Chapter Text
There’s a pregnant woman being wheeled into the sliding doors, wailing and completely drenched in sweat, but Mari isn’t looking at her. She’s too busy trying to keep her left eye open and her recently shattered dignity in one piece.
Her right eye is already a lost cause, swollen shut, a deadly shade of purple throbbing to the rhythm of her erratic heartbeat. Better yet, her lips are so bruised bloody it’s as though she just ate a whole cactus for dinner, and every breath tastes like pennies and drywall dust.
Mari never goes to hospitals. It’s an unspoken rule that she’s maintained, raised on the firm belief that if a bone isn’t sticking through the skin, then you ice it, wrap it with some duct tape and call it. In all her years of unsanctioned fighting, she’d mastered the art of biting through the pain. Split lip? Swallowed the blood. Sprained ankle? Two days with four pairs of chopsticks as a stirrup brace and she’s good as new.
Pain is really just an opinion, and Mari has never given two shits about anyone’s opinion.
Tonight, though, the stakes had been different. There was a fat stack of rent money and a week’s worth of groceries riding on the main event, and for the first time in her sad life, Mari had let the pressure get inside her head. She’d fought sloppy. Traded defense for raw, desperate offense like some try-hard noob and taking brutal, unblocked hits in exchange for a few extra paydirts of her own.
She’d won the purse, question is at what cost? Because she knew she was in deep shit the moment she’d tried to walk off the adrenaline and found her vision doing backsflips before going completely dark for a split second. The real dead giveaway was when Nagahama had told her to get a grip on herself and she physically couldn’t, so sweet, no-nonsense Nagahama told her not to bother coming back to the warehouse looking like that.
When the pain started pulsing in real time with her actual heart, Mari had a strong prediction that her usual remedy of a cold beer and a bag of frozen chicken wasn’t going to cut it. Either swallow her pride, or die in an alley with five hundred bucks in her pocket.
Five hundred bucks and a highly plausible facial fracture. Fuckin’ worth it.
Stepping up to the triage desk, Mari slumps against the counter. Behind the desk sits a nurse with shockingly red hair and eyes so bright Mari momentarily wonders if she’d taken a harder hit to the head than she thought. The nurse’s nametag reads Lara, complete with a little sticker of a sea turtle next to her name in golden cursive. She looks like she belongs on the cover of Sunshine and Rainbows magazine, not surrounded by sick people at two in the morning.
“Hi there!” Lara greets, her voice entirely too cheerful for the hour. Then her eyes land on Mari and the cheerfulness rearranges itself into something closer to horror. “Oh. Oh dear.”
“Yeah,” Mari grunts, her voice raspy. “Need a couple stitches. Maybe.”
Lara is out from behind the desk in a flash, instantly hovering and unsure of what is and isn’t safe to touch. “Maybe? You look like you got put through a blender on the setting above purée. What happened to your face?”
Pride goes to war with Mari’s better judgement. Loses, obviously, because pride always wins when you’ve got a stranger this close to your face. How could she possibly tell a hospital nurse she puts herself in a ring under an abandoned warehouse and lets people punch her in the jaw for a living?
“I tripped,” Mari says bluntly. It’s the worst lie she’s ever told.
Lara pauses, tilting her head to give Mari a onceover, taking in the bruised knuckles, the eyes swollen to the size of croquettes, the blood splattered across her shirt, and the distinct lack of scraped knees. She blinks. “You… tripped?”
“Mhm, down the stairs.”
“Did the stairs also,” Lara says, gesturing vaguely at the whole crime scene of Mari’s face. “Hit you? Repeatedly? Because that’s- that’s a very specific trip.”
“It was a very aggressive set of stairs,” Mari mutters, glaring with one eye she’s got left to glare with.
Instead of arguing, Lara gently takes Mari by the arm, her touch warm and incredibly cautious, as if Mari might collapse and pass away on the spot. She might as well, really.
“Okay, let’s get you a bed before you bleed on the linoleum. I’m Lara.”
“Mari,” she offers, letting herself be dragged down the hall.
