Post by Pyro on Aug 10, 2006 10:52:13 GMT -5
In her arms, John shifted position until he was actually clinging onto her arm like a child holding a stuffed toy.
Thinking of her spare gloves, which she wasn't wearing now in favour of her pink mittens, she would have called after Python if she'd actually thought they'd fit the young mutant clinging to her. They probably wouldn't, though, and Angie didn't want to wake John - who was shifting position so that he was clinging to her arm like a teddy bear. Glad to have his weight shifted, because her hip joints had started to cramp from having her legs crossed under him for so long, Angie unfolded herself and shifted as gently as she could.
"Oh, John." She took her right hand out from under her head, wishing again that he'd chosen a better place to fall asleep on her - a bed, maybe, or somewhere with a padded floor - and pushed her own hair off her face. Her hand paused, hovering over his shoulder. She wanted to wake him up, to shift him to somewhere more comfortable, but at the same time she didn't want to - because while he was asleep, he was holding onto her, and she didn't know if he'd ever do it again.
Her movement was gentle, but it was enough to rouse John from his slumber and he sat up slowly, one side of his hair plastered to his face where he'd been lying on it.
He blinked, owlishly, and rubbed at his eyes.
"Angie?"
Clear, coherent and sane as he could possibly sound. A lucid moment.
Drawing her hand back as if she'd been burnt, Angie sat up quickly when John said her name, crossing her legs again. He sounded... normal, again, if a little confused at her presence, and she wondered if he remembered anything that had happened before he'd fallen asleep.
"Er... Did you sleep well?" She winced on the inside as she said it. Smooth.
"Not really," he said, vaguely. Ah, not that lucid that. "I have a headache. And my stomach hurts. Am I sick?"
He stretched out aching muscles and got unsteadily to his feet, moving so that he was sitting on the edge of the metal bed in the corner. He looked young, vulnerable and lost, yet in the eyes was the spark of the mutant capable of the level of death and destruction he'd achieved only a day or so previously.
He reached over and picked up the pillow on the bed and hugged it to himself, rocking slightly with it in his arms. Then he looked up at her and there were tears spilling down his cheeks.
"I could have killed her," he wept. "I didn't mean it, I never mean it."
Oh, god. "I know you didn't, John, don't worry." Her tone was soothing, as soothing as she could make it in response to such a declaration. She wanted to cry with him, cry for him, but her eyes stayed dry this time, trying to be strong. Angie stood and walked over to the bed, taking off one mitten to lay her hand on his arm. The headache was back - again - though she took her hand away as soon as it was gone, not wanting to feel his emotional pain for any longer than she had to.Aurora can affect emotions... Maybe she can help. The thought was gone as quickly as it came. Putting her mitten back on, Angie sat on the floor in front of him, not confident enough to sit next to him and hug him even though she wanted to.
"I never meant to kill anybody in that warehouse," he said, and it was hard to extract the words from his sobs. "Threaten them, yeah, but I didn't want to kill anybody if I didn't have to...then they threw that thing at me...what's happening to me, Angie? I'm so scared."
He buried his face in the pillow and she watched his whole body shaking with sobs. One extreme to the other. Anger to abject despondency with no pause for catching his breath.
John had never been a demonstrative boy. He'd built his confidence with Kitty to a point where he'd sometimes voluntarily hold her hand or put his arms around her, but generally he'd been starved of physical affection and had no way of asking for the comfort he so desperately needed right now.
But his posture and stance was crying it out for him.
"I... I don't know, John." I'm scared too. If Angie's life had been like normal seventeen year old girls, she'd have been able to hold him, been able to comfort him the way that people so easily did, without feeling strange and without worrying that it would be unwelcome. But until she'd come in here and he'd fallen asleep on her lap, she'd never held anyone, had never had anyone but her mother hold her while she cried - and that had stopped when she was thirteen years old. Rising up onto her knees, she awkwardly reached out to him with mitten-clad hands, rubbing his arms and looking only a little less uncomfortable than she felt. She just didn't know what to do - her only way of comforting people was with words, and words failed in a situation like this. She'd never known anyone who carried the responsibility for people's deaths, and she didn't know what to say to help that. Hell, she didn't know what to say to help most of the time - Angie had all of two friends, and they both knew how hard it was for her to show them how she felt.
Eventually, of course, the tears stopped and he sat up, the pillow still clutched tightly to him. He looked so tired, so pale, so sick. "Thank you," he said, sniffling slightly. "The Professor told me once that this would happen to me eventually, that he'd help me deal with it when the time came, but then the stupid old bastard died."
