Chapter Text
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The last time Debbie saw Ruth in a hospital bed, Mark said, “Sometimes I think you love her more than you love me.”
She doesn’t remember the exact details, but she has a vague, half-hazy notion that it was supposed to be a big night, a ‘them’ night, whatever the fuck that’s supposed to mean. Some arbitrary anniversary or another, back when everything was some arbitrary anniversary or another. Six months they’d been married, or three weeks since she last cussed out his mother, possibly a promotion or some other bullshit he’d gotten at work. Something she didn’t give a shit about, anyhow. Something he gave enough of a shit about to make a big fucking deal out of it.
It’s probably telling, she realises a thousand lifetimes too late, that she can’t remember.
It’s definitely telling that the only thing she does remember in any kind of detail is Ruth.
They were still at home. She remembers that much, at least. They were in the bedroom, her and Mark, getting ready to go to dinner, or to the movie theatre, or to wherever the hell he’d decided to take her to celebrate whatever the hell they were supposed to be celebrating. She was uncomfortable, all dolled up in some slinky little off-the-shoulder number she hadn’t worn in more than three years, and he looked like an overstuffed canapé, squeezed into the only nice suit he actually owned.
She was fixing his tie. She remembers that too. She remembers how annoyed she was, impatient and restless and done with his shit, sniping some petty whatever about how a fully grown man really should be able to dress himself, and then—
And then the shrilling of the phone.
And then Ruth, calling collect from a hospital payphone, her voice warped in a way that Debbie could tell had nothing to do with the crackling of the line.
“I didn’t know who else to call,” she whispered, and Debbie remembers the kick behind her ribs, remembers the way Mark’s face fell, like he’d heard it too.
It wasn’t bad, Ruth insisted, even though she must have realised Debbie wasn’t that fucking stupid, must have realised that the quaver in her voice would give her away to the woman who knew her as deeply and intimately as she knew her own heartbeat. She was always doing shit like that, even back then, shrinking down the painful, unhappy parts of herself, trying to fit them into a space small enough for Debbie to hold without having to bend.
It wasn’t bad, Ruth insisted, lying through her fucking teeth. No big deal, nothing serious, just a teeny tiny little burst appendix — right in the middle of an audition for a fucking medical drama, because of course it was — and a teeny tiny little emergency surgery and a teeny tiny little three-day hospital stay, and oh, so that was why Debbie hadn’t heard from her in nearly a week.
Nothing to worry about. Nothing bad, nothing serious, nothing—
“You’re such a fucking disaster,” Debbie sighed into the phone.
Ruth made a pitiful little noise. Debbie’s ribs gave another kick.
“They won’t let me drive myself home.” Going by the wobble to her voice, the hint of a slur that suggested she was probably on the happy-fun-times variety of pain medication, Debbie thought that was probably a smart decision on their part. “And I can’t afford to stay another night. So, uh... I was kind of hoping...”
Debbie massaged her temples. “I’ll be there as soon as I can.”
She heard the slither of fabric as Mark’s stupid tie fell to the floor, abandoned and surrendered and given up for dead, just like their plans for the night. She heard the click on the other end of the line as Ruth hung up, heard the hollow, empty tone left in its wake. She felt the air leave her lungs as she laid the receiver back on its cradle, the slow exhalation of a breath she hadn’t even realised she was holding. She stood there for a moment, eyes closed, counting to ten, then she plastered on a regretful smile and turned around to face her husband.
Mark was staring at the wall. He didn’t look angry, didn’t even look particularly upset. He just looked tired. Resigned, Debbie remembers thinking. Like he was waiting for it, like it was fucking inevitable.
“Ruth,” he said, and the name sounded strange on his tongue, wrong, like it didn’t belong there.
Debbie clenched her teeth, swallowed down the urge to clench her fists as well. “She’s in the fucking hospital, Mark. What was I supposed to do?”
Mark didn’t answer. He just stooped to pick up his tie, handling it carefully, like it was something precious, something delicate and easily broken.
“Sometimes,” he muttered, to the tie, not to her, “I think you love her more than you love me.”
She wanted to punch him for that. She wanted to snatch that stupid ugly-as-shit tie out of his hands and pull it tight it around his throat, not like a fashion accessory but like a noose, like a fucking garotte. She wanted to scream at him, but she didn’t really know what to say except ‘fuck you’, and even as furious as she was she knew that would be pointless.
She was seething. She was so fucking angry she could barely see straight, but it wasn’t until twenty minutes later, stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the way to a stupid fucking hospital a million fucking miles away, that it occurred to her — stupidly delayed, because even back then it should have been so damn obvious — he wasn’t the one she was angry with.
She remembers the journey like it was yesterday. She remembers the static-punctured buzz of the traffic report on the radio, gloom and doom and four-wheeled misery intercut with overly cheerful bubblegum pop, remembers tapping her lacquered nails on the steering wheel, remembers how furious she was, thinking of Ruth lying on her back in some shitty, disease-ridden hospital bed, alone and in pain, for three fucking days before she dared to call.
She never got angry at Mark like that.
Even when he deserved it. Even when he pushed her bullshit tolerance right under the fucking wire, even when a lesser woman would have lost more than her temper over his bad attitude or his bad behaviour or his flagrant fucking incompetence. She resented him sometimes, to be sure, in the normal way a wife sometimes resents her husband, tired and frustrated and occasionally despairing. But real anger? That searing, scorching, all-devouring fury? The red haze of violence, the great wash of brutal, bloody rage tearing through her insides and twisting her fingers into fists?
In all the years they’d known each other, she’d never felt that for him.
Not even when he cheated on her.
She never cared enough to feel that much, that deeply, that strongly.
Not for him. Not for her husband.
That depth of passion, apparently, she saved for Ruth and Ruth alone.
Ruth, who would go on to tear their friendship to shreds by fucking the man who never gave a shit about her until he wanted to hurt his wife. Ruth, who then had the audacity to try and justify it all by pointing out that Debbie never really loved him anyway. Ruth, who spent three whole days in a hospital bed, all alone with her stupid fucking burst appendix, too proud or too stubborn or too much of an idiot to call until she needed a ride, until she had no other choice and no-one else she could turn to.
Ruth, who has always pushed Debbie’s buttons, who has always been able to make her feel too damn much.
