Chapter Text
Margo could not confidently say she was getting the best of grades.
That wasn’t to say she wasn’t understanding things, but proving it was another matter entirely. Margo understood bodies. She understood how to handle injuries, how to treat viruses. She had practiced her sutures and how to pack wounds and labeled body parts until her head spun. Margo understood how to take care of people.
But Margo did not do well on tests. Practical application she excelled at. And perhaps some of her ideas on methodology were a bit… concerning. But she was still trying her best, and she desperately wanted to pass.
She hadn’t come two thirds of the way to quit, anyhow. Not like the boy who’d briefly been her neighbor. Was he still living there? She wasn’t sure.
The scarab next door in the dorms had quickly fallen in with the wrong crowd. He was still enrolled, for now, but Margo wasn’t sure she ever saw him go to class. She hadn’t even caught his name, for how little she’d seen him. She knew everyone else in the hallway. She kept up to date with them, letting them come to her with little scrapes and scratches like the elected floor mother. She didn’t mind it. It was practice, after all.
That was how it had been, up until the night Margo was studying for her finals and found her window being forced open from the outside. She watched in stunned silence as the beetle hovered at her window, wiggling it open and mutely climbing in. He must have counted the windows wrong, because he looked absolutely shocked when he looked up and met her bright pink eyes with his hazed yellow.
Margo did not scream. Margo was a composed, relaxed individual who kept her calm under every circumstance. She did, however, tilt her head to the side curiously. “Lost, are we?”
The beetle swore quietly under his breath but he just slid the window shut as quickly and quietly as he could manage. “Get the lights off,” he rasped to her, sounding urgent and, dare Margo say it, scared.
Something about the look of him made her do it immediately. She lunged across the desk for the lightswitch. Her dorm room plunged into darkness and the beetle huddled by the window to wait for… something.
Margo couldn't help herself. She sidled up next to him to watch out the window as well. The beetle was taller than her by quite a bit, she was able to slide in beneath him to see. He held his breath, and she could hear a quiet concerned sound.
Margo watched with him as a group of mobians and humans ran by, shouting to one another. They didn't pause by the dorms. The beetle let out the breath he was holding and deflated a bit.
Margo could smell blood. She looked up at the beetle- not much older than herself. In the dark she could still see his eyes. Bright and reflective, built to catch the light. He must’ve been able to see pretty well in the dark. “I'm Margo,” she told. “Got a name?”
The bug stepped away from her and the window. “Sorry about that,” he said instead of answering her question, flicking the lightswitch back on. “Won't happen again.”
Margos' expression remained carefully neutral. “It's alright,” she said evenly. “I like helping.” Neither one of them moved for a moment, but Margo was fine with that. She took the opportunity to scan the bigger mobian down, looking for the source of the tinny scent.
She found it pretty easily once she knew to look. His shoulder was torn open, like he'd barely avoided being fully shot. He held himself ridgedly, careful not to put much strain on it. His body language read out the pain he was in. Must have been deep. “Do you want more help?” asked Margo, pointing to the bloodied limb.
Beetles and other mobians had plating in certain areas, but it could still be broken. It wasn’t like a real exoskeleton. Stitching it was a bit odd but doable. Margo had practiced on fake patients.
Margo hadn’t ever practiced on a real patient before.
The bug just looked at her. “Ferrell,” he said after a moment. “No hospitals. They'll be looking for me there. They know they tagged me.”
Margo motioned him forward and grabbed her practice suture kit. “No hospital,” she agreed easily. “I'm a med student. I can handle that.”
Ferrell moved slowly, sitting on the floor against the bed where she directed. He stared at her with undisguised bewilderment. “Why are you helping me? I just broke into your room,” he rumbled, but let Margo pull up her chair and lay his arm across her lap.
“Well, I believe you were trying to break into your room,” she reasoned, fishing a first aid kit out of her bags and grabbing a lighter. “You were running away from someone, anyways. You weren’t looking to hurt me or you’d have done it already.” Step one: stop the blood.
The injury was just deep enough that she wasn't confident it would heal without stitching. Still bleeding, as well. Margo slathered her hands in hand sanitizer after pulling off her gloves and pulled gauze from the kit to press over the long, messy injury.
