x_muses | [ with worldwillendinfire ] "With these broken wings..."

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[ with worldwillendinfire ] "With these broken wings..."

Pain. Incredible pain.

That was the first thing that Warren became aware of. He was groggy, and had no idea where he was but he recognised the medicinal and clinical smell. He didn't just wake up and respond to anything. There was actually a fair amount of time that passed between his consciousness clawing back than when he attempted to open his eyes. Even then, the first few tries failed because it actually even felt like his eyelids were painful too. After that, he gave up trying and slipped back out of consciousness.

He didn't know how many times he came close to actual wakefulness before he managed it. This time, he got his eyes open a little bit but they were just assaulted by a bright light that caused him to moan very softly, hoarsely, and it would have been a sound missed by anyone who wasn't right by his side. The way he was lying felt awkward. Partly on his stomach, partly on his side with his cheek squashed in against the pillow beneath his head.

He was in so much pain that it hurt to take a breath; it was reactionary for him to suck in a shallow gasp of breath and hold onto it, but holy fuck, did that hurt too and the noise he made that time was a soft agonised cry that was met with a hand closing around his that was resting limply beside him. Waking up was making him feel sick. Why was he feeling sick and in this much pain? Why wasn't his healing easing it?

There was no realisation of how bad he looked, which was just as bad as how he felt. He was covered in bruises, cuts, and grazes from the impact with the sidewalk, and one arm was entirely covered in bandages up to his shoulder. The blinding pain in his wings that was tucked up against his back to aid this weird as fuck recovery position he was in. He couldn't decide whether the urge to pee or throw up was stronger. This had to be hell. There was no other explanation for it.

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John had been sitting here since his conversation with Scott... or at least as much as he could be, considering that Josh and Hank had to ask him to move every few hours to check Warren over again -- vital signs and all that stuff. But John hadn't left him. At one point, Rahne had come in here to bring him food, make sure he was eating. He didn't feel like eating all that much, and what she brought him was met with gratefulness, though he could only pick at it. He felt sick and in pain, because Warren was sick and in pain, and that was tearing him apart inside.

There was always the possibility that Warren would never wake up. That the damage done was irreparable, and that his body would eventually give up. There was no way of knowing what kind of poison the Brotherhood had used, but it had designed to take Warren out. Maybe it still would. Maybe it would kill him. And then, John knew, he'd have to leave the X-Men, because if Warren died, ideals and rules and philosophies of life be damned. He was going to kill them all. Every single member of the Brotherhood would be dead. He would find them and burn them alive, one right after the other, and like with the ones who'd attacked Warren, he would feel no remorse -- no guilt at all -- for destroying so many lives. Warren's life was worth all of theirs and then some.

But as he sat there in silence, Warren was waking up. He was waking up, and leaving John absolutely stunned. But it was clear that he was in pain, and a weak cry told John immediately just how much pain. His fingers wrapped around his lover's hand and he held onto it tightly. "Babe... Warren, babe, are you..." Awake? Not entirely. Okay? Absolutely not. "Can you hear me, babe?" he asked softly. "You... You don't have to say anything. If you can hear me, just squeeze my hand."

"Squeeze your hand? Fucking seriously?" Warren bitched in a pained mumbled. He could barely move his eyes without it hurting, and he was pretty sure from the pain he was feeling in his arm that everything connected to it felt broken too. He wanted to move to test his healing. Maybe if he tried to fight against the pain, it would jump start into things resolving. Though, he had known from the start that if he had been seriously hurt, it could take a few days to get back to normal. There was also the fuck that if he moved, he knew he would throw up. It wasn't even necessarily about feeling sick, it was just that the pain was so overwhelming that it was making him feel physically sick. He was in a hospital or the clinic. He recognised the smell. He had healed people himself here, if they'd had the compatible blood type. But why? Why was he in a bed in the clinic and feeling so miserable?

It hit him pretty quick that he couldn't move even if he wanted to. Something was really wrong. His wings were agony and he couldn't even move them a little. There was a small attempt, but they were held in place and not being able to move his wings started to panic him and his heart rate increased. His wings were biggest part of him, they were the most dominant and having them restricted like this was freaking him out. Then he made the mistake of trying to move to see them, and his body was flooded with a red-hot pain. Either he was dying, or everything in him was broken. It wasn't quite everything, but there were enough sporadic breaks throughout his body to restrict him, not to mention the fact he was black and blue from bruises. He swore - a lot - but it was through clenched teeth and tears were coming to his eyes in response. "What happened? Why am I being tortured? Why are my wings tied?"