She felt so much that night, she remembers. In the car, waiting out the endless rivers of traffic, the anger bubbling like bile in the pit of her stomach, sour in her mouth and sharp in her chest. In the car, drumming her fingers on the wheel to try and stop herself from clenching them into fists and driving them through the fucking window. In the car, muttering to herself, “you’re such a fucking disaster, Ruth,” over and over and over again, until the words started dissolving into each other, bleeding and blending and blurring, until it was just Ruth, Ruth, Ruth—
In the car, seething, and then later, when she finally got to that awful place and saw her in that awful bed and felt—
So much. So fucking much.
Ruth always did that to her. She reached into her chest, pulled out her heart, and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed until she was damn sure Debbie could feel it.
And oh, did Debbie feel it.
She was still angry, of course. Still fucking furious, in fact, because who wouldn’t be? Still burning with it, a firestorm blazing from the inside, because fucking hell, Ruth had to know she would have been there right from the very start, had to know she would have dropped everything to be there, as long as she needed, as much as she wanted, if only she’d swallowed her damn pride and called her sooner, if only she’d let herself imagine, even just for one fucking second, that her best friend might actually care about her.
Underneath the anger, though, were other things, not as hot but much, much darker, softer but only in the way a blow is softer than a blade. Fear, choking her throat until she couldn’t breathe. Worry, lashing out from behind her ribs, tiny kicking feet like embryonic panic attacks. Fear, worry, panic, yes, and deeper still, under all of that, the bitter, acrid-tasting grief of knowing that if something had gone wrong — more wrong, really, because, once again, fucking hell, Ruth — she might never have known.
It shredded her from the inside, stepping into that shitty hospital room with its grubby off-white walls and its too-bright lights glaring down from the ceiling like their only purpose in life was to give her a damn migraine. It shredded her, all those sickly shades of pale, and Ruth, her Ruth, the palest of them all, lying there in that cramped, crappy bed, small and sad and completely, totally alone.
She remembers how desperately she wanted to yell at her. She remembers all those feelings surging up into her mouth, remembers how badly she wanted to grab her by the shoulders and shake her until her stitches tore open, shake her until her fingers left bruises, indelible proof that she was here, that she would have been here long before now, that she did care, she did, she did. She wanted to shake her until their bones rattled, and she wanted to scream right into her pale, pain-soaked face, why didn’t you call me sooner, what the fuck is wrong with you, did you really think I wouldn’t have come?
But even then, furious and worried and terrified and panicking as she was, she knew better than to scream at a woman lying in a hospital bed.
Even back then, she knew better than to—
Well.
A lot has changed since then, apparently.
It’s a different hospital, for one thing. A different shitty room, a different set of walls stained with a different shade of not-quite-white, a different kind of glare pounding behind her eyes from a different set of overhead lights. A different Ruth lying in a different bed, still pale and still small and still sad but all of those things in a different way. A different Ruth, and a different Debbie too, holding out a pair of pants to preserve her modesty like it’s the most normal thing in the world, like they weren’t screaming bloody murder at each other less than four hours ago.
A broken ankle is nothing like a burst appendix, as it turns out, and the kind of anger that comes from fear and worry and panic is nothing like the kind that comes from betrayal, booze, and an ill-advised line of coke.
Debbie wonders if she ever loved Mark enough to break his ankle. She wonders if she ever loved him enough to scream at him in a hospital bed, or enough to storm out in a rage and then come crawling back with her tail between her legs, holding out a bundle of clothes like the world’s shittiest peace offering.
She wonders—
No. She doesn’t.
She pretends to wonder, but really, deep down in the darkest, coldest, most fucked up parts of herself, she knows.
Just like Ruth did.
It’s a small mercy, she supposes, that Ruth isn’t looking at her right now. She’s looking at Sam, at Bash, at the enormous cast swallowing her left leg, at Bash’s stupid scribbled joke, ‘A Bash Howard Production!’ in glaring capital letters across the plaster, at Sam’s stupid initials and Debbie’s pathetic attempt, ‘sorry I broke your ankle’ carefully printed right in the middle. She’s looking at the ceiling, looking at the wall, blinking wetly at the empty spot where Doctor Asshole showed them the x-ray of her leg and told them, like it was some kind of fucking compliment, “this is such a beautiful break”.
Another critically acclaimed performance from the great Debbie Eagan. She wonders if she should feel proud.
Ruth doesn’t look proud. She doesn’t look angry, either, at least not like she was a few hours ago when they were fighting with each other. She doesn’t look crushed or hurt, doesn’t look depressed or devastated or despondent, doesn’t look like any kind of feeling Debbie can put a name to. She just looks lost. Broken, not like a bone but like a heart, like the torn-up space in Debbie’s chest where their friendship once made its home.
Debbie doesn’t know what to do with this version of Ruth. She doesn’t recognise this quiet, broken husk of a woman, so far from the submissive, apologetic shadow she became after Mark, so far from the angry, ravaged, nothing-left-to-lose firebrand who yelled at her from this same hospital bed only a few hours ago. She doesn’t know what to do with a version of Ruth who isn’t loud, who isn’t present, who can’t even look at her.
She doesn’t know what to do with this version of herself, either, this strange new Debbie who can look down at her one-time best friend, her one-time mortal enemy, her one-time everything, and not want to break her.
Been there, done that, a part of her thinks, and she has no idea where they’re supposed to go from here.
She feels numb. She feels confused, feels ashamed, feels adrift. She feels hollowed out and overfull all at once, too big for the cramped little room, too small for all the layers of history simmering like poisoned blood between them. She feels like a mouse blown up on the big screen, made into a monster through camera tricks and clever angles, a great hulking abomination that needs to be slain before it destroys everything in its path.
She feels—
“So,” says Sam, cutting through the maelstrom in Debbie’s head with his trademark tactlessness. “Who’s ready to get the fuck out of this shithole?”
Debbie feels her shoulders go slack, feels the tension in her gut ease up just a little. “Fuck, yes,” she mutters, and forces herself to look at Ruth.
Ruth is staring at her stupid pants, folded neatly at the foot of the bed, blinking like it’s taking every ounce of strength she has not to burst into tears.
