Clarice’s hands don’t seem right covered in blood. There should be blood running hot inside them, but not liquid thin over them or drying on top. Sweat from training? Perfectly fine. Flour from baking something in the bank’s makeshift kitchen? Sure, if uncommon. Glitter and glue from doing a craft with the littlest and quietest kids who nobody thought would open up to anyone? Absolutely not to be discussed aloud, but beautiful. Blood? What the fuck is that all about? Hell no.
At least, these are John’s mangled thoughts, which are really not as productive as he wants them to be. Clarice is asking him something, he needs to be listening– there are other reasons he needs to be listening, he reminds himself, but Clarice’s wide, sage green eyes are the most immediate reason and he grounds himself with those– she is asking him something.
“John, can you even hear me!?” She is shouting, and, honestly, why does she need to be so loud about this? “Really need you to at least groan in pain or something right now.” She is scared he will die, John recognizes as she shifts from putting pressure on one of his wounds to firing a gun over a barricade of crates, scared he is dead, because she can’t hear the shallow rise and fall of his chest the same way he can hear her hummingbird heartbeat. He coughs, wetly, she sighs with relief. It’s enough relief to put her off guard, and John barely has enough time to drag her below the safety of the crates they’re staked out behind as a bullet breezes overhead.
“Oh thank god, I thought I was going to have to drag your corpse out of here,” her voice is as solid as a soldier in their first firefight, as solid as ice. She will hold until she doesn’t.
They need to get out of here.
“Can you hear me?” Clarice repeats, and John nods. He won’t be able to hold much longer. “You look like shit, man,” she mumbles, worrying her lip, “we need to get out of here.” John purses his lips, and Clarice answers him like she’s a mind reader, “If we can just get far enough from Pulse, I can make a portal to somewhere, probably.” She sounds pretty certain. Well, not very certain, actually, but John takes that sliver of determination and magnifies it enough to take a steadying breath, clench his fists, and stand straight up, determined to walk to a safer location. It only takes less than a block to be out of Pulse’s mutant-interference range. He can walk that far, probably.
He had forgotten about the bullet holes in his abdomen, shoulder, and thigh, as well as all the abrasions and bruises, and the gun-toting agents who had been the cause of all this bullshit. Clarice yelps in surprise, following after him. Soon they’re running– and who knows how that happened– John can barely feel his own body. He knows Clarice is doing something to help him stay upright, while his feet provide the necessary motions to propel him forward, because he can’t tell which way is up even as he looks straight ahead.
Something must have gotten messed up his head, because the rural factory landscape is blending into a sandy memory mindscape. John can’t tell the difference between the two soon. Clarice could be a small marine next to him, the people firing the bullets could just as easily be local insurgents as government agents, there’s still that gunfire.
When Clarice screams in pain, it snaps John just enough to himself to recognize that the bullet had been aimed at him. Clarice took it on purpose.
Things become very real for a few seconds then: John looks around, activates his powers– then he realizes he can actually do that, meaning Gus is far enough away. He uses the last of his adrenaline, fueled by the echoes of screams in his mind, to push himself and Clarice behind a ventilation unit. “Gotta go.” He commands. He doesn’t want to make her do it, not when she’s clearly pushing it just standing on whatever part of her body is dripping blood, but if she doesn’t get them out, she won’t be there to make a snide comment at him or fix Zingo’s toy or break Zingo’s toy or do all those nice things she hates talking about like making cookies for new arrivals and do crafts with terrified little kids.
With a wetness born of pain and fear brightening the pink marks on her face, Clarice stretches her hands, covered in a mixture of both her own and John’s blood, as far as she can. John learns that the bullet hit her side when she can only stretch them just enough to make a tiny portal.
Clarice had made the portal, but John was the one to drag them both through it. He dives in, dragging Clarice with him, and her head smacks the ground hard enough and John has lost enough blood that they both pass out on impact with some wooden floor. The closing of the portal barely misses their toes.
John has nightmares. He’s back in that house, the one where Clarice’s foster family died, and he’s glued to the floor. He can’t move, can’t speak, can’t breathe. It’s one of those ones. He just hears her sobbing, and he hears this awful scraping noise. All of this in flashes, like a nightmare on loop, over and over. At some point these nightmares stop, and are replaced by just whiteness all around him, muffling the things he wants to hear and see and smell.
Eventually, the thought occurs to him that none of this was a dream at all, and that these nightmares were actually snippets of consciousness as his body fought to heal itself in overtime. He can move now, but his throat is so dry that he still needs several minutes to garner enough moisture in it to even mumble. He shakes the fading delirium off, as well as the white comforter that was covering him, then assesses his surroundings.
