Chapter Thirteen: Doctor Mac
Derrick crouched down to let Cassie climb on his back, then followed MacGyver as he carried Dylan up to the house with an arm still around Cindy's shoulders. *
"All right, Dylan, let's check and see if we need to make a trip to the doctor," MacGyver said cheerfully as they entered the house.
"No!" Dylan cried. "I don't wanna! Don't make me, Mr Mac, please!"
"Whoa, whoa, hey; easy! I can patch you up here if you're not hurt too bad, but what's so scary about going to the doctor?" Part of his near-hysterical response was a reaction to this fright at falling in the pit, MacGyver knew, but his apparent fear of doctors was also real.
"I won't want to go to the doctor!" Dylan insisted, crying now.
"Shh," MacGyver soothed, rocking him gently. He glanced toward the others. "Anyone know why he's so scared?"
"Mummy says we have to go to the doctor if we're bad!" Cassie declared.
MacGyver frowned, not liking the idea of contradicting their mother, but also not liking that she had used the doctor as a threat. "Shh, Dylan, it's okay. I'm not mad at ya, buddy; you didn't do anything wrong."
"But you said you might make me go to the doctor!" Dylan wailed.
"The doctor isn't a monster, Dylan," MacGyver told him. "When you get hurt or sick, he's there to help you get better. You might have to see him when you're naughty because that's when you're most likely to get hurt, but going to him isn't a punishment." Maybe that was what Celia Witowski had meant, he reflected, and the kids had misunderstood.
"Oh," Dylan sniffled, wiping his nose on MacGyver's shirt. "But I still don't wanna."
"Well, let's take a look and see; maybe ya won't have to. You kids know if you've got a first aid kit anywhere around here?"
Cindy shrugged. "There's band-aids and stuff in the medicine cabinet."
MacGyver frowned, dubious about the "and stuff." As wild as the kids were, he imagined they got hurt fairly often, but most of it, like Dylan's scratched face earlier in the week, probably required only washing, and he suspected the more minor scratches didn't even get that. "One of ya run out to my jeep; bring me the first aid kit from between the seats. Here, Dylan, hang on a minute, buddy." Sitting the boy on the counter, he quickly washed his hands at the kitchen sink, then carried Dylan to the living room and laid him on the sofa.
"Okay, let me have a look where those boards got ya." He gently pulled up the boy's shirt and felt a stab of unease.
Once, he had been chaperoning a group of young gang members when the plane they were in went down. One of them had been injured internally, the location eerily similar to the dark bruise on Dylan's side.
But it wasn't the same, he reminded himself firmly. If Dylan was hurt, he had two good vehicles to get him to a doctor, or he could even call for an ambulance if the situation warranted.
And there was no need to worry about any of that because Dylan's belly was soft under his touch, with no sign of internal injury. "Looks like you're just bruised and scraped up, buddy," he said with relief in his voice, pushing the earlier incident to the back of his mind.
"So I don't have to go to the doctor?" Dylan asked anxiously.
"Nope." He looked up as Cindy and Derrick came back in with the first aid kit. "Hey, thanks." He snapped open the latches with the comfortable sense of knowing exactly what the box contained. "This might sting a little, Dylan," he warned, soaking a piece of gauze in antiseptic.
"That's okay; I'm brave!"
MacGyver smiled to see Dylan acting more like his normal self. "You sure are," he agreed.
"Ow!" Dylan yelped, grimacing as MacGyver swabbed the broken flesh. He glanced toward his siblings, and MacGyver grinned, guessing the yelps were meant to impress on them how much it hurt and how brave he was being not to cry.
"Looks like ya got a couple splinters in there, buddy," MacGyver noted.
"Want a needle?" Cindy offered. "That's what Ma uses."
"Yeah, she pokes and pokes!" Dylan added, shrinking back.
