Chapter Text
Kamala messed up.
Okay, no - to say that she messed up is being a bit harsh.
On the whole, she’d say tonight went pretty well. Foiled some villainous plans, beat the bad guys! All in a night’s work for Jersey City’s finest homegrown superhero!
Only, at present, she now finds herself leaning against a rain-damp wall in an alleyway three blocks from the Circle Q, having to put all her strength into staying upright and dragging one foot in front of the other, clutching at her side in a vain effort to keep the blood on the inside (which doesn’t work; even Kamala knows it doesn’t work like that).
Her powers had given out about a block away - luckily, while she was close enough to the ground that she only got a sprained ankle out of it - and now it seems like 5 minutes away from her destination, her legs are about to do the same.
She can still feel her connection to the Noor, it’s still there, but… shaky, like it’s just out of arm’s reach, and she doesn’t have the energy to stretch far enough to be able to grasp it.
Kamala staggers back against the wall, letting it take all of her weight as her knees buckle underneath her and she crumples to the ground.
Yeah, okay… so maybe she messed up.
Turns out even the experience from five months of superheroing does not make taking on an entire warehouse full of criminal lackeys single-handedly any easier. Which Kamala probably should’ve realised in advance of storming the place, and she probably should’ve planned that entrance more (or at all) and she probably should’ve got out before things got to this, but - who is she kidding, she wasn’t going to do that.
Sure, there’s a lot of things she probably should’ve done, and probably feels a lot like the sharp pain in her side and tastes like the iron of blood from the cut on her lip and sounds like Bruno’s voice telling her maybe we should call this one in.
And oh, God. Bruno.
Groaning, Kamala lifts her suddenly far too heavy hand into the pocket of her suit and draws out her phone. When she turns it over the screen lights up the dark alley with the Captain Marvel fan-art she has set as her wallpaper and a string of notification boxes.
9 missed calls, 20 messages; all from Bruno. Kamala winces.
Right, because while she had told Bruno her plans before she left, she failed to tell him when she had successfully carried out those plans (on account of the whole, y’know, barely making it out alive thing).
Kamala tries to lift herself off the ground, but a sharp stab of pain pierces through her side and halts that plan in its tracks. A wave of dizzy nausea hits her, leaving everything feeling fuzzy and weirdly muffled; the alleyway grows dangerously out of focus around her.
Through the heavy fog she raises her phone higher and angles it towards herself, groaning when it turns out facial recognition doesn’t recognise her with the mask (and what else she doesn’t even want to know, but she doesn’t need to see herself to know she’s looked better), and she has to swipe up to clumsily punch in her passcode instead.
She last closed her phone on her chat with Bruno, so when it unlocks she only has to hit one button to send her location to him before she lets the phone drop to the floor along with her hand.
And then she passes out.
--
Bruno is at his desk when the message comes through. He’s not doing anything besides staring at a bunch of words on his computer screen he’s not reading, so when his phone lights up he snatches it off the desk immediately, heart lifting and then dropping ten feet when his eyes scan over the screen and see that it’s a message from Kamala - no words, no context, just a location.
He’s already on his feet before he’s even opened his phone and seen that Kamala - or Kamala’s phone, at least - is apparently only five minutes out from his apartment. Only pausing to grab his keys, he flings himself out the apartment door and down the stairs to the ground floor as fast as humanly possible.
It was raining hard earlier, though it seems to have eased up a bit by the time Bruno steps outside and is hit by the cold night air that his thin flannel shirt does little to shield against. At this point it’s just past midnight, and the street is mostly dark; the few lights from the Circle Q and the 24 hr laundromat opposite his apartment cast bright, blurry reflections in puddles on the sidewalk.
It’s not hard to get to the location - small alleyway off the butcher's shop just down the road from the Circle - nor is it hard to find her there.
For a second Bruno freezes and his heart all but stills when he sees the familiar figure slumped against the wall. Her head is tipped back, phone discarded on the ground beside her, long scarf trailing away over the rain soaked floor.
There’s patches of red mixing with the rain and pooling around Kamala’s unconscious form, and it’s only the sight of that that breaks Bruno out of whatever stupor he’s in; almost tripping over his feet he staggers forward, kneels down in front of her.
“Kamala,” he stutters, voice only halfway there, “Hey. Hey, KK, hey, it’s me.”
The alleyway is quiet - at least relative to the street - but something’s pounding in his ears, so loud he doubts he would be able to hear anything anyway. Too many thoughts are spinning around in his brain and he can’t pin any down long enough to focus on them; he’s trapped only with the sight of Kamala on the ground, bleeding, unconscious.
One of his hands drifts up to her face, then hesitates, because suddenly he’s terrified to know if he’s already too late.
(He knew he shouldn’t have let KK go to that warehouse tonight; knew he should’ve tried harder to convince her to stay. Shouldn’t have helped her gather information on the gang that was hiding out there; should’ve gone with her.
But his heart feels like lead because he knows that no matter the regrets now, in every possible permutation of tonight Kamala would’ve gone, and he would’ve let her go.)
His hand meets cool skin, and when he tilts her face up slightly she doesn’t stir. Hand fully shaking now, he moves it to her neck and presses just beneath her jaw. When his two fingers find a faint pulse there he lets out the deepest, most shuddering sigh, and tries to fight back the urge to throw up, or cry, or both.
Okay.
Okay.
She’s alive.
That’s - that’s a good sign, at least.
