Sup guys, I'm aaalive! *Rises from the depths and grabs you in a massive hug* I've missed you guys so, so much, and writing! Sorry I just vanished like a fart in the wind (again, I know). Hopefully this time I'll finally be getting back into it, yay! So here's my attempt at getting back into writing - another chapter of Blank Cobwebs, yayyy! It is shorter than my usual chapters and probably full of mistakes because I haven't written in like more than a year (again, really sorry!) but I hope you enjoy it! Thanks again for clicking into this and reading - it means a lot to me!

Enjoy! :D

Hank thought that his heart had stopped. "He's one of Eric's soldiers" – his best friend's statement wouldn't stop spinning around in his head. He could do nothing but continue staring at Alex, whose blue eyes were also blank with shock.

"He's the one who was able to toss the X-Jet onto the Cuban beach," Alex continued quietly. "I'm sure of it."

"The one with the tornadoes?" Hank's voice soundly oddly far away from his own ears, although his initial shock was beginning to fade. "He was the most dangerous of the lot, besides Azazel!"

Alex breathed heavily and ran a hand thought his thick, blond hair. He finally dragged his eyes off the body on the floor, looking into Hank's eyes. "I know. We were lucky that Eric knocked his out when he did, otherwise the final battle would have been much harder to win."

Hank shuddered at the thought at trying to fight against tornadoes. They could have all been ripped apart or suffocated…his eyes drifted back down to the unconscious, bleeding man at their feet; a huge difference to when they had last seen him: dressed in a suit and wild hair whipping around his serious face. The memory of the absolute fury he had seen in those dark eyes almost made Hank turn his head away from the guy's limp form, but he managed to keep his gaze locked on him.

"What do we do now?" Alex's voice broke the long silence; he sounded completely lost.

"We help him." The words were out before Hank's brain had even processed them and their consequences. He could feel Alex staring at him, so he rushed to continue before his brother-in-arms could object. "He obviously hasn't come here to attack us! He's at death's door, yet he came here instead of getting himself too hospitable. Whatever his reasoning was for being on Shaw's side and attacking us is irrelevant now, that was almost half a year ago! No matter what we think of him, he's just another mutant come to the mansion looking for help, as we once did. What right do we have to turn him away?"

There was a moment's silence, and then Alex broke it with a chuckle. Hank looked up at him to see a teasing smile forming on the blonds' lips. "Damn Hank, I never knew that you were into speeches."

Hank felt himself smile in return at that, glad that the tension was beginning to fade from the between the two of them.

"Come on," Alex said as he pushed himself to his feet, "Let's get him to the medical bay, otherwise all his blood, sweat and tears will have been in vain."

"Right," Hank agreed seriously. "Go get the stretcher; he's got too many injuries for us to carry him there by picking him up ourselves."

Once the man was lying on the stretcher on his stomach, Hank and Alex picked it up by one end and started making their way from the foyer and towards the medical bay. Stealing a quick glance over his shoulder, Hank winced at the amount of blood that had pooled onto the carpet where the man had been laying, not to mention what was starting to drip off the stretcher and land at their feet as they walked. "That's going to take forever to get off…I'll have to try and get Banshee to do it before Charles wakes up."

"He's a lot lighter than he looks," Alex suddenly remarked, breaking Hank's train of thought. "He might just be skin and bones underneath all this blood."

"Then that'll make it even harder for his body to recover from the wounds." Hank's mind started to whirl, trying to think of the best way to treat him. "We'll have to hook him up to a drip, and inject liquidised food into him too, in order to try and bring his weight up. He'll have to be put in medical-induced coma too, for about three months –"

"Three months?!" Alex cried, almost tripping over his own feet as they went into the medical bay.

Hank nodded wordlessly in answer to his best friend, concentrating on placing their patient on an empty bed. Grabbing a large cloth, he threw another one at Alex's head and motioned for him to help him wipe the blood off the man's back, and to be mindful of the glass sticking out of it.

"That's forever, and do you think Charles will allow it?" Alex continued as he started to clean off the blood. "This guy used to be on Shaw's team, and than Erik's! I don't think will want to help, not after what's happened between him and Erik."

"We'll have to convince him otherwise then," Hank huffed, annoyed that his friend had a very good point. He's a fellow mutant, surely Charles wouldn't turn this man away when he's dying at our feet?"

It came out as more of a hesitant question than a strong statement. Silence filled the room and the two young men got work saving the guy that had only been trying to kill them five months ago. An hour later, their arms were aching but they refused to take a break. The glass had been removed from the man's back, the cuts and his horrifically burnt shoulder now wrapped in swathes of bandages. They'd turned him carefully onto his back, finally taking care of his bruises and scores on his chest and stomach.

"Look at this…" Hank's voice trailed off in disbelief as he pointed at something that was trailing from several of the man's wounds. "Thread. So, stitches?"

"Looks like it," Alex agreed as he peered at the bits of black string.

"They look professional," Hank muttered. "So he must have been too hospitable after all, he couldn't have done these himself and I doubt anyone on Erik's team – or Erik himself – knows how to stitch."

"But why would they just suddenly kick him out of hospitable when he's in such bad shape?"

"Because they found out he's a mutant." Bitterness covered Hank's tone, laced with a hint of anger. "Humans have always hated us, but I didn't know they could be as cruel as this. Perhaps they were the ones who did this to him in the first place?"

"We'll change their minds someday Hank," Alex sighed as he carefully covered five mysterious deep strikes that were on the man's chest, covering his heart. "We have to."

The young men finally sat back with equally heavy sighs, exhausted. Though they wanted nothing more than to forgot about their horrendous morning, something compelled them to stay for a little longer and watch their patient – who had now been put into a coma, his lax, pale face finally see-able from being cleaned of dried blood. Clean sheets had been pulled up to his neck and his head was help up by a pile of fluffy pillows. The only sounds that could be heard were the rhythmic beeping of the heart monitor, and the man's quiet breathing.

"He's going to be covered in scars for the rest of his life." Hank couldn't help but say, breaking the easy silence between him and Alex.

His friend shook his head, his blond locks ruffled from running this hands through his hair too much. "I've never seen such server wounds. The cuts, the glass, the horrible burn on his shoulder -what has Erik been making him do?"

"I don't know, man" Hank replied tiredly. "I guess we'll to wait till we can wake him up and find out."

A thought suddenly struck Hank, and he sat bolt upright. "Wait, do we even know his name?"

Alex slowly looked over at him, somewhat guiltily. "No. I don't think we do…codename or real name. I've never heard anyone mention –"

"Janos Quested, or known to Shaw as Riptide." The quiet voice startled both young men, and they slowly turned their heads to see a very angry Charles Xavier sitting in his wheelchair at the doorway, his blue eyes filled with rage. As they watched their mentor glare at them with hell's wrath, he snarled, "And I want him the fuck out of my house."