Chapter Text
“Are we really doing this here?” John asks with some difficulty when Clarice helps him sit on the edge at the back of the car and starts taking apart a first-aid kit. They're basically in the middle of nowhere, just far enough from the Purifiers' compound to be sure they haven't been followed. Everyone else had already filed out of the two cars, the tension between them reaching its breaking point.
“I'm sorry, John, I know this isn't ideal but we have a three-hour trip back home. I don't want you to bleed out. We'll get Caitlin to take a look at you, but she's, uh, occupied right now.”
“With Andy?”
Clarice nods and grimaces.
“There's pellets still in your wounds. I need to get them out,” she says.
John shakes his head, wincing when it pulls on his wounds. “Get Lorna. While she's still here.”
“I can do this, we don't need her.”
“Look, Clarice,” John starts, hating how hard it is to speak. His ears are still ringing loud enough for him to want to curl up in a ball, and the words just won't come all the way to his mouth. “I get that−” he stops to cough, and bends double at the pain. “−that you don't want to depend on her more. But−” Another agonizing cough. Speaking is getting even harder, his mouth too dry and his tongue bitten and swollen. “−they're too deep.”
“What do you mean?”
“My skin can't be...stretched, or cut. I need Lorna.”
He sees the shift in Clarice's expression when she realizes what he's trying to say.
“But last time, Dr Kelsey−”
“Not as deep. Not so close,” John gives up on making full sentences. At this point, he can barely hold himself up.
“Okay,” Clarice says. She sees him sway and slips under his arm to stabilize him.
John gratefully leans onto her, though not so much as to risk crushing her with his weight. He closes his eyes briefly, exhausted.
“Lorna!” Clarice yells. Loudly. Far too loudly.
Absurdly, after being shot so many times, after the hours of torture and brutality, of impossibly loud music, that's what almost defeats John. A low guttural sound makes it out of his mouth and he feels the ground shift under him. Falling to his knees, he heaves painfully and throws up on the floor, barely avoiding Clarice's shoes. Not that he's in any state to notice.
“Dammit,” Clarice murmurs, crouching urgently beside him. “John, I'm so sorry.”
John dimly feels the urge to tell her not to be, but he's overtaken by another bout of nausea. When he reaches up to wipe his mouth, he finds his face wet with tears. He hadn't even realized he was crying.
“John,” Clarice repeats, her voice still as low as she can make it. “John, please look at me.”
“'M okay,” John croaks out painfully.
“What is it?” comes Lorna's voice from somewhere above him. Too loud. Now that the adrenaline is leaving his body, everything is too loud. John knows he'll pay dearly for the music Turner inflicted on him. “John? Come on, let's get you back up.”
Between them, the girls manage to get him sitting at the back of the car. John tries to help, but even holding his head up is hard. Tears are still pouring down his face, from sheer pain and exhaustion. Clarice notices and tries to dry them, but they just keep coming.
“What did you want me for?” Lorna asks. She sounds like she's trying to seem uncaring, but the effect is ruined by the fact that she's whispering, and unconsciously rubbing circles into John's arm.
“He say you're the only one who can get the pellets out,” Clarice answers, her anger barely contained. John reaches out for her with his injured arm, but he ends up bumping into her leg instead of talking her hand like he wanted. She looks down and grabs his hand. “You with me?” she asks quietly.
John doesn't try to meet her eyes−any sensory input is too much, right now−but he nods minutely.
“Can you...feel them?” he asks Lorna, trying hard not to cough again.
“Yes. You're moving too much, it will be better if you lean on something.”
John dimly realizes how much his hands are shaking, how much his whole body is trembling and swaying. For the first time in years, he's cold, and it has nothing to do with the outside temperature.
Clarice gently helps him lean back against the crates in the truck of the car. John doesn't let himself relax, knowing exactly what's coming−the harrowing pain of Lorna pulling at the pellets embedded in his flesh.
His vision is clouded by the tears, but he can feel how much Lorna's power has changed, how much smoother and stronger it is than that day years ago when she tried to remove the pieces of shrapnel in his back. So long ago. Before Marcos, before Clarice, before all this. Back when they were all each other had.
“Superficial ones first,” Lorna says, her voice still quiet enough that it barely registers above the ringing in John's ears. But he couldn't handle anything louder. “I think I've got them all. A few of them have gone in really deep, this is not going to be pleasant.”
John nods his acknowledgment. Clarice shifts closer to him, taking his hand again.
“No,” he murmurs, gently pushing her away. “Don't want to hurt you.”
“You won't,” Clarice murmurs back, but she still moves her hand to his forearm, squeezing tight.
“There we go,” Lorna says.
