It's been a while since I updated this story, but here is chapter 3.
"Someone's coming," John mutters weakly.
Marcos and Lorna make a concerted move to duck back into the shadows of the alley, and John bites back a groan. He's already struggling to keep his feet under him, knowing that the two of them can't take his full weight for long, but his left leg keeps giving out. And that's not even considering the agony that is his side, with his upper body forced up by Marcos's taller shoulders, even hunched over.
He leans against the wall with relief, while they wait for the old man taking out his trash to go back inside. Shirtless and covered in bandages, John is too conspicuous, and they can't afford to get noticed, not after what happened here today. The police and Sentinel Services most likely have his description, if not surveillance pictures, and they likely have identified him by now. Turner may not be able to talk for a while, but John will definitely have to lay low.
"Let's go," Marcos murmurs, hauling him back up.
John groans out loud this time. Zingo, at his feet, whines at him, but he doesn't have a free arm to pet her.
The rest of the way to the junk yard is painful and slow. John is barely conscious, letting his friends guide him as he focuses on putting one leg in front of the other.
He tries to shakes himself when they briefly stop in front of the warehouse.
"Caitlin? The kids?" he asks.
"They're already here," Lorna answers.
John nods.
"Just a few more minutes and you can rest," Marcos says.
Despite his exhaustion, despite the pain intensifying with every step, it's not rest that's on John's mind as he passes the threshold. It's these people, his friends, who made it through this devastating day−week−and the ones who didn't. He's close to the dead tonight.
Caitlin rises from the couch, where she's sitting with one of her children on each side, as soon as she hears them come in. Lauren and Andy look up, their faces streaked with tears.
"John," Caitlin says. Her relief is mixed with so much sadness that John chokes. He can't process it yet, Reed being gone, but he recognizes her pain instantly. His heart tugs. Reed and Clarice are both everywhere in this room still, Reed's trace stronger and more recent than Clarice's.
John removes his arms from his friends' shoulders and takes a couple of steps forward toward Caitlin. He stops before stumbling and opens his arms.
Caitlin breaches the distance between them and he hugs her tightly, careful not to put too much of his weight on her. He can feel the way her breathing picks up in his shoulder, the silent sobs wracking her body.
"I'm so sorry," John murmurs, and she looks up at him. A sad kind of understanding passes between them. Love, and loss, and pain. And holding on. John's throat knots up.
Caitlin nods through her tears.
John lets go of her when his legs give out under him, to avoid crushing her with his weight. He tries to break his fall with his arm instead, but Marcos and Lorna are the one who keep him from tumbling to the floor.
"John!" Caitlin exclaims. "Get him to the couch," she tells Marcos, who has one of John's arm around his shoulders again.
John hears her as if through a fog, the pain overtaking his senses. He doubles over, pressing his free hand to his stomach. The stabbing, throbbing pain is more brutal with every second.
"Table," Lorna says. "I need to take the bullets out."
He feels Marcos pulling him over to one of the workbenches, while Lorna clears it of the scrap metal covering the surface. John does his best to help his friend lift him onto the bench, but his strength is just gone. His head lolls to the side as soon as he's lying down, out of his control.
Caitlin takes a shocked breath when she cuts through Erg's makeshift bandages.
"That's a lot of wounds," she says. "John, I need you to tell me where it hurts most."
Barely comprehending her words, John blinks. He opens his mouth sluggishly, but it's hard to remember what he wants to say.
"John!" Lorna tries. "Where does it hurt?"
John moves his hands to his stomach again, slowly.
"There?" Caitlin asks. "In your side?"
John nods. "Leg, too," he murmurs. "Left."
"Okay, I'm going to have a look at this wound, alright?"
Things get confused after that for John. He's lost too much blood, and his brain isn't making sense of what's happening. There's a sudden, excruciating pain, followed by a moment of panic around him. John's side and hand feel wet, flooded with blood.
"Lauren!" Caitlin is yelling, desperately pressing on the wound Lorna just pulled a bullet from.
"Mom? What is it? Oh my God," Lauren is at their side in seconds. "What do you need me to do?"
"Keep pressure inside," Caitlin says. "Bullet hit a major vein, I can't widen the wound, so I can't reach far enough to stop the bleeding."
John groans as the pressure on his stomach goes.
"I think I've got it," Lauren says. "But I can't hold it forever. If you can't stitch it−"
"We'll have to cauterize it," Caitlin sighs. "Marcos?"
