#for star

“Keep away from me.” Star warns, low and dangerous, her expression cold. "I’m dealing with it, Tracy, it's none of your concern.” The last thing any of them expected from their trip to NYC was for Star to come back from a groceries errand with what looks like a horrible stab wound instead of the tea, Crocky Crunch cereal and fresh fruit she'd gone for.

She’s pretty sure that she hasn't been followed back here, though. She’d been careful - done several loops around the block, trying to blend into the shadows, to be certain that nothing could be traced back to the Tracy's - because while turning up at the hotel bruised, battered and bleeding wasn't exactly ideal, Star hadn’t really had much of a choice in the matter. She has nowhere else to go, after all. She’d hoped to sneak past both of the Tracy's rooms to her own without alerting them to the situation, but Scott, having chosen exactly the wrong moment to head for the bar downstairs, had scuppered that.

Stupid Scott, she thinks, scowling even as blood continues to seep steadily into the fibres of her shirt. Stupid Scott and his terrible timing.

John's been giving lectures here in NYC and Scott had kindly offered to be their pilot - as, outside of an emergency, neither spacefarer can be cleared to be in control of any vehicle, let alone a plane like the Tracy Two, for 48 hours after touchdown.

“But-” Scott opens his mouth to start to protest, but Star is already strategically shuffling away from him, toward the safety of her hotel room - paid for with Tracy money, she notes, as a sign of trust that she'll keep herself out of trouble or else the GDF will want her back in a cell. 

The only problem with that is that trouble tends to find her.

With blood-slippery fingers, Star swipes the room card shakily through the scanner on her door and shoves her way through it, kicking it shut behind her before Scott can catch up and get his foot in. There’s a hammering of fists on wood on the other side but Star resolutely ignores it, stumbling instead into the small, adjoining bathroom only for her knees to give out and she’s pitched, face first, onto the floor.

Star opens her eyes, hazy and unamused, to find her cheek pressed against cold tile, her fingers curled and bloodied in front of her face. Star bites back a groan, slapping both palms down and heaving herself to more of a sitting position; slouched and awful, before curling around the ragged, awful slash across her waist.

Oh fuck does it hurt.

She’s just peeling up the bloodied mess of her t-shirt when, of course, there’s a soft, quiet rap of knuckles against the bathroom door, and Star almost rolls her eyes because she knows exactly who Scott’s sicced on her.

“You can come in, John.” There’s an edge of what almost might be misery to her tone. This is what she gets for the GDF insisting that if she’s going to be on Earth, their hotel rooms have to be conjoined by the bathroom. So John can keep an eye on her, or the other way round, Star’s not sure at this point.

“What happened?” Tall, ginger and worried asks, ever so gently, already crouching at her side, and Star’s torn between the temptation to burst into tears, or to hit him for making her feel that way. There’s a chunky, green first aid kit in his hand (definitely IR standard, not the hotel’s), so he must have been warned. She watches him languidly, as he sets it down and clicks it open.

“I don’t want to talk about it.” She insists, fully aware that it’s not going to be long before she does anyway. John just hums, non-committal and light, pulling a pair of blue plastic gloves on over his fingers with a snap, snap.

“Star.” John’s watching her, quiet and earnest. 

She does her best to crack a weak smile in his direction, but it must fall flat because he looks nothing but soft and serious in return. There’s a creeping fire spreading from her side and wrapping around her ribs, pooling in her lungs and she’s torn between reaching for him, clinging tight and crying and the way her skin itches with the ingrained need to run away.

She stays where she is, frozen and trembling on the cold tiles of a bathroom that's not her own. It’s probably lucky that tile is one of the easier things to clean blood up from.

She would know.

“Hey.” John’s crouching to match her hazy eyeline, fingers hovering close, but not touching. “Think it’d be ok for me to have a look?” He treats her as far more startled bunny in headlights than snake coiled to strike and Star wants to cry; ‘don't you know what I’m capable of! Don’t you know that I could hurt you! Put you and all of your precious brothers in danger just by being near you!’ But she doesn’t, because John’s smart. John already knows all that and he’s here for her anyway.