“I don’t...” She wets her lips, exhales shakily. Debbie counts her lashes as she blinks a few more times, studies the way the light catches the blue of her eyes every time they open again, bright and dazzling, like the neon strobes that light up the ring when they’re filming the show. “I, uh... I mean, I can’t...”
For a few stupid and embarrassing seconds, Debbie has no idea what the hell she’s talking about. She can’t stand up? They all know that; that’s what the crutches and the wheelchair are for. She can’t string a coherent sentence together? That’s not exactly new information either; Ruth has been an incoherent, gibbering mess for as long as Debbie has known her. She can’t, what, swallow her stupid stubborn pride and—
And then she notices the way Ruth’s hands are twitching, the way she’s tugging at the spandex of her costume like she can’t quite figure out if it’s too tight or too loose, and then she follows the line of her gaze to the pile of neatly folded clothes, to the great big ugly cast on her leg, clunky and cumbersome and unwieldy, and then she sees the humiliation colouring her face, washing away the sickly pallor of too much pain, and then—
“Oh,” she hears herself breathe.
Sam, inattentive dickhead that he is, clicks his tongue irritably. “What’s the problem now?”
Ruth prods at the cast, tugs at her costume, and says nothing.
Debbie bites her lip, bites her tongue, and says, “Can you two assholes give us the room?”
Sam opens his mouth, then snaps it shut it again with a glare.
Bash, who is usually the only person in the world even less observant than their so-called mastermind director, is the one who actually gets it.
“Right,” he says, clearing his throat with all the grace one would expect from a glam-rock imbecile in a monkey suit. “But, like, just to be clear... you’re just going to help her get changed, right? I mean, no more broken bones or other near-fatal injuries to my wallet?”
Ruth makes a strangled sound, somewhere between a giggle and a sob.
Debbie rolls her eyes. “No promises,” she quips, and instantly regrets it.
Ruth doesn’t flinch, but she curls in on herself, shoulders hunched and head down, like she’s bracing in anticipation of a blow. It’s a strange look on her; the only time she’s really in danger of getting hit is in the ring, and she never pulls back then; it doesn’t matter if Debbie’s bouncing her face off the turnbuckle or ramming her spine into the mat, Ruth always faces her head-on, always meets her eye even when they’re both having a bad day.
Not here. Not any more.
She’s lost the right to it.
Ruth isn’t facing her head-on any more, isn’t meeting her eye or taking without complaint whatever moves Debbie throws at her. She’s shrinking herself down, making herself small, making herself less of a target, and Debbie might understand if it was because she’s scared but one look at her face, even halfway hidden under the product-matted tower of her hair, makes it clear she’s not.
It’s ridiculous, really. Debbie beat her to within an inch of her life, cornered her and brutalised her in a place she couldn’t escape, snapped her ankle right in two, and all in front of a live audience; Ruth should be scared of her, she should be fucking terrified, and if she’s being completely honest with herself, there’s a twisted, fucked-up not-so-little corner of Debbie that wishes she was.
It’s not fear she sees in Ruth’s shadow-darkened eyes, though; it’s just pain and exhaustion. Resignation, the kind that says I don’t care what you do, I don’t have the strength to take any more. It’s a kind of surrender, a kind of submission, and the sight of it throws Debbie back to that first day at the gym, to the anger and hate pooling lava-hot in her gut — “Am I on fucking Candid Camera? why is she still here?” — and the way Ruth hunched down, twisted her body into something meek and pitiful as Sheila whispered helpfully in her ear, “Slouch, submit, she might kill you”.
Back then, it was funny. Or it would have been, if Debbie was capable of finding anything funny.
It’s definitely not funny now, though. It’s just sad and stupid, and so fucked up she wants to cry.
Ruth swallows, shudders, and rasps, “Debbie.”
Debbie bites her tongue hard, relishes the tang of discomfort, brief but helpfully grounding. She wonders how much pain she’d have to feel to make amends, how badly she would need to mutilate her own body to make up for breaking Ruth’s. She wonders how much of Ruth’s blood she would have to see spilled in turn, to make amends for breaking both their hearts.
“It was a joke,” Debbie gets out, and hates herself just a little bit more.
Bash and Sam look at each other, sharing what seems like an entire conversation in one split-second glance.
Ruth’s fingers tangle in the spandex of her costume. “Right,” she says.
“Forget it,” Debbie’s voice goes on, without her consent. “It doesn’t matter. I’m the only one here with any kind of experience in getting clothes onto helpless babies who don’t have full control of their limbs, so...”
Sam breathes in, lets it all out in a low whistle. “Jesus fucking Christ.”
Ruth just shrugs. She doesn’t look hurt, doesn’t look wounded or crushed or even angry. She’d have a right, probably, to feel any one of those things, or even all of them at once, but she doesn’t. She just looks like she feels empty, like she’s already felt so much there isn’t any room for anything else, and somehow that makes Debbie feel a thousand times worse.
“I’ll try to be fractionally more cooperative than your infant son,” Ruth tells her flatly. Her eyes are impossibly blue, impossibly bright; they catch the glare from those godawful ceiling lights and throw it right back into Debbie’s face, dazzling and disorienting and so fucking painful. “But, hey, no promises, right?”
Bash looks unsure, probably with good reason, but Sam is just about smart enough to recognise the futility of trying to argue with his two most stubborn and issue-riddled wrestlers. He shakes his head, throws up his hands in exaggerated mock-surrender, probably because he thinks playing up the melodrama will make Ruth laugh, then he grabs their hapless producer by the arm and begins dragging him towards the still-open door.
“Just don’t fucking kill each other,” he sighs as he goes.
Debbie looks down at Ruth. Ruth looks down at her leg, her cast, her beautifully broken bone.
“No promises,” they both say, in brittle, hollow unison.
Ruth is quite a lot more cooperative than Debbie’s infant son, as it turns out, but that doesn’t really help either of them.
She’s fussy and fidgety, and clearly in desperate need of either a nap or a pacifier — so, actually, more or less exactly like Randy — but she’s also quiet and yielding in a way he never, ever is, and she at least mostly understands what Debbie is asking her to do when she snaps, probably a little too harshly, given the situation, “Will you lift your fucking ass off the fucking bed, for the love of god?”
Ruth does lift her ass, thank whoever, but she bites her tongue as she does it, balling her fists as her whole body seizes with pain.
