Thanks to hippiechick2112 and feathered moon wings for reviewing!
Chris goes to see her again after work, and again. And after that. Their walks become a regular part of the day, mostly discussing airplanes, but occasionally drifting into other things. He learns that she enjoys reading poetry and works afternoons because she still attends school. He enlisted at eighteen and is twenty now, not so large a gap that he oughtn't look a bit.
(So he does.)
They talk about home. He has three little siblings back in Akron and sends most of his pay home. It's 1936, seven years into a real long, real sparse time.
"Did you know there was a march on the capitol just four years ago?" she asks. "Had you heard of it?"
Chris dismisses the matter: "Bolshies stirring things up as usual."
The look on her face is argument enough. She adds words, anyway. "They were veterans. They were given promises of bonuses to be paid years later, they were out of work and desperate. You would call the men who defeated the Hun Bolsheviks?"
"Of course I wouldn't!"
The veterans of the Great War are heroes. Chris would never suggest they were the same as the greatest threat to democracy and the United States of America.
But she is younger and a woman at that, and he simply can't believe he is being put in his place. So he argues, "You're mistaken."
"How do you know?"
"How do you?"
He tries not to wince at how he sounds like a child saying so, but it is fair. Isn't it?
"Because I read, I pay attention! The government you work for refused to help the men who served it, and this has happened before. From the very founding of our country!"
Chris scoffs. Shakes his head. All nonsense.
"Look up Shays' Rebellion. Try the dusty, un-American section of the library."
He says to this things he'll regret later.
Hank confirmed what Ruth already suspected: Ororo's arm was broken. Hank was the go-to medic for scrapes, bruises, burns, and anything involving Scott who was afraid of doctors and syringes. For Ororo's broken arm, they went to the hospital. Ruth paused only long enough to pick up a folder from Charles's study.
Ororo noticed the folder in the car, but it didn't seem important then, not compared to how her arm hurt at every pothole and speed bump. The jolting motion seemed to settle exclusive in her arm.
They didn't speak on the drive. Occasionally the car jolted or Ororo moved and she tried to keep the flood in her eyes to a minimum. She really didn't want to do that. Or talk about it.
Only, when she had parked at the hospital, Ruth turned to Ororo and said, "Listen to me. You fell out of a tree. Understand? You were climbing a tree and you fell. That is how you hurt your arm."
Ororo nodded. "The elm." That was her favorite tree to climb. She never fell out of it, but she understood: telling these people the truth was out of the question.
Ruth took the folder with them. When she was talking to a woman at the front desk, she showed the woman some of the pages. Ororo noticed, but didn't pay attention. They were pages of letters, of course. Ororo was hurt. Was there any better excuse for taking a day off from reading?
Besides, the hospital was interesting. It smelled chemical and sickly sweet, like they used the same cleaning stuff here as the orphanage. There were other people, other sick people, though not many. A woman in white called someone through a pair of double doors and a pink-striped smock carried a stack of sheets.
Ororo had never seen a place like this and wasn't sure she cared for it. It was like something Hank would build, only without the comfortable places next door like at the mansion.
"It should only be a few minutes," Ruth said.
Ororo nodded.
"Can I go to the candy machine?" she asked.
"With that arm?"
"I only need one arm for candy."
Ruth fished a handful of coins from the bottom of her purse and, trying not to jostle the busted arm, Ororo walked over to the vending machine.
Using it with a busted arm actually was challenging. She needed to sort the coins by feel, keeping the lot in her pocket, until she found what she thought was a nickel. Nickels were kind of confusing, though. Pennies were easy to sort out because they were so thin, but she always thought nickels would be the smallest and instead dropped a dime into the candy machine.
She bought a packet of Twizzlers, which she tucked into her pocket for later, and a box of Lemonheads, which she was trying to open as she made her way back to Ruth. That took her focus off her surroundings, though.
When someone bumped into her she swore.
Loudly.
The person who had bumped into her stared, not sure how to handle this small, angry girl. She was so little but giving him a very rude look. Had she not been crying, he would have shouted.
She was, though. Her arm really hurt.
Ruth was at her side before Ororo could do or say anything she would regret.
And just that moment, a nurse struggled to call her next patient: "Or… um… Oro-oro Munroe?"
Ororo looked up at Ruth. She knew there might be consequences for this. Sometimes when Scott swore, Professor Xavier threatened to wash his mouth out with soap. While that seemed to be a joke, or at least an empty threat, shouting rude words in a hospital probably topped what Scott called the clogged sink.
