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As soon as the brotherhood had vanished in a flash of wispy red vapors, Laurien joined the others as they all rushed over to where Moira sat with Charles' rigid body cradled in her trembling arms, her breath hitching painfully as her nightmares came to life before her.
"I– I wasn't thinking. I didn't mean to." Moira said to her, the words tumbling out of her mouth gradually reaching a high pitch until they're almost inaudible.
"It's all right." Laurien told her stiffly even though she knew that it most certainly was a lie, her hand hovering uncertainly over the CIA agent's arm as she struggled to figure out what to do to calm her before giving up entirely. "It wasn't your fault."
"She's right, Moira." Charles said, sounding completely strained and terse as he tried to keep his voice as steady as he can, tears streaming down his strikingly pale face. "This was Erik's doing."
Laurien flinched visibly at the mention of his name before shaking it off, cursing herself mentally with all the nasty words that she knows before reaching over and laying a gentle hand on Charles' forehead.
The moment her fingers touched his cold skin, a jolt of electricity suddenly sparked in her head. An image flashed before her eyes, of Shaw, frozen how she'd last seen him, while a coin forced its way into his forehead. The sharp crack as his skull gave way snapped her back to reality, prompting Laurien to snatch back her hand with a gasp that caused a wave of searing pain through her lungs. She glanced at Charles in alarm, only to be met with an apologetic look from his bright blue eyes before they shut tightly in pain.
"He's getting clammy, Hank." Laurien said tentatively, still not taking her eyes off of Charles. "He might be going into shock."
"We need to get him to a hospital quickly." Hank said, as she saw him nod hurriedly in the corner of her eye. "And Laurien, I–"
"We're screwed." Sean interrupted loudly from where he sat cradling his visibly dislocated shoulder, talking to no one in particular as he stared unseeingly at the sand in front of him. "We're stranded in the middle of nowhere, with injuries galore, and our rides are destroyed. Oh, and I forgot to mention that the whole fucking American and Soviet navy is staring at us from afar after just trying to kill us! We're dead!"
"Shut up, you idiot! We're not going to die here." Alex shouted at him before turning to the others and whispering, "We're going to die here." Prompting Laurien to stifle the impulse to roll her eyes at them both.
"Alex, Sean, you're not helping. Could you two just–" She growled, before quickly stopped herself as she felt something rising uncomfortably in her stomach, suddenly nauseous. Her vision blurred slightly as sweat dripped down her brow from the sun beating down mercilessly on them. "Never mind. Moira, can you alert the fleet on the plane's radio?"
Moira nodded quickly, but when she went to move, her knee accidentally knocked into Charles' shoulder, causing him to let out a sharp cry of pain that frightened them all to the core.
"Oh my God, I'm so sorry, Charles!" Moira exclaimed as one of Charles' hand clawed blindly into the sand before the pain subsided and he laid still.
"Help me up." He demanded, trying to roll over onto his side before falling back with another shout.
"Wait!" Hank urged. "Charles, don't move."
"I– I can't." Charles managed from behind gritted teeth, his face screwed up in agony as his words made Laurien's heart stop. Before she could come to any conclusions, his hand suddenly clamped down on her bare wrist and almost overwhelmed her with a shock wave that electrified her entire body.
Laurien gasped in surprise at the reaction that was coursing through her veins as it hit her with full force again, only causing her to choke on the sudden intake of air and keel over onto the sand in pain.
She desperately tried to steady herself with both hands planted firmly in front of her, as the coughs that ensued violently wracked through her entire body. Her chest heaved arduously as it tried to keep up the airflow to her lungs that she demanded with each shallow attempt to breathe between her coughing fits. Her airflow was suddenly cut off as a thickly metallic substance worked its way up her throat and splattered onto the sand like little red firework explosions.
She flinched when hands suddenly grab her, suddenly fearful that Dan had returned to finish her off, but the hands only rubbed soothing circles on her back as a gentle voice cooed softly in her ear. She slowly lifted her head up, misguided hope sparking inside her chest as blood seeped down her chin, expecting to see Erik beside her, but instead, she saw an oddly familiar looking young woman sitting crossed legged at her side in what appeared to be Charles' study back at the mansion.
Laurien took in her surroundings, her eyes darting around the room in confusion, as she feared that the red mutant had come back and transported her to the mansion.
"What the hell?" She mouthed, panic rising rapidly in her chest as she looked for Azazel, before her gaze rested on the woman. Short wavy auburn hair dusted her shoulders lightly as the woman smiled sadly back at her, dark red lips pulling back to reveal a perfect set of teeth. She had a heavy black jacket over her shoulders and a thick blue scarf wrapped loosely around her neck, and as Laurien quickly looked past her, she saw small specks of icy particles floating down outside the window of Charles' study.
