It’s like Kitty’s throat. Sae much blood an’ nothin’ tae show for it.
Who: Neena and Moira What: Neena has an episode. Death in a dream leads to emergency first aid in the waking world. Also, she gets her eye spot. When: Tuesday Night Status: complete Rating: R for blood and angst
Romany pulled a cigarette out of a package, and lit a match. It flared brightly in the night's dim light, before she lit the cigarette with it and blew it out. Neena watched from the shadows as both match and cigarette were tossed into the grave. Pete Wisdom's grave.
The members of X-force that remained had gathered around her as she'd made her presence known. She'd been on the run for awhile, at that point, on the run and terrified for her life, facing a man with a power for murder. Back at the new X-force headquarters, they asked her how it was she'd gotten into this situation, and why it was that the man - Marcus Tseung - would have such an interest in her.
Why would he want to kill her?
'Because he already killed me 6 months ago', came her response. And then it was revealed - the Alien Symbiote that had grown out of the fist-sized hole blown into her spine. The fact that she'd been dead long enough for them to start the mainline incision on her autopsy before she'd woken up. How she'd fled to France, changed her eye color, dyed her hair and even changed the shape of her face. But he'd still found her, and his power had killed her without any warning at all - one hole, straight through her abdomen and through her spine. She'd been dead before she hit the ground.
In the real world, Moira's instruments suddenly went crazy. Neena had been stable moments previous - her vitals in the usual patterns for her current predicament and the fact that she was sleeping. But her rate spiked randomly, and then plummeted into a flatline, without warning.
Blood spread across her shirt and the sheet she'd been sleeping under, and soaked into the mattress underneath her.
Moira flailed, falling backwards out of her chair. She picked herself up, grabbing her kit and rushing into Neena's room as the machines screamed their alarm.
"Oh shite..." She ripped the blanket off, and cut through Neena's night gown.
There was definitely a wound, one the size of moira's fist in diameter. It looked like someone had come in and blown a hole through the woman with a large caliber gun, but there was no evidence of the kind of burning and tissue damage that a bullet would have done to her. There was just a hole there, one that went all the way through Neena's back.
No one had been in or out of the room, either.
It had taken up the space of most of her back, grown over her shoulder and down some of her arm, this living thing. It was an odd shade of green, and there seemed to be an eye growing out of it, below her shoulder. She joked about it being 'more awesome than a tattoo' while showing it to her kids. The thing was attached to her spine, and when it moved, it always felt like the hulk was doing a tapdance on it. Jesse tried to do a scan and it responded by jerking around on her back. Junior, as she'd decided to call him, obviously didn't like to be scanned.
She talked about how she'd woken up in the morgue, and escaped. How the symbiote had saved her life and started out much smaller than its current size. How it had restored her body to peak physical condition, removing all of her scars and even dying her hair back to its original shade. She was younger. She was stronger. She'd run for her life, and Marcus had chased her every step of the way.
There was no coming back from this. No way to staunch the blood, and Moira felt helpless. She called down to the nurses in the hospital below for help as she started to massage Neena's heart. She wasn't going to give up. She just needed to keep the heart pumping while the nurses, packed the wound and worked on infusing plasma into her bloodstream.
Drenched in blood, Moira felt like an eternity was passing, and her voice had a distant echoey quality to her own ears, "Get that wound packed! I need more pressure! Nae! Harder!"
Before the wound could be packed in, however, it started to miraculously close in on itself, as if being healed quickly by some otherworldly force. Her lips slowly faded in a deep purple, and other parts of her skin started following suit.
Over Neena's left eye, a dark tattoo began to fade in, as well. Her vitals began to stabilize. It had been almost 5 minutes.
They'd taken in with some anarchists in the hunt for Marcus Tseung, but he'd been waiting for them. No amount of extensive training was enough to combat him, and Neena thought for sure that this time, she was really going to die. Only what happened afterwards was even more terrifying. The Symbiote that had saved her life took over her body, animating it and overturning her free will. It was the last thing she remembered before waking up in a hospital in London.
They'd removed it from her, but a light webbing of scars remained on her back, marking the place that it had grown over her skin and down her right arm. The only other scar she'd had left was the surgical scar from its removal. In the end, Neena had really just been glad that it was over.
Moira yanked her hands off of Neena's heart, and watched in wonder as the wound closed. It was like Kitty. Just like Kitty's throat and was the most disturbing thing she'd ever seen.
The only evidence that something had gone wrong, was the scars on Neena's back, and what appeared to be a surgical scar. Moira dismissed the nurses, promising them overtime pay if they kept this quiet, then she went to wash up. She was soaked through with blood.
And it wasn't just that wound that had closed. Every trace of Neena's recent captivity, every single wound from it had healed. Stitches had popped up and away from her healed flesh, leaving no mark behind them. The burns on her wrists were gone, and every sign of the several gunshot wounds she'd received over the last month had also disappeared.
Scans would probably show that the only indication anything had gone wrong in the last few months was the chip and its problematic wires, which stubbornly continued to exist.
The spot over her eye faded into view completely, and Neena's eyes snapped open. She made a confused noise as she noticed that her front and back were soaked. What the hell had just happened?
It made no sense, and indeed the scans showed just the chip, and the scars. It continued to show the anomalies in Neena's blood but nothing Moira could pin down. Certainly nothing that explained this.