An x-ray scan later, Mari is sitting on the edge of a gurney, wincing as Lara wipes a wet, cold swab across her cheekbone. Up close, Lara is absurdly attentive, leaning in like she’s trying to read the injury’s diary.
“Okay so,” Lara sets down the swab, picks up a different swab, seems to reconsider, puts that one down too. “Good news, bad news. Good news, no displacement, your right cheekbone’s cracked but it’s gonna knit itself back together like nothing happened. Bad news, this eyebrow situation needs stitches. Four, probably five if you keep making that face.”
“What face.”
“That one, the I’m doing math on how fast I can bolt out of this place face.”
“Just glue it,” Mari argues, staring at the floor.
“Um, no. We don’t glue things that look like an open zipper,” Lara says, already threading a needle without looking at it, which Mari finds oddly impressive for someone who talks this much. “You know for someone who walked in here voluntarily looking like this, you’re acting like I dragged you in off the street.”
“Because I hate hospitals,” Mari says, her right eye squeezed shut as she stares resolutely at a crusty coffee stain on the wall. “And I hate needles. And I hate sitting in rooms that smell like isopropanol and crushed dreams.”
“Cool, so, bad day all around, got it,” Lara leans in close enough that Mari catches sandalwood soap losing a fight against the smell of antiseptic, and says, far too casually, “little pinch,” at the exact moment the needle goes in.
A white-hot spike of agony shoots straight through Mari’s skull. Her body reacts before her brain could stop it - her hands fly up to shove the threat away and she clamps her jaw shut so hard her back molars clicked, a sound comes out of her that isn’t a word, isn’t a curse, is just sound. Ugly sound.
“Oops - hey, hands down, I got you-” Lara catches Mari’s wrist without breaking rhythm, gentle but immovable, like she’s done this fifty times tonight already. “I say little pinch and it’s never little, I don’t know why I keep saying that, it’s a bald-faced lie every time. I should just say this is going to hurt very bad actually-”
“Warn me before,” Mari grits out, eyes watering. “Not during-”
“I know, I know! That’s a design flaw in me as a nurse, honestly. Ask literally anyone I’ve stitched up,” Lara’s still talking, hands steady, and somehow the rambling is worse than silence would’ve been, filling up the space where Mari wants to scream and punch a wall. “Three more, you’re doing great. I promise the next one I’ll actually warn you, I’m gonna say ‘pinch’ and mean it this time.”
“You said that last-”
“I know, I’m growing as a person! Hold still, please.”
By the time Lara ties off the last stitch, Mari’s fists are aching from being clenched so hard her own bruised knuckles have started throbbing in solidarity with her face. Lara tips Mari’s chin up with two gloved fingers, tilting her head side to side for a final visual check.
“So,” Lara starts again, still holding her chin. “Just- clarifying. Because I’ve stitched up stair injuries before. Scraped knees, rolled ankles, the usual. I have never, in four years, stitched an eyebrow closed because of stairs, so either this building has a major engineering flaw or-”
“The railing hit me.”
“The railing.”
“Like, it swung at me.”
“A mugger of a railing,” Lara says, nodding slowly like she’s taking a witness statement. While Mari understands her jarring lack of expertise in the field of lying, the fight club stays in the shadows no matter what. And yes, even if Mari was held at gun point. Plus, Lara is a fucking nurse, not law enforcement. Mari is sure nurses have seen worse cases that came with many great levels of fucked up in multitude of lies, so. “Did the stairs also steal your wallet? Because if architectural features are jumping people in this city, I should really start taking the elevator.”
Despite everything currently wrong with her face, Mari feels a laugh try to claw its way up her throat, and hates it immediately. She turns it into a cough. Lara’s smile says she noticed anyway.
“You’re a real comedian,” she snorts. “Finish up so I can leave.”
“Already done. You’re cracked but not broken, and you’re apparently allergic to elevators?” Lara peels off her gloves with a snap. “No heavy lifting. No workouts. And please, for the love of God, no rematch with the stairs.
