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“It’s not the worst thing that’s ever happened to me,” Johnny panted. It wasn’t even a lie, but he was trying very hard not to freak out. “Just… wait till I get my mojo back. I’ll be able to—”
“No,” Reed said, hand on his shoulder. “Don’t… there’s already been too much damage done.”
“Reed.” Johnny couldn’t breathe properly, couldn’t suck in enough air to speak or to move or do anything except try very desperately not to panic. “Reed, get it out—”
There was someone clutching his hand. Even without looking, he could tell who it was, just as he could tell that Sue was probably freaking out almost as much as he was. “Johnny,” she was saying, “Johnny, look at me. Don’t look at it. Just… concentrate on me, okay?”
It was impossible to not be completely attuned to the giant rod sticking out of his middle, but Johnny did his best. “Trying,” he got out. The worst part was the constant heat and cold, the feeling of his powers just out of reach, coming and going as his body fought against whatever the Doombot had sprayed him with. “Where’s Ben? Can’t he… yank it out of me?”
Reed and Sue exchanged a look. “I’m going to cut you free from the rest of the debris, lad,” Reed said, ignoring his question. “We’re going to sedate you, and then move you back home. Okay?”
“Why can’t you just pull it out? I can feel it moving – is it the blood or something?”
“Yes,” Sue cut in smoothly as Reed got out some kind of giant gun and aimed it towards Johnny. “It’s much safer to do it in the lab.”
Johnny tried to read her face, but found that the way his vision was coming and going was making it extremely difficult. “Okay, yeah,” he finally said, though it probably wouldn’t’ve mattered, because Reed was already at work with his laser ray. “Hey, ha-has he always had that… in his… back pocket?”
Sue squeezed his hand again. “You know Reed,” she whispered. “Just try and save your strength, okay?”
Johnny tried to nod, but his limbs were having trouble listening to him. He wondered again where Ben was, because now would be a really good time to use that strength of his.
The first thing Johnny had tried to do when he’d been impaled onto this rod was melt it, which hadn’t gone too well. The thing was, Johnny had never faced something as mundane as being impaled, because the heat he usually radiated when he was in a fight would typically melt it, just like how bullets couldn’t touch him, not when he was flamed on.
The problem was that the Doombot he’d been flying after had clearly been luring him close, because just as he’d been about to melt it, it had turned around and sprayed him with a fine mist, something that he’d barely registered. What, you ran out of water? he’d said, before promptly falling. And landing on a metal rod sticking out in the demolition site they were currently fighting at.
At first, he’d thought he’d just gotten the air knocked out of him. And then he’d tried to flame on, but it was… sluggish. The flame was just beyond his reach, like smoke to a bee.
Then he’d tried to get up, to get off his back and hopefully into a more defensive position, when he’d discovered he was stuck. Or pinned would be a better word. And that was when he’d discovered the pool of blood beneath him.
Had this been before Johnny had died, before the Negative Zone and countless deaths and resurrections that had been far more horrific than a simple rod going through his centre, he might’ve panicked. Now, he’d just felt a faint wave of exhaustion wash over him again, a wave of again?
So he’d tried to melt the rod – normally, that was how he dealt with things. But with his power coming and going, it hadn’t entirely worked. And then he’d called over the rest of the team. He probably should’ve broken his condition to them a bit better, as opposed to ‘I’m in a bit of a tight spot here’.
“Johnny,” Reed was saying in his ear. “Stay awake for me, lad. Ben’s here. He’s going to lift you up, and it’s going to hurt.”
“It’s okay, Reed,” Johnny replied. Or he thought he said it – he couldn’t really tell if his mouth moved. He knew for a fact though that his words were slurring. “I’ve had wo—” He choked, something rising in his throat.
“Cough, kid,” Ben said, and his rough voice was like a balm. Maybe that’d been the worst part of the Negative Zone – the fact that he’d had to die alone every time, and then wake up by himself in his cell afterwards. “Get it out of—Stretch! He’s choking!”