Debbie doesn’t let herself feel guilty for that. She doesn’t allow her guts to knot with shame, doesn’t allow her ribs to pull tight, doesn’t allow her throat to close up. She doesn’t let herself think back to the match, doesn’t let herself remember the sweat gathering under her costume, the hot, bright lights all but melting the makeup off her face, the booze and coke and rage all rushing through her system like the worst kind of adrenaline rush, the heat and the lights and the colours all amplified until she couldn’t see, couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but feel, feel, feel.
She doesn’t let herself think about the the dead weight of Ruth’s leg under her arm as she wrenched it up and back, doesn’t let herself wonder if the screams from the crowd were louder than Ruth’s screams of pain. She doesn’t let herself think about that awful sickening crack, doesn’t let herself recall the way it drowned out the audience’s cheers, drowned out Ruth’s cries, drowned out everything as she pulled and twisted and—
“Fuck,” Ruth gasps, as Debbie gets the leotard down past her hips and her ass, and then again as she sinks back down onto the bed, pale and shaking. “Fuck.”
There’s a bruise blooming across her ribs, Debbie notices, and another stamped dark on her hip. She remembers slamming Ruth back against the ropes, the turnbuckle, the mat; she remembers the satisfying thud every time her body made contact with something hard, the sound of it echoing like a drumbeat inside her coke-addled head, over and over and over again. She remembers thinking it was long past time that she got to leave a mark on Ruth for once, remembers wondering if she could make enough, on both of them, to cover up Mark’s fingerprints, to burn away his fucking taint.
She remembers—
She closes her eyes, blocks out the bruises, the breaks, the back-bending arc of Ruth’s body as she shakes and shudders and sweats.
“Hold still,” she says, and Ruth does.
Getting the leotard down and off over the cumbersome bulk of the plaster cast is easier than it should be, and definitely easier than it would have been if Ruth had tried to do it by herself. She’s tentative, Ruth, careful to a fault with anything she sees as a piece of her character, while Debbie doesn’t give a shit if the fabric stretches or twists or gets bent out of shape. The show’s getting cancelled anyway, and even if it wasn’t they’ll be wrapped long before Ruth is back on her feet; who cares if her stupid costume is ruined when they both know she’ll probably never wear it again anyway?
Ruth is shivering by the time it’s done, goosebumps rippling over her skin and teeth chattering hard. She’s probably just cold, almost naked and exposed as she is in the chill of the room, but Debbie can’t stop staring at her ribs, her hip, the mottled brands swirling across her skin in the shape of the turnbuckle or the mat or her boot.
The details, when she tries to pinpoint them, are fuzzy and indistinct. She can’t recall the exact moment her foot lodged itself in Ruth’s side, or the exact moment she shoved her up against the ropes just hard enough to make her cry out. The moves flash through her mind like a blur, automatic and instinctive as they were after a whole week of rehearsal and practise and training; she can’t remember the specifics, but she sure as hell remembers the coke-fuelled thrill that buzzed through her every time she felt that thud, that thunk, the violence vibrating through both their bodies, performance and power and so much delicious pain.
“Fuck,” Ruth chokes again, and Debbie doesn’t know whether to apologise for the things she did or for the part of her that enjoyed doing them.
Of its own accord, her voice blurts out, “Did they at least give you some painkillers or something?”
Ruth shakes her head. “It’s fine,” she gets out, and Debbie thinks that may just be the least convincing lie she’s ever told. Which, given their history, is really saying something. “I don’t... it’s not... can you just get my pants on, please?”
Debbie nods, a jerky sort of spasm, but she doesn’t pick up the pants, doesn’t really move at all.
She’s sort of outside her own body, floating somewhere high above the bed, above the lights, above Ruth’s mostly-naked form shivering on that thin hospital sheet, that creaking, too-small bed. She’s floating, not in the way she did during that nightmare of a match, coke and alcohol and adrenaline and rage, but like she did that night a thousand lifetimes ago, when Ruth’s voice crackled over the weak, staticky phone line, small and broken and so fucking lost, when she whispered, like Debbie was her guardian angel come to life, “I didn’t know who else to call.”
Her fingers reach out, beyond her control, and brush across the bruise stamped on Ruth’s ribs.
“Fuck,” she whispers, a twisted echo of the way Ruth said it just a moment ago. “Fuck, Ruth, you’re...”
Ruth swallows, exhales. The line of her throat convulses; the bruise shifts as her lungs expand.
“... a fucking disaster?” she finishes, and all of a sudden Debbie’s ribs ache too.
She thinks back to that night, a thousand lifetimes ago, almost entirely forgotten until half an hour ago, when she was driving back here from the Dusty Spur with Ruth’s clothes folded neatly in the passenger seat, hand-picked by Sheila, judging the hell out of her in stony, pastel-tinted silence. She thinks of that phone call, all those years ago, of the way she turned away and shut her eyes to block out the frustration and disappointment already spilling across Mark’s face, the way he knew, even before she said a single word, who it was and what it meant.
She thinks of Ruth’s voice that night, tinny and crackling, as weak and small as a child’s, and she thinks of how loud her own voice sounded in comparison, so powerful and so in control as she sighed and said, “You’re such a fucking disaster.”
She thinks of Ruth’s voice, not on the phone but here, in front of her, in this cramped hospital room, three or four or however many hours ago, so much stronger with a broken leg than a burst appendix. She thinks of the way it pitched and rose, physical pain shot through with the other kind, the deeper kind, as she cried, “You’re the success and I’m the disaster.”
She thinks of her own voice, too, of the way it pitched just like Ruth’s, just as jagged, just as rough, just as raw with fucking pain, when she shouted back, not even really convincing herself it was the truth, “I never made you feel like a disaster.”
She thinks—
“Fuck,” she says again, and wonders when that became the only word they can say to each other without drawing blood.
Ruth covers Debbie’s hand with her own, cold and pale and still trembling ever so slightly. She pushes down on her knuckles, pressing the sticky pads of her fingers right into the bruise, harder and harder until Debbie knows it must be hurting like a bitch. She’s looking down, Ruth, eyes unfocused, gaze locked on the ash-white of her own skin, the clear polish of Debbie’s nails, the bruise blooming blue-black beneath them both.