He is in the house, if he’s correct then he’s been here for half a day. Clarice isn’t in the small room where they had initially teleported to, but there’s a thin trail of red drops that detail a wobbly wander out of the room. There are little toys all over the room, whether because someone was interrupted mid-play or because they had pulled things from the shelf when they portalled in. John can see by the height markings on the doorframe that this had been Clarice’s room. There’s still the scraping noise coming from somewhere.
John is, at this point, entirely healed of all but scar tissue, so he can get up and maneuver through the dead house in wary silence with ease. He follows the noise, grabbing a baseball bat off of the hallway floor just in case. When he reaches the kitchen, he finds Clarice. Her eyes are as vacant as the rooms, she is trying to scrub the puddle of red off of the floor with a rag that has long since frayed to fibers, leaving her with torn knuckles scrubbing over and over against the aging wood. She doesn’t seem to realize this, or the fact that the blood of her foster parents has sat so long that it will likely never leave the floorboards, or that her own blood has coagulated against her side and her head and her shoulder and who knows how many other places.
John drops the bat, “Holy–” he starts, “Clarice.” She doesn’t hear her own name, just keeps adding her own pain to the stain left under her. He sits down in front of her, but she doesn’t see him until he gently– so gently– places his hands on her arms. Then she winces like she’s been struck before the clarity comes back, over the course of several seconds, to those catlike eyes. A sob rises from her chest, and it causes a portal to fluctuate into existence in the place of the kitchen door. The portal shows, for a half a second, the concerned faces of Lorna, Marcos, Caitlin, Reed, and a handful of others in the mutant underground headquarters. Everyone has just enough time to register the encounter before the portal collapses with it’s creator.
It’s the second time John has held Clarice in this house, and somehow the circumstances have gotten even worse than before. There’s just enough moisture in the maroon clinging to her side to make it stick to his shirt.
“Clarice, are you okay?” The question has a clear answer without verbal response, Clarice is so far from okay, but John needs to see exactly how lucid she is. If the blood dried over her left eye is any indicator, Clarice has had a head injury, and John isn’t sure how bad it is.
Just below a whisper, “J-John, they’re… they’re dead. They’re dead,” John would have missed that small, wobbling stutter if he had been anyone else the same way he would have missed her heartbeat pick up and race with her breath. Another portal was thrown open above the washing machine. A few desperate shouts got through, demanding answers, but John gave them a stern, knowing look and went back to Clarice.
“Can you breathe with me? Clarice?” Tears fed on panic fed on more tears, and it took several minutes for him to convince her to breathe slower, deeper.
Abruptly, mumbling through John’s shirt and her tears, Clarice began “The-they’re dea–… John, they’re–” She hadn’t said anything else for ten minutes. Shock. Caitlin could help, probably. They had to get to headquarters, but who knew if those portals would hold up well enough for them to get through safely.
“I know, Clarice. It’s going to be okay.”
“John. I want to go home.” Something snapped. Clarice had called it home. After what she had told him those months ago about how little that word had meant to her, how few places fit the description and role in her life, she could only mean headquarters. She had just called a run down, broken apart bank full of nothing but leftovers and refugees ‘home.’
Another sob came from Clarice, this one opened a portal next to the key rings, and in the second and a half John had, he threw a shoe through. He saw Marcos catch it with a consternated glare, and he didn’t seem to get it, but Lorna did, and nodded fervently with a thumbs up to reassure him.
After several more minutes of dazed rambling from Clarice and attempts at comfort from John, another portal fell open three feet to the left. John didn’t hesitate: he picked up Clarice and sprinted through the rip in space.
Once again, Clarice had made the portal, and once again, John had been the one to drag them both through it.
He almost thought they wouldn’t make it when he felt the sparking purple ring closing on his skin, but make it they did, and John yelled for a medic when his knees hit the wooden floor of the bank vault.
“Knew I could trust you guys for a supply run,” Lorna teases, crossing bitterness and humor.
John has nothing left for humor at the moment, “We didn’t know Sentinel Services would be there,” he bites back flatly.
Marcos is there with a clap on the shoulder, “She’s going to be fine. Caitlin knows what she’s doing.”