Ferrell didn't flinch despite the pressure she applied. He stared at the wall, and heaved a sigh that felt too weary for someone so young. “I was,” he said. “Trying for my room. Yeah. Got into some trouble…”
“I get it,” Margo said, waiting patiently as she held firm. “Trouble happens, no matter where you go. I figure I can either whine about it or help people when it comes around.”
Ferrell smiled a little at that, and Margo realized his face wasn't as harsh as she'd thought it was. He was big and the carapace on his head was all sharp angles, but the smile softened him significantly. “Thanks,” he said, and he sounded sincere.
“Don't thank me yet,” Margo said airily. “We've only just started. We haven't even gotten to the fun part yet. You might not wanna come back after that.”
Farrell's expression slipped into light confusion but he didn't argue. He let Margo hold the gauze for the next little while in silence.
He sighed again. “You're… really not going to ask any questions?”
“I mean, if you want to talk about how you got shot, be my guest,” Margo replied, starting to peel the bloodied gauze back. She hummed softly at it, pleased with the now sluggish and lazy rate at which it was bleeding.
That would work.
Step two: disinfect.
Ferrell was staring at her again as she pulled peroxide out of her first aid kit. “Really?”
“You're hurt,” Margo said plainly. “I don't care how it happened, I'm gonna fix it.”
“Even if I deserved it?”
He must have thought that would throw her off. She just shrugged and poured a generous amount of the disinfectant over his arm, letting it drip onto the carpet. He hissed in surprise- Margo knew it stung.
“Even if you deserved it,” she echoed. “I'm not a cop, I'm a doctor. Or, I will be. My job is to keep people alive and well, not to decide if they get punished for what they did or didn't do.”
Ferrell nodded slowly. “So are you gonna… call the cops?”
Margo shrugged again. “All I see is a guy bleeding in my dorm. I don't think the cops need to know,” she said, watching the peroxide bubble away. She smiled and picked up her lighter.
Step three: sutures.
Ferrell just stared at her as she passed the flame over her needle and hemostats. It wasn't an ideal way to sterilize but it'd work. She threaded the needle and leaned over his arm.
“Now, try not to move around,” she said. “This'll pinch.”
Ferrell watched intensely. Margo considered telling him to look away but decided against it. His face blanched a bit when she started piercing the skin. Plated skin wasn't completely hard- her professors had compared it to sewing leather or something similar. Margo needed to apply more pressure than she'd usually like to get the needle through his skin at all.
“Sorry,” she found herself saying, but when she looked up, his head was lulled back against the bed. His face was pale. His breathing even and slow.
He'd fainted. The big, scary criminal scarab that lived next door had fainted. Margo huffed a breathy laugh and went about her work, pretending it was just another row of practice stitches.
She was actually pretty happy with the row of 6 knots when she was done. It didn't look too bad at all. She threw a generous slather of antibiotic cream over it, covered it up and wrapped it well before Ferrell started to stir again.
He didn't move at first, his yellow eyes fluttering as he squinted at the ceiling. Margo had already gone back to her textbook. “Do you want some water?” she asked when she heard him finally move. Ferrell just stared across the dorm room at her. Slowly, he nodded. A cup was placed in his hands, followed by a fistful of basic painkillers.
“What happened?”
“You fainted,” Margo supplied lightly. “I finished up while you took your power nap. Probably for the best.” Ferrell sipped the water and swallowed the pills, eyeballing Margo’s wrap job on his arm. He lowered the cup and started to stand. “Move slow,” Margo warned. “If you fall over it's gonna hurt.”
He listened at least, rising up to his full height slowly enough that he didn’t sway. He looked down at Margo. “What do I owe you?”
“Dinner might be nice,” Margo rattled off immediately. “Or more coffee, I have finals coming up. Oh, I could go for a pizza–”
“You saved my butt and all you want is pizza? ”
“I mean, you weren’t gonna die from that,” she reasoned. “Just a little thing, don’t worry about it.”
Ferrell stared at her, gestured a bit with his uninjured arm. Margo just smiled at him. “We could start a tab instead if you want,” she mused. “I work cheap. Look out, I might ask you for two pizzas.”
Ferrell just stared at her, looking like he was doing math in his head. He worked his jaw up and down a couple times and tilted his head to the side. “I guess that works,” he said slowly. “If I… need a hand again, can I come back?”
Margo thought about it. Free practice, and he wouldn’t go complain about her work to anyone because he was hiding in the first place. She smiled at Ferrell and stuck her paw out. “Anytime, darling,” she said easily.
They shook on it.