“Stay still.” A gruff voice is the first thing I recognize as I come to, bleary-eyed and bone-rattled. It’s the only anchor point I have out of the darkness.

“Saint Peter? Is that you?”

“No.” I reach up towards the figure the voice is coming from, but it slaps my hand down hard, pinning it against the table I’m laying on. “Goddamn it, I said stay still. Unless you want to die.”

I gulp, throat extremely dry. “Going to be honest, I thought I already was.” The figure laughs, coming more into view. He’s hunched over me, blocking the view of the rest of my body. It’s him… Basilisk. “Where… am I?”

He scoffs, seemingly pretty intensely focused on something. “My compound.” He gestures, and I barely manage to turn my head to the various knicks and knobs going on. It seems more like a cramped warehouse than anything else. Random half built machines lie about here and there. God, imagine what I could get for some of them! Off to the side there’s a computer station set up in the corner of the space, looking more or less like a command station.

“But… why? Am I here?”

He laughs, moving away from my point of view, leaning up to look at me. “It was either this, or you do meet Saint Peter.” I’m less staring at him than at the large shard of that shimmering glass-like material sticking straight out of my heart. My bra is still on, but he’s cut the rest of my clothes down to my waist.  

Oh. This was my favorite top…

He pinches his nose, leaning back over my chest, prodding at the skin  “Damnedest thing, kid. I’m frankly shocked that you survived the whole way here. This thing is like a knife barely above your heart. I did the best I could to stabilize you here, but I can’t seem to get the shard out of you.”

“Uh, sir? Mr. Basilisk?” He stops what he’s doing, and looks up at me. He’s not wearing his mask anymore, although he’s left greasepaint all over his eyes still. I look around for it a bit, and try not to think how much that could get me. God, imagine the bragging rights I would have putting up the cowl of a code red villain! It’d almost be worth almost dying to get it. 

Now that I have a good look at him, I can admit he’s pretty handsome up close, in that sloppy, disheveled way middle aged men can get. I can see why someone as dangerous as him has the fanbase of women he has. He starts to get an impatient look on his face. Oh yeah, I nearly forgot that I grabbed his attention. “I meant… Why am I here? Why are you trying to save me? Why not wait for the doctors to come, or…”

“I am a doctor,” he cuts me off, “before anything else. Remember that. After what you did for me, no one else was going to come to your aid.” He gruffs and looks back at my chest. “I don’t do favors. And I don’t owe anyone anything. You were not going to get yourself killed for me, kid.”

I don’t know what to say to that. Be thankful that I’m not dead? In awe of what I had seen? I settled for petulant annoyance. “I’m not a kid, though. I’m twenty five.” 

“Like that’s supposed to impress me? Sorry, you’re still a kid. Only a little girl would have pulled a stunt like that.” God, it’s like he wanted to die. He could show a little appreciation to me for saving his life, maybe? 

Well… I guess he’s doing that by, uh, saving mine. He doesn’t say anything else after that, just letting the conversation die off completely, going back to work. I guess me being asleep for this isn’t high on his priority list, either. He checks a little monitoring tablet set up on a side table connected to a bunch of skin pads all around me, and flicks the shard with some kind of tool; it feels like a knife just pressed into each of my limbs at once. Owie! Come on, man! 

I grit my teeth and hiss, but he pays me no mind, just focusing on how to get the shard out of me. “Why don’t you just… You know. Melt it, or whatever.” I waggle my fingers at him the same way he did to Shiftra out on the street.

“Christ alive, are you always this talkative? Do I need to sedate you or something to get you to stop already?” Man, who would have guessed a top villain would be so rude? “If you must know. That thing isn’t just a stick in your chest. It’s snaking around inside you, shooting off in a million directions. It's covering your heart, too. Probably the only reason you didn't bleed out there on the road. I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s touching your nerves at this point. Even if I could kill it, it’d just turn you into primordial ooze too.” This thing is… growing? I shudder, just as bewildered. “Besides, I don’t know what the hell this thing is made of. First time I’ve ever seen something withstand the xenophage. I need to think about how to handle this, so if you would so kindly shut the fuck up and let me think?”

Fine. If he wants silence, I can do silence. It gives me time to contemplate this mess I’m in here. I don’t know what possessed me to try and save Basilisk of all people. One of the most infamous villains in the city, notoriously cruel, notoriously standoffish. And here he is, saving my life. I guess he is being a jerk about it. He’s treating me like a little girl!

Wait. He’s treating me like a little girl. He said as much. Oh my god! Did he not notice? My bra is still on, after all… He… He needs to know, right? Like, medical disclosure and all that? Granted, I don’t think ‘pulling out shrapnel’ requires knowing that I’m a guy, but maybe it’s important! It’s really weird Shiftra shrapnel after all.

I cough to get his attention. “Mr. Basilisk? Sir? Uh, what you said before? About me being a little girl. I’m, I’m really not.” 