I'd have killed the Professor if you'd given me the chance.
A flash of memory. He'd said those words to Magneto once, only to have his hero bark in his face Charles Xavier was my friend. He did more for mutants than you'll ever know.
The memory broke and scattered, despite the way he metaphorically tried to catch it and hold it to him.
The sound of the key in the lock made him look up as Python entered the room, a few rolls of bandages in his hand. "Angie, a word?"
She continued to rub his arms awkwardly as he clutched the pillow to his chest, thanking her and then talking about this Professor character again, and then staring off into space. They were both a little startled by the sound of the lock and the door opening, and while John just looked up, Angie flushed, feeling embarrassed at being caught holding Pyro again. Apparently, Python had the worst timing in the world, and Angie turned to him with a bright red face.
"I... Um, yes." She stood up, feeling her cheeks burning even hotter - if that was possible - and walked to the door. Composure was long gone, though she tried to piece together a few shreds, and she looked up at the tall mutant with bright green eyes. "What's up?"
He drew her away from John, who lay down on the bed, his back to them, seemingly disinterested in the proceedings - which, in fact, he was.
"I figure he trusts you more than me to do this." He gave her the bandages. "I got a syringe load of sedative as well. Probably the best thing for him if you can get it into him." Python slipped the syringe from his pocket. "Reckon you can sort that for me?"
The young woman nodded, though the idea that John would trust her more, when he'd only known her for a couple of days, made a fleeting look of confusion pass over her face. Accepting the bandages and the syringe, she waited until Python had left the room before slipping them into her jacket's pockets and walking back over to the bed, sitting at the end of it.
"Pyro? I have some things here to help you, if you want them." He wasn't exactly a huge guy, but she was even smaller, and knew that he could overpower her if he wanted to. She wasn't going to try to force anything on him, but she knew that it would be for the best if he could get some decent sleep for at least a few hours. She only hoped that he would understand that too.
"Help me?"
He rolled back over again and sat up to face her, rubbing at his already sore eyes. Almost shyly, he nodded. "I understand," he said. "I'm a danger to everyone. It's for the best."
He straightened his back and held his head up high. "I'm not scared. Not now."
The message was clear in his eyes.
Lord above, he was expecting her to kill him.
When she saw the look in his eyes, Angie gasped.
"Oh, god, not like that! Never like that." The last three words were barely a whisper. She put a hand to her head, feeling a headache that was starting to throb behind her temples, and wishing for a moment that she could do something to fix her own pain. Angie had to deal with pain and injuries like most people, and she rubbed her temple for a moment before taking the things out of her pocket and laying them down on the bed between them.
"When I came in to see you, you'd scratched your face and scratched at the door. You hurt your hands. Python just wants to make sure that you don't hurt your hands again, by accident," She was explaining it in simple terms, but she felt like she was being patronising. Picking up the syringe, she said, "And this is to help you sleep, it's just a basic sedative. I won't even give you all of it if you don't want me to." She put it back down again, not making any move to actually do anything until he gave her permission.
He blinked at her, then looked down at the bandages, at the syringe, then at his hands which were still covered in dried blood. "I'm such a mess," he said, in a sad little voice.
Then, much to her alarm, the aloof young leader of the Brotherhood flung his arms around her neck and hugged her. "I'm gonna get out of this, right? I'm gonna get sorted. It'll all be alright. It'll all be alright."
He was telling himself rather than her.
"Yes," he said, in her ear. "Bandages...sleep. Yes."
"It will be alright, Pyro." Though she'd actually flinched from surprise when he'd thrown his arms around her neck, Angie now wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her cheek against his. "I'll stay with you until you fall asleep, if you want." Squeezing him gently, her face pressing into his neck and her lips touching his collarbone momentarily, the young woman gently broke the embrace. She smiled at him, taking her mittens off and picking up the bandages, putting one of them and the syringe back into her pocket so that he could lie down when he wanted to. Looking down shyly, she picked up one of his hands and started to make a makeshift mitten, winding the bandage around and around his fingers and then his thumb.
"Mine are cuter." She tried to make a joke as she finished down around his wrist, tearing the bandage and fastening it down, checking the remainder to see if there was enough left for the other hand. Seemed like it. Glancing up, green eyes meeting green, Angie gave him a small, nervous smile.
