Aizawa *probably drunk, otherwise he wouldn't be sharing this much*: on the first day of high school, we had to share something about ourselves, but I didn't want anyone to talk to me, so I said the one thing I thought would make everyone leave me alone, which is that my father is dead
Aizawa *still drunk*: and the boy who would become my best friend. He says to me and-I-quote 'Cowabummer. My old man just left me at the hospital when I was born'
Aizawa *somehow more drunk, even though he hasn't had more to drink*: and now he's been stuck with me for half our lives.
also on the topic of jack abbot having a scar from the sternal io that probably saved his life:
jack who, over the years, has purchased several FAST1 kits, and likes to have at least two of them on hand in his (sometimes dubiously obtained) trauma supplies closet, just in case. jack who is meticulous about checking the expiry dates on everything in his stash — from sterile gauze and 4x4s (3-5 year shelf life) to occlusive chest seals (2-6 years, mostly depending on the particular adhesives each brand uses). the FAST1 has a two-year shelf life, and there's one that's been sitting in its original packaging in the big orange bin at the bottom of the closet marked EXPIRED — DO NOT USE in jack's spikey handwriting, the do not use underlined three times in harsh streaks of sharpie, for about six months now.
it's not that jack's... unaware, of how robby feels about the scar. he's tried to tell robby more than once that that wasn't the first sternal io he'd had placed, just the last one. how practically everybody he knew in the medical corps used to practice on one another downrange — junior enlisted E3s and 4s, NCOs; even officers, 62As and Bs like jack — to keep sharp, or kill time, or just prove how tough shit they were, and how they'd demonstrate the expired kits on mostly-willing voluntell-ees. but it means something to robby that is just doesn't to jack.
(it's why he hasn't gotten rid of the expired FAST in his closet. he's been working through a thought, trying to figure out how to broach it in a way that won't get him shut down immediately.)
he takes the leap one of those weird afternoons where robby's been off all day, and it's about time for jack to start thinking about getting up and around for his shift if he wants to leave himself enough time to make food beforehand (a must-do), but they've spent a good chunk of the day in bed with the blackout curtains pulled, ignoring their respective errands and letting the time go sticky-soft around them.
jack props himself up on one elbow to peer at robby, absorbed by something on his phone. (based on the reflection in his glasses, jack suspects it's that damned 3-tile-match game that robby's been quietly obsessed with since the lockdown. this many years out, he's passed some insane number of levels, like over fifty-five hundred, and jack's never sure if he should be guardedly impressed or just flat-out horrified.)
"I have an expired FAST kit in the closet," he says without preamble or pausing for breath. "you wanna try it out?"
robby just looks over at him, glasses perched halfway down his nose and his phone clutched at an angle that makes jack's wrists throb with sympathy aches. "what, right now?"
"no, idiot; I gotta go to work now. some other time." robby's not saying anything, so jack plows on, undeterred. "look, you know I hate to toss it out unexpended — like that video you sent me, with the people setting off those expired emergency floats, from the airplane? and I just figured — I dunno." he gives a little one-shoulder shrug, pushing himself up to seated, "you've never done one, right? so, I figure: low-stakes situation, you get to play with one'a my fancy toys, I get to feel like I didn't blow the money for nothin', everybody goes home happy."
"you want me to give you a sternal io. for fun?" robby asks, in the same tone jack's heard him use to preface leviticus, bible-type tongue lashing, most recently a set of parents who came in with their lethargic, underweight newborn whom they'd seen fit to put on a no-fat, low-carb, low-protein diet with no medical input or oversight whatsoever. like jack's just proposed that robby stop his heart and try open cardiac massage on their living room floor, or something equally as drastic and risky, instead of something jack used to do in a tent, for fun, to wipe out the tedium, when he hadn't slept in actual days.
"jesus, 'm not gonna twist your arm if you don't want to. just say so, I'll get rid of it." he raises his hands, palms up, "no harm, no foul."
"jack..."
"no, look, I'm not married to the idea or anything; I just thought..." he huffs a sigh, crumpling the edge of the blanket in one hand and smoothing it out again. "I know it freaks you out." he gestures at his own chest, where the scar's not even visible through his ancient sleep shirt.
"not freaked out," robby counters.
"yeah, well, you do a shit job of conveying it."
robby ducks him head, caught out. "fine, maybe. but only because it's like this talisman that's permanently etched on you, that this one thing is what kept you alive and that if it hadn't, I never would've met you."
christ. this infuriating, incredible man. shit like that makes jack feel like the cartoon grinch, like his heart is sudden too small for his chest. "you, my friend, are wasted on medicine. ladies and gentlemen: michael robinavitch, poet laureate."
"fuck you," robby laughs easily. then — "look," he says, all seriousness again. "I don't wanna place an io on you anywhere. and I don't need to cover that scar with one I put there myself." he pulls the corner of his lip between his teeth, tugging at the skin there contemplatively. "but I think I'd be okay if you wanted to try it out on me."