“I thought it would hurt less,” Ruth confesses, as soft as a prayer. “Rolling around in your mistakes for once.”
Debbie shuts her eyes. Scorched onto her retinas, she sees the Ruth of three or four hours ago, pain-drenched and tearful, standing up for herself for the first time in all the years they’d known each other, tearing Debbie to shreds, one thread at a time, with blunted nails and sharp words and those big fucking eyes of hers, impossibly blue, impossibly bright, impossibly wet.
“If I made you feel so fucking worthless,” Debbie hears herself spit, venom dripping off her tongue, spilling onto the raw, exposed nerves, “why the hell did you keep coming back?”
The pressure on her fingers increases. She opens her eyes to find Ruth staring at her, wan and drawn, jaw clenched to swallow down the mewl of pain, like she thinks she can hide the discomfort just by keeping herself silent. She thinks she should pull away, thinks that’s what Ruth wants her to do, thinks maybe it’s a test to see if she will, if she can bring herself to let go of the bruise, let go of the pain, let go of her, of Ruth, without being forced to do it.
If it is a test, she fails. She hears the rattle of Ruth’s breath, feels the bruise swell under her fingertips, but she can’t let it go, can’t pull away, can’t move at all.
Ruth closes her eyes, swallows the pain and swallows the misery and swallows the years stretching out between them, the unspoken grief, the unvoiced hurt.
“You were all I had,” she whispers, and Debbie is not prepared for how much that hurts.
Her fingers flex, instinctive and outside her control, a quick little jolt back against Ruth’s hand, and Ruth’s fingers yield instantly, letting Debbie kick free just like she does when they’re in the ring, breaking out of a hold or kicking loose from a pin with less than a second before Keith counts three. No coke, no booze, no violence clouding her vision in shades of red and black, just the two of them, her and Ruth, oblivious to the cameras and the crowds and the glaring neon lights, communicating through their bodies, silent and easy and perfectly clear.
What does it say about their friendship, she wonders, that they only ever truly understand each other when they’re speaking without words?
“You could have told me,” she says, using the momentum to stumble back and put a few steps of much-needed space between herself and that awful bed. “You could have said, ‘hey, you know what, Deb, I really don’t feel like dealing with my crap tonight, so how about we just get wasted and talk shit about your co-stars instead?’.”
Ruth touches her ribs, the fading white of Debbie’s fingerprints standing out like beacons against the blues and blacks of the bruise, then gestures pointedly at the rest of her body. “Can we have this conversation after you’ve helped me get my pants on?” she asks, voice tight. “It’s fucking cold, Debbie, and I don’t—”
She stops.
Something coils in Debbie’s stomach, hot and sharp, like a knot of barbed wire. “You don’t what?”
“Debbie.” Ruth chews her lip, a barely-there smear of long-since removed lipstick. “Pants. Please.”
Debbie rolls her eyes, annoyed at the deflection, but she does as she’s told just the same. The saccharine pastels that make up the majority of Ruth’s wardrobe these days are, quite frankly, an affront to fashion, an abomination unto the laws of basic human decency, and she’s not above making that point aloud as she lobs the whatever-the-fuck monstrosity passes as a sweatshirt at Ruth’s head.
“Seriously, Wilder,” she gripes, pretending not to notice the way Ruth winces as she catches it, the way the bed creaks with the movement. “You have a paycheck now. You’ve actually got more than ten dollars in your bank account. There’s no excuse for this thrift store bargain basement bullshit.”
Ruth struggles into the fuzzy abomination, grappling with the thing in a ridiculous psuedo-wrestling match that would probably fill more seats than their usual fare. Debbie averts her gaze, breathing slowly, steadily, taking advantage of the way Ruth’s face is hidden in the layers of fabric; it’s easier to draw the air into her lungs, she finds, when the space behind her ribs isn’t already filled to bursting with the blue of Ruth’s eyes.
“It’s comfortable,” Ruth says, when she finally emerges from the sea of pistachio mint. “Comfort is more important to me than fashion.”
“Oh, I can tell,” Debbie deadpans, smoothing out imaginary creases in the stupid too-soft pants, like she really thinks that will save them from the crime against nature that is every other part of them. She takes another slow breath, lungs twinging just a little when her gaze lingers a moment too long on Ruth’s rapidly blinking eyes, then she holds out the offending pants and says, as kindly as she can, “You ready?”
Ruth nods, grits her teeth. “Be gentle.”
Debbie doesn’t smile. “No promises.”
It’s a little bit awkward, fumbling the narrow pant-sleeve up and over the unyielding plaster of the cast, but at least it’s not difficult. At this point in her life, Debbie is a master in the art of fumbling clothes onto a wriggly, irritable baby, and Randy is more frustrating than Ruth by far; she’s used to contending with tiny flailing legs and tiny thrashing fists, sliding diapers and spit-up and fuck knows what else every time she tries to make the kid presentable for five fucking seconds. She’s used to the kind of mess that requires a bath and an entire roll of toilet paper to fix, and for all of Ruth’s messiness in every other facet of her life, she is at least more or less clean in the literal, physical sense.
The cast is a bitch to work around, the bed is narrow and tight, and Ruth’s body is a minefield of jutting bones and still-fresh bruises, but she keeps herself still and compliant, and she’s actively trying to work with Debbie instead of against her, which is a damn sight more than Debbie could say about the other little monster in her life.
In short, at least from Debbie’s perspective, it could be a whole lot worse.
From Ruth’s perspective...
Well.
Debbie can tell it hurts like hell, the way she has to yank her leg around to get it where she needs it. She can tell it’s fucking agony, and not just in the physical way, being manipulated and manhandled by the same woman who put her in the hospital in the first place, and she knows that Ruth is biting down hard on all that pain, all that probably-fear, balling it up and pretending it’s less than it is, just to make things easier for Debbie.
She knows this because she knows Ruth as well as she knows herself, but she doesn’t let herself try to apologise. She doesn’t think she’s capable of it, and honestly, she’s not sure Ruth could stomach those words right now either.
Debbie has never been the type to swallow her pride and say she’s sorry, even when she knows she should. Ruth knows that about her, has known it for as long as they’ve been in each other’s lives; if she wasn’t at least some measure of okay with it, their friendship would have died a long, long time ago.