Laurien frowned at the woman, who only looked to be a couple of years older than her, wondering why she was there. A sudden sensation stirred within her as she finally laid eyes on the woman's mismatched gaze and noticed that one of her eyes was a familiar light blue while the other was a bright hazel.
"I'm sorry." The woman told her, diverting Laurien's attention to her hands as she placed a simple silver ring in her palm and closed the younger woman's fingers around it, a single tear rolling down from her one blue eye. She suddenly released her soft hold on Laurien, and her and the ring in her fist began fading away as the beach slowly returned before Laurien's eyes.
Laurien tried to call out to her, but found that her words are stuck in her bloody throat. Darkness drifted in over her eyes until she quickly found that she couldn't see at all, before she heard Charles' pain filled voice cut through the fog like a knife and ring in her ears. "I can't feel my legs."
A harsh ray of light peaked through the curtains of Laurien's hospital window, making her wince as it rudely hit her eye. She made to turn away from the intrusive light, but abruptly stopped herself as a nasty twinge twisted her side. She opened her eyes slowly and glanced down bitterly at the mountain of bandages that surrounded the tube sticking out of her skin, before following the trail to where it led to a large container to her right.
She groaned inwardly as she saw how much watery pinkish fluid was being drained through it, before almost jumping out of her skin as she suddenly became aware of the blue mound in one of the visitor's chairs by the side of her bed.
"Jesus Christ– ouch!" Her exclamation abruptly turned into a yelp as she accidentally hit the tube with her elbow, waking Hank from his slumber.
"You're awake!" He stated excitedly, quickly sitting up straight in his seat before prodding a snoozing Alex who retaliated by smacking him hard in the face.
Hank growled and shoved Alex out of his chair and onto the floor, which prompted the blond to get to his feet with his hands curled into fists before he noticed that Laurien was staring at him, a bewildered look plain on her face. His hands slackened and he smiled, before dashing out of the room, only to return a moment later with a quite smitten-looking nurse.
The next day, a good-natured fellow with a head of short prematurely graying hair called Doctor Fisher came in to check on her. He explained her condition before promptly hurrying away at the sight of Hank.
Hank had barely left her side since they'd arrived yesterday evening at whatever hospital the military had dropped them off at. Hank told her the name after she'd woken up, but with all the painkillers she was on, it was a miracle that she could remember her own birthday. Though even with the painkillers, she could still feel the guilt coming off of him in waves as he tried to avoid her eyes. It turned out that when he had tried to hold her back on the beach, he had accidentally pushed the large piece of glass deeper into her side and, consequentially, into her lung.
Doctor Fisher had told her that the air from her punctured lung had escaped into the pleural space, what he had explained to be the tiny area between her lung and her chest cavity.
"It's a traumatic pneumothorax, dear." Doctor Fisher had stated simply, seemingly hiding behind his chart, all the while taking quick glances at a somber Hank who was trying to busy himself with the paper.
After Fisher had left, Laurien reached over to Hank and clumsily grabbed one of his large soft hands in her own seemingly drunken pair. "You need to stop blaming yourself, Hank." She said, kindly. "I've already told you that it wasn't your fault."
"I know." He murmured, finally meeting her gaze. "It's just that… you might have died if we hadn't gotten here when we did." He sighed, looking out the window that showed the front of the hospital and taking note of an ambulance that was dropping off someone who was bleeding severely from the neck. "I've been thinking about the chain of events, a ripple effect, as if each incident directly affected the others… I don't know if you know what I mean, but–"
Laurien knew exactly what he meant, considering that ever since she'd woken up, she had been stuck in the hospital bed with nothing else to do but babble incoherently about random things while she rode her drug-induced high or ruminate over what had happened and how she could have stopped it as the pain slowly ebbed back.
The dominoes fell where they may that day on the beach. What Laurien gathered from Hank was that he felt if he hadn't grabbed Laurien and accidentally punctured her lung with the glass, then Erik wouldn't have been able to overpower her by using her wound to his advantage during their fight in the water. If she hadn't failed and had managed to keep him out of reach of the missiles, then Moira wouldn't have shot at him, and Erik wouldn't have deflected the bullet into Charles' back.
Though Laurien saw it more as if she had been able to stop Erik from putting that damned helmet back on his head, then none of it would have happened and, in the end, Charles would've been able to feel his legs on that beach.
They hadn't let them see Charles since they had wheeled him in for surgery when they'd first reached the hospital, and no matter how hard Sean and Alex looked, they couldn't find him. Over the next couple of days, Laurien lost count of how many times she asked the nurses and doctors that passed through if they could see him, but she was only met with resounding nos. It was getting to the point where Alex asked Hank to try growling at one of the doctors to see if that would work.
