LJ Idol Season 9, Week 19 - Kindling
Kara took slow steps across the sick bay. The muscles in her hip protested as she forced them to move and, had anyone been watching, the grimace on her face would have made it clear how much effort the movement was costing her. Not that she would have been allowed to walk around if anyone had been watching her. She was sure that was part of the problem, actually. The enforced bed rest after her backside’s kissing glance with vacuum was part of the reason for the stiffness. Isometric exercises lying in bed could only do so much. And she was as sure as could be that the doctor had no valid theory behind her worry about incipient blood clots.
Still, she wasn’t going to give Doctor Know-It-All the satisfaction of arguing with her. She could nod and play the good little girl card while the medical staff was around, and then do her own thing when they left her alone. No matter how much it hurt, dammit. Kara didn’t notice she was rubbing the half-dollar sized scab on her backside until she started to scratch it. It felt so good that she didn’t stop until she felt bits of scab under her fingernails.
Oops. They weren’t going to like that. Every time the damn thing bled, they wanted to do more tests. There was nothing wrong with it, it just itched. Didn’t doctors know that meant it was healing? Still, she looked around for something to dab off the blood so they wouldn’t see that she’d scratched it into submission again. Finding a gauze pad in one of the drawers, she dropped trou and started mopping up the mess. Damned inconvenient place for a scab, so low on the buttock.
Kara suddenly became aware of a soft laughter in the room with her. She tried to spin around, but with her pants around her knees… She just barely managed to plant herself in a chair rather than fall on the floor.
Jacob stood with his back to her, his whole body shaking with the effort of not laughing out loud. A small bunch of flowers was in the hand behind his back. The other hand was being used to hold in the laughter.
“And what, exactly, is so funny?” Kara stormed as she stood, pulled her pants back up, and hastily tied the drawstring.
“You went to s-s-so much effort to, to convince the doctors to, heh, let you wear scrubs instead of a h-h-hospital gown,” he took a deep breath. “Just so you w-w-wouldn’t have someone w-w-walk in with your ass b-b-bare to the wind, and then… then…”
He lost it. The muffled laughter turned into a full-on, bent-in-half, knee-slapping guffaw. The flowers were a bit worse for the wear by the time he was done.
When he finally turned around, Kara sat in the chair staring at him. Her arms were crossed, fingers tapping on one arm, foot swinging from a crossed knee. And a very “we are not amused” look on her face. He’d been on the other end of that look before. The thought sobered him up quickly.
“I’m sorry Kara, but you have to admit, it is a bit ironic.” He crossed the room and held out the flowers. “Here, these are for you.”
“Well I sure as hell didn’t think they were for Doctor Wall, now did I?”
Kara snatched the flowers out of his hand and went to the sink to put them into a pitcher turned vase. She dumped out the wilting flowers into the compost chute and stood there for a moment with her back to Jacob, arranging the new bouquet. He watched silently, knowing that he had to allow the humor to sink in or she’d be mad for days.
Jacob waited, and waited. He was starting to get annoyed when he realized that Kara’s back was heaving rhythmically. Crap, she was crying. He was halfway across the room when she turned around.
There were tears streaming down her face, all right, but one look told him that they were caused by laughter rather than sorrow, or anger. Jacob’s worry turned into a smile and then he joined Kara as she crumpled into a little ball of helpless laughter on the floor.
They laughed until they couldn’t breathe. They laughed at it all: the ridiculousness of the situation, the stress of the recent events and Kara’s ‘hospitalization’, the oddity of living aboard a starship mind-paired with aquatic animals, the fears and the worries of colonizing. They laughed until they couldn’t breathe and then, when they caught their breath, they glanced at one another and laughed some more.
In the midst of this, somewhere, an orderly knocked and came in. They didn’t hear him until he sat Kara’s lunch tray down on the side table. They watched him back slowly out of the room, bumping into the bulkhead on his way out, and dissolved into laughter once again as the door closed behind him.
After a while, Jacob lay on his back, staring at the ceiling to avoid looking at Kara and trying catch his breath. When he finally had the hysteria under control, he rolled onto his side and looked at her. Her face was red, hair plastered to the side of her face, her eyes streaming tears; and she was absolutely the most beautiful person he had ever seen
.
He reached over to push her hair off of her face and ended up stroking her cheek.
“I think I’m going to kiss you now.”
Kara smiled. “Took you long enough.”
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This is a part of an ongoing story for LJ Idol, Season 9. In chronological order, the stories are:
Week 5
Week 9
Week 18
Week 11
Week 17
Week 4,
week 12,
Week 7,
Week 16,
Week 8,
Week 6 ( Week 15 kind of wraps around Week 6)
and this week.