Cecilia, Logan, & Wade | Monday Night (backdated)

[x-deadpool.livejournal.com]

X-Force manages to get Wade back to the mansion, but things are looking pretty dire. Cecilia calls in Logan for a blood transfusion: as the saying goes - desperate times, desperate measures.


Warning: Graphic medical content regarding injuries sustained during Into the Fog, multiple (temporary) cardiac arrests, and a desperate, unsanitary blood transfusion. Blood, gore, probably too much detail.


Wade wasn't unconscious as they rolled him into the medlab, but he definitely wasn't actually coherent, either. Blood loss, broken bones, acid, and plasma burns... he'd been worked over pretty thoroughly. It was horribly obvious that his healing factor was trying its best to keep up with the damage. It was also horribly obvious that it was not succeeding as well as everyone in the medlab might have liked. He'd come through eventually, but he'd probably do a lot of dying and reviving in the meantime.

"Leave him here, thanks." The hardest thing Cecilia had found about working at the mansion was the need to divorce her friendships from her work. With Wade on the table, that was proving especially difficult. She'd been briefed on his condition and had a hunch about what to expect (which is why she had surgical implements, 1000ML saline bags, and several units of O-Neg, cryo, and platelets on-hand). But seeing a close friend - perhaps her closest - with his face melted off was not easy.

"Okay, Wade." She said, her voice commanding as she shifted into doctor mode. "Let's get you some more blood so that healing factor can get to work."

It was tough to tell where to start, and had she not specialized in trauma, she might have been at a loss. If the bleeding hadn't stopped yet, she needed to find where it was coming from - but she also needed to make sure he had enough blood circulating to take care of everything else, so her immediate concern was hooking him up to simultaneously infuse two units of blood. But as she hooked him up, the motions more or less routine, she took the time to study his body.

The world seemed to slow a bit as she took him in. The bullet wound wasn't bleeding - that seemed to have healed up, at least enough that she wasn't worried about it. But Wade's face was a fucking mess (far worse than advertised), which was as good a sign as any that his body was in the process of shutting down. Finding the bleed was the next thing on her list that she needed to accomplish, and that was tricky because of how much trauma his body suffered. "Wound VAC," she murmured, watching as the blood started to drip through the tubing connected to the bag. She glanced back at his face. "No." She'd almost forgotten who she was dealing with. This was Wade. The healing factor complicated everything.

Already, it was complicating her blood transfusion. The blood kept clotting as soon as it circulated through his system enough to hit the wounds, so she kept having to explore the damage done to his abdomen to remove massive pieces of congealed blood. She tried pushing heparin, but whatever the X-gene was doing to Wade's hematic system proved to be very stubborn.

She worked mostly in silence, pleased to see she was making progress. And then, the vital monitors started going crazy. "Shit! Okay, okay, okay – pulse dropping, blood pressure is..." She leaned toward the monitor and glanced around her. "Patient's crashing. I need the chest cart. Someone get me the goddamn chest cart." As if on queue, his heart stopped, his pulse dropping to zero as the cart rolled in. She reached for the paddles, but there was no need - just as suddenly as it stopped, his heart started again, his vitals restoring.

The healing factor.

She continued to work steadily, interrupted twice more by Wade's systems essentially rebooting. She managed to close wounds, to stop some of the bleeding and allow his healing ability to take over in certain areas of trauma. But this was an uphill battle in many ways, and so it wasn't surprising when after two hours, they ran out of fluids.

"No more O-Neg? Are you kidding me?" This was – she'd need to talk to Clarice about this. To Charles. To somebody. They had never run out of blood before. Something must have changed. Or the more likely option was that, as fast as they were transfusing the units, they were clotting or flowing right back out of the gaping wound in Wade's abdomen. "We need a donor, and the patient's O-Neg." She racked her brain, going through a mental spreadsheet of blood types and mansion residents.

Oh, fucking hell. "Logan." She swore. "Somebody fucking call Logan."

Logan walked into the medlab to a scene that could've come right out of a horror movie. It looked like there was blood everywhere, heaps of blood soaked rags tossed haphazardly on carts and every available surface. Cecilia was in the middle of it all, barking orders and reaching for items that were handed to her barely in time.

His phone had summoned him to the medlab with a flashing and vibrating medalert. That'd been a new one for him. Guess the phones handed out to anyone affiliated with the mansion had grown some upgrades. He'd need to go track down someone who'd get a kick out of reading the specs to figure out what else they could do now.

Around Cecilia, he could see the prone form of a body. He couldn't see who it was, though they had to be in pretty bad shape from the looks of the place. "Alright, I'm here. What's the medical emergency?"

