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Doc knew he should ask for help, go to Stress or Xisuma or someone, but… he couldn’t.
Every time he got hurt and thought about asking for help, all he could remember was being experimented on as a kid, by scientists that liked to call themselves “doctors” who wanted more information about creeper hybrids.
He remembered them fucking up his eye, and he remembered screaming while they fitted the mechanical replacement.
He remembered screaming so much he lost his voice for two days after and nearly passing out from the pain when Etho was installing his mechanical arm after he’d beaten Dinnerbone in a fight and the dev had cut off his arm. None of the anesthetics or sedatives they’d tried worked, and it was awful for them both.
So when he got hurt working on some redstone maintenance, he didn’t tell anyone.
He’d been repairing something in the elevator in the Perimeter when he slipped and all of a sudden there was an explosion of pain in his right leg, and it felt like he nearly bit his tongue clean off trying to keep himself from crying out.
Doc pulled himself out of the tight space he was working in and sat up to look at his leg, and nearly threw up at the sight. There was a deep gash down his calf, and it was surrounded by redstone burns.
He closed his eyes and took deep breaths through his nose. He didn’t want to throw up, and he couldn’t pass out. If he passed out, with his luck someone would find him out and take him to Stress, and if he woke up in another sterile white room he was going to lose his fucking mind. So he breathed until he felt less faint and then opened his eyes again.
Looking down at his leg again, he found himself thankful that he didn’t bleed like a human. The gunpowder that mixed with his blood as a creeper hybrid made him bleed slower, and scab faster. It hurt like hell, though.
“Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck- ” he hissed through clenched teeth as he slammed down one of the ender chests he carried around and dug out his first-aid kit.
He looked at the suture kit that he had just in case he ever managed to use it, but whenever he thought about going for it all he could think about was pain and fear and this time was no different, so he passed it over and went for saline and bandages.
He poured saline over his whole calf, hissing in pain as he rinsed the redstone dust off, cleaning the cut and the burns.
Doc patted it dry as best he could with a piece of gauze before grabbing a roll of bandages and wrapping it around his ankle, below the wounds. He took a deep breath before wrapping his leg as tightly as he could from ankle to knee, doing his best to force the edges of the wound together with the overly tight bandages.
He nearly passed out wrapping the worst part, but he didn’t and once he was done he let himself lay flat on the ground and breathe, watching the clouds for a few minutes as he got himself back under control, and then he went back to work.
He’d run out of wool. He kept having to replace the color-coded wool he was using to keep track of his redstone because he kept messing it up while working, and he didn’t have any more.
It took him a minute to crawl his way out from where he was, much deeper in the redstone than before, and a few pained noises slipped from his mouth as his leg kept bumping into things. Once he was out, he strapped on his elytra, grabbed some rockets, and immediately headed for the wool shop Beef had made at spawn.
He’d just finished picking out and paying for all the wool he needed when he heard rockets.
“Hey, Doc!” He heard Gem call out as she landed behind him. “How’s it going?”
“Pretty good, how are you?” he asked, shoving the rest of the wool he needed into his shulker boxes and gathering them up before turning to
“I’m good- hey, Doc, are you okay?” she cut herself off, looking down at the bandages around his leg. Fuck.
“Yeah, why?”
“You look like you’re in pain, and you’ve got bandages,” she said, pointing. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” he said, trying not to snap but not managing to keep the frustration from his tone, and she flinched a little. “Sorry,” he said the moment that happened, forcing his tone softer and kinder. “Sorry, Gem. I’m okay.”
Before she could respond, he turned around and took off.
Doc headed back to the Perimeter and once again began to work, quickly forgetting about the interaction, all the space in his brain taken up trying to figure out what was wrong with this stupid redstone.
He didn’t know how long it’d been when he heard and felt his comm buzz, and he grabbed it to find a message from Etho.
Etho whispers to you: hey doc what r ur coords
The message was out of nowhere and Etho didn’t give any context, but he’d been friends with the man for over a decade and didn’t even think twice before pressing the key to send his coords in their DMs.