“Yeah, yeah.”
Like hell. Mari has a three hundred dollar match scheduled for Thursday, a reputation to upkeep, and rent due on the 30th.
Three days later, Mari’s face has downgraded from crime scene to merely bad news. The swelling’s gone down enough that she can see out of both eyes again, which she considers a full medical clearance. The stitches over her brow itch like hell, but itching means healing, and healing means she’s fine, and fine means she’s beating someone up tonight.
That’s the logic, anyway. It’s held up pretty good so far.
When she trudges into the warehouse at midnight, the building is a familiar stench of rust, sweat and something like gasoline that nobody’s ever explained to her satisfaction. Somewhere past the plastic sheeting they’ve strung up to a fake “ring”, a crowd’s already murmuring, probably about how big of a gambling transaction the upcoming fight will generate and who would be the one to walk away with the cash.
She should go straight there, join the crowd, do some stretches. Instead, out of some masochistic sense of professional courtesy, she detours to Nagahama’s office first.
Nagahama doesn’t look up from the clipboard when Mari knocks on the open door.
“If you’re here to tell me you’re fighting tonight, save it, I already-” She looks up. The clipboard hits the desk. “Get the fuck out.”
“Hello to you too.”
“No. Out, Mari, I’m not asking,” Nagahama’s on her feet now, and for a boxing coach pushing thirty five she still moves like she could put Mari on the ground in four seconds flat, which, historically, she has on several occasions. “I explicitly told you not to come back until you look like some semblance of a functioning human again. You look like someone stapled a beehive to your face.”
“Christ,” Mari breathes out. Most of the time, she feels good about herself, confident, even. But Nagahama has always had a way of drilling brutal reality into Mari’s orbit. Unsolicited and all. “I got stitches. I’m stitched. That’s basically a repair.”
“You had a concussion.”
“Allegedly.”
“Fuck you mean allegedly? You literally blacked out walking.”
“For like, two seconds. I don’t think that counts-”
“Mari,” Nagahama says her name in the same tone back when Mari was about to get her ass whooped from being a little shit because she didn’t know better, because she was fifteen and naive. Then over the years, it’d become grounding for Mari, born from gratitude knowing that despite Nagahama’s spiky exterior, she’s always had Mari’s back. Mari’s loyalty is largely built on the solid friendship they’ve nurtured, swearing on her life she would keep Nagahama’s business safe, even if it means enabling your friend to be a criminal, even if it means lying to certain nurses. “I’ve known you since you were a teenager and had a two-piece combo that could drop grown men, and I have never once seen you act this stupid on purpose.”
“Wow, hella rude. But go on.”
Nagahama’s left eye twitches in annoyance. “I’m not letting you in that ring.”
“I already paid the entry,” Mari almost whines, but she knows her big, round doe eyes aren’t as big and round as they were ten years ago, hence their effect on Nagahama has greatly diminished.
This earns her a dismissive shrug. “Then you’re out ten bucks.”
“It’s not ten bucks, it’s my rent. Come on-” Mari drops the smart mouth for one second, just long enough to be honest, which costs her more than the stitches did. “I need this one. I’ll keep my guard up, I’ll be smart about it. I fought stupid last time, I know that, but I’m not stupid tonight.”
Nagahama stares at her for a long, ugly stretch of silence, the kind that makes Mari question every single decision she’s ever made on the quantum level. After what feels like two decades, Nagahama blows an exhausted sigh upward into her bangs.
“You get one hit to that eye,” she finally says, low and dangerous. “Just one, and I’m throwing the towel myself. I don’t care what it does to your purse of your pride-”
“Deal.”
“I mean it, Otsu Mari.”
“Relax, I heard you the first time,” Mari’s already halfway out the door, rolling her shoulders like that settles it. “One hit, got it. Won’t happen.”
It happens fifteen minutes into the fight.
