London Calling: Endgame - very early Friday morning

[xp_daytripper]

Regrouping at one of the local hospitals, X-Force does a headcount and comes up one short.



Some kind nurse had taken one look at Wanda and had conjured up a chair for her. The casualty ward the police officer had taken her to was overcrowded, flooded with victims that she had no doubt had managed to be caught up in the attacks. She closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the wall behind her, trying not to go to sleep. The injuries she sported were probably worse looking than they actually were - the blood on her pants alone had caused a flurry of activity before they realized there were worse injuries - but there were more than a fair number of them, including a potential concussion. She had, after all, fallen off a bloody building. Kind of.

Really, she knew better than to sleep but the fights had all but drained her dry of her reserves and she just wanted to get away from the aches and pains of her injuries. With no nurse in sight to gently shake her awake, Wanda's head nodded slightly.

Jubilee's hand came down on her shoulder and shook her gently as she sat down beside her, eyes tracking the people around them with a focussed gaze. She'd just come from the burns ward where they're pumped her full of oxygen for smoke inhalation and slathered her with burn cream for the sunburn, God how she hated sunburn.

"No going to sleep, wouldn't want you not waking up now." she muttered.

"Fuck off," Wanda muttered but it held no heat as she forced her eyes open once more. Normally she wasn't quite so openly crass with her language but at the moment, she couldn't bring herself to care. "Where're the others?"

Bishop leaned in further from the door frame as the pair spoke "Well I'm right here, at least." All in all he wasn't really in that bad of condition other then some bandages wrapped around his hands, a self done job from the look of how they're oddly layered. "I think at the second you're in the worst shape, until something happens with the concussion."

"Piffle, I'm perfectly fine. If you discount the wound in my leg that won't stop bleeding, the concussion that's making me see double - though you, my friend, I will cheerfully take two of - and...well, all right. I am a fine mess." She glared balefully at him, though it was clear she was pleased to see him on his feet and in one, general, piece. "If this is the worst of it, I'll count my blessings."

"I love how bleeding leg wounds are an actual plus at the moment." Jubilee said, "So, what was your fight?"

"I fought the law, the order, of the very city itself," she murmured.

"Sounds fucking horrible. I got off light. Christopher Marlowe tried to kill me, and it turns out that hand-to-hand training wasn't high on the list of priorities for Elizabethan spies, for some reason." Pete shrugged, and pushed himself off the wall he was leaning against - his suit was slightly tattered, his trousers were covered in mud, and the bottom half of his tie was missing, but he looked largely unhurt. "Despite a long history of being involved in stupidly improbable things, I never thought I'd find myself 400 years in the past, have to beat major literary figures to death in order to get back to the present. On the plus side, I can now write a book about what Marlowe was doing in Deptford that day. On the downside, no-one will ever believe it."

"That did not stop Dan Brown." Marie-Ange had emerged from the care of one of the nurses with several bandages on her neck and hands, and an ice pack held to the back of her head. She almost shrugged at the annoyed look from Wanda. "I read a lot of trash on airplanes. It passes the time." She switched the arm holding up the ice pack, and let her jacket slip down on her arm enough to show a mottled pattern of purple and blue bruises. "Mad puppet with a stick. If Doug makes any jokes about wee puppet men, would someone who can move without pain kill him for me?"

"Is there a Gepetto in the house?" Doug asked cheekily as he entered the room, none the worse for wear except a few assorted bruises and scrapes from being jostled around by the crowd in Trafalgar Square. "Mine was...weird," he told the group as he skipped away from a frowning Marie-Ange. "It was like some manifestation of the Mob. Not the Mafia," he noted with a raised hand, "I mean like 'the madding crowd' and all that. Something was whipping them into a frenzy with all these old speeches about war and sacrifice and stuff."

"I am going to smother you to death in your sleep." Marie-Ange said dryly. "Once I stop hurting."

"I got some big fire style Goddess thing," Jubilee said, moving to slouch slightly and then winced as her skin protested the pressure. "Did anyone else see Amanda by the by? I swear I saw her pointing me toward this water main at one point."

"Probably hallucinating from breathin' in too much smoke," replied Mark, sitting by himself on a chair in the corner away from everyone else. He had an earbud in one ear and idly tapped the screen of his iPhone, constantly switching between songs in order to fill the silence.

At that, Wanda roused herself again. "Somehow I doubt it was a hallucination," she responded. "When I was on the run, I tried to call someone through a public phone since mine was destroyed and when I did, Amanda got in touch. She said something about the London Stone sucking her in, that she was all over the very city itself - the connection kept fading in and out but she also said that London was protecting itself. From us." She grimaced as she sat up straight. "Has anyone else seen any sign of Amanda, either in weird ways or actually seen her since these damned attacks stopped?"

