Accidents Happen
Hello-Lovely
Smellerbee isn't ditzy, inattentive or a klutz, but she always seems to injure herself in the strangest manners.
She has a scar on her left shoulder, front and back, from the time she accidentally walked into the midst of Longshot's shooting range. She claims that she never saw the arrow coming, not until it pierced her shoulder. She fell to the dirt, yowling and clutching herself, forcing almost everyone in camp to leave their posts and see what the matter was.
Jet didn't so much as bat an eye when he saw her sitting on the ground, skewered. He merely snipped the arrow in two and pulled the pieces out, chastising her for making such a big deal about nothing. She regained use of her arm fairly fast, but Longshot was horrified by what he'd - however accidentally - done and wouldn't use his bow for a week after.
She also fell off of a moving cart once when she was a bit younger. She was standing up when the ostrich horse suddenly panicked at the crack of a whip and started running at full speed, sending her flying to land face-first onto the path. The landing broke her wrist, bloodied her nose and bruised her legs so badly that she was sure she would never walk again. And she almost broke her tailbone trying to jump back on to the cart while her teammates did nothing more than sit there and laugh at her.
She wanted to cry, to scream and slug somebody while they made fun of her, but she'd had to settle for the bandages that Longshot always kept in his travel pack and Pipsqueak's consoling pats on the back. These things always happened to her, she groused.
And just today she rolled over in her sleeping sack and banged her head on a rock, dashing her hopes of making it to Ba Sing Se accident-free.
She tries to be a big girl about it, slapping her friends' hands away when they try to inspect it and growling that she is just fine. They ignore her for a while, trying not to eye the sizeable scrape near her temple that isn't even close to scabbing over. She has to keep pressing on it with her bandana to keep the blood from running anywhere (she's not ready to admit that she bleeds like, well, a girl).
But she can only keep the charade up for so long - her head is killing her - and so she tilts her chin up like an obedient girl and lets Longshot inspect the scrape and dab it with stinging antiseptic to his heart's content. After, Jet gives her a noogie and says that she's tough, like him, making her smile despite herself.
And Smellerbee decides that she doesn't care if she is accident-prone, because she knows that her two men will always be there to take care of her.
A/n: A silly old drabble that I posted on the shootingbees community back in March. I had completely forgotten it existed until now. It was kindly beta'd by EE's Skysong.
Try not to choke on the fluff. .
(Disclaimer: I don't own Avatar: The Last Airbender.)