Work Text:
The Paradise Lounge was busy at this time of night. Elliott has always been kind to them, lacking any reasons not to be; he spotted them pushing through the crowd and made a brief gesture at the back entrance, a this-a-way, ladies, and Bangalore tugged Sunbird in and shut it so they were left in the dark, close backroom as Elliott did what he does best; take the heat and bask in it.
There was a deep, rough sigh of mixed exasperation and relief. The light flicked on. Anita brushed her hair back, and a deal of her stiff soldier’s bearing melted away; never all of it, because she had been hollowed out by the IMC and filled back up with them, but even with all of that she was still Anita. There was no chance of cameras back here. It was safe, and relatively private. Away from the adoring crush of fans or the more distant, indifferently buzzed patrons of the lounge, they’re alone. A sigh left Laura without her even noticing it. Her mobility aids were giving her alerts that they were dying; she knew better, but she ignored it. In the grand scheme of things she wasn’t terribly concerned about them, because nothing was especially wrong with them that she couldn’t fix with time. With her? She was feeling a little crispy. However bad she felt, Anita looked worse. The thick, acrid scent of smoke clung to her and while the syringes did a good job making sure they could fight, it stopped right about there and without the closer, more tender attentions of an actual medic the wounds had to be giving her trouble; she was bruised and cut up and worse everywhere, and Laura was sure she had at least once fracture.
Laura couldn’t do much about the whole bones situation, not without much more heavy-duty gear, but they’d likely be heading back to the Apex Complex for a more formal look-over once the media storm died down anyway. For now, dealing with the most pressing, external wounds was key.
“Looks like you need a patch job,” Anita broke in. She could always tell when Laura was scrutinizing her. She’d said something about it at some point, but it was slipping Laura’s mind. She could hear Anita’s voice and the intention behind it, the good-natured teasing, but that and the memory of what she’d said in the first place was swamped by what she sounded like now. Her no-nonsense tone was compromised with her own discomfort. Relief, from avoiding the media. Something else that Laura did not wish to linger on overmuch.
Her clothes were torn and blood slicked down her arm. Laura remembered seeing it happen; while he generally did not, Pathfinder’s zipline gun still was a gun and when used as a weapon the concrete-piercing impact tore through clothes, flesh, muscle underneath and only barely avoided punching a hole in Anita’s arm wholesale. Through some miraculous twist of fate it had only taken a modest chunk out of her arm, which had then been mostly filled in by bio-flesh and knit messily together. It had reopened sometime between offlining Pathfinder and winning the Game and though Laura could tell at a glance that Anita hadn’t lost enough blood to cause worry, she had to be in a great deal of pain.
So.
“You need that patch job more. Allow me.”
Anita reached up with her good arm to shimmy a first aid kit off of a shelf and gestured that both of them should sit down in the old chairs that had at one point been used in the Lounge before Elliott upgraded.
“--barely a scratch. Come on now. You’re all scuffed up too.”
Laura tamped down a bright flare of irritation. Anita was so… so… the word escaped her, but she was sure it was not entirely flattering. “Don’t come on now me. You’re bleeding. Sit down.”
Anita shut up and sit down. Now that her eyes had adjusted to the low light, Laura saw a slick of blood by her hairline, some dried and flaking in tight curls. Anita’s lips were pursed in pain. She didn’t often wear makeup aside from neutrals, but for the end-of-Season celebration she often wore a deep burgundy lipstick that was very flattering.
Anita was bleeding, Laure reminded herself, and what little eyeshadow she wore for games was smeared all the way to her temple. Laura popped open the first aid kit and brought out some cotton pads, gauze, disinfectant wipes, and butterfly closures. There was a headlight in the kit. She slipped it on, adjusted it, and turned the light on before looking around for a switch; there was a desk light, which she also flicked on, and an overhead light that she thankfully only had to reach and stretch a little to tug and turn on. The backroom flooded with light and for a moment Laura wished that it hadn’t.
In the sunlight, they could fit the part of victorious champions. The sunlight shone on Anita’s skin and caught the dull browns and reflective yellows of her gear. Laura’s mobility aid, too, sometimes glittered in the right light like she was walking on stars. It was one of the descriptors she’d read in a dirt sheet and liked, and occasionally passed her mind idly when she was resting.
In the backroom, they looked… tired. Anita looked uncomfortable. Streaks of ash stained her face and gear, mixing with sweat and blood and the makeup Laura had noticed earlier. Earlier, she had ran into a battle to pick Laura up; in the choking cloud of smoke they’d clutched at each other, the cold sting of the hypo needle plunging epinephrine and the rest of the exuberant cocktail of drugs into Laura’s system and getting her back on her feet. Anita, gripping her by the wrist and tugging her up. What had helped more?
