Chapter Text
When the final bell rings for the day Ponyboy finds himself letting out a soft sigh. He shoves his belongings, (a pen and his notebook), into his backpack. He stands quickly and swings his bag over his shoulder before heading out of the loud, horrible school building. It’s rare when he gets a Friday afternoon off. Most of the time he has a track meet the very next day so he usually has practice. Today, however, he is free.
After school he always walks with Johnny back to Curtius' house. But this week Johnny is stuck in detention, forced to make up some seat time for missing so much school throughout the year due to being sick and being jumped. Pony doesn’t really mind, though. He likes walking by himself sometimes. Besides, he’ll see him later at the drive-in that Darry (begrudgingly) agreed to let him go to with Two-Bit, Johnny, and Dally.
While he walks he finds himself limping a bit.
Damn it, he thinks to himself, I thought my leg was fine today.
His leg injury doesn’t flare up too often, but when it does it sucks.
The doctors aren’t too sure what happened. After he was all but carried off the track last spring he was taken to multiple doctors and had a lot of tests run on him. He walked with a horrible limp for weeks and had shooting pain throughout his left hip. All of the results were inconclusive, but all the doctors said basically the same thing. Go to physical therapy, and rest it whenever possible.
He did that…for a while. But Pony knows how expensive it can be to go to doctor’s appointments weekly. Even when Darry and Soda tried to play it off, he knew they had extra stress by having to take up extra work shifts just to pay for his leg. He also couldn’t just rest it. That would mean giving up track and rumbles. He doesn’t like fighting that much, but at the end of the day he’s a Greaser. He can’t just sit out of every rumble.
So he rests it whenever he can and takes pain relieving medicine prescribed to him if he really needs it. But other than that, he doesn’t take care of his leg all that much. He knows it’ll fix itself eventually.
Stuck in thought about his leg means that Ponyboy doesn’t hear the three Socs quickly walking up to him. Soda once said he easily gets ‘lost in the clouds,’ which Dally followed up with ‘yeah, which will get him killed’. He can’t help but feel like both of them were right when he realizes that the group is surrounding him, cutting off almost every opportunity to run.
“Well, well, look who it is. Our very own Greaser. Say, Grease, where’s your little friend? The sad little puppy?” One of the Socs asks with a grin, moving in front of Pony and slightly shoving his shoulder causing him to nearly stumble backwards.
Pony feels himself start to get irritated with what they’re saying about Johnny. Johnny Cade isn’t no puppy. He’s braver than any Soc he’s ever met.
“What, nothing to say?” A different Soc asks, “Come on, we know you and your little boyfriend are practically glued at the hip.” The three boys shove him around. Not enough to get him anywhere near the ground, but enough to irritate the Greaser.
Laughter passes all over the group as Ponyboy says, “He’s not my goddamn boyfriend.”
“Sure, sure,” The third Soc chuckles, “We just wanted to give you a reminder from last week. From the track meet.” His expression turns serious, and the other boys stop shoving Pony around to make sure he is fully listening.
Pony goes over everything that happened last weekend. He can’t think of anything. He stays to himself during track meets. The other athletes hate him because he’s a Greaser and is damn good. He even placed first in one of his races.
“You are always just so full of yourself,” (Ponyboy tries to not snort at the irony. Come on, him? The self-obsessed one?), “whenever you win first you always get a big head about it.” The other boy takes a step closer to him, grabbing onto the front of Pony’s shirt.
“Maybe you should just run faster. It ain’t all that hard,” Ponyboy says with a slight laugh. Pony knows he’s fast, and he also knows that the three other boys suck. They always place dead last or close to it.
The Soc frowns deeply, before raising his right fist and punching Ponyboy straight in the nose.
He lets out a small yelp as his knees give out and he falls to the cement. He hears laughter all around him. He doesn’t want this to turn into a fight. He’s already in bad enough shape as it is with his leg, making him unable to fight as well as he usually does.
“Wait, wait,” He hears one of them shout, “I got him. Remember all those practices he had to sit out? The stupid injury or whatever? We can see if that injury is real or if he’s just being a dramatic bitch.” Ponyboy barely has any time to lift his head up and see what is about to happen. Before he knows it, the Soc raises his foot and stomps on his left hip. The exact place he’s injured.
Ponyboy doesn’t even hear himself scream before his world basically goes black and pain floods over his entire body.