"Thanks, but I've got tweezers in my knife here." He flipped the blade open and wiped it down with alcohol. The splinters were large enough to be easy to grasp, and Dylan winced only a little as MacGyver deftly extracted them. "Wasn't so bad, was it?"
"Nuh-uh."
MacGyver swabbed the area once more, then spread ointment over it and taped on a gauze bandage. He felt above it just to be sure Dylan's ribs hadn't been injured, then once more pressed a hand to the boy's belly, still trying to banish the haunting image of Ramone's earlier injury from his mind.
"Okay, that was the worst; let's see if anything else needs attention. Anywhere hurt, buddy?"
"Here," Dylan said, rubbing a hand under his arms.
"Yeah…looks like ya got some rope burn there," MacGyver commented, pushing his shirt up further to check. "Not much I can do for that; it'll heal up in a day or two." He glanced toward the others. "How about you two; your hands all right?"
Cindy examined her hands thoughtfully, frowning as she realized now that they did hurt. "I guess the rope got me, too," she admitted.
"Let's see." MacGyver took her hands and whistled softly. "Whew, looks like you've got some rope fibers in your hand here."
Cindy shrugged. "It's okay, Mr Mac; it doesn't really hurt."
"Nope, and it'll hurt less when I get them out."
Cindy closed her eyes, unable to make herself watch as MacGyver once more used the tweezers blade to pull the fibers out.
"All right, go wash up good with soap and water, and you should be fine. Derrick, how about you?"
Derrick rubbed his hands together. "Mine are a little sore, but I don't think anything's stuck in them."
"Wash up, then, and let me know if it starts getting more sore."
"Look at my hands, Mr Mac!" Cassie demanded.
MacGyver chuckled and examined the hands she held up to him. "Yours look fine, baby," he told her.
"What about yours, Mr Mac?" Cindy demanded as she returned.
MacGyver glanced briefly at his own palm. "I had the handkerchief around my hand; think I'm all right." His hand did feel slightly bruised from when it had taken the full force of Dylan's weight, and thinking about it made him recall how hard he and Derrick had grabbed Dylan's wrists.
Sure enough, an examination showed signs of bruising, but MacGyver found no indication that there was serious damage. "How're the shoulders, buddy; can ya move all right?" he questioned.
"Uh-huh."
"Let's see." MacGyver felt his shoulders and gently rotated his arms, concerned that they might have been pulled out of joint when first Derrick and then MacGyver had caught him. "Yeah, looks all right." MacGyver pulled Dylan's shirt back down over the bandage. "You're good as new!" he announced, sealing the used gauze in a plastic bag and putting the rest of the items away.
Dylan grinned and sat up. "I'm hungry, Mr Mac!"
"Well, that's a good sign. Cassie and I were in the middle of lunch; if one of ya will run this back to the jeep, I'll fix sandwiches for the rest of ya." He offered Dylan a hand up and headed into the kitchen with the kids trailing behind.
Cindy remained quiet, watching MacGyver almost expectantly.
"Aren't you going to say it?" she demanded as he set her sandwich in front of her.
MacGyver raised an eyebrow. "Say what?"
"'I told you so.'"
"All right…I told you so."
"You didn't hafta say it," Cindy muttered.
"You told me to!" MacGyver protested. "But ya knew without my saying it, didn't you?"
"Yeah," Cindy admitted. "Are you gonna punish us, Mr Mac?"
"Nope. Punishment is just to teach ya that actions have consequences, an' I think ya already figured that out. After lunch, how about we go out and cover up that hole?"
"Okay!" Cindy agreed, understanding from his tone that their earlier misdeeds were as good as forgotten.
Accordingly, after lunch they all trooped out after MacGyver as he led them to the shed. "Thought I saw something in the back here…" he commented, shifting several items to the side to reach what his sharp eye had spotted. "Aha! Thought so," he remarked, pulling two old doors from behind the other miscellaneous objects. He rapped on one with his knuckles. "Solid; good. Your father ever use these for anything?"
"Nuh-uh; they've been here forever," Cindy assured him.
