Got a call from Jeannie, Elf is MIA from a feckin' Council meetin'.
Fer fucks sake.
Wot am I? His fuckin' secretary?
'Cept she's worried, an' Jeannie don't worry over nothin'.
An Kurt? Well, yeah, my lad's many things but he's usually reliable.

So I'm on my way up to his rooms.

Door open for me, they're keyed to open to people he trusts. So that's me. Oh, let's be honest, that's probably half the Island.

Smell hits me soon as I'm through the door. Blood. Fuck.
I drop to a defensive crouch. But there, under the metallic blood is another smell, the sweet, nasty smell of sickness. Fuck. Where are you, laddie?
**Jeannie? Trouble.**

The lounge is clear, bedroom too. Bathroom.
Fuck, it's a fuckin' bloodbath.
What the hell?

I sit him on the toilet. Crouch down in front of him. He's zoned out, the left side of his face is scarlet with blood, it's all over the floor, the side of the bath too.
"Elf? Kurt?" No response. I can hear the wheeze of his chest. I grab a towel and try to wipe away some of the gore, it's clotting, he's been bleeding for a while, how long has he been lying here?
"...logan..." He's got no voice. Up close, the sound of his chest is horrible. He lifts his head, makes a grasp for my forearm. He's cold, the fingers are icy against me. Ah, bright lad, what happened to ya'?

There's a flash of light in the lounge, then the place is full of people, half the feckin' Council.
Popular, my lad is. Nah, it's not that. It's Kurt. Our Kurt. It's not just me that cares for him.

"Wolverine. Report?" Slim's voice is tense. Shit, forgot about the audience.
"No threat, stand down."

'Ro is beside us, kneeling in the blood, she looks distraught.
"Kurt? Kurt!" She cups his head in her hands, looks at me. "What happened? Who hit him?"
She looks around the bathroom for super-villains, no one is there.
"S'okay, 'Ro, I think he got sick, think he fell and hurt himself."
Her face goes from anger to sorrow and she reaches out to push the tangled, bloody hair off his forehead. "Oh, Kurt, beloved."
"...ororo?..." He looks around at his anxious audience, he looks confused and frightened.
I really do not like the wheeze of his breathing.

She passes me a bath towel to wrap him in, he's stark naked, and I pick him up, he's six inches taller than me, see, he's not really a 'little lad' he's a strapping guy, but he's my boy, an' I carry him when he needs it. As he would for me.
He has his head on my shoulder, now I can feel the heat coming off him; he was cold when I first found him. Scotty comes over.
"What a mess. Let's get him down to The Healing Garden."
"Oh," Jeannie's in the doorway, puts her hand to her mouth. She looks around the bathroom. "How long has he been here?"

Gorgon is looking at the lot of us like we've lost our minds.
We're not just team, we're family. The core of us. Hell, we're closer than some families, stronger. We don't always get on an' it's 'Ro an' Jeannie an' Elf who are the glue which holds us together.
Don't give a fuck what he thinks.

'Yanna 'ports us all down to that Healin' place.

Well, that was the end of my quiet shift. Half the Quiet Council tuning up in a flash of light.
Out. Out. Out. It's like shooing chickens.
I get Wolverine to put my patient down on the bed.
"What's the story?"
"Found him on the floor in his bathroom like this, he's been there a while."
"Okay. Kurt?" I get into his eyeline, not much of a glow there, sure sign he hurt.
"He was cold when I got there but he's burnin' now, an' he sounds all wheezy."

That's a few more pieces to the puzzle. I start rattling off a list for Deb my duty nurse. We'll start with a head and chest CT and X-Ray, don't want to mess about with a possible skull injury. Then we'll see about his chest, he does indeed sound very wheezy.
Temp's high, BP low, he's lost a fair bit of blood and I'll bet a dollar that his oxygen saturation is right off.
Logan's still here, I could do with him out too, but it's not worth the upset and argument, he'll shift when we get the X-Ray over here, he's not actually stupid. How the hell did you manage to get in the kinda mess in your own bathroom, Kurt? Impressive, even for you.
Right, let's get to work.

Thirty minutes later, I find the time to go update his entourage.
I look round at anxious faces, Charles, Eric and Peter Rasputin to add to my collection. Oh, this is going down in the record books.
"Okay. He's going to be fine but it's going to take a week or so." Several people open their mouths to speak, I raise my hand to cut them off before they start. "First things first. The scalp laceration is superficial, he's possibly got a mild concussion, certainly got a headache but there's no skull fracture or bleeding as far as we can tell. More worrisome, he has pneumonia in both lungs, I don't yet know if this is bacterial or viral, we're running cultures now. I'm a little concerned how fast this has taken hold, when did anyone last see Kurt and was he unwell at the time?"

They all look at each other. Okay, so much for the 'team as family' which gets trotted out every time they want to be underfoot. "Can we find out? Doesn't he have security? When did they last see him?"
Well, that opens a can of worms. They all talk all over each other. These are busy, important people, they've been all over the place, doing all sorts of busy, important things.
Sigh.
Near as I can pin down, it's three days since anyone saw him, two days since he emailed The Council to say that a report he was working on would be late as he had a cold. One day since his dismissed his security, by text, which everyone seems to agree is unusual, because he felt, and I quote 'a bit under the weather'.
Double sigh.

They all want to see him. No. This is not a petting zoo.
I let Logan and Ororo, Jean and Scott in, which is two more than I'd really like.
The nebuliser is really helping, but his oxygen levels are still too low and he's a bit spaced out, I don't let them stay for long.

Truth be told, I'm still a bit cross.
This young man, their, supposed, friend, was lying alone for at least seven hours, possibly as long as twenty hours, on a cold tiled floor. He'd been ill for at least a couple of days and no one had checked up on him, not even a quick call. I want them to think about that.

When I scoot them all out, I'm aware of Wolverine, still skulking about. Hm. Some of them are easier to intimidate with my doctor-fu than others.
But Hank is on duty in an hour. He can have the fun of evicting him.