Backdated log: Helena and Marta Who: Helena and Marta What: Rescue! Where: Streets of New York, Marvel When: Backdated. After finding Seven and before calling Steve Warnings/Rating: Blood, injuries, and a lot of freaking feels.
Following Seven, she had to stop, pulled over a block away just to breathe. Slow, in and out, breathe in. Hold. She'd been running since she came in, she was still running, but she could feel the warps along the edges of her awareness, the shadow cracks of past weakness. Breathe out. Those things belonged to the girl-that-was. She rubbed her palms against the steering wheel as if scratching them.
This was real.
This was now. Breathe in.
There were three more on the list. Marta. Ella and Co. Liam. Three more. Breathe out. Three was not so many. Breathe in. Her life existed in multiples of three. Three Bruces. Wonder Woman, Superman, Cat Woman. Three worlds. Three people. Breathe out. The stiffness eased out of her shoulders, though her back stung from the heat of the explosion. That could wait.
Her eyes opened and she shifted the gear back into drive. One thing at a time. Marta.
She was almost to the location that Eddie got when she saw the girl sitting at the base of the pay phone, receiver hanging down. Three more and she must stop for this one. She pulled over, grabbed one of the syringes off the passenger side seat and slid out, boots landing heavily on the asphalt. "Hey. Hey? Hi?"
Marta wasn't aware of Helena's approach. She wasn't aware of much of anything. Shoeless and with her hoodie hanging half off one shoulder, she curled against the wall like she was trying to escape into it. The skin of her bare feet was raw where she'd tried to use her legs as leverage to push herself farther into the wall. All it had done was to scrape up her feet and bruise her shoulder. And once she'd seen the second (and then third, fourth, and fifth) time that Seven died in front of her, she had clenched her eyes shut and started to hit her head into the brick of the wall. As if that would stop the gory visions from coming. Instead, it bruised the side of her head, a small scrape forming under her hair.
The phone handset hanging next to her face had begun to chirp its rhythmic bleat of requesting to be returned to the cradle. It was loud and insistent, but with each impact of her head against the wall, she cared a little less. And then she just… stopped. Her body froze, breaking the damaging rhythm, and then a shiver ran along her skin, her limbs, teeth clenched as she shook. It lasted too long, and ended with a whimper in the ensuing stillness of her body, until her previous rhythm started again. It was impossible to tell how long the cycle had been going.
Nothing. She could be a ghost for all that the girl noticed her, a phantasm of will and sharp needle pricks, but not blood stained, no. Helena had washed Seven's blood off her hands, but the smell of it clung to the cuffs of her hoodie. Tested at a CSI lab it might reveal blood stains, but they were lost in the dark weave of cloth. The vacancy was noted, the stillness not indicative of fear, it didn't have that hyper-alert on-point tension. This was mental checking out, a frisson of badly fired electrical pulses in the brain. There was no use speaking to her right now, there would be no response.
Helena knew exactly how it felt. And the moment it stopped, in that hazy postictic state she pushed the cap off the syringe with her thumb and forefinger and jammed it into the girl's thigh. No warning, just done, antidote delivered. She recapped the needle and stuck it in another pocket so she wouldn't grab it by accident. Only then did she start checking the girl out. Scuffs, scrapes on her head and feet, and she couldn't imagine what the girl had been seeing, only that it looked like she was trying to get away from it. "Yeah, I get it," she said quietly, the words of another Helena. A sigh, an inner snarl for which there could be no words said out loud and she crouched down close, snugged her side up to the girl's, wrapped arm and tail around her, one arm over her own shoulders, and pushed upwards.
Somehow, the stab of the needle made it through her dulled awareness, though it was processed as an attack, and her body jerked into motion again, pressing against the wall, fingers clawing at the brick and tearing her black-painted nails down to rough, jagged edges. Her feet pushed again at the sidewalk, scraping her feet though they were already bloody. Everything was an attempt at escape, but she couldn't get her body to cooperate enough to carry her away. It only ended when another seizure hit, too close to the last one, exhausted muscles only able to give a series of twitches before she fell still again.
For one painful moment, things cleared just enough for her to register the pain of hand and head and feet, and it pulled another jagged sound from her throat. Tears slipped past her lashes, down cheeks that were already smeared with mascara and dirt, and she gasped for a breath that wasn't choked with the visions of blood and brain and glassy, open eyes.
And then she was being lifted. Warm body against hers, strong arms (she thought they were both arms), and she finally opened her eyes even though she knew that there would be a body on the ground that she didn't want to see, staring blankly back at her. But there were arms around her, and she needed to know who they belonged to. Because there was only one person that had lifted her recently. Only one (though it had been with her legs tight around his hips, his hands on her thighs, her arms draped over wide shoulders, hands in his hair, mouth on his jaw - before he'd been shot in front of her).
"Seven?"
The name got a look, more than the struggles did (she was used to that, hands on her wrist, a caress and then tight, cautionary). "No, I'm no, I'm." And a grunt filled pause as she steadied her weight without the addition of her tail (that was busy helping in other ways). Slow step forward. Pause. Her struggles had only made her feet bloodier, old ones reopening and new ones tearing open. "I'm Helena. Can you tell me what your name is?" Was she coherent enough for that?
"I've got to pick you up. Don't hit me." She could take it, but it would just be one more hurt on top of the ones she didn't want to have. Her tail left the other girl's hips as she bent down, one arm behind her knees, pulled her in close enough that the cotton of her hoodie caught and moved with the girl as Helena lifted her up. Shit was harder than it looked in the movies and she wasn't near as light as Selina had been in her arms. "Just don't hit me," she whispered under her breath, tail lifted out behind her, moving only when it was needed to help keep her balance.