Her face is an uncomfortably ashy grey and John would rather deal with the horrific amount of blood smeared on her side and fingers and floor before they need to look into transfusion options.

She just nods, stiff and uncomfortable and in pain. Her teeth ache.

“Take your shirt off,” he instructs. If it was anyone else, she’d have made some kind of joke about them having to buy her a drink first, but this is John and he’s about as into that sort of thing as one of the plant’s he’s cultivating up in space would be, so she just sighs and lets him help her peel the sticky, clinging fabric from the wound and up over her head.

Her waist is a weeping wash of red and John pulls a face to show that he’s less than impressed. The long knife wound is clean across and doesn’t look too deep, but it’s raw and juicy with new blood and the skin around it already has a dark wash of purple bruising. John goes a little bit grey-pale at the sight of it - a fresh reminder that they’ve both been on the planet less than 24 hours.

“You ok?” She brings a wobbly hand up to catch on his elbow, just below where he’s rolled his sweater up to his elbows so that she doesn’t get bloody fingerprints on Grandma Tracy’s rough cableknit.

“I’m not the one with the nasty, jagged slice across my stomach.” John points out, dryly, and it’s not like she can deny that. He slides a steadying hand around her back and Star has to resist the urge to hold her breath as he inspects the injury.

She just wants to curl up in bed with a blanket over her head and not exist for a few hours. She wants to go home and that’s an odd feeling to clash with the presence of the careful ginger man who’s rapidly become the definition of the word.

“You didn’t get me strawberries then,” John comments, lightly, as he works. The spaceman’s sweet tooth is practically non-existent until it comes to fruit. She knows his weakness. “This might sting a bit.” He says, though both of them are well aware it’s an understatement.

“Next t-time.” There’s a bit of a wheeze as John swipes a sterile wipe over her stomach, busy cleaning up the wound. She’s got one hand clamped tightly onto his shoulder now, white-knuckled, not quite sure how it had ended up there when she’d been so careful about not getting his sweater bloodied. She hopes he’s not going to have bruises on that pale skin of his in the morning.

She closes her eyes and tips her head back, trying to get better control over her shaky breathing. 

“I’m going to start closing this.” He advises, carefully judging her grimace as he presses the wound closed with his fingers, squelchy and horrible, but ready for him to begin applying steri strips from the first aid kit. It’s a tricky job with her curled over like she is, and when every breath she takes pulls at the skin, so John places a firm but careful hand on her shoulder and pushes her back flat against the tile wall so that he can see what he’s doing.

To his credit, he is, at least, quick about it.

"If I suggest that you should probably get this checked by a hospital,” John adds, gently probing at his fix-up-job of the angry, swollen wound, before he puts a triage bandage over it. “are you gonna try to run for it?"

He'd rather have a second opinion on if this needs more than steri strips to hold it closed, and though he could holo-call Virgil, he'd rather not risk her wrath. She doesn’t dignify the idea with an answer though, instead, angling her cheek away from him and breathing hard through her nose to try and get a handle on the pain.

"I'll compromise," He says, with the tone of a man who knows he'll get what he wants either way, "take some morphine and a full spectrum antibiotic and… uh-ha-ha," he holds up a hand to keep her from interrupting him with protests, "There could have been anything on that, uh… knife?” It looks like a knife wound. “Take both of these and I'll not drag you to A&E by your floppy bangs."

Like he could. Star would almost be amused by the attempted bribery if not for the agony her side is in. Each breath tastes like fire now, and the round circles John presses into her palm are a couple of miniature blessings.

"And I don't have to explain myself to Scott." She's not going to anyway, but it feels like an important thing to add to the bargain before she knocks the drugs back.

"No ones gonna make you talk to Scott." John reaffirms, "but you know he's just worried. He's a big brother, it's what he does best. I imagine he'll have called Virgil to freak out about it though.”