"Well," Cecilia was focused on sewing skin back together and didn't spare Logan a glance. "This patient is Wade. The fact that you can't tell might give you some idea of how things are going on my end." One advantage to dealing with Logan (not that she dealt with him much): He wouldn't comment on her brusqueness. "We need O-Neg and I figure blood with a healing factor's got to be even better. How are you with needles?"

"Ain't got a problem with needles. Usually it's the other way around." Logan moved closer, trying to not to knock items covered in blood onto the floor while also staying out of the way of the folks helping Cecilia. "What'cha need me to do?" He glanced at Wade. "Though maybe I oughta just slice up my arm and press it against the nearest open wound. It'd probably save you some time."

"Uh, no." Cecilia took a break from holding part of Wade's intestines together to look up at him, an eyebrow raised behind her glasses. Had her face not been covered by a surgical mask, he might have seen her lips purse. "Nothing about that is sterile. Or clean. Or logical." She stared at him, tilting her head and practically daring him to ask her to continue. "I'll get Amelia to stick you. It'll be fine."

"Healin' factors are weird things. You'd be surprised what they'd consider sterile enough to do the work ya want 'em to." Logan cleared off a chair and table and settled himself down. "But you're the doc. I'll defer to your judgment." He felt in the way and useless just sitting there waiting for someone else to draw his blood.

"Yeah, I — wait, hold on." Cecilia turned her attention back to Wade's body, where her fingers found yet another blood clot that interfered with her work. "Really?" She started to clear it, then glanced back at Logan. It would take a good few minutes to get a blood transfusion set up, and she wasn't sure exactly how much time she would have before Wade's body rebooted again. Because good judgment or not, Cecilia was surprisingly out of her element. Having a friend on the table was clearly clouding her judgment.

"Okay," she sighed, her resignation palpable. "Go sterilize your claws."

Logan wasn't sure he'd heard right. No respectable doctor he'd ever met listened to him, other than to ask questions he couldn't answer. "Do ya have - " He stopped as he spotted the rubbing alcohol on a nearby cart. "Never mind." He wouldn't put it past the med lab to have a blow torch on hand but he didn't think Cecilia would take kindly to him asking for it.

He moved to a sink then slid out the claws on his right hand. With his left, he doused them liberally with rubbing alcohol then carefully walked over to where Cecilia was standing beside Wade.

"Okay" Cecilia said in a strained voice. She closed her eyes for a second and wiped sweat off her forehead. "Just so we're clear, if this works, I'm not going to knock on your door for medical advice or anything." She pointed to a wound on Wade's leg that she hadn't started to treat yet. "Let's try there. Good a place to start as any. And he can live without it if something goes wrong."

"Yes, ma'am." Logan hadn't expected anything less. The weird stuff usually didn't get done more than once and only in dire situations. Evidently, Wade trying to bleed himself out on the table as a result of his slow healing factor was one of those. He made a fist then jabbed his claws into his left forearm, grimacing as he tore through skin. Blood welled up rapidly and Logan positioned his arm so it'd fall directly into Wade's wound. He had to continually rake his claws over his arm to keep the blood flowing. It was a good thing Logan and pain were rather well acquainted.

Nothing happened for several long moments, the blood dripping into Wade's open wound pooled, almost overflowing and spattering to the floor. Just before the surface tension broke, though, the pooling seemed to even out despite the fact that Logan's arm was still bleeding. Damaged flesh, whitened from lack of blood and oxygen, suddenly pinked and then began to rapidly mend.

"Go figure," Cecilia muttered, resisting the urge to shout Spanish curses. She glanced over at Logan, shrugging as a form of gratitude. "Looks like your healing factor's making me obsolete. You want to go for his stomach next?" Her hands felt their way along Wade's small bowel, looking for ruptures or abnormalities.

"Not always all they're cracked up to be, healing factors." Case in point was Wade laid out on the table right now. Logan moved his arm so it bled into the gaping stomach wound, opposite where Cecilia had her hands. It was kinda weird seeing his rapid healing factor work on someone else. He wondered how far this blood transfusion thing was pushing his own body's limits, if they were being pushed at all.

"Hey, pull back." Cecilia looked up at Logan, her hands now working at the wound in Wade's stomach. "You're not a blood factory either." With her hands busy, she nodded from his arm to a spot outside the body cavity. "That's plenty. You need me to get someone to sew you up? My hands are a little full."

Logan snorted. "That's probably the nicest thing you've ever said to me." He shook his head and once he stopped clawing himself his skin knit itself back together. "Nah, just need to stop aggravatin' things and it fixes itself." He watched with detached interest. "Kinda comes in handy most days. Be more useful if I could bottle it up and pass it on to people who ain't Marie."

"Sure." Cecilia's relative disinterest was pretty clear. She barely looked up as she continued to work. "And then we could both live the rest of our lives in relative isolation."