To Mari’s credit, she does try to keep her guard up. For about a round and a half, anyway, right up until her opponent - this Itadori guy who throws punches like his dick’s on fire - catches her clean across the same cheekbone that was, technically, still healing from a fracture. The world does a slow, sickening spin and she tastes blood again, fresh over the old copper aftertaste that never really left.
She doesn’t go down though, not after eating a raw hook to the face and, remarkably, not after getting the wind knocked out of her lungs when Itadori’s fist connected with her ribs. That’s the part she’ll be proud of later, assuming later-Mari isn’t too busy being unconscious to be proud of anything.
She wins, of fucking course she wins. Ugly, disheveled, on a split decision that the crowd boos half of, but a win’s a win and three hundred bucks plus the gamblers’ payouts doesn’t ask how pretty you looked getting it.
Nagahama doesn’t throw the towel, because being the brilliant and merciless woman she is, she had positioned herself close enough to the ropes to physically drag Mari out the second the final bell rings, before Mari’s legs can decide if they should walk or limp her way across.
For her own convenience Mari would like to think she’s okay, aside from the recurring injury on her already busted face now looking nastier than before, she’s dandy, really. Except she finds it increasingly harder to breathe as she practically gets equipped around Nagahama’s shoulders to a nearby stool, and she suspects it’s the result of the last punch on her ribs she allowed Itadori to land.
Fucker Itadori, he’s careless and messy but he sure is strong.
“I’m taking you to the hospital,” Nagahama says, and it isn’t a suggestion.
“I can walk-”
“You can sit down and shut up, is what you can do.”
Mari, for once, doesn’t have the strength to argue, which, in retrospect, is probably the most alarming symptom of it all.
Warzone is the word Mari would use to describe the waiting room tonight.
Every chair full and there are children running around shrieking. Mari signs in, gets handed a number, and is informed with real sympathy by the front desk guy that the wait is looking like a while.
A while turns out to mean long enough that Mari, propped against the hallway wall since every chair in the building has been claimed by people with presumably less impressive injuries, slides slowly down the wall until her ass hits the floor. And then, so very briefly, her mind wanders back to the nurse who treated her the first time, if she’s on shift today, if she’d freak out when she finds Mari’s lifeless body in the hallway, before promptly passing out.
She wakes up to a shoe nudging her thigh, not gently.
“Hey, wake up,” Another rough nudge. “Wake up, you can’t sleep here. Unless you’re dead? Blink if you’re not dead.”
Mari cracks one eye open to find a woman crouched in front of her, arms folded over her knees, staring down with an expression that’s somewhere between clinical interest and open judgement. Her scrubs have a suspicious looking stain shaped vaguely like Australia.
“I’m not dead,” Mari croaks out, voice still thick with sleep.
“Good, because the floor is not a bed, and also you’re blocking the crash cart route,” the woman stands, hauling Mari up by the arm with a grip that suggests she does this several times a shift and has stopped being gentle about it. “Up, up, get up.”
Lifting her left arm sends pain shooting through her chest and it reminds her of the fun night she had circa three hours ago, the pain so sharp it renders her incapable of yanking herself away from whoever the fuck this is.
All she can say is, “Ow, ow-”
“Oh,” The woman huffs, loosening her grip on Mari just enough for the pain to ease a little.
Her badge says Dr. Grace, Attending Physician, and Mari wants to snort at the sheer irony of things that seem to operate this emergency room - extremely poor bedside manner.
“I can get up myself,” Mari manages to slip her arm free from Grace’s grip. She is two hundred percent sure one of her ribs broke off. “And there weren’t any chairs.”
“There’s never any chairs, it’s a Thursday in July, half the city’s decided tonight’s the night to have an emergency,” Grace is already steering them both down the hall, moving fast, talking faster. “Follow me.”
Mari struggles to keep up, but eventually she’s dumped into a bed behind a thin curtain. Grace snaps on gloves without breaking stride, tilting Mari’s chin up with two fingers - clinical and brisk, the complete opposite like Lara who held her chin with fragile caution - wheels herself to the charts by the computer, wheels back and clicks her tongue.
