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Jabber nestled his head into Cthoni’s lap. She scooped enough water into a cup, pushed his locs out of his face, and poured it onto his scalp. The water was freezing, but Jabber didn’t react. He just had a dazed look in his eyes.
She worked a bit of shampoo she found in his bag — hopefully that’s what it was — between her hands and began lathering it into Jabber’s scalp. He shivered.
“It feels good, doesn’t it, Jabber?” Cthoni asked, but he didn’t respond. “Okay, sit up.”
She moved on, pushing the locs she’d already washed to the side, and worked her fingers through the back of his head. Jabber finally seemed to enjoy it, but she stopped when she noticed the suds were turning pink.
More blood? She thought. She poked a finger into his hair.
“Nng!” he lit up. Sure enough, he had some nasty gash buried in there.
“You didn’t tell me you got hit on the head.” Cthoni fussed. She’d just finished washing and looking him over for any more serious injuries, but with how locked up his hair is at the scalp, it was pretty hard to tell if he had anything there on her own. She would have to rely on him to say something, but obviously she couldn’t.
“Yeahh, guess I just forgot, huh?” Jabber turned to face her with a smile, suddenly much more energetic. “But if I had told you, you wouldn’t have gone and dug your fingers into it.” He reached to keep messing with it, but Cthoni smacked his hand away.
“I don’t want you to hurt yourself.” She said without thinking, and Jabber’s face went soft.
When Zodyl didn’t need him, sometimes Jabber liked to go missing. Cthoni tried not to worry, she knew he could always manage to at least survive on his own, but she still found herself looking for him this time, anyway. It was a few hours ago when she finally found him sprawled out deep inside an old pipe system, with a trail of blood leading up to him. He was covered in blood, vomit, and who knows what else, with a few puncture wounds on his chest.
Self-inflicted. She assumed. It looked as if he just mindlessly stabbed himself with Mankira over and over again, trying to get the pain to go away. He must’ve been too out of it to realize that not all of the pain he was feeling was physical, and no amount of doses from Mankira could do anything for him in that regard. As she got closer, she heard him mumbling something under his breath. She leaned in to listen, but he swung his claws at her, just barely missing her face. If she said she wasn’t scared of Mankira, she would be lying, but Jabber could never scare her. So, she cautiously held out her hand in front of his nose, and he almost instantly shot up and wrapped his arms around her. She tensed, feeling the haunting presence of Mankira against her back, but Jabber was gentle.
Any other Raider would have just left him there until he came down from his high on his own. Why didn’t she? She stayed despite Jabber’s deranged state and despite the blood and vomit getting all over her as he dug his face deeper into her. It pissed her off, but she just couldn’t leave. His eyes were bloodshot, darting all over the place, and he had that big shit-eating grin plastered on his face. It wasn’t unlike him to get into some crazy drugs on his own, but someone had clearly bashed his face in. The bruises were already visible.
Poisons and toxins and all that other stuff were Jabber’s specialty, but Cthoni guessed it was a hallucinogen that somebody got him with. Who knew what all he was seeing. So, she stayed by his side until it ran its course through his system. And Cthoni never asked what happened, how he ended up like this, or who did it. Jabber must think she doesn’t care, but really, she cares too much. She had to maintain some distance between them in these moments though, or she might find herself saying things that were unfamiliar to her. So yeah, she never asked.
“We…we need to take a bath, Cthoni.” Jabber croaked out, laughing. It was the first coherent sentence he had spoken since she’d arrived. He was half-joking, but Cthoni already went through the junk in his bag that he must’ve found or stolen or whatever, and pulled out some hunk of plastic he shoved in there. It was a kiddie pool. She barely recognized it, having never really seen one of these things, until she folded it out.
She looked down at her clothes. Gross. She wasn’t going to sit around covered in all sorts of Jabber's fluids any longer. So while she was here waiting for him to get better, she peeled them off. She was too old to be ashamed of getting undressed in front of Jabber. Regardless, she didn’t have to worry about him. He was a young man, but he wasn’t like other young men in that, while he did unabashedly express his desires, other’s nakedness, Cthoni’s especially, didn’t seem to cross his mind in that way. It was much more straightforward for him:
“Hurt me.”
It was a disturbing way of getting off to her. She couldn’t judge him for being like that, though.
Between the two of them, they had enough water to fill up the pool for a decent wash, but Cthoni rationed her water for her clothes first. She got as much of the filth as she could out and created a makeshift clothesline towards the entrance of the pipe system where it could at least dry quicker. She cleared the dirty water from the pool, and then she looked over at Jabber.
“You want to get cleaned up, too?” She asked.
