Work Text:
The light was low, lamps on but room empty, no sound of running water from the bathroom alerting him to Smurf’s presence. Pope limped down the hallway by the ensuite, swaying slightly in his dizziness and exhaustion. Anger brewed in his chest like strong surf, swelling and crashing in waves, but was dulled by the pain coursing through his entire body. His temple ached, his head throbbed, his ears rang, his arms stung, his left ankle smarted with every step. Dried blood felt tacky and gross on his skin, running down his forearm in rivulets and matting his hair to the nape of his neck. He could almost feel bruises blossoming underneath his skin, tingling and undulating, and he noted with dread that he was going to be so fucking sore tomorrow.
His side was the worst. It was a white-hot, gnawing pain, somehow aching, burning and stinging all at once, and he could feel the lacerations there stretching nauseatingly with every movement, shards of glass digging in between his ribs. With another step, the room tilted, and he palmed the frame of the bathroom door for stability, leaning forward as he panted.
A little boy, bottom lip trembling, knees grazed, looking for his mom.
“Hey!” Angela’s voice cut through the silence and sent a sharp knife of pain through his left eye out the back of his skull. “Just got back?”
Pope didn’t reply. Too busy focusing on not passing out, throwing up, or somehow both at the same time.
“Wonder where she went,” Angela mused.
“I don’t know,” Pope forced out, breath coming in heavy puffs as he leant further into the wall. He felt the air in the room shift as Angela noticed the gashes on his forearm, the blood on his temple.
“Are you alright?” she rushed towards him, grasping his elbow just in time for his knees to turn to sponge and his legs to jelly. He staggered to the right, grunting in alarm.
“Holy shit,” she held him tighter, her other hand going to his back to steady him. “Sit down.”
The floor seemed to somehow bottom out, tilt and spin beneath him, all at once. He stumbled backwards into Angela’s hold, her hand gripping underneath his armpit now, struggling under his weight. He wasn’t necessarily a big guy, but he was bigger than her, especially with the bulking Smurf had him doing for cage fights. His hand flew to his ribs, the wounds there erupting with pain, and he coughed out a strained noise.
“Okay,” Angela soothed, and lowered him onto the edge of the bathtub.
The room abruptly shifted back into level focus as he sat down. “Whoa,” he breathed out, winded.
Angela’s hands were all over him, his side, his shoulder, as she steadied him and took in his injuries.
“What’s under your shirt?” she demanded. Pope’s vision blurred again and he leaned to rest his head against the wall, utterly spent.
She lifted his t-shirt to survey the damage, revealing a mess of cuts over his ribs and side, broken glass poking out, glinting in the dim light of the ensuite. Pope gingerly touched a finger to his skin and realised most of the wounds were still oozing fresh blood. He smelt copper, and it made him feel sick.
“Okay,” Angela said with determination, hurrying over to the bathroom cabinet. “Stay there.”
“I think there’s some broken glass,” he rasped out, closing his eyes against the pain and dizziness. He was disturbed by Angela sitting beside him, a bottle of antiseptic, cotton wool, and a pair of tweezers in hand. He made to sit up straighter, embarrassed by his pitifulness, but his balance was shot to hell and he wobbled uneasily, gripping the edge of the bathtub so hard his knuckles whitened.
Angela brushed her hair out of her face and gripped his shoulder, turning him back to lean against the tile. “This’ll hurt a little,” she warned, looking up at him through her lashes with a steady expression on her face.
“Angela,” he gasped out shakily. She was focused on pulling a shard of glass out of one of the cuts. “Angela.”
She looked up at him expectantly.
“The job went bad.”
“It’s okay,” she rubbed his bicep soothingly, her voice dropping to a whisper, “it’s okay.”
Pope puffed out a groan as she removed another piece of glass. She worked quickly and quietly, and soon enough the bathtub was awash with tiny shards streaked with blood, but his skin was empty of them.
“What was it?” she asked, unscrewing the antiseptic and dabbing a cotton pad with it. Pope was elsewhere again, his head leaned back against the wall, tilted up to the ceiling, eyes closed, breath heaving.
“Hey,” she squeezed his shoulder until he came back to her. “What was it? What happened?”
Pope shook his head wordlessly.
“I just wanna if this is gonna get infected,” she pressed. “And you look awful, you could have internal bleeding-”
“M’fine,” he groaned.
“You’re white,” she argued, “I’ve never seen anyone look so pale.”
“M’good. Jus’need to bandage it.”
“Jesus Christ,” Angela rolled her eyes. A losing battle. “Alright, well I’m gonna clean them up a bit. It’ll hurt. Tell me if you need to stop.”
She pressed the cotton pad to his side and pulled, wiping away at the gunky coagulated blood there, and Pope’s skin erupted, the pain so sinister it started to make him nauseous. He turned his head to press his forehead and nose into the wall, looking for grounding in the cool paint. Angela replaced the pad, pressed again and a whimper tore from him between wheezing breaths.
“Sorry, sorry, I’m trying to be gentle.” She soothed, stopping for a moment to stroke his bicep as he let out a pathetic moan. “I know. Do you need a break?”
“Just do it,” he gritted out.
The next few minutes passed in a blur of searing hot pain. Pope tried to choke back the awful sounds he was making, biting his lip until he tasted blood, so they came out in a series of whines, hisses and grunts. He was so exhausted, in so much pain. The nostalgic warmth of Angela’s presence, her soothing words, her light touch, made him feel an odd, uneasy sense of safety, and towards the end of the ordeal he made a noise that sounded dangerously like a sob.
