Disclaimer: X-Men = Marvel's.
Well… there's really not much to this fic, but I hope you like it.
Henry McCoy in the Dark
By Kassia
"What do you think, Scott?"
Scott looked up from his newspaper. "Of what?"
"My new dress, silly. That's why I'm spreading my arms out and pirouetting."
"Oh." Scott peered more closely, to demonstrate that he was indeed giving the question serious consideration. "It's lovely. Er - good pattern. Very flattering."
Jean smiled. "Thanks, hon."
* * *
When Hank regained consciousness, he found his legs were broken.
Or maybe just one leg was broken. Or maybe neither.
He was a doctor; this was the sort of thing he should know. In his defense, though, the pain was somewhat blinding. Figuratively speaking.
The darkness was literally blinding. There were no lights in this basement, no windows, and any light that may have issued through the cracks in the door was obscured by the debris that had come crashing down during the fire. He assumed they had been able to get the frightened, injured girl out before the structure had collapsed. They had had plenty of time, though they had wasted some of it shooting at him.
The fact remained he wasn't sure where the door was, and he was even more doubtful about his ability to manage the stairs leading up to it. He felt his legs. Three bullets wounds, he thought, though not all direct hits, and maybe a few fractures acquired during his graceless descent.
He hadn't even pulled a weapon on them. In all fairness to the beleaguered policemen, he must've been an alarming sight: looming over an injured girl, dressed in a trench coat and face wrapped in a scarf. It was no wonder that, when he had stood up and spread his hands to show his good attentions, they had only seen blue fur and deadly claws, and not heard him say, "I assure you, gentlemen - "
But that didn't mean they had to shoot at him. He had leapt into the air as they fired. Luckily - otherwise the bullets might have killed him. But they only hit his legs. He hadn't noticed for the first few seconds, while he flipped and leaped towards the only doorway he saw.
The bullets had kicked in as he passed through the doorway, and he had fallen. Down stairs. Like a stupid cartoon character running over the edge of a cliff, and plummeting as he realized nothing was supporting him.
The upper floor had probably caved in by now. He wondered how long he had been unconscious. A few minutes? Half an hour? More? Was the fire still blazing upstairs? Not that that was his main concern. No doubt the owner of the store had insurance to cover the damage - did it cover bleeding mutants in the basement?
Well, first thing first. He had to stop the bleeding. He probed through blood-matted fur until he found the bloodiest spots and the loudest screaming nerve-endings. Then he took off his scarf and wrapped it around one of the wounds, knotting it tightly. He made the rest of his make-shift bandages by shredding his extremely expensive trench coat.
He felt and tugged at the bandages, testing his handiwork, and decided it was the best that could be expected under the circumstances. Now, to get out of here, if possible. The bandages would help a bit, but he needed medical attention. Is there a doctor in the house?
It didn't seem very funny.
He dragged himself in the direction his hands were facing, and found that at least one of his legs functioned well enough to give him a bit of leverage. After about five drags, he reached an obstruction. A test touch told him that it was a shelf filled with shoe boxes - appropriately enough, stuffed with shoes. He mentally added shoes to his list of assets. What would MacGyver do?
He couldn't think of a way shoes or shoe laces would help him, nor the shoe boxes. There was something ironic about being trapped in a shoe store and unable to walk. No doubt it was deeply metaphorical. He would have to think about it at some time when he wasn't slowly bleeding to death.
He turned himself around, painfully, and leaned against the book case. He took a deep breath and shouted, "Help! I'm down here! HELP!"
No answer, so he resumed crawling. Bugs did it, babies did it, some of the more poetic seas did it, and now Dr. Henry McCoy did, too. No doubt there was some great irony and deeper meaning in this as well.
Come to think of it, it wasn't very hard to find. Here he was, on all fours, incapable of communication. An infant crying in the night, An infant crying for the light, And with no language but a cry.
Really. This was no time for poetry.
Or maybe this was the perfect time for poetry, songs, memorized scientific formulae, anything to take his mind off the pain in his legs as he crawled around and felt for the stairs. Stairs that would only lead to a burned husk of a shoe store, yes, but the top of them was still that much closer to the light of day.
So he began to mentally recite "Christopher Robin Has Sneezles and Wheezles" as he crawled. He gave up when he realized he couldn't remember which order the sneezles, wheezles, measles, and mumps came in.
He reached a bare cement wall a few extremely long moments later. His best course would be to follow the wall until he came to the stairs. He hadn't gotten a good look at the room, though - there was always the possibility that the stairs were in the middle of the room, and that the room made a full circle around them.
But his options were very limited, and he had a feeling that the time he had before he lost consciousness was as well. He left the remains of his trench coat next to the wall so that he would know when he had made a full circle, and began to feel his way along the wall.
He had gotten rather use to Unpleasant Things happening to him, but he couldn't help but wonder why this particular Thing had to happen to him at a strip mall in the middle of nowhere.