Warren was awake and bitching, and John's eyes were flooding with tears of shock and gratefulness all at once, and as soon as he knew that his other half could hear him, the first words out of his mouth were a rushed, "I love you." He'd never before said those words to Warren, nor had Warren said them to him, but he damn well needed to right now. He was never going to be afraid again of losing Warren without him knowing how John truly felt about him. He was glad at least that Warren was aware, and able to bitch up a storm, as was his way. "I love you," he repeated, more firmly, with confidence born of meaning exactly what he was saying.

John gave a tight squeeze to Warren's hand, knowing that he was panicking. Warren was always the picture of cool confidence, completely comfortable in who he was and what he was capable of, but right now, all of that was gone. His capabilities were obviously at a far lowered level right now. "You got shot, babe," John explained to him. "It was members of the Brotherhood, and they had some sort of poison in the bullet. Your body isn't healing itself... Not the way it usually does. Your wings and everything... They're broken. Josh and Hank are working their asses off trying to help you, but they think it may be a matter of regular human healing times... You're not being tortured, babe. At least not by us."

Warren's recollection of any of it seemed to be patchy, at best. Some of what John was saying had a vague familiarity to it, but having hit his head pretty hard when he fell, his memory of it wasn't making much sense. How had all this even happened? His face scrunched up with a mix of pain and confusion was he did try to get his brain to work to make more sense of this. "Th'text," he mumbled. "They kidnapped you..." Only, John was sitting there with him and he sounded fine. Warren had a black and swollen eye, so trying to peer at John through the cracks his eyes were affording him with was making his vision a little obscured.

Then he closed his eyes again, squeezing them shut. "Fuck... m'hallucinating," he moaned. There was no way in hell John would just be sitting there saying those three little words so freely. It was some sort of concussed fantasy his brain was feeding him, maybe to counteract all the pain. He gave a fruitless attempt to move again because he was starting to really fear he was dying here.

"I got the same text, only it was about you," John explained softly. "It was the Brotherhood. The guys who did it used to be my teammates. I used to work side by side with them all the damn time. They didn't kidnap me. They lured me there to watch you die." His hand was still wrapped around Warren's, holding onto him as if terrified to let go. In a lot of ways he was. Warren was his boyfriend, but more than that, John knew full well that he was the only person that he'd ever truly been completely in love with. It was a crazy thing for him to realize, and maybe his timing was a little off, but at this point, timing didn't matter so much as the fact that he said it. That was what mattered most.

"You're not hallucinating," John assured him, with another squeeze to his hand. He needed right now to try and keep Warren conscious and talking. It was more than they'd gotten out of him since the whole thing happened, and John was absolutely terrified of losing him. "I mean, unless you're seeing me as a bright green hippopotamus or something, this is real, Warren. I'm here. I've barely left your side since it happened. Aside than because Scott bitched me out and I had to tell him what happened. I've been waiting for you to wake up. I didn't want you to wake up alone."

What the fuck... poison? That was basically the only place Warren's mind would let him go, because it was ridiculous. Right? Though, in the mutant world, nothing was really ridiculous. Warren just was very much not the sort of person who would take kindly to being incapacitated. He was generally the 'can't keep a good bitch down' sort of guy and he would fight until the end. Had that been what he had done? He was trying to recall any tiny snippets of memory of it to give him a clearer idea of what happened, but his aching, groggy head wasn't cooperating. "Fucksake, I feel like m'gonna puke," was the response to hearing it was the Brotherhood who left him in this way. It was no secret whatsoever what Warren thought of that particular faction. He hadn't just been verbally vocal on the subject, but he had splashed it all over the media a time or two in his past, just because he had the exposure to and wanted the bastards to rot in hell. It sucked when your past came back to bite you in the ass.