"I don't know if I can do this, Caitlin. Inside him, like this−"
"There's no choice," Caitlin says firmly.
John just hears Marcos take a deep breath, and Caitlin's frame keep him from seeing more of what's going on. He's not quite expecting the pain when it comes.
He can't keep in the scream. It burns like he's never been burned before. Lorna's hands are on his face, trying to keep him still, but he can barely hear her murmurs.
"Can't we put him to sleep or something?" Lorna asks, louder.
"I don't have any anesthetic, only painkillers," Caitlin answers. "He won't take them."
"No," John mutters, and even he is not entirely sure if he's responding to Caitlin's words or to the prospect of more pain. He can't keep track of who's around him any longer, but he feels Lorna's hands leave his skin. He tries to reach out, but makes a strangled sound when the pain only gets worse.
"John, it's okay, it's almost over," Lorna murmurs. She's lying, John knows, but he nods anyway.
"Lorna, I need you to take out the other bullets," Caitlin says. "We'll be more careful. Lauren, can you stay in case it happens again?"
"Of course, Mom."
John gets a glimpse of Lauren's face, tear tracks on her cheeks but a determined look in her eyes. She just lost her father, he remembers dimly. She shouldn't be here.
"Shouldn't be here," he mutters out loud.
"Who?" Marcos asks. "John, who shouldn't be here?"
"All of you. Should've...left me."
Lorna closes her eyes for a moment, her hands still in John's sweat-covered hair. "John," she says. "Look at me."
John obeys sluggishly.
"We could never leave you, okay? Watching you walk out that door this morning was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do."
"But you left before," John mutters. He's not even sure what he's saying, his mind too clouded to think.
"And I'm sorry," Lorna says. "I will never leave again."
John looks at her for a while, lost, and nods. She won't leave. He can hold on to that.
Except everyone leaves. Those who don't just end up dying. Like Pulse, and Sonya. And Clarice. Clarice left and then died.
"You should," he says, closing his eyes. "I'm...poison. Destroy everything."
"What?" Lorna shakes his head gently, but John can't find the strength to open his eyes again. "John, what are you saying?"
"He's probably delirious," Caitlin says. "He has a fever. It's from the shock."
"He's not warm," Lorna remarks. John hears them more and more dimly, his brain incapable of processing their words.
"He's lost too much blood for that. We need to treat his wounds quickly. I can't get an IV into him, so a transfusion is out. We just have to hope that he doesn't bleed out more."
Lorna sits on the floor beside the couch, where John lies asleep, his face flushed with fever. Taking out the rest of the bullets was excruciating, but he never passed out, though he wasn't even responding to her touch by the end. He's now covered in bandages again, clean and tidy like Caitlin can make them, after she swathed the wounds with burn cream. Marcos's power was efficient in stopping the bleeding, but his trembling hands left burns all around the bullet holes.
Lorna looks at John's face now, lined with pain even in sleep. She doesn't know if it's physical pain or grief, probably a mix of the two. His delirious mutters are concerning. Lorna doesn't know anyone who blames themselves more easily that John does, but if he truly believes that they should have left him to die…
She shakes the thought away and stands up. She hasn't slept, though it's morning and light is starting to come through the warehouse windows. She's been too tense, worried, reliving the events of the day.
Caitlin, Lauren and Andy are lying on the floor on blankets, in a corner of the room, but Lorna is fairly sure none of them slept either. They're holding onto each other, as if afraid to let go, and she can understand. Reed wasn't Lorna's friend, but even she feels his death sharply. And Clarice's, and Sage's, and even Fade's. They've lost far too much.
And so much of it is her fault. None of the Underground would even have gotten involved with Reeva if it wasn't for her. Sage and Fade followed her to the Inner Circle, and Andy recently admitted to the same.
Marcos is outside, working on a car, protective glasses on his face.
"I didn't want to wake anyone up," he says when he sees Lorna. "I needed something to do."
"Yeah, me too," Lorna says, though she's so tired that she can barely walk straight. Sleep seems impossible to attain. Maybe later, when John wakes up and they get back to the apartments.
"Want to help?"
"Sure."
They work together for a while, and it's almost like before, when they would spend hours down in the vault at the station, making furniture and tools. Lorna lifts and shapes the metal pieces, bringing the totaled car back to it's original shape, and Marcos welds them together.
