RUSTY | frank castle

NINE

"Hold him still." Rusty instructed, though David just stared at her. She repeated, harshly this time, "Hold. Him. Still."

"On three, you lift him up so I can get that arrow out of him."

David nodded. 

"Three."

The man hesitated, but held Frank on his side. Rusty passed some bandages to him, saying, "Keep the pressure on that wound."

Rusty held one hand under where she was going to cut Frank's flesh, and the other as still as a Greek statue as she neared the scalpel to the skin. She kept her focus on the instrument as it made contact to the skin, although Micro looked away and started breathing rather loud. 

Blood started coming out of the wound that Rusty made, the scalpel's point fully entering the flesh. Her movements were precise by half a millimetre, everything neat, albeit the blood was running down Frank's wet skin like a stream.

David chuckled as he held his eyes shut.

"Don't fucking move!" Rusty shouted at him as the movements he produced while chuckling caused Frank's body to move, too. 

Some blood squirted out as Rusty slowly moved the knife across Frank's flesh.

"Jesus."

"Don't move. Don't speak. Don't fucking breathe if it means Frank is motionless." She shouted at him, though, incredibly, her attention was still on Frank's cut flesh. "Do not lose you shit. You understand?"

David nodded.

"Say it, goddammit."

"I will not lose my shit. I'm good."

Rusty put the scalpel (which was covered in Frank's blood) on the table with the rest of the metal equipment and put her fingers gently into the large cut. She started to feel the soft flesh, but there was no sign of the goddamn arrow yet. 

"Oh, wow!"

"Look at my fucking dogs if it fucking helps, but don't you dare faint."

David did as Rusty said, looking at her Dutch shepherd and her Rottweiler as she used some medical tweezers to try and grab the arrow instead. The tweezers looked like scissors, but were thinner than her fingers and could grab the foreign object with less damage to Frank's muscled shoulder. 

Micro grunted, hearing the squirts of blood and the squelching of flesh. Albeit, Rusty was completely unaffected. 

She heard and felt the touch of metal against metal, "Got it."

She pinched the tweezers around a side of the object, getting a good grip on it and slowly pulling it out of Frank's shoulder. "Goddamn you and your giant shoulders, poster boy." Rusty muttered to herself. 

She saw the black point of the arrow, and got the head of it out if his body. She then exhaled a breath as she pulled the rest of the unusual weapon out. She looked at it, shaking her head at the trouble that her poster boy has gotten himself into. 

Metal clanked against metal as Rusty threw the bloodied arrow into a steel container. 

"Hold this." She passed more bandages to David, who was starting to shake nervously now, "Keep the pressure on."

"Oh, fuck!" He exhaled. "Can you just go - get it again for. . ."

His unimportant mumbling and stuttering was interrupted when Rusty poured whisky onto Frank's wound.

"Ah, wow." He looked away again. 

Rusty grabbed the only thing she had handy to close the cut: a staple gun. Micro groaned, looking away again as Rusty stapled Frank's wound closed, holding the flesh together with her other hand.