Johnny could barely make out their words – his entire world went static as his coughing and hacking and trying his damnedest to get the gunk out of himself made him jostle the rod, which sent down white hot pain through his body.
There was spit dribbling out of his mouth. Johnny would be horrified at that, had it not been for the fact that he was currently impaled. He knew from experience that if he survived this, by the look on Sue’s face, he was probably not going to be allowed out of bed for a very long time, let alone be teased by anyone for drooling.
“…might’ve nicked a lung,” Reed was saying. “Have… standing by… out of the way…”
“Didn’t,” Johnny tried to say. “Reed.”
“You’re going to be fine,” Sue was saying, though her body was coming and going in a strange state of transparency. “Brace yourself, three, two, one—"
Johnny lost consciousness.
The next time he woke up, he was in their rarely used medbay. Their problems were rarely things that normal hospitals could resolve, like bullet wounds or knife injuries, the types of things that Peter faced so often on the streets, so they’d designed this place to suit their needs, a bit like an extension of Reed’s lab. Johnny couldn’t remember the last time he’d been in here for himself – mostly, the worst that happened to him was exhaustion from going nova.
He was lying on his back, which was a bonus, though the glaring light wasn’t. “Sue?” he tried to say, and then coughed. “Reed? Ben? You guys in here?” Johnny barely had time to finish speaking before Sue was there beside him.
“Hey, little brother,” she said, her smile forced. “You’re… well, you’re going to be fine. It’s just…”
“C’mon, that’s the face you use on Franklin when he doesn’t want a jab.” Johnny said. “I’ve died before, y’know. I can take a little pain.”
Sue’s face spasmed, and she turned to the wall, biting her lip. And then, taking a deep breath, she looked back at Johnny. “The Doombot did something to your system to temporarily shut down the cells that can create your flame. When you tried fighting against it, your body went really hot and really cold in very small amounts of time. Which normally wouldn’t be too bad, for you.”
Johnny was getting a sick sense of what was coming. “But ‘cause of the iron… it…”
Sue nodded, her hand tightening on his. “It sort of fused to your insides,” she told him, voice quiet. “That’s why we couldn’t just pull it right out.”
Johnny shut his eyes. “So I made things worse,” he muttered. “Of course I did.”
“You couldn’t’ve known,” Sue said.
“Where’re the others?” Johnny asked.
“Basically, if we can get your flame working again, the stuff inside you won’t be a problem. It’s also… worked to stem the blood flow.”
“So they’re figuring that out now?”
Reed chose that moment to jog into the room. “Okay, this should work,” he said. “But it also means that the sedative we gave you will wear off. Do you want to—”
“Chomp down on something?” Johnny raised an eyebrow. “Give me one of Ben’s fingers if it looks like I’m about to bite off my tongue, Reed. Just get on with it.” Ben was standing at the edge of the room, but he stepped closer when Johnny spoke. “C’mon, guys, look a little livelier. I’m not dead yet.”
Comments like that had gotten him a whack of Sue’s arm or silence from Ben or an awkward clearing of the throat from Reed. Now, none of them spoke, and Johnny didn’t have the strength to try lightening the mood any more.
Something slid into his upper arm, the cold sensation of a syringe as liquid trickled into him. Reed had to make stuff specifically for his system nowadays – he had to do that for the kids as well, not to mention Ben. Johnny usually had to focus to not flame on as it entered his system, his brain always wanting to react to it like an unwanted substance.
Now, he shivered, and he felt the fire lighting up his belly but in all the ways he didn’t want. “Working,” he got out. “I can… feel a lot of things.”
Sue’s thumb stroked his hand, even though part of him wanted her to let go so he wouldn’t have to worry about accidentally burning her. “Don’t do anything until you can feel yourself getting back to normal. Or it’ll probably get a lot worse before it gets better.”
Reed was over by the computer, monitoring his vitals. “Core temperature rising,” he said.
