It's definitely a knife wound!

Jared has seen and treated enough stab wounds to be an expert at identifying them. It's not deep enough to have done any serious damage, though. It was a short blade of some kind, straight in and out. A clean wound.

Praise God!

A couple of stitches should take care of it nicely; he is more worried about the who and the why of the incident. Seeing his friend in this state makes his hands shaky, and for once, he is not as cool and collected while dealing with injuries as normal.

Ranger squirms, jerking away from him when his agitation causes him to use the needle with more aggression than he meant to. He is worried about the fact that Ranger seems to be lethargic and is drifting in and out of consciousness. He doesn't think it's due to blood loss only and suspects that his friend might have a concussion.

"You'd better start talking, or this is going to get a lot worse," he warns Ranger instead of instinctively apologising for hurting him more than he had to. He still tries to be much more careful, though.

"Jar, please-"

"No," Jared interrupts sternly. "Something is going on with you and has been going on for some time."

He carefully uses the needle driver to push the needle into the skin on one side of the wound and helps it out on the other side, using forceps. This is not the first time Jared has stitched up one of his friends. Hell, it's not even the second time, either. His buddies are rough enough to provide him with many opportunities to practice his skills since paramedics (especially volunteers) don't generally stitch up patients unless there's no other way. He learned how to put in sutures from his mother, the expert.

"You lurked in my flat last night, in the dark, talking about people following you. When I woke up this morning, you were gone. Then I get a weird voicemail from you, saying you're in trouble, and then you disappeared off the friggin' face of the earth for hours, and I couldn't find you anywhere..." His voice falters when anxiety caused by those hours overcomes him. He'd been going out of his mind until Alicia called. "And here you are now, beaten and stabbed! You've got blood - mostly not even your own - all over the clothes you borrowed from my closet, and you smell like a blooming brewery."

"I'm sorry about your tracks-"

"I don't care about the bloody tracksuit, Ranger!" Jared snaps, his heart constricting with dread. "What's going on?!"

Ranger hisses in pain, squeezing his eyes shut, but he doesn't answer; he stays quiet long enough for Jared to think that he'd lost consciousness again. He finishes the last of the three stitches required to close the wound, puts his tools away, and grabs the eye exam light from his kit.

Lifting one of Ranger's eyelids, he shines the light into his eye, watching the pupil contract. Ranger flinches, weakly trying to brush the intrusion away with his hand, but Jared firmly repeats the process with his other eye. His patient doesn't resist when his head, neck and ribs are subjected to a thorough examination too.

Jared is relieved to find that his friend has more cuts and abrasions but nothing life threatening and none that need sutures. He only needs to clean and dress them if required, which he does.

"You hit your head pretty hard, judging by that lump."

"I didn't hit my head," Ranger mutters, his voice barely audible. "A bottle broke on it."

Jared does not like the sound of that. The stiffness in his throat is gradually shifting to his stomach. Clearly, his friend hadn't been in a fair fight. Ranger usually comes out of those without serious injuries.

"Who broke the bottle on your head?" he asks, waiting for an answer that doesn't come, causing him to sigh miserably. "I don't think you have a concussion, not a bad one, at least... but we'll wake you up every two hours for the next six hours, just in case," he tells Ranger, wondering if the boy is even hearing him because he'd gone very quiet again. "There are no broken ribs. Most of your injuries seem to be superficial... I hope..."

Sitting back on his haunches, he squints at his friend, hating how pale and lifeless he seems. His throat closes up, thinking about everything that must've happened to Ranger to put him in this sorry state. Usually, the guy is a vibrant force of life to be reckoned with; now, he has dark shadows under his sunken eyes, and his skin is way too pale.

"You do know that I'm not a qualified doctor, right? I've done a couple of advanced first aid courses and I volunteer on ambulances, but I am not a doctor. You should get yourself checked out by one."

"You're all the doctor I need."

"You're also stabbed," Jared continues, ignoring him, though he's pleased to hear him speak without a slur. "We should be calling the police."