"Bloody dreams... easy lass..." Moira held her down gently, "Ye've had an experience."
"I'm covered in blood, Moira, you call that an experience?" Neena blinked down at her nightgown and up at Moira, more confused than anything. She'd been dead in her dreams for a while. A long while. Long enough to...
"... Hell." She added in a muttered whisper.
"What did ye dream about?" Moira asked, helping Neena sit up. They needed to get her to the shower. Hell, both of them to the shower.”
Neena felt more disoriented than anything, though she was a little weak still, like a kitten. It was like she'd really lost all of that blood, though she had nothing to show for it. She let Moira help her up, and rubbed at her face a bit with her hands, noting the fact that her arms were completely clean.
And her nail beds were black-purple again. She took a deep breath and let it out, then shook her head, "I died. There was a man who had the ability to shoot energy bullets out of his finger, ones that didn't need anything but line of sight. They went through walls, and everything. He killed me... and I woke up in the morgue."
"Och..." Moira guided her towards the shower, stripping off her own soaked clothing as she did so. It would be cold and uncomfortable, but they'd be clean at least, “Ye dunnae even have that hole in yuir chest anymore. It’s like Kitty’s throat. Sae much blood an’ nothin’ tae show for it.”
"Funny, she didn't mention that..." Neena frowned. She was too weak to stand on her own, and couldn't help but lean heavily on Moira while the doctor stripped the both of them and got them into the shower.
Kitty had had her throat slit at some point? Neena didn't remember that happening. She had almost all of the memories now to put them together into a complete set, she was certain of it, but she didn't remember that. And why hadn't anyone told her?
She wrapped an arm around Moira's neck to hold herself up, and let the warm water pour over her. It was hard to figure out what she was feeling. It would have been nice to die, but she wasn't disappointed. In the dream, the symbiote hadn't let her die, either. Neena hadn't really been expecting to wake up covered in blood like that. Instead of relief, she mainly felt tired.
Neena wondered if Kitty had the same kind of mixed feelings.
"Ye had enough on yuir plate, lass." Moira replied, starting to scrub them down. It was incredibly clinical and not remotely sexy at all, "I didnae want tae worry ye further but now..."
And Kitty? Would understand.
"...It's all over now... She's had her experience and this isn't the first time I've died in my bed, so... It's okay, Moira."
The scrubbing was, indeed, clinical, though Neena wondered if some kind of scandalous rumours would get spread around about them anyway. People could make up shit without much prompting, really. There'd already been pictures around of her kissing a woman in a coffee shop.
Moira hoped Kitty had some lives left. Neena too. Hell, "The rate ye lot are givin' me gray hairs I'll be white by next week, an' dead the week after."
She guided Neena out of the shower and sat her down to help her dry, "Feels like we're all losin' extra lives."
"Well you know me, Moira, I'm like a cat. I was born with at least 9 of them," Neena tried to sound reassuring, but it came off more like bitter. She couldn't apologize for that. She shook her head, "I come back from everything, and my powers are working again. Don't worry about me."
"... I hope that's the last time we need to worry about Kitty, thought." She added, after a pause. Damn these people and making her care about them. How was she supposed to trust anyone when her own husband was fake the whole time? For how many years?
Stop THINKING about that, she told herself. Then she rested her head back against the wall, lifted it, and whacked it back against the wall again.
"I'm goin' tae worry about every one of ye an' then some. It's what I do, lass. It's me job, it always will be." She rubbed at her jaw, thinking about her own death in her dreams. About the end that had come.
She had to dream about the Legacy cure. She had to. Why hadn't she?!
"I charge extra for concussions."
"Well you may worry about us constantly, but no worries there. I don't have the energy to hit my head hard enough to give myself a concussion." Neena smiled up at her weakly, then closed her eyes, "So. I'm me, aren't I? I'm all me now. Black and White. Like a little domino. It remade me, Jr. did. It remade me like I was."
What she was asking wasn't plain. There weren't any mirrors anywhere, and nothing in the shower had been shiny enough to look. If she was done changing everywhere else and the thing had reboot her back to scratch, then the spot was probably there, too.
"Nae, I charge tae give them," She replied, giving Neena a big smile. The smile faded a little bit at Neena's words, "Aye, yuir all white and dark. Ye even have ye spot back."
"Damn."
There would have been a time when that information would have made her angry. She would have broken things. She was almost certain if she'd seen herself with the spot in the mirror even 3 weeks ago she would have punched the mirror.
Right now, it really just felt like it all made sense. And she was too tired to argue with life anymore.
"Well, that's life," She muttered, as she reached her arms out to Moira, "Let's get back to the room before people start staring at us. I'm pretty sure I'm going to need some orange juice and cookies or something. I feel like I just donated an assload of blood."
"I wonder if that has anything tae do with the anomalies in yuir blood I saw," Moira replied. "Like t'changes were startin' ahead o'time an' now..."
She shrugged a shoulder, and helped Neena up, "Congratulations, yuir a mutant?"
She helped her into a different room, "I'll bring yuir things in here. We're goin' tae need tae incinerate that old bed."
The new room had white walls and made Neena's skin crawl almost instantly, but it was better than the old room with it's very bloody bed and the ghost of her old life still standing in the corner.
She curled up in the new bed and closed her eyes, "Congratulations to me."