Alex and Sean were both itching to get out of the confines of the hospital though with Alex's ankle bound tightly in a cast and Sean's arm in a sling, there wasn't much that they could do besides keep Laurien company.
"Man, this blows. I want to be back in New York." Sean drawled from across the room after the third day of being in the hospital, his words slightly distorted as he mashed on a massive piece of chewing gum that he had managed to charm off of a young nurse in their ward. "Florida's too hot."
Laurien had to agree with him there. Even with it being the middle of October, the temperature was still in the mid-twenties, or high seventies, as the Americans said. She grimaced as she felt the thin sheets sticking to her sweat soaked skin before reaching for her glass of water on the side table where one of Hank's discarded newspapers laid.
There had been nothing about them in the paper, only the bolded title of "Khrushchev Offers to Scrap Cuba Bases," and "Kennedy Calls 'Statesmanlike Decision' Aid to Peace" on the front page of the New York Herald Tribune. They'd covered it up, she'd thought, all of it. She honestly wouldn't have been surprised if she heard that the government had threatened all the soldiers on the battleships into keeping their mouths shut about what they'd witnessed of the event.
From what Hank, Alex and Sean had told her since she woke up, they'd been picked up by some of the Americans. The mutants had been treated like prisoners when they'd been boarded onto the ships, surrounded by men that gripped their guns a little tighter with every move the mutants made.
They'd been airlifted to Florida, though she couldn't remember anything of the trip. She didn't even remember passing out, just crowding around Charles on the beach and then suddenly waking up in the hospital room with a rather large tube sticking out of her.
She'd had a pneumothorax before in her lifetime, though it was still two times too many. She was anxious to get out of bed and walk around a bit to see if she could find Charles on her own, as she couldn't help but play out every scenario in her head of what had happened to him, but she knew what had to come beforehand.
The removal of the tube was nothing to look forward to. Ever since she'd undergone her first time, she would shudder violently when odd little things reminded her of the sensation as the doctor would pull it out, such as an earthworm being tugged out of the ground by the beak of a crow. When Doctor Fisher came back into her room the next day holding a large needle and thread, she felt the sudden urge to jump out of the bed and make a run for it, though she knew that she wouldn't make it all that far, not while still being attached to the damn 'lung juice vacuum,' as Sean called it.
Laurien lifted both arms above her head, as was standard protocol, and tried to calm herself down as she avoided looking at the thick needle that Fisher was preparing. Her breaths became rapid and shallow, not at all what she was supposed to do to help her lungs adjust. She squeezed her eyes shut and urged herself to quell the anxiety within.
A soft, warm hand encased hers, making her eyes snapped open before she glanced up to see Hank squeeze it reassuringly. She couldn't help but flash a quick smile as a warm sensation spread throughout her cheeks.
"All right, dear. Are you ready?" Fisher asked as steadily as he could, glancing quickly at Hank's sharp claws before turning back to her.
Laurien tightened her grip on Hank's hand and nodded, waiting as Fisher peeled away the layers upon layers of bandages and cut the stitches holding the tube in place.
"Take a slow breath, and then hold it, please." The doctor said as he wiggled the tube around a bit, being extra careful as to not jostle any of Laurien's recently set ribs.
She breathed in deeply and held it, the anticipation killing her as she waited with tightly shut eyes, before he finally pulled the long coil of tubing out in one swift and very slimy motion. A soft whimper escaped her lips as a sharp stinging sensation spread throughout her chest. She was somewhat aware of Hank's growls as the pain slowly, but surely, subsided into bearableness until it suddenly redoubled again, even stronger than before, as Fisher cleaned the wound with what felt like acid burning through her skin.
"Fuck!" She ground out between gritted teeth, not seeing or caring about Fisher's stern look of disapproval at her language as he quickly sewed the hole together, the thread pulling at the folds of her skin like a puppeteer with a marionette.
"All right then." Fisher said as cheerfully as he could after he had stretched new dressings over the wound. "I'll be checking on you in about an hour."
"Thank you." Laurien managed politely, forcing a quick smile as he left before adding another small obscene word under her breath.
"You all right?" Hank asked warmly as he fidgeted in his chair and reached for something behind him.
"Mmmhmm." She hummed in response, sighing as Hank passed her a few painkillers. "Ah, you're a darling."
She swallowed all of them in one big gulp before trying to swing her legs over the side of her bed. Hank stopped her with a large hand on her shoulder, his heavy heart bleeding out clearly in his yellow eyes.
"Please, Hank." Laurien pleaded, grabbing onto his furry wrist tightly with one of her hands as the other was planted firmly into the bed to keep herself from falling over.
"Tomorrow." He murmured. "Just let the stitches settle for a couple of hours and then we can go see if we can find him."
She nodded dejectedly, wincing as a particularly deep breath pulled on her stitches before challenging Hank to a game of Contract Rummy.
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