"Thank you," he said, again, his eyes never once leaving hers. There was something in the way she smiled at him, something in the similarity of her size and build that reminded him almost painfully of Kitty - not that he could recall Kitty's name to mind right this moment.
He looked down at the one bandaged hand and let out a giggle. "Looks silly," he said.
The mood was changing again, it seemed.
Raising her eyebrows, Angie tried to keep the light mood going. "Hey! Some of us have to wear this kind of thing all the time, boy-oh." She grinned at him, advancing with the bandage to capture the other hand and start wrapping around his wrist and up around his fingers. Once his whole hand was wrapped, and his thumb seperately, she fastened the end of the bandage down and examined her handiwork. "Doesn't look too bad. Now, if everyone would wrap themselves up all the time, I'd be fine." She cracked the knuckles in her thumbs and smiled mischeivously. "Not too tight or anything?" It was as though she was putting off giving him the sedative, both because he was happy for the moment and because she didn't want to go back to her room and spend the rest of the day by herself again.
He shook his head. "Nuh-uh. Just right." He shifted his position on the bed again. "Hard to hold anything properly, though," he observed in that same oddly childish way.
John waved his hands vaguely in the air and smiled delightedly at them. "Good job," he said, happily. Then, with the ever-changing attention span of a child, he said, "I'm hungry."
Python had made sure John had been drinking liquid, but had kept food out the equation for now, all too aware that if he ate, chances were he'd be sick next time he ranted and raved - and he hadn't wanted to run the risk of the kid choking on his own vomit.
"That's why my mittens have holes in them." Which, of course, would totally defeat the purpose of his bandage-mittens, but she was just making conversation. She took them out of her pocket and put them on, poking her fingers through to demonstrate, though she'd probably have to take them off again when she gave him the injection. It was habit, but it was also an unconcious sign that she didn't want to put him to sleep just yet.
"Why don't you have a drink for now, and then I'll give you your sedative and when you wake up I'll make us breakfast. Anything you like, as long as I can find the supplies." She was quite a good cook - her mother was abysmal, and almost never at home, which had made learning to cook a type of survival mechanism for the young Australian. "I could make us pancakes, or... fresh bread for toast, or..." She was going to say bacon and eggs before realising that she didn't even know if the island had access to either.
"I like pancakes."
The words were accompanied with the most endearing, beaming smile, the sort which he'd never knowingly have given were he in his right mind. "OK, I'll have a drink."
He waited for her to pass him the (metal) beaker of water, which he drank back thirstily, emptying its contents swiftly. How he could cope with the speed at which his emotions were changing was beyond her, but then, he'd dealt with his mood swings since he'd been twelve years old.
"Got a match? Or a lighter? I want to play."
The question was innocuous, almost innocent, but she picked up immediately the glint of danger there.
She beamed back at him, fixing that expression in her mind. If it ever did come down to Python's 'Option B', Angie wanted to remember him as he was just then. "Pancakes it is," she said, passing him the beaker of water and noticing that it was made of metal. As was everything in the base - how they could all stand being surrounded by the cool material all the time was beyond her.
His seemingly innocent question made her blink for a moment, trying to think of how to respond. "I'm sorry, Pyro, but I don't have anything like that. I'm probably not as much fun, but you can play with me, if you like." It didn't even occur to her that her innocent response could sound exactly the opposite to someone listening in. Or to him, were he in a different frame of mind.
"I want fire," he said, and his tone had slid into agitation. "You don't understand. I need fire." He began chewing at his forearm. She remembered him outside NovaTeX, chewing on the back of his hand. He bit hard enough to draw blood and stared blankly at his arm for a moment.
"Please?" he tried, hopefully.
"I'm sorry Pyro, I don't have any fire." She thought for a moment, remembering that he needed a source of fire to be able to use it. Probably a good thing at this point. "If I had fire, I'd give it to you, but I don't have any." She was glad that she didn't have to lie to him. Reaching out to touch his arm with her fingertips, Angie watched the would heal before the droplets of blood could dry. "Please don't do that again, Pyro. I need to fix you like you need fire, and it makes me tired." It had never really occurred to her before that she needed to use her powers, but she did. She didn't like to use them on the humans, because they didn't understand, and they all wanted to be fixed, but her fellow mutants... She didn't even think before using her powers. She could imagine how difficult it was for him to not be allowed to use his.
He fell into sullen, sulky silence and glowered at her.
I can only manipulate the flame. I can't create it.
Another memory that flew skittishly through his tangled mind. He closed his eyes, trying to make some sort of sense out of the cacophony inside his head. "So tired," he said, with weary resignation. "I want this to stop now."