“Hey,” Johnny muttered, “does this mean that I punctured my lung and then fixed it myself?”
Ben huffed a breath. “No, half-pint,” he said. “You just bit your tongue.”
“Sue, let go,” Johnny gasped, and she released her hold instantly. But something was wrong – Johnny could feel the fire building up inside himself, but he couldn’t flame on. He tried, squeezing his eyes shut and trying to will his body temperature to rise, to burn.
All it did was make his body scream.
“Stop, stop—” Reed was coming over to him now. “Johnny, stop!”
“What—why?” Johnny blinked, and there was Reed’s head with his elongated neck, the rest of his body probably still at the computer typing away. “What’s wrong?”
“Your body temperature is rising, but your flames aren’t coming,” he said with a frown. “Because it’s temporary, I have every reason to believe it’ll fix itself in due time. But with this,” he gestured to Johnny torso, where if Johnny glanced down (he didn’t) he’d probably be able to see the rebar sticking out of his belly.
It made him think of the worms, of waking up to find himself being stitched together. He shivered again, but this time it was from the phantom sensation of the bugs crawling over his body and seeing his skin be knit back together, all of the pink flesh on the inside once again.
“Bucket,” Johnny gasped, and Ben was just in time to shove one beside his face.
Turning to puke in it was excruciating, even with Reed and Sue helping tilt his body to the side. He dry-heaved into the bucket, knowing full well that nothing was going to come out and hating his body for making him go through the motions now, at the mere thought of it again, as though he hadn’t relived it at least once a week in his dreams ever since coming home.
Someone was running their hand down his back. “Done?” Sue said, and when Johnny nodded, she and Reed gently turned him back onto his back.
“Okay, this next part is going to suck—”
“Trust me, brother in law, it already sucks.”
“—but it’s better than waiting for your system to flush out the serum. You’re going to flame on, as much as you can, and Ben’s going to slowly pull out the rebar from inside you.”
Johnny let out a hysterical snort. “That’s a terrible idea. What about the stuff you said was fused to my insides? Won’t that stay there when he pulls out the main bar?”
Reed was shaking his head, already probably having anticipated Johnny’s reaction. It made it so hard to have a satisfying argument with him. “The bits that get left behind will be fine,” he said. “Eventually, your body will flush it out when your powers are back to normal. I’m more concerned about the rod itself.”
Johnny slumped back into the cot. “Okay, yeah, sure,” he said. “I’m not too keen on it either.”
Reed nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. Brace yourself, lad.”
Johnny did, shutting his eyes again as he tried to flame on. It felt like a blocked pipe, like all that energy and force was being shoved into something that was refusing to budge. It was excruciating; his nerves lit up every inch of his body, nothing like the instantaneous deaths he’d tried to go for once he’d experienced a slow end.
He’d tried so hard to escape the worms, had tried a few times to scatter his body in so many places that it wouldn’t be possible to revive him again, but they’d still managed it.
Someone was screaming, and it took Johnny a moment to realise it was him. The sound coming out of his mouth was strangled, like someone forcing it to be quiet and inhumane, like the sound of an untouched youth would be stomped out in an instant.
“A little bit longer, that’s it, Johnny, you’re doing so great,” Sue was saying. Johnny clung to that, to her voice, in the oasis of memories that were flooding through his mind, the past and the present blending into one with only pain being the common factor.
And then, just when Johnny thought he couldn’t keep it up anymore, Reed shouted, “It’s out!” and Johnny fell back into the cot, spent.
“Done?” he slurred. “‘S it over?”
Fingers ran through his hair, even as he felt hands touching his stomach, methodical and distant. “Yes, just seeing the damage inside now. You’re going to be fine.”
Johnny huffed a strangled laugh when he felt a needle poke into his flesh. “Times like this,” he said, to no one in particular, “I don’t miss the worms at all. The itching was hell. Reed’s much better at stitching than they were.”
He didn’t see the glances exchanged above him; he was too busy finally falling into unconsciousness.