Holy Crap, the response to the first chapter was amazing. Thank you all for your reviews and favorites and follows and encouragement!
From here on out, I'm going to normalize into a Sunday/Wednesday posting schedule, so Chapter 3 will be out on Sunday, April sixth.
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Hiccup is both exhausted and bolstered driving into the garage at ten thirty that night, because it's one of those rare and beautiful days where cramming for a week was absolutely worth it. Toothless and Spike greet him at the door and he lets the wolf jump up, huge paw on his shoulder and primed for a hug. Hiccup scratches Spike's head and walks forward slowly, laughing as Toothless totters backwards on his hind feet like a horrible ballerina, smiling with his tongue hanging out the side of his mouth.
Hiccup stops short of the kitchen, staring at Astrid, who is reclined on the couch with her right foot elevated, knee buckled into a bulky brace.
Ok, this midterm must have finally done him in. Astrid is at school, not icing her knee on his couch. His dad looks up from the TV and spots him, heaving out of his easy-chair and hustling quietly to the kitchen.
Astrid must be asleep or a hallucination, because she hasn't looked his way.
"What?..." Hiccup starts as soon as his dad gets close enough, but his exact question is lagging behind in his test-exhausted brain. What is Astrid doing here? Why is her knee or leg elevated?
Why is only figuring about all of this now? How long has she been here?
"She didn't want to tell you because of your test," his father starts, voice hushed as he ushers Hiccup into the kitchen. "How did that go, anyway?"
"Fine, thanks for asking," and the sentiment is genuine until he remembers Astrid prone and slightly sallow on the couch. "But what's going on?"
Gerard gestures for a moment, mouth moving soundlessly as he tries to figure out how to phrase…everything. Astrid probably isn't in the best form to know right now, because when the hospital gave her pain killers for the night, it appears that they forgot to take into account that she's barely a hundred pounds.
It turns out that Astrid loathes feeling groggy.
Angry Astrid on downers isn't great company.
Jerry hasn't been so terrified of a woman since Val caught him smashing a wolf spider with the Sunday newspaper and yelled at him for an hour about the inside ecosystem and how they were going to have fly problems now and that spider wasn't doing anything to him anyway so why did he have to go killing things?
He refocuses on Hiccup and wonders why his boy's nature ever shocked him.
"She slipped on her run this morning, and messed up her knee pretty badly," Gerard steps forward as Hiccup blanches and leans on the counter, looking every bit as worried as Astrid feared he would be. Toothless noses at his boy's hand and Spike sits warily in the doorway, worried to leave Astrid but not wanting to be left out of the conversation.
"Is she alright?" Hiccup asks, remembering every time she talked about that knee. Every time she's spent the weekend gimping around after a meet, whining about having to take a few days off.
"It's pretty serious," and the man doesn't really need to say anything else, because the truth is carved into the grim lines of his forehead. "It's her ACL, and maybe a damaged PCL too, they won't know about that until they get her into surgery tomorrow—"
"Tomorrow?" Hiccup cuts his dad off. "Why didn't you let me know about this?"
"I was dealing with…" he gestures to the couch vaguely. Hiccup smiles to himself, because no matter how worried he is, he can acknowledge what an awful patient his girlfriend happens to be. When she has the flu, she thinks she's dying, and the only way to get cold medicine into her is to slip it into her food and pray she doesn't see you escaping .
"Right, I'd almost forgotten how fun sick Astrid is. What time tomorrow?" Hiccup asks, the surprise suspended exhaustion slapping him in the face.
"They want her there at 2:30."
"Alright, I got it."
"She's not very patient with the crutches," his dad warns like he just spent the day learning the quirks of some wild animal. Hiccup bites his tongue from reminding his dad of the time he threw out his back when he insisted on carrying a new bathtub to the second floor of the house rather than hiring a contractor.
Hiccup suggested a back brace and would have gotten yelled out of the house if it didn't hurt his father to breathe.