"You think John's gonna be okay?" Lorna asks, when they start working on the engine itself. Marcos's welding makes too much noise to talk, but this is more delicate work, and they're standing closer, almost touching.
"Caitlin says he should recover fine, though it will take a while," Marcos answers.
"I don't mean physically," Lorna says.
Marcos shakes his head. "I don't know. Losing Clarice… It hasn't been two days yet, but I can't see him come back from that easily. Hell, it hit me really hard, and she wasn't−" his voice breaks.
"She was your friend," Lorna says.
"Yes. A really good friend."
"I'm sorry."
"I know. I don't...I don't blame you, and I don't think John does either. What Jace Turner did is not on you."
"I still feel responsible," Lorna says. "But you don't need to try to comfort me. You're the one I should be comforting."
"Right now I'm mostly trying not to think about it. I can't...it's hasn't sunk in yet. Clarice, and Reed, all the Morlocks who died, and the Sentinel Services people...so much death..."
Marcos looks away and coughs, holding back tears.
"Me too," Lorna says. "Sage died too. Because of me. And Fade. I know he was trying to kill us, but...he was a friend, once."
"Where do we go from here? How do we...keep going?"
"We...we lean on each other. We help John get back on his feet, and we get through this."
"We've lost so much. John has lost...so much. How do we help him?"
"By being there," Lorna says, without hesitation. "You remember, after we lost Pulse?"
Marcos nods. They thought, back then, that giving John space to grieve was the right thing to do, but he threw himself into work instead until he burned himself out. Lorna sees them again, lying beside John in his bed and holding onto him as he screamed through the worst migraine he ever had. She remembers the two weeks they spent taking care of him as he retreated into himself, sick and lost and numb, never leaving his room and crying himself to sleep.
She doesn't want to live through that again, but she will if it comes to it. She'll do whatever is needed to help John through this new grief, and get him to the other side.
"Last night, he said something about destroying everything," she says. "Do you know what he meant?"
Marcos sighs. "I'm not sure, but...the other day, before you came back, he said that...he felt like everyone he loves dies. After Clarice−"
"God," Lorna murmurs. "It does feel like that, doesn't it? Pulse, and Sonya, and now Clarice..."
"You know, after you left, I was so devastated that I never stopped to think about how John was feeling," Marcos says. "I acted like I was the only one suffering, and John was so selfless, like−"
"Like he always is," Lorna finishes. Until he collapses. She didn't see him cry once for Sonya, she realizes. Lorna and Marcos both cried at the memorial, and said their goodbyes, but John stood stoically throughout and then went right on to work.
"But he'd just lost Sonya, and his home, and...you...he's been going down a spiral of guilt and grief this whole time and I never saw it. I called him out, just before he got captured by Turner, over how reckless he was being, I said that he'd forgotten what we were fighting for, but−God… He's been taking huge risks and putting himself in danger because he was so afraid of losing someone else."
Lorna closes her eyes in dismay. How is John going to recover from this? From another loss?
"Jace Turner took Clarice from me. He can't do anything worse."
John has always been ready to sacrifice himself for his friends in a heartbeat, but he used to value his own life as much ad everyone else's. But he truly believed, yesterday, that his death or capture would be a small price to pay for stopping the Inner Circle. That his friends leaving and dying was his own fault, somehow, and that removing himself from the equation might keep them alive.
Lorna blinks when she realizes where her thoughts have taken her. The John she knew was sometimes depressed, sometimes reckless and rash, but never suicidal. But what she saw in his eyes yesterday before he went to meet the Purifier, the anguish in his voice when he said he destroyed everything… He's never been like this before.
She hasn't been there to watch his downward spiral, but the man lying on the couch in the warehouse is not the one she turned her back on nine months ago. And that man might well be gone forever.
"Are you alright?" Marcos asks, concerned.
Lorna looks up and realizes she's started crying without noticing. "I...no," she admits. "I don't know what to do."
"Come here," Marcos opens his arms.
Lorna leans into the hug and tries to concentrate on the moment, instead of the mistakes she made and the bleakness of their future.
"We're gonna make it though this," Marcos murmurs in her ear.
She wishes she could truly believe that.
I hope you liked this! There's more John whump to come, though the worst is over, but mostly reflections on mourning, being together, and rebuilding. I'm still not sure where this story is going and the progress is very slow, though.
Please give me a sign if you're still reading, whether it's a review, even just an emoji, or, I don't know, a flare? I need to know I'm not the only one still attached to this fandom (and I'll love you forever).