It occurred at that moment, to Bishop, that not only had he not but no one had. He'd watched her back once before and she was nice enough to him that he was actually concerned. Since no one had any information at the moment, and he seemed to be in better shape compared to most everyone else, so he stepped from the room. He didn't know if it would but time could matter. Since his hands weren't in any condition for desk research Bishop reverted back to his old instincts; he hit the streets.

"That," Wanda said in the ensuring silence following Bishop's departure, "was not a good sign. Anyone else?" Under the exhaustion and pain, a hot bubble of panic and worry started to work its way up and out. She swallowed hard and forced it back down.

"She's not dead," announced Emma as she entered the room, icy anger in her voice. Her back was spectacularly painful - Jeremy had commented on the bruising, which meant it was going to be absolutely livid in a day or so and, now that the adrenalin had worn off, she was certain she'd torn some rib cartilage. "There's - something - in the Astral Plane. But it's not quite Amanda and I can't find her. Not since Farouk turned the whole thing into a fucking wasteland. If there are any other psychics out there who deal with their mummy/daddy issues by creating homicidal alter egos who eat their brains and our Plane and prevent me finding my fucking people, then I vote me to do the psychic surgery with no anasthetic to pull the fuckers out of their heads and murder them." Emma caught the startled glances of her team and shrugged, masking the pain the movement caused her. "I got hit by a statue. Several times."

Just shortly behind Emma was Sarah, who by the reactions of the nurses following her, was looking a bit worse for wear. "I swear to god, if you all do not quit fussing over me I will do something unpleasant. I am not in the mood." Her look was absolutely murderous. She stood there, wearing an oversize sweatshirt over her nearly useless clothes, blood seeping through slowly at the shoulder and the side. "The next time I say I want a dog the size of a bear, throw something heavy at me. Please."

"It's de damn city." Remy was barely recognizable under the oozing cuts all over his face. He looked like he'd been slashed with a dozen razors, and even the cuts that had stopped bleeding were caking blood together in patches over the Cajun's face. His clothes were shredded, punctured by beaks and then soaked in both their blood and his. He looked like a frayed statue, picked at on the edges so much that his body looked fuzzy and indistinct. "Whatever started all of dis is linked wit' de city somehow. De... public mythos? Merde! Tante's talked 'bout dis. Dere's a consciousness to some places. Dat's what 'manda must have heard, and den, de madness we walked into. Where is she? If anyone going to have an idea 'bout - Jubilee, Remy get a bandage in a minute - 'bout what's going on, it her."

Jubilee had stood when she'd seen Remy come in, and now she pushed him into her seat before he fell over. "I saw her, I'm positive of it, and she helped me. Wherever she is, she needs us to find her. But we won't do her any good if we don't take care of ourselves first."

Wanda frowned as a nurse called out her name and watched as the woman, who was looking rather fuzzy, started to head in her direction. “London’s eaten her up,” she muttered in exhaustion. “And I plan on making it spit her back out as soon as we’re out of this hospital.”




So just where did Amanda wind up?




Sam Newport whistled tunelessly between his teeth as he employed his dustpan and broom. Five in the morning on a Friday, it was a mug's game, but someone had to make sure the platforms were clean before the commuter rush. Then he could go back to his little storage space, have a cuppa and read the paper - there'd been some sort of commotion last night in the middle of the city, to judge from the headlines. What was the world coming to...

The whistle became a sigh as he saw the huddled form ahead. Bloody tramps. Give them an inch and they'd take the whole bloody mile. Weren't there places they could go? Reaching the figure, he cleared his throat.

"Oi. Time to move on. You can't stay here."

There was a groan and then the person stirred, uncurling slightly. Dishevelled blonde hair hung over bloodshot blue eyes in a pale face. Jesus Christ, it was a girl. Hardly out of her teens, if that. Kids these days, messing up their lives with drugs and drink. "C'mon, sunshine, you need to move on," he repeated, a bit more sternly.

She blinked at him. "W-what?" she croaked, voice sounding somehow rusty. "Where...?"

"Liverpool Street Station." There was a blank stare. "London," he added sarcastically. Any more of this and he'd just call security.

"London." That seemed to sink in. "London has teeth and she will swallow you whole, swallow you and encircle you and hold you close. She'll love you and eat your soul doing it," she said, her voice a soft sing-song. Sam almost audibly groaned. The girl was a bloody druggie, out of her mind on something. Just his luck.

"Right, you, push off. Go and sleep it off somewhere away from reasonable folk." He didn't actually nudge her with the broom, but it was close.

She blinked up at him again, but something registered - she hauled herself to her feet. "Keep your head down, keep a low profile. Don't give the game away," she informed him almost solemnly, before tottering off down the platform. Sam watched her go, then shook his head, dismissing her.

"Bleeding druggies," he muttered, returning to his sweeping.

Behind him on the tiled floor was a small drawing, crudely scratched out with a bent bottle cap. A single stick figure, wearing a pointy hat and holding a broomstick.