A sad look flashed over her face so quickly that he might have imagined it. "Alright, John." Taking her mittens off, Angie slowly put them into one of her pockets, her hand bumping into something hard. She took the syringe out and uncapped it, holding it up and tapping it to make sure there were no air bubbles. Squeezing a tiny bit out to make sure that they were all gone, she put the syringe between her teeth carefully and took a hold of his arm. Without a tourniquet, it would be a bit more difficult to find a vein, but she felt around in his forearm, up near his elbow, until she'd found one.
"Good night, Pyro." She pushed the needle into his arm gently.
He flinched as the needle broke his skin and shivered at the sensation of the sedative flowing into him, cooling the blood in his veins. It was a fairly swift acting one, but much to her consternation - or delight - he crawled over to lay with his head in her lap again.
Within a few short moments, he was out cold, his breathing even and regular, and apparently he was nightmare free.
He was sedated - reasonably heavily, too, so she knew that she didn't need to worry about waking him up by moving him. After capping the needle again and placing it and the spare bandage on the floor near the bed - the only spot she could reach, Angie leant over John to find the pillow he'd been clutching earlier, and to reach for his blanket. Instead of replacing her lap with the pillow, though, which would have been the smart thing to do, she gently shifted him so that she was lying down with the pillow beneath her head, and he was more on her chest than her lap. Throwing the blanket over them, she pushed off her shoes and kicked them over the side of the bed, fishing her mittens out of her pocket and pulling them on. One hand rested on his back, the other on her stomach, and though she was relaxed and somewhat sleepy, she didn't let herself fall asleep even though she was tired. It was better to monitor someone who had just been given intravenous sedatives, but more than that, she was somehow expecting Python's impeccable timing to bring him walking in and setting her face afire at any moment.
Python didn't come in again, not for a while. He'd heard John's constant talking subside into silence and figured the girl had given him the injection. He'd made sure it was a hefty dosage. Kid was better off out of it - for now, at least.
After an hour had passed and Angie hadn't come out, however, he did feel obliged to check that she was alright. When he opened the door, he didn't seem in the least startled or embarrassed by the apparent intimacy of the pair inside the cell.
"Everything alright?" he asked her, softly.
She was three quarters asleep, starting to dream about being back in Australia, when the door opened and Python walked in. Somehow, it all incorporated into the dream, the sound of the lock and the metal door making her frown at the aluminium-framed screen door that she'd been opening - it just didn't make sense. Python's soft words roused her, and she flinched as her eyes opened immediately, a look of surprise on her face. "Oh, god, you startled me." She blinked for a few moments, feeling her heart racing in her chest and glad that John was sedated and wouldn't hear it. He was so warm - the half of her that he was pressed against felt a good deal warmer than the other half, and she realised that her brain was off on a tangent when she blinked again and remembered Python looking down on them.
"Uhm, yeah, everything's fine." Her face caught up with her brain and she blushed again, the heat of her cheeks not quite matching the heat of the young mutant sleeping on her. "He asked for fire. And food. I told him I'd make him breakfast when he wakes up. Pancakes." As if saying that made the position she was in somehow less compromising. Python may have been used to finding people... cuddled up, but Angie was the least qualified person in the world to be casual about physical intimacy, even if it was only the appearance of physical intimacy.
"He SHOULD be alright with that sedative. Hard to say with John. He has days when he reacts badly to aspirin. But what do I do? Come on, Miss. You shouldn't stay in here in case he wakes up and loses his temper again. I won't let him hurt anybody else unintentionally."
Such a strange man.
"I'll keep a close eye on him if that's what's botherin' you."
It did make sense, of course - she'd seen what he'd done to himself, and she knew what he was capable of, but she didn't want to leave. She couldn't say that to Python; if there was anyone who shouldn't be staying with Pyro, it was her - being the only one she couldn't fix - and the tall mutant could probably throw her over his shoulder and take her out if he wanted to. With a sigh, she gently slipped herself out from under John, laying his head down on the pillow and swinging her legs out to sit up. She felt the cool air hit her where he'd been lying as she slipped her shoes on, and she handed the syringe and spare bandage to Python. "I should go and catch up on some sleep, anyway. Make sure that you get some sometime, too." With one last look at the sleeping boy, Angie stood up. "Keep an eye on him. I'll see him later with pancakes." She stood and left the room, not looking back, and headed toward what was now her bed to try to catch up on the sleep she'd missed out on. It seemed much more cold and lonely than it had been last time she was lying in it.
