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The cafeteria of lovely Aurora is quiet, which means it very soon isn’t going to be. You’d think that in a ship as large as this Carmilla would be able to read and drink tea in relative peace even in the open halls of the cafeteria. Unfortunately, that would never be the case.
At the moment there are three Mechanisms on the ship, not including the vampire. Nastya, who is as always in the vents, likely making a mess of gods knows what. Carmilla certainly doesn’t want to know anymore than she already does, which is something for a self proclaimed nosy mother. The Toy Soldier is rewinding its gears in its own quarters, carefully fixing rusted clockwork underneath wooden skin. And, of course, Jonny, who had been grounded to the ship instead of being let on planetside after he shot directly into Brian’s morality switch, through the artificial brain stem, and caused Brian to have his own little crisis until Carmilla could fix up his wiring, this time with stronger cables in the spine.
And since Jonny is on board there would never be peace. Really her own fault, she can admit that. But sometimes you must inconvenience yourself to teach your own child a lesson. Or maybe she didn’t? She should pick up some more parenting books. The ones on her shelf were starting to get moth-eaten again.
And since she knows that Jonny was on board she doesn’t flinch when he stumbles into the cafeteria with all the grace of a newborn calf and makes his way toward the liquor cabinet. She peers over her book, another vampire novel because she loves to hate read whatever myths any new system had about the disgraceful blight of vampirism. Jonny snatches a bottle of dark whiskey that hadn’t yet turned into vinegar by this point and a shot glass. He leans heavily on the counter as he pours himself a shot and downs it in one. He scowls and goes back to the cabinet, pulling out something stronger and clear and popping the cap.
“Are you really so bored as to drink yourself into an alcoholic overdose again?” Carmilla questions as she sets her book facedown on her legs.
She is graced with a pair of fingers held up in her general direction as Jonny takes a large swig and stumbles over to the table. She couldn’t smell alcohol in his blood, yet, so the stumbling wasn’t caused by that. Her eyes snap down to his feet. An injury perhaps. Maybe he had fallen over or kicked something too hard. He is favoring his left leg, almost walking on the tips of his toes on his right. He leans against a table when he gets to it, taking his right foot off of the ground.
“Do I need to dig shrapnel out of your leg again? Don’t tell me you wandered in on Nastya and Aurora again, I don’t want to know.”
“‘M fine,” Jonny grumbles, sliding into a seat at one of the many tables, setting the bottle of clear liquor next to him, shot glass abandoned. “Twisted my ankle.”
“Well, put it up, then,” she says, grabbing a bookmark from beside her. A random piece of moth-eaten page, probably from a different book. Ivy hates it when she does that, but it’s not Ivy’s book anyway. “Not gonna heal very fast if you let it swell.”
Jonny rolls his eyes. “My ankle’ll be fine, doc,” he says. “Jus’ hurts for a bit then I walk it off.”
“Just like you walked off your fractured knee?” Carmilla prods, setting the book aside. “Come on, leg up, let me see how badly you sprained it so I know if you’re out for an hour or a week.”
“A week?! ” Jonny sputters as Carmilla gets to him and pulls his leg up onto the table, starting to undo the laces of his boot. “It’s just a sprain!”
“It’s never “just a sprain,” Jonny,” she sighs, working his boot off much more carefully than she normally would if she was carrying off his drunken ass to bed. “You’re not walking it off if you tore something.” She slides his sock off, grimacing at the smell but ignoring it to let her eyes scan over the swollen ankle before her. “Did you feel a pop when you hurt it?”
“Course I felt a pop, that’s how I know I sprained it, duh,” Jonny says, leaning back in the chair precariously as he takes another swig, the alcohol working its way into his blood.
Carmilla snatches the bottle from his hand. “Drinking is only going to make it more inflamed.”
He tries to reach for the bottle and groans when she puts it far out of his reach. “It’ll make the fucking pain stop.”
She raises a brow at this. Jonny has a rather high pain tolerance. He once claimed that he got a detailed spine tattoo in one session and she tentatively believed him when Ashes corroborated his tale. It’s likely a bad sprain if he’s trying to drink the pain away instead of ignoring it.
She rolls up the hem of his pant leg and prods at the swollen joint, taking note of the way he sucks air in through his teeth. Her face flattens out as she smells the raw edge of a torn ligament and the rush of white blood cells toward the injury. No smell of bone marrow.
“Well it’s definitely torn,” she says, standing back up to her full height. Jonny tries to set his leg back down but she stops him, gently grabbing his calf. “Nope. You’re going to stay here while I get a boot. You’ll only need to wear it for a week. Be glad for my handiwork.”
“What?” Jonny shouts. “This isn’t even the worst I hurt it! I got a sprain worse than this back on New Texas and I just walked it off.”
Carmilla sputters. “You what? You tore your ligament and you kept walking on it?” She shakes her head. “Aurora, gurney, stat.”
An automated gurney, the wheels trembling with speed, slides through the automated doors and clunks against the table as Jonny spits out defenses.
“I’m fine, Carmilla!” he insists as she hoists him onto the gurney. He’s not a light lift but enhanced strength does help. “It’s just a fuckin sprain, you freak!”
“Yes, yes, I’m such a freak,” she says as she rolls him toward her medical lab, the one with the MRI. “I’m so so odd for worrying about a lifelong injury in your ankle that I managed to miss in previous check ups, especially when I have the technology to fix it.”
“Fix what? I’m not baby, I can handle a sprained ankle every so often.”
“And how often is often, d’Ville?”
“I don’t know. I twist it every couple weeks or so but it’s not like I sprain it every time.”
“A twist can still be a sprain. Sprain is just an umbrella term for injuries to the ligaments in your joints. A twist could’ve stretched it. This is definitely torn, though. Normally I’d just put you in a boot for a week and let it be, but if this injury originally happened before mechanization it’s something that I’m going to need to recode and stitch up properly so you don’t have to hurt yourself every few weeks.”
“It’s not a big deal.”
“Do you want to be in pain like this?”
There’s quiet for a second as she waits for an answer. The rolling of the wheels under the gurney are the only company as Jonny sits up.
“I don’t know. I’m just used to it at this point. Dad always told me to walk it off when I sprained it so I thought it wasn’t a big deal.”
Carmilla sighs. “A sprain isn’t something you can walk off. Well, with your advanced healing it technically can be, but in a mortal body absolutely not.” She turns a corner and he nearly falls over from the jerking. “It’s a serious injury and if left untreated it can cause chronic joint instability which I should have noticed before this. That’s on me. I just assumed that’s how you walk.”
“What the fuck do you mean by that?!” he spits.
“The way you favor your left leg over your right. Most people put more weight on one leg than the other, but yours is because of the instability in your leg.”
It’s quiet again for a moment as Jonny processes the new information.
“So you’re saying that he shouldn’t have made me carry furniture into the wagon a week after I sprained it?”
Carmilla tries not to scowl. She is glad she let Jonny kill Billy Vangelis for his own sake but she does wish she could’ve done some … highly unethical experiments beforehand. It’s in the past now. Focus on the now.
“Absolutely not. Highly irresponsible. Not unsurprising given his - his everythi- fuck! ”
A crowbar slams into her kneecaps as she approaches a fork in the halls. Jonny sits up straight and starts laughing wildly, clutching his stomach as he doubles over.
“Oops, wrong person,” the smooth voice of Ashes says above her prone form. “Was hoping to hit Jonny, oh well.”
Things devolve from there into gunshots and yelling and a distinct lack of getting Jonny to the MRI machine that day.
A week later, though, Jonny walks with a new spring in his step as he gets used to the new stability in his right leg.