“Here,” Laura prompted, reaching out with a disinfectant wipe. Anita turned to allow her to survey the wound properly. It was about three inches long and ugly; friction burn from the tough fiber of the zipline and almost macerated from blood and serum brought out by the zipline’s prongs that could punch through concrete. Through steel. She drew back the wipe and gently dabbed away the worst of the mess first. Anita’s lips were tight around the edges; her teeth were clenched. She was staring at a spot on the wall where Elliott had put a bunch of chibi stickers of himself like a self-centered collage.
“I’m going to disinfect it now,” Laura warned. “It may sting.” Anita snorted, a harsh noise in her throat.
“I’m not a civvie. You don’t have to baby me.” Laura knew it was more from strain than any legitimate desire to be condescending, but she still allowed it to prick at her and thus felt far less guilt in pressing the disinfectant wipe to Anita’s arm and feeling her body tighten at the sting. Still, it would help, and it was necessary. Laura did not trust the syringe tech, with how quickly the medics always looked them over after Games and peeled the results out and off of them. It was aggressive in holding a body together.
Too aggressive, she feared, but never said. There was no shame in needing it or using it, but…
Anita was looking at her. She had stopped disinfecting the wound entirely to stare at Anita’s jawline, tensed in discomfort, but strong and resolute and absolutely trusting that Laura was only doing what was best for her.
“There’s blood on your forehead,” Laura bluffed, and used a clean corner of the wipe to carefully rub it off. “Did your head get hit?”
Anita, evidently, did not buy it but took pity on her regardless. “It’s not mine. My head’s fine.”
“Good.”
She balled it up in her hand, tossed the soiled wipe to the worktable, and picked up the butterfly bandages instead. They’d work in a pinch; she liked them, actually. Good for wounds big and small, so long as they weren’t too wide, and they’d hold Anita’s arm together well enough, and would hold if she decided to not go to the Complex medics.
The other wounds followed in short order. None of them were as severe as the one on her arm, thankfully, at most requiring a quick wipe-down to reveal the actual injury under crusted blood. Laura’s own wounds were beginning to ache in a real painful way now that the adrenaline rush had faded. She finished cleaning Anita up almost by reflex; mindlessly assessing the severity of each wound and doling out disinfectant, gauze, and bandages as needed.
They’d worked well together, today. Not in the distant way of teamwork that Laura was familiar with. There was something else; a shared electric excitement that Laura didn’t really want to confront or acknowledge. And when Anita had saved her...
“Hey, now, Birdie.” Anita’s palm was soft against her left arm, just under a long, sore friction burn. It would have bruised if it was on her right side, but she just had to skid down a hill on her left side. The contact was almost painful with proximity, but Anita wasn’t touching it yet. Just asking. She hadn’t deemed it necessary to use a syringe on; the thin film of artificial skin would burn as it grew and then would burn as it came off under a medic’s scalpel. She didn’t need it, anyway. She stilled, though, and allowed Anita to assess the damage. “Let me get this for you, at least.”
Laura knew that voice. Over time, Anita had perfected it from “I’m going to do this” to “I’m going to do this and you can’t stop me.” Laura found herself rolling the word conviction over in her head as she allowed the other woman to lift her arm and position it on the worktable, reaching into the first aid kit for another tube of burn cream. Conviction. Anita. They didn’t share much but syllables. Still, Laura thought them again, words in pairs.
“Ow,” she said more than exclaimed as a rippling wave of stinging, hot discomfort followed in the wake of Anita’s sleeve brushing her skin. Anita lifted her hand. The burn cream was soothingly cool, pleasant against the abraded skin, but the pressure of application still hurt no matter how delicate Anita was trying to be. She just wasn’t built for that, Laura thought to herself. Privately, if not for a small smile.
“That’s what you get for wearing a costume instead of a uniform,” Anita muttered. She carefully smeared the burn cream over Laura’s left arm a few more times, brows pinched. “There,” she finally declared. Laura craned her neck to see the red, swollen mess of her arm; Anita’s hand rested at the bend of it, right above her brachioradialis. Her arm. Anita’s hand was resting on her arm, she rephrased, as to not give it the polite distance of medical terms.
“Perhaps to save it from the elements…” she ventured, almost scared to set Anita into motion. A startled bird, flying away. Anita’s shoulders tensed (they did that, she carried all her tension there and in her neck) and Laura fought a tiny, alarmed tremor in her chest as her hand lifted. Only to dip into the kit again; only to draw out another roll of gauze.
“Of course I was going to bandage it.”
The basic medical training all IMC soldiers received was barely enough to help them hold their own guts in, Laura thought bitterly, but Anita wasn’t like every other IMC soldier, and she forced herself off that train of thought as firmly and forcefully as she could. Anita wound the gauze around her arm securely but not tightly; loose, and avoiding undue pressure. Her fingertips felt like little more than soft breaths. A sigh, if touches could sigh. Anita’s brows knit as she tried to keep the pressure light. Assured that her attention was elsewhere, Laura stared. A cotton pad, as one might use for a regular wound, would do no good for a burn. The sterile gauze would keep air and irritants from the wound. It would protect the blistered skin as it healed, or perhaps only until they returned to the Apex Complex. They could be returned to a marriageable state much faster, there.
