Without the aid of a flying vigilante, we’re forced to escape back through the facility. Blue Storm picks up Guardian and sprints off, leaving Aaron and me to bring up the rear. We encounter a few brave souls who try to pick fights with us, but Aaron mostly takes them out with some perfectly aimed headshots. It’s harder than it looks to shoot and run at the same time, let alone shoot with such accuracy, but Aaron makes it seem truly effortless.
Once we’re free and clear of the facility, we meet back up with the parents, all of them huddled together behind a building a few streets away. They seem mildly alarmed by the bleeding Guardian and pissed-off Blue Storm, but they let themselves be corralled by Aaron into our getaway black van. He also manages to convince the two vigilantes to come with us rather than running off on their own, which, considering the hostility radiating from Blue Storm, might be the most impressive thing I’ve seen from him tonight.
We go back to the safe house from earlier, where all the parents are promptly ushered upstairs so they can take showers and hopefully get some sleep before we take them back to England tomorrow. A couple put up a protest about wanting to see their children immediately, but Aaron is firm with them. I can tell he’s genuinely sympathetic to their desperation, seeming to understand it intimately, leading me to believe that he has children of his own somewhere out there.
Blue Storm sweeps everything off the dining room table and lays Guardian down on it. She tears off the damaged Kevlar and the clothes beneath, exposing Guardian’s hole-riddled torso. Black blood leaks from the wounds although I can see the parts where the skin has already tried to heal itself.
“Some of them are still in there,” Blue Storm says, either to us or to herself I don’t know. “We need to get them out before her body knits itself back together.”
Mostly, super healing is an extreme benefit, but at times like these, it can come with its own set of specific problems.
Blue Storm looks up at me with a fierceness in her gaze that would scare most men with its severity. As it stands, it’ll be a cold day in hell before I wilt under the stare of any vigilante, no matter how powerful or full of self-righteous rage they are.
“I need you to hold her down while I dig the bullets out,” she says to me. “Otherwise, she’ll struggle and bleed out too quickly.”
It’s an order, not a request, and under different circumstances I might balk at that, but this definitely comes under the title of “special.”
I step forward and wrap a hand around Guardian’s bicep. She’s staring down at her injuries, wild-eyed and shocky, but when I touch her arm, her head snaps up, and she looks right at me. There’s fear in her eyes, fear of the pain that will come onceBlue Storm starts digging around her insides for the little bits of metal that ripped her open.
“Let me do it,” I say, shouldering off my armoured jacket and rolling up the sleeves of my Kevlar undershirt.
“Why you?” Blue Storm demands, her face scrunching up defensively, like she thinks I have some nefarious reason for wanting to pry bullets out of her partner.
“For one, I have actual medical training and experience with bullet wounds. I also happen to have extensive knowledge about our accelerated healing; mine was tested to its every limit when I was a kid,” I answer, too droll and acerbic for the situation but unable to be any softer than that with so much adrenaline still coursing through me from all the fighting and use of my power.
It always gives me a buzz, letting my ability loose on people, like getting high, or diving off a cliff into ice-cold water. Most Liquid Onyx survivors are drained by using their powers, but with me it’s the opposite. Using my ability is invigorating, a rush like no other, giving me a blast of energy that resets and reloads my mind and body like they’re an overheated computer.
Blue Storm flinches at the mention of my childhood torture at the hands of OI, but she doesn’t comment on it, all her attention reserved for Guardian. She nods reluctantly at me in acquiescence and moves to pin the other super down so she won’t flail around when I’m rooting around inside her wounds.
I survey the damage again, ignoring the swoop of nerves in my gut. Despite my earlier confidence, it’s still going to be a risk trying to get the bullet shrapnel out of her. At least Liquid Onyx survivors are impervious to disease and infection, so there’s that.
“Those bullets probably broke apart inside her,” I say, eyeing the flayed, blackened wounds, her flesh torn apart like someone gouged at her torso with a meat hook. I meet Guardian’s wide eyes, telling her, “I’ll need to get every little piece of it out, okay?”
Guardian’s breathing is thready, and there’s a decided pallidness to her already-pale complexion, but she answers me with a surprisingly strong, “Alright, do what you need to do.”
With her permission and one last pointed look exchanged with Blue Storm, I search through the bag of medical supplies we brought with us on the mission just in case any of the parents were hurt until I find a pair of medical pliers. Once I have them in hand, I go to work on Guardian’s potholed torso.
It takes a while to get all the bits of bullet shrapnel, and halfway through, Aaron reappears, most likely because Guardian’s pain-filled cries are piercingly loud and probably upsetting for the parents, wherever they are upstairs.
Aaron does us all the favour of finding something for Guardian to bite down on, both to spare our ears and to stop her from biting her own lip off. He mentions using a tranquiliser to knock her out, but we don’t have enough of the stuff to really put Guardian down, and anything less would just trap her in a state of distress where she can still feel what we’re doing but be unable to react to it.
OI experimented with anaesthetic enough that I understand the terror of such a thing, the idea of risking submitting Guardian to it completely revolting to me.
Guardian bears the agony of my medical ministrations as best she can, Blue Storm doing what she can to soothe her partner with words and touch alone, and it does seem to help. The two women retain eye contact through most of the procedure, Guardian visibly drawing strength from her partner.
Aaron leaves us to it, taking a call in the other room, likely to FISA, giving them our status update.
Afterward, when Guardian is bullet free and patched up so she can heal properly, Blue Storm is eager to leave. She doesn’t thank me for helping them, and honestly, I respect her for that.
Swayed by the parents’ demands to see their children, Aaron tells me he’s managed to wrangle a helicopter ride back to England, and he takes them to the nearest landing strip. There’s not enough room in the helicopter for the two of us, so the plan is still for him and me to stay here tonight and take the ferry tomorrow morning.
Once Aaron and I are alone in the safe house, we settle in the living room, both of us still too wired to think about trying to sleep. Aaron surprises me by breaking out a bottle of old whiskey that must have been left behind here in the cupboards at some point by some other agents who used the house.
Liquid Onyx survivors have very fast metabolisms, which means that while getting drunk isn’t impossible, it does take a lot for us to even feel tipsy. Just as well since I don’t think loosening my inhibitions around Aaron would lead to anywhere good for either of us.
On the other hand, lowering his might allow me to ask the questions I’ve found myself really wanting the answers to.
But Aaron proves himself too careful, not at all unexpected, and nurses his first and second drink for a long time.