Thinking of her spare gloves, which she wasn't wearing now in favour of her pink mittens, she would have called after Python if she'd actually thought they'd fit the young mutant clinging to her. They probably wouldn't, though, and Angie didn't want to wake John - who was shifting position so that he was clinging to her arm like a teddy bear. Glad to have his weight shifted, because her hip joints had started to cramp from having her legs crossed under him for so long, Angie unfolded herself and shifted as gently as she could.
"Oh, John." She took her right hand out from under her head, wishing again that he'd chosen a better place to fall asleep on her - a bed, maybe, or somewhere with a padded floor - and pushed her own hair off her face. Her hand paused, hovering over his shoulder. She wanted to wake him up, to shift him to somewhere more comfortable, but at the same time she didn't want to - because while he was asleep, he was holding onto her, and she didn't know if he'd ever do it again.
Her movement was gentle, but it was enough to rouse John from his slumber and he sat up slowly, one side of his hair plastered to his face where he'd been lying on it.
He blinked, owlishly, and rubbed at his eyes.
"Angie?"
Clear, coherent and sane as he could possibly sound. A lucid moment.
Drawing her hand back as if she'd been burnt, Angie sat up quickly when John said her name, crossing her legs again. He sounded... normal, again, if a little confused at her presence, and she wondered if he remembered anything that had happened before he'd fallen asleep.
"Er... Did you sleep well?" She winced on the inside as she said it. Smooth.
"Not really," he said, vaguely. Ah, not that lucid that. "I have a headache. And my stomach hurts. Am I sick?"
He stretched out aching muscles and got unsteadily to his feet, moving so that he was sitting on the edge of the metal bed in the corner. He looked young, vulnerable and lost, yet in the eyes was the spark of the mutant capable of the level of death and destruction he'd achieved only a day or so previously.
He reached over and picked up the pillow on the bed and hugged it to himself, rocking slightly with it in his arms. Then he looked up at her and there were tears spilling down his cheeks.
"I could have killed her," he wept. "I didn't mean it, I never mean it."
Oh, god. "I know you didn't, John, don't worry." Her tone was soothing, as soothing as she could make it in response to such a declaration. She wanted to cry with him, cry for him, but her eyes stayed dry this time, trying to be strong. Angie stood and walked over to the bed, taking off one mitten to lay her hand on his arm. The headache was back - again - though she took her hand away as soon as it was gone, not wanting to feel his emotional pain for any longer than she had to.Aurora can affect emotions... Maybe she can help. The thought was gone as quickly as it came. Putting her mitten back on, Angie sat on the floor in front of him, not confident enough to sit next to him and hug him even though she wanted to.
"I never meant to kill anybody in that warehouse," he said, and it was hard to extract the words from his sobs. "Threaten them, yeah, but I didn't want to kill anybody if I didn't have to...then they threw that thing at me...what's happening to me, Angie? I'm so scared."
He buried his face in the pillow and she watched his whole body shaking with sobs. One extreme to the other. Anger to abject despondency with no pause for catching his breath.
John had never been a demonstrative boy. He'd built his confidence with Kitty to a point where he'd sometimes voluntarily hold her hand or put his arms around her, but generally he'd been starved of physical affection and had no way of asking for the comfort he so desperately needed right now.
But his posture and stance was crying it out for him.
"I... I don't know, John." I'm scared too. If Angie's life had been like normal seventeen year old girls, she'd have been able to hold him, been able to comfort him the way that people so easily did, without feeling strange and without worrying that it would be unwelcome. But until she'd come in here and he'd fallen asleep on her lap, she'd never held anyone, had never had anyone but her mother hold her while she cried - and that had stopped when she was thirteen years old. Rising up onto her knees, she awkwardly reached out to him with mitten-clad hands, rubbing his arms and looking only a little less uncomfortable than she felt. She just didn't know what to do - her only way of comforting people was with words, and words failed in a situation like this. She'd never known anyone who carried the responsibility for people's deaths, and she didn't know what to say to help that. Hell, she didn't know what to say to help most of the time - Angie had all of two friends, and they both knew how hard it was for her to show them how she felt.
Eventually, of course, the tears stopped and he sat up, the pillow still clutched tightly to him. He looked so tired, so pale, so sick. "Thank you," he said, sniffling slightly. "The Professor told me once that this would happen to me eventually, that he'd help me deal with it when the time came, but then the stupid old bastard died."