Great. Another worrywart with questions. Just what she needs.

Virgil isn’t so bad though, there’s something calming about the family’s gentle giant, and she’s watched him patch John up more than enough times to trust he knows what he’s doing. Unlike Scott, Virgil’s knows when not to stick his nose into something.

“John…” There’s something else worrying her, nagging at her, something far worse than a stab wound because it could cost her her place aboard Thunderbird Five. “You’re not going to... report this to the GDF, uh, are you?” She’s not supposed to go off on her own, for one, and scrapping with some old familiar faces isn’t going to earn her any gold stars on the behave and we’ll let you stay with John chart.

It was a weird mix of punishment and witness protection and a favor from John’s Aunt Val that put her up there in the first place, and while at first, she’d have done almost anything to be anywhere but, Thunderbird Five… well, John’s grown on her.

“I think the bigger problem will be convincing Scott that it’s none of his business.” John points out lightly, “Dare I ask what happened?” Her face is losing color by the second. It seems important to keep her talking. Can’t be unconscious if you’re talking.

“People don’t like to go down without a fight.’ Star offers him the widest grin she can manage, revealing that one of her front teeth is a little chipped. “Gangs with long-standing grudges especially.”

John shakes his head, slow and disparaging.

“Right. Of course. Think you can stand?” When she nods slowly in confirmation, John gently leavers her upright, waiting patiently the few seconds it takes for her to blink the phosphenes from her vision as the blood drains away from her head. Both her hands find his shoulders again, but he doesn’t seem to mind.

“It’s lucky it wasn’t too deep.” John sighs, probably more to himself than anyone. She tilts her head back down to find him looking at the covered patch on her side. “Those bruises do look bad though, it really would be better if someone could check you for internal injury.” He glances at her face from beneath a sweep of golden-ginger lashes, waiting for an answer. When she doesn’t offer him one, he sighs. “I could call Virgil and make him run a scan and-”

“Tomorrow, John.” Her head falls, heavy, onto his shoulder with a bit of a thunk. “I just wanna go to bed.” The last bit comes out as not much more than a whisper.

“Right then, come on.” John slides a supportive arm around her back, careful not to let his fingers brush skin. “Bed it is.”

Star swivels around so she can wrap her arms around his waist and press her face into his shoulder, trying to get as close to the warmth as possible. With John here, she doesn't really want to go back to where she's sleeping. Alone everything seems so… dangerous. The hotel filters in the sounds of the streets, people she doesn’t know in the corridors, threats from every angle. It creeps her out a little, and so she clings to John a little tighter. She starts mumbling again, trying to tell him she'll happily sleep on the floor if it means she doesn't have to be alone.

“Star…? Star.” He sighs, supporting more of her slight weight, shaking his head fondly. “Fine, ok, I’ll stay with you. You’re as bad as Alan, wanting to sleep on the floor. What am I going to do with you?” He laughs, and she feels it verberate through his chest. “Come on, you’re not alone.”

He pulls at her shoulder, half spinning her in an almost dance-like move as he lets her knees crumple and Star finds herself sitting on the plush hotel bed. Very gently, John tugs up the comforter and drapes it over her shoulders, like a blanket-cape.

He vanishes, briefly, to go find her a new, clean t-shirt and a pair of sleep sweats and looks entirely unsurprised when he comes back with one of his own, faded t-shirts in hand, pilfered by her long ago.

"I did wonder where this had gone." He points out, softly amused, as he helps manoeuvre it over her head. "You could at least leave me an IOU so I know what you've… borrowed." It's a kinder word than stolen but John's well aware of the chances of him getting things back once they've made their way into Star’s wardrobe.

Just as well his Father was a billionaire, really. John hardly minds a few things going missing here and there when they're going to a girl who has so very little in the way of her own possessions and no money to her name. He's caught her liberating his bank cards more than once, and it had only prompted a conversation about asking first before he sighs and hands the plastic over.

Privately, John thinks that had she not have wanted to be caught, she wouldn't have been.