When Marta opened her eyes, she didn't see Helena. She didn't see much of anything, the world gone strange and blurry but also horrifying. The arms around her were familiar to her mind if not her body, and she turned her head enough to rest against a shoulder. "Seven…" The word was a murmur, no longer a question, pressed close to the side of a neck with a soft sigh. She didn't lash out, didn't hit 'him', kept her sharp elbows to herself and only clung to the front of the shirt she was pressed against.
Even with the antitoxin beginning its journey through her body, she was still ill, sweating and trembling in Helena's arms. When her body shook without her permission, it pulled a pained sound from her throat, her body aching even more now that they were moving, now that she was being moved. She couldn't feel the raw soles of her feet, only knowing that everything hurt in a distant sort of way that her mind couldn't quite process. "You're dead." Lips pressed to skin intimately, she whispered.
It was the flush of lips to long abandoned skin that unleashed a swarm of snakes in her belly. It had been years since anyone touched her in such a way - the last had been - was - the woman in Wonderland. Her last kiss had been with the angel that saved her - lips to her wrist, a benediction of touch. It hurt so much her knees nearly gave out, but what she said before - Seven. The girl in her arms was kissing someone Helena was not, believed herself safe and protected by him, and here she was, the interloper, the thief and the only way anyone would feel those things towards her was when they believed she was someone else.
It was something she hadn't been able to rip out of herself in Silent Hill, there was no monster that she could take apart, that could be left as broken bones and raw meat to get past this. She swallowed hard to keep the bile in her stomach, swallowed again, and rushed forward. The sooner they were apart, the sooner she could push this gaping wound of hers together again and pretend like it never existed at all. Getting the rear door open was a balancing act that ended with her leaning into Marta, pinning her to the rear panel of the SUV one knee cocked out, thigh to thigh to keep her feet off the ground, one arm still around her as she grabbed the handle and yanked the door open. "He's not. He's not dead. I'm going to take you to see him," she whispered, even as the words burned in her throat.
"He's not. ...you're not." Marta's mind was doing its best to fight through the pain and the fear and the confusion. For one bright moment, she was aware of everything, the way it came in too sharp, wrapped in the uncontrollable shaking of her hands. No, the person there wasn't Seven. They were smaller, smelled different, had shoulders whose width wasn't familiar. "Where…? Who are you?" The last was a demand, even though her current condition held so little authority. She was weak in those unfamiliar arms, and when her own body was juggled and pressed to the warm panel of automotive metal, her legs gave out on her, only kept upright by the body against hers. A stranger's body. But a stranger that knew Seven.
Her hands didn't quite want to cooperate, but she reached up nonetheless, pressed a shaky palm to the side of a delicate neck, touch uncertain and unsteady. "I see him. He keeps dying." Words that were pained and desperate for all that they were quiet under the chaos of the city. "Who are you?" Her hand slid, fingers in hair that was long - longer - and she tried to blink, tried to focus, her companion still unidentified even under her fingers. "Why? Who?"
"He's not dead." A pained promise, her eyes shutting with the touch. Who was she touching? Was it Seven again? Was she still the interloper? The kleptomaniac of touches that belonged to another? She wanted to lean into that touch, the fingers in her hair (when had been the last time? A dreamy froth of Selina's hands in her hair at the Manor, years ago when she had been a younger cat and Helena still a kitten) but it came with cracks in her foundation and she couldn't allow herself to break again.
In went a shuddering breath. "I'm a friend. Who are you? Can you tell me your name?" Her arm slid back under Marta's knees and she lifted her up. One foot on the floor and into the rear seat. "I'm going to give you another injection, okay? Something for pain. And then I'm taking you to the hospital. Seven's there. He's alive."
"A friend…" Marta's whisper was repetition, as if it hearing it again would force everything to make more sense. It didn't. But she repeated it again. And again. Four or five times before her mind jolted itself to what came next. Her eyes focused on the woman's face, intense for a long and silent moment until she tipped forward, head against shoulder, and exhaled. "Martha," she said, still a whisper, the memory of someone else cooing in her ear, memories that were too old to come with vision or really anything more than sweet scents that had no place around a child. But then she shook herself (and her head) and frowned. "Marta."
And then she was moving, being lifted, and she'd regained enough focus to groan with the pain of it. There was the soft promise of something to steal the pain away, but for the moment she simply had to grit her teeth against it. It made her awareness grey out for a bit, and when she regained focus, the arms were gone. But the voice remained, feminine, with promises that Seven hadn't died, even though she'd seen it. She'd seen it so many times. But the promises… "Alive." There was a longing to her own word, but after that one she went silent. And hoped.
Martha was her grandmother's name and it made her mouth quirk, but it was the change, the clarification that caught her attention, had her head jerking sharply to look at the woman. "Marta. Marta? Seven was looking for you. I'm going to take you to him." Her own mantra as she helped Marta get settled into the seat, doing her best to keep the pressure off the other woman's feet.
And then, like she promised, she reached into her pocket for another vial and a syringe. Hell if she understood dosing, but she had skimmed the package insert earlier when giving a dose to Seven and drew up 10 mg's. "I really hope you aren't allergic to this," she said, a fervent wish before she gave her the silver kiss of a needle into her upper arm. "There." Antidote and pain medicine given, she shut the door and clambered into the driver's seat to call Steve and get Marta to the hospital.