"Dontouchme[I]Don't touch ME-![/I]" Abigail whipped her hand out of Siobhan's grip and with it a shelf of forgotten screws and lugnuts in little divider boxes came crashing and pattering down like rain - from the other end of the shed. She registered her need to see Angeline but didn't notice the telekinesis over the searing, bubbling pain - so sharp it felt like the sting of ice, shooting up her elbow and through her shoulder and clutching tighter and tighter over her chest. "Sunnuvabitchin' gyppo, I ain't needing the god-damn [I]pity[/I] from someone like-" she cut off into a hiss of pain and frustration. It hurt so much. It wasn't brief and bad because the plastic was still in there, bubbling away at her skin. "Just get on out to the house!" Abigail sputtered. She stumbled past Siobhan without so much as an apology and out into the 'yard' of the site.

No Angeline. A body but not a healer in sight. "Fuuuuck," she groaned miserably and slid down the front-facing wall of the shed, clutching her glistening palm as she inspected the damage. Two misshapen beads of plastic had eaten a quarter of an inch into her palm, which was bubbly and shiny and wet-looking with speckles of red and white in a wonky circle of meat. A choked sob of pain managed to escape from her incredibly tight ribcage as she reviewed her options.

When she looked up for a moment, through her tears, her vision was lit up by the golden glow of the broken sunlit facade of the outback bungalow. The sun had, in that way that the sun sometimes does in books and novels and movies, just crested the hill behind her, and for a tiny fraction of a second the entire world was alive with the dust and hardship of the outback - even the house, for just that little moment, looked new and lived in again.

With the adjustment of her eyes to the brightness of the dawning day, Abi could see properly again - and she saw that Billy had just rounded the corner from whence he’d parked up the van, rifle in hand. When [i]he[/i] saw [i]her[/i] however, his eyes went wide.

“Hey, hey hey, what’s the matter? You alright over here, Abi?” He exclaimed softly, voice laden with concern as he saw her holding her arm, rushing over.

"I fucked up," Abigail croaked bitterly. "N' I've got...ssshit in my hand," she added on in the hopes that there was [I]someone[/I] who could help her with her predicament. With the coming dawn the wound was placed into sharp relief and the clouds of dust stung against her palm.

“Aw, shit. Angeline’s got the first aid kit just now, but let’s take a look.” He ushered her over to the van and had her sit down in one of the seats, taking a knee to get a better look at the wound. “Christ above, that’s real nasty. Can you move it at all?”

"Never really crossed my damn mind to start wriggling it around," Abigail seethed, collapsing into one of the chairs. "What if it gets….stuck." Open sobbing wasn't an option. The kid was literally shaking with pain but in the past two weeks, the familiar pierce of a burn had become a bitter and steadfast reoccurrence. "Just...pair'a tweezers, gnh...a teaspoon, anything." She hiccoughed and held both hands to the light, wrists touching. 

“Aw hell, Abigail, I ain’t no doctor or anythin. Alright, aright, just uh, just gimme a second to think here.” He scratched his head anxiously, looking around the van for something that might have been passably useful. After a moment, his eyes lit up with realisation, and he practically leapt to his feet and ran to the back of the van. It took him about six seconds to return with his toolkit in hand, which he plonked down in the dust next to them, and threw open. “We’ll get you some painkillers in a bit, from the doctor bag in the house, but for now this’ll do in a pinch.” He half-mumbled as he retrieved a thin pair of electrician’s pliers and a small bottle simply labelled ‘spirit’. He doused the pliers in spirit, and then looked up at Abi.

“This is really gonna hurt.”

Abigail snorted a wad of mucus up her nose, wiping her eyes with the base of her good hand. "Do I look like the kinda' gal who grew up with health insurance?" She quipped, thrusting her glistening wound in Billy's face as she stuffed the collar of her jumper into her mouth. She couldn't look.

“Yeah, yeah I get you, I just… I mean, I don’t like hurtin’ folk. Awful sorry ‘bout this. Put your other hand on my shoulder or somethin’, you can squeeze as hard as you have to, ok? And just let me know when you’ve had too much, we can take a break whenever alright?” He mumbled, as he pressed the pliers into the blistering flesh until they got a grip on the first ex-ziptie, and then started to pull it out.

Abigail let out a muffled shriek of surprise. Initially she had her hand on his shoulder but the way she lurched made the globule shift in an agonising new direction so she began kicking the seat in front of her like a mule, dirt and dust flying from it as the plastic backing shuddered with each blow. Her watery, bloodshot gaze flipped to Billy in an instant, full of anger and desperation all at once as her face went bright pink and her neck muscles turned to thick cords from the sheer strain of it.

“It’s ok, it’s ok, it’s gonna be ok Abi, you’re doing so well, just… just a bit more.” He continued, as the head of the melted string of plastic came free of her palm, leaving a little trench of flesh in its wake, which filled with blood as the polymer came free. After another ten seconds, the first of the little cords came loose, and he dropped it onto the ground in front of him. “Ok. Ok, one down, like two or three more to go. How you doing?”

"GHHHHHHH." Abigail pawed at and then found purchase on the windowsill of the Kombi, white knuckled and shaking. She looked away and braced herself for the next wave of pain, screwing her eyes shut and pushing out two fat tears along with it.

Billy grimaced, and nodded, reminding himself not to ask stupid questions.

