CREATURE

・chapter 24・

In the minutes following the incident on stage Debbie promptly marched her student up to the physical therapy wing and sat her down on one of the foam beds for one of the physios to take a look at her. The young ballerina had her limbs rotated and bent at all different angles to try and figure out what was wrong, but no verdict had been given.

'And this?' the physio asked, bending her leg inward. She winced and nodded, blinking hard into the harsh lights to suppress the tears behind her eyes. It did hurt, it hurt a lot. But she really couldn't afford to look like she was in excruciating pain if she had any hope of escaping this fiasco lightly.

They couldn't bench her over this. They wouldn't, they couldn't.

She sat up while the physio asked her a few more questions, hunched over with her legs dangling over the edge of the bed. She kept her answers vague, short. Nothing that would make it seem objectively bad.

While the physio filled out something on a form, she glanced at her reflection in the glass-paned walls of the office. Holy shit.

She looked haggard. Washed-out and defeated, the dark circles under her eyes starker than ever against her pale skin. Her hair was plastered against the back of her neck, and making her wonder if-

The door to the office swung open and she jumped, only to find Julian hurtling at her before pulling her into a bone-crusher of a hug. Debbie must have tracked him down then.

'Are you okay?' he stuttered out breathlessly. She nodded, feeling him rub her back in slow, absent circles while he rocked her from side to side slightly.

He muttered something about his mother going to kill him and started unpinning her hair, freeing the coffee-coloured tresses from her bun to let it fall loosely over her shoulders. It relieved some of the strain in her head, and she smiled weakly up at him.

'Alright, Nastasia.' the physiotherapist announced, setting down his clipboard on the table by the window. 'The good news is that as far as I can tell nothing is torn or broken.'

She closed her eyes and breathed a small sigh of relief.

'The bad news is that based on the limited range of motion in your leg and that snapping noise you've been hearing, your left hip is severely impinged.'

Hip impingement, she thought. It was an overuse injury rather common amongst dancers, and usually, recovery time wasn't that long. He said it was severe, but maybe they would let her keep dancing-

'We caught it early enough that you don't need surgery, but you will need time off to rehabilitate it safely before we can get you back to fighting fit.' the physiotherapist explained. 'For the time being, I'm putting you on mandatory bedrest for two weeks, and then we'll start rehab.'

'When can I dance?' she asked earnestly. Two wasn't that bad, if she stayed in shape she could still make Nutcracker.

'Six weeks, at the very earliest.'

Her stomach did a nauseating turn.

'Sorry, did you say-'

'Six weeks.' the physiotherapist repeated firmly. 'If everything goes well, you can start easing into it in six weeks' time.'

・・・

Roman was out for blood. He'd been decently angry when he left the main stage a few minutes earlier, but by the time he reached the upstairs dressing rooms, he was fucking furious.

After Debbie had ushered her student off stage and shot him a look that told him not to follow, he'd been left behind to try and make sense of what had happened. The initial panic that came with realizing something was wrong with her subsided until he felt dangerously numb, unable to feel anything besides the remnants of shock. She was hurt. Something happened on stage, she'd cracked, pulled, torn or broken something, something in her was hurt, she was hurt.