I'd have killed the Professor if you'd given me the chance.
A flash of memory. He'd said those words to Magneto once, only to have his hero bark in his face Charles Xavier was my friend. He did more for mutants than you'll ever know.
The memory broke and scattered, despite the way he metaphorically tried to catch it and hold it to him.
The sound of the key in the lock made him look up as Python entered the room, a few rolls of bandages in his hand. "Angie, a word?"
She continued to rub his arms awkwardly as he clutched the pillow to his chest, thanking her and then talking about this Professor character again, and then staring off into space. They were both a little startled by the sound of the lock and the door opening, and while John just looked up, Angie flushed, feeling embarrassed at being caught holding Pyro again. Apparently, Python had the worst timing in the world, and Angie turned to him with a bright red face.
"I... Um, yes." She stood up, feeling her cheeks burning even hotter - if that was possible - and walked to the door. Composure was long gone, though she tried to piece together a few shreds, and she looked up at the tall mutant with bright green eyes. "What's up?"
He drew her away from John, who lay down on the bed, his back to them, seemingly disinterested in the proceedings - which, in fact, he was.
"I figure he trusts you more than me to do this." He gave her the bandages. "I got a syringe load of sedative as well. Probably the best thing for him if you can get it into him." Python slipped the syringe from his pocket. "Reckon you can sort that for me?"
The young woman nodded, though the idea that John would trust her more, when he'd only known her for a couple of days, made a fleeting look of confusion pass over her face. Accepting the bandages and the syringe, she waited until Python had left the room before slipping them into her jacket's pockets and walking back over to the bed, sitting at the end of it.
"Pyro? I have some things here to help you, if you want them." He wasn't exactly a huge guy, but she was even smaller, and knew that he could overpower her if he wanted to. She wasn't going to try to force anything on him, but she knew that it would be for the best if he could get some decent sleep for at least a few hours. She only hoped that he would understand that too.
"Help me?"
He rolled back over again and sat up to face her, rubbing at his already sore eyes. Almost shyly, he nodded. "I understand," he said. "I'm a danger to everyone. It's for the best."
He straightened his back and held his head up high. "I'm not scared. Not now."
The message was clear in his eyes.
Lord above, he was expecting her to kill him.
When she saw the look in his eyes, Angie gasped.
"Oh, god, not like that! Never like that." The last three words were barely a whisper. She put a hand to her head, feeling a headache that was starting to throb behind her temples, and wishing for a moment that she could do something to fix her own pain. Angie had to deal with pain and injuries like most people, and she rubbed her temple for a moment before taking the things out of her pocket and laying them down on the bed between them.
"When I came in to see you, you'd scratched your face and scratched at the door. You hurt your hands. Python just wants to make sure that you don't hurt your hands again, by accident," She was explaining it in simple terms, but she felt like she was being patronising. Picking up the syringe, she said, "And this is to help you sleep, it's just a basic sedative. I won't even give you all of it if you don't want me to." She put it back down again, not making any move to actually do anything until he gave her permission.
He blinked at her, then looked down at the bandages, at the syringe, then at his hands which were still covered in dried blood. "I'm such a mess," he said, in a sad little voice.
Then, much to her alarm, the aloof young leader of the Brotherhood flung his arms around her neck and hugged her. "I'm gonna get out of this, right? I'm gonna get sorted. It'll all be alright. It'll all be alright."
He was telling himself rather than her.
"Yes," he said, in her ear. "Bandages...sleep. Yes."
"It will be alright, Pyro." Though she'd actually flinched from surprise when he'd thrown his arms around her neck, Angie now wrapped her arms around his waist and pressed her cheek against his. "I'll stay with you until you fall asleep, if you want." Squeezing him gently, her face pressing into his neck and her lips touching his collarbone momentarily, the young woman gently broke the embrace. She smiled at him, taking her mittens off and picking up the bandages, putting one of them and the syringe back into her pocket so that he could lie down when he wanted to. Looking down shyly, she picked up one of his hands and started to make a makeshift mitten, winding the bandage around and around his fingers and then his thumb.
"Mine are cuter." She tried to make a joke as she finished down around his wrist, tearing the bandage and fastening it down, checking the remainder to see if there was enough left for the other hand. Seemed like it. Glancing up, green eyes meeting green, Angie gave him a small, nervous smile.
"Thank you," he said, again, his eyes never once leaving hers. There was something in the way she smiled at him, something in the similarity of her size and build that reminded him almost painfully of Kitty - not that he could recall Kitty's name to mind right this moment.
