vivreencore (vivreencore) wrote in rooms, @ 2014-04-10 18:52:00 |
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Entry tags: | !marvel comics, *narrative, jack corvus |
Who: Jack Corvus [Narrative]
What: Jack gets snagged from the hospital by questionable types with bad intentions.
Where: Midtown Hospital
When: Just post the Oscorp pulse.
Warnings/Rating: Some violence and kidnapping.
The world was a whirlwind and Jack’s head was pounding unbelievably. An EMT with short, cropped blonde hair helped him into the ambulance. They forced him to sit, to breathe from an oxygen tank, and draped a blanket over his back to prevent shock. Before long the ambulance was full of people in various states of distress and injury. Then they were off toward the hospital as fast as it could carry them.
Jack didn’t pay much attention to the others, with the exception of Luke. As for himself, he wasn’t injured, not really. He hadn’t hit his head, like some of those he’d seen carried into ambulances instead of walking, and he wasn’t bleeding like the man across from him, who had balled up a pair of sodden scarlet kleenexes under his nose. But he was dizzy, and his head pounded uncontrollably. His limbs ached, and his muscles were still twitching. It was like he’d been hit by lightning, and his muscles were still feeling the twisting pinch, unable to calm and lie smooth.
By the time they reached the hospital all he wanted to do was lie down a while, take an aspirin, and be somewhere cool and dark until the headache passed. He wanted to sleep off the soreness in his aching limbs, and the crawling feeling somewhere he couldn't scratch that all was not right. It was as if someone had reached inside him, grabbed something important, and twisted it in every cell. It wasn’t sickness. It was something...else. A lack of familiarity with his own skin.
The EMTs pulled up at the hospital and led out their stumbling patients to wheelchairs, rolling out what gurneys they had. People were flooding in through the emergency room doors, so many that the nurses who manned intake had given up checking anyone in individually. The hospital had gone into crisis mode, ferrying patients into makeshift rooms, thin paper dividers set up between them. Those in the worst shape were taken to private rooms, while the rest found places to sit inside, waiting for a doctor or a nurse to tend to them. Despite the panic and the hushed/shouted murmurings of bombs and terror attacks, there were no missing limbs, no screaming patients. There were a million kinds of minor scrapes, bruises, and concussions, and people lined up for CAT scans by the dozens. No one was dying, though, and no one was dead.
The lack of fatal or severe injuries made Jack feel a little better, even if his head was pounding so hard that black and red stars appeared before his eyes. He didn’t get migraine, so what was this? Had they been electrocuted by some offloading of energy from the tower, or was this something worse? The feeling like the wave had climbed inside him and altered wasn't fading. It was like there was something alive in him. He tried not to think about it, but, of course, that only made him think of it more.
Somehow he was led to a small, partitioned section of the makeshift treatment area, surrounded on two sides by paper walls and with cement on the third. He sat down, only after waving Luke off and promising to find him later. He put his head in his hands, closing his eyes. It seemed so loud in this room, the lights much too bright. He swallowed, hard, and tried not to think about much of anything, just breathing, waiting for the pain to fade.
A doctor arrived within a few minutes, her brown hair falling out of place, a well-chewed pen tucked behind one ear. She was swift, businesslike. She checked his pupils and noted how he flinched when the impossibly bright pen light was shown in them, wrote him a prescription for a mild painkiller and diagnosed him with a concussion. He protested, quietly, that he hadn't hit his head. He didn't even notice the Doctor's pause before responding that a nurse would fetch him when it was his turn for a CAT scan.
The only chair available had wheels on it, so he settled in, leaning his head against his arm on the windowsill, determined to get some rest any way he could. It was loud, and his head was still pounding, but a nurse did soon return with a few small pills and a cup of water. “We’ll be around with some paperwork soon,” she assured him, cheerfully. “We’re a little overbooked.”
He downed the pills with a short sip of the water, and he gave her a wan, crooked smile. “I noticed,” he said. He craned around her for a glimpse of Luke while he waited, but as soon as she moved out of the doorway, the fluorescent light was directly in his eyes, so he shut them again.
Luke came by soon after. He seemed like he was in a hurry to leave - likely because of Wren, who would be off somewhere panicking over whether he was safe. It was just enough to make him smile. Luke made Jack promise to meet him at Max’s. “Sure, sure.” Then Luke was gone, too. But why Max's place, and not home to Wren and the kids?
Hours stretched on, and by evening, Jack was dozing in the wheelchair. He’d made it to the CAT scan, but his results still hadn't come back. The hospital had been busy and overcrowded, but now many patients were being released. He could hear the men in the next bed talking when he drifted awake again. No serious injuries, and most people out with a clean bill of health.