“Besides,” Lorna adds, “if she could survive for twelve hours while she bled into the floor,” the magnetic little pixie notices when John flinches, and adjusts her tone, “she can tough it out while they pour some alcohol on her and stitch her back up.” Lorna’s eyes soften at John. She knows that Clarice is tough, that she’ll survive this and get stronger from it, so she takes the time to notice her pseudo-brother’s affection. This moment isn’t the epitome of it, this moment is just an expression of it. John would care about anyone getting hurt, especially on his watch, but he had never been one to wait nearby for word from Caitlin when they were ready to be seen. He’d never regretted a situation as much as he regretted this, and Lorna is torn between admiration for the girl who had the invincible marine veteran so vulnerable, and an instinct to protect John from his own guilt.
Marcos beats Lorna to the punch, “It wasn’t your fault, John.” When they get no response, Marcos asks “You did what you could, right? Then it wasn’t your fault.”
There’s a little voice in John’s head telling him that Marcos is wrong; he should have done more, done it better, done it faster.
It’s been around two hours since they came back, about an hour and a half since everyone stopped asking him ‘what the hell happened?’ and ‘are you okay?’ and ‘how did you even survive?’ Apparently, Clarice had been throwing up portals to headquarters for hours before he woke up. Lauren had noticed them first, and she had alerted the others. They didn’t know if it could be safe to go through, so they just watched with broken hearts as Clarice tried to clean blood off the floor of her childhood home with tears. Apparently, it had been absolutely horrifying, so everyone who wasn’t immediately necessary had been shuffled into other rooms. Some of them had thought John was dead, so a few had started crying when he tiptoed into their portal’s vision, and a few more cried when both John and Clarice made it to safety.
Now, Clarice is being taken care of by Caitlin and Andy Strucker, who are the current medical staff, and John is sitting with Lorna and Marcos just outside that room. It had been a hellish day. John is still covered in his and Clarice’s blood. He doesn’t notice it until he looks down at his hands, smeared with drying red flakes.
“She took a bullet for me.” John states, perfunctory concern clouding his eyes.
Though Lorna would never say as much out loud, she hears the subtext that John had been in bad enough shape to not be able to prevent this. Marcos, however, is not so quiet on these things, “What actually happened?” he asked, though John had explained the whole situation the moment Clarice was out of his hands, “To you, I mean?”
John answers like a computer spitting out a line of code, “I was shot in the thigh, abdomen, shoulder. Probably a concussion. Lots of scraping, bruising. Lost a shit ton of blood– we both did. Clarice was grazed on the side, sprained a wrist, she got this awful gash on her leg, another concussion, all sorts of other little things too, I couldn’t see all of it.”
“Fuck.” Lorna breathes, casting a worried glance to the makeshift med bay made up in a room to the side.
Just then, Andy steps out of the med bay, carrying a plastic shopping bag full of red-stained baby wipes and an empty bottle of isopropyl alcohol. He looks at the three sitting there and pauses trash duty long enough to say, “She’s okay now,” but when John stands he adds, “but there’s no way my mom’s gonna let you in there looking like that.” Andy has the cheek to laugh at that, which must mean things went pretty well. The mood lightens noticeably.
“The kid has a point.” Marcos assents with a shrug.
John’s almost ready to protest, but Lorna laughs a little and says “You’re a health hazard, and you look like a murder scene. Shower first.”
Andy calls over his shoulder as he walks away, “She won’t wake up from the anaesthesia for another hour, anyway.”
John sighs heavily before heading to the bathrooms with a frustrated grimace.
He’s just finishing changing when portals start flying again. They’re gone too fast for him to see anything through them except flashes of dark pink hair, but he can hear snippets.
“– arice, calm do–.”
“–e’s dead, isn’t–?”
“Upstair–”
“– John–?”
He’s sprinting down the stairs before he can help himself, and he realizes there’s flashes of portals flickering out all over the place. Nowhere near the catastrophe that Clarice had shown herself capable of summoning before, actually these portals were just like little blinks of light more than anything, but people were still panicking a little. John all but vaulted over these people.
“Clarice?” She’s sitting up in a bed in the corner of the med bay, she looks panicked and pained but very much living, Caitlin is trying to calm her down.
Some of the tension eases out of her face when she sees him, and she tries to use this to snap, “Glad to see you’re alive,” but it devolves into tears of relief halfway through the sentence.
Pushing past Caitlin, who looks grateful and exhausted, he wraps Clarice in his arms. “Yep,” he mutters with an uncharacteristic, dry laugh, “I’m alive.” He doesn’t know what else to say, except “You’re alive too.”
Clarice laughs at that, pulling away from him enough to wipe her eyes with a hand. “Yep,” she parrots teasingly, “I’m alive too.”
A half second later, Lorna, Marcos, Lauren, and even Zingo push through the door, and the first thing Lorna says is “You two are never going on supply runs again. Like, ever.”