"Is getting stabbed illegal?" Ranger's voice might be weak, but his attitude is still firmly in place, deserving at least some admiration.

Shaking his head, torn between being annoyed, worried, amused, and a mixture of all of the above, Jared pulls off the bloodied surgical gloves he's wearing, turns them inside out and dumps them into his kit to throw out later with the rest of the debris from his medical care. He shoves his face into the palms of his hands, suppressing the urge to strangle his buddy.

"Who did this?" he finally asks. "Why did they do this? What trouble is it that you're in? Let me help you, dammit!"

"I was a little drunk and sentimental when I called you earlier," Ranger assures him, gazing at Jared from between eyelids that seem too heavy to stay open. "I'm fine."

"Why can't you trust me, Range?"

Jared clenches his teeth, biting back his anger. He would know Ranger's drunken voice when he heard it, and the voice on the message was not it. He can also tell that the alcohol he smells on Ranger is coming from his clothes and hair, not his breath. Besides, Ranger doesn't get drunk anymore. He's growing up now... or at least, he was; what he's doing now is anybody's guess.

"I'm literally trusting you with my life right now, Jar," he scoffs, trying to give Jared a sassy look. He almost succeeds.

On their first day of high school, when Ranger crashed into their lives, the bastard had been a horrible disaster looking for a place to happen. Angry, rebellious and aggressive, a lot worse than now. Jared liked him on sight! There was just something about his abounding cockiness that amused and inspired him. Ranger often says and does the freakiest things, and he couldn't care less about what people think of him.

Yet, Jared saw something in his eyes that made complete lies of his attitude and actions. Wounds are his drug of choice, and Ranger's wounds lie very deep. Jared was curious and probably needed someone in a worse mental state than he was in to help him feel better.

At first, Ranger wanted nothing to do with Jared, but the ever-cheerful, difficult-to-offend, tenacious boy wore him down, and now they trust each other without reserve... at least that's what Jared thought. With a little more time, John accepted him, too, and Archer learned to tolerate him. Ranger, in his messed-up way, really cares about all of them.

He is probably the only person Jared knows who would classify himself as fine while suffering from a stab wound, a messed-up face and a head injury. He also knows from experience that pushing Ranger will not make him talk.

His buddy is a mess.

If the well-placed knife wound had been deeper, he would probably have been dead. The idea is causing Jared's throat to close up again. Losing Ranger is unthinkable; the very idea is making him queasy.

"Come on, let's get you comfortable," he mutters, tapping Ranger's face to rouse him. "Can you take off your pants? You're wet through."

When Alicia finally feels warm, clean, and dry enough to leave the bathroom and rejoin the boys, wearing grey lounge pants and a snuggly blue and white sweater, Ranger is comfortably tucked in her bed.

"Would you like coffee or something?" she asks Jared. She feels silly asking him that under these terrible circumstances, but coffee is something normal and she is craving normal. She had a good cry in the shower and is feeling a little better now that she can see that Ranger didn't die while she was in the bathroom feeling sorry for herself.

"That will be great, thanks, but I'll go make it; you should make yourself comforta-" he glances at her bed, finishing his sentence with a frown, as he runs his eyes over the white lilies against a soft green background all over the duvet warming Ranger. "That's your bed..."

Jared had been so stressed and focused on Ranger's condition that he didn't register, until now, that they weren't in Ranger's bedroom, despite the abundance of clues and the lack of chaos. He'd been in Ranger's room a million times.

Alicia bites her lower lip, feeling flustered. Why did she bring Ranger to her bedroom when his room is just across from hers? Being too nervous to enter Ranger's domain since he is the king of the dunghill and has made that clear on multiple occasions had a lot to do with her instinctive decision to take him into her room instead.

Jared's face asks her the same question; his lips are pushed together in a cute upside-down bow, and his eyebrows are arched with amusement. There is no way Alicia is admitting her minion status to him, so she shrugs and avoids his eyes.

"Reflex... I guess..." she mumbles noncommittally, and, to her dismay, she can feel a blush flushing warmly on her cheeks.