The next band of plastic removed was a slightly quicker affair, but it bled worse when it came out. Compared to the searing pain of the first one, it was almost a relief, and given the sheer extent of the trauma to her hand at this point, Abi actually barely felt it.

But the last of the zipties had melted straight into the crease of her palm, and worse still, it had split in two when it got burned.

“Ok, alright kiddo, this is gon’ be the worst one yet. You ready?”

"Mmfn." Abigail sunk back into the chair. She had stopped shaking but the blood was oozing down her palm and onto Billy's hand. Her gaze was pinned to the grimy window and the changing colours of the sky, her breathing laboured and ragged, a sheen of sweat starting to form on her face and neck. 

The first, shorter bit of the plastic tie came out reasonably easily, but Billy had to pull it out along the groove it had left in her hand rather than peel it away from the palm. The second piece was slightly longer, and significantly thinner - like it had been stretched as it melted.

Billy shook his head grimly, and took a firmer hold of Abi’s wrist with his supporting hand.

“Jeez, I’m so sorry Abi.” 

Again, he dug the pliers into her hand, again, he peeled the plastic out of her palm, and again, it hurt like a bitch on speed. When eventually the little plastic string came away, it took some flesh with it, and even Billy’s hand was shaking a little.

“Ok, alright, we’re done. You’re uh, you’re in a lot of pain, I’m uh, I’ll go get some painkillers.” He stuttered, dropping the pliers entirely and pushing himself to his feet.

Abigail let her arm drop to the seat, palm facing upward, as she disentangled her clenched jaw from the wad of stale nylon jumper that she'd stuffed in there. An uneven dark patch of saliva followed the dark rings of sweat around her collar and armpits and the shivering started again, as if her body was giving her a rough shake to try and spur it into movement. She stared at the roof of the Kombi as her blood soaked into the cushions, barely registering Billy as her gaze flickers to various spots on the mottled and badly stained ceiling.

Her lips begin to twitch in voiceless syllables as she scrunches her eyes shut tight.

“Alright, ok Abi, I’ve uh, I’ve got you some, uh…” He paused, looking at the packet he had returned with, quite possibly only just reading what it says now. “Aloe vera liddocaine. Acetaminnophen. And aspirin.” He looked up at her, as if for a approval, before remembering that he was the adult here.

“Aight, ok, shit, uh, here have some water, take these pills, I’m uh, I’m gonna try and rinse the burn and put this painkiller stuff on it.”

Abigail nodded sluggishly and grunted again. She sat up a bit more, fumbling for the water first, then shoving the pills behind her lips one by one with her remaining good hand. As she tilted her neck back to swallow the painkillers, she shuffled her wound onto her lap - the edges of the burn were already starting to seal into shiny flesh whilst the deep, dark red holes had stopped bleeding as profusely as they did before. 

“Ok.” Billy said, mostly to himself, as he squeezed too much aloe vera out of the little plastic tube it came in, and started applying it to the wound. “Hey, lookie here, you’re already lookin’ so much better.” He said hopefully.

“What happened to you, anyway?”

"Nuffin." Abigail grunted, then her eyes snapped open and a frown formed. "As in, I did nothing. I fucked up. My stupid... magic went off even though I had it covered. Gawh. Ughmh. When is this going to kick in?" She was determinedly not looking at the wound but, in the process, stared at the warped sticks of plastic all red and streaky and somewhat covered in meat and felt the bile rise in the back of her throat. "Couldn't even look through a fuckin' shed without getting it wrong," she grumbled with palpable disgust.

“I uh, I don’t know. Next half hour probably. But hey, look, ain’t no point in kickin’ yerself for trippin’ over. I don’t know a whole lot about magic or nothin’, but all this crap is still new to you, you know what I mean?” Billy said softly, retrieving his pliers and washing them off with ‘spirit’, before kicking dirt over the recovered pieces of plastic. “Now don’t get me wrong, I sure wish you weren’t hurtin’ right now, but it’s all a learnin’ experience, and you ain’t put nobody in danger or anythin’. You’re still learnin’, and there’s just gon’ be some hiccups on the way to bein’ learned, that’s just how the world works. Alright? I don’t blame you for… well, shit, for anythin’. Least of all this.”

"I sure hope everyone else takes the same kinda' mindset as you, buddy," Abigail squirmed in her seat, the pain still throbbing up her arm, "'cause the way I see it, I ain't made the best first impression." 

Billy paused, face turned down in contemplation.

“You’re right. You ain’t made the best first impression.” He sighed. “But you can’t change a first impression after it’s made, you can’t time travel. So what are you gonna do about it?”

"Unless you know a feller that [I]can[/I] time travel, I'm gonna...sit in this here bus until I look like I ain't been cryin' and tryin' not to hurl for the past couple of minutes. " Despite sweating and shaking like a leaf, Abigail was able to articulate herself enough through the pain to lift one tremulous finger. "May have lost a lotta blood and dignity, but doggone it, I'll keep my pride." She flashed Billy a nauseating toothsome grin as she wiped her brow and swung her legs up onto the bench to have a brief but well deserved lie down.

“You don’t gotta time travel, Abi. You just gotta learn. An’ you will learn, ‘cos you’re smart, even if you can’t see just how you’re smart, yet.” Billy added, softly, as he turned and went to get some more crap from the medical kit, to properly dress the wound.

As properly as he knew how, at least. He was better at talking, and not amazing at that either.