(jack is very lucky that he can make a peanut butter and maple-bacon avocado sandwich on autopilot, because the blasé little "think about it" robby gives him before being sucked back into his game is possibly something that would've killed a lesser man from sheer horniness.)
they have to wait, of course. jack's insistent that they both have at least a day off for recovery, whatever form that might take, and robby's schedule proves to be its usual shit-fest. so it's nearly another two weeks before jack finds himself propped up against the headboard with robby flat on his back between jack's spread legs, stripped to the waist and lying atop one of the dark navy towels robby's been toting around since undergrad.
"do you want — I can give you a painkiller, before we start."
robby quirks an eyebrow at him, the expression all the funnier to being upside down. "did you used to hand out painkillers when you were goin' around, jamming FASTs into each others' sternums for fun?"
"sometimes," jack shrugs. "if it was for a demo or something, yeah; we'd give the poor sucker a couple'a pills. if he wanted."
"but you wouldn't, right?"
jack shakes his head, rueful. "no, I never had anything onboard when we would practice sternal placements. I think I'd maybe had uh, some valium. the last time," he gestures vaguely to his residual limb. "but I can't remember, exactly."
(he doesn't, is the thing. he knows they ended up using two or three tourniquets on him — his own, the one he kept draped around his neck, ends tucked under the chest rig of his flak vest anytime he was outside the wire, plus at least one more. he knows the guys all carried valium autoinjectors in their kits, along with all that supid fuckin' cipro the powers that be made them carry around, even when it became abundantly clear that there weren't going to be any biological attacks forthcoming. he would've been fucked up, beyond what most of those guys — kids, practically all of them — would've seen up close before that, and jack can put two and two together. they would've done what they could to make him feel better. or less. or nothing at all, after he passed out.)
"it's mostly pressure anyways," he adds hastily, because robby's getting that look like all the guilt in all the world is pressing down on his chest and shoulders. "won't hurt a bit." he winks, "you're in good hands. I'm a delicate touch; I've been assured of this."
"lucky me."
jack's already gloved up, and he swipes fast and hard with the alcohol wipe, the way he would in the field. "finding the sternal notch," he narrates, palpating between robby's clavicles. "aaaand... applying the pad." it's a good thing this one's expired; means maybe it won't stick in robby's chest hair so bad. (he'd offered to shave a patch, and jack had looked him over blandly and asked, rhetorical and mean, "you think I got time to cut down a rainforest when I'm tryna save a life out there? leave it, man." besides, body hair's practically federally protected in this house.)
"okay," he says, half to robby and half to reassure himself once he's got the introducer poised over the protective dressing. "last chance to back out."
"fuckin' send it, doc," robby chirps, sounding for a dizzying second so fucking moto that it's got jack chubbing up in his shorts.
"'kay, copy."
and jack punches the 14-gauge home with a straight-arm push and a deceptively soft pop. robby grunts, one reflexive jerk and a soft exhale, like jack's forced it out of him with the io. "you good?"
"yeah," robby chokes, a little breathless. (from the width of his pupils, jack's not worried about any pain he might be feeling.) "fuck."
"you said it, brother." a thin line of blood drips briskly from the placement, up robby's throat and toward his chin — expected, anticipated as jack wipes the worst of it clear with a couple 4x4 gauze pads.
"'s a matched set now," robby says, reaching back to grope at jack's chest through his shirt.
jack thumbs at the edge of the adhesive dressing. this man. "yeah, mikey. it's a match."
important to me that y'all know that a single FAST1 kit will typically run you somewhere between $400-500 USD on the open market. (I'll take "expensive unconventional date night activities" for 500, alex.) anyways. no funnier dynamic to me than jack abbot being like "I don't need a ton of stuff, I was in the army, I'm used to frugal living" while robby is shaking his head behind him and gesticulating toward the 180 square-foot walk-in closet of medical supplies jack keeps stocked at home. jack abbot, walking embodiment of the phrase "better to have and not need than to need and not have". (it's a trauma response. be nice to him.)
62A & 62B are two of the areas of concentration delineated by the US army medical corps; Emergency Physician and Field Surgeon/Battalion Surgeon/General Medical Officer (respectively). per wikipedia: "a young MC officer typically starts out as a general medical officer (AOC 62B) following completion of the first year of graduate medical education (GME)"
Everyone else is posting their thingies, and its past the time Zora stated these should actually be posted soooo,,
Hi hi @crabsnpersimmons!! I was your secret skeleton! I hopee that you like it!
Notes below,,
Hope that crabs sona is visible even with Eclipse behind them..I realized a bit too late that placing a purple pallette right in front of another is not a good choice- Had a harder time overall figuring out Eclipse- still like how it came out though!
After seeing that they like ghost pokemon, especially gengar, I decided to make all of their costumes ghost pokemon!
Crabs and Moon are kinda obvious, mimkyu and gengar onesies. But Suns outfit is loosely based off of Gourgeist, and Eclipse's is based off of Mismagius!
Why are my favorite parts of this how I did the flour, and the pattern on the candy bowl
Anyway, AUGH my neck LMAO, I was hunched over my tablet for half of the day drawing this XDD
Eshonai: What did it mean then? Life.
Stormfather: Meaning is a thing of mortals. It is not a thing of storms.
Eshonai: That's sad.
Stormfather: Is it? I should think it encouraging. Mortals search for meaning, so it is proper that they should create it. You get to decide what it meant, Eshonai. What you meant.
