Chapter Text
The first two times the wrongness showed itself, everyone noticed, but no one suspected anything, because Nikki was a creature of spontaneity. Even she wrote off her own words and feelings, blaming these strange things on a platypus egg. Nobody proposed the conspiracy theory that the weirdness in her 'lower parts' or her sobbing outburst would have happened even if Campbell's experiment never occurred. Maybe if someone did, that afternoon would have been a lot less useless and a lot more scary.
The next day, the wrongness made itself known again. The Quartermaster, for whatever sick reason, felt it would be fine to serve pancakes and scrambled eggs for breakfast. He was right; none of the drowsy campers batted an eyelash at the foodstuffs they were shoveling into their mouths.
He was mostly right, because all but one camper was totally content to eat a reminder of yesterday. Unfortunately for the Quartermaster's infallibility, Nikki's yesterday was abnormally shitty. When those yellow lumps plopped onto her tray, a bawling mess of a girl came to be where Nikki stood. Neil was the first person to understand, and it was he that shifted her portion of eggs onto Nurf's tray as he led her to a seat between himself and Max. When Max told her to shut up and eat, she wiped off the tears and snot on her sleeve and managed to eat a few bites of her pancakes. Everyone noticed her lack of appetite. Most of them were confused, and her friends were worried, but nobody suspected anything. Because Nikki was ten, and tomboyish, and too ignorant of her own well-being to recognize that she had seen these things before in other people, too distracted to acknowledge they were taking place in her.
After breakfast, nothing else significant happened. Nikki ate enough for herself and both her boys at dinner, and all worry spawned from that morning dissolved.
When Neil woke himself up the next day, right away his brain registered the familiar feeling of wrongness. The groggy child didn't immediately comprehend the source of the warning, though; he had to ingest a cup of coffee before he could fully gauge his surroundings. After his dose of caffeine, three things were made known to him:
- Pained groans and pitiful whimpers were fluttering flimsily from Nikki's folded-over form on the ground.
- There were red stains on some of blankets and pillows strewn all over the floor.
- Nikki appeared distinctly more feminine than she should.
Suddenly, the rest of Neil's half of the coffee pot was no longer needed to wake him up. "Max!" he shouted. "Wake up! Wake up right now, you sluggish little fucker!"
Max's hands twitched as he cracked open one eye with difficulty and groaned with displeasure. "What's so goddamn important that you're cursing at the top of your lungs this early in the morning, Neil? Even I have more respect than that."
"Max, it's happened again!" Neil wailed at his friend as he gestured towards the corner where Nikki was curled on her side. "She was fine last night, wasn't she?"
In his half-asleep state, Max was as attentive as Neil was before his coffee. "What the fuck are you—the hell?" he yelped as his eyes landed on a bloody pillow next to him. In an instant, he was by Nikki's side, and the whole of the coffee pot's contents were rendered useless. "Nikki! What happened? Are you coughing up blood again, or is something hurt? What hurts? Why the fuck is your hair in braids?"
Nikki rolled over to her other side, searching for relief in the movement, and finding none. "The lower part of my tummy hurts," she moaned. "I didn't even know stomachs reached that far down."
"Stomach pains? Okay, that's fixable. But it doesn't explain the fucking blood and eyelashes!" Neil exclaimed with flailing arms.
"Okay, Neil, calm down—"
"I am calm, you hypocrite!"
"Like hell you are!" Max stopped himself, pinched the bridge of his nose, and tried again. "Look, we don't have all the answers we need right now. But we do know something; Nikki's got some sort of bug, and it hurts like shit. So let's haul her ass over to the mess hall and get something that'll help!"
"But—"
Max was done with the conversation. He wrenched Nikki's too-pale arms away from her waist and dragged her up into a sitting position, ignoring her feeble resistance to the change. "You carry her. I'll hold the doors and find the drugs."
Gwen wasn't necessarily a morning person, but her internal clock had been fucked up a few nights ago (again), so she was up even earlier than everyone else, as far as she knew. Whenever this happened, she would just sit and read in the mess hall, so she wouldn’t have to move again until it was time for morning exercises. Campers would start to lumber in at about eight o' clock to get their breakfast, and it was almost a peaceful atmosphere until the brats started eating and woke up completely. So when the doors burst open at six thirty and Max ran in with air about him that very nearly resembled trepidation, Gwen couldn’t help but feel a little disappointment alongside bemusement. This mild sadness was forgotten a moment after Neil dashed in with a nigh-unrecognizable figure huddled against his chest; since when were Nikki's cheeks that pale?
"What the fuck?"