John arches his back as the pellets are squeezed out one by one. He manages not to make a sound, but his desperate gasps for air turn into coughing again. Clarice cradles his head in her hands, trying to keep him from moving, until John pushes her away to throw up again. He's dry-heaving by now, with nothing left in his stomach to come back up−he doesn't remember the last time he's eaten. Or slept.
It's hard to focus his mind on anything but the pain. There's Clarice's presence, and Lorna's−how is she even here?−and Turner's−no, no, Turner's not here. Turner with a shotgun, and the headphones, the music burning holes in his brain…
“John!”
John snaps back to attention, out of a reflex from long-gone times. Clarice and Lorna are both trying to hold him up, to get him off his knees. His body doesn't seem to remember how to stand back up.
“It's done,” Lorna murmurs in his ear. “It's over, John. You'll be alright.”
John blinks and looks at her, a memory coming back to his mind. “You kept your promise,” he says slowly.
“I'm not back,” Lorna answers.
“I know.”
Your friends are never getting out of the Inner Circle, Evangeline told him. She was right. He's known that all along. He also know it's his responsibility to stop them from doing any more harm.
But not today. Today, Lorna and Andy came for him. Saved him.
“Thank you,” he whispers.
Lorna sighs. “ You would have done the same for me.”
“In a heartbeat,” John answers.
T aking a shaky breath, Lorna squeezes his hand and walks away. John closes his eyes.
“Okay, one more effort,” Clarice says. “We need to clean the wounds and bandage them.”
John grits his teeth through the sting of the disinfectant Clarice pours over his chest and arm. She then proceeds to use gauze to clean up some of the blood, trying to avoid scraping his wounds directly.
“Wait,” John says when she takes out rolls of bandages.
“You need a minute to breathe?”
John nods. He's panting, barely holding himself up. He wipes his eyes angrily, wincing when his nails hit the cuts on his face he's forgotten about. He still has enough adrenaline in him that he hasn't completely collapsed, but the ringing in his ears is getting louder, accompanied by the telltale constricting pain behind his eyes, the beginning of a migraine.
After a few deep breaths−as deep as he can take them, he's pretty sure he has at least a couple of cracked rib from that car ramming in to him−his body feels slightly less like one large bruise. He's starting to distinguish the individual hurts. His wrists and ankles are raw from the chains, from the damage he did to himself trying to break them and simply because Turner and his new friends chained him so tight that the metal dug into his dense skin. His neck is a mess of bruises and abrasions, his throat hoarse from the collar.
He's always wondered what the power-containment collars would do to him, with an active ability he can't actually turn off. He's rather thankful he didn't have to find out today, that he was captured by Purifiers rather than by Sentinel Services. Jace Turner was far more dangerous when he had real means at his disposal. The Purifiers are a real concern for society, for mutants as a whole, but individually they don't have much power.
Turner is creative, though, John has to give him that. Most mutant-haters are so afraid of mutant powers that they wouldn't even think to use them. But Turner remembered John's enhanced senses and tailored his torture for him. The music, for hours on end, was honestly worse than the shotgun. John still wants to curl up and press his hands over his ears, even while knowing it won't do anything for the ringing.
“You ready?” Clarice asks.
John opens his eyes and nods. Clarice ducks under his arm to support him as she starts rolling bandages around his waist.
“This is awful,” she says. “One more shot could have killed you.”
Just like that, he's staring down t he barrel of the shotgun again , hearing the click as Turner tried to empty it once more and it didn't go off. John blinks and doesn't tell Clarice . Her look when she saw him...she doesn't need any more trauma today. He flinches instead as she touches a particularly sensitive spot.
“Sorry,” she whispers.
John tries to rid himself of the image of Turner floating around in his mind−which is hard, since he's the one who inflicted these injuries. Every flinch, every drop of blood takes him back to that room. Sometimes John wants to curse his mutation, when it just won't let him escape from the bad stuff.
“Andy and Lorna…” he starts instead. He trails off. He doesn't know how to convey what he's trying to ask, and the words are still too hard to get through his mouth. “How?” he settles on.
“It's a long story,” Clarice sighs. “John, I'm−I'm so sorry I wasn't there when you got captured, I should−”
John looks up at her when her voice breaks, heartbroken to see the tears in her eyes.
“Hey,” he murmurs, pulling her closer. “You saved me.”
They stay immobile for a while, brow to brow, as close as they can get to hugging for now. Clarice is crying, from relief or guilt or pain, John doesn't know anymore. He just breathes in her scent and lets that comfort him. He has plenty to feel guilty and pained and broken about, too, but not right now. The worst of the emotions will come later, along with the consequences of what happened. For now he's just relieved to be out of there .
“Let's go home,” Clarice says eventually, finishing bandaging his wounds.
John is more than ready for that.