#stitches cw

Danny corrected his course.  He’d been drifting off.  His eyes were starting to blur, which wasn’t a good sign.  Ahead of him, the doors of Long Now opened.  Clockwork floated between them, still and frowning.  

Danny almost stopped.  But he didn’t quite have enough control over his momentum to do that at the moment, and he practically ran into Clockwork.  

“Hi,” he said as Clockwork pulled him past the doors and into Long Now.  “I was wondering, um, if you could patch me up.”

He looked down at his hands, the ones that had been putting pressure on the great cut on his stomach.  That was a mistake.  His vision grayed out until Clockwork pushed his hands back.  

“I am not the ghost of miracle cures,” said Clockwork, quietly, even as he guided Danny through the air to sit down on…  A table?  This looked like some kind of work table.  “I am unused to sewing flesh.”

“Neither was Tucker,” said Danny.  Even sitting he wobbled, and he had to steady himself against Clockwork’s shoulder.  “Or Sam.  Or Jazz.  I just need to be patched up, I think.  I’ve had worse.”

“I am aware.  I am merely warning you that my methods might not be what you are accustomed to.”

“Uh huh,” said Danny.  He wasn’t really in a position to be picky, but Clockwork really couldn’t be worse than Jazz had been, that first time.  She’d thrown up.  Besides, his body wasn’t nearly as sensitive to things like infection as a human body.  Sew him up, and he’d heal right up.  Well.  Not immediately.  It’d take a few hours.  Or days.  Depending on how badly he was hurt.  

“As long as you know that,” said Clockwork, still quiet, still gentle.  He had a box open on the table, and he was taking things out of it.  “Cuts.  How did you get them?”

“Mm,” said Danny as Clockwork put a pad of cloth up against his shoulder and neck, then moved one of his hands away from his stomach to hold pressure there.  Clockwork put another pad against the big slash on his stomach.  “Guy made out of knives.”

“I see.”

“There’s all sorts of guys here,” said Danny.  “I can’t keep track of them all.”

“Indeed,” said Clockwork.  He had a pair of tiny brass scissors.  He used them to cut away Danny’s suit, sliding the pieces of it away from his wounds.  “This one appears to be the most severe.  Lay down.”

Danny did and shivered.  It was cold in the Ghost Zone, even on his skin, and the table was metal. There were cuts on his back, too, and they ached.  

Spools of multicolored thread were stacked next to Danny’s head.  “I phase through most things,” Danny warned Clockwork.  “It’s got to work in both forms.”

“I am aware,” said Clockwork.  He held up a gleaming needle and started to thread it.  

“Sorry,” said Danny. He turned away.  Looking at the needle while he was being sewn up never failed to make him sick.  

“For?” asked Clockwork.

Danny’s shoulder twitched up, but Clockwork put a gloved hand on it, holding it still.  Right.  He was about to start poking Danny with a needle.  Danny should try not to move if he didn’t have to.  

“Would you prefer to be sedated?” asked Clockwork.  

“That’s an option?” asked Danny.  Usually, painkillers didn’t work on Danny.  

“Of course,” said Clockwork.  

Then… “Yes.  Please.”  

Clockwork moved his hand from Danny’s shoulder to his forehead, and Danny felt the slight tingle of something phasing through his skin.  Surprised, he tried to twitch, but the air had become soft and pillowy, too heavy to move through.  His thoughts expanded, diffuse, like a drop of dye in water.  

Gently, Clockwork lifted Danny’s wrist and moved his hand to his side, so that the large cut on his stomach was clear.  He leaned in, and the needle started dipping in and out, the thread pulling at his skin.  The stitches were tiny, the pinpricks close together.  The seam curved, branched.  Here and there, Clockwork would pause, to change color or needle, to switch to a different branch, to remove something from the wound, or add something to the string. The sewn lines grew.  They went across his stomach and up to his chest, and down, around the curve of his hip to his thigh.  They knotted his shoulder and bicep.  They littered his forearms and shins.  Danny hardly felt it.  

A hand on his face tilted his head further to the side.  Clockwork sewed up the side of Danny’s neck with thread finer than silk.  A minute later, he lifted Danny and turned him over, starting work on the back.  

Clockwork’s stitches were as steady as a machine’s, perfectly rhythmic.  Between the sedation and his earlier ectoplasm-loss, Danny hovered at the edge of sleep.  Clockwork was giving him so many stitches.  He must have been more injured than he thought.  Then, just as he was about to take the step over, Clockwork rolled him back over.  

“Take a look,” said Clockwork.  

With some difficulty, Danny pulled his eyes open and looked down at his body.  Then, he struggled to sit up, a faint sense of alarm breaking through the fog of sedation.  Clockwork helped him, one hand coming to rest at the small of his back.  

There was thread on his side and stomach, his chest, his shoulder, his legs, his arms.  The thread pulled as he twisted and turned to see it all.  Every piece of skin that had been cut had been sewn, but there were so many more stitches, knots, beads.  

Danny had been embroidered.  

The only reason Danny’s hand moved smoothly through the air was because he was too tired to tremble.  He brushed his hand over the almost solid mass of thread and tiny seed beads.  The stitches were like brushstrokes, each working together in the larger painting his skin had become.  Underneath, his flesh throbbed, painfully.  

Not all of him was covered.  If Danny had to estimate, he’d say that less than an eighth of his skin was really covered, but…  

Danny’s eyes scanned the pattern again.  It was a nebula, full of forming stars, represented by flashing, glittering seed beads, stretching from his stomach to his shoulder, dissolving into flowers and starbursts around the edges.  Other beads formed outlines of brass gears, overlying the larger picture.  Smaller patches of embroidery, covering smaller cuts, were smaller nebulae, rays of light, constellations, vines, leaves.  

His mouth gaped at the beautiful, terrible sight, and he felt the line of stitches, of embroidery, on his neck stretch and pull.  Anything he could have said was caught behind a lump in his throat.  The only thing that escaped was a sort of strangled whine.  

“It will only take a couple of hours to set,” said Clockwork, and what did that mean?  “You should sleep until then.”

Danny wanted to object, but Clockwork was already lying him back down, his body unhelpfully boneless, unresisting.  Clockwork pressed Danny’s eyes closed, then put his hand back on Danny’s forehead.  

Captain Possum Winetsky-Jones

Parvati Holcomb

Felix Millstone