He groans loudly, practically throwing his tools down on the side table. “I’m starting to wish you hadn’t woken up, kid. If you want me to see you as anything else, you can start by not referring to me like a schoolmarm.”

“No, sir, I mean. Not that I’m a kid, I… You shouldn’t have brought me here, I’m not what you think I am…” 

The color drains from his face quickly, a scowl deep on his lips. Before I can say anything to clarify myself, to figure out my wording, he bolts forward, grabbing me by the mouth, hard. My eyes go wide as he snarls down at me. “What is it that I think you are, then? What are you? Are you a spy? Do you work for them? Did they send you here to case me out? Bugged out to the teeth so they can find my lab, listen in on my plans?” The grip on my face is digging into my cheeks, pressing into the joint on my jaw. It’s incredibly painful! As quickly as he jumped up, he ripped his hand off my jaw, reached into his belt, pulled out a knife and shoved it right up against my throat. “Well! What is it! Because I swear to Christ, if you don’t explain yourself in the next ten seconds I’m going to bleed you out like a stuck pig and dump your body on the CCHIP doorway, and they can figure out how to get that thing out of your corpse.” 

His knife presses deep into my throat; I can feel it slicing into me, hot stinging pain against my adam’s apple. I didn’t realize how paranoid he would be! I change my mind, he's a little bit terrifying. God, this is my fault, I should have realized someone like him would be jumping at shadows with the world against him so often. Oh god, and if he’s this quick to jump off the handle, and finds out I’m… God, I don’t want to know what he would do. Abort, change gears, he can never know. I have to deescalate this, fast.

“Wait! Sir, I didn’t mean it like that, I meant that, like, I’m not a good person, I’m not worth saving, I was being self deprecating and in my head and please don’t kill me sir!” I lean into a self hatred angle; I’m sure he’s known plenty of people like that on the villain’s side. He doesn’t flinch, however. What else? I’m willing to bet a man like this would love begging, ego-stroking. I throw my hands up in surrender around my head, under his arm. “Look, sir, I promise, I won’t do anything stupid. I’ll leave, I’ll stay out of your lab, I have no idea where we are and you can black bag me and leave me in the middle of the city and I’ll just go to the hospital and someone there can help me, you don’t have to worry about me. I promise you that you’ll never see from me again if you don’t want to.” 

He stays still, almost trancelike, boring holes in my head with his eyes. The sting from the knife dulls, though, and eventually melts away. He seems to notice, too, pulling the knife up into mine and his views. The handle has molded over, fuzzy and crumbling. The once pristine knife is a deep, orange rust, holes eating though all over, segments sloughing off bit by bit. He sighs, throws it down to the ground, and steps away. “Goddamn it, you made me blow one of my favorite knives.” He stomps away to his main computer, while I stay laying down, frozen in shock. “Fuck! Don’t scare me like that, kid. You’re incredibly lucky that I already had access to the CCHIP databases, and I don’t remember you in them.” He’s flicking through the files on everyone just to triple check. I can recognize files on several of the city’s heroes zip by quickly. “Either you’re so high up on the chain that I’m fucked already, or you’re just a moron who was in the wrong place at the wrong time. And I know which way I’m leaning towards, so again. Lucky you.”  

I sit up, to look over to him, swinging my legs over the table, the remains of my top pooling out around my hips. I feel my heart going a million miles an hour, the shard practically poking against it with every expansion. “Look, sir, thank you for trying to save me, but you really don’t owe me anything. I really should be going, stop inconveniencing you.” I put my hands on top of the shard, gripping it tightly. He bolts upright when I do so. “Hell, I pulled the thing halfway out at the scene anyways, I’m sure I can just tug it out–” 

He jumps up, runs over to me, cutting me off. “No! Don’t touch that thing, it’s so wired into your chest at this point that you’ll just be ripping out your own–” 

But it’s too late. It feels like he’s moving in slow motion now, it’s all gone so quickly. I’ve already tugged the thing most of the way out, giving like dough to me. It’s like pulling a drawer open. My fingers sink into the shard, grip tightening into it, getting to the crest of the thing. It pulls like butter until the very end of it, feeling like it’s blocked off, like it’s been flared and there’s no crossing the final barrier; the pressure feels like I’m pulling my entire body out of my chest. Just as I’m about to get the final break out, pull the whole thing through, Basilisk grabs my arms, pulling them away from the shard. My fingers slide out of it just as easily as they slide in, pulling out and away, my grip on it totally gone. And with the pressure of the rest of my body so high, there’s nowhere left for it to go but back.

It feels like a gunshot right to my heart. In the blink of an eye, the entire shard is sucked into me. My ears pop; the pressure in my body makes it feel like I’m going to implode. My vision instantly bleeds out into pure white, and then pulsating veins of red all around. I feel like I’m seeing into my own eyeballs. Every vein in my body pulsates and burns, feels like they’re trying to leap out of my skin. I scream, and then everything is black again.

CassieSandwich

This bitch can't stop dying, huh! I'm sure this time it'll take~

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