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There's blood coming from his eye but he doesn't scream, just this wheezy half-cough that nosedives into a cackle, deranged and pitchy.
"Fuck, fuuuck , hurts, huuurts !" His whole face is screwed up, makes the pit of his eye, all slick with blood, a shiny little hole in his face. It winks, almost in taunt. Blood runs from his hairline and down his chin, and he grimaces along with it, lets it roll from the edge of his black mouth like saliva. His head from all angles, front or back, is indistinguishable, a curtain of angry red. Hungry, hungry.
He staggers forward a little, swings something that isn’t there, and falls, still-lucid. He tastes dirt, something clear and earthy muddied with iron, and his tongue squirms with it, chasing it away to taste the familiarly bitter wax of his lipstick instead.
Eustass Kid doesn’t talk for the next couple days, head swaddled in cotton and the gape to his left aching, not just for solidity, but with pain-- searing white and not all there. He doesn’t talk, rather raves, mouth running a stream of constant, incoherent filth, bugged out on nearly the entire medbay’s supply of painkillers (forced into his mouth, his veins by a shaking hand as he straddled the line between waking and sleep, delirious with pain and snapping his teeth like a cornered animal even as his lids flutter from hypovolemic shock), a vivid vein popping hard in his forehead. He moves to wipe the spit gathering at the edge of his lips with a thumb that isn’t fucking there , and he draws his shoulders up hard enough to make his bandages creak with strain-- a noise uncharacteristic of soft cloth, only drawn out from the infinitely tight winding of the truly desperate. He mutters, too, fingers coiled in blonde hair hard enough to make his first mate wince as he’s wrenched over him, half-coherent reassurances and threats laced with the lead of a promise. Wire crosses long legs over each other from a wooden chair in the corner of the room, settling his hands in his lap and sending Killer a wary glance.
He doesn’t talk the next couple days, either. Just screams, grunts through clenched teeth as he drives wires into healing skin, the cut of his arm jagged and messy, exposed bone and sinewy muscle. The scant gap between the keratin of his nails and the bed is black with blood when he reaches to jostle the handle to his captain’s quarters in response to a hoarse call or when he heads below deck to rummage through scrap with a single-minded, animal intensity. The bandages on his face are stuck fast to his skin, soaked through and tacky brown over his forehead and cheek, patchwork on his pale skin gone blotchy with fever.
Killer carries him to bed with a single arm, his captain heaved over his shoulder, when he’s found, drooling onto the floor, the thud of metal hitting the floor loud as he passes out from exhaustion. Nerves worn thin, well-meaning crewmates can feel the teeth glinting from beneath the mask when they offer a hand, Killer’s own tight in the bunched fabric of Kid’s pants.
The prosthetic on Kid’s desk is larger than life, the wood seeming to bow beneath it, and Killer feels the air rush over his bottom lip when he sees it. The cut of it is surprisingly sleek, metal joined smoothly to metal even where it’s soldered or welded black, the curve of the joint perfectly round, divots evenly spaced, slotting perfectly into the blooming hunks of metal reaching from his captain’s wound. It would fit nicely, he thinks, steel cool and impervious to fits of rage that left broken barstools scattered in splinters across pub floors and dark rivers running over the ridge of every angry vein, churning with as much dark mystery, hate, as any of the rivers splicing the canopy on any no-name archetypal Jungled Island. Or maybe it’s just blood, thick and metallic, and he can’t stand seeing his captain bleed.
He doesn’t share the bed with him, rather wakes up on the floor, head tipped against the mattress and hair in a messy splay about him, with Kid staring down at him with haunted eyes. Killer reaches up and peels the bandaging from his face, slowly, warm to the touch with the rush of healing blood, and the skin beneath has two ruddy lightning bolts seared over his eye, still blinking with his adjusting to the light of the room. The wounds are dry, wrinkled in the way stripped flesh gets, and Killer realizes, suddenly, with a vengeance , that Kid doesn’t know what he looks like yet (not anymore). He doesn’t know until he’s got the meat above the joint of his elbow exposed and bloody and his splintered bones creaking under the new weight of cold iron, and by that point the beef-jerky strips on his head and chest have gone soft and pink and fleshy. The sight is Killer’s alone, and it makes him gasp, Kid narrowing his eyes. He gives a retributive little tug on his first mate’s own bandaging, another wince drawn from the older man, right along his raw wrist, and rolls back over with a sigh.
Killer stands to marvel at the prosthetic. Reaches to touch it. Takes the fact that Kid hasn’t flown out of bed in an angry mass as approval. It’s unfinished, and the room is strewn with scrap, but something of it speaks finality, makes rough fingers skim calluses over its burnished surface softly, reverently. He doesn’t hesitate when he begins to rummage through the bolts scattered over the table, fingers twitching when they contact the cold metal. He takes up a wrench easily.
Wire lifts a hand to the door a few days later, thinking of the set in Killer’s shoulders as he moves to carry metal in and out of the room, a mirror of their captain from days earlier. Lets it drop. Walks away.
Kid’s arm clicks into place easily. He talks to his crew mates, and his laugh is lucid, or at least close enough to, sharp and maniacal, eager in the way it rushes his words and huffs out from his chest with a sarcastic quip. He breaks a table trying to lift a mug to his lips, staggers unevenly on deck, and Killer hangs close. His wounds are still raw and grotesque, aching into empty air and pressing his forehead deep into his blankets with nothing but a consoling hand against his bare back, but he brandishes his arm like a spoil rather than a loss, his face split with a grin. He drinks and he bleeds the same.