Even with knowing the rigor and reason of a medical facility, Laura found the attentions of the Syndicate doctors distant and clinical. It was different from what she did in far-off villages or small towns, and she knew why some Legends preferred to lick their own wounds rather than go to the medical bay; the clinicians never let them forget that they were assets.
“Trying to power a small planet with those sighs?” Anita cut in. “Up and at ‘em. We should probably get going before Witt comes back here and accuses us of canoodling.”
There was truth in the joke. Laura’s heart tightened. Why was she feeling like this?
She knew why.
As if by perfect chance, there was an upset-sounding beep from her aids and they suddenly decided that the abuse they’d seen was enough, and powered down entirely.
“Ah,” Laura said, because in between her bandaging Anita’s wounds and Anita bandaging hers, she’d managed to forget that they needed to be charged.
“That’s not good.”
Anita did have a talent for stating the obvious-- not her fault that sometimes people didn’t see the obvious until it was stated, anyway-- but Laura knew she meant it more in a sympathetic way than anything else.
“I’ll just…” She cast her eyes around for a charging port. There had to be one back here, she knew that, but even in the light the backroom managed to be entirely foreign to her. “Wait here until it charges up.”
“I can carry you home,” Anita suggested almost at the same time.
“No!”
“Uh.”
“I’m fine.” Laura nearly lunged out of the chair in her haste to reach the outlet that was right by her chair. “I’ll be fine. I’m not helpless.”
“I never said you were,” Anita argued, “only that I don’t want to leave you here alone with the paps still roving around outside like a pack of bloodthirsty prowlers. You know they’ll ask questions. I’ll wait here with you until your mobility aid is charged enough for you to get home.”
Smooth moves, Anita, Laura groused to herself even though she wasn’t that upset at the prospect of sitting in Elliott’s backroom with Anita for anywhere from fifteen minutes to a half hour. “Fine. You can stay.”
At that, Anita snickered; both of them looked ridiculous, covered in ash, smoke, blood, and now bandages as club music pumped through the closed door. There was a loud crashing noise from somewhere outside. The adrenaline was gone, but to some degree they were both still riding the thrill of being champions. It was kind of funny that their competitors would (usually) be brought back as (mostly) clean slates, but that was the appeal of battle scars; they were a sign that says I survived. Anita looked toward the door, then to the open, now-depleted first aid kit, then to Laura as the lights flickered from something happening outside. Laura was not entirely sure if she wanted to know. “Thanks for not kicking me out.”
“You’re welcome.”
Anita laughed again. Laura, despite herself, joined in; feeling odd and giddy at the easy banter. She cautiously circled her shoulder and resisted wincing at the painful tug. If only there had been painkiller in the first aid kit… still, she wasn’t sure how long it had been since it had been restocked, and she owed Elliott gauze and bandages already.
“That was some work you did out there today,” Anita finally offered. She leaned back to prop up one elbow-- considering the other, her injured arm, but thinking better of it and resting that hand in her lap-- on the workbench behind her.
Laura had often entertained a fantasy when nights were nippy. Fantasies were always easier to construct when they had memories to draw on, was all, and she’d never shared it with a soul. It was private. Hers, and hers alone.
“Which part?” It wasn’t that she craved Anita’s approval. She didn’t need it. But-- if Anita was going to say something-- she wanted to hear it.
“That stunt you pulled on Silva. Taking down the MRVN. Not that I thought you didn’t have it in you--” Laura could tell Anita was trying very hard to not shove her foot in her mouth. If she was in a more combative mood, she’d waste no time in pointing it out. As they were now, she sighed and waved permissively. “But it was impressive. We were on the ropes, but you pulled it off.”
“Thank you. Your timing on that smoke grenade was perfect, when you picked me up.”
“I’ll always pick you up,” Anita boasted, only to make a face and stare at the wall. “No man left behind.”
Laura, again, wasn’t in the mood to needle her for it, and she herself was feeling odd. There was a tightness in her chest that Anita always managed to kindle, like she was stumbling around blind in her smoke cover. Even if she avoided looking at her, she could still see her in the corner of her eye, and could still hear the measured rhythm of her breath, slight huffs from the back of her throat whenever she pulled her bandages. They sat there in near-silence, accompanied by muffled sounds of the city and the lounge, until Laura’s mobility aids beeped to let her know that they were adequately charged. She unplugged them, activated them, and stood up from the chair.
“There. I can head home now,” she said firmly as Anita stood and headed toward the back door.
“There’s still going to be paps around,” Anita argued again. “Let me walk you home. I can tell the sharks to buzz off.”
Anita clearly would not be dissuaded by anything short of Laura telling her to buzz off, and despite herself Laura wanted to spend more time with her. This had been… pleasant, despite the circumstances.
“Alright,” she conceded; a little more softly than she would like. Anita pushed the door open and held it, scouting out the alleyway for hovering paparazzi or journalists, and gestured for Laura to follow through.
“Let’s go home.”