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If there was one thing Carol kept a strict schedule of, it’s the transfusions. Not that she had a planner with jotted down dates and hours and set some sort of reminder system so she didn’t forget about it. There was no need, her body reminded her I’m not made for this. So she did it as soon as the discomfort started to eat through her muscles.
Carol leaned pretty quickly that it was a terrible idea to postpone the procedure. It was a harsh lesson, hours after taking off from earth. It had been days by then, since the last transfusion — back with the Kree, it was perfectly schedule with dates and time. A normal thing, she was told, and then she started to ask herself if it was a control thing when she learned she was not, indeed, Kree-born. That maybe the growing discomfort was her body cleansing itself from non-human.
Turned out, Kree blood had healing properties someone like Carol needed to survive.
The lesson had been painful and gruesome. Vomiting, bleeding, her skin blistered and then it fell off. The medic tried five times to put an IV access because her body was simply falling apart. She has been lucky that they had harvest blood from the dead Kree just in case it was needed.
So Carol learned to steal blood before her body started to melt and she had to stumble her way into the process.
She needed it much sooner when she was injured in her duties. Bruises would start to bloom in seconds and she knew she had to be back into the Hoopty as soon as possible, it was even when she bled, a drop or a gallon didn’t change it much.
But things happened too fucking fast, she didn’t have time to process things such as being thrown hard into concrete. And how taxing the switch was. It didn’t seem to affect Monica and Kamala nearly as much as it was affecting Carol, probably because their powers weren’t poison running through their bodies.
Their bodies were made for power — born or given —, Carol was an ordinary human.
Now she looked not a day older than that afternoon in 1989, shooting fire from her fists and a dead woman walking.
Carol only realised how badly she needed the blood when she suddenly couldn’t stay on her feet and was throwing up the blood-stained yellowish white liquid she knew was her body saying hi, we’re chronically ruined. It fully registered when Kamala’s panicked voice was calling her name and trying to keep her up and not get hit by the vomit at the same time. Carol half yelped in pain when hands tried to hold her arms and slipped, when was the last time my skin started to detach itself from my muscles?
Not a thing a child should see someone try to survive. Humanised idol or not, it was ugly and filthy and even the war-jaded medic that treated her the first time had nausea from the sight.
Carol was a lot heavier than she looked, something about star cores and what infinity does to a person, Kamala didn’t have a chance to keep her upright even if Carol’s skin wasn’t divorcing itself from her body, even if Carol’s flesh wasn’t detaching itself from her bones.
The world was muffled, it has been decades since she felt anything like this — and even then, it ha been a memory. Of too-steady hands shooting an alien gun, the blue hellfire slamming into her perfectly human body like a semi-truck. The flashes of a white room and thin tubes forcing foreign blood into her veins, we saved you, they repeated a thousand million times, you’re one of us, we saved you.
Her ears hummer with radioactive buzz, she was sure it was some kind of auditory hallucination caused by the fact that her cells were actively dying. It made it hard to understand what Maria was saying, one word she kept repeating was probably her name, but the rest was impossible to distinguish from static and the smell of metal-and-wrong blood.
Wait. She buried Maria, didn’t she? She buried Maria because a motherfucking intergalactic dictator decided to erase half of life from existence. One of the only few living friends Maria had and her daughter turned into dust with them. And Carol, the liar — the coward, the runaway, the not-quite-human, — had to bury her alone.
Right. When did Monica started to sound and look so much like Maria? She was her own person, but she also was her mother’s daughter and even more so through the blurry vision of burning tears. I hate it when crying hurts too.
It was soothing, almost, wasn’t it,
Carol wasn’t quite conscious as Monica took her and then Kamala back to the Hoopty — because of course Carol had to fall apart in the enemy’s territory. She tried to talk, but only spat gibberish, whimpers and blood. She tried to walk, but it felt like she was going to break her bones through her flesh if she did so. I only have to get to the medbay. She was conscious enough to smell the panic coming off in waves from both of them. Their joined effort worked well enough to take Carol as a whole, well, except for a blood trail but her limbs were still attached when they put her as gently as possible on the only medical bed she kept in the ship.
Her throat felt liquified as she tried to explain, so she gave up after managing to make sure Kamala would leave the room. Her fingers were blistered, bloated, and left red stains over everything she touched. It took four attempts to attach the needle. The machine hummed, it took seconds for it to start to pump healthy, warm blood. It hurt every time, but it was relief in comparison to her current state.
Her body knew she was safe enough for her mind to shutdown until she was more person than pain again.
“Carol? Hey, you’re alright.”
Her tongue felt melted against the roof of her mouth and her teeth were all in the wrong place, it gave her time to recognise she was the Carol in question before asking. Monica — when did she get… grown up? Carol had been pretty sure Monica was barely a toddler. She tried to speak, but coughed instead. Monica handed water and helped her to sit up, the hand felt like ice against her back.
You run hot, it’s not her hand that is in the wrong temperature. The voice sounded suspiciously like Lawson’s. As she finished the water, her brain finally un-scrambled itself enough for her to know where was, why she smelled weird and why Monica was not a toddler anymore.
She had been told it was normal to wake up disoriented, but she wasn’t sure it was normal that it meant she wasn’t sure who she was, where she was, and what she was for solid ten minutes. Sometimes (a lot of times) she still woke up more Vers than anything else. Sometimes she was just Carol, Air Force pilot who had no idea why she was floating.
This time, it had been empty. Last time it happened was when she pretty much cracked her own skull in one of her many run-ins with the Kree. But radiation remembering you that you’re a dead woman walking was also a perfectly understandable reason for you brain to feel like it was void.
“I can explain,” she started. Because she was supposed to, right? She could lie a little, about where the blood came from. But not about what happened.
“Are you ok?” Carol doesn’t think she deserved concern from Monica of all people.
“I’m fine now,” her body was aching. Re-knitting itself. Her human blood being burned away from taking hold where it belonged. “How’s Kamala?”
“Resting. She’ll be alright.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Your powers are killing you. Or the radiation of it.”
There was no running from it, was there? “The radiation of it.” It wasn’t time to get technical. “Long story short: a small part of the Space Stone is still here,” she pointed at her chest. Sometimes she could feel it, the blue fire that went through her like a sword. “Humans aren’t exactly built to hold cosmic radiation inside of them.”
“You’re not quite… fully human anymore, are you?” There were charts, exams. Missing organs, extra bones. Modifications she didn’t. Modifications she actively ignored all the time.
‘No.”
“And you keep a corpse on your ship,” straight to the point.
“He’s no dead,” she tried to twist her legs and leave the bed, Monica only stared at her.
“Don’t.”
Monica was a toddler yesterday, but Carol knew better than to try to out-stubborn the kid: “He’s in an induced coma. Kree blood has healing properties.”
“And you’re part Kree.”
“Not enough, my bones make human blood. The extra stuff doesn’t compensate.”
She blinked: “Extra… stuff?”
“You didn’t see the charts?”
“No, Carol, I was busy trying to not panic because you were melting and you have a not-corpse on the ship!”
“Oh.”
“Look, we can talk about it later. You can show me the charts, you can tell me what actually happened to you. But for now, you need to rest, alright,” she was already, for all intents and purposes, tucking Carol in. Then she muttered. “Then we can fix it.”
“There’s no fixing. I’m not supposed to be this.”
“But you are, and I won’t let you suffer like this for the rest of your life.”