"It's reflex to take helpless guys to your bed?" Ranger gibes. "Good to know..."

Surprised to hear his voice and mortified by his words, Alicia steps closer to the bed, feeling oddly brave enough to drag him from it. Even though he'd spoken in that annoyingly cocky, lazy way of his, he is still too pale, and his eyes are barely open. He looks like hell, and that scares her.

"Is he going to be okay?" she asks instead, swallowing nervously.

"He'll be fine. He's had worse."

"He's here, and he can hear you," Ranger grunts.

Worse?!

Alicia definitely doesn't even want to know what that means. When she removed his sweater, she'd noticed that Ranger's upper body had a couple of other faint scars but nothing that looked as bad as the one Jared had just stitched up. Actually, she is surprised that he doesn't have more scars since he is always getting into fights, showing up looking like he got dragged through a field, breaking his mother's heart.

Nothing like today, though.

Too uncomfortable to meet Jared's eyes or look at the boy lying in her bed, Alicia lowers her head and spots Ranger's pants and underwear lying in a soggy pile on her carpet. She can feel her toes curling unpleasantly.

"Is he naked in there?!" she blurts out her thoughts, instantly wishing she hadn't. Jared just shrugs while he openly struggles not to laugh at the horror on her face, something which completely blows Alecia's mind.

Laugh? Really? Now?!

"He was wet..."

Storming closer, she grabs the soggy clothes and marches out of her room. On her way to Ranger's bedroom, she tosses the offending garments towards the open bathroom door to be dealt with later.

Stopping in front of Ranger's half-open bedroom door, she glares at the roughly drawn paper sign, telling her, Alicia specifically, to stay out of his room. As if she ever wanted to go in there before! She places her hand in the middle of his sign, pushes the door open wider and steps inside.

To hell with his friggin' territory!

She doesn't need to go hunting for something he could wear because clothes are strewn all over his floor; she simply has to bend over and grab something. The something turns out to be a pair of boxers covered in images of Groot - the sentient tree-like creature from Guardians of the Galaxy - in various poses.

Cute but still gross.

She carries it back to her bedroom, gingerly holding it out in front of her, pinched between two fingers as if it were an insect or a mouse caught by its tail.

"Please put this on him," she asks Jared when she reaches her bed. He silently glances at Ranger, the boxers, Alicia, the boxers, Ranger, and once again at her, and blinks large eyes like those of a cartoon chipmunk. If Alicia were in a better mood, she would laugh at the comical expression on his handsome face.

"I don't think so," he finally says, shaking his head.

"You took off his pants!" she points out. "Didn't you?"

"He did most of the work."

Shifting her weight from one foot to the other, completely at a loss as to what to do now, she gives Jared a beseeching look.

"Please."

The thought of Ranger naked under her duvet, on her sheet, is more than she can handle. She's not exactly sure why, but she finds the thought highly disturbing, even though he is just lying there, pale and quiet and not doing anything strange.

Shrugging, Jared takes the boxers from her and moves from where he's seated on the edge of the bed to flick up the part of the duvet covering Ranger's lower legs. Frowning with concentration, he pulls the boy's feet into the leg holes of the pants, and dramatically rolling his eyes and pulling exaggerated faces, he works the garment up his friend's legs to his knees.

"Take over, Range," he says, pulling the duvet back in place and, awkwardly wiggling his body and grunting in pain, Ranger pulls the pants up. After a few seconds of struggling, he finally lies still again, breathing heavily, and Alicia experiences a rush of guilt about the extra discomfort she'd just caused him.

"All done," Jared tells her with a wide, happy grin, brushing his palms together victoriously.

"Thanks," she mutters in reply, once again feeling awkward and out of place despite this being her bedroom, her domain. She looks at Ranger's dark hair lying wet against her pillow and makes another run to the bathroom. She stays there long enough to take the wet clothes she'd tossed at the door, dump them on the shower floor with the others and grab a towel.

Back in her room, she gently lifts Ranger's head and places the towel on the pillow. She has never touched him as much as she is touching him today. In fact, she'd only ever touched him to push him out of her way when he was pretending not to see her trying to get past him in the hallway.