A few minutes later, he heard rockets and paused what he was doing.
“Doc! Hey, man, where are you?”
That was Etho.
“One sec, I’m pretty far in here,” he called back.
He pulled himself back out of the redstone, again taking a few minutes. He was so deep in the redstone and still hadn’t figured out the issue and it was driving him mad.
He blinked his eyes a few times to adjust to the change in lighting and sat up to see Etho crouched in front of him.
“Hey, what’s up?” he asked.
Etho stared at him for a few moments, before sighing and pointing at his leg.
“You’re hurt.”
“And?” Doc said defensively, the word followed by a creeper’s hissing noise.
Etho wasn’t deterred. He knew Doc, and he knew that the other wasn’t angry, that he wouldn’t hurt him. “Show me,” he said.
“Why the hell would I do that?” Doc asked.
“I’m not stupid, Doc, and neither are you,” Etho pointed out. “Show me. Or tell me first, I don’t care.”
“Why are you even here, Etho?”
To nearly anyone else, Doc’s tone would just seem annoyed, but Etho could hear the underlying fear.
“Stress messaged me, said Gem told her she saw you at the wool shop looking hurt. She figured you’d prefer me showing up to her showing up.”
Doc couldn’t even be upset at that. Gem had been worried, he didn’t blame her for going to Stress, it was the logical thing to do, go to the server medic if you think someone’s injured. And Stress was right, sending Etho. If she’d shown up out of nowhere he’d’ve had a panic attack and bolted, probably.
Damnit, Stress knew him too well by now.
“It’s fine, Etho, I took care of it,” Doc said. At this point, there was a constant, quiet hissing noise coming from him, strengthening every time he spoke.
“Now why don’t I believe you?” Etho asked sarcastically, before sighing and speaking in a softer tone. “C’mon. Show me. Talk to me.”
Doc knew he wasn’t getting out of this. If he was being honest with himself, he’d know that from the moment Etho had pointed at his leg and said “you’re hurt,” but he’d had to at least try.
“Fuck you,” he muttered, reaching down with a steady mechanical arm and now shaking flesh one to begin to unwrap the bandages, but before he could there was a hand on his wrist.
“Let me?” Etho offered, and Doc sighed, nodding and pulling his hands back.
“What happened?” Etho asked as he worked on unwrapping the tight, thick layers of bandages from where they were covering Doc’s entire lower leg, knee to ankle.
“Slipped trying to fix the redstone in the elevator,” he muttered, pulling his good knee to his chest and resting his chin on top of it. “Dunno what I caught it on exactly, but it sliced my leg open and burned me.”
Etho finished unwrapping his leg, and Doc saw his eyes widen. Oh, he was definitely fucked.
“Doc, what the fuck. You thought you could just wrap this and it’d be fine?” he asked incredulously.
“Etho…” he growled.
Etho took a breath. “Sorry, sorry,” he said, tone much gentler. “Doc, bandages aren’t gonna cut it for this and we both know it.”
The hissing was getting louder, and Doc could smell the scent of gunpowder beginning to seep into the air.
“Okay fuck this, I know I’m not supposed to ‘do’ emotions and that you supposedly don’t ‘do’ emotions, but for fuck’s sake, Doc. We’ve known each other for over a decade. We’ve done this before, work with me here. I don’t know about you but I’d like this to be as untraumatic as it can be, and it’s gonna be damn hard to pull that off if you won’t admit you need help.”
“I know that, Etho.”
“Then let me help, Doc.”
Doc glared at Etho for a few minutes, and the other man just met his gaze, not blinking once in the time Doc was looking at him.
“Fine,” he mumbled, defeated. “Fine.”
Etho reached out a hand and Doc took it, lacing his fingers through Etho’s and holding on tightly, letting a shuddering breath out through clenched teeth. The panic that had been building in him since he’d first gotten hurt was getting to a point that he wasn’t going to be able to deal with alone.
“We’re gonna go see Stress.” The scent of gunpowder thickened and Doc’s grip tightened on his hand. “You want Beef and Bdubs there, or just me?” he asked.