It was partly his fault. He could've taken a plane, but no, he had wanted to drive. He always needed two seats on a plane, after all, and he had thought this was a chance to see some of America. This was the intellect they praised, this intellect that had him taking unnecessarily long car trips and rushing into burning buildings to see if anyone needed saving.
He was somewhere in Ohio, now. Lovely state. He wished he had flown over it.
If he could only get out of here, he still had time to make it to the conference in Chicago. He had worked hard on his speech, and couldn't wait to give it. He had some rather original points to make, and he couldn't quell the illogical fear that if he didn't make them soon, publicly, someone else would make them first.
Then he remembered he would have to go to the hospital, and he laughed softly at himself. Maybe he could have them transfer him to a hospital in Chicago, and then take him in a wheelchair to the college where he would make his speech, both legs in a cast. But he had a feeling they wouldn't hear a word he said if he did that. The fact that he was blue and furry was enough distraction for an audience, without throwing a bunch of bandages and a wheelchair in. Sometimes he felt great sympathy for busty women who complained that men stared at their breasts instead of listening to them.
He paused again, and shouted for help. He didn't expect an answer, and he didn't get one. And - strange for him, in this sort of situation - there was no telepath's voice in his head, reassuring him.
He thought to Jean, thought at Jean, but there was no answer from her, either. He hadn't really expected one. The telepathic links between Jean and most of the X-Men weren't very strong, and since he had left to pursue his research, there had hardly been any need to keep it active. What was she doing right now? Training? Saving the world? Taking a bath?
Now, there were some people Jean would've sensed immediately had they been in this same trouble. Hank smiled grimly to himself. If only he had married a telepath, he wouldn't have been in this fix.
He shook of the thought and decided to see if he could remember his speech. He was pleased to find he could remember all the major points, as well as the jokes he had thought up while practicing it in the car. Pretty good jokes, too. He had been going over them constantly while he drove, to make sure they were fixed in his mind. Jokes were a useful way to make sure people heard what you were saying. He wanted his colleagues to remember ideas, and not just a mutant. Though he wanted them to remember that, too. Here was a mutant with ideas. Revolutionary thought.
Well, it would be to some. Unfortunately, it was only the progressive scientists that wanted to hear him speak, and not those who really needed to hear him. Not those who could be changed by it.
He continued to feel his way around the room. His vision was growing lighter, greyer, and he was having more and more trouble pushing the dizziness away. A thought occurred to him, and he reached behind him and touched the cement floor. It was damp and sticky; he seemed to be trailing blood behind him. That explained why so many thoughts that were occurring to him now made sense when he knew they shouldn't. The empty stinging high of blood loss - he had a feeling it wouldn't be the next big thing among teenagers.
He had always hoped to die on his feet or in bed.
What a waste. What a waste of a mind, what a waste of a body. He could help people, convince people, if only he could get out of here. Why didn't they come? He had things he needed to do. Didn't they know that Hank McCoy was down here, with things to do?
But was he Henry McCoy when he was in the middle of nowhere? Was he Henry McCoy in the dark?
They didn't know he had fought with the Avengers, had saved the world with the X-Men. They didn't know what he had discovered, and how much more he knew he could discover. They certainly didn't know of all the people he needed to see again - just a drop in the universal bucket.
He frowned at these thoughts, but then reflected that he could take advantage of his mindset. He tried to think of things he wanted to say to people but never had - that was usually what people did, when they thought they were dying, and that way, when - when - he got out of here, he could say the right things to the right people.
But he couldn't think of anything he hadn't said.
His crawling became more imperative, and simultaneously his legs became even more useless. He was like a blue furry slug, leaving a slime-trail of blood.
Okay, there was no deeper meaning in that.
There was a scraping sound upstairs, and he stopped thinking, not daring to consider what it could mean. He didn't want to have his last moments filled with disappointment.
The door opened and Hank saw that the stairs were on the other side of the room. "Hello? Anyone down there?" called the firefighter, framed against the waning daylight.
"Yes. But I'm afraid I can't walk."
"We'll get you a stretcher."
"It will have to be large," said Hank apologetically. "I'm rather - large. Er, and blue, and fuzzy."
"Huh," was all the firefighter said. He turned around. "We need a stretcher," he called. "There's an injured man downstairs."
Hank frowned. The firefighter hadn't taken his warning to heart. Two guys with a normal sized stretcher wouldn't be able to carry him.
Oh, well. He leaned back against the wall, and closed his eyes. He'd let them figure it out.
* * *
"And what do you think of this outfit?" asked Jean.
"It's lovely. Just like all the others. You've been doing this for half an hour now. How many things did you buy, Jean?"
"I kind of went on a spree," she admitted sheepishly.
He smiled. "You deserve it. Those are nice shoes. Are they new, too?"
Jean grinned. "I can't believe you noticed them, honey."
"Sometimes I get lucky," said Scott, and returned to reading his newspaper.