He looked down at the one bandaged hand and let out a giggle. "Looks silly," he said.
The mood was changing again, it seemed.
Raising her eyebrows, Angie tried to keep the light mood going. "Hey! Some of us have to wear this kind of thing all the time, boy-oh." She grinned at him, advancing with the bandage to capture the other hand and start wrapping around his wrist and up around his fingers. Once his whole hand was wrapped, and his thumb seperately, she fastened the end of the bandage down and examined her handiwork. "Doesn't look too bad. Now, if everyone would wrap themselves up all the time, I'd be fine." She cracked the knuckles in her thumbs and smiled mischeivously. "Not too tight or anything?" It was as though she was putting off giving him the sedative, both because he was happy for the moment and because she didn't want to go back to her room and spend the rest of the day by herself again.
He shook his head. "Nuh-uh. Just right." He shifted his position on the bed again. "Hard to hold anything properly, though," he observed in that same oddly childish way.
John waved his hands vaguely in the air and smiled delightedly at them. "Good job," he said, happily. Then, with the ever-changing attention span of a child, he said, "I'm hungry."
Python had made sure John had been drinking liquid, but had kept food out the equation for now, all too aware that if he ate, chances were he'd be sick next time he ranted and raved - and he hadn't wanted to run the risk of the kid choking on his own vomit.
"That's why my mittens have holes in them." Which, of course, would totally defeat the purpose of his bandage-mittens, but she was just making conversation. She took them out of her pocket and put them on, poking her fingers through to demonstrate, though she'd probably have to take them off again when she gave him the injection. It was habit, but it was also an unconcious sign that she didn't want to put him to sleep just yet.
"Why don't you have a drink for now, and then I'll give you your sedative and when you wake up I'll make us breakfast. Anything you like, as long as I can find the supplies." She was quite a good cook - her mother was abysmal, and almost never at home, which had made learning to cook a type of survival mechanism for the young Australian. "I could make us pancakes, or... fresh bread for toast, or..." She was going to say bacon and eggs before realising that she didn't even know if the island had access to either.
"I like pancakes."
The words were accompanied with the most endearing, beaming smile, the sort which he'd never knowingly have given were he in his right mind. "OK, I'll have a drink."
He waited for her to pass him the (metal) beaker of water, which he drank back thirstily, emptying its contents swiftly. How he could cope with the speed at which his emotions were changing was beyond her, but then, he'd dealt with his mood swings since he'd been twelve years old.
"Got a match? Or a lighter? I want to play."
The question was innocuous, almost innocent, but she picked up immediately the glint of danger there.
She beamed back at him, fixing that expression in her mind. If it ever did come down to Python's 'Option B', Angie wanted to remember him as he was just then. "Pancakes it is," she said, passing him the beaker of water and noticing that it was made of metal. As was everything in the base - how they could all stand being surrounded by the cool material all the time was beyond her.
His seemingly innocent question made her blink for a moment, trying to think of how to respond. "I'm sorry, Pyro, but I don't have anything like that. I'm probably not as much fun, but you can play with me, if you like." It didn't even occur to her that her innocent response could sound exactly the opposite to someone listening in. Or to him, were he in a different frame of mind.
"I want fire," he said, and his tone had slid into agitation. "You don't understand. I need fire." He began chewing at his forearm. She remembered him outside NovaTeX, chewing on the back of his hand. He bit hard enough to draw blood and stared blankly at his arm for a moment.
"Please?" he tried, hopefully.
"I'm sorry Pyro, I don't have any fire." She thought for a moment, remembering that he needed a source of fire to be able to use it. Probably a good thing at this point. "If I had fire, I'd give it to you, but I don't have any." She was glad that she didn't have to lie to him. Reaching out to touch his arm with her fingertips, Angie watched the would heal before the droplets of blood could dry. "Please don't do that again, Pyro. I need to fix you like you need fire, and it makes me tired." It had never really occurred to her before that she needed to use her powers, but she did. She didn't like to use them on the humans, because they didn't understand, and they all wanted to be fixed, but her fellow mutants... She didn't even think before using her powers. She could imagine how difficult it was for him to not be allowed to use his.
He fell into sullen, sulky silence and glowered at her.
I can only manipulate the flame. I can't create it.
Another memory that flew skittishly through his tangled mind. He closed his eyes, trying to make some sort of sense out of the cacophony inside his head. "So tired," he said, with weary resignation. "I want this to stop now."
