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Casey has this bad habit of drinking after practice.
Nothing heavy, just a beer or two, and only on days that are particularly bad. And only light beers; Modelos, Coronas, Miller High Lifes. Whatever he’s got on hand. Today was one of those bad days. Apparently, Raph had a run-in with Slash when Casey wasn’t around, and Slash decided to make it Casey’s problem at practice. He’d been slammed into the rink barriers more times than he can count, and he’s aching in a way that promises bruises in the morning.
So, he deserves a beer or two.
He’s winding down, halfway through his Modelo, halfway through Red Dead 2, halfway to his brain bluescreening, when a knock on his door jolts him back into alertness. He pauses his game and gets up, moving carefully around his own soreness, crosses to the door. Opens it. It’s Raph, leaning heavy against the wall, beat to shit and covered in fresh bruises. One of his arms is dripping blood onto a towel clutched in his fist, and the shoulder is torn apart in a mess of what looks like shattered glass or clear plastic. He’s paler than Casey’s ever seen him, looks seconds away from keeling over, and is panting, looking up at Casey with pleading eyes.
“I need some help,” he says, and the words seem to drip from his mouth like the blood from his arm.
Casey nods, tells him, “Bathroom,” and steps away from the door to find his first aid kit and a paper bag.
The first aid kit is easy enough to find, he had just used it on himself when he got back from practice. He has to dig through his trash for a paper bag, but he finds one, then takes both of those and his beer and rushes to the bathroom.
Raph’s there, bracing himself against the counter with his good arm, the other hanging by his side. His blood is splattered on the tiles between them and the towel is nowhere to be seen.
“You wanna sit?” Casey asks, and Raph looks up, eyes a little cloudy, like he didn’t realize Casey was there too.
“What?”
“Sit on the counter. If you’re gonna pass out I’d rather it not be while you’re standing. Need help?”
Raph shakes his head, but it takes him three tries to actually get up there, and Casey suspects it has nothing to do with how short he is. But he doesn’t say anything about it, just maneuvers Raph’s bleeding arm over the sink. He digs through his first aid kit, pulls out tweezers and isopropyl alcohol, and mutters a quiet apology. Raph hisses in pain as Casey wipes down the wound with alcohol as gently as possible, but he doesn’t flinch. When Casey is done, he pushes his half-empty Modelo into Raph’s hand.
“Sorry I ain’t got anythin’ stronger. This is gonna hurt.”
Raph nods and downs the rest of Casey’s beer in one swallow, puts the bottle down gently and sets his shoulders. “Go ahead.”
Raph doesn’t move as Casey removes the first piece of bloody glass with the tweezers and drops it into the paper bag. Not when Casey takes out the second or the third, either. By the tenth small shard, though, Casey notices how Raph’s hands are curling around the edge of the counter, knuckles turning white with the strength of his grip. He pauses to let Raph breathe for a moment and to take stock of his progress. Raph's arm is bleeding more than it was before they started, but Casey figures that makes sense, since he's digging around in the wound with tweezers. He grabs a paper towel and wipes away some of the excess blood.
"So what happened?
Raph looks up from where he was staring at his knees, and his voice is shaky as he answers, "Shoved through a window."
Casey hums. That didn't really answer anything, but Raph is pretty out of it anyways, so he's not about to push too hard.
"Going back in. Take a couple deep breaths for me?
He goes back to pulling out shards of glass one by one, dropping them into the paper bag next to the sink and pretending not to notice when Raph flinches or whimpers. It's pretty impressive, honestly, that Casey can be poking all of those exposed nerve endings over and over again, and the most Raph is doing is flinching slightly. It must be that ninja training, or whatever the hell Raph had said in that bar so many months ago. Casey wonders distantly if Raph has been getting injuries like this his whole life. He pulls out another piece of glass.
Raph takes a concerningly shaky breath in, and Casey thinks maybe he should comment on it, but Raph starts speaking before he can. "Remember when I told you my dad has this rivalry from back when he lived in Japan?"
Casey nods and works his way towards slightly bigger pieces of glass.
"Turns out he was right to be paranoid. Got fuckin' jumped on my way uptown." He pauses to take another quivering breath. "Oh god, I think I might puke."
Casey's eyes widen at that, and he glances up at Raph briefly before yanking the glass piece he had been working on the rest of the way out, whipping around to grab the trash can, and hurriedly shoving it into Raph's hands. "It's okay if you do, just so you know. No judgement."
Raph's resulting laugh is sharp, sardonic, and completely lacking any humor. It's a little off-putting. Casey is used to Raph being unerringly genuine, if a little sarcastic at times, but he's never heard him laugh like that. Again, though, he chooses not to comment on it, and washes his hands again.
"Oh, shit, maybe a little late to ask, but do you want me wearing gloves?" Raph shakes his head no, leaning over the trash can in his hands and looking distinctly green. "Fuck, speaking of. Should we be taking you to a hospital?"
Raph's head snaps out of the trash can at that. "Hell no. No hospitals."
Casey files that under the 'Raph' section of his brain. Raph hates hospitals. Got it. He debates asking for a reason, and eventually gives in with a quiet, "Any particular reason?”
Raph is back to gazing into the depths of the trash can. "Pops always said that hospital workers can't be trusted. A lot of nurses and doctors get paid out by Saki, or so he claims, so we've never been hospital people." He sighs, heavy. "Usually I patch us up. I have the neatest stitches and I'm the best at wrapping shit. Kinda hard to clean up my own shoulder, though."
In the time that Raph has been talking, Casey has removed three medium sized pieces of glass from his shoulder with him barely noticing. Casey decides that keeping Raph talking is going to help get the glass out of his shoulder faster. So he asks, "You get hurt like this often?"
