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Beep. Beep. Beep. Oh, that’s a familiar sound. Crack an eye open. White fluorescents beam directly into his retina. Uh-huh. That’s what he thought.
He can tell he’s on morphine, and his muscle memory kicks in, reaching for the buttons to decrease the drip. It just jostles the rails of the bed. Oh shit. His hand is in a cast. And his other hand- Shit! Jabber forces his eyes open.
Movement? With great difficulty, he rolls his head to look at the other side of the room.
Stares.
Zanka sure looks less kempt than usual. His shaggy half-blonde half-brunette all-freak-of-nature head finishes picking itself up from where it evidently fell asleep, drooling, propped up on his palm with his elbow braced against the plastic arm of his hospital chair. His tassel earrings gently swing. Deep-water blue eyes blink open to their full uninhibited size, and he leans forward, Lovely Assistaff leaning with him where she’s cradled in the crook of his elbow, staring Jabber directly in the face.
“M’ hands,” Jabber slurs through the numbness and the haze and the drip-dripping pain medication. “Where-”
Zanka immediately reaches into the pouch he always carries at his waist and pulls out a wrapped leather parcel. He unties its knot and pulls back its folds to reveal—ten sets of three. All ten, each all three. The beeping from the other side of the room slows down.
With his free hand, Jabber reaches out, palm up.
Zanka scoots his chair closer. Instead of dumping the contents of the parcel into Jabber’s palm, he picks up each stack of rings individually and places them one by one.
“Put ‘em on me,” Jabber mumbles.
“Can’t,” says Zanka.
“‘M too beat up to do anything.”
“No yer not. But it ain’t about that. Yer fingers are swollen,” says Zanka. “She’ll mess with yer circulation.”
“Yo, fuck my circulation.”
Zanka’s eye twitches. “Do ya wanna have knuckles to wear her on or not?!”
“Man, fuck you,” says Jabber, but okay fine that’s a pretty good argument. And she’s in his hand. So that’s okay then, he guesses, closing his fingers.
His body slumps fully back against the hospital bed, and a smile creeps over his face. “Fuck you doin’ here anyway?”
“I’m the one who took you to the hospital,” says Zanka.
Yeah okay that makes sense. He was there for what happened. And he’s a good boy, with the good guys, or so he believes, unlike that girl with the gun. Oh speaking of what happened. “You the one who put me in the hospital?”
“Almost,” Zanka grits out.
Huh. Jabber still can’t really feel most of his body, so he asks, “The fuck did, then?”
“A fuckin’ car, you idiot!” Zanka drops his face into his propped-up hand. “Why do ya think I was wavin’ around so much?”
“I dunno, interpretive dance?” says Jabber, grinning. Aww, he tried to warn me? How sweet. And entirely like his stupid honorable self. Jabber certainly wouldn’t’ve in his place—Zanka has to know that.
“Ain’t a fair fight with random motor vehicles zippin’ by all over the place,” Zanka grumbles. “Next time will you just fuckin’ follow me onto the roof? Instead of detachin’ the fuckin’ fire escape from the wall like a psychopath?! I’m gonna have to go put that back, yaknow!”
“Sowwy,” says Jabber, grinning.
“Don’t gimme that. You ain’t ‘sowwy.’ Yer never ‘sowwy.’”
What Jabber really never did is think Zanka would ever say the word ‘sowwy.’ He bursts out laughing, which doesn’t hurt nearly as much as it should. “Ay, can you turn down my morphine drip?”
“Yer kiddin’,” Zanka groans, but leans over Jabber to do it anyway.
He smells like incense and road dust, and his clothes are all torn up and stained like they got last night. Like he really did go to sleep in that chair some unknown hours ago. “You been here all night or somethin’?” says Jabber, raising an eyebrow. Trying to raise an eyebrow. Facial control is a work in progress right now.
“Yeah,” says Zanka, settling back into his chair. Now he’s sitting all prim, legs crossed instead of sprawled out, Assistaff resting against the wall to his right, behind Jabber’s head.
“Doin’ what?” Jabber laughs.
“Waitin’ for yer dumb ass to get outta surgery,” says Zanka. “Also, I have all yer shit. They had to take off Mankira so they could operate. And yer choker ‘n stuff. I’ve heard of some hospitals selling off their patients’ stuff if they can’t pay, so.”
“Aww,” says Jabber. He doesn’t really know what else to say. If these fuckers had sold Mankira, he would’ve pulled out the guts from every single last one of them until he found out where she went. Except she didn’t go anywhere, because Zanka had her in a pouch in his bag at his waist by Jabber’s bedside, because he’s been here for who even knows how the fuck long. “It was that good for you?” he coos.
To his complete and utter lack of surprise, Zanka blushes. Too easy to rile up; Jabber loves it. “Do not make me beat yer ass while you got like seven hundred stitches and a cast on yer arm,” he growls.
“Ooh, talk dirty to me,” Jabber simpers.
“Why are you such a fuckin’ perv!” Zanka hollers. “Shut the fuck up ‘n heal already, ya dumb motherfucker! Ya got hit by a fuckin’ CAR!”