“You,” he said. “But… they can be there, maybe outside. If she needs help.”
Etho nodded and pulled out his comm, shooting a quick message to a group DM with Beef and Bdubs explaining the situation and asking them to be near Stress’ medical building. Both of them were aware of Doc’s past. Not as aware as Etho was, but they knew enough.
He slipped his comm back into his pocket and looked back up at Doc, who frankly looked like shit.
He tightened his grip on Doc’s hand before saying, “We’re gonna go now, okay?” It wasn’t a question, it was a statement. They were going now.
Etho let go of his hand in order to grab his arms and lift him up so he didn’t have to put pressure on his leg standing up, and then he put an arm behind his knees and swept the other into his arms.
“Etho-” he tried to protest, but he was immediately cut off.
“I’m not letting you walk on that more than you probably already have. Wrap your arms around my neck, I need an arm for rockets.”
Doc did as he said, and he shifted to make sure he was pinned as tightly against him as possible before pulling the string on the rocket and taking off for Stress’ base.
Etho managed to land smoothly and then he immediately switched back to carrying Doc the way he had been earlier and walking in.
The hall they had to walk down was white and brightly lit, but when they turned into the room, Doc looked around in shock.
“It was her idea, I just agreed and told her she should do it,” Etho said, answering the question he hadn’t even asked yet.
The bed was a regular bed instead of a hospital bed, or it looked like one, at least. It probably still functioned as a hospital bed. The lights were dimmer and the walls had been swapped out from white concrete to a glazed terracotta. It barely even looked like a hospital room.
“Remind me to tell her thanks,” he mumbled to Etho.
Etho set him down on the bed, making sure he was propped up a bit on the pillows, and then he took a seat on the bed up by Doc’s head and grabbed his hand again.
A few moments later, Stress poked her head into the room, relief briefly flashing across her face that Etho had managed to get Doc over to her.
“Oh hi! You’re here!” she said cheerfully, stepping in.
She then turned to Etho, and asked, “By the way, Etho, Beef and Bdubs are hanging around outside, I’m guessing that was you, love?”
“Yeah, they’re there if we need them,” he replied vaguely.
Stepping closer to Doc, she said, “Gem was worried about you, she saw you limping your way around the wool shop at spawn.”
“Needed more wool to color code my redstone, for the elevator,” Doc said. Redstone was an easy topic, the rest of it not so much. “Still can’t figure that damn thing out.”
Stress nodded, and he didn’t go any further in-depth, knowing she wouldn’t understand anything more he said about redstone.
“Can I see what happened?” she asked, and suddenly the faint scent of gunpowder that had mostly dissipated on the flight over was strengthening and the hissing was back.
She stepped back immediately and Doc muttered, “Fuck,” before saying louder, “Sorry, sorry.”
“It’s fine,” she said, reaching into her pocket and pulling out a nose plug clip of all things and sliding it over her nose. “There, problem solved.” Somehow, it didn’t make her voice sound all that much different, but it looked funny and Etho snorted.
Doc just kinda stared at her for a moment before saying, “Stress, you’re a strange person.”
She smiled, and then repeated her earlier question, “So, can I? See what happened?”
He felt Etho’s grip on his hand tighten reassuringly, and he nodded slowly. He didn’t take his eyes off Stress as she stepped forward and gently grabbed his knee and his ankle so she could move his leg to get a better look, ignoring the ever-present background noise of hissing. He saw when her brows furrowed and she leaned closer, and thought to himself, fuck.
She pulled her hands back after a moment, stepping back and looking up to meet his eyes.
“The burns will be fine,” she said. “They just need to be wrapped. That cut, on the other hand… that needs stitches.”
Etho immediately pulled out his comm and shot off a message to Bdubs and Beef, asking them to come in, tossing an “it needs stitches” in at the end of the message as context. If she needs help, is what Doc had said about the two of them, and she was definitely going to need help on this one. He didn’t wait for a response, immediately shoving the device back into his pocket in favor of tightly grabbing Doc’s shoulder.
