You're Our Little Blessing
Two days later.
Her eyes open to see a white ceiling, white walls, and a dim light. Her ears take in the sound of beeping, and she smells the scent of flowers that are now wilting, even though they’ve only been there for a couple of days.
Her eyes are tired, but they stay open long enough to spot a man with a metal arm asleep on a chair nearby.
And then they drift closed.
~
She is semi-conscious on and off for the next week.
When she fell, she hit her head on a bar, and then Ajara Agni—who was still handcuffed but could kick—did so about three times before Ward pulled her off.
Bucky tried to stop the bleeding, but by the time medics could get there, she had lost enough blood to create a puddle on the floor.
By the time she was out of her final surgery, she had lost forty percent of her blood.
Bucky wanted to donate, and so did Cap, but they didn’t have the right Type, and then any other people who were not super soldiers or like them could not donate, because it could cause more harm to Gretchen.
Peter Parker stepped up.
Peter is not actually a super soldier, but it is close enough to successfully be given to Gretchen—according to Dr. Banner and Dr. Cho.
With Peter’s O-negative blood, the soldier now had a donor.
Now it has been a week since she was shot, and she is still only conscious for a few minutes at a time, and even then, she isn’t responding to anyone.
She can hear, see, smell, feel, and taste, and she still isn’t responding.
Her eyes don’t track anyone’s movements, and they don’t stay open long.
Waking up from her coma is painful. The medicine isn’t enough to take the pain away, and it makes her want to go back to sleep, but the soldier doesn’t want to stay asleep when the mission wasn’t finished. That she knows of. The target was apprehended, but then during that shot, when the soldier thought that the mission was more important than her own life, she blacked out.
She resists the pain and opens her eyes.
White ceiling. White walls.
She can’t move her neck very well, but she does manage to see a man.
She can see his lips moving, but his words are hard to understand.
He rubs a hand over his scruffy face, running it through his hair, and then looks up, his eyes seeing hers open.
The man’s mouth opens, and he looks relieved, and he says something, but it’s so hard to understand, and her eyes shut soon after.
~
Four more days of this, not being able to hear very well, but it does get clearer.
She does recognize people now.
Bucky is there most of the time, but sometimes there’s a new person.
Peter talking about a movie in space, barely taking breaths between sentences. She’s reluctant to go back to sleep then, but when other people are around, it’s usually more boring.
Clint flicking rubber bands across the room. Natasha reading a book. Sam promising to make waffles when she wakes up and can eat food. Steve drawing or something in a little notebook. Wanda playing with a teddy bear that winds up on the nightstand that is overflowing with stuffed bears, puppies, flowers, and cards, and a little Hulk figurine that she woke up to see Stark sneaking in, which was cute, but she usually wouldn’t even think about that. Vision usually tells her about his latest mishap when he was cooking. May came over once that Gretchen knows of, and she listened to Peter with her.
It was quite nice.
Dr. Banner mostly came to check up on her, even though there was another doctor in charge.
Dr. Cho? Yes, Helen Cho. Gretchen vaguely remembers hurting her when she first woke up and tried to murder Cap.
Finally, her days of drifting slowly dwindle until she is awake for more than small snippets at a time, and Dr. Banner is asking her how she feels.
“I am healing satisfactorily.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“What do you need to know?”
“I want to know what hurts, how much, and if anything is numb, and then I want to know your mental state, if you could tell me.”
“My abdomen and head hurt, but how much is problematic to answer.”
“Why? Is anything numb?”
“As the Experim- As a soldier, I was trained to push the pain to the back burner until it… fell off the stove. I was never to feel pain—or react to it—or my handlers would inflict real pain.”
“What about your mental state?” Banner asks, and a light hint of green tints at his skin around his neck as he tries to grasp what horrible implications that could mean.
“I am feeling… tired. I apologize, that is all. Except, where is James?”
She hasn’t seen him in about four days, since she started to wake up more.
“I can tell him that you want to see him. He is currently in the gym, last I heard.”
“May I leave now?”
“No, you could tear your stitches. Your injuries were bad enough that if you were not a super soldier, you probably would have died, or at least been bed-ridden for months. It’s only been about two weeks, and since you heal only slightly slower than Peter, you should be able to get around in three days without someone being forced to make you stay. You can get up, but only for a short time.”
“How short?”
“As long as it would take to go to the bathroom. Mild exercise by a normal injured person’s standards. A bullet hit one of your major arteries—the aorta—and most people would be dead right now.”
“I’ve been blessed,” Gretchen says as a mental image of a happy man with dark hair and eyes picking her up, the image in her point of view, but she was small.
“You’re our little blessing, Bunny,” the man says, distant in her ears.
“Higher, Father!” She squealed.
Her sight clears to see Dr. Banner rummaging in his bag.
She shakes her head slightly, and immediately regrets it not because of the pain it causes, but of the image fading.
“May I have some paper and a pen?”
“Of course. Do you mind if we finish first? We don’t have much left.”
~
By the time she got paper and a pen, the image was almost gone. At first, she tried to draw it, but it was too fuzzy, so she put a description beside the smudged picture, staring at it until it was ingrained in her memory.