“Okay,” Angela whispered, gripping his elbow and sweeping her thumb forwards and backwards. “You’re okay. Almost done.”
Pope made the mistake of looking down at the mess of bloodied cotton in the tub and the gaping cuts in his side. Without so much blood, they looked like gills, and he could see them opening and closing as his chest wall moved with every breath. The sight made him oddly sick, and he gagged closed mouthed, pressing a fist against his lips desperately.
Angela’s head snapped up in alarm. “You gonna throw up?”
“Oh, fuck,” Pope moaned, and gagged again, harder.
“Shit, okay, okay,” Angela swiped the trash can from the corner of the bathroom and emptied it’s meager contents into the sink in a panic before thrusting it under Pope’s chin. Just in time for him to spit up a mouthful of yellow bile into the bottom.
The retching made his ribs throb even worse, and he grasped at them with one hand while the other gripped the edge of the bathtub. He felt Angela’s palm rubbing small circles between his shoulder blades.
“You’re alright, just let it out,” she hushed as an embarrassingly loud retch tore out of him. Between the stress of the job, the chaos of the ambulance crash and the rageful fallout that ensued, Pope hadn’t eaten much of anything today, so his stomach twisted and cramped with heaves that didn’t end before the next one began. Thin streams of hot, acrid bile surged up and out of him intermittently, burning his nose and making him cough.
“Easy, Pope, you’re alright,” Angela murmured as he struggled through empty gags and hiccups, whimpering and gasping in-between. Eventually it settled, and he was left panting over the trashcan, Angela still rubbing his back.
“Think you’re done?”
He nodded hesitantly and shot her an uneasy look. “Sorry.”
“I’m an ex-junkie, you don’t know how many times I’ve seen people puke,” Angela smiled, pulling the trashcan away from him and handing him a towel to wipe his mouth. “Let me take care of this. Where’s your first aid kit?”
“Kitchen. Under the sink.”
“Ice packs?”
“Freezer. Second drawer.”
She returned quickly to find him stood over the sink, rinsing out his mouth before tentatively sipping from a glass of water, bracing himself heavily over the counter with one hand.
“What are you doing stood up?” Angela demanded as she rushed over to him, steering him over to sit on the closed lid of the toilet.
“This is, like, really well-stocked,” she commented as she opened the first-aid kit, bulging with gauze, dressings, even sutures. “Can’t tell if that means it never gets used, or that it’s always getting used.”
“Here,” she offered him an ice pack, “for your cheek. Gonna have one hell of a shiner.”
He took it wordlessly and held it up to his eye, sighing gratefully at the relief it brought from his headache. They remained in comfortable silence as Angela got to work cleaning the dried blood from his skin, taking care to get it all out of the hair on his arms and at the nape of his neck. She knew he’d hate the sticky feeling if she didn’t get it all off, and didn’t want to risk him showering in case he passed out or something. She carefully dressed the worst of the cuts, apologizing clumsily when some of the dressings weren’t big enough for his arm and left gashes poking out from underneath. Pope said nothing, just stared at the ceiling with droopy eyes and breathed.
“Okay,” she sighed finally, “I think we’re all done. Anywhere else need attention?”
“Don't think so.”
“Alright. It’s late, you wanna just go right to bed?”
Pope shook his head minutely, “won’t sleep.”
“Why don’t you go lay down on the couch while I clean up in here? We can watch a movie or something,” Angela smiled, “I found some popcorn in the back of one of your cabinets.”
“VCR was in the closet - still works,” Angela carried the promised bowl of popcorn under her arm, popping a kernel in her mouth as she set up some awful old slasher movie she and Pope had watched as teenagers. “Can’t get the clock to stop blinking, though.”
Pope said nothing as she sat beside him, his posture tense and straight. He’d left the icepack behind, she noticed, and the bruises on his forehead and cheekbone were already starting to bloom into angry, brown-red swells. He clenched his jaw and breathed carefully, eyes downcast, a methodology she recognised as his way of trying not to get upset. Uncertain, but figuring she’d already seen him vulnerable enough tonight, she reached a tentative hand up to play with the curls above his ear, stroking down to the back of his neck. He turned to face her in response, sighing heavily. He said nothing, but his eyes spoke for him. I can’t talk about it. Don’t make me talk about it.
Angela pulled him in by the shoulder and let him settle down with his head in her lap, wincing and grimacing as the movement pulled at his side. She held him close, one hand in his hair, ruffling and stroking it absent-mindedly, the other held steadily on his shoulder, grounding him. Pope breathed out shakily through pursed lips, resting his hand above her knee, then glanced down at her hand on his shoulder, yearning to take hold of it, for any sort of further contact. He felt like a dish towel that had been wrung out and tossed aside, and in his misery, he relented against his self-preserving urges and reached up to tuck his hand into hers, nuzzling his face further into her thigh.
The crackly sounds of chainsaws and screaming and low light flickering from the TV, and the hand in his hair stroking a soothing rhythm through his curls suddenly made Pope feel bone-tired. His eyelids started to lag and droop, and his breaths evened out as exhaustion swept him into sleep.
He missed the soft smile that crossed Angela’s face as she held him close, tight, safe, beyond when the movie finished and the credits rolled, the VCR clock still blinking.