“You’ve got a healing hairline fracture in your cheek from- three days ago, huh. That’s fresh trauma on top of old trauma. That’s a sequel injury. Who let you fight like this?”
“Who said I was in a fight?”
“Honey, we get gang members and criminals come in here all the time, telling us they either tripped, got beat by their mama, or walked into a pole, but their mechanism of injury is written all over their wounds. Your chart says you fell down the stairs, which is a very insulting lie to my knowledge as a doctor.”
“It’s not like that. Can you just patch me up so I can go?”
“No. You re-aggravated a facial fracture that was three days into healing and reopened the laceration on your eyebrow, that’s not a patch-up-and-go situation. We’ll need to do another scan,” Dr. Grace pulls out a penlight, clicks it on and shines it directly into Mari’s bad eye without an ounce of warning. Everyone here is apparently trained by Dr. Cox. “Pupils are even, that’s good, means your brain is still intact. Follow my finger.”
“Is that really necessary-”
“Follow. The. Finger.”
Mari, scowling, follows the damn finger.
“So,” Grace clicks the light off, unbothered, already peeling open a suture kit. “I need you to tell me exactly what happened, and I’m not asking because I care about your business, I genuinely do not. I’m asking because it changes what I’m looking for on this next scan. If you got hit, I need to know which side, how many times, and whether you lost consciousness, because that’s the difference between whether I let you go or keep you here for observation.”
Mari hesitates. It’s not the interrogation that gets her - she can stonewall a cop, she’s done it twice before - it’s the flat, procedural boredom in Grace’s voice that makes lying feel pointless, kind of like lying to a vending machine.
“Twice, same side. Also to the ribs on the left, it hurts to breathe. I didn’t black out this time, though.”
Just trying to finish this sentence already has Mari out of breath. The doctor instructs her to move back and swiftly lifts the hem of Mari’s shirt to find a large bruise sitting between the fifth and seventh intercostal space. This examination feels like an assault more than all the fights she’s ever been involved in.
“Yeah, that’s not just bruising,” Dr. Grace presses, feather-light but precise, right along the purple swell, and Mari’s whole body squares up squarer than Joe Keery’s face, a sharp hiss tearing out of her wobbly lips. “Yep, there it is. Pretty sure you’ve got at least one fractured rib in there, maybe a hairline in the neighbour too. We’ll know once we get you scanned.”
That’s not good. And worse, it’s not even surprising, which is really the most depressing part of this whole ordeal. Mari’s had a lot of bad ideas in her life, like the tramp stamp at seventeen, working three jobs with three hours of sleep a day, but “turn my body into business” might be the worst one yet, if only because it’s the one that keeps fucking working.
That’s the problem. It works - hundreds of dollars a night, cash, no boss, no tax forms or bullshit HR seminars about appropriate workplace conduct. Just Mari, her fists, and some poor bastard’s jaw. When she figured out years ago that all those hours of legit boxing with Nagahama had accidentally turned her into a walking ATM machine, it felt like winning the world’s dumbest lottery. Rent and groceries all solved with one bloody nose at a time.
The real problem is Mari has never particularly liked slowing down, because slowing down means sitting still, and sitting still means her brain gets bored enough to wander back to her hometown where her mom stopped being in it. Turns out getting punched in the face for money is a genuinely excellent way to not think about that. Ten out of ten, highly recommend, side effects may include mild organ damage. Big fucking deal.
Though she’s never actually broken anything before. Bruised, sure. But an actual rib? That’s new, probably a good indicator that her body has limits, and no matter how good she is at throwing punches, she is human after all.
“What on earth happened to you?”
Mari’s train of thoughts are derailed when a familiar voice cuts through the cold space of her room. She turns, wincing, and there’s Lara, shoving the curtain aside with aggressive force, eyes wide and already scanning Mari head to toe. Undeniable is the absolute horror in her eyes, and truthfully speaking, Mari can’t remember when was the last time someone was this concerned for her wellbeing, save for Nagahama’s occasional nagging and her brother’s text once every three months asking are you alive?
