Author's Note: This is kind of a pet project of mine. I'm not really sure where it's going to go, yet. Hope you enjoy the ride along with me.
At the time, catching the energy ball in the palm of her hand had seemed like a good idea. Actually, since said energy ball had been headed directly at Piper, who had no chance to get out of the way, it seemed like the only idea.
At the time.
Except now she was holding live electricity in her bare hand, and human beings were not meant to handle electricity. Every nerve ending in her hand and arm was on fire, and she couldn't feel anything except for the blinding pain shooting up her body, and every instinct she had was screaming at her to throw the damn ball away, already! And she did.
She was aiming for the demon that had thrown it in the first place, she honestly was. But, she'd forgotten that she was fighting alongside two sisters, and not just one, and while she could see Piper out of the corner of her eye, she hadn't kept track of where Phoebe was. And she hadn't seen Phoebe as she'd levitated toward the demon, hadn't seen her until it was too late, until the energy ball had clipped her in the hip, sending her spinning through the air to crash into the banister of the stairs.
The energy ball had fizzled out after it had struck Phoebe, but it had been enough of a distraction for Piper to throw an explosive blast at the demon. It hadn't vanquished him, they needed the Power of Three for that, but it had injured the demon enough to get him to retreat, shimmering back to Hell to lick his wounds.
Leaving Paige alone with one sister that she'd inadvertently injured, and another that wanted to kill her.
Piper had already started toward Phoebe as soon as the demon had disappeared, bending over their unconscious sister and rolling her gently onto her back. Phoebe had a dark bruise on her temple where her head had struck the banister, and her eyes stayed shut, even when Piper called her name, sharply. Her chest was rising in slow, shallow breaths, and her face was too pale to be healthy.
"We need to-" Paige started to say, but Piper shot her a slashing look, her eyes hard as she glared.
"Haven't you done enough?" she snapped, and Paige took an automatic step backward at the cold fury in her older sister's voice. "Leo!" Piper snapped, her eyes on the ceiling as she dismissed Paige with little more than a thought. "Leo, get down here!"
Paige backed away from her sisters as Leo orbed into the Manor, immediately kneeling down beside Phoebe to heal her head injury. Her hand brushed against her leg as she moved, and she stifled a yell as a blinding pain shot from her hand, up her arm. Glancing down, she saw that the skin on the palm of her hand was bright red and starting to blister. For a second, her mind with blank with pain and the beginnings of panic, and then the long hours she'd spent in first aid training kicked in.
'Water,' she thought, as she headed into the kitchen. She flicked the cold water on with her good hand, putting her burned hand under the spray.
Then, she had to force herself not to jerk her hand out from under the water almost immediately, as the water hitting her palm made the pain ratchet up to nearly-unbearable. She gritted her teeth, but she was unable to stop a soft whimper of pain from escaping her clenched teeth. Digging the fingers of her good hand into her leg, she watched as the water washed over the burn. Slowly, the pain receded as her hand numbed to the cold, and after about five minutes, she couldn't feel anything in her hand. An experimental poke to her wrist reassured her that the loss of feeling was due to the cold, rather than the burn.
As she kept her hand under the water, she looked around the kitchen. She knew that Piper and Phoebe kept a first aid kit somewhere in the kitchen, in case of emergencies when cooking or making potions, but they hadn't told her which cabinet it was in. And she didn't want to take her hand out from under the water long enough to look for it. She cast a quick glance toward the living room, wondering briefly if she should call someone in to help, but then Piper's furious face filled her memory, and she flinched away from the idea. She'd made her sisters made enough at her for one day; no, she could manage this on her own.
'Think,' she scolded herself. 'It's just a simple first aid kit. You can do this.'
Then, when the answer occurred to her, Paige could have slapped herself. With her new power, all she had to do was call for it. A second later, the first aid kit had materialized in her hand in a swirl of bright, white lights.
Setting the white, fairly-decent-sized box on the counter, she thumbed the latch up and flipped it open, the lid smacking against the tile with a soft pop. She dug through the cluttered kit, one-handed, and made an absent note to take time to reorganize the box so that things were easier to find. If her sisters were willing to let her back in the house, that was.
She found the roll of thin, white gauze at the bottom of the kit, along with a roll of medical tape. After she'd left her hand under the water for another minute, she shut the water off and carefully patted her hand dry with a clean towel, wincing as the towel dragged across her overly-sensitized skin despite her best efforts.
She put a folded gauze pad in the palm of her hand, directly over the worst of the burn, and then she slowly wrapped her hand in the gauze bandage, securing the end with a strip of tape. When she was finished, she dumped the supplies back into the first aid kit, and then opened every cabinet in the kitchen until she found the empty space where the kit had been sitting before she used it. She meticulously wiped up the water that she'd splashed on the counter while she'd been treating her burn.
And then, when she was done stalling, she screwed up her courage and went back out to the living room, where her sisters were undoubtedly waiting to yell at her over her screw-up.
"-Piper, she's still new to the Craft."
"She nearly got you killed, Phoebe! Hell, she nearly killed you, herself."
Paige winced at the strident tone in Piper's voice, pausing at the doorway. She blinked back the tears that had sprung to her eyes at Piper's accusation, trying to swallow past the lump in her throat.
"None of us were perfect when we first started out as witches," Phoebe protested, and Paige managed a small smile. At least one of her sisters didn't seem to hate her.
"This never would have happened when Prue was alive," Piper shot back, bitterly, and Paige nodded, grimly. She'd been wondering how long it would take before that argument came about.
She also decided to make her presence known. She'd heard more than enough, and she just wanted to get out of there, and the only way to her car was through the living room to the front door.
'Really need to work on that whole orbing thing,' she thought, as she stepped out into the living room.
Piper and Phoebe immediately stared at her, and from the horrified look on Phoebe's face, it was pretty clear that she knew Paige had overheard their conversation. Paige didn't let her say anything, though, crossing over to where she was standing to give her a quick hug to reassure herself that she was all right.
"Are you okay?" she asked, and Phoebe nodded, numbly. "I'm really sorry about what happened," she went on, without giving Phoebe time to speak. "I swear, it's never going to happen, again."
"Paige, it was an accident," Phoebe protested, weakly.
"And it won't happen again," Paige promised. "I have to get back to work."
Then, she darted out the front door before either of her sisters could say anything.