As the smooth plaster of the cast slides distractingly under her hands, Debbie finds herself wondering, for the very first time, if perhaps it would have been easier on them both, or at least gentler, if it had.
“Be gentle,” Ruth said, about the act of putting on her pants, about Debbie yanking her battered, beaten, broken body around to get it done. “Be gentle,” she pleaded, and Debbie pushes the pant-sleeve up past the length of the cast, exposing those stupid words, ‘sorry I broke your ankle’, and thinks, when have you and I ever been gentle with each other?
Ruth is gasping by the time they’re finished, the raw rattle of exertion and strain heaving through her body even though she’s barely moved a muscle. Debbie keeps her gaze lowered, spends much more time than she really needs tucking the pant-sleeve into the edge of the cast, making it neat and tidy and presentable, pretending it matters when they both know no-one in this hospital gives a shit.
It’s stupid work, pointless work, imaginary work, but it gives her an excuse to keep her head down, to pretend she’s focused and concentrating, and it offers her another few precious seconds of not having to lift her gaze and see the sweat drenching Ruth’s brow, the tension clicking her jaw, the laboured rise and fall of her chest, her clenched fists, her—
“You’re done,” Debbie says. Then, because apparently she can’t help herself, “You big fucking baby.”
Ruth groans, shivers. “If that’s how you take care of babies, I understand why Randy’s always crying.”
“Fuck you. I’m an excellent mother.”
It’s supposed to be a joke, or at least something close to one. It’s supposed to be light, casual, is supposed to be a return to the effortless back-and-forth that used to come so naturally to them. It’s supposed to be gentle, the very thing Ruth asked her to be, but Debbie has never been gentle, wasn’t gentle even before Ruth gave her a hundred reasons to be cruel. It’s supposed to be them, a vague approximation of the way they once were, but it comes out so sharp, so jagged and cold, so much the opposite of all those things, it’s really not a surprise that it makes Ruth suck in her breath.
“Sorry,” she whispers, dropping her head like she’s ducking a clothesline in the ring, and Debbie doesn’t know which of the two of them she resents more.
She thinks of the conversation they should be having right now, the conversation that neither of them wants to have, the conversation that’s been simmering between them for months now, just below the surface. She thinks of Ruth shrinking down, pulling away, retreating, hiding just like she always does behind paper-thin excuses. “Can we have this conversation after you’ve helped me get my pants on,” she asked, and that’s done now, the pants are on, isn’t this the part where Debbie should start pushing?
Instead, she says, “Sam and Bash are waiting.”
Ruth fidgets, tugging at her sweatshirt. “Yeah.”
She looks even smaller now, Debbie thinks, all wrapped up in those sickening off-colour pastels, her already tiny frame swallowed whole by the layers of fabric. If she were more cynical, or perhaps if she didn’t know Ruth as well as she does, she might wonder if she dresses like that on purpose, to play up the wide-eyed ingenue thing, innocence and that cloying fucking idealism she wears so damn well. She thinks it could so easily become a weapon, if only Ruth had the presence of mind to wield it as one.
She doesn’t, though, and maybe that’s why it works as brilliantly as it does. Wielded or not, it cuts with the keen, perfect edges of a well-honed blade, the wretched look on her face, the big blue eyes, the way she makes herself look so vulnerable, so wounded and fragile, so fucking broken.
Admittedly, it’s a bit more effective when she’s lying in a hospital bed with her leg in a cast.
And it’s much more effective to Debbie specifically, when she’s the bitch who put her there.
She looks around the room, lets her gaze settle on the blank space just beyond Ruth’s shoulder, the dead white screen where that stupid fucking x-ray once glared down at them both. It’s hard to try and picture the damage without the visual staring her right in the face, hard to put together the idea of a bone snapped clean in two with the fact, real and true and inescapable, that it’s Ruth’s bone, Ruth’s ankle, Ruth’s body, and Debbie’s act of violence that did it.
Briefly, pathetically, she wonders what Mark would say if he learned she has that much strength, that much brutality, that much raw passion inside of her.
She suspects he’d probably say exactly the same thing he said the last time she dropped everything to help Ruth get ready to leave a stupid shitty hospital.
“Sometimes I think you love her more than you love me,” he said to her, all those years ago, and didn’t Ruth make the same damn point during their argument, just three or four hours or however many hours ago, staring up at her from that damn bed with wet eyes and a broken ankle, bleeding pain like it was all she had to keep her alive?
“You never loved Mark,” Ruth spat, and Debbie thinks, if that’s true, why can’t I stop thinking about him?
“You love her more than me,” Mark said, and Debbie thinks, is that why she's the one you chose to fuck?
If he wanted to take something precious from her, it worked. If he wanted to hit her where it hurt them most, it worked. If he wanted to tear apart the only thing in her life that she still gave a shit about, it worked, it worked, it fucking worked.
Debbie’s stomach clenches as she turns away from that empty space, back to Ruth in her stupid pastels in her stupid bed in her stupid fucking cast. Her stomach clenches, her ribs contract, pulling hard against the memory of a bruise that never even touched her skin, and she knows, like she knows her own name, like she knows Randy’s feeding schedule, like she knows everything there is to know about Ruth Wilder, she knows that she can’t stay here, alone with her, in this off-white nightmare of a room, for one more fucking second.
“I...” Her voice catches, breaks. “Fuck, I...”
Ruth takes a shuddering breath. “Debbie.”
Debbie spins on her heels, graceful and effortless despite the churning of her insides. She navigates to the open door by muscle memory, moves with the rabid desperation of what Sheila would probably label a prey animal. A stupid, weird, ridiculous thing to call it, Debbie thinks, especially considering the fact that her would-be predator can’t even stand up under her own power. But then, haven’t she and Ruth always been stupid and weird and ridiculous together?
“I’m going to fetch a wheelchair,” she says, so she can leave this space, this moment, and not have to think too hard about the mess of it all. “Stay here.”
Ruth’s laugh, rough and watery, chases her out the door.
“That,” she says, so cold it almost burns, “I can promise.”
Coward that she is, Debbie lets Sam deal with the getting-Ruth-into-the-wheelchair problem.