Dr. Grace, entirely unbothered by the interruption, glances between the two of them incredulously. “You know this one?”
“I stitched this one a few days ago!” Lara’s already at the bedside, and there’s something different in her voice, under the alarm. Like she truly believes Mari is on her deathbed now.
“It’s a rib,” Dr. Grace supplies helpfully, already walking off toward the computer. “Maybe two. She also got hit in the same fractured cheek from three days ago. I’m going to order some tests, in the meantime, I’ll have Lara stitch you up. Again.”
The last part Grace actually says with more venom than necessary, and Mari fights the urge to roll her eyes.
Lara’s face, already pale, goes a shade paler. “A fractured rib- Oh god, depending on how bad it is, it can develop into a pneumothorax! We need to get you admitted, like, now-”
At the word admitted, Mari straightens out in an attempt to protest, then instantly regrets it when pain takes over every one of her sensory nerves. “Fuck.”
“You’re not walking out of here,” Lara’s hand is already at her shoulder, easing her flat. “Don’t argue with me right now, I genuinely don’t have it in me.”
Mari, mouth half-open around some imaginary argument she doesn't have the strength for, closes it. And, according to Nagahama, sometimes it’s just better to shut the fuck up altogether anyway, prevent slip-ups and crannies. The hospital, doctors and nurses, those are dangerous people of authority who are probably the last to keep quiet when push comes to shove - when they find out just what kind of funny business Mari is involved in. It’s bad enough that she might be out of commission for weeks, if not months, the last thing she needs is stacking more complications to her already miserable life by refusing treatment at a hospital she voluntarily showed up in.
“I just paged radiology,” Dr. Grace calls from the computer, not turning around. “I’ll get her a bed on the floor once we know what we’re dealing with.”
“Thank you,” Lara says it fast, but her hands aren’t quite steady as she reaches for fresh gloves. Then, to Mari, she’s quieter: “Breathe in for me, tell me exactly where it hurts.”
Mari breathes in. Regrets it a second time. “Here, worse when I go deep.”
“Sharp or dull?”
“Sharp.”
At that, Lara adjusts the head of the bed up a few degrees without being asked.
“Better?”
Mari exhales, careful and shallow. “Yeah.”
“Good,” Lara ‘s hand lingers half a second longer, resting light against Mari’s shoulder, before she pulls it back and reaches for the suture kit instead, all business again. “Okay, let’s get you stitched up and scanned, and then,” she adds, almost to herself, “We’re gonna have a conversation about why this keeps happening to you.”
“Can’t wait,” Mari mutters, eyes already sliding shut against the fluorescent light and the physical exhaustion finally catching up to her all at once.
By the time they’ve got her settled into an actual room, it’s nearly four in the morning, and Mari’s body has decided that now, of all times, is when it wants to be wide awake.
There was indeed a rib fracture, but she was told that the bone hasn’t shifted out of place so her lungs are perfectly safe. She was given a dose of pain meds and a side of medical jargon about possible fluid buildup or pneumonia before being thrown into a gown that ties in the back and covers absolutely nothing.
Lara comes in on the hour, exactly. Cuff, beep, penlight - gentler than Grace’s ever was.
“You’re supposed to be resting,” she says the second round, walking into Mari glaring at the ceiling hoping it’ll somehow catch fire.
Mari snorts and pats the bed. “Try laying on concrete with a broken rib.”
“They’re memory foam.”
“They remember being fucking awful, then.”
Lara huffs something close to a laugh, wrapping the blood pressure cuff without breaking rhythm. “Most people who break their bones at least have the decency to look sorry about it.”
Mari puts on the best deadpan she can muster and points out, “This is my sorry face.”
The cuff hisses, tightens, releases. Lara notes the number without quite looking away from the monitor, but from this angle, Mari can see the little upturning on the corner of Lara’s lips.
“You know, for someone who hates hospitals, you sure keep finding your way back to this one.”
Mari doesn’t answer right away. Five-thirty in the morning, ribs held together by sheer spite, and Lara’s close enough that Mari can see the tired smudges under her eyes that weren’t there three nights ago.