A sad look flashed over her face so quickly that he might have imagined it. "Alright, John." Taking her mittens off, Angie slowly put them into one of her pockets, her hand bumping into something hard. She took the syringe out and uncapped it, holding it up and tapping it to make sure there were no air bubbles. Squeezing a tiny bit out to make sure that they were all gone, she put the syringe between her teeth carefully and took a hold of his arm. Without a tourniquet, it would be a bit more difficult to find a vein, but she felt around in his forearm, up near his elbow, until she'd found one.
"Good night, Pyro." She pushed the needle into his arm gently.
He flinched as the needle broke his skin and shivered at the sensation of the sedative flowing into him, cooling the blood in his veins. It was a fairly swift acting one, but much to her consternation - or delight - he crawled over to lay with his head in her lap again.
Within a few short moments, he was out cold, his breathing even and regular, and apparently he was nightmare free.
He was sedated - reasonably heavily, too, so she knew that she didn't need to worry about waking him up by moving him. After capping the needle again and placing it and the spare bandage on the floor near the bed - the only spot she could reach, Angie leant over John to find the pillow he'd been clutching earlier, and to reach for his blanket. Instead of replacing her lap with the pillow, though, which would have been the smart thing to do, she gently shifted him so that she was lying down with the pillow beneath her head, and he was more on her chest than her lap. Throwing the blanket over them, she pushed off her shoes and kicked them over the side of the bed, fishing her mittens out of her pocket and pulling them on. One hand rested on his back, the other on her stomach, and though she was relaxed and somewhat sleepy, she didn't let herself fall asleep even though she was tired. It was better to monitor someone who had just been given intravenous sedatives, but more than that, she was somehow expecting Python's impeccable timing to bring him walking in and setting her face afire at any moment.
Python didn't come in again, not for a while. He'd heard John's constant talking subside into silence and figured the girl had given him the injection. He'd made sure it was a hefty dosage. Kid was better off out of it - for now, at least.
After an hour had passed and Angie hadn't come out, however, he did feel obliged to check that she was alright. When he opened the door, he didn't seem in the least startled or embarrassed by the apparent intimacy of the pair inside the cell.
"Everything alright?" he asked her, softly.
She was three quarters asleep, starting to dream about being back in Australia, when the door opened and Python walked in. Somehow, it all incorporated into the dream, the sound of the lock and the metal door making her frown at the aluminium-framed screen door that she'd been opening - it just didn't make sense. Python's soft words roused her, and she flinched as her eyes opened immediately, a look of surprise on her face. "Oh, god, you startled me." She blinked for a few moments, feeling her heart racing in her chest and glad that John was sedated and wouldn't hear it. He was so warm - the half of her that he was pressed against felt a good deal warmer than the other half, and she realised that her brain was off on a tangent when she blinked again and remembered Python looking down on them.
"Uhm, yeah, everything's fine." Her face caught up with her brain and she blushed again, the heat of her cheeks not quite matching the heat of the young mutant sleeping on her. "He asked for fire. And food. I told him I'd make him breakfast when he wakes up. Pancakes." As if saying that made the position she was in somehow less compromising. Python may have been used to finding people... cuddled up, but Angie was the least qualified person in the world to be casual about physical intimacy, even if it was only the appearance of physical intimacy.
"He SHOULD be alright with that sedative. Hard to say with John. He has days when he reacts badly to aspirin. But what do I do? Come on, Miss. You shouldn't stay in here in case he wakes up and loses his temper again. I won't let him hurt anybody else unintentionally."
Such a strange man.
"I'll keep a close eye on him if that's what's botherin' you."
It did make sense, of course - she'd seen what he'd done to himself, and she knew what he was capable of, but she didn't want to leave. She couldn't say that to Python; if there was anyone who shouldn't be staying with Pyro, it was her - being the only one she couldn't fix - and the tall mutant could probably throw her over his shoulder and take her out if he wanted to. With a sigh, she gently slipped herself out from under John, laying his head down on the pillow and swinging her legs out to sit up. She felt the cool air hit her where he'd been lying as she slipped her shoes on, and she handed the syringe and spare bandage to Python. "I should go and catch up on some sleep, anyway. Make sure that you get some sometime, too." With one last look at the sleeping boy, Angie stood up. "Keep an eye on him. I'll see him later with pancakes." She stood and left the room, not looking back, and headed toward what was now her bed to try to catch up on the sleep she'd missed out on. It seemed much more cold and lonely than it had been last time she was lying in it.
