#piper's permanent react is a reference to a mash episode

[commonwealth-ladies-react]

How do you think the ladies would react to not being able to do their main /thing/ (Piper her paper, Curie not practicing medicine anymore, etc.)

[Thank you for the ask! I’m going to make this a long react and write one as if it were a temporary thing, and another (probably angsty) one as if it were permanent. Also I’m so sorry, I was kinda figuring that Cait’s “thing” is fighting/exploring. I need to travel with her more.]

Cait (temporary): As if it weren’t bad enough that Cait managed to get injured in a fight, now she wasn’t even allowed to go bash the bastard’s face in. Both Nora and the doc gave her strict instructions not to use her broken arm; and unfortunately, Nora was keeping a close eye on her to make sure.

“Can’t I at least watch you go punch the bastard?” She whined, fidgeting where she sat.

“No.” Nora rolled her eyes. “You need to let the bones heal.”

“You know I don’t like all this…this sittin’ around.”

Nora gave an aggravated sigh. “I know, I know…”

Cait doesn’t handle being still very well. The eight weeks it took for her broken arm to heal felt like actual hell, and by the end of it, Nora was running out of ways to make sure Cait stayed in one spot.

Cait (permanent): Much as she tried not to be too bitter about everything, it was a lost cause, really. Nora told her the news herself: she was stuck. No more exploring the Commonwealth, bringing her own brand of Irish-flavored justice. No more fighting at all. For fun or for her life.

At least she lost the use of her legs protecting Nora. That was the only good thing about it all: that Nora was still okay. Cait had to tell herself that, sometimes out loud, whenever she woke up in the morning. She wished she could be out there by Nora’s side, where she belonged. But now, the only fighting she did was with herself, daily, to keep from sinking back into her old habits. Chems had never looked better.

Curie (temporary): “Just ‘ow long will it take to rebuild?” Though deep down she already knew the answer would be much longer than she wished.

“I dunno. A month, two months? Probably two months.” Sturges whistled as he looked over the wreckage. “Yeah. Two months. Minimum.”

Curie suppressed a groan. One of her experiments went horribly, terribly wrong, and she counted herself lucky to have escaped with only a few cuts and burns. But her lab, unfortunately, burned to the ground. If it would take two months just to rebuild the building and some of her equipment, it would take even longer to get back all the beakers, Bunsen burners, flasks, test tubes, and everything else she needed. Not even her greenhouse survived.

Left with little choice, she joined Nora on a quest to recover as many medical and science supplies as they could find. The journeys helped a little, but Curie always felt something like an itch in the back of her mind. She knew she should have been doing research and experiments, and was instead spending time doing anything but that. On the upside, at least she kept a log of all the new things she wanted to experiment with and try to formulate.

Curie (permanent): How many test tubes had she broken now? As she stared at the broken shards on the lab table, her vision began to blur. Was it from her frustrated tears, or were her eyes malfunctioning again?

She didn’t need a doctor to tell her she would never truly be back to normal. She knew already that she should have counted herself lucky to even be alive, but at the moment, everything felt impossible. The brain, human or Synth, was a complicated thing. And hers was damaged. Forever. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time, and one hit from a Super Mutant changed everything.

The ever-present ringing in her ears caused her also ever-present dull headache to spike, and she let her hand drop to her side. She was designed to be a doctor, a scientist. She dedicated her life, over two hundred years of it, to helping humanity. And now? She could hardly even hold a cup without dropping it. What was left, if she could not do the one thing she was made to do?

Piper (temporary): Well, it was inevitable, really. She knew that eventually her old, beat-up terminal would go on the fritz and need to be replaced, but she hoped her luck would hold out. It didn’t.

“Yeah, I’m gonna need some fuses, a vacuum tube… Hm…” Nora picked at the back and it sparked, causing her to jump back. “And someone better with terminals than me.”

Piper slammed her fist on the top of the case and some circuits fell out the back. “Well, damn it. Know any terminal salesmen?”

Nora, surprisingly, knew where they could get a replacement terminal. But, it would take a few weeks for Sturges to build one. In the meantime, Piper tried to write the paper by hand. After only a few nights of that, she decided the cramps weren’t worth it. The most she could do was keep notes in her notepad, as no one else’s terminal was set up properly for her to use.

In the time it took for her new terminal to be built, she met almost every adventure with, “This would make a great article, if I could write it!” But eventually, she could. And she was right; they did make great articles.

Piper (permanent): “But what about my hand?”

Curie looked down at the clipboard in her own hand. “Er…”

It was never a good sign for the doctor to hesitate, and in Piper’s case, it spelled her doom. Her right hand, her dominant hand, would forever be…well, in her humble opinion, useless. Damaged nerves, tendons, ligaments. Her fingers were stiff and never wanted to move, and most days she could barely manage to stretch them all out.

Oh sure, she tried to type with one hand at first. Each key individually, slowly, painstakingly. It took her all night just to pump out most of an article. No editing, just a draft.

Piper broke down right there at her desk. Her writing career was over. How was she expected to do anything without her hands, especially without her dominant one? She couldn’t ask Nat to take dictation—her pride wouldn’t let her, and she didn’t want to encroach on her sister’s homework time—and Nora and Nick and Ellie and everyone else were too busy.

Nora even tried to lift her spirits by making a poorly-timed joke about how she could change her name to “Piper Left”, but it only made her feel worse. She wanted to leave…the world.