Resting his head back in place, she runs her eyes over him from head to toe and sees that most of him is nicely hidden under her flowery duvet, but she's not quite happy yet.

"You're sure he's... covered... everywhere...?" she asks Jared again, blushing profusely. He just shrugs, his face a picture of wide-eyed innocence. Alicia wouldn't put it past Ranger to have just pretended to pull up the pants, and she's not entirely certain that Jared can be trusted, either.

"Would you please make sure?" she begs, finding the entire situation too bizarre to process. She has never had a boy in her bed before! Except for Bobby, of course, and he doesn't count. She definitely never expected to have one in her bed under these kinds of circumstances, and it is even more unsettling that the boy in her bed is Ranger Botticelli, of all people!

"I'm not gonna feel him," Jared states flatly.

"You can look!" Alicia's embarrassment is starting to reach the kind of level where it could cause another medical emergency. She is a second away from running away completely.

"Oh, right," Jared says; lifting a section of the duvet, he peeks under the covers, squinting with one eye as if he's afraid of what he might see. "Yup, everybody is snug and warm in there."

Ranger snorts and it finally dawns on Alicia that Jared has been messing with her this entire time. She glances at Ranger, who is watching her through narrow slits, and then she glares at Jared. He is also watching her, openly grinning now.

Alicia is struggling to keep her lips from trembling. She's exhausted by the ordeal of bringing Ranger here and is constantly fighting the urge to cry. She is horrified, barely keeping it together; meanwhile, they think it is all a big joke! She might laugh about this ridiculous situation tomorrow, but right now, she's just fed up and upset.

"Told you she's a stuffy little snob..." Ranger chuckles.

"Hey! The stuffy little snob saved your life!" Jared scolds his friend, and despite repeating Ranger's insulting assessment, he seems to mean it. "Show some gratitude!"

"Thanks, Snubs," Ranger grunts, smiling at her, and it almost seems sincere. It's remarkable! As weak and trembling as he is, his smile is still haughty and able to annoy Alicia to her marrow... Then there's that absurd nickname he gave her months ago, simply for telling him it was not whoever I want to kiss, but whomever... and the non-grammar related problem with his statement wasn't the who part; it was the where part.

To clarify, it was during an argument about having to step over him and his kissing partner to enter the library.

She glares at the two boys, wondering if they are actual imbeciles. Who would joke around at a time like this? They should call for an ambulance and the police, not hang around in her bedroom playing doctor-doctor and making jokes. She wants to call Aunt Bernice, but she knows it would only upset her, and she already has her hands full over at her in-law's home.

Jared sees the jumble of mixed emotions, exhaustion, fear and discomfort, causing Alicia's lower lip to tremble. He could tell that she'd been crying or she'd suddenly developed a bad eye infection since he'd arrived. He realises that he shouldn't be teasing her. She doesn't know that he is only doing it to keep a grip on his sanity and stay brave. She'd been courageous, caring for Ranger until he arrived. He cannot only imagine how scared she must've been and probably still is.

Offering her a contrite smile, he rises from the bed and pulls the girl into a warm, comforting embrace. When she stiffens in surprise, he makes soothing sounds but doesn't let her go.

"It's going to be okay," he whispers into her hair, stroking her back with gentle hands, and Alicia's heart skips enough beats to leave her completely breathless.

This is a very new experience for her, and typically, she would've been horrified by the intrusion into her space... or ecstatic since he is rather pleasing. Chances are 50/50 on either reaction. Right now, she just feels relieved and curls her fingers into his black paramedic T-shirt, closes her eyes and enjoys his subtle fragrance and the warmth of his arms.

She didn't realise just how much she needed this hug.

"I'm sorry, we're assholes," he says, stepping away after a couple of minutes but keeping his arm slung around her shoulders. "Come on, let's go make some coffee. It seems like you could really do with a cup."

"Me too..." Ranger mumbles.

"You shut up," Jared tosses over his shoulder as he steers Alicia to the door. "I'm still pissed at you."

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