Day 10, Pony (Inked cont.) Just a normal evening with a normal rooming group in normal NLA. Gino loses his pants, again.

cw swears, Gino continues to not do so good

All the good things belong to MonolithSoft.

Josephina and her special friend stuck their heads out of the bedroom door, one face over the other, like two-thirds of a stop light. Josephina's curls were sweaty and Susu's eyes were sleepy, and both of them were angry and maybe a little disgusted.

"Oh my god, Diego, not in the common area," Josephina burst out angrily.

"I don't want anything to do with them playing pony," Susu added in her airy-fairy voice.

Diego was dragging Gino down the hall, arms around his chest and with Gino leaning back almost as stiff as a sawhorse. He'd gone from collapsing to frozen with pain by the time Lucky had reached him. "Does this look like fun?" hissed Diego.

"Oh my god, oh my god," Gino was wailing through teeth clamped tight.

Josephina never gave Gino the benefit of the doubt, but Susu nudged her out of the bedroom. Josephina snorted, then ducked around the two men blocking the hallway and wheeled a desk chair towards them. "Plunk him down in this," she suggested.

"Can you bend, man?" Lucky asked Gino.

"Oh my god oh my god," said Gino, flopping sideways into the chair and promptly falling off the side. Josephina stopped him, and Lucky grabbed his shoulder and squeezed hard enough to make a dent. Something about that unexpected pinch made him relax into a shuddering, twitching sitting position.

"Wheel him over to the sofa," said Diego.

"Ugh, his pants. He's nasty. He'll wreck it."

"Screw that. Help me get him comfortable."

Susu raced forward with a towel snatched from the bathroom and threw it over the sofa first. She was wearing one of Josefina's t-shirts, the one with 25 rude things you could do to a Prone. Not for public wear anymore, but Josefina liked it for around the house. Not Susu's style at all, but she'd clearly grabbed the first shirt she could find. Her eyes were almost closed, but she always looked that way.

The things Lucky noticed during a crisis, it made him shake his head. Later, he'd laugh at himself. Now, he was trying not to panic. He was not great in a medical crisis, which made living with Gino tricky. Every day he needed to guess how bad Gino was doing, because he never could bring himself to ask. Mostly Gino took care of it himself. If he was being obvious, then it must be worse than normal. Tonight Diego couldn't even guess how bad it was. Gino was grimacing and shaking, but being on the sofa seemed to help. At least he wasn't making the choking noises from earlier. He coughed, hard, and tried to say something. Diego didn't catch it.

Susu giggled. "He says we need to take off his pants."

Josefina glared down at Gino. "I'm out. You're on your own."

"No worries," Diego said. "Gino, my guy, if it's okay with you...?" He was going to accept Gino's grunt as agreement. Snaps, zipper, waistband, nothing surprising. Gino even managed to wriggle when Diego needed to pull past the hips, almost helpful. The last stretch would have been easy if he'd remembered to get Gino's boots off first. He hurried to fix his blunder.

That's why Josephina noticed first. "Holy shit, what have you been doing to yourself?"

a/n: Not sure why I wanted to write that, but oh well. At least Susu now has a name (she's showed up 5 years ago in another story nameless)

Next up: Inked continues. Scrabble. Oh come on, I managed "pony" but this is too hard.