"I got it," Hiccup repeats. "I wish I'd known earlier, but…" he sighs and rubs the back of his neck. "Yeah, I can get tomorrow off of school. It's only one class."
"She thought it'd mess up your test if she told you," Gerard says in Astrid's defense and her disgruntled boyfriend grins.
"She's probably right, but don't tell her that."
"I'm going to bed if you're sure you can handle it…and if I were you, I'd just leave her on the couch overnight…she's a little cranky right now," his father warns and Hiccup cocks his head.
"Does it hurt that bad?" How bad would something have to hurt to perturb Astrid that much?
"She's got some pretty big pills to get her through, but it was pretty bad," the man is sheepish, waiting for that anxious anger that Hiccup reserves for Astrid and the wolf.
The younger man grinds his jaw and swallows, loathing the fact that Astrid spent all day thinking about his test of all things. God, she probably sent him that text from the hospital, perking him up when he should have been there with her.
She spent days on end curled up next to his hospital bed, everyone told him how far she disappeared from the world when he was under.
"Goodnight dad," Hiccup waves his father off absently and walks back towards Astrid's couch, vowing not to bring anything controversial up tonight.
Like the fact that she didn't tell him that she was in the hospital.
Nothing perturbing like that.
She appears to be sleeping, eyes closed and breathing slow and even under the blanket across her chest. Her expression is a little off-kilter, tired and pinched, and Hiccup wonders if she's being at all honest about how much this hurts.
He rests his hand on her forehead, lightly sweeping her bangs to the side. She blinks at him, bleary eyed and scowling at the light before softening and smiling at him, still pained but relaxing. He should have been there, she would have relaxed earlier if he'd just been there.
Toothless noses encouragingly at the back of his legs, pressing him forward towards the couch. Spike growls at his proximity, nervous at her girl's condition.
"Hey, how'd your test go?" The question tugs his heart in two directions at once, and he appreciates the support as much as he regrets letting her know that he was stressed. "Better than my day, I hope."
"Come on," he smiles softly, because it's hard to be mad with those bleary and unquestionably needy blue eyes staring up at him. "You did get to go to the hospital and get poked."
"So fun," she laughs, shifting to get up and giving in with an ungainly flop onto the pillow propped behind her head. "I was going to sit up and make room for you, but I guess that's not happening," she grumbles, irritated with the world in general.
"Does this work?" He asks, carefully lifting her head and sliding underneath her pillow, settling her head back onto his lap so gently that it does all sorts of undignified things to Astrid's admittedly drugged stomach. She wiggles her shoulders against his thigh, wincing slightly as it jiggles her knee.
"This is fine," her eyes close again as his hand rests on her ribs, stroking gently through her tee-shirt. Upon a second glance, he recognizes it as one of his and his heart throbs earnestly in his chest.
She should have called him. He would have come.
"Do you want to talk about anything?" He asks after a quiet minute, failing to get interested in the food network droning in the background.
"Not really," she shrugs, twitching as her bangs tickle the bridge of her nose. Hiccup pushes the errant hairs back and rests his warm palm on her forehead. "I did wish you were there earlier, by the way," he smiles in spite of the situation at the honesty. "I almost punched the doctor and I couldn't concentrate at all when they were showing me the scans," she frowns, "so you better have aced that test."
"I think I did," he nods to himself and she looks something past smug as her oh-so-brilliant plan proves itself. "But next time you end up in the hospital, I'd like it if you actually, you know, told me."
"I don't know if there's going to be a next time," she grumbles, leaning into his touch as his fingers stroke along her cheekbone. Toothless snuffles at her left foot, licking her toes with a wide, warm tongue before laying down next to Spike by the foot of the couch.
This is too much for even the triple team of comfort.
"I missed out on your only hospital adventure?" It falls flat as a joke, because absolutely none of this is funny, but leaching his worry out onto her is only going to piss her off. She's too warm on top of him, slightly clammy sweat chilling against her scalp.
