Word count 1,512
A Kaligirl Production
A Lancer Fic Spoof
Johnny and Scott were coming down the stairs, dressed to the nines and ready for the party, shoving and pushing at each other intermittently.
“Would you two knock it off before one of you breaks your damn neck,” Murdoch barked in ill tempered annoyance. Scott threw out a hand in surprise and in an ill fated step Johnny actually did fall down the stairs and break his damn neck!
“Boys will be boys!” Sam declared, figuring that with one more near fatal injury out of the Lancer household he’d be able to send his daughter to nursing school and then she would be able to join him in practice. Finally! “Oh! This looks bad!” the good doctor grimly pronounced at the end of his thorough examination of the sapphire orbed ex-gunfighter heaped up at the bottom of the stairs.
“We’d better get him up to his bed,” the Lancer patriarch commanded as he reached down and single handedly plucked the boy up from the floor, and though his back almost gave out several times en route he still managed to get his raven locked man-child into bed.
“Teresa! I’ll need your expert assistance young lady! We shall have to fashion a brace for Johnny’s broken neck!” Jenkins ordered.
“Can it be done Sam?” Teresa wondered as tears began to well up in her eyes.
“Well, if I can pull it off, it’ll set the medical world on its ear and I shall become more wealthy and powerful than you ever imagined!” Sam declared before getting down to business. “Maria! I will need boiling water, bandages, chicken wire…and soup! And if you look in my bag, there is one million cc’s of morphine and a gallon of laudanum! For the pain!”
Johnny’s ears pricked up at the mention of the pain medicine and though his broken neck protested the youngest Lancer managed to rise up from his sick bed and make for the door in a cat-like crouch.
He hadn’t get far before Scott, the blue-grey-eyed proper Bostonian, spied the escape attempt and raised the alert. Everyone in the room pounced, tackling the gunfighter with a heart of soft gold to the ground, the doctor calling for the meds and the patient protesting that the medicine a once made him ill, dulled his well honed reflexes and plus he was addicted. But his protests went unheeded and all million cc’s were injected into his ass. Teresa removed all clothing from the room—just in case he came to and tried to escape once again and a feeding tube was fed down his throat for no real good or apparent reason except added measure.
Many sweaty, grueling hours later the good doctor immerged from the surgery and joined the rest of the family in the Great Room. “How is he, Sam?” Murdoch growled, pressing a much needed drink into the grizzled old sawbones’ hand.
“It’ll be touch and go for the next 38 chapters and he still might not pull through!” Jenkins bluntly laid it out, never one to mince words.
Teresa, who was already aware of this as she’d been at the doctor’s side, helpfully wringing her hands for the entirety of the 43 hour surgery, began to wail floods of tears and ran from the room. Maria, who loved no one better than her precioso Juanito (precious Johnny) began to cross herself and mutter and pray in a queer combination of English and Spanish. Teresa soon returned, bearing a tray of coffee and sandwiches and a pie and biscuits, and with Maria’s help soon had everyone but herself and the loyal housekeeper fed before fleeing from the room once again in further floods of tears. Maria followed, presumably to console.
“What’s wrong with that girl?” the tall rancher muttered before rounding on the doctor. “Sam!” he roared. “Johnny can’t be laid up for 38 chapters; there are fences to mend and cattle to drive. Time is money, Sam! This is a working ranch and it doesn’t run itself.”
“This is all my fault, Sir!” Murdoch’s besotted Blue-blooded elder boy moaned. “I will do mine and Johnny’s chores as penance.”
“But Scott, you’re honorable and brave and forgiving and gentle and kind and otherwise perfect in everyway. Besides, you might break a nail and Harlan would be out here so quick heads would spin…” Murdoch eyed the fireplace suspiciously when, for a moment, the fire sparked green. “I thought I relieved that old buzzard of all of his floo powder after he shoved Catherine, the beloved into the hellmouth…” he muttered.
“What was that, Sir?” Scott sobbed.
“Nothing!” the vertically unchallenged proprietor of the rural seat roared. “It was nothing!”
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And so it went for the next 38 chapters. Anytime Johnny came out of his drug induced stupor he was alternately cutely irascible, boyishly charming, grimly depressing and an all around bad patient. And his efforts to escape the confines of his room were in no way thwarted by the Frankenstein-like halo that ringed his head and stabilized his broken neck. It got so bad, in fact, that he had to be put on round the clock watch and so, consequently, no work got done on this working ranch.
Maria took pity on her niño and fed him copious amounts of chocolate cake, milk and tamales, all that he wanted. And he wanted plenty. Though how she got this all down the feeding tube is a secret that she took to her grave.
Teresa, in a fit of unexplained disgust threw up her hands and fled, sobbing from the room and wasn’t seen or heard from again until chapter 39 when she turned up at the barn raising barbecue that Kalimah finally got around to writing and it was discovered that she ran off to live with Hortence the Horrible. As it turned out, unfortunately, Hortence was even more horrible than anyone suspected and so Miss Teresa, the simpering nurse/cook teamed up with Johnny’s arch-nemesis Carlos Madrid. He began pimping her out of a saloon in Green River and she became a simpering nurse/cook/whore. No one at Lancer knew. And no one at Lancer cared.
Because they were all so traumatized by Johnny’s condition no one, not even the hands were going into town. And luckily the sapphire-orbed man-child was too tied up, and the blond-blue-grey eyed Boston dandy was too guilt-ridden, and the tall Lancer patriarch rancher was too damn old to go into town and get it on with the saloon girls. The Lancer’s and Maria had forgotten about her entirely, anyway, in the wake of Johnny’s long, torturous illness.
Meanwhile, poor Johnny was wasting away, and no one could figure out why. He’d also been periodically falling into and out of comas and it wasn’t discovered until it was almost too late that the boy had a tapeworm. Scott was completely undone, morose, guilt ridden and heart broken. He felt unbearable grief and spent a good deal of his time wailing and beating his chest. The fruits of Murdoch’s loins were reduced to nightly confessionals because each one could be Johnny’s last and they wanted to make sure he went to his maker with a clean conscience and that nothing, but nothing was left unsaid. Many, many “I love you, Brothers!” and “you are the tender, golden heart at the center of my souls” and “You’re the best thing that ever happened to me, Brothers” passed between the hermanos y compadres (brothers and friends) and if Scott was not with him there was a parade of people, ranch hands and such, coming through the room. And still no work was getting done on this working ranch.
Murdoch was generally grumpy and absent, spending most of his days and nights staring pensively out of the enormous lead glass window behind his desk, contemplating his blades of grass and the thousand dollars it was starting to look like he wasted saving the child-like gunfighter from that firing squad.
Suddenly, Scott and Johnny’s sire found his heart beating where a lump of coal used to be. He leapt up from his desk, dashed up the stairs, taking them by twos and in a surprising twist of fate, Murdoch, in his bereft state and lost in a permanent haze of memories of Baby Johnny, plucked BJ’s wasted from up out of bed, taking his son to his own bed room, placing him tenderly on the same bed in which he was sired…and born. He then jumped on the bed with him, and cradling Johnny’s head, halo and all, in the crook of his shoulder, told Johnny everything that happened to him from the day he was born until, his mother, the bruja, split. Murdoch, the Lancer phoenix, cried the healing tears and Johnny came out of his unexplained coma. “I love you, Papa,” he softly croaked and then, sticking his thumb in his mouth, snuggled in for a warm, comforting rest.
The end…☺
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