The more he started to wake up, the more he began to isolate where a majority of the pain was coming from. His wings were blinding agony, which confirmed what John was telling him. They were broken. His shoulder was next on the list and he was pretty sure the arm attached to it was broken. Probably ribs, and his ankle. Not to mention the pain in his back. He seriously could have fucking died, from the sounds of it, and it was a hell of a lot to try to take in when you were concussed and in agony. "Tell 'em I'm dead. At least they'll be running scared then." Tactical, maybe, but if he wanted them to rot in hell before, now he wanted them to be annihilated by a nuclear bomb, or something else on just as grand a scale. If the Brotherhood thought he was dead, they would think his plan worked and would be lulled into a false sense of security. "How long?" he asked, and his voice was still croaky from lack of use and probably a billion high tech medical things Hank would have used to save him.

"I know you're freaking out, and you want to move, babe," John said, keeping his tone even and soft, trying not to raise the tension levels in the room. "But the less you do, the better off you'll be. I can go get you a cool cloth for your face and ask Hank if he has anything to help with the nausea if you want to try something. I can get you whatever you need," he added, his voice a subdued tone that revealed very clearly how worried he was. This was no joke. His lover's life hung in a dangerous balance here, because they still had no idea what the poison was capable of causing, or if they'd seen the last of it yet. But John would be casually hopeful as long as Warren was still awake and talking to him. John was usually so devil-may-care about everything. Nothing phased him... nothing got to him or bothered him. But this had far more than bothered him. It had taken his entire world, spun it upside down, and shaken everything up.

"Press release?" John asked thoughtfully. "The whole nine yards? We can do that. I'll get in touch with your PR guy... In a bit, though. I want to hang close for the time being." It was the most open and truthful John had probably ever been about his feelings for Warren... His need to be near him and know that he was safe in the wake of what had happened to him. "The... The ones who did this to you... They're dead. I wanted to send a message of my own, and they're... They're definitely gone. They're not coming back, either, unless there's some sort of serum that reanimates ashes." John was quiet for a moment, thinking it over. "A few days now. Three? I think it's three, but they've kind of started running together at this point."

"Just want the pain to stop," Warren mumbled, because he really did want that more than the need to move. The two would cancel each other out, sure, but he wasn't coping well with the pain. His healing was part of him, and when he needed to heal from bad injuries, it took a little longer to pull off and more focus. To him, this would be the equivalent of a human suddenly finding themselves disabled and wheelchair bound. It wasn't helping that Hank couldn't tell him if this was permanent, and if it was, would his injuries leave him disabled and useless like it would a human who suffered the same fall from a great height? It was leaving him wracked with anxiety to the point his hands were shaking, and again, that was so out-of-character for him.

He looked at John, despite the obstruction of a swollen eye. "Do you really want to do this?" 'This' could encompass a hell of a lot right now. But this was Warren issuing John an easy get out of jail free card. If Warren was going to be incapacitated like this for some time, he was going to need to be taken care of. It was an awful realisation for him to make, but he and John had never really blatantly breached the romantic, committed couple zone. In fact, they both seemed to make a concerted effort not to for whatever reasons. Now it was crunch time, and Warren didn't want to leave John tethered to the burned if all he wanted was the manwhore, bachelor, single guy lifestyle. "You killed them?" There was a pause, a couple of beats to absorb the information, and then, "Good. Cunts."

"So do I," John murmured, and that was utter truth -- not his own pain at seeing Warren hurt, though that was a desperate want, too. But he wanted more than anything for Warren's pain to stop. He'd teased Warren a million times about using his flame throwers to make Warren's wings into "hot wings" but the truth was that he loved them. He loved seeing Warren with the two brilliant white wings spread out behind him... It made him larger than life, and for someone like John, that was a huge turn-on. Warren was more than human, but so were all the other mutants. It was different with him because he, at least to John, was more than even the other mutants were.

"I love you," John said again, each time he repeated it, the conviction in the words becoming that much stronger. "No, I don't want to do this, because I don't want you to be hurt. I don't want this to be what you have to go through. Nobody in their right mind would want this, Warren. But I love you, and if you're hurting, I'm going to be there beside you. We've been together a long time, and we've called this everything under the sun but what it is, Warren. You're not my fuckbuddy. You're my lover... My boyfriend. And fuck the world. I'm staying with you." His eyes quickly looked over Warren's wings, usually snow white, but now spattered with his life's blood. "Every single one. There was nothing left to even identify. Not even dental records."

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[ with worldwillendinfire ] "With these broken wings..."

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