“Uhm…anyway, we’ll need to separate these locs so I can clean and seal your wound,” Cthoni cleared her throat, looking around for anything sharp. They were too locked together to be easily pulled apart, and doing that would not only hurt like hell, but the force needed could also further agitate the cut. But since Cthoni didn’t expect to be doing this, she didn’t bring anything that could be of use. Jabber wiggled his fingers to emphasize his rings.
“Mankir—”
“No,” Cthoni quickly asserted. Jabber clicked his tongue at her.
“Ain’t no reason to bark at me.”
As the hallucinogen slowly started wearing off, he was turning back into his usual, smart self. It wasn’t that it wouldn’t work, she just simply did not like the idea of him using Mankira so close to his skin, and especially near an open wound. She would have to guide his hand, and well, it might end up a mess. However, there weren’t many other options, so Cthoni would have to compromise.
“Okay, Jabber. I’m just going to rip them apart, but it’ll hurt.”
That got Jabber all riled up. She did this for him now and then, separated his locs, but it was far from something she enjoyed. And she was already regretting saying she’d do it. Might as well get it done quick now.
She stood up, holding two of his locs in her hand. She tried gently tugging them apart, but they didn’t budge, causing Jabber to bite his lip in anticipation.
“Do you want a countdown?”
“Just do it alread—!”
And with a quick rip, Jabber didn’t even make a sound; he just keeled over. She grabbed two more. Same quick motion.
“Aughhhahahaha haaa…haaa…” Jabber moaned. A bit of drool trailed down his chin. “Man, that fucking hurt!”
As expected, blood began pouring out onto his neck and further down his bare back. But Cthoni could see the wound more clearly now. It wasn’t as bad as it seemed, thankfully. It looked like something blunt had hit him, so the wound wasn’t too deep. So long as Jabber didn’t pick at it, and knowing him, he would, and Cthoni would have to yell at him to stop several times, a bit of his salve would do the trick just fine.
Cthoni took the last bit of clean water she had left and poured it over the wound, washing away the blood. She dug through Jabber’s bag and found a small tin. He mixed up this mysterious concoction a while ago — a salve he would put on any sort of cuts — and in no time, with routine application, they’d heal without leaving so much as a scar. Cthoni had no idea what was in it, and with Jabber there’s probably a few unnecessary things he’d added just to make it “better”. So when she opened the tin, she grabbed Jabber’s finger and used it to scoop up some of the salve. From there, she brought his hand to the back of his head, parted his hair, and rubbed it into the wound. Jabber seemed amused by this little operation.
Cthoni sighed, “All done, Jabber.”
Jabber propped himself up, knees wobbling. He was still weak from vomiting his insides out, but fortunately, that was reduced to dry heaving some time ago. He grabbed his locs in a bunch and rang as much of the water out as he could. They were still heavy however, and his head hung to the side a bit from the weight. Cthoni knew it’d take the rest of the day for them to fully dry. He started making his way towards the pipe's entrance to get their clothes when he paused.
He turned his head around and looked back, directly into Cthoni's eyes, with a calm expression. Cthoni stiffened. It seemed like he noticed this, his face now giving away a subtle hesitation.
“Thanks.” was all he said, and he turned back around and walked away.
Cthoni didn’t mean to react like that; she really wished she hadn’t. Because for as long as they’ve known each other, and for as much as she’d done for him, he’d never said that word to her before. She wondered if he originally had more to say. But that brief look of sanity in his eyes...he was capable of that sometimes, especially after a nasty fight, when all the adrenaline wore off and he was left to really look at himself, at what he’d done. But she’d never seen it so clearly before.
Neither of them really knew each other’s pasts. But in these moments, when Cthoni could really study him, just by that look in his eyes, you could tell. Someone really, really messed him up. But she’d never found the point in asking, because knowing would just make her feel things she didn’t want to feel. There’s no fixing someone like Jabber, anyway. And did she really even care to?
Yeah. Yeah, in a way she did. That’s why she stayed with him and patched him up like this so tediously. Why she’s the only Raider who ever did this for him at all. She didn’t want to watch him completely waste away, so this was all she could do to prevent it. She knew that him and his pursuit of pain; they were inseparable. He would always be like this. Nothing she could ever do or say would stop that. Having accepted that made her feel things she couldn’t quite place.
And she couldn’t quite place when she started to care this much about him to begin with either. She could understand being loyal, so she’d tell herself: Jabber, you’re just a great asset to Zodyl, that’s all. To explain how she’d felt. But even she could recognize this clearly goes beyond loyalty. And when she’d find herself here, in this same spot time and time again, she finally reminded herself again why there’s no point getting caught up in these thoughts at all. Because she knew for people like Jabber, there’s only one way things were going to end. So for now, all Cthoni could do was hope that she could stall the inevitable long enough for her to have time to learn how to stop caring again. Because she knew there was nothing that could fix the kind of hurt that came with caring. It was a kind that lingered with you forever, even if it was just over someone like Jabber. She didn’t want to get hurt like that.