If she needed to put stitches into Doc, the two of them weren’t going to cut it. Stress needed to be able to fully focus on doing the stitches, and Etho needed to be able to fully focus on Doc, on making sure he was as okay as possible, and that left nobody to help Stress out and nobody to keep his leg still.
“It’ll be fine, it’ll heal,” Doc said, glaring.
“It really won’t, Doc,” Stress said, and Doc found himself having to remind himself that the look on her face was empathy and not pity.
Before he could think of anything to say to that, he heard footsteps approaching and turned his head to the door to see Beef and Bdubs walking in.
“What’s up?” Beef asked, and Etho gestured to Doc’s leg.
“Bleh, ew,” Bdubs said wrinkling his nose at the sight.
“Yeah, what he said,” Beef said. “How’s it goin’, Doc?”
“Like shit,” Doc replied.
“Fair enough.”
It was quiet for a moment, nobody really sure what to say. There was a nervous tension in the air. They all knew what was happening and how this was gonna go, but it seemed nobody was sure how to start.
Etho ended up being the one to break the awkward silence, sighing.
“Alright, c’mon, let’s not all just sit here doing nothing forever,” he said, and Stress met his eyes for a moment before grabbing Beef and Bdubs and pulling them over to a corner of the room to talk to them.
Etho turned to Doc and asked, “You wanna be sitting up and able to see, or laying down and not?”
He actually took a second to think about that one, before deciding and replying, “Down is probably the best idea.”
“Alright.” Etho squeezed his hand before letting go and getting up for a moment to help him move the pillows and lie down flat, only one pillow remaining.
He grabbed Doc’s hand again and sat on the edge of the bed, facing toward the top of the bed this time.
Looking directly at his face, he could tell just how much this was getting to him. Etho hated it when Doc got hurt because it always ended up with something like this. He didn’t like triggering and retraumatizing one of his best friends, but he also couldn’t let him walk around on a fucked up leg, so here they were.
“Hey,” Etho said, meeting Doc’s eyes and squeezing his hand, “I’ve got you.”
And he meant that. Etho had him and he was going to get them through this. It wasn’t the first time they’d done this and it probably wouldn’t be the last, and it really fucking sucked, but at least having Etho there Doc knew he was gonna make it out the other side, one way or another.
Stress had finished talking to the other two and they made their way back over to Doc and Etho.
Doc jumped at the feeling of hands on his legs, and Etho used his free hand to press Doc’s shoulder down so he didn’t get up.
“It’s just Beef,” Etho said reassuringly. “It’s okay.”
“Sorry I startled you, should’ve mentioned it first,” Beef said, moving his hands so one was just above his knee and the other was on his ankle, keeping his leg still and pressed to the bed.
Doc anxiously clenched and unclenched his prosthetic hand, and caught himself starting to grind his teeth together. He was certain that by this point the room must have smelled like a gunpowder factory, and he felt a little bit bad for the others. Stress had honestly probably had the right idea, bringing a nose clip.
It took all his self control to not make an attempt at getting up and making a run for it, and he was pretty sure he only managed it because he’d convinced himself that doing that would be incredibly embarrassing, much more so than whatever this would end up being like.
He felt another pair of hands on his legs and pushed up against Etho’s hand, trying to sit up and see what was happening, despite him having been the one to decide on lying down and not seeing in the first place.
“Hey, hey, stop trying to sit up and look at them. Look at me, Doc. C’mon.” Etho said, moving his hand from the other’s shoulder to his face, making him look at him instead of what the others were doing with his leg.
Doc felt a combination of panic and embarrassment as he met Etho’s gaze, panic from the whole situation and embarrassment at the fact that he was panicking, even knowing it wasn’t anything to be embarrassed by.
“Sorry,” he said quietly, unable to stop himself.
“Don’t be,” Etho said firmly, leaving no room for argument.
Etho turned around to look at what was going on and nodded as something Stress had said too quietly for Doc to hear, and then turned back to meet his eyes again.
“Stress wants to get started, that okay?” he asked, squeezing his hand, and Doc shut his eyes for a moment and took a breath before nodding.