"It might be the big one," she hedges, when she knows the might is absolutely unnecessary.
It is the big one.
The only injury worth remembering is the last one.
The ending of something indefinable and huge looms like the last fifty pages of a good book when it becomes evident that there's no way all loose ends will be cinched together in time.
It's all…everyone's fault. Why wasn't Hiccup there? Why did his stupid teacher make his stupid test today? Why didn't she come down to keep him company while he studied, and avoid that icy run altogether?
Her eyes blink open, glancing past the pool of blankets piled on top of her and down to that unfamiliar, tight, and clunky knee brace that's holding her foot in the air at a stiff angle. How long is it going to take to get used to that?
Is it going to be there long enough to get used to?
That's more horrifying than anything else, the fact that she might be standing in the doorway of some new state of being. One that involves knee braces and pain killers before running and freedom.
His hand slides under her neck and rubs in soothing circles, practically forcing her to relax bonelessly into the pillow.
"Thuggory thought it was hilarious to hit on the TA proctoring the test," Hiccup starts with a chuckle, hoping to distract her. Her eyes latch onto his, and he continues, fingers still kneading her neck. "She's probably grading the tests too, it wasn't a smart move."
"What did he say?" Astrid snorts, craning her neck to the right and giving him better access to a knot settled into the side of her muscle. His fingers find it and she groans, enthusiastically appreciative.
"He asked for some private tutoring on conductive heat transfer, " Hiccup laughs and Astrid opens her eyes, frowning at him.
"Because I totally know what that is," she snaps, chemically groggy brain irrationally irritated at being left behind.
"Conductive heat transfer is heat passing between surfaces that are touching," he clarifies and Astrid thinks for a moment before grinning.
"And how was that received?"
"I don't know, they were still talking when I left," his fingers stroke her hair back from her face, gentle and ticklish against her forehead, and she blinks slowly, melting even further against him.
"I bet Thugs is getting laid," she proclaims with a sleepy leer.
"You've been spending too much time with Ruff," it should be sickening when he taps her nose with the tip of his finger, but an uninhibited wave of warmth spreads through her like a whiskey burn.
She wrinkles her nose and slides her palm up his chest, hooking it around the back of his neck and tangling it in the too long hair there. He'd smile if he could get over the bleary glaze in her eyes.
Astrid isn't supposed to be…docile like this.
"Well, I couldn't spend any time with you because you ditched me for your heat transfer book," she pats his cheek, humorously condescending, before settling her hand against his jaw and stroking her thumb through the too-busy-to-shave stubble that's almost long enough to be soft.
"I think Thuggory probably screwed himself," Hiccup muses as her thumb glides clumsily across his lower lip, its usual confidence lost to whatever she took.
"I don't know, he does have that whole dimples thing going on," she shrugs and Hiccup sits up straighter, neglected protective side flowing into some inner source of manliness and puffing up his chest.
"Do I have the dimples thing?" He asks warily and she rolls her eyes, hand sliding back down his front to rest limply in her own lap.
Being an invalid, like everything else, is improved by Hiccup's involvement.
"Eh, not my thing," she assures him with a cavalier shrug that pulls on her knee like stabbing a hot poker into the joint. The medicine helps her not mind so much. "But a lot of girls are into it."
"If that's not your thing, then what is?" He asks, torn between curiosity and the need to distract her without frustrating her, lacing his fingers with hers on her stomach. She squeezes his hand, still scarily strong.
"This week—"
"This week?"
"Yes, this week it's probably beards," she finishes, staring up at his chin and barely holding in another scalding shrug.
"Beards? But you're the one always nagging me to shave," he reminds her indignantly and she rolls her eyes.
"Stubble is not my thing. But you're past the stubble." She reaches up again to rub her unclaimed hand across his jaw and he genuinely grins.
She remembers being shocked when after a few days in the hospital, Hiccup's jaw was completely overgrown with prickly auburn. Not that she ever cared, he was in a coma and his grooming was sort of the last thing on anyone's mind, but he just didn't look like a guy who could grow a full beard.