Raph gives this sort of half-nod, more to the trash can than to Casey. "Sorta. I mean kids generally get hurt pretty easily, with the whole learning motor skills shit and everything. Combine that with sharp weapons and short fuses, and. Well. Injuries a little different from this, but."
"Sure, sure." Casey pulls out the last medium-ish piece of glass lodged in Raph's shoulder, determinedly ignores the way he can feel blood pooling in his cuticles. "So why not ask one of your brothers? They must know first aid too?"
"I mean, yeah. They do. They ain't as good at it as I am," Raph chuckles weakly (but it's genuine, Casey notes), "but we all learned. And I would, but Mike is with Leatherhead tonight, and I'm not about to drag them both back to our dorm. Leo is off doing god only knows what, and she's unreachable for the nngh--" Raph chokes around the word as Casey has to dig into his wound with his hands to free a particularly stubborn piece of glass.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry babe, I know. I gotta get it out though." Casey is fighting both the piece of glass and the urge to run his hand through Raph's hair.
Raph finally gives in to the urge to vomit, and starts to wrench away from Casey's hands. Casey tightens his grip on the glass as Raph twists away, and Raph's movement manages to yank the shard out of his flesh. Casey drops it in the bag and turns away from Raph, flinching with concern each time Raph heaves. He wants to comfort him, but he's hyper aware of the blood on his hands and wrists, and doesn't want to get blood in Raph's hair or on his clothes.
Eventually, the retching stops, and he hears Raph panting heavily over his shoulder, so he wets another paper towel and turns around to hand it to him.
"Sorry," Raph mutters, "I'm alright."
Casey is convinced it's a lie, but he so isn't going to call him out for it. He picks the tweezers up again and goes back to digging for glass shards. "So Mikey is with Leatherhead and Leo is unreachable. What about Donnie?"
Raph exhales gently, settling back into whatever they had before he puked. "Donnie gets so anxious whenever one of us gets hurt. You'd think he'd be used to it by now. I mean, when we were kids, I was picking fights with every other person I ran into. Actually fought about half'a them. I've come home with more than enough wounds. But nope, one of us comes home a little damaged and they're up all night, running back and forth between rooms until he passes out from exhaustion. I don't want them to end up sleeping on my dorm floor tonight, so. I couldn't go to him."
Casey nods, only half listening, entirely focused on this last piece of glass that he's almost freed from the prison of Raph's shoulder. With a couple more solid tugs, it comes loose, and with a sigh of relief, Casey drops it into the paper bag with the 800 other shards. The clinking sound of it hitting the other glass sounds like success.
"Okay, I think that's all of the glass. How are you doing?"
For the first time since he got onto the counter, Raph looks down at his arm. He gives another half-nod, this time to his shoulder, and takes an extra deep breath.
"Thanks, man. I really owe you one." He shifts like he's going to hop off the counter, so Casey shifts in front of him to stop him.
"Why are you talking like you're done? I need to wash the wound and wrap it. Keep your ass right there." Raph looks a little surprised at that, but settles back into his spot as Casey pulls the isopropyl alcohol out again. "Hang in there, alcohol incoming. This is gonna hurt."
He starts gently wiping down the wound as Raph laughs. "The hell are you on about, Case? You saw what I just sat through. Alcohol ain't shit."
Casey suspects he might be talking a big game to distract himself from the stinging of the alcohol, but hey. If it gets him to feel less like he's going to vomit, then Casey is all for it. Once he's wiped some of the blood away, he does a quick assessment of the wound. It's more of a bad case of road rash than any sort of puncture wound, and he's pretty sure it won't need stitches, just a lot of gauze.
"Do you think it needs stitches? From my angle, it doesn't look like it, and I don't have shit to stitch with, but I'm sure we can find someone if you think it'll need it."
Raph looks down at it again, this time to assess it rather than just look, and he gets a little greener, like he might puke again.
"Okay, don't look too hard if you're gonna get sick," Casey chides.
"No, it's fine. I'm fine, I swear. I don't think it needs stitches either. Do you have gauze, though? I think it'll need some under the bandages."
Casey nods, washes his hands again, dries them quickly, and pulls over his first aid kit. He hums a little in the back of his throat as he digs through it, pulling out two rolls of gauze and two rolls of bandages. He wraps the gauze tight around the wound, hoping it'll provide enough pressure to stop the bleeding. Then he wraps the whole thing in both rolls of bandages, steps back.
"What do you think?"
Raph looks down at it and sighs. A little bit of color comes back to his face, or maybe Casey is imagining it. "It's great. I seriously owe you one."
"You don't owe me shit." Casey helps Raph down off the counter, steadying him as he lands and sways a little. "Actually, I lied. Y'know what you owe me?"
Raph blinks up at him, eyes hazy, and hums.
"You're crashing with me tonight. You said Mikey ain't here, and you're sure as hell not safe enough to be alone. You're one head rush from passing the fuck out."
Raph grins in a way he must think is flirty, but mostly comes across as drunken. "If you want me in your bed, baby, you can just ask."
Casey feels his face and neck heat up at that, but Raph is so out of it that he probably has no idea what he's saying. So he laughs it off and pulls Raph into his side, keeping an arm wrapped around his shoulders as he packs up the first aid supplies one-handed and leads them out of the bathroom.
"Sure thing, Raphie. If this were me hitting on you, I'd absolutely ask. But you're injured, and I'm worried, so this is me telling you. You're staying with me tonight."
Raph is looking up at him again, batting his eyelashes and stumbling over his own feet. "I'd stay with you every night if you asked."
Casey swallows his laugh as he opens his door and lets Raph in first. "Very romantic of you. Get your ass into bed and go to sleep."