Author's note: a massive thanks to Guest and Romey123456 for reviewing! Your support means everything and you inpsired me out of my writer's block. Please don't fear... I'm not done with the angst hahaha!
DISCLAIMER: I am in no way a medical professional, and while I did do a lot of research for the following chapter, it's possible I left some horrendous inaccuracies so apologies to anyobe who actually knows their medical facts!
Warning for descriptions of injuries!
Last time
And she was wrapped in a foil blanket and they were talking to her but she heard nothing but Natasha's last breaths echoing in her ears, and then something cool was placed on her leg, and it was Steve with a compress.
He was saying it's okay, it'll be okay, but looking at his pale face and his watery eyes and she didn't believe him.
On the quinjet
They loaded up Natasha and Wanda. Steve, Tony, Maria Hill and the medical team took one quinjet. The rest of the team stayed behind to survey the wreckage for Barton.
Steve sat, knee bouncing up and down, head in his hands, listening to the medics working as they broke the speed limits in the sky.
"Set at 100."
"Clear."
The buzz of the defibrillator.
Tony stood in the threshold of the cockpit and the main bay, his suit stiff and still. Maria Hill flew the quinjet.
"Nothing."
"200."
"Clear."
Buzz.
"Nothing."
Wanda lay, deep asleep on a stretcher. Sprained ankle bandaged. Cuts and grazes cleaned and stitched.
"Maximum at 360."
"Clear."
Buzz.
...
The quinjet held its breath.
...
"We have a pulse! Beginning compressions."
Tony staggered into the co-pilot seat.
"Blood pressure dropping."
"Oxygen flowing at 10L/min."
"What's her blood type?"
"AB negative."
"Starting blood transfusion."
...
"We need more. Any of you have the same blood type?"
Clint did. Had.
"I do."
Maria Hill walked over, rolling up her sleeve. Tony flicked the switch for autopilot.
"Take as much as you need to save her."
Wanda didn't know there where she was or what was happening, just that a darkness was grabbing her and not letting go. She let herself sleep.
When the quinjet landed, Tony didn't stay at the hospital.
He went straight to his lab, and Pepper heard a crash shake through the Tower. She found him amongst the shards of the overturned lab, wires in the ceiling fizzing, him sitting in the middle of it all, using the repulsors from his suit to blow up boxes labeled 'prototype comms'.
Wanda was wheeled into the ER, a team of doctors waiting. She had fallen unconscious on the flight.
She was hooked up to a steady drip of fluids, her ankle diagnosed as sprained and bandaged, various cuts cleaned, and a larger gash on her head stitched. She was then put in a recover room.
Vision hovered outside.
It was Emily's first shift as a nurse in this new hospital in Upstate New York. She'd done her training at the SHIELD medical facility, but when it fell, she was suddenly unemployed.
Then Tony Stark funded the building of a new multi-facility medical base, and all the SHIELD medical personnel were given jobs automatically, and now it was her first day.
"Ambulance incoming." Bo, her supervisor, told her, as they rushed towards the emergency arrivals entrance. "Patient is female. Heart stopped in the ambulance twice, but they got it back. Erratic BP, weak pulse, internal bleeding, undetermined fractures in arm, potentially punctured lung."
And then a massive quinjet was landing outside, and a stretcher was being rolled out, the emergency medics running along side with an oxygen tank. Emily's stomach dropped to her feet.
You couldn't tell where skin started and blood stopped. The girl on the stretcher looked like a blood-smeared skeleton. Her hair was matted together in clumps of blood and vomit, and her face was grimy.
All she wore were tight-fitting black leggings, the looked like they had been cut at the wist to expose a… Emily almost gagged when she saw her midriff. The paramedics had tried to staunch the blood, tried to survey the damage, but it was more flesh than skin, ribs pressing against the skin in an unnatural angle.
Her arm was splinted hastily, a mess of red and ligaments. They wheeled her straight into surgery.
"How is she alive?!" Emily later asked Bo in the rec room. She was still in surgery.
Bo shrugged. "Well, she's an Avenger."
Yes, I know it was pitifully short, but honestly I never really planned what would happen when I got this far! But I'm not done... far from it... Hopefully I'll update sooner next time!
Thanks for reading! :)