That was back when he was still skinny and boyish, bandaged leg a poorly hidden elephant in the room while she tried to justify waiting next to him. The nurses started shaving him after about a week, but she sort of missed the shadow. It made him look less like a boy plucked by God on a bad draw and more like a man who fought so hard to defend what he loved.
"So, what's going to be your thing next week?" He asks casually, leaning his chin into her touch.
"I don't know. If I knew, it would be my thing now."
"Do you have a new thing every week? Like 'Oh, it's been seven days, better find something else to like'?" He laughs.
"It keeps missing you interesting," she explains. "If I'm looking forward to something specific it makes the time go by faster."
"Maybe I should start doing that," he smiles at her reasoning, squeezing her hand in his.
"Don't bother. It looks like I'm going to be here for a while." They both glance down at her knee. "No offense, but I wish I could be back at school, you know?"
It's somehow less futile than wishing this stupid thing hadn't happened. Generically wishing to reset the morning seems less desperate, less harried and misplaced.
It's not about her knee, it's about her day, wasted in hospitals when she has a paper due next week. It's about bothering people with her dumb ass injury that she's never going to live down.
It's not about deploring the fact that her wonderful life is trying to shift underneath her. And it's actually wonderful this time, she's not a deluded teenager clinging to popularity above substance.
She has everything she could ever want.
Has. Had.
"I wish you could be back at school too," Hiccup agrees simply.
He gets the whole couch when she's gone. No one flips the breaker with their hairdryer when he's trying to shave in the morning. He can have quiet whenever he wants it, and doesn't have to pause every two seconds until Astrid is done play-growling at Spike while they wrestle on the floor like littermates.
He'd rather be so stiflingly lonely and have her be ok somewhere else, than sit here with a wrongly downed Astrid in his lap.
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"I've never had surgery before," Astrid admits, left leg jiggling nervously against the hospital bed. She looks impossibly younger, tired anxious eyes rimmed with dark circles and long blonde hair in a low ponytail at the nape of her neck. She slept on the couch last night, with Spike curled on the floor under her drooping hand. Hiccup stayed with her for a while, watching movies, until she encouraged him to go to bed because someone has to be in their right mind for her surgery.
Hiccup reaches out and grabs her twitching hand, holding it still in his.
"You'll be fine," he comforts her. She won't even be awake for it. She won't even realize it's happening.
He is smart enough not to say any of those things, because if anyone understands those hospital nerves it's him. He remembers so many bland afternoons wasted staring at mottled white tile and waiting for some awful new piece of information that'd ground him or send him through another round of therapy.
"I still have my wisdom teeth," she laughs nervously, squeezing his hand too tight.
"Well, it shows, you're so wise" Hiccup compliments her wryly, receiving an eye-roll and a bracing squeeze that grinds his knuckle bones together. He hides his wince behind a cough as her left foot slips off of the bed, shaking nervously.
"And it's bad enough that they're going into my knee," she stares at the joint, letting it know just how offensive it truly is. Stupid knee. Stupid, useless, knee. This is all her dumb knee's fault. At least Hiccup's foot had the decency to leave, instead of mocking him from the end of his leg. "But I've never…have you ever been put under?" She asks, voice shrinking in her throat.
"For my wisdom teeth," he ignores the scared undertone in her voice and she loves him all the more for it. "But the nurse made sure I had plenty of laughing gas first." Astrid grins at that, still obviously uncomfortable.
"Do they really make you do the counting down thing?" She prods him further, "because I really don't like the idea that I'm suddenly not going to be able to count down from ten. I'm not an idiot."
"I think that's how they know that you're actually asleep," he takes her hand in both of his and squeezes comfortingly. "You stop counting and they know that you aren't going to freak out when they start—" cutting. He stops himself just in time and swallows hard.
She'll be fine. Of course she'll be fine.
