“Don’t move.” With Carey and Magnus? Platonically of course.
"Hey!"
Carey froze with one foot touching the hardwood floor and another halfway out of the infirmary bed. She felt the familiar sensation of her body going stiff and still as a spring-trap, which is to say the feeling of being caught.
Magnus had his arms crossed and wore the sternest look he could manage, which was not very. "What the fuck did I tell you? Don't move!"
"What are you, a cop?" she shot back, even as she slipped back beneath the covers. "I can walk around with a broken tail, Mags. I'm not paralyzed."
"Hey, I've seen you use your tail to get around all the time! Pretty sure that's why the Director stopped using those hanging ceiling lights--she got sick of you swinging from them to get around the base."
"I can't believe you'd take her side on that, when you know damn well that it's the best way to get around and I look dope doing it."
He snorted out a laugh. "You look like Fantasy Tarzan."
"Do not."
"Do too!"
"Do not--ow, fuck!" She spun as she felt the whack of her tail hitting the bedpost and snarled. She hadn't been conscious of the way she'd begun to whip it around in agitation.
Unsurprisingly, the shit-eating grin still graced Magnus's mug when she turned back around to face him. "I told you."
She flopped onto the bed with a huff and grabbed a pillow to smush into her face. "This suuuucks. I'm so bored here and it hurts like a bitch. And it's not just because I keep moving it! It hurt like this before."
He gave her the cocked-headed look of a curious dog. "Hold up. Carey," he started, "have you never broken a bone before?"
"Not since I was a little kid. And even then it was just once." She shrugged. "You know how I feel about taking the big hits, bud. Besides, since I got so good at doing rad stunts, I haven't even had a bad ankle sprain in years. And that shit's nothing like this."
He let out his too-loud laugh, the kind that filled up every corner of the room like heat from a fireplace. "Well, you're looking at the guy who broke his femur in the same place four times, so you're in luck!"
"Maggie, sometimes I worry about you."
"Here, want me to change your bandages? You got a pretty nasty wound on top of that break, right?"
"Can you do that? Like, Merle will let you?"
"Ah, he'll be fine with it." He began to pull out fresh gauze and wet it with some sort of topical potion. For how thick his fingers were, the way he unrolled the bandages was quick and almost delicate. He had the steady and nimble hand of a woodcarver, sure, but there was something practiced about it too. "I've patched myself up enough times to know what to do. Anyway, Merle's taught me some himself, just like he learned how to throw a good punch from me once. We all picked up on each other's skills some, back on the ship."
Carey ran her tongue over the scales that covered her lips. By now, she knew enough not to ask about which ship he meant. She knew only two things in that regard: first, that he didn't seem to know the first thing about sailing despite how often he referenced his time spent on a ship, and second, that any further prompting about the ship would be equivalent to a sucker-punch. It left him stunned and reeling and bloodless in the face every time, blinking like there was a film in front of his eyes that he couldn't quite clear. Left him stammering like a broken motor, a dozen false starts at speaking. Sometimes she worried about him. Maybe he had taken too many blows to the head over time. Maybe he had taken some blows to the mind, too, though she wasn't about to go near that shit. It was his to tell, not hers to ask for.
In this case, anyway, he didn't seem to notice that he'd even brought it up. Before he could think about it, she asked, "Magnus, how many bones have you broken?"
"Pfft! Come on, I lost count back when I was a teenager."
"Okay, well, what's the most batshit way you've ever broken a bone?"
"Hmm..." He ran his thumb and forefinger over the patch of red-brown beard on his chin. Then, his look changed from thoughtful to smug as the corners of his mouth lifted and he glanced back her way. "You really wanna know?"
"Don't fuck with me! Of course I do!"
He turned to face her, while she concentrated on not lashing her tail in anticipation. "So where I grew up, there's all these hills surrounding the valley, right? And of course, when we got our heaps of snow up there every year, all the kids would go sledding every day. Well, let's just say when I was all of maybe sixteen, I had a lot of friends who were just as full of piss and vinegar as me. We decide we're bored of just sledding on powder. So of course, we're gonna go out and build a ramp that's just pure, frictionless ice, all the way down the hillside, and that's what we're gonna sled on."
"Fantasy Jesus Christ, Mags, of course you would."
"Right? So one of my friends, she's got this wicked fire magic, and she starts melting the snow on the hill so the water will refreeze as ice--"
"Hold up, you had a super fire magician as a friend when you were that young?"
She knew she'd fucked up the second after she said it. It took only a moment more before he shed his smile and seemed to draw back as if from a slap. He blinks, a lot.
"Mango?"
"I, it's...I..." He knitted his brow, and the lines in his forehead simply kept multiplying. "I thought it was--"
"Hey, buddy? Magnus?"
His head snapped up, but he did not turn her way. It was a hopeful sign nevertheless. He had not turned so far into himself that she could not reach in and feel for him.
"Hey, look at me for a sec." She waited until he did. "You don't have to tell me, okay? You don't have to explain anything."
"But..."
"Nah, listen. Past is past. I'm not entitled to it just because I'm your friend. I am no matter what."
"Yeah. Yeah okay."
"You okay, then? Moving on?"
"Moving on."
"Now let me tell you about all the shit I'm going to do after I'm out of this infirmary."
((Thank u I'm lov them. Also apologies if the format is weird. I'm on mobile.))