“Guess I like the service,” she says finally.
Lara’s pen stalls on the chart, for just half a second. “Yeah?”
“Your stitch game’s up there.”
“That’s it? We’re not gonna talk about my S-tier hospitality?”
Mari finds herself fighting a smile breaking out of her lips. It’s much harder than she thought. “Get off the high horse.”
Lara rolls her eyes, smiling despite herself, and heads for the door. “Go to sleep. Back in an hour to make sure you haven’t grown a third lung.”
Within the next hour, Mari drifts in and out of consciousness between tangible things and the intangible. She dreams in fragments - the crowd’s noise from three nights ago bleeding into some beeping monitor in the background, the specific white-hot sting of a needle she still hasn’t forgiven Lara for.
At some point she dreams about her mother’s kitchen, which she hasn’t done in months, and wakes from it with her jaw clenched so tight it aches worse than her ribs do.
By the time the door creaks open again, Mari’s not sure how long she’s been asleep or awake for. Lara slips in quietly this time, softer-footed than the last two rounds like she’s trying not to disturb something even though the vital checks require exactly the same amount of poking regardless.
“Hey,” Lara’s voice is lower now, worn a little at the edges from the hour. “Still alive in here?”
Mari lets out a long, exhausted sigh. “Unfortunately.”
“Rough crowd,” Lara reaches for the cuff, wraps it slow, and for a second neither of them says anything while the machine does its work. Lara’s watching the numbers, but her attention seems scattered elsewhere. “Can I tell you something kind of insane?”
The question catches Mari off guard. “Huh?”
“I had a sister who used to crash cars for money.”
That gets Mari’s attention. “What?”
“Insurance fraud, mostly staged accidents. She’d get in these- I don’t even know what to call it. Rings, I guess? These groups of people who’d set up a crash and split the payout,” Lara says it evenly and the flatness of her voice implies just how many times she’s recited this to herself. “She’d come home busted up constantly. Whiplash, cracked ribs like yours, once she had a concussion so bad she couldn’t remember what day it was for two days straight.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah,” Lara finally looks over, and there’s a gleam of cautiousness in her eyes gauging for a reaction. Mari doesn’t react, only waits. “She never went to a real hospital, obviously, because paper trail, right? Insurance company would’ve caught on, so she’d come to me instead. I’ve patched her up in my own kitchen more times than I want to admit.”
There’s a version of this conversation where Mari can see exactly where it’s going - Lara laying a story down like a bridge, waiting for Mari to take the bait and cross it with the truth. It’s a good move. Smart, even, given Mari’s current vulnerability. Gotta respect it.
“That sounds rough,” she says instead, giving nothing.
“It was,” A pause from Lara. “You kind of remind me of her, a little. The whole-” Lara gestures vaguely at all of Mari, the ribs, the bruising, the crime scene in general. “-refusing help, putting up a front-”
“Lara,” Mari interrupts, firm, because she doesn’t like where this is going. “Why are you telling me this?”
“I just don’t like seeing people get hurt. It’s the whole reason why I’m a nurse, but really, the irony lies in the fact that a nurse’s job is to see people who are hurt. And then there’s people like you who come in with a complete disregard for their health, which got me wondering what’s more important than keeping yourself safe.”
Mari can feel the exact shape of the door Lara’s holding open for her: tell me, I get it, I’ve seen it all, I won’t judge you for it. Some small, tired, honest part of her almost wants to walk through it, especially when Lara looks so terrifyingly genuine. But it’s too risky.
“I appreciate the concern,” she says instead. “But I’d like to keep my business to myself.”
Something flickers across Lara’s face. Not quite hurt, exactly, more like disappointment she has already braced for prior to this conversation. She nods and goes back to jotting the vitals down like nothing happened.
“Okay,” she says simply. “Sleep, Mari.”
Long after Lara is gone, Mari keeps her eyes trained on the ceiling, contemplating all the decisions she’s ever made, all the paths she’d chosen to take. How did she end up here?