"They don't need to mock my counting skills to make sure I'm asleep."
"No one is mocking your counting skills," Hiccup assures her a little too pedantically, earning a glare.
Astrid looks back at her toes, bluish from the overnight constriction of the brace and generally unhealthy looking. Her left foot swings freely, toes hooking on the frame of the cot and squeezing the metal bar between them, relishing in the innate strength of her grip. It's always been easy, she's always been healthy.
And she still is, mostly. It's the bruise on the surface of an otherwise pristine apple, causing everyone to throw it back in the bin rather than give it a shot.
Even Hiccup can't imagine how this feels. He woke up in the aftermath, when everything was healed and new, like the world had passed into some new reality without his consent. She has as little consent as he did, but she has to watch, she has to see everything fall apart in front of her eyes.
Will she ever break a 4:45 mile again? She did it last summer, because Gobber said she couldn't. It was a late night drinking thing, Hiccup was asleep and she was up with Gerard and her old coach, and somehow discussion got around to Roger Bannister and impossible times. First her coach ribbed her for never breaking five in high school, and she retorted that five is no big deal. He proposed 4:45, and a wager of twenty dollars.
Astrid insisted it wouldn't be a problem and Gobber laughed in her face, sputtering and knocking his mouth against his bottle so hard he almost chipped a tooth.
She did it the next morning at her high school track, hung over and miserable with Hiccup holding that blue stopwatch and yawning every two seconds. It was a spite record, and nothing she's set since has felt anywhere near as victorious.
Of course she's done it since then, she even managed a four thirty nine mile split when she won the 3000 at worlds. It was practically a party trick, one she'd whip out the day before competitions to scare the other teams sharing the track.
But then her coach started putting her on the fifteen hundred, and she started losing the five thousand and...
There's really no use dwelling on that now, is there?
It's already gone even if it doesn't feel like it yet. This surgery is going to fix what she mangled, but from here on out she's like a vase glued back together, not quite as water tight, not quite as reliable. The vase that stays in the kitchen because it's too horrible to throw it away, because it's grandma's vase or some sort of souvenir from a first date, but no one ever brings it down anymore.
It's gone, and she wants to try to get it back. She really does. She wants to be some sort of wunderkind, and spring up from the operating table, surging through physical therapy and finishing out some of what's left of her season.
That's not going to happen. All that's going to happen is a whole lot more pain, and a lot more crutches and limping and…
She wants someone real to blame.
"I'm scared," she admits in a shamefully tiny voice. "I'm scared that…that this is going to hurt, and that it's…" Hiccup lets her have her privacy, holding her hand while she stares at her knee. "It's not going to be the same. I'm never going to race again, and I'm never going to…" her hand flops listlessly against her thigh. It bounces off of that still hard quad, so familiar six inches above the foreign line of her brace.
"It'll be different," Hiccup admits, nudging the metal end of his leg against her swinging healthy foot. "But it'll be ok…eventually."
"At least you're honest," she smiles at him, more sad than anything.
"What? You don't want any more of the 'you'll be racing again in five minutes' spiel?" She manages a tired chuckle and lies back on the cot, shifting and trying to get comfortable.
Nothing is comfortable.
Her knee sings at her, out of key and wretched, throbbing in time with her too fast heartbeat.
"I want the truth to be different."
"I know."
He holds her hand until they roll her away to the operating room.
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"Ok, you were right," Hiccup sing songs through an irrationally thick throat, sitting beside Astrid's hospital bed and looking at everything but her bandaged and elevated leg. "The anesthetic was a big deal after all…you had a reaction, but that seems like sort of an understatement.
"I think they gave you too much because you insisted on telling them how tough you are, and they probably believed you," he laughs to himself, grin slowly fading to a frown as her face remains slack. "You would have punched me for that one…softy," he taunts to no avail, tapping his foot against the floor and abating the waiting silence with the frenetic clicking. "I don't think I've ever seen you this still, even when you're asleep you're twitching."