But not nearly the least of Bruno’s worries, when he glances over the rest of Kamala’s unconscious form. She’s bleeding heavily from her side, red soaked into the fabric of her costume. It looks worryingly like a stab wound or something, and he can’t stop his head from spinning as he jerkily reaches out to apply pressure to the wound because he’s seen enough movies to know that’s probably what he should do.
Bruno forces his eyes shut for a second, just about manages to make himself take several deep breaths, and think - put aside the screaming of his heart and think about this, one step at a time, because that’s the only thing he’s good for, right; thinking; the only thing Kamala needs him for - besides apparently bailing her out of situations like this - so he might as well try to live up to the expectation.
And the facts are as follows:
- Kamala’s hurt. Seriously hurt, and though he’s patched her up plenty of times in the past when she’s got roughed up in a fight or accidentally hurt herself back when they were trying to figure out her hard light abilities - Bruno wouldn’t be able to count the number of times she’s fallen from a malfunctioning platform on one hand - somehow, instinctively, he knows this is different.
- At this rate, there’s a genuine non-zero chance she’s going to die. Bruno doesn’t even have to be a genius to work that one out. The puddle of rain-diluted blood growing around his knees is testament to that fact, not to mention her too-fast pulse and too-short breaths.
- She’s probably going to hate him for what he’s about to do.
Keeping one hand firmly on the wound on Kamala’s side, Bruno digs in his jeans pocket for his phone. He balks when he realises his hand is covered in Kamala’s blood, and he has to roughly wipe it on his jeans before being able to unlock the phone. With shaking fingers he brings up the phone keypad and punches in three numbers.
Beneath his hand Kamala stirs, groaning. Bruno’s heart leaps into his throat, but he keeps the phone pressed against his ear.
“Ungh… Bruno…” Kamala’s voice comes from below him, shaky and barely there, but then the call connects and an operator speaks on the other end of the line, tinny sound from his phone’s speakers loud in the dark alley.
“911, what’s your emergency?”
“Bruno, no-!”
Kamala suddenly lurches forward, yanks the phone from his hand and hits the end call button before he can stop her.
Bruno’s so shocked by the sudden display of lucidity, not to mention the fact that she just hung up on the emergency services, that what comes out of his mouth is only a rushed jumble of words,
“Kamalawhatthehell–”
“Can’t - can’t go to the hospital,” Kamala cuts him off, grimacing as she speaks.
Which is obviously a consideration Bruno’s already made - if she goes to the hospital, not only are they going to have to call her family, but suddenly a lot more people are going to know who Ms. Marvel is. And knowing people, and the internet, by morning that’ll probably have expanded to just about everyone in New Jersey. But if it’s between her cover being blown and her dying, the choice - at least to him - is obvious.
“Kamala, it looks like - like you’ve been stabbed, or something, you need to go to the hospital.”
“Can’t, Bruno,” Kamala repeats obstinately. “‘Sides, I heal fast.”
Which is true - Kamala does heal weirdly fast. Bruno’s postulated it’s something to do with the matter she borrows from the Noor dimension regenerating her body when she uses it - but that’s still just a theory, and he needs to gather more data before they can fully understand it.
And for now, it doesn’t help them - there’s still too many unknowns, and Kamala’s never been this hurt before.
Kamala shifts against the wall like she’s attempting to sit up. Panic flares in Bruno’s stomach and he puts his hands on her shoulders, trying to gently (but firmly) keep her in place.
“No no no no, I really don’t think you should be moving right now.”
Kamala pouts and gives him a look, which at any other time might be endearing but right now only adds to his stress because Kamala clearly doesn’t recognise how serious this is.
As much as he wants to ignore her protests and call 911 again, in the meantime he resolves that he needs more information, and for Kamala to not fall unconscious again, so he asks, “What happened, KK?”
Kamala groans in response. “Dunno,” she mutters in a strained voice. She sucks in a sharp breath as her hands move to her side. “Things just… got out of hand. Couldn’t go home. Not like this. Thought I could hole up at the Circle Q… You still keep that spare key over the door, right…?”
“Kamala…”
“Bruno, I know how this looks,” she adds after a beat, quiet and serious like she never is. “But please, just trust me. I’ll be fine, I just… Might need your help a bit.”
Because of course. Bruno hangs his head. “Okay,” he mutters. “Yeah, okay, fine. You’re in luck, ‘cause Nonna’s out of town for the weekend, so we can go back to my place.”
Bruno shifts back onto his heels, trying to decide how best to go about this. “Think you can stand?” he asks. He’d offer to carry her back, but… well, let’s just say the gym has not been a number one priority over the past few months (but maybe that’s another one he should add to the never ending to-do-list). “You can lean on me.”
“Mhm,” Kamala hums in reply, groaning when he awkwardly helps her struggle to her feet.
Bruno grabs one of her arms and hoists it over his shoulder, his other hand moving to her waist. Kamala hisses in pain when the movement jostles her side and her eyes scrunch shut, her head falling onto his shoulder.
“Sorry,” Bruno mutters. He tries to ignore the proximity of her, because Kamala’s obviously in a lot of pain right now, and he still can’t shake the feeling that this is a bad, bad idea. But Kamala’s already made up her mind on the matter, and that means there’s no use trying to change it now. “Try to keep pressure on that wound,” he tells her anyway.
“Mmmhmm.”
With the heavy weight of Kamala’s arm over his shoulders, her side pressed against his to stay upright, and the even heavier weight of anxiety in his chest, they start staggering back in the direction of his apartment.