Finally Ruth grinned. "Come on, Oro-oro."
In spite of the situation, Ororo giggled.
The nurse led them through a maze of hallways that all smelled like that same cloying cleanser, explaining, "Before a doctor can see you to set that bone, we'll take an x-ray to confirm and locate the break."
Ruth translated the word 'x-ray'. When Ororo still looked blank, she explained, "A special camera for taking pictures of bones."
Ororo stared, not because of what Ruth said but because of the way she said it. She didn't sound like her usual self—she sounded like Charles!
"Where is she from?" the nurse asked.
Ororo decided she did not like this woman, with her pinned-up short hair and her severe expression—and her assumption that being from another country meant being deaf and dumb.
Rather than answer, Ruth looked to Ororo. "Bati?"
Well, what could she say?
Ororo used to think of her past in terms of names. She went by Squatter in Cairo. Among the Maasai, she had been Wind Rider. Only when she came to the United States did she fish out the name her long-gone parents gave her, the name she used now.
"I am from New York," she said.
Ruth carefully placed an arm around her shoulders.
The x-ray turned out to be a giant camera hanging over a bed. It looked like a torture machine, like in that story The Pit and the Pendulum. (Ororo liked short stories a lot more than novels!) The x-ray machine was not a pendulum, but it looked looming-like.
"Lie down under the machine," the nurse said.
Ororo thought a rude word at her.
Ruth repeated the instruction in Arabic. Ororo took a deep breath and hopped onto the bed. Were they beds, these funny slabs people laid on in hospitals?
"Can't understand English, honestly, the sorts of people these days…"
"She understands perfectly," Ruth replied, again using Charles's lofty, vaguely condescending English accent.
Ororo forced herself to look up at the x-ray machine. Her heart raced, but she forced herself to take steady breaths. Look at the machine and breathe, because if she looked away she was sure it would creep closer. It would… she didn't… it was pressing down on her and she couldn't breathe properly!
The machine overhead made her think of buildings collapsing. The metal against her back reminded her of a car, of a hand against her throat.
"Ororo?"
Ruth took her hand and stroked her face gently. No one had done that in years. Ororo wanted to resent it.
"I can't," she murmured. Ruth could know. That sour-faced nurse could not.
"You have to," Ruth replied. "It's to make you better, habibti."
"Couldn't we do this at home? Couldn't Hank…?"
"No, it must be here. Hank cannot."
"If we could get on with this?" the nurse said. It was routine to her, those x-rays, and a nervous young person little more than an inconvenience.
Ororo shook her head and tightened her grip on Ruth's hand.
"Here." Ruth reached up and unfastened her necklace.
A year ago, when Scott suggested that Ruth and Ororo came from similar places, Ororo snapped at him for suggesting that Ruth could possibly understand her experiences. She said that a Jew could not possibly know what it was like to be Cairene. Now she didn't care that it was a Star of David. It was Ruth's necklace and Ororo squeezed it in her good hand as the machine above her whirred.
When the x-rays were finished, the nurse seemed glad to leave Ruth and Ororo in an exam room. Ororo was glad to see her go, too.
They sat quietly for a while. When her panic receded, the pain in Ororo's arm returned. Nevertheless, she had to say, "I didn't fall."
"I know."
"No. I didn't—"
"Looks like a fractured ulna in here," the doctor commented, stepping into the room. He looked between Ororo and Ruth, the uncertainty clear on his face. He didn't comment, though.
Ororo wasn't sure which was worse: the doctor feeling her arm to find the break, or the feeling as he pulled the bone into place. She squirmed at the former. At the latter, she outright shrieked—partly at the pain, partly in outrage at the pain.
As he wrapped layers of cotton around her arm, Ororo asked in Arabic, "What is that folder, anyway?"
Ruth had kept the folder close the entire time, occasionally bringing out a page from it.
"This is your file—your insurance and foster paperwork are in here. Among other things."
Well, that explained why she kept turning to it, anyway.
"Do the others have them?"
"Doug and Laurie's are different because they are only students," Ruth explained. "Scott has one much like yours. I was relieved Charles adopted him. If anything should have happened…"
"Like it matters," Ororo sulked. "Scott looks just like you."
Ruth chuckled. "Scott looks just like his father. How that man has not noticed…" and she shook her head. "How is your reading coming?"
Ororo sighed. "I can't have one day off? I got hurt!"
"Because you jumped off Mr. Summers's ship! But I suppose a day off would not be the worst thing."