He pauses to stroke the crest of her wrist, jagging between three cocoa brown freckles in a crooked line. She looks small, taking up barely half the bed with her knee propped up on a pile of pillows. He doesn't like that she looks small, it's wrong in his brain, something seems woefully out of place. She's supposed to be animated and awake, confident and sure of herself in the face of something daunting.
He doesn't like seeing her broken down and still. She looks almost too perfect, like a china doll in the midst of playing hospital, tan against the white sheets with perfectly smooth skin, only interrupted by unusually pale lips. She's normally more colorful, flushed and healthy, but something about her lying prone awakens a normally useless protective urge in the base of his chest.
He wants to climb on the bed with her, holding her close to him and making sure that her even breathing and slow paced heartbeat maintains itself. The idea of being that close to her right now makes him flush, and his eyes almost greedily take in the smooth planes of her cheeks and the cute way that her ears stick out and peek through her messy hair, falling out of her ponytail.
"Sometimes I forget just how pretty you are," he says more quietly, imaging the wonderfully animated eye roll that he'd receive if she could hear any of this. "When you're not snoring or making faces at Spike—and this is amazing that you haven't woken up to hit me—but it's sort of easy to forget you're…pretty much perfect.
"Not that I don't always think you're beautiful, because I do," he backpedals, and all of this seems ridiculously private and public all at once. Anyone could walk in right now, his father, nurses, Ruff popping down for a surprise visit and pretending that she's not worried, but at the same time every thought in his head is safe and protected by the shield of silence. "You look smaller than normal. I guess when you're up and moving you seem a lot bigger. Maybe that's on purpose…and I guess it works because you fooled the anesthesiologist.
"Honestly, I want to deck that guy," he laughs lightly, scooting his chair forward until his knees rasp against the sheets. His hand slithers over the covers and engulfs her small limp one, shrouding it entirely from view. "And I know you'd say he's yours to punch, but that's the glory of you sleeping, there's no one to restrain all this manliness." It's not as funny without her there to scoff and grin and his voice dips slightly. "They're keeping you over night," he informs her, oddly fixated on the utterly relaxed skin between her eyebrows, where she almost always seems to hold her expressions aloft, "but they'll kick me out at eight, and I doubt I'm scary, charming, or sneaky enough to convince them to let me stay.
"Plus, this chair sucks," he sighs and shifts, trying futilely to get comfortable. "It feels like it's reverse forming to me." He can't help but think about all of those countless hours during those three weeks she must have pretzeled herself into a chair like this. It's not something that he's even trying to repay, she didn't have any reason to do this back then, but it puts his hours old discomfort into perspective. "Now I know why you fell in love with me, anything in the room was better than the chair, and the IV bag turned you down .
"That has always been sort of a mystery," he sighs after a too quiet moment, waiting for her to speak and of course hearing nothing. "One day you were terrifying me with kisses, which I was not ready for by the way," he laughs and squeezes her hand gently in his, like he's afraid of breaking it. She'd hate that. "And the next day you were crying over me and staying all night in an uncomfortable-ass chair and holding my hand…you're lucky the shock didn't kill me.
"I'm still sort of surprised that it didn't kill me, if we're honest," he shakes his head, sympathetic to that terrified eighteen year old boy that he used to be, too confused and wrenched and misplaced to be properly elated. "I don't think I'm ever going to fully put together what happened while I was out. I mean, obviously my dad found his long lost best friend, and Toothless gained a mom, and you figured yourself out…and I laid there, probably looking way less tragically beautiful than you do now.
"And I know that you didn't love me before, it was what? Two days since you broke up with Scott? And we'd kissed twice?" He shakes his head, eternally wishing he'd known to press her against the door and make out with her when she'd showed up in the middle of the night and kissed him.
Hey, even if he had messed up, it's not like he'd even remember it anyway. He still only has a patchwork of that weekend, strung together by Astrid's extremely inaccurate and unflattering impression of him utterly terrified.
