giveittoyoursister | Room 232, Saturday Morning

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Room 232, Saturday Morning

Vi was shadow boxing. Getting back into training properly, like she knew she should, was still eluding her, but this much at least she'd been able to keep up with.

She paused, rolling her shoulders and swinging her arms. She was stiffer than she'd like. Not that it was a surprise. Everything was either overworked or underworked, she she still hadn't adjusted to the beds here, in all she'd be more surprised if she wasn't stiff as a board. Just about the only positive was that her last few lingering bruises had faded to that final dull, ugly brown.

Her stomach growled and she rolled her shoulders one final time as she brought her fists up. Five more minutes and she'd go find breakfast.

So, naturally, during those five minutes, she overextended her left arm, something twinged in her bad shoulder, and just like that, her entire torso was on fire as her back spasmed.

"Shit." She bit out the curse. Doubling over and biting down on the back of a handwrap to muffle the noise she made, she tried to ride it out.

As least it wasn't also dislocated this time. Fixing that sucked so much.

[Open to the roomie if she's around.]

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Libby had been trying her best to lay low around Vi for the past two weeks, and, really, she felt she had a pretty good system down by now. It wasn't exactly a complicated system, really, and was mostly dependant on who got up first: if it was Libby, then it was pretty easy, she just slipped out as quietly as she could, hopefully without disturbing Vi on her way out, and if it was Vi who got up first, well, then Libby would just pretty much pretend to still be sleeping until the other girl left, unless she herself had a class or her clinic shift to get to. She found herself trying to wake up earlier and earlier to avoid most of it, really, which wasn't that difficult, they'd always been pretty 'rise and shine at the crack of dawn' sort of family, but the lack of such a rigerou schedule had her taking advantage sometimes of just being able to sleep in, a novel concept in and of itself...

So when she heard Vi doing her boxing thing, she got ready to just sort of ride it out until she was done, trying to think of what she could do with her day today, when she heard the cuss word come out of Vi's mouth and the subsequent muffled sound to follow it, and she just couldn't just lay there pretending to not exist after that.

"Vi?" she asked, turning over, tentatively pulling herself up on an elbow as she looked worriedly over at her roommate. "Are you okay?"

[[ and totally going into SP mode, but, I MEAN. IF IT'S OPEN.... ]]

"It's okay, Libs," Without thinking, Vi used the same tone she'd always used when she didn't want to worry Powder about something. "I'll be fine."

It wasn't really a lie, since she was pretty sure Libby wouldn't try to shiv her as she knelt on the floor, pale and sweating. She could probably even make it back over to her own bed.

Trying to move set off another wave of muscle spasms and a low whimper she wasn't quick enough at catching. Okay, maybe not.

And a lot of Libby's own natural tendancies were superceding her efforts to just stay out of Vi's way in that moment, most specifically a sudden desire to huff in indignation at someone's stubborn attempts to convince her of something other than what her own two eyes were seeing. She had brash and stubborn brothers, after all, who would rather be caught dead than admit that they'd overexerted themselves.

But she also knew that pointing that out to them only seemed to ever make them more stubborn about it.

Still, the covers were officially pulled back now, and Libby was sitting on the edge of her bed, leaning forward almost as a threat that she was just a few mere seconds from getting up and seeing what all the fuss was about for herself.

"It sounded," she ventured, and, sure, Libby wasn't one to shiv anybody, but she apparently had no problem with taking a metaphorical stick to poke at the waters a little to see if anything jumped out to bite it, "like you may have hurt yourself...."

And it sure was looking like it, too.

In Vi's defence, it'd usually worked on Powder. Mostly because she was only nine. No, eleven, she'd be eleven now.

She gave up on the bed and sat back against the wall instead, gripping her shoulder tightly. "Yeah, but it'll pass," she tried, voice hitching. "Usually does."

She couldn't imagine how Libby would ever get the impression she was stubborn.

Libby was watching Vi carefully, sorting through the piles of basic care and first aid she'd been brushing up on in the last couple of weeks, but this one, she felt was a pretty easy one.

"Well," she said, feet poking around the floor for her slippers and reaching for her robe as she found them, slipped her feet in, and stood up, "we should at least put it on ice, then maybe some heat, help pass it along a little quicker."

She tied her robe with a firm air of decision as she told Vi, "I'll be right back."

She wasn't going to tell Vi that she'd be disappointed if she came back and Vi was anywhere but where she was right now, of course. She was going to just let her tone say that part before leaving to go to the common room, hoping to find there what she needed.

Vi wasn't really planning on moving any time soon, though it was debatable if that had anything to do with disappointing Libby as opposed to being physically unable to.

"Hey, at least we're talking again," she muttered dryly to herself.