When he wakes up again, he sits up with a groan. The Socs must’ve ran off after he blacked out. He isn’t sure what time it is, but it still looks to still be afternoon so he couldn’t have been out for long. Maybe thirty minutes or an hour at most.
Shit, Pony thinks to himself as he lays his legs out in front of him. His left hip is in agony and he doubts he’d be able to walk the whole way home at this rate. The shooting pain is impossible to ignore, and every time he shifts even the tiniest amount he feels the pain grow.
He reaches into his bag blindly, rummaging around until his fingers grasp around what he was looking for. He pulls the orange bottle out of the bottom of his bag. He undoes the cap and shakes out four pills into his palm, which is two more pills then he’s actually prescribed.
He swallows the pills dry and then falls onto his back, staring up at the sky with a blank expression.
The pain medication takes about twenty minutes to kick in. Pony is in so much pain, though, that the time flies by and he barely recognizes that any time has passed at all.
Ponyboy knows he got lucky. The Soc couldn’t have kicked him that hard since once the meds finally alleviate some of the pain he’s able to push himself to standing. He then makes his way home very slowly, limping each step he takes.
It takes him almost double the time it usually does. He doesn’t worry too much about timing, since he knows Darry and Soda won’t be home yet. He tries to be gentle with his leg, but all he wants to do is sit down and take a minute so he pushes harder than strictly necessary.
When he finally makes it home he falls onto the couch. He doesn’t even think about his nose and how his face must be bloody. He just needs to sit. His leg is still screaming in pain. It’s not as bad as it was before the medication, but he can still feel it. The pain always makes him extremely tired, and he finds his eyes slowly drifting closed.
After what feels like five minutes of drifting off he hears the front door slam open.
“Pony! Guess wha-” Soda screams through the house before stopping short when he gets a sight of his younger brother, “Jesus, what happened?”
“Hey Soda, nothing happened, I'm all good.” Pony says with a small wave. He just wants to go back to sleep, but he knows Soda is always extremely energized after his shifts for some reason.
“Like hell you’re ‘all good’, your face is all bloody!” Soda exclaims before rushing off to grab a wet washcloth. He then makes his way over to Ponyboy, places a soft hand on his right cheek, and starts to gently wipe the blood off of his face. There’s not a lot, and his nose doesn’t seem to be broken, but there’s enough to cause Soda’s eyebrows to furrow.
Oh, right. I forgot to clean my face once I got home. Stupid ass leg.
“Just a little run in with the Socs, it’s really nothin’ I swear.” Pony tries to comfort his brother as much as he can, but he finds he has little to no energy and every word feels like a lot of effort to say.
Soda hums, but continues the task. The gentle feeling of the washcloth and the pain from his leg almost lulls Ponyboy to sleep. His eyes start to flutter closed ever so slightly and his head starts to drift towards Soda’s shoulder.
“Hey,” Soda says with the softest voice he can manage, “don’t fall asleep on me just yet. Are you sure nothing else is bothering you?” He taps his fingers against Pony’s cheek to try and keep him awake.
Pony thinks about this for a moment. If he were to come clean about his leg, his brothers would just start worrying. He hasn’t had a bad flare up in a couple of months. He knows they would just push him back in physical therapy. He also knows they can’t afford it.
“Nothing, I swear. Just tired from school. I think I’m going to take a nap, okay? Before the drive-in.” Pony pushes himself up and starts to walk back to his and Soda’s bedroom. He feels bad for brushing his brother off like that, but the way Soda was being so gentle makes him queasy and feel like he needs to tell his brother everything. He can’t do that to them. He can’t worry them again over some stupid injury.
He doesn’t see Soda’s frown as he walks away. Or the way the older boy looks up to check the clock to see when Darry will be home.
Pony doesn’t remember anything from the time between his and Soda’s conversation and falling asleep when he wakes back up at some random point. He even still has both of his shoes on, showing that he must have passed out the moment he laid in bed.
“-on’t know, he was limping though. And he’s been out since 5 o’clock.”
“-appened?”
“-eally, I don’t know.”
Pony hears the muffled conversation through the walls of the house. Wasn’t he supposed to go to the drive-in? When he looks out the window, though, he sees the sky is pitch-black. He also realizes he has no energy at all.
He finds himself unable to do anything but fall straight back asleep, curling into himself even closer. He doesn’t even make a move to take his shoes off or to listen back into the conversation. He just feels the dark overcome him and passes out once again.