A few seconds after he’d given the okay, he felt saline rinsing the wound again and he tensed but didn’t pull away. Etho’s hand slipped away from his face and moved back down to his shoulder, squeezing comfortingly.
Doc felt something drying off his leg and then there was a hand resting right next to the wound, and Stress was saying, “I’m gonna start stitching this now, okay love?”
Instinctively he tried to jerk his leg away, but it was held steady by Beef. He felt a hand on his good leg, gently squeezing his leg in support. Bdubs, he assumed.
Deciding on forcing himself to stay still for as long as he can, he forced himself to be still and held tightly to Etho’s hand, and nodded.
It seemed that as long as he could wasn’t in fact very long because after two or three stitches he was no longer able to keep himself from trying to pull his leg away.
Etho noticed, having been keeping a close eye on Doc’s body language since he’d first laid eyes on him earlier in the Perimeter, and tightened his grip, gently rubbing his thumb across the back of Doc’s hand.
He wished he was able to tune out the feeling of the stitches because they hurt really badly. He tried to focus on the feeling of Etho gently rubbing the back of his hand, but that turned out to be a mistake.
When he closed his eyes, it let his brain transform the room around him into one from the past, one of those sterile white rooms full of people that caused him nothing but pain, and made him absolutely terrified of doctors and hospitals and anything remotely related to the two of those things because of what they did to him.
Beef’s hands morphed in his mind, turning into straps holding him down against a cold table and the needle going in and out of his leg was doing so much less gently and it hurt and-
“Doc, hey, Doc, open your eyes,” he heard Etho say, and he did, blinking rapidly and glancing around as best as he could, taking in his actual surroundings. “Maybe keep your eyes on me instead of closing them?” He suggests.
“Sorry, sorry, I didn’t realize that was gonna happen,” he managed to say.
“Don’t be sorry, PTSD’s a bitch.”
Doc snorted before wincing as Stress put a stitch in a particularly tender spot, somehow managing to tighten his grip on the other’s hand even more.
“Fuck,” he hissed.
“I’m nearly done,” Stress said softly, the first thing she’d said since she’d begun.
“Okay,” he managed to mumble quickly, wincing again at the next stitch. The one after that wasn’t too bad, and then finally…
“There, last stitch. That’s done, love,” she said reassuringly, and he was able to untense a bit. “Just gonna clean it off again, put something on those burns, and wrap it up.”
He nodded, and the grip Beef had on his leg loosened as she rinsed the stitches with saline and patten them dry. Doc felt as she spread something cooling over the redstone burns, making them feel much better than before. Then they were bending his leg, which hurt a bit, and he could feel Stress wrapping bandages over the stitches, not nearly as painfully tightly as he’d done earlier.
She straightened his leg out and then nobody was touching his leg anymore and he was able to breathe. It still hurt, but now that they weren’t messing with it, it would soon dull to a much more manageable level.
“You good?” Etho asked, removing his hand from Doc’s shoulder but not releasing his grip on his hand.
Doc thought for a few seconds before slowly nodding. He felt better, his leg wasn’t as painful as it had been before and he wasn’t suppressing panic about someone finding out he was hurt and he wasn’t trying not to have a mental breakdown while others helped him.
He felt heavy and tired, and it was becoming a bit of a chore to keep his eyes open. THe stress was dissipating, taking the adrenaline with it, and he was feeling it.
Etho noticed that his eyes were drifting shut every few seconds before he forced them open again, and he looked around to try and see if there were any extra blankets, and was met with Stress, already holding one out, and when he reached to take it, it was a warm blanket too.
He let go of Doc’s hand to spread the warm blanket over him, tucking it a bit around his shoulders, wanting him to be comfortable.
“You’re okay, now,” he said softly, gently squeezing his shoulder and saying, “You can sleep, it’s safe. We’ve got you.”
He let go as he saw Doc’s eyes slip closed again, actually staying closed this time, and he sat down in the chair next to the bed, getting comfortable to keep an eye on him until he woke up again. Doc wouldn’t be waking up without him.