Oh, yes, because Vi was quite the chatterbox with Libby before, too!

After a little while, Libby bustled her way back to the room, with some ice in a plastic bag wrapped a thin towel so it wouldn't be too cold on the skin, and knelt down beside Vi to hand it over to her.

"This should help," she offered. "I couldn't find a hot water bottle," but she was now adding picking one ip to the top of her list!, "but in a little bit, I can go get a hot towel, that should work just fine."

Hey, prison tended to do a number on a girl's interpersonal skills, especially the ones requiring displays of vulnerability.

Vi took the ice and pressed it against her shoulder. "Thanks, Libs. Should probably lie down." She looked up and across at her bed and sighed. "Lend me a hand?"

"No need to rush it," Libby said, with a small shake of her head. "You just sit there and relax for now, that bed's not going anywhere.

"Well," she amended, with a faint smile, "actually, from some of the stuff I've heard about this place, it actually just might, but I think we'll have bigger concerns if the furniture starts moving out on us!"

But, with that said, she settled her hands planitively in her lap and regarded Vi with a much more serious face.

"Now," she ventured, "on a scale of one to ten, how bad would you rate the pain?"

She figured , if she was going to do this, she might as well try and follow Proper Procedures like she'd been reading up on!

Edited 2022-01-15 15:45 (UTC)

"Wouldn't be the first time I've slept on the floor. Furniture's overrated anyway."

The pain in her shoulder was starting to dull, so Vi leaned forward and shifted the ice so it spread out further over her back.

Proper Procedures and Vi were barely even passing acquaintances, so Libby got a look for that.

"Seriously? I don't know, seven, maybe eight," she said. "It's been worse." A lot worse sometimes.

Libby's eyes went a little wide at that, since that was much higher than she was expecting Vi to rate it, especially when she'd rather assumed Vi was the type to say a three when it was closer to a six or seven. She frowned thoughtfully, unsure of what to really do at that point, if she was entirely honest with herself.

Except be patient, really. Once they got past the ice and heat stage, Vi would let her have a closer look.

"Hopefully," she said, "it won't get much worse than that, too."

She chewed her lower lip thoughtfully for a moment before asking, "Can you describe for me what you think happened?"

She was starting to feel like she should probably have a clipboard and write this all down.

If Vi was more familiar with the idea of a pain scale or had longer to think about it, she might have tried to downplay it, but as it was it was too late not to be honest.

"I fucked my shoulder up a few years ago," she said. "Never got fixed right, so this happens sometimes. It'll pass."

"Oh, I'm sure it will," Libby agreed, but there was something in her expression that held the same kind of gentle reproach she gave the Littles far too often, "until the one time that is doesn't because you keep agitating it."

But there was sympathy in there, too, and curiosity, and she tilted her head thoughtfully. She hesitated a moment, but figured she could chalk being nosy in this case up to professional interest...

"How did you..." She stopped, like hitting a roadblock, in realizing that she really couldn't just say that word, "...injure it the first time round?"

"Haven't exactly been a place I can afford not to, Libs," she said with a bark of laughter that was half sob.

Vi closed her eyes, remembered blue light, flying through the air, the crushing weight on the door. "A building fell on me."

Libby was just going to blame that she was still frowning and trying to figure out what exactly Vi meant by that first part to have missed what she'd really said on the second, because she must have heard that wrong.

"A building?"

"Somebody blew it up," Vi said dully, Powder's voice echoing in her ears. Vi, it worked. "Took out my entire family."

So Libby had heard that right after all, and she didn't think her eyes could get any bigger.

"Oh, Vi," she said, the distraught sincerity practically melting off of her. "I'm so sorry..."

It was debatable that Vi even heard her over the memory of Powder's insistent I was only trying to help.

"They're all gone because some bastard with a grudge against my dad looked at his kids," she forced the words out "-at my sister, at Claggor and Mylo, at me, and he saw weapons he could use to hurt Vander."

Libby felt as though she'd been hit by the emotional equivalent of a building just then, too, as that first conversation back at the welcome picnic came rushing back at her with all the devastation that a full perspective could now bring to it.

And she had not had nearly enough of her Trauma classes to know how to handle this; she was pretty sure that the only thing she could think to say was something Vi wouldn't exactly appreciate hearing just then.

"That's so horrible," she finally managed, shaking her head a little, "that that happened to you, Vi. I'm....I'm so sorry."

Yes, she knew she already said that. But that didn't make it any less true.

To be fair, there probably weren't enough Trauma classes in the world for Libby to know how to handle it. Especially not the parts Vi hadn't and wasn't planning on telling her.

She scrubbed her eyes with the palm of her hand. "I was supposed to protect her and I didn't."

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Room 232, Saturday Morning

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