CHAPTER 27: COMPLICATIONS
The apartment smelled like coffee and antiseptic.
Claire had cleared space on her kitchen table, laying out supplies with the methodical precision I'd come to associate with her medical work. Splints. Tape. Gauze. The good painkillers that probably shouldn't have been outside a hospital.
"Sit," she said.
I sat.
She took my hand—the injured one—with more gentleness than I deserved. Her fingers probed the damage, professional and careful despite the anger I could see building behind her eyes.
"Two metacarpals," she said finally. "Maybe three. I'll need to set them."
"Okay."
"It's going to hurt."
"I figured."
She positioned my hand on the table, palm up. The swelling had gotten worse during the walk over—angry purple spreading across skin that shouldn't have been that color.
"Bite down on something."
I grabbed a dish towel from the counter. Rolled it tight. Put it between my teeth.
Claire set the first bone.
The pain was exquisite. White-hot and absolute, shooting up my arm into my shoulder and beyond. I bit down on the towel hard enough that my jaw ached. A sound escaped me—something between a groan and a scream, muffled by fabric.
"One more," Claire said. "Breathe."
I breathed. She set the second bone.
The world went gray around the edges. For a moment I thought I might pass out, which would have been a mercy. Instead I stayed conscious, experiencing every excruciating second as she aligned the bones and wrapped them into proper position.
When it was done, my hand was immobilized in a splint that ran from my fingers to halfway up my forearm. The pain had settled into a deep, persistent throb that the painkillers were only beginning to touch.
"This is why you train," Claire said, not looking at me. "Proper technique. Proper form. You can have all the power in the world, but if you don't know how to use it, you hurt yourself as much as your enemies."
"I know."
"Do you?" She finally met my eyes, and the anger had transformed into something worse. Fear. "Roy, how many times can you show up here broken before you show up dead?"
The question hung in the air between us. I didn't have a good answer.
"Claire—"
"I've done this before. Patched up people who thought they were invincible. Do you know how many of them are still alive?" Her voice cracked slightly. "Not many. Because they kept pushing, kept thinking they could handle anything, until they hit something they couldn't handle."
"I'm being careful—"
"You're not." She cut me off, hands clenching. "You accepted your role. You said you were going to be support, not frontline. And then the first time something happened, you threw yourself into a fight you didn't have to join."
She was right. I knew she was right. But the words that came out weren't defense or explanation.
"I can't stop," I said quietly. "I know it's dangerous. I know I'm not ready. But there's something coming, Claire. Something worse than a few Russian enforcers or Fisk's real estate schemes. And when it comes, I need to be able to fight."
"What something?"
I couldn't tell her. Couldn't explain that I knew the future—or a version of it. That the Hand was coming. That Hell would break loose in ways she couldn't imagine. That everyone I cared about was going to need protection I might not be able to provide.
"I don't know exactly," I said instead. A truth wrapped in a lie. "But I can feel it building. And I won't be able to live with myself if I'm not ready."
Claire was quiet for a long moment. Then she exhaled slowly, some of the tension draining from her shoulders.
"You're an idiot," she said. "A stubborn, self-destructive idiot who's going to get himself killed."
"Probably."
"And I'm apparently stupid enough to care about you anyway."
Something shifted in the air between us. The words were simple but the weight behind them was anything but.
"Claire—"
"Don't." She held up a hand. "Don't make it weird. I'm just... I'm telling you that if you die out there, I'm going to be upset. Not just professionally. Personally. And I'm not great at having people to lose."
I understood what she wasn't saying. The vulnerability underneath the clinical exterior. The years of keeping herself separate from the violence she patched up, and the slow erosion of that distance as she found herself caring about the people who kept bleeding on her table.
"I'll be smarter," I said. "I promise. I won't stop—I can't—but I'll be smarter about how I do this."
"That's not enough."
"It's what I can offer."
She held my gaze for a long moment, something working behind her eyes. Then she nodded slowly.
"Fine. But if you're going to be stupid, you're going to be stupid correctly." She gestured at my splinted hand. "Come here."
I stood, confused. She positioned herself beside me, demonstrating.
"Proper fist formation. You turn your wrist like this—" she showed me "—and you align the first two knuckles with the bones of your forearm. Not the last two. Those are fragile."
"Matt showed me this."
"And you forgot it in the heat of the moment. So we're going over it again. And again. And again, until it's muscle memory."
She spent the next twenty minutes drilling me on technique I could barely practice with one hand immobilized. But I understood the point. If she couldn't stop me from fighting, she was going to make sure I did it right.
When she finished, dawn was starting to lighten the sky outside her window. The city was waking up around us—garbage trucks, early commuters, the distant clatter of delivery gates opening.
"You should sleep," Claire said.
"So should you."
"I don't have two broken bones in my hand."
Fair point. But neither of us moved toward the door. We stood at her window, watching Hell's Kitchen emerge from the night. The buildings I'd been fighting to protect. The streets I'd bled on. The neighborhood that had become something like home despite everything.
Claire leaned against me slightly. Just a moment of contact, her shoulder against my arm. Warmth against the cold of the coming dawn.
"Your hand will heal," she said quietly. "Six weeks normally. Maybe three with whatever freaky healing thing you have going on."
"Silver lining."
"Matt's going to ask about it."
I hadn't thought about that. Saturday training. My right hand in a splint. Questions I'd have to answer.
"I'll tell him it was a boxing injury. Bad form at the gym."
"He'll know you're lying."
"Probably. But he won't push."
Claire made a sound that might have been agreement or might have been skepticism. It didn't matter. The alliance between me and Matt was built on unspoken truths and boundaries respected. He wouldn't demand explanations I wasn't ready to give.
"I should go," I said finally.
"Yes. You should."
But I stood there a moment longer, watching the sunrise paint the buildings gold and pink and eventually ordinary morning gray. My hand throbbed. My body ached from the crash. My heart was doing something complicated I didn't want to examine too closely.
The Russian war was ending—I could feel it in how desperate those enforcers had been, how willing to murder a civilian to hurt their enemies. Something had shifted in the balance of power. Matt was winning, or at least not losing.
But that was the small war. The warm-up act.
The real war—against Fisk, against whatever was coming after—was just beginning.
I left Claire's apartment as the city finished waking up. My hand hurt. My everything hurt. But I was alive, and I'd learned something important about my power, and I had people who cared whether I came home.
That was more than enough to keep fighting for.
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