She laughs about that night now, but he gets the impression she was pretty crushed at the instant.
Crushed, not heartbroken.
Not the way she felt when they almost fell apart that next spring. She's ever more elegant than he is, and refers to those weeks as a plague on their relationship. Something evil that settled like a dark cloud and fed on fizzling the still new energy between them.
A plague like that would have made obscenely quick work of whatever spark they'd kindled before his accident. Extremely amplified them in a second and left a puddle of destroyed cells where something new had just been growing.
"Was it the silence that did it?" He ponders aloud, thumb stroking her skinny, still wrist. "Was I suddenly charming and dashing as soon as I shut up for five minutes?" He laughs at his own suggestion, "I don't think you'll ever tell me, and it's less likely that I'll figure out how your brain works.
"And I guess I'm ok with a forever not knowing," he smiles to himself and shakes his head. "See that's what you do, Astrid. You took a perfectly sane kid and turned him into a man who doesn't even care how your brain works, only that it does. And I completely blame the urge to punch doctors on you. That's entirely your fault.
"You're a good influence, Hofferson," he nods, tapping of his metal foot resuming. "I don't…I used to be all in my head, you know? And I thought I knew everything, right on schedule for a seventeen year old, I know, but—
"Your heart is beating really slowly." He pauses to look at her heart rate monitor, even and demure in a way Astrid isn't. "They gave you too much. Seriously, it's doctor punching time," he makes no move to stand, gripping her hand gently in his and fingering a flat white scar across her knuckles. "I don't know what I'd do without—
"What would I have done with Toothless? Somehow drag him to Harvard with me? Right, 'hey roomie, hope you don't mind my wolf sleeping in the corner'." Hiccup swallows hard, thinking of everything that's different because of that other, longer hospital stay. "I don't know if I ever would have stood up to anyone, you know? But I started right near the top of that pyramid, pissing you off…
"That kid whose arm you broke…he was alright, but I swear he'd have fainted if I'd told him that we'd end up—be, just be—I promise I'm not creepily proposing to your unconscious body—together. He was smart but he didn't know what the hell he was doing.
"He sort of wasn't doing anything…just drifting. He spent half of his time corralling Toothless and Spike and Meatlug further away from the world, and the other half wondering why he was lonely…It could have been worse than that number you did on my arm, I really didn't have that much longer to make a decision about…I didn't have a plan besides 'don't do what dad wants'
"At some point, I don't even remember when, you told me that I made you want to be better, but you made me want to be more. I didn't want to be some geeky dog trainer. I wanted you to be—I wanted you to think that I was better than Scott and that meant I worked on impressing you.
"And impressing you happened to cross through a whole lot of dignity check points." Her fingers twitch lethargically in his and his heart beats faster along with her machines, she mumbles inarticulately before fading back into that deep sleep. Her jaw slips slightly crooked as a wheezy snore slips out, and she's suddenly his Astrid again, instead of the untouchably beautiful body snatcher who occupied the bed a moment before. He grins and stands just enough to kiss her forehead.
She responds with a remarkably chainsaw like sound and he sighs fondly.
"Well, that's back to normal ."
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Public Service announcement:
So, it seems that a few people are asking about ACL injuries, which must mean that there are another 20 people who aren't asking. Basically, and I'm going to try to keep from biomechanically geeking out here, the ACL is one of the crucial ligaments that connects the upper leg to the lower leg. It commonly tears in female athletes, normally from a combination of general wear and tear and a catastrophic event such as a tackle or a fall.
It does require surgery, because there is no bloodflow directly to the ligament, and this is a surgery that has really been reformed in the last ten years. It's now something that encourages the patient back on their feet, rather than laying down, and it's now a surgery that is done right away rather than waiting and forcing the knee to heal from two separate events.
If anyone has any specific questions, feel free to PM me or leave them in a review! This stuff is crazy interesting to me.
Thanks for coming back with so much enthusiasm, it means the world.