“But you like it,” says Jabber with a pout, which makes Zanka’s face go blazing red, which is familiar territory that he milks for all it’s worth until it becomes clear that Zanka actually isn’t going to hit him while he’s in a hospital bed. Lame. This is prime time for Zanka to be dishing out some deeply deserved revenge. Just Jabber’s luck to get stuck with a playmate who won’t even take advantage of him while he’s down. He tells Zanka so.
“The fuck is the point of that?” says Zanka with a snort. “I wanna fight ya. If I hurt you right now, it’s just gonna be even longer until our next match.”
“Yeah, but you could rough me up a little,” says Jabber, pouting again.
“You have like seventeen thousand stitches,” says Zanka flatly. “If I blew on ya, that machine’d start beepin’.”
“Whatever. No fun,” Jabber groans.
A moment passes where Zanka just watches him.
“So are you gonna, like, leave, or,” says Jabber.
Zanka frowns. “Who’s comin’ to pick you up?”
Jabber shrugs the good shoulder. “I dunno. Cthoni, maybe.” He wonders if he could hypothetically get Zanka to turn off the light.
Zanka shoves his hand into his bag and pulls out Jabber’s choker. Man, he didn’t even have to dig, the fuck? Is his shit, like, organized in there? Fuckin’ figures. “Wanna call her?”
“So you just gonna let me call a Raider to come pick me up from the hospital,” says Jabber. “And take me back to the Raiders.” He squints. “Did you get hit by a car? Ay, not that I’m complaining.”
Zanka shrugs. “You don’t know jack shit about what yer boss is doin’, and Corvus was pretty clear we can’t keep the Hell Guard from killin’ ya. If we see you again, I’ll just beat the shit out of ya like I did last time we met. Sounds fair to me.”
Last time was hilarious, and also the worst. Zanka got him all the way down, beat him real sore, made him limp for days—and Jabber was happily running his mouth on the ground, inches away from maybe getting Zanka to hit him in the actual dick—when Zanka’s choker bracelet started shrieking and he ran off to go save some worthless normals from a trash beast. Leaving Jabber rock fucking hard and too accidentally paralyzed with his own venom to do anything about it. “Aww, you wanna play with me,” Jabber coos. “Gonna get me good next time?”
“Yeah, I thought we fuckin’ established that,” says Zanka curtly. Which. Is not his line. “You wanna make yer call?”
Huh.
“Naw, I’ll do it later,” says Jabber. Cthoni is definitely not coming to pick him up from getting hit by a car because he was off fighting and not killing Zanka Nijiku on personal time. She might come pick him up if she calls him about something, but in this state… yeaaah he’s on his own.
“Fine. Well, you prolly shouldn’t wear yer choker in case yer neck swells up or somethin’,” says Zanka. He slips it back into his bag.
Jabber stares at it for a bit.
“When you gonna give me my shit back?” he ends up mumbling.
“When you can fuckin’ hold it,” says Zanka. “Okay, I was s’posed to call the nurse when ya woke up. Uh. I basically got the whole rundown from the doctor while you were sleepin’, so… guess I’m also gonna go get somethin’ to eat. Want anything?”
Jabber blinks at him.
“Uh, hot chips?” he tries.
“Motherfucker, I meant food,” says Zanka, rolling his eyes.
“Ay, hot chips is food,” says Jabber, grinning.
“Okay. I’m just gonna get you a sandwich,” says Zanka, standing up. Tassels swinging. He doesn’t even sound angry anymore. Jabber’s grin fades.
“Wait,” he says, when Zanka’s at the door.
Zanka turns around. “Yeah?”
Jabber looks at him. Zanka looks back calmly.
“Nothin’,” says Jabber, ducking his head. “Nevermind.”
“‘Kay,” says Zanka. His feet shuffle. “I won’t be long.”
The fuck did he say that for. Fight’s over. Mankira’s here. Chokers are expensive, but whatever. Jabber doesn’t care if he-
The nurse does come in and talk to him, which is how Jabber learns his hospital stay has been paid for. Well, she doesn’t tell him, and Jabber doesn’t ask, but she treats him too nice for a patient who hasn’t paid. He knows they didn’t take it from his things because he wasn’t carrying any money last night. So unless Zodyl was in one of his rare and bizarre good moods, somehow knew where Jabber was, and decided to stop by…
Not too long after she leaves, the door swings open, and there’s Zanka again.
He has a big tray that he’s balancing with one hand because the other one is holding Assistaff. Wordlessly, he crosses the room to lean her against the wall again, then flips down a folding table surface attached to Jabber’s unusually nice hospital bed. He sets the tray down on the table. There’s two cups, sweating condensation, and two wrapped sandwiches. No sooner do Jabber’s eyes alight on the bag of hot chips than does Zanka snatch it away.
Jabber stares at his face. The monitor goes beep-beep-beep-beep.
“You can have one hot chip,” says Zanka. “One.” And he settles in to eat his sandwich.