the dare (the mighty ducks)

chapter thirty-two

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chapter thirty-two: a vague sort of truce on behalf of louise riley

a/n:

my only defense is that I have none.

tw(s) - medical stuff (it's very greys anatomy ngl.) poetic descriptions of gore. mentions of drugs (lou is on morphine, scott and averman make jokes at her expense) and alcohol and cigarettes (nothing is drunk or smoked.) cheating/infidelity. implications of sex between two characters. a relationship with an insane power imbalance.

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Appendicitis. A condition in which the appendix, an organ made useless by time, gets infected, becoming inflamed and filling with pus. The most common symptoms are abdominal pain, fever, loss of appetite, and nausea. For two days, Louise sat up in her bedroom, pumping herself full of medicine and Gatorade, thinking that she was just menstruating while a finger-sized tube of flesh was festering inside of her. How did nobody know? How did none of them figure it out? Jess is a little distracted with legal matters, and neither Rick nor James could tell the difference between a period cramp and an organ moments away from bursting. Is it technically any of their faults? (Probably not. Louise wouldn't blame any of them, would she?)

The man who took Louise into surgery said that her appendix was on the precipice of rupturing. He'd said that, had Ali not done her test and gotten them to the hospital, the "stakes would've been much higher."

In layman's terms, Louise could've died. It wasn't a likely outcome, but it was still a possibility.

Rick's never lost anyone. Sure, there have been funerals - a blur of Forbes or Rileys gathering to celebrate the lives of their late relatives, actually just waiting for the estate to be chopped up into inheritable-sized pieces. He never knew any of the deceased, though. His job at these events was to entertain a fussy James and keep Louise in his peripheral at all times, give her his arm to hold onto and tell her all the gossip he knows about their cousins, make sure she knows who to avoid and why. There were no emotions on his part, no stages of grief. Nothing at stake.

Oh, how the tides have changed

Louise Riley. His little sister. The annoying little shit who stopped eating meat because of a book he bought for her so she'd stop begging him for it, the little girl who crossed the expanse of the dark hallway to crawl into his bed when she was too scared to sleep alone and carefully ate ice cream with him from the passenger seat of his brand new car. His baby sister, almost dead and tucked away in some operating room, her delicate skin giving way under the sharpness of a doctor's blade, all of her secrets and her entrails exposed for all the world to see. (Can she feel it? Does she know that they're seeing that much of her? If only he could safely wrap her up in a blanket and take her far away from here.) She's probably bleeding. Louise is always bleeding. She was bleeding that day in her bed when Fulton Reed's truth cracked her chest open, and she was bleeding that night their father told her that he never loved her in the first place, and she bled that day on the playground when he failed her --

Rick shakes his head as if he can shake the thoughts from his mind and presses his thumbs into his eyes so hard that a kaleidoscope of colors dances across his eyelids.

The hospital waiting room is a small one with a single entrance. Rows of chairs line the walls and knee-high tables sit in the center, littered with magazines for entertainment. No one has touched them. There are a dozen people in here with them and they haven't picked up a magazine. He thinks that they, with their blank faces and their handkerchiefs and their rosaries, will haunt him.