as he reaches out to Rat.
“Don’t worry ‘bout hurtin it.” he rumbles as his boyfriend moves closer. His cadence in a bit slower in his drunken state, but he’s not actually slurring any more than usual. “I can take it. Jus’ get it out.”
Beneath the bandages is not a pretty sight. Less so than usual. Hog’s eye has started to reform, but it’s… off. The shape is wrong. There is a noticeable divot in the orb where the bullet is preventing his eye from healing fully. There’s no iris or pupil, just cloudy white all over. On the bright side, nothing around it looks injured at all anymore… at least for the time being, there’s no way it will look as pristine when Rat is done.
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