She and Bash wait in the hallway outside the room, taking up more space than they probably should while nurses and orderlies swerve and weave to avoid colliding with them. Debbie feels stupid, like an extra waiting to walk through someone else’s scene, watching from a disconnected distance as Sam coaxes, cajoles, and eventually flat-out bullies Ruth out of the bed. It’s their struggle, their problem; Debbie shouldn’t even really be a witness to it, but she can’t seem to tear her gaze away.
Ruth is pouty and sulky, but it’s a weirdly comfortable kind of sulkiness, closer to playful than actually petulant; it’s nothing at all like the way she was with Debbie, and even when she yelps in pain from a twist or knock to her broken leg, there’s still a lightness to the way she behaves with Sam that makes Debbie feel—
She doesn’t know.
She’s not sure she wants to know, if she’s honest. She’s not sure she has the strength to pick apart the churning in her gut, the tightness in her jaw, the pains in her chest as she watches Sam effortlessly ease the tension in Ruth’s spine, soothe her and calm her and steady her like it’s second nature, like he’s the one who’s known her for a decade, like Debbie is less than a footnote to either one of them.
She’s pretty sure she shouldn’t be feeling anything.
Maybe her stubborn body hasn’t got the memo yet.
Bash, standing next to her and leaning against the wall like he thinks he’s fucking James Dean, clears his throat and says, in a deeply misguided attempt at showing compassion, “I’ll bet she really appreciates you coming back.”
Debbie rolls her eyes. “I really doubt that.” She exhales a sigh, willing herself to turn away from the soap opera drama unfolding inside the room and failing pathetically. “But at least she’s wearing normal clothes now. Or, well, the Ruth Wilder equivalent of ‘normal’, whatever the fuck that is. That should count for something, right?”
They both know it doesn’t, but bless his innocent little heart, Bash is just about smart enough not to point that out.
Neither of them speaks again for a few long minutes, both unable to tear their unfortunate gazes away from the horror movie spectacle that is Sam and Ruth attempting to navigate the intricacies of a goddamn wheelchair. Like Ruth hasn’t gone through three of the damn things since she arrived in this shithole, like Sam hasn’t probably directed a dozen movies that used them as props or whatever. Debbie has a sneaking suspicion they’re drawing out the whole farce on purpose, just to make her and Bash squirm.
It doesn’t work. She won’t let it work. She won’t let it—
“Hey,” Bash blurts out, right as Debbie is about to storm back into the room, grab Ruth’s stupid crutches, and smack her and Sam upside the head with them.
Debbie doesn’t look at him. “What’s the matter now?”
She hears his breathing pick up, feels the air grow colder as he steps away from the wall and starts bouncing on the balls of his feet. He’s nervous, she can tell, would be able to tell even without his jittery body giving him away; she wonders if that’s a wrestling thing, how easily she can attune herself to other people’s physical responses, or if it’s a mom thing; did she learn it from Randy, listening carefully for every little sniffle or hiccup or whimper, or from Ruth, reading her body and her face in the ring, communicating through glances and touches, muscle against muscle, skin against skin?
She thinks maybe she’s been taking it for granted lately, that Ruth has been reading her that way as well, that she has become just as attuned to Debbie’s body, Debbie’s soul, as Debbie is to hers.
It’s been so fucking long since anyone got that close to her, she’d almost forgotten what it feels like to look into someone else’s eyes and hear, without the need for words, I’ve got you, we’ve got this.
Motherhood is a thankless fucking job.
Foolishly, idealistically, and so, so, so briefly, she once let herself imagine that wrestling might be different.
Bash says, very softly, “It was my fault.”
Debbie laughs, right in his face. It’s high and harsh, all serrated edges and deliberate cruelty, the kind of bald-faced spite she usually only unleashes on Ruth or her soon-to-be-ex-mother-in-law; she wouldn’t usually be so overtly disrespectful to their executive producer — he does still pay the girls’ wages, after all, even if he does absolutely nothing else — but this has been one of the longest nights of her fucking life, and underneath the titles and the hairspray and the pretty-boy posturing Bash is just a spoiled brat who thinks ‘taking responsibility’ is what other people do while he’s sucking up to his mom’s checkbook.
So fuck him. He’s earned a bit of spite.
“Bash,” she says, and the name coats her tongue like acid, like bile, like bitter resentment. “I appreciate you trying to be chivalrous or whatever the hell you think you’re doing here, but for the love of god, drop the fucking martyr complex.” She bites down on the inside of her cheek, watches Ruth swipe at Sam’s hands as he manipulates the wheelchair like the uncoordinated dinosaur he is. “Ruth and I practised those moves a thousand times this week. It had nothing to do with you.”
He whines. Like a pathetic, snivelling little schoolboy. “I shouldn’t have pushed you so—”
“You were there for ten fucking minutes every other day, you dick. You didn’t do anything.”
She feels a little bit shitty for saying it, but not so much that she’d ever take it back. He is a dick, and a useless fucking hands-off producer too, and he doesn’t get to dive in and claim all the blame for himself just because he yelled at them for five minutes at the start of the week. He’s not the one who got drunk and high right before the show; he’s not the one who tore Ruth to shreds in front of a live audience and then snapped her ankle in two. He’s the guy who pays their wages and their hospital bills, that’s all, and half the time he’s barely even good for that.
Debbie understands that he’s trying to make her feel better, really she does. But playing the pariah so she doesn’t have to is definitely not the way to do it.
“Sorry,” he mumbles, and he sounds so much like Ruth, small and sad and submissive, that Debbie wants to strangle him. “I was just trying to—”
“I know what you were trying to do, Bash.” It’s true, she does, and somehow that makes it all so much worse. “But I’m the one who fucked up and broke Ruth’s ankle, not you. So just... let me have that, okay?”
It sounds so calloused, put that way. Let me have that, like it’s the stupid plastic crown their wrestling characters are fighting over every damn week, like it’s some kind of reward for hard work or effort or putting in an especially badass performance or something. Let me have that, like it’s something she even wanted in the first place, all that guilt and shame.
Or maybe it’s not the guilt she’s hungry for after all. Maybe it’s just knowing that she did this. Not Bash, not Sam, not Mark, not Tom fucking Grant. She, Debbie, finally got to take something from Ruth that hurt nearly as much as everything Ruth took from her, the betrayal and the heartache and the crushing of her safe, happy life, the broken-bone agony of finding out that the person she loved most in the whole damn world had—
“Fuck,” she hears herself croak. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
Bash, uncharacteristically sensible, says nothing.