At last the doctor arrived again. At some point in the evening she had tamed her flyaways and tidied her appearance to match her demeanor. She wasn't alone this time either. He looked up at her, and he noticed how green her eyes were. They were dark, brown flecks spiraling out from the iris. Even to him, it seemed like a strange thing to note. “I have some bad news,” she said. “We’re going to have to transfer you.”
Jack sat up, wincing as he tried to open his eyes wider. “I’m fine,” he insisted. It was hard to see her face with the lights haloing around her like that, but he'd be fine, right?
She turned her mouth down. “I’m afraid we’ll have to,” she said, her tone apologetic, but her expression firm and pursed. “You aren’t fit to be released yet. Look at you. You still have light sensitivity, you wouldn’t even make it home. We need to keep you under observation until we can be sure it's nothing more serious."
He squinted between her and the orderlies. She waited, expectant, a little impatient. She obviously had other patients to get to, and felt like he was wasting her time.
He should have said no.
But he was tired, and the pain medication was wearing off, the pounding in his head slowly returning. Everything hurt, from his stomach to his fingernails, and that couldn’t be right. If only he could sleep it off. If they took him to a hospital that had enough room to give him a bed, he could get some real sleep. What a relief that would be. Max would understand if he didn't come around until morning. “Alright,” he said, surrendering, though the orderly was already wheeling him away. “Alright.”
It seemed as if the journey to the ambulance took them through the entire hospital. They were going out a different way, it seemed, than they’d come in. There were a few people behind them, too, with orderlies pushing them out. The overflow. It made sense.
Some of the halls were darkened at this time of night, and when they passed through an area where the lights were dimmed, he glanced up at the orderlies. They had hard faces, both of them, lean and tall, their hair cropped short. It made him feel uneasy without really knowing why, and suddenly, he didn't want to go to the other hospital. He wanted to get up out of the chair and run, with his eyes half-shut if necessary, all the way to Max’s apartment.
He stiffened in the chair, but the orderlies didn't seem to notice. He kept his eyes mostly closed, feigning exhaustion. Down the elevators they went, sitting in total silence as the machinery hummed and the dropped down five floors. Out into the hallway, then, and past an empty lobby desk, and out a fire door.
The orderlies managed to get about two feet outside the door before Jack sprang out of his chair, the way they’d been expecting, the way they’d been waiting for. The first orderly grabbed him by the arm, so he shrugged his jacket loose and turned, giving him a sharp right hook for his trouble. He kicked the legs out from under Orderly the Second when he tried to grab him around his middle and shove him into the waiting truck. He slid through the kick, low to the ground, and he was just rising again when the driver of the truck struck him with brutal efficiency across the small of his back with a baton.
It hit like a baseball bat. Jack toppled forward with a short, sharp sound, his spine spiking with pain. He just caught his fall and pushed, pushed up, scrabbling for purchase against mindless pain. There wasn’t even enough time to envision reaching around for the baton before it struck again, against his shoulder blades now. It knocked him flat, and shook the breath from him for the second time in one day.
He had fought men unarmed and come out the victor before. But three men when he could barely keep his eyes open without punishing pain, his limbs weak and aching? Three men was too many. He twisted over onto his back, teeth gritted. There was nothing but pain, nausea, and disorientation. He had every delusional intention of pitching back to his feet, but when he opened his eyes there was a gas mask descending on his face.
A fresh flood of adrenaline ran through him, and he kicked upward with both feet. They connected in a completely satisfying, vicious way with one orderly's stomach, and he kicked up again, this time hooking his feet and yanking backward to pull the second hired gun in white hospital clothes to the ground.
Then the driver was behind him again, with the baton pulled taught under his throat. Jack couldn't breathe, not through the mask, not at all, and he clawed back at the hands holding the bar across his throat. His limited vision swam, and his lungs exploded in pain. “Open the back,” the driver said over his head, as if he wasn’t having the flesh torn from his arms by the man below him.
Slowly, Jack's struggling lessened, slowing as his vision faded to nothing at all. Just at the moment where everything started to fill with red, the baton dropped away, and Jack gasped reflexively in a desperate lungful of whatever the tank was connected to. Something in the chemical fog that filled his lungs smelled sour, and his failing cognitive processes recognized it as fear.
After that, after a few more breaths that he couldn't hold now, nothing hurt so much anymore. He breathed sharply, trying to replace what had been lost, and then it grew more and more even, more and more deep. He blinked like a sleeper, then shut his eyes. Nothing hurt, and then there was nothing at all.