"Yeah, Dad put them out here when we got the house painted and got new ones," Derrick supplied, his memory going back slightly further than Cindy's.
"Then he won't mind if we use them," MacGyver surmised.
The kids looked at each other, wondering how he possibly planned to use a couple old doors.
Leaving the doors for the moment, MacGyver gathered a few other items off the shelves, handing them to Dylan and Cassie.
"Okay, you two, c'mon an' give me a hand with these doors," he told Derrick and Cindy. With MacGyver at one end and the kids at the other, they carried the doors from the shed and up the hill to the pit.
"Set them down here," MacGyver directed, stopping well back from the hole. "All of ya, stay back." Approaching cautiously, he picked up a small stone and tossed it down the black opening, wincing at how many seconds passed before he heard it land. "Whew, that's deep," he muttered, an almost sick feeling in his stomach as he looked at Dylan.
Returning to where the kids stood, he drew a firm line in the dirt with his toe. "Nobody crosses this line," he ordered, meeting their eyes one by one. "Anyone puts as much as a toe across it, I'll change my mind about spankin' ya."
Dylan's foot edged toward the line, the glint in his eye showing that he was thinking of putting exactly one toe over as a joke. But MacGyver's face was deadly serious, looking as if he would turn anyone who disobeyed over his knee then and there, and Dylan thought better of it.
"But how can we help you if we have to stay back here?" Cindy protested, pouting.
"You can help me later," MacGyver promised. "Right now, it'll help me a lot more to know you're not gonna fall in."
"You better not fall in," Cassie warned solemnly.
MacGyver grinned at the little girl. "I won't," he promised, starting to clear away the broken boards from around the hole. Then he laid the doors across it, forming a solid covering.
Taking the wooden stakes from Dylan, he pounded them deep into the earth beside the doors, then drove the nails Cassie carried through the stakes into the sides of the doors.
"There! I'm gonna suggest your father get that filled in, but I guess that'll hold for now."
"What's the hole from?" Cindy wondered.
"An old well, probably," MacGyver hazarded. "C'mon now and help me make a fence around it."
"Why do we need a fence and a cover?" Cindy asked.
"Double safety," MacGyver responded. "Not that I think any of ya would forget where it is an' be foolish enough to go near it."
As the kids helped him make a fence, and through the rest of the afternoon as he played with them in the yard, MacGyver kept a close eye on Dylan. He seemed chipper enough, favoring his side only a little, and ate with a good appetite at dinner.
There was no reason to suppose he'd been hurt worse than it first appeared, MacGyver knew, it was just that odd similarity to the placement of Ramone's injury making him uneasy.
That evening MacGyver told Dylan it was his turn for a bath, and afterward covered his scrapes with a fresh bandage. Then for his own peace of mind, he checked Dylan's belly once more. "How ya feeling; tummy hurt at all?" he questioned. *
"Nuh-uh," Dylan responded.
And if it did, MacGyver reflected, it was as likely to be a result of too much homemade ice cream and strawberry syrup as anything else. "Well, if it starts hurting in the night, you come an' tell me, or tell Derrick. And, Derrick, if he's complaining about any pain in the night, don't worry about disturbing me."
"He's all right, isn't he?" Derrick questioned.
MacGyver forced a smile. "Yeah…'course he is. I'm just bein' a worrywart because of something that happened once to someone else I knew. I know he'll be fine, but if you're not sure, come an' get me. Now get up to bed," he added, pulling the covers over Dylan.
Derrick climbed the ladder to his upper bunk, then leaned his head over the edge. "Good night, Mr Mac."
"Good night," MacGyver responded, and turned out the light on his way out the door.
Next chapter coming next week!
* Illustration for this scene can be found at
www . deviantart . com [slash] femalechauvinist [slash] art [slash] Piggyback-884235518
www . deviantart . com [slash] femalechauvinist [slash] art [slash] Bedtime-Checkup-884235593
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