He takes her hand, gives it a squeeze, then lets go.
It brings her a small bit of comfort, almost in spite of herself. His softness, the quiet of the contact, the way he bites down on his own instincts to be loud and self-flagellating because he knows it’s not what she needs. It’s kind, it’s warm, and a part of her wishes she could resent him for it. It’s not what she wants, all that kindness and warmth, and it’s sure as hell not what she deserves.
She grits her teeth, returns her attention to the room just in time to see Sam finally get Ruth’s wheelchair pointed in the right direction, and spits out, knowing full well that she’s being unfair, “Will you two quit fucking around already?”
Sam snorts, unoffended. For a washed-up director who gets hyper-defensive if someone so much as sneezes in the vicinity of his ‘artistic vision’ or whatever, he has a maddeningly thick skin in the moments when Debbie wants him to bristle.
“Don’t let us keep you,” he says with a shrug. “I’m sure you’ve got somewhere more important to be.”
Something about the way he says it lashes across Debbie’s shoulders, quick and clean as a whip, not a blunted prop but a real one. He’s not actively trying to be an asshole, she’s fairly sure, or at least not any more of one than he usually is, just by being himself and awake and more or less sober; condescension is just a part of his nature, just like it’s a part of Bash’s nature to be awkward, clumsy, and generally fucking useless.
Objectively, Debbie knows that.
But that doesn’t change the fact that he’s looking down at her — no: looking down on her, the pretentious jackass — like the barely two inches he’s got over her is a full six feet, and he’s crowding Ruth’s stupid little wheelchair like it belongs to him, like it—
Like Ruth, sitting up too straight and hugging Zoya’s boots to her chest, is his fucking property.
It makes Debbie see red, makes her stomach churn in a way that doesn’t really make any sense.
Or maybe it’s not that at all, maybe it’s just the words. I’m sure you’ve got somewhere more important to be, he says, like he doesn’t know perfectly well that she doesn’t, like he wasn’t sitting right there in his office, the big-shot director in his big-shot chair, when she stormed in before the show, like he didn’t watch her teeter on the verge of a nervous fucking breakdown and offer her a fucking drink.
Like it wasn’t his motherfucking coke flooding through her veins when she snapped Ruth’s ankle in two.
I'm sure you’ve got somewhere more important to be, he says, and Debbie wants to break his ankle too.
“Do I look like I’ve got somewhere more important to be?” she snarls, hating the catch in her voice, hating the way it makes Ruth sit up even straighter, the way it makes Sam raise his stupid caterpillar eyebrows, like he can see right through every damn word. “Do you really think I would’ve wasted my time driving all the way back to this shithole to bring Ruth a pair of ugly-as-shit pants if there was literally anywhere else in the fucking world I could have been instead?”
Sam takes a long, obnoxious drag of his cigarette.
Bash takes a big, melodramatic step backwards.
Ruth takes a deep breath and whispers, “Debbie.”
Debbie bites her tongue. Her breathing, despite her best efforts to keep it under her own control, catches rhythm with Ruth’s, steady but strained, even but laboured. She steps around the chair, dodging Sam’s stupid raised eyebrows, and the backs of her fingers brush across the sleeve of Ruth’s hideous sweatshirt. It’s barely a touch at all, really, just a quick, half-moment sort of thing, a fleeting flutter of contact that could so easily be dismissed as a stumble, a mistake, a—
An accident.
Like a broken bone, snapped right in two.
Like a marriage or a friendship or a heart.
Like—
Ruth’s breath catches. Debbie knows this because her breath catches as well, at the same time. She doesn’t meet her eye, doesn’t look down to find out if Ruth’s are wet or dry, if she’s looking up at her or down at the cast or back at Sam. She doesn’t want to to know, and she tells herself, a lie that kicks behind her ribs in harmony with their shared breathing, that she doesn’t care anyway.
A stumble, a mistake, an accident. What does she care if Ruth reads it as an act of comfort? What does she care what Ruth feels or thinks at all?
She pushes past her, past the chair, past Sam and Bash, past everyone and everything. She storms into the empty room, stares at the vacant bed, the rumpled sheets and discarded blankets, crumpled-up balls of paper and plastic cups, a half-full water jug and a bag of potato chips, an empty box of cookies, a crumpled candy bar wrapper, the discarded trash of a long, long night, the mess left behind by her brutality and Ruth’s broken body.
She closes her eyes, slows her breathing now she’s free from Ruth’s influence. It comes easier without the strained rumble of Ruth’s lungs to direct her own, comes harder without having someone else’s rhythm to help her focus. She breathes and breathes and breathes, lets the soulless chill of the empty room seep into her bones, then she opens her eyes and looks up at the ceiling, the harsh lights scorching jagged lines on her retinas.
Fuck this place, she thinks, and grabs Ruth’s crutches where they lean against the far wall, holds on tight like she’s the one who needs them.
“Fuck this place,” she says out loud, and wrestles the stupid crutches out through the stupid too-tight door, back into the corridor where Sam and Bash stand and Ruth sits, all three of them waiting for her, all three of them staring at her. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
Bash claps his hands together, beaming, like that’s the best thing he’s ever heard in his sad, worthless, overly privileged life.
Sam doesn’t move or speak, but the cigarette loosens between his lips, which is as close to enthusiasm as he ever truly gets.
As for Ruth...
She lifts her head, tearing her gaze from the sleeve of her sweatshirt, her boots, her broken leg, to meet Debbie’s, and she—
Well. It’s definitely not a smile, the tiny, barely-there twitch that lifts the corner of her mouth, but it’s not really pain either. It’s not anger or resentment, isn’t hate or fear or grief or any of the thousand other awful things she’d be perfectly justified to be feeling right now.
It’s just Ruth, her eyes and her mouth, her fingers coming up to slide down the cold metal length of the crutches, her blunt, bitten-down nails catching on the fabric of Debbie’s sleeve, a mirror of the way Debbie touched her before, just light enough to be an accident.
“Yeah,” she says, so softly Debbie knows it’s meant for her and her alone. “Let’s get out of here.”