She received a very partial answer from Max when he shouted, "C'mon! There's a box full of meds in the bathroom!" Gwen put down her mag and followed the boys. Something serious was going on, and she’d probably lose her job if she didn't take the matter out of ten-year-old hands.
"I'm not asking a rhetorical question here, you two! Whatever kind of shit's going down, you'd better spill. Besides, all that stuff is expired, Max. Whatever the issue is, you'll probably just make it worse."
"Something's really wrong with Nikki." Neil replied over Max's swearing at his own mistake. "She’s got stomach pains, we don't know if she's coughing up blood or bleeding, and she's as sick as the time we took her to town. What do we do?"
"Well, for starters, put her down. Keeping her in that position is putting pressure on her stomach, and that's doing her no favors." Gwen pulled back the shower curtain to the left of the door to reveal a sad-looking bathtub with dirt stains to match the curtain's. "Go on, just lay her on her back in there."
Neil obeyed, and when he pulled away, the smear of blood left on his arm sneered up at them all. As Neil was preoccupied with unleashing a masculine cry of terror and Max was preoccupied with not getting hit by Neil’s flailing arms, Gwen underwent an investigation for the source of blood. Her search was not in vain, but her findings were, to say the least, unforeseen. At last, someone identified the wrongness.
"Uh, boys, you're going to have to get out. Nikki needs a bath." Both of them stopped moving to glare at the tall counselor in shock.
Neil exclaimed, "What? No!" at the same time Max said, "Oh, fuck that noise!". Neither response was what she expected to the implication that Nikki would be naked in a few minutes.
Max helped to clear up her confusion on the matter when he snarled, "Do you really think we're about to leave Nikki alone with the likes of you when she's this sick? Suck a dick, Gwen!"
"Yeah, Gwen," Neil added. "we have an agreement to uphold. We're not going anywhere."
Gwen's thoughts turned to ice. Nikki unleashed a sobbing wail so very unlike her. Only then did Gwen speak again, and when she did, her voice sparked with all the exasperated voltage of an overworked, underpaid woman whose morning had not followed any path resembling the peace she'd needed and expected. "I don't give a shit about whatever obscure agreement you two have running through your heads, but I'm literally paid to do things like this. Now, I'm going to make sure the water is working properly on this tub. When I turn back around, I don't want to see either of you. If I do, I will literally kick both of you out the door. Okay? Okay." And she did exactly as she said; screechy valves and rusty pipes were coaxed to give water, and she made sure none of it touched Nikki until it turned lukewarm. Predictably, when she turned back to where Max and Neil had been standing, stubbornness had glued them to their places on the grimy linoleum with an adhesive of childlike obstinateness. About three seconds later, both of them were tumbling out the bathroom door, kicked aside like a couple of uprooted weeds. Another thirty seconds, and the door squawked miserably again as it was forced open, and three articles of clothing (a yellow T-shirt, a pair of red overalls, and a training bra stained with dirt and sweat) joined the boys on the floor. "Here! If you want to do Nikki some semblance of a favor, go get those cleaned! I know you know how to work the washing machine, Neil! I haven't forgotten that fucking stunt you three pulled last week!" With that, the poor bathroom door slammed shut.
Two heartbeats of silence, and two blinks from two different pair of eyes. "Huh," Max grunted. "I did not think she was serious. Or capable of that. Neil, did you make a note?"
"Yep."
"Cool." Max stood up and gathered the clothes. He made sure to layer the training bra between the shirt and the overalls before rolling it all up.
Neil stood up too, and murmured, "You think Nikki's gonna be okay with Gwen?"
"Going in there now would probably leave us in worse shape than Nikki is in right now. Besides, if Gwen doesn't do what she's literally paid for, we can always read some of her trash literature aloud through a megaphone at David's campfires until the end of the summer. I know where she hides the really M-rated stuff. If that isn't enough for you, we can throw together something traumatic for her as a group project."
"Okay, sounds good to me. You get those in the washing machine, and I'll break the child's lock on the laundry chemical cabinet. I still don't get why a lock that complex was necessary."
"It's because David and Gwen overreact whenever we have fun."
"Touché. Okay, we're here. Just throw everything in and set the machine's settings to cold. I don't think Nikki will care if the colors bleed. Don't start it yet."
"Got it. Also, the meat tenderizer's in the kitchen, if you want to move this along."
"That would just waste more time; David put more of the same child locks in there. You just sit tight."
"Got it," Max said again, and the two boys fell into a worried silence for their friend's health. Despite their